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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On July 29 2014 11:15 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Show nested quote +FRANKFURT — The United States and Europe put aside their differences and agreed Monday to sharply escalate economic sanctions against Russia amid worries that Moscow is stepping up its intervention in Ukraine and may be setting the stage for an outright invasion.
After months in which European leaders resisted going as far as the Americans, the two sides settled on a package of measures that would target Russia’s financial, energy and military sectors. In some cases, the Europeans may actually leapfrog beyond what the United States has done, forcing Washington to catch up.
The collaboration suggested a hardening resolve among the allies after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine this month. Not only has Moscow not backed down, as some hoped it might, but American, European and Ukrainian officials said Russia had actually accelerated its involvement in Ukraine’s civil war with pro-Russian separatists.
The agreement came during an unusual five-way videoconference involving President Obama and his counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and Italy in advance of a European Union meeting on Tuesday to consider new sanctions on Russia. If the Europeans announce their new measures as expected, Obama administration officials said they planned to follow with their own later in the day or on Wednesday. Source Mistrals and petrol unaffected. Color me unimpressed.
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On July 29 2014 11:24 Jormundr wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2014 11:15 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:FRANKFURT — The United States and Europe put aside their differences and agreed Monday to sharply escalate economic sanctions against Russia amid worries that Moscow is stepping up its intervention in Ukraine and may be setting the stage for an outright invasion.
After months in which European leaders resisted going as far as the Americans, the two sides settled on a package of measures that would target Russia’s financial, energy and military sectors. In some cases, the Europeans may actually leapfrog beyond what the United States has done, forcing Washington to catch up.
The collaboration suggested a hardening resolve among the allies after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine this month. Not only has Moscow not backed down, as some hoped it might, but American, European and Ukrainian officials said Russia had actually accelerated its involvement in Ukraine’s civil war with pro-Russian separatists.
The agreement came during an unusual five-way videoconference involving President Obama and his counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and Italy in advance of a European Union meeting on Tuesday to consider new sanctions on Russia. If the Europeans announce their new measures as expected, Obama administration officials said they planned to follow with their own later in the day or on Wednesday. Source Mistrals and petrol unaffected. Color me unimpressed. If it makes you feel better, there was a $50B ruling against Russia's state-owned oil company Rosneft today. It goes in favor of Yukos' former shareholders (mostly living abroad by now?) and it does go against Putin pretty directly, so there's that.
Former Yukos shareholders awarded $50bn in damages against Russia
Former leading shareholders of the Yukos oil company have been awarded $50bn in damages against Russia, by far the biggest compensation award ever made in an arbitration case. ... Source
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He kind of answers his own questions. Standards are falling because the last time anyone cared about nuclear weapons was in the 1980s and it has long been regarded as a dead end career. I would also note that it is Democrats who go crazy every time someone suggests funding for upgrades to nuclear weapons or their facilities. To be fair, both parties pork like hell to get whatever funding there in their state and don't care for upgrades or safety.
Unfortunately, John Oliver doesn't really hint at the real source of this, which is Eric Schlosser's fantastic book Command and Control. I highly recommend reading it, it will knock you on your ass about how lucky America is to not have had an unintentional detonation in the US mainland.
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The Israelis are not happy with Sec State John Kerry's brand of diplomacy and the Obama administration is not happy that Israel is not happy (quote order reversed so the story makes more sense chronologically):
As Kerry returned from the region over the weekend, Israeli media commentators leveled almost nonstop criticism of his attempts to bring Qatar and Turkey — two countries viewed by Israel as strong Hamas supporters — into the cease-fire negotiations. Kerry was also accused of abandoning some of Israel's key demands during the negotiations, including demilitarizing Gaza.
In trying to implement the cease-fire over the weekend, "U.S. Secretary of State of State John Kerry ruined everything," wrote columnist Ari Shavit in Monday's Haaretz, Israel's leading liberal newspaper. "Very senior officials in Jerusalem described the proposal that Kerry put on the table as a 'strategic terrorist attack.'"
The Obama administration pushed back strongly Monday at a torrent of Israeli criticism over Secretary of State John Kerry's latest bid to secure a cease-fire with Hamas, accusing some in Israel of launching a "misinformation campaign" against the top American diplomat.
"It's simply not the way partners and allies treat each other," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
Her comments were echoed by the White House, where National Security Adviser Susan Rice said the U.S. was "dismayed" by mischaracterizations of Kerry's efforts. Israeli media reports have cast Kerry as seeking a cease-fire that is more favorable to Hamas and being dismissive of key Israeli concerns.
Kerry himself, in a speech to the Center for American Progress, noted the criticism but did not give ground.
"Make no mistake, when the people of Israel are rushing to bomb shelters, when innocent Israeli and Palestinian teenagers are abducted and murdered, when hundreds of innocent civilians have lost their lives, I will and we will make no apologies for our engagement," he said.
The coordinated pushback in Washington came amid growing U.S. frustration with Israel as Palestinian civilian casualties mount amid a sustained Israeli air and ground war in the Gaza Strip. In recent days, U.S. officials have been using subtle yet noticeably tougher language in pressing Israel to accept an immediate and unconditional humanitarian cease-fire. There is some dispute about what is occurring in negotiations between the US and Israel. US officials say some draft proposals were leaked by the Israelis to make them look bad and discredit negotiations. The Israelis say they were asked to vote on the proposals and they were unanimously rejected, and they are talking about the proposal and being publicly upset to show that the US is being unfair to their own ally.
To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if both were true. The Obama administration is trying to push the Israelis to give concessions that they haven't been asked to give before in the name of politics, to make Obama look like a hero for stopping the war and improve US standing in the Muslim world by making it look like he browbeat the Israelis and twisted their arms. And the Israelis are indeed trying to sabotage negotiations because they have no intention of giving any concessions at all and they think they'll win the war so it should be Hamas giving them concessions.
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On July 29 2014 17:39 coverpunch wrote:The Israelis are not happy with Sec State John Kerry's brand of diplomacy and the Obama administration is not happy that Israel is not happy (quote order reversed so the story makes more sense chronologically): Show nested quote + As Kerry returned from the region over the weekend, Israeli media commentators leveled almost nonstop criticism of his attempts to bring Qatar and Turkey — two countries viewed by Israel as strong Hamas supporters — into the cease-fire negotiations. Kerry was also accused of abandoning some of Israel's key demands during the negotiations, including demilitarizing Gaza.
In trying to implement the cease-fire over the weekend, "U.S. Secretary of State of State John Kerry ruined everything," wrote columnist Ari Shavit in Monday's Haaretz, Israel's leading liberal newspaper. "Very senior officials in Jerusalem described the proposal that Kerry put on the table as a 'strategic terrorist attack.'" Show nested quote + The Obama administration pushed back strongly Monday at a torrent of Israeli criticism over Secretary of State John Kerry's latest bid to secure a cease-fire with Hamas, accusing some in Israel of launching a "misinformation campaign" against the top American diplomat.
"It's simply not the way partners and allies treat each other," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
Her comments were echoed by the White House, where National Security Adviser Susan Rice said the U.S. was "dismayed" by mischaracterizations of Kerry's efforts. Israeli media reports have cast Kerry as seeking a cease-fire that is more favorable to Hamas and being dismissive of key Israeli concerns.
