Do powerplants use too much water?

Coal and nuclear powerplants make heat, convert some of that to electriciy, and reject the rest. They use water, and lots of it, to reject the heat.

The USGS says that thermoelectric powerplants (nearly all coal and nuclear) use 49% of the water withdrawn in the US. That sounds like a lot, and it is. It's also misleading.

92% of the water used by powerplants is used for once-through cooling. That means they suck water from the river, use it to cool their condensers, then pump it back the river at somewhat higher temperature. There are legal limits to the temperature they can send back out, and as the intake water temperature rises closer to those limits, they have to pump more water, and eventually shut down the powerplant. This has happened, famously, in France during a heat wave, right when everyone wanted to run their air conditioners.

The other 8% of the water used by powerplants is used in recirculating cooling. In these systems water is used to cool the condensers, but then some of that water is evaporated in those familiar hyperbolic cooling towers, which cools the rest, and the water is cycled around. These systems use a lot less water because they only need to make up the water that evaporates. Of that 8%, about 70% is evaporated and 30% returned to the lake or river it came from.

Since 1990, the US has mostly built gas-turbine powerplants. These reject heat in the form of incredibly hot jet exhaust, and don't need water. But they burn natural gas which has caused us to send our plastics industry to China. I don't think many people appreciate how dumb that was.

New nuclear plants in the US will be either on the coastline or evaporatively cooled, because there is no appetite for increasing the amount of once-through freshwater cooling. And I don't think there will be many evaporatively cooled plants at either greenfield or brownfield sites: Greenfield evaporatively cooled plants require new water rights which are very difficult to secure. Brownfield replacements of older coal fired powerplants will be difficult because nuclear plants are much bigger than older coal plants, reject a lot more heat, and so need a lot more water, getting back to the new water rights problem. That leaves new PWR development for areas with a lot of water (US southeast) and coastlines. [Edit: And any new coastline PWR developments are going to face new hurdles as a result of Fukushima.]

Water rights are one reason why I'm so interested in molten salt reactors. MSR cores and turbines run at higher temperatures than those of pressurized water reactor cores, so they can be air cooled without killing their efficiency (and thus jacking up their costs a lot). Air cooling is a good thing because it removes an entire class of regulatory problems, and thus an entire kind of project risk.

Bill Gates nails it

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-gates/why-we-need-innovation-no_b_430699.html

His essential argument is:

• We have some agreement on two goals: 30% reduction of CO2 output by 2025, 80% reduction by 2050.
• Some countries will not make much reduction, and some countries, like China and India, will expand their CO2 output quite a bit as their huge populations pass through their own industrial revolution.
• Some portions of our western economies will not reduce their CO2 output easily. (I think this is a minor point.)
• The former goal might be achieved through conservation and improved efficiency.
• The latter goal requires that CO2 output from two sectors, transportation and electricity generation, be reduced to zero. Still more will be required, but this is a baseline.
• Once transport and electricity have been reduced to zero CO2 output, conservation in these areas will not improve our CO2 outputs. This is, for instance, why France doesn't bother subsidizing more efficient electric appliances, as many other countries do -- France's electricity is close to zero CO2, so improved electric efficiency doesn't reduce CO2 emissions.
• Therefore, reworking the economy to reduce transportation and electric consumption does not help towards the 2050 goal. To the extent that it costs money that could otherwise be spent on zero-CO2 electricity and transport, it frustrates progress towards the 2050 goal.

So, what does it take to get to zero CO2 from electricity and transport by 2050? These two subgoals are tied together: transport must be electrified.

Our transport sector currently burns 146 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel every year. In 2050, assuming an increase of 2%/year in transport miles and a fleet efficiency increase from 17 to 23 MPG, it will consume the equivalent of 248 billion gallons of petroleum. If we replace those vehicles with electric vehicles getting 3 km/kWh, those vehicles will consume 3 billion megawatt hours per year. The Nissan Leaf gets 5 km/kWh, so I think an estimate of 3 km/kWh average may be reasonable.

So, the big question raised by Gates' insight is, what can deliver energy like that? To my mind, there are two contenders, wind and nuclear.

The first problem is generation. And the second problem is storage, to cover variations in production as well as consumption.