Kerry himself, in a speech to the Center for American Progress, noted the criticism but did not give ground.
"Make no mistake, when the people of Israel are rushing to bomb shelters, when innocent Israeli and Palestinian teenagers are abducted and murdered, when hundreds of innocent civilians have lost their lives, I will and we will make no apologies for our engagement," he said.
The coordinated pushback in Washington came amid growing U.S. frustration with Israel as Palestinian civilian casualties mount amid a sustained Israeli air and ground war in the Gaza Strip. In recent days, U.S. officials have been using subtle yet noticeably tougher language in pressing Israel to accept an immediate and unconditional humanitarian cease-fire. There is some dispute about what is occurring in negotiations between the US and Israel. US officials say some draft proposals were leaked by the Israelis to make them look bad and discredit negotiations. The Israelis say they were asked to vote on the proposals and they were unanimously rejected, and they are talking about the proposal and being publicly upset to show that the US is being unfair to their own ally. To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if both were true. The Obama administration is trying to push the Israelis to give concessions that they haven't been asked to give before in the name of politics, to make Obama look like a hero for stopping the war and improve US standing in the Muslim world by making it look like he browbeat the Israelis and twisted their arms. And the Israelis are indeed trying to sabotage negotiations because they have no intention of giving any concessions at all and they think they'll win the war so it should be Hamas giving them concessions. I see it more as a general frosting of relations between Israel and everybody else. Right now, the US is their only friend ancd we're watching them decimate Gaza while showing only token gestures to limit civilian casualties. Go back 5 years, and we see them continually illegally settle in the West Bank while promising to stop. We see the wellbeing of those in Gaza continue to deteriorate while the war crazy wing of Israel insists upon impossible demands in EVERY negotiation.
This isn't some "appease Muslims" nonsense. It's attempting to get Israel off the war hungry path that's making them just as disgusting as the Middle East countries we threaten to invade.
You're probably spot on for Israel though.
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Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe the undocumented Central American children entering along the U.S.-Mexico border should be treated as refugees, a new poll shows.
According to a poll released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute, 69 percent of those surveyed believe U.S. authorities should treat the children as refugees and allow them to stay in the country if it is determined it is not safe for them to return to their home country. Twenty-seven percent of Americans say the children should be treated as illegal immigrants and should be deported.
Seventy-one percent also say they mostly or completely agree that the U.S. should provide refuge and protection for all people who come to the U.S. if they are fleeing serious danger in their home country, the poll found. But 59 percent of Americans say they mostly or completely agree with the statement that the allowing the children to stay will increase illegal immigration.
The findings come as the Obama administration and Congress debate how to respond to the influx of more than 50,000 undocumented children that have arrived at the border since October. Congressional Republicans are largely pushing for a change to a 2008 law that would expedite the deportation process for the children, while Democrats have resisted a change in the law.
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A new White House report released Tuesday warns that delaying environmental action would be costly and argues that swift action serves as "climate insurance" to mitigate the "most severe and irreversible potential consequences of climate change."
The report, titled "A Cost Of Delaying Action To Stem Climate Change," comes in the wake of the Obama administration's decision to bypass Congress and propose new rules on coal-fired power plants aimed at slashing carbon pollution by 30 percent by 2030.
Citing the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, the report lists economic consequences of putting off action.
"Impacts include decreased agricultural production; coastal flooding, erosion, and submergence; increases in heat-related illness and other stresses due to extreme weather events; reduction in water availability and quality; displacement of people and increased risk of violent conflict; and species extinction andbiodiversity loss," it reads. "Although these impacts vary by region, and some impacts are not well-understood, evidence of these impacts has grown in recent years."
The report claims that the rule on power plant emissions would "generate large positive net benefits, which EPA estimates to be in the range of $27-50 billion annually in 2020 and $49-84 billion in 2030" -- including health benefits from cutting harmful emissions.
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Some commentary on the SEC's new money market mutual fund (mmmf) rules. It's largely in line with my initial take, better than nothing but hardly effective.
Regulating Money Market Mutual Funds: An Update
The SEC has finally acted. On July 23, the SEC issued 859 pages of new rules for the operation of some money market funds. (You can find a mercifully short description here.) To summarize our reaction: we are underwhelmed! It is hard to see how the new rules will reduce systemic risk in any meaningful way.
We first wrote about money market funds in May. The original post is here. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start by summarizing the new final regulation. It has three parts:
1) It applies to institutional prime money funds only.
2) These funds are required to have floating net asset values (NAV).
3) Fund boards will have the option to impose liquidity fees and redemption gates if the funds “weekly liquid assets” fall below a threshold.
This new framework simply will not stop runs. Think about it. If you are worried that a fund you own is about to impose a 1% or 2% fee for withdrawals, would you wait around until they did it? What if you became concerned that the fund would suspend redemptions for the next two weeks? Rational, prudent, informed institutional investors will do exactly what we all expect: withdraw ASAP! ...
What about a floating NAV? Here, the jury is less one-sided. This was the first alternative suggested by the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) in its 2012 reform proposals, and it was endorsed by the Reserve Bank Presidents. Compared to a fixed share price, a floating NAV should reduce the first-mover advantage of those who run. However, it would not fully eliminate that advantage. ...
Finally, there is the first part of the new rule: it only applies to a subset of funds. According to data from the Investment Company Institute, coverage is slightly more than one-third of the total $2.56 trillion currently held in money market funds. Source
I haven't heard anyone jumping for joy that the new regs will be very effective. If anyone knows of a big supporter, please share so I can see their view.
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Now for some Space Policy:
NASA intends to use future U.S. commercial crew vehicles to carry not only its astronauts, but also those of its Russian partner, to the International Space Station (ISS), said Dan Hartman, deputy space station program manager, at a NASA Advisory Council (NAC) meeting on Monday (July 28).
Different international vehicles routinely transport crew and cargo to and from the ISS, a laboratory circling some 250 miles above Earth. Currently, the U.S. commercially provided Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Cygnus and SpaceX’s Dragon, Russia’s Progress, Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) and Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) provide cargo resupply to the space station. ATV-5, scheduled to lift off today from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, is the last of its kind.
Russia’s Soyuz, however, remains the world’s sole operational crew vehicle, on which NASA must continue to rely until U.S. commercial alternatives are ready.
“We’re going to stay mixed” though, Hartman said at a meeting of NAC’s Committee on Human Exploration and Operations at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. NASA’s plan is for some NASA astronauts to continue launching on the Soyuz from Kazakhstan and some Russian cosmonauts to be launched from the United States by private companies, he explained. The idea is to barter: “It would be just a seat for a seat.”
Source
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Assumes $50 / ton carbon cost:
+ Show Spoiler +SUBSIDIES for renewable energy are one of the most contested areas of public policy. Billions are spent nursing the infant solar- and wind-power industries in the hope that they will one day undercut fossil fuels and drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere. The idea seems to be working. Photovoltaic panels have halved in price since 2008 and the capital cost of a solar-power plant—of which panels account for slightly under half—fell by 22% in 2010-13. In a few sunny places, solar power is providing electricity to the grid as cheaply as conventional coal- or gas-fired power plants.
But whereas the cost of a solar panel is easy to calculate, the cost of electricity is harder to assess. It depends not only on the fuel used, but also on the cost of capital (power plants take years to build and last for decades), how much of the time a plant operates, and whether it generates power at times of peak demand. To take account of all this, economists use “levelised costs”—the net present value of all costs (capital and operating) of a generating unit over its life cycle, divided by the number of megawatt-hours of electricity it is expected to supply.
The trouble, as Paul Joskow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out, is that levelised costs do not take account of the costs of intermittency.* Wind power is not generated on a calm day, nor solar power at night, so conventional power plants must be kept on standby—but are not included in the levelised cost of renewables. Electricity demand also varies during the day in ways that the supply from wind and solar generation may not match, so even if renewable forms of energy have the same levelised cost as conventional ones, the value of the power they produce may be lower. In short, levelised costs are poor at comparing different forms of power generation.
To get around that problem Charles Frank of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, uses a cost-benefit analysis to rank various forms of energy. The costs include those of building and running power plants, and those associated with particular technologies, such as balancing the electricity system when wind or solar plants go offline or disposing of spent nuclear-fuel rods. The benefits of renewable energy include the value of the fuel that would have been used if coal- or gas-fired plants had produced the same amount of electricity and the amount of carbon-dioxide emissions that they avoid. The table summarises these costs and benefits. It makes wind and solar power look far more expensive than they appear on the basis of levelised costs.
Mr Frank took four sorts of zero-carbon energy (solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear), plus a low-carbon sort (an especially efficient type of gas-burning plant), and compared them with various sorts of conventional power. Obviously, low- and no-carbon power plants do not avoid emissions when they are not working, though they do incur some costs. So nuclear-power plants, which run at about 90% of capacity, avoid almost four times as much CO{-2} per unit of capacity as do wind turbines, which run at about 25%; they avoid six times as much as solar arrays do. If you assume a carbon price of $50 a tonne—way over most actual prices—nuclear energy avoids over $400,000-worth of carbon emissions per megawatt (MW) of capacity, compared with only $69,500 for solar and $107,000 for wind.
Nuclear power plants, however, are vastly expensive. A new plant at Hinkley Point, in south-west England, for example, is likely to cost at least $27 billion. They are also uninsurable commercially. Yet the fact that they run around the clock makes them only 75% more expensive to build and run per MW of capacity than a solar-power plant, Mr Frank reckons.
To determine the overall cost or benefit, though, the cost of the fossil-fuel plants that have to be kept hanging around for the times when solar and wind plants stand idle must also be factored in. Mr Frank calls these “avoided capacity costs”—costs that would not have been incurred had the green-energy plants not been built. Thus a 1MW wind farm running at about 25% of capacity can replace only about 0.23MW of a coal plant running at 90% of capacity. Solar farms run at only about 15% of capacity, so they can replace even less. Seven solar plants or four wind farms would thus be needed to produce the same amount of electricity over time as a similar-sized coal-fired plant. And all that extra solar and wind capacity is expensive.
A levelised playing field If all the costs and benefits are totted up using Mr Frank’s calculation, solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions. It costs $189,000 to replace 1MW per year of power from coal. Wind is the next most expensive. Hydropower provides a modest net benefit. But the most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power. The pattern is similar if 1MW of gas-fired capacity is displaced instead of coal. And all this assumes a carbon price of $50 a tonne. Using actual carbon prices (below $10 in Europe) makes solar and wind look even worse. The carbon price would have to rise to $185 a tonne before solar power shows a net benefit.
There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to choose one form of energy over another, including emissions of pollutants other than CO2 and fear of nuclear accidents. Mr Frank does not look at these. Still, his findings have profound policy implications. At the moment, most rich countries and China subsidise solar and wind power to help stem climate change. Yet this is the most expensive way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile Germany and Japan, among others, are mothballing nuclear plants, which (in terms of carbon abatement) are cheaper. The implication of Mr Frank’s research is clear: governments should target emissions reductions from any source rather than focus on boosting certain kinds of renewable energy. Link
Link to paper.
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On July 30 2014 06:19 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Assumes $50 / ton carbon cost: Show nested quote ++ Show Spoiler +SUBSIDIES for renewable energy are one of the most contested areas of public policy. Billions are spent nursing the infant solar- and wind-power industries in the hope that they will one day undercut fossil fuels and drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere. The idea seems to be working. Photovoltaic panels have halved in price since 2008 and the capital cost of a solar-power plant—of which panels account for slightly under half—fell by 22% in 2010-13. In a few sunny places, solar power is providing electricity to the grid as cheaply as conventional coal- or gas-fired power plants.
But whereas the cost of a solar panel is easy to calculate, the cost of electricity is harder to assess. It depends not only on the fuel used, but also on the cost of capital (power plants take years to build and last for decades), how much of the time a plant operates, and whether it generates power at times of peak demand. To take account of all this, economists use “levelised costs”—the net present value of all costs (capital and operating) of a generating unit over its life cycle, divided by the number of megawatt-hours of electricity it is expected to supply.
The trouble, as Paul Joskow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out, is that levelised costs do not take account of the costs of intermittency.* Wind power is not generated on a calm day, nor solar power at night, so conventional power plants must be kept on standby—but are not included in the levelised cost of renewables. Electricity demand also varies during the day in ways that the supply from wind and solar generation may not match, so even if renewable forms of energy have the same levelised cost as conventional ones, the value of the power they produce may be lower. In short, levelised costs are poor at comparing different forms of power generation.
To get around that problem Charles Frank of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, uses a cost-benefit analysis to rank various forms of energy. The costs include those of building and running power plants, and those associated with particular technologies, such as balancing the electricity system when wind or solar plants go offline or disposing of spent nuclear-fuel rods. The benefits of renewable energy include the value of the fuel that would have been used if coal- or gas-fired plants had produced the same amount of electricity and the amount of carbon-dioxide emissions that they avoid. The table summarises these costs and benefits. It makes wind and solar power look far more expensive than they appear on the basis of levelised costs.
Mr Frank took four sorts of zero-carbon energy (solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear), plus a low-carbon sort (an especially efficient type of gas-burning plant), and compared them with various sorts of conventional power. Obviously, low- and no-carbon power plants do not avoid emissions when they are not working, though they do incur some costs. So nuclear-power plants, which run at about 90% of capacity, avoid almost four times as much CO{-2} per unit of capacity as do wind turbines, which run at about 25%; they avoid six times as much as solar arrays do. If you assume a carbon price of $50 a tonne—way over most actual prices—nuclear energy avoids over $400,000-worth of carbon emissions per megawatt (MW) of capacity, compared with only $69,500 for solar and $107,000 for wind.
Nuclear power plants, however, are vastly expensive. A new plant at Hinkley Point, in south-west England, for example, is likely to cost at least $27 billion. They are also uninsurable commercially. Yet the fact that they run around the clock makes them only 75% more expensive to build and run per MW of capacity than a solar-power plant, Mr Frank reckons.
To determine the overall cost or benefit, though, the cost of the fossil-fuel plants that have to be kept hanging around for the times when solar and wind plants stand idle must also be factored in. Mr Frank calls these “avoided capacity costs”—costs that would not have been incurred had the green-energy plants not been built. Thus a 1MW wind farm running at about 25% of capacity can replace only about 0.23MW of a coal plant running at 90% of capacity. Solar farms run at only about 15% of capacity, so they can replace even less. Seven solar plants or four wind farms would thus be needed to produce the same amount of electricity over time as a similar-sized coal-fired plant. And all that extra solar and wind capacity is expensive.