Here is the generation problem:

The US consumed an average of 470 gigawatts in 2008. The EIA predicts annual increases of 2%/year, so that the average might be 1038 gigawatts in 2050, for the same uses we have today.

The additional 3 billion kWh per year needed to run the electric car fleet, if spread evenly through the year, amounts to 350 GW, which isn't really so bad when thought of in the context of total electric generation. So the grid in 2050 will have to deliver an average of 1400 GW.

1400 average gigawatts could come from 1 million 5 megawatt wind turbines spread over 1.2 million km^2 (at 1.2 watts/m^2). Right now, the US has 1.75 million km^2 of cultivated cropland, so switching US electricity and transport to wind would require a wind farming sector nearly as physically large as our crop farming sector. This is conceivable. After all, 150 years ago most farms had a wind turbine for pumping water. However, 150 years ago that turbine was not the majority of the capital on the farm. These new turbines will cost about $5000/acre, compared with the $2100/acre that farm real estate is currently worth. From an economic standpoint, wind farming would be a much larger activity than crop farming.

The turbines have a 30-year lifespan, so the cost is more than just the initial capital expense. By 2050 all of the turbines installed in the next decade will have worn out, and we'd be into a continuous replacement mode. Cost? $5 trillion in capital outlay for the turbines, another $5 trillion for the infrastructure, and around $160 billion a year (present dollars) for worn turbine replacement.

Here's the storage problem:

The morning commute in any major US city lasts for about 3 hours, with most of the activity in that last hour. The evening commute is longer and more centrally distributed. If we have east-west transmission lines capable of moving most of the commute peak power, we can smooth the U.S. commute peaks into two with four-hour wide centers. Even assuming this transmission capacity, electric consumption during commute hours would be about 500 GW above average.

The current thrust of electric-car research is to improve the batteries so significantly that the cars can be charged overnight and the batteries can provide all necessary power for daytime use. Per vehicle, that's about 18 kilowatt-hours per car, which sounds possible. There is a problem, however: there simply isn't enough material to make these batteries for all our cars.  [Edit: I was wrong, there is.  Lead-acid batteries require 240 kg lead for 18 kWh.  Lithium-ion batteries require 8.5 kg lithium for 18 kWh.]

• Lead-acid batteries would require 60 million metric tons of lead for the 254 million U.S. cars. World production of lead is around 4 million tons/year, and total reserves are around 170 million tons.
• Lithium-ion batteries store 75 watt-hours per pound, and can use about 60% of that (although a five-year life is a goal rather than a deliverable). 18 kWh would require 400 pounds of battery per car, which is physically possible. The U.S. fleet would require 2 million tons of lithium. Total recoverable worldwide lithium is 35 million tons.

The most economical way to store electricity is pumped hydro. Cars could pick up their electricity from metal strips in the freeway. Pumped hydro is at least plausible: the commute surge could be stored by pumping water from Lake Ontario back up to Lake Erie, raising Lake Erie by 60 cm twice a day.

Another way to achieve this goal is with nuclear reactors. Thousands of them. A nuclear electric infrastructure would have five big advantages over a wind infrastructure:

1. It would cost far less to build.
2. It would last 60 years or more.
3. It would not be weather dependent.
4. It would not require secondary storage (still more cost).
5. It would have far less environmental impact (no lakes with tides, no dead birds).

And the biggest advantage of all: it could keep getting bigger.

However, if we are to scale up the existing fleet of 104 reactors by over an order of magnitude, some things are going to have to change.

• Nobody really knows how much it will cost to build the next American reactor. We know that it costs the Koreans and Chinese $1.70/watt, and we know that it used to cost about that much in the U.S. If we build thousands of reactors, the cost will drop back into this range or below.
• Most of the new powerplants will have to be cooled by seawater or air, but not fresh water as is most commonly done today. We do not have enough fresh water to cool thousands of plants. Quite the contrary, by 2050 electric power and waste heat from reactors will be used to desalinate seawater for residential use, as is already the case in Florida and some California municipalities.
• Typical reactor sites will have a dozen or more gigawatt-class reactors, rather than the two or three as is common today. Far from being "extra large", gigawatt reactors are right-sized.
• Either very large new deposits of uranium will be discovered, or most reactors will be breeder reactors.