A levelised playing field If all the costs and benefits are totted up using Mr Frank’s calculation, solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions. It costs $189,000 to replace 1MW per year of power from coal. Wind is the next most expensive. Hydropower provides a modest net benefit. But the most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power. The pattern is similar if 1MW of gas-fired capacity is displaced instead of coal. And all this assumes a carbon price of $50 a tonne. Using actual carbon prices (below $10 in Europe) makes solar and wind look even worse. The carbon price would have to rise to $185 a tonne before solar power shows a net benefit.
There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to choose one form of energy over another, including emissions of pollutants other than CO2 and fear of nuclear accidents. Mr Frank does not look at these. Still, his findings have profound policy implications. At the moment, most rich countries and China subsidise solar and wind power to help stem climate change. Yet this is the most expensive way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile Germany and Japan, among others, are mothballing nuclear plants, which (in terms of carbon abatement) are cheaper. The implication of Mr Frank’s research is clear: governments should target emissions reductions from any source rather than focus on boosting certain kinds of renewable energy. LinkLink to paper.
Hmmm. Couldn't help but notice the paper doesn't say anything about nuclear waste storage and disposal? It seems they looked at the damage from carbon emissions but not any of the other environmental costs to the various sources (as they kind of mention at the end of your quote).
Solar is the obvious way to go it's just a matter of developing the technology. The sun provides more energy to earth in a day than we use in a year so it's kind of obvious to me it's the most sensible way to power the world in our future. Seems ass backward to try to plan to burn new/different stuff (that we know is limited) for energy when we have a giant (practically unlimited) furnace constantly bombarding us with energy.
Wish we could go back in time and spend 2 trillion on Solar research, or working on a new grid, instead of a war in Iraq.
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President Barack Obama gave a statement on the crisis in Ukraine Tuesday, announcing tougher U.S. sanctions on key sectors of the Russian economy, including energy, arms and finance.
"Today is a reminder that the United States means what it says," Obama said.
According to the Treasury Department, the U.S. penalties target the Bank of Moscow, the Russian Agricultural Bank and VTB Bank, the AP reports. Also listed on the Treasury designation is the United Shipbuilding Corp., which is based in St. Petersburg, Russia.
These new penalties against Russia follow tougher sanctions agreed to by European Union leaders earlier on Tuesday. White House spokesman Josh Earnest commented on the EU sanctions before Obama spoke, calling them welcome news.
"Russia is once again isolating itself from the international community, setting back decades of progress," Obama said. "It doesn't have to be this way."
When prompted by a reporter, Obama said, "No, it's not a new Cold War." But he did chide Russia and its proxies, saying they have failed to cooperate with the investigation of the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17.
Source
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On July 30 2014 06:57 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2014 06:19 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Assumes $50 / ton carbon cost: + Show Spoiler +SUBSIDIES for renewable energy are one of the most contested areas of public policy. Billions are spent nursing the infant solar- and wind-power industries in the hope that they will one day undercut fossil fuels and drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere. The idea seems to be working. Photovoltaic panels have halved in price since 2008 and the capital cost of a solar-power plant—of which panels account for slightly under half—fell by 22% in 2010-13. In a few sunny places, solar power is providing electricity to the grid as cheaply as conventional coal- or gas-fired power plants.
But whereas the cost of a solar panel is easy to calculate, the cost of electricity is harder to assess. It depends not only on the fuel used, but also on the cost of capital (power plants take years to build and last for decades), how much of the time a plant operates, and whether it generates power at times of peak demand. To take account of all this, economists use “levelised costs”—the net present value of all costs (capital and operating) of a generating unit over its life cycle, divided by the number of megawatt-hours of electricity it is expected to supply.
The trouble, as Paul Joskow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out, is that levelised costs do not take account of the costs of intermittency.* Wind power is not generated on a calm day, nor solar power at night, so conventional power plants must be kept on standby—but are not included in the levelised cost of renewables. Electricity demand also varies during the day in ways that the supply from wind and solar generation may not match, so even if renewable forms of energy have the same levelised cost as conventional ones, the value of the power they produce may be lower. In short, levelised costs are poor at comparing different forms of power generation.
To get around that problem Charles Frank of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, uses a cost-benefit analysis to rank various forms of energy. The costs include those of building and running power plants, and those associated with particular technologies, such as balancing the electricity system when wind or solar plants go offline or disposing of spent nuclear-fuel rods. The benefits of renewable energy include the value of the fuel that would have been used if coal- or gas-fired plants had produced the same amount of electricity and the amount of carbon-dioxide emissions that they avoid. The table summarises these costs and benefits. It makes wind and solar power look far more expensive than they appear on the basis of levelised costs.
Mr Frank took four sorts of zero-carbon energy (solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear), plus a low-carbon sort (an especially efficient type of gas-burning plant), and compared them with various sorts of conventional power. Obviously, low- and no-carbon power plants do not avoid emissions when they are not working, though they do incur some costs. So nuclear-power plants, which run at about 90% of capacity, avoid almost four times as much CO{-2} per unit of capacity as do wind turbines, which run at about 25%; they avoid six times as much as solar arrays do. If you assume a carbon price of $50 a tonne—way over most actual prices—nuclear energy avoids over $400,000-worth of carbon emissions per megawatt (MW) of capacity, compared with only $69,500 for solar and $107,000 for wind.
Nuclear power plants, however, are vastly expensive. A new plant at Hinkley Point, in south-west England, for example, is likely to cost at least $27 billion. They are also uninsurable commercially. Yet the fact that they run around the clock makes them only 75% more expensive to build and run per MW of capacity than a solar-power plant, Mr Frank reckons.
To determine the overall cost or benefit, though, the cost of the fossil-fuel plants that have to be kept hanging around for the times when solar and wind plants stand idle must also be factored in. Mr Frank calls these “avoided capacity costs”—costs that would not have been incurred had the green-energy plants not been built. Thus a 1MW wind farm running at about 25% of capacity can replace only about 0.23MW of a coal plant running at 90% of capacity. Solar farms run at only about 15% of capacity, so they can replace even less. Seven solar plants or four wind farms would thus be needed to produce the same amount of electricity over time as a similar-sized coal-fired plant. And all that extra solar and wind capacity is expensive.
A levelised playing field If all the costs and benefits are totted up using Mr Frank’s calculation, solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions. It costs $189,000 to replace 1MW per year of power from coal. Wind is the next most expensive. Hydropower provides a modest net benefit. But the most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power. The pattern is similar if 1MW of gas-fired capacity is displaced instead of coal. And all this assumes a carbon price of $50 a tonne. Using actual carbon prices (below $10 in Europe) makes solar and wind look even worse. The carbon price would have to rise to $185 a tonne before solar power shows a net benefit.
There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to choose one form of energy over another, including emissions of pollutants other than CO2 and fear of nuclear accidents. Mr Frank does not look at these. Still, his findings have profound policy implications. At the moment, most rich countries and China subsidise solar and wind power to help stem climate change. Yet this is the most expensive way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile Germany and Japan, among others, are mothballing nuclear plants, which (in terms of carbon abatement) are cheaper. The implication of Mr Frank’s research is clear: governments should target emissions reductions from any source rather than focus on boosting certain kinds of renewable energy. LinkLink to paper. Hmmm. Couldn't help but notice the paper doesn't say anything about nuclear waste storage and disposal? It seems they looked at the damage from carbon emissions but not any of the other environmental costs to the various sources (as they kind of mention at the end of your quote). Solar is the obvious way to go it's just a matter of developing the technology. The sun provides more energy to earth in a day than we use in a year so it's kind of obvious to me it's the most sensible way to power the world in our future. Seems ass backward to try to plan to burn new/different stuff (that we know is limited) for energy when we have a giant (practically unlimited) furnace constantly bombarding us with energy. Wish we could go back in time and spend 2 trillion on Solar research, or working on a new grid, instead of a war in Iraq. Wish we could go back in time and spend the solar subsidy money on R&D instead, which would be a good idea once the subsidies expire in 2016.
Radiation fears make nuclear a tough issue, but that's a shame really. Nuclear could fill an important role in the energy mix: it's always on (unlike solar and wind), doesn't create CO2 and we can get the fuel from domestic sources.
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The problem with nuclear is that it is really expensive if you don't ignore the cost of the storage of the nuclear waste for the very long amounts of time it needs to be stored. And if you ignore it, you make it even more expensive for someone else later down the line.
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On July 30 2014 07:59 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2014 06:57 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 30 2014 06:19 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Assumes $50 / ton carbon cost: + Show Spoiler +SUBSIDIES for renewable energy are one of the most contested areas of public policy. Billions are spent nursing the infant solar- and wind-power industries in the hope that they will one day undercut fossil fuels and drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere. The idea seems to be working. Photovoltaic panels have halved in price since 2008 and the capital cost of a solar-power plant—of which panels account for slightly under half—fell by 22% in 2010-13. In a few sunny places, solar power is providing electricity to the grid as cheaply as conventional coal- or gas-fired power plants.
But whereas the cost of a solar panel is easy to calculate, the cost of electricity is harder to assess. It depends not only on the fuel used, but also on the cost of capital (power plants take years to build and last for decades), how much of the time a plant operates, and whether it generates power at times of peak demand. To take account of all this, economists use “levelised costs”—the net present value of all costs (capital and operating) of a generating unit over its life cycle, divided by the number of megawatt-hours of electricity it is expected to supply.
The trouble, as Paul Joskow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out, is that levelised costs do not take account of the costs of intermittency.* Wind power is not generated on a calm day, nor solar power at night, so conventional power plants must be kept on standby—but are not included in the levelised cost of renewables. Electricity demand also varies during the day in ways that the supply from wind and solar generation may not match, so even if renewable forms of energy have the same levelised cost as conventional ones, the value of the power they produce may be lower. In short, levelised costs are poor at comparing different forms of power generation.
To get around that problem Charles Frank of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, uses a cost-benefit analysis to rank various forms of energy. The costs include those of building and running power plants, and those associated with particular technologies, such as balancing the electricity system when wind or solar plants go offline or disposing of spent nuclear-fuel rods. The benefits of renewable energy include the value of the fuel that would have been used if coal- or gas-fired plants had produced the same amount of electricity and the amount of carbon-dioxide emissions that they avoid. The table summarises these costs and benefits. It makes wind and solar power look far more expensive than they appear on the basis of levelised costs.
Mr Frank took four sorts of zero-carbon energy (solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear), plus a low-carbon sort (an especially efficient type of gas-burning plant), and compared them with various sorts of conventional power. Obviously, low- and no-carbon power plants do not avoid emissions when they are not working, though they do incur some costs. So nuclear-power plants, which run at about 90% of capacity, avoid almost four times as much CO{-2} per unit of capacity as do wind turbines, which run at about 25%; they avoid six times as much as solar arrays do. If you assume a carbon price of $50 a tonne—way over most actual prices—nuclear energy avoids over $400,000-worth of carbon emissions per megawatt (MW) of capacity, compared with only $69,500 for solar and $107,000 for wind.
Nuclear power plants, however, are vastly expensive. A new plant at Hinkley Point, in south-west England, for example, is likely to cost at least $27 billion. They are also uninsurable commercially. Yet the fact that they run around the clock makes them only 75% more expensive to build and run per MW of capacity than a solar-power plant, Mr Frank reckons.
To determine the overall cost or benefit, though, the cost of the fossil-fuel plants that have to be kept hanging around for the times when solar and wind plants stand idle must also be factored in. Mr Frank calls these “avoided capacity costs”—costs that would not have been incurred had the green-energy plants not been built. Thus a 1MW wind farm running at about 25% of capacity can replace only about 0.23MW of a coal plant running at 90% of capacity. Solar farms run at only about 15% of capacity, so they can replace even less. Seven solar plants or four wind farms would thus be needed to produce the same amount of electricity over time as a similar-sized coal-fired plant. And all that extra solar and wind capacity is expensive.
A levelised playing field If all the costs and benefits are totted up using Mr Frank’s calculation, solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions. It costs $189,000 to replace 1MW per year of power from coal. Wind is the next most expensive. Hydropower provides a modest net benefit. But the most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power. The pattern is similar if 1MW of gas-fired capacity is displaced instead of coal. And all this assumes a carbon price of $50 a tonne. Using actual carbon prices (below $10 in Europe) makes solar and wind look even worse. The carbon price would have to rise to $185 a tonne before solar power shows a net benefit.
There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to choose one form of energy over another, including emissions of pollutants other than CO2 and fear of nuclear accidents. Mr Frank does not look at these. Still, his findings have profound policy implications. At the moment, most rich countries and China subsidise solar and wind power to help stem climate change. Yet this is the most expensive way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile Germany and Japan, among others, are mothballing nuclear plants, which (in terms of carbon abatement) are cheaper. The implication of Mr Frank’s research is clear: governments should target emissions reductions from any source rather than focus on boosting certain kinds of renewable energy. LinkLink to paper. Hmmm. Couldn't help but notice the paper doesn't say anything about nuclear waste storage and disposal? It seems they looked at the damage from carbon emissions but not any of the other environmental costs to the various sources (as they kind of mention at the end of your quote). Solar is the obvious way to go it's just a matter of developing the technology. The sun provides more energy to earth in a day than we use in a year so it's kind of obvious to me it's the most sensible way to power the world in our future. Seems ass backward to try to plan to burn new/different stuff (that we know is limited) for energy when we have a giant (practically unlimited) furnace constantly bombarding us with energy. Wish we could go back in time and spend 2 trillion on Solar research, or working on a new grid, instead of a war in Iraq. Wish we could go back in time and spend the solar subsidy money on R&D instead, which would be a good idea once the subsidies expire in 2016. Radiation fears make nuclear a tough issue, but that's a shame really. Nuclear could fill an important role in the energy mix: it's always on (unlike solar and wind), doesn't create CO2 and we can get the fuel from domestic sources. I agree I prefer R&D over the style of subsidies we've used.
Not just radiation fears but think about it like this. If more nuclear reactors are built here and around the world, it becomes even harder to try to prevent Iran or IS from building Nuclear power (they have to transition too) And considering how we secure our nuclear weapons, it's probably not a great idea to create more potential nuclear disasters around the world if we don't absolutely have to.
If we dedicated the American engine to developing breakthroughs in solar it would be the easiest sale in history to get the middle east and plenty of the rest of the world to buy the technology.
I have no question if we don't turn to something like solar we'll be here again 20 years later, again, asking why did we spend trillions more in another war in the middle east to protect oil we should of stopped needing decades ago?
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On July 30 2014 08:21 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2014 07:59 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On July 30 2014 06:57 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 30 2014 06:19 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Assumes $50 / ton carbon cost: + Show Spoiler +SUBSIDIES for renewable energy are one of the most contested areas of public policy. Billions are spent nursing the infant solar- and wind-power industries in the hope that they will one day undercut fossil fuels and drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere. The idea seems to be working. Photovoltaic panels have halved in price since 2008 and the capital cost of a solar-power plant—of which panels account for slightly under half—fell by 22% in 2010-13. In a few sunny places, solar power is providing electricity to the grid as cheaply as conventional coal- or gas-fired power plants.
But whereas the cost of a solar panel is easy to calculate, the cost of electricity is harder to assess. It depends not only on the fuel used, but also on the cost of capital (power plants take years to build and last for decades), how much of the time a plant operates, and whether it generates power at times of peak demand. To take account of all this, economists use “levelised costs”—the net present value of all costs (capital and operating) of a generating unit over its life cycle, divided by the number of megawatt-hours of electricity it is expected to supply.
The trouble, as Paul Joskow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out, is that levelised costs do not take account of the costs of intermittency.* Wind power is not generated on a calm day, nor solar power at night, so conventional power plants must be kept on standby—but are not included in the levelised cost of renewables. Electricity demand also varies during the day in ways that the supply from wind and solar generation may not match, so even if renewable forms of energy have the same levelised cost as conventional ones, the value of the power they produce may be lower. In short, levelised costs are poor at comparing different forms of power generation.
To get around that problem Charles Frank of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, uses a cost-benefit analysis to rank various forms of energy. The costs include those of building and running power plants, and those associated with particular technologies, such as balancing the electricity system when wind or solar plants go offline or disposing of spent nuclear-fuel rods. The benefits of renewable energy include the value of the fuel that would have been used if coal- or gas-fired plants had produced the same amount of electricity and the amount of carbon-dioxide emissions that they avoid. The table summarises these costs and benefits. It makes wind and solar power look far more expensive than they appear on the basis of levelised costs.
Mr Frank took four sorts of zero-carbon energy (solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear), plus a low-carbon sort (an especially efficient type of gas-burning plant), and compared them with various sorts of conventional power. Obviously, low- and no-carbon power plants do not avoid emissions when they are not working, though they do incur some costs. So nuclear-power plants, which run at about 90% of capacity, avoid almost four times as much CO{-2} per unit of capacity as do wind turbines, which run at about 25%; they avoid six times as much as solar arrays do. If you assume a carbon price of $50 a tonne—way over most actual prices—nuclear energy avoids over $400,000-worth of carbon emissions per megawatt (MW) of capacity, compared with only $69,500 for solar and $107,000 for wind.
Nuclear power plants, however, are vastly expensive. A new plant at Hinkley Point, in south-west England, for example, is likely to cost at least $27 billion. They are also uninsurable commercially. Yet the fact that they run around the clock makes them only 75% more expensive to build and run per MW of capacity than a solar-power plant, Mr Frank reckons.
To determine the overall cost or benefit, though, the cost of the fossil-fuel plants that have to be kept hanging around for the times when solar and wind plants stand idle must also be factored in. Mr Frank calls these “avoided capacity costs”—costs that would not have been incurred had the green-energy plants not been built. Thus a 1MW wind farm running at about 25% of capacity can replace only about 0.23MW of a coal plant running at 90% of capacity. Solar farms run at only about 15% of capacity, so they can replace even less. Seven solar plants or four wind farms would thus be needed to produce the same amount of electricity over time as a similar-sized coal-fired plant. And all that extra solar and wind capacity is expensive.
A levelised playing field If all the costs and benefits are totted up using Mr Frank’s calculation, solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions. It costs $189,000 to replace 1MW per year of power from coal. Wind is the next most expensive. Hydropower provides a modest net benefit. But the most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power. The pattern is similar if 1MW of gas-fired capacity is displaced instead of coal. And all this assumes a carbon price of $50 a tonne. Using actual carbon prices (below $10 in Europe) makes solar and wind look even worse. The carbon price would have to rise to $185 a tonne before solar power shows a net benefit.
There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to choose one form of energy over another, including emissions of pollutants other than CO2 and fear of nuclear accidents. Mr Frank does not look at these. Still, his findings have profound policy implications. At the moment, most rich countries and China subsidise solar and wind power to help stem climate change. Yet this is the most expensive way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile Germany and Japan, among others, are mothballing nuclear plants, which (in terms of carbon abatement) are cheaper. The implication of Mr Frank’s research is clear: governments should target emissions reductions from any source rather than focus on boosting certain kinds of renewable energy. LinkLink to paper. Hmmm. Couldn't help but notice the paper doesn't say anything about nuclear waste storage and disposal? It seems they looked at the damage from carbon emissions but not any of the other environmental costs to the various sources (as they kind of mention at the end of your quote). Solar is the obvious way to go it's just a matter of developing the technology. The sun provides more energy to earth in a day than we use in a year so it's kind of obvious to me it's the most sensible way to power the world in our future. Seems ass backward to try to plan to burn new/different stuff (that we know is limited) for energy when we have a giant (practically unlimited) furnace constantly bombarding us with energy. Wish we could go back in time and spend 2 trillion on Solar research, or working on a new grid, instead of a war in Iraq. Wish we could go back in time and spend the solar subsidy money on R&D instead, which would be a good idea once the subsidies expire in 2016. Radiation fears make nuclear a tough issue, but that's a shame really. Nuclear could fill an important role in the energy mix: it's always on (unlike solar and wind), doesn't create CO2 and we can get the fuel from domestic sources. I agree I prefer R&D over the style of subsidies we've used. Not just radiation fears but think about it like this. If more nuclear reactors are built here and around the world, it becomes even harder to try to prevent Iran or IS from building Nuclear power (they have to transition too) And considering how we secure our nuclear weapons, it's probably not a great idea to create more potential nuclear disasters around the world if we don't absolutely have to. If we dedicated the American engine to developing breakthroughs in solar it would be the easiest sale in history to get the middle east and plenty of the rest of the world to buy the technology. I have no question if we don't turn to something like solar we'll be here again 20 years later, again, asking why did we spend trillions more in another war in the middle east to protect oil we should of stopped needing decades ago? One of the fundamental problems with solar is that it's not always producing electricity. So unless something radical changes, like mass battery storage becomes feasible, we're going to need to rely on more than just solar.
Nuclear power is a bit different from nuclear weapons. There's a lot of technology overlap for sure, but to my knowledge you can't turn a nuclear power plant into a nuclear bomb.
I'm not sure what you mean by "if we don't turn to something like solar" - we've been turned to solar for decades. I also don't see oil becoming obsolete for at least a couple generations.
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On July 30 2014 08:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2014 08:21 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 30 2014 07:59 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On July 30 2014 06:57 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 30 2014 06:19 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Assumes $50 / ton carbon cost: + Show Spoiler +SUBSIDIES for renewable energy are one of the most contested areas of public policy. Billions are spent nursing the infant solar- and wind-power industries in the hope that they will one day undercut fossil fuels and drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere. The idea seems to be working. Photovoltaic panels have halved in price since 2008 and the capital cost of a solar-power plant—of which panels account for slightly under half—fell by 22% in 2010-13. In a few sunny places, solar power is providing electricity to the grid as cheaply as conventional coal- or gas-fired power plants.
But whereas the cost of a solar panel is easy to calculate, the cost of electricity is harder to assess. It depends not only on the fuel used, but also on the cost of capital (power plants take years to build and last for decades), how much of the time a plant operates, and whether it generates power at times of peak demand. To take account of all this, economists use “levelised costs”—the net present value of all costs (capital and operating) of a generating unit over its life cycle, divided by the number of megawatt-hours of electricity it is expected to supply.
The trouble, as Paul Joskow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out, is that levelised costs do not take account of the costs of intermittency.* Wind power is not generated on a calm day, nor solar power at night, so conventional power plants must be kept on standby—but are not included in the levelised cost of renewables. Electricity demand also varies during the day in ways that the supply from wind and solar generation may not match, so even if renewable forms of energy have the same levelised cost as conventional ones, the value of the power they produce may be lower. In short, levelised costs are poor at comparing different forms of power generation.
To get around that problem Charles Frank of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, uses a cost-benefit analysis to rank various forms of energy. The costs include those of building and running power plants, and those associated with particular technologies, such as balancing the electricity system when wind or solar plants go offline or disposing of spent nuclear-fuel rods. The benefits of renewable energy include the value of the fuel that would have been used if coal- or gas-fired plants had produced the same amount of electricity and the amount of carbon-dioxide emissions that they avoid. The table summarises these costs and benefits. It makes wind and solar power look far more expensive than they appear on the basis of levelised costs.
Mr Frank took four sorts of zero-carbon energy (solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear), plus a low-carbon sort (an especially efficient type of gas-burning plant), and compared them with various sorts of conventional power. Obviously, low- and no-carbon power plants do not avoid emissions when they are not working, though they do incur some costs. So nuclear-power plants, which run at about 90% of capacity, avoid almost four times as much CO{-2} per unit of capacity as do wind turbines, which run at about 25%; they avoid six times as much as solar arrays do. If you assume a carbon price of $50 a tonne—way over most actual prices—nuclear energy avoids over $400,000-worth of carbon emissions per megawatt (MW) of capacity, compared with only $69,500 for solar and $107,000 for wind.
Nuclear power plants, however, are vastly expensive. A new plant at Hinkley Point, in south-west England, for example, is likely to cost at least $27 billion. They are also uninsurable commercially. Yet the fact that they run around the clock makes them only 75% more expensive to build and run per MW of capacity than a solar-power plant, Mr Frank reckons.
To determine the overall cost or benefit, though, the cost of the fossil-fuel plants that have to be kept hanging around for the times when solar and wind plants stand idle must also be factored in. Mr Frank calls these “avoided capacity costs”—costs that would not have been incurred had the green-energy plants not been built. Thus a 1MW wind farm running at about 25% of capacity can replace only about 0.23MW of a coal plant running at 90% of capacity. Solar farms run at only about 15% of capacity, so they can replace even less. Seven solar plants or four wind farms would thus be needed to produce the same amount of electricity over time as a similar-sized coal-fired plant. And all that extra solar and wind capacity is expensive.
A levelised playing field If all the costs and benefits are totted up using Mr Frank’s calculation, solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions. It costs $189,000 to replace 1MW per year of power from coal. Wind is the next most expensive. Hydropower provides a modest net benefit. But the most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power. The pattern is similar if 1MW of gas-fired capacity is displaced instead of coal. And all this assumes a carbon price of $50 a tonne. Using actual carbon prices (below $10 in Europe) makes solar and wind look even worse. The carbon price would have to rise to $185 a tonne before solar power shows a net benefit.
There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to choose one form of energy over another, including emissions of pollutants other than CO2 and fear of nuclear accidents. Mr Frank does not look at these. Still, his findings have profound policy implications. At the moment, most rich countries and China subsidise solar and wind power to help stem climate change. Yet this is the most expensive way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile Germany and Japan, among others, are mothballing nuclear plants, which (in terms of carbon abatement) are cheaper. The implication of Mr Frank’s research is clear: governments should target emissions reductions from any source rather than focus on boosting certain kinds of renewable energy. LinkLink to paper. Hmmm. Couldn't help but notice the paper doesn't say anything about nuclear waste storage and disposal? It seems they looked at the damage from carbon emissions but not any of the other environmental costs to the various sources (as they kind of mention at the end of your quote). Solar is the obvious way to go it's just a matter of developing the technology. The sun provides more energy to earth in a day than we use in a year so it's kind of obvious to me it's the most sensible way to power the world in our future. Seems ass backward to try to plan to burn new/different stuff (that we know is limited) for energy when we have a giant (practically unlimited) furnace constantly bombarding us with energy. Wish we could go back in time and spend 2 trillion on Solar research, or working on a new grid, instead of a war in Iraq. Wish we could go back in time and spend the solar subsidy money on R&D instead, which would be a good idea once the subsidies expire in 2016. Radiation fears make nuclear a tough issue, but that's a shame really. Nuclear could fill an important role in the energy mix: it's always on (unlike solar and wind), doesn't create CO2 and we can get the fuel from domestic sources. I agree I prefer R&D over the style of subsidies we've used. Not just radiation fears but think about it like this. If more nuclear reactors are built here and around the world, it becomes even harder to try to prevent Iran or IS from building Nuclear power (they have to transition too) And considering how we secure our nuclear weapons, it's probably not a great idea to create more potential nuclear disasters around the world if we don't absolutely have to. If we dedicated the American engine to developing breakthroughs in solar it would be the easiest sale in history to get the middle east and plenty of the rest of the world to buy the technology. I have no question if we don't turn to something like solar we'll be here again 20 years later, again, asking why did we spend trillions more in another war in the middle east to protect oil we should of stopped needing decades ago? One of the fundamental problems with solar is that it's not always producing electricity. So unless something radical changes, like mass battery storage becomes feasible, we're going to need to rely on more than just solar. Nuclear power is a bit different from nuclear weapons. There's a lot of technology overlap for sure, but to my knowledge you can't turn a nuclear power plant into a nuclear bomb. I'm not sure what you mean by "if we don't turn to something like solar" - we've been turned to solar for decades. I also don't see oil becoming obsolete for at least a couple generations.
Well radical advance in batteries/energy storage doubles for solar and electric cars (although the current actual over lap is limited) so I kind of lump that in with solar/energy R&D. The current solar plants have made significant advances in storing the solar energy on the massive scale with salt, and the smaller car type versions could be enlarged to make them part of typical homes.
Well no, nuclear reactors don't make good traditional bombs, but they more than do the job of the suitcase nukes we've been so terrified of for the past decade+. Not to mention they provide resources that would be useful in making said suitcase dirty bomb.
I'll consider us turned toward solar when instead of 'drill baby drill' we hear chants of 'solar, solar' from the RNC.
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On July 30 2014 06:57 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2014 06:19 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Assumes $50 / ton carbon cost: + Show Spoiler +SUBSIDIES for renewable energy are one of the most contested areas of public policy. Billions are spent nursing the infant solar- and wind-power industries in the hope that they will one day undercut fossil fuels and drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere. The idea seems to be working. Photovoltaic panels have halved in price since 2008 and the capital cost of a solar-power plant—of which panels account for slightly under half—fell by 22% in 2010-13. In a few sunny places, solar power is providing electricity to the grid as cheaply as conventional coal- or gas-fired power plants.
But whereas the cost of a solar panel is easy to calculate, the cost of electricity is harder to assess. It depends not only on the fuel used, but also on the cost of capital (power plants take years to build and last for decades), how much of the time a plant operates, and whether it generates power at times of peak demand. To take account of all this, economists use “levelised costs”—the net present value of all costs (capital and operating) of a generating unit over its life cycle, divided by the number of megawatt-hours of electricity it is expected to supply.
The trouble, as Paul Joskow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out, is that levelised costs do not take account of the costs of intermittency.* Wind power is not generated on a calm day, nor solar power at night, so conventional power plants must be kept on standby—but are not included in the levelised cost of renewables. Electricity demand also varies during the day in ways that the supply from wind and solar generation may not match, so even if renewable forms of energy have the same levelised cost as conventional ones, the value of the power they produce may be lower. In short, levelised costs are poor at comparing different forms of power generation.
To get around that problem Charles Frank of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, uses a cost-benefit analysis to rank various forms of energy. The costs include those of building and running power plants, and those associated with particular technologies, such as balancing the electricity system when wind or solar plants go offline or disposing of spent nuclear-fuel rods. The benefits of renewable energy include the value of the fuel that would have been used if coal- or gas-fired plants had produced the same amount of electricity and the amount of carbon-dioxide emissions that they avoid. The table summarises these costs and benefits. It makes wind and solar power look far more expensive than they appear on the basis of levelised costs.
Mr Frank took four sorts of zero-carbon energy (solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear), plus a low-carbon sort (an especially efficient type of gas-burning plant), and compared them with various sorts of conventional power. Obviously, low- and no-carbon power plants do not avoid emissions when they are not working, though they do incur some costs. So nuclear-power plants, which run at about 90% of capacity, avoid almost four times as much CO{-2} per unit of capacity as do wind turbines, which run at about 25%; they avoid six times as much as solar arrays do. If you assume a carbon price of $50 a tonne—way over most actual prices—nuclear energy avoids over $400,000-worth of carbon emissions per megawatt (MW) of capacity, compared with only $69,500 for solar and $107,000 for wind.
Nuclear power plants, however, are vastly expensive. A new plant at Hinkley Point, in south-west England, for example, is likely to cost at least $27 billion. They are also uninsurable commercially. Yet the fact that they run around the clock makes them only 75% more expensive to build and run per MW of capacity than a solar-power plant, Mr Frank reckons.
To determine the overall cost or benefit, though, the cost of the fossil-fuel plants that have to be kept hanging around for the times when solar and wind plants stand idle must also be factored in. Mr Frank calls these “avoided capacity costs”—costs that would not have been incurred had the green-energy plants not been built. Thus a 1MW wind farm running at about 25% of capacity can replace only about 0.23MW of a coal plant running at 90% of capacity. Solar farms run at only about 15% of capacity, so they can replace even less. Seven solar plants or four wind farms would thus be needed to produce the same amount of electricity over time as a similar-sized coal-fired plant. And all that extra solar and wind capacity is expensive.
A levelised playing field If all the costs and benefits are totted up using Mr Frank’s calculation, solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions. It costs $189,000 to replace 1MW per year of power from coal. Wind is the next most expensive. Hydropower provides a modest net benefit. But the most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power. The pattern is similar if 1MW of gas-fired capacity is displaced instead of coal. And all this assumes a carbon price of $50 a tonne. Using actual carbon prices (below $10 in Europe) makes solar and wind look even worse. The carbon price would have to rise to $185 a tonne before solar power shows a net benefit.
There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to choose one form of energy over another, including emissions of pollutants other than CO2 and fear of nuclear accidents. Mr Frank does not look at these. Still, his findings have profound policy implications. At the moment, most rich countries and China subsidise solar and wind power to help stem climate change. Yet this is the most expensive way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile Germany and Japan, among others, are mothballing nuclear plants, which (in terms of carbon abatement) are cheaper. The implication of Mr Frank’s research is clear: governments should target emissions reductions from any source rather than focus on boosting certain kinds of renewable energy. LinkLink to paper. Hmmm. Couldn't help but notice the paper doesn't say anything about nuclear waste storage and disposal? It seems they looked at the damage from carbon emissions but not any of the other environmental costs to the various sources (as they kind of mention at the end of your quote). Solar is the obvious way to go it's just a matter of developing the technology. The sun provides more energy to earth in a day than we use in a year so it's kind of obvious to me it's the most sensible way to power the world in our future. Seems ass backward to try to plan to burn new/different stuff (that we know is limited) for energy when we have a giant (practically unlimited) furnace constantly bombarding us with energy. Wish we could go back in time and spend 2 trillion on Solar research, or working on a new grid, instead of a war in Iraq. I don't agree that solar is the way to go. The sun doesn't shine all the time. Nuclear is the obvious way to go, specifically Thorium. Thorium is hundreds of times more common than Uranium, a Thorium-fueled reactor is passively stable meaning if something breaks, it just shuts off, it doesn't melt down. The nuclear waste from Thorium reactors is only dangerous for a few decades, not millions of years, Thorium reactors produce much less waste to begin with, and they can burn the some of the waste from other reactors. Thorium reactors also cant produce bomb-grade material, nor can their contents be used for dirty bombs. Thorium fission produces several gamma emitters, which means two things. One, any sensitive electronics, like those in a bomb, will get fried. Two, gamma rays are easily detected, making sneaking out with any nuclear material practically impossible.
The only real problem is that Thorium reactors require the use of fluoride salts, and liquid fluoride. Both of which are very corrosive and very toxic. This means that every Thorium reactor would also basically need a chemical plant on-sight.
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DENVER (AP) — Hundreds of people across the country lined up Tuesday to tell the Environmental Protection Agency that its new rules for power-plant pollution either go too far or not far enough.
The agency is holding hearings this week in Atlanta, Denver, Pittsburgh and Washington on President Barack Obama's plan to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 30 percent by 2030, with 2005 levels as the starting point. The rules are intended to curb global warming.
Coal mines, electric utilities, labor unions, environmental groups, renewable-energy companies, government agencies, religious and civil rights organizations and others sent representatives to the hearings.
Some endorsed the proposals, while others said they were a timid response to a huge problem or an unwarranted attack on the coal industry and its employees.
John Kinkaid, a Moffat County, Colorado, commissioner, told the EPA in Denver that the rules would devastate his area, home to a major power plant.
"Energy is the lifeblood of our economy," he said. "Moffat County deserves better than to be turned into another Detroit, Michigan."
Retired coal miner Stanley Sturgill of Harlan County, Kentucky, traveled to Denver to tell the EPA that coal-fired plants are crippling his health and the public's. Sturgill said he suffers from black lung and other respiratory diseases.
"The rule does not do nearly enough to protect the health of the front-line communities," he said. "We're dying, literally dying, for you to help us."
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