Bill Gates knows that the nuclear option is going to be the one we eventually choose, and he has a company, TerraPower, developing a new reactor which he hopes will cash in on the $100 billion/year domestic market for nuclear plants. I wish him the best.

Pocohontas Retold

Spoiler alert: I discuss the movie Avatar below.

When I read the Pocohontas story to my kids (we have the Disney version), we usually have a little discussion when we get to the page where Pocohontas attempts to dissuade her father (the local Indian chief) from starting a war with the settlers. The kids are interested in the idea that both people are trying to do the right thing, but they have completely different ideas about what the right thing is.

For those of you not familiar with the story, Pocohontas has fallen in love with a mercenary on the voyage (John Smith), and the two of them want to establish peace between the settlers and the natives. The book suggests that peace involves the settlers staying in North America. Powhatan, her father, is assembling a war party to drive the settlers away.

We can look back in history to better understand who was "right".

• As the book makes clear, a war between the settlers and the Indians is going to lead to many Indian casualties, since the settlers have guns and the Indians do not. Furthermore, most of the settlers are not intending to do harm to the Indians, as they've been told they are settling land that has no ownership yet. Pocohontas' efforts end up saving many well-intentioned people's lives.
• These same settlers would probably understand that, had they landed anywhere in England and built a village where they landed, they would be summarily evicted by whomever owned the land they were on. The racism here is lightly touched on in the book, but it's helpful because it's pretty easy for the kids to see how convenient it is for the settlers to suppose that nobody in North America owns anything yet.
  
• I usually tell the kids what little I know of the Mauri, the indigenous people of New Zealand. As I understand it, they immediately made war with white folks who arrived. I suspect that the Mauri were territorial in a way that worked better with the White conception of property, and because of that Mauri today have a significant representation in the New Zealand constitution and legislature, and own very large amounts of New Zealand's real estate. I expect many Native Americans would prefer the Mauri outcome to their own.

I recently went to see Avatar. It's basically the Pocohontas story, but the ending has changed and the natives switch from the Pocohontas to the Mauri approach. The change comes from two differences:

1. The Na'vi are territorial. They have a few specific high-value trees. My understanding is that most of the North American natives had a much less specific sense of property.
2. The movie has the natives resisting under human leadership, which is interesting to think about. It seems a bit condescending (especially the bit where the human, after 3 months of training, is outperforming the best of the natives), but historically North American natives really did not grasp the nature of the European threat fast enough to organize a massive resistance in time, and it seems at least possible that a charismatic European might have communicated the continent-level consequences of the European idea of property to enough of them to organize a resistance.
   

Although the movie doesn't make it clear enough, guns are a big advantage, but a multi-year supply line is an even bigger disadvantage. Although some of the dialog is a bit trite, I think the story is probably going to be a useful place to start interesting discussions. Hopefully they'll have some story books out at some point, because the PG-13 movie is far too violent for my kids to watch.

I once asked a friend who is a lawyer if all property rights, at least in North America, trace back to peace treaties of some kind, or if some (particular the French claim to the center of the continent that was then sold as the Louisiana Purchase) are based on bald assertions of authority without even a war. I never did get a decent answer.

If, in reading this post, anyone is wondering if I'm willing to cede my house to a Native American, the answer is no.

Chuck DeVore nails it

Relative Risk: Global Warming and Imported Fossil Fuels vs Nuclear Power

It's from last year, but Representative DeVore perfectly summarizes the environmental aspirations and political logjam in California, and points out that a voter initiative is possibly the only way to cut through the logjam.

World Wildlife Foundation donations suspended

At the July 8-10, 2009 G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, Allianz (a global insurance company) partnered with the World Wildlife Foundation to deliver and publicize a report on how the 8 richest countries in the world are doing at reducing their greenhouse gases. Sounds good.

WWF/Allianz "does not consider electricity generated by nuclear power a sustainable option", an opinion shared by many. Their trouble was that any simple ranking of countries will show that nuclear power has made France the world leader in reducing greenhouse gases. Since WWF/Allianz doesn't want to promote nuclear power, they cooked the numbers.

They didn't lie. There have been a number of outraged comments about this report, but these folks did not lie. Their footnotes say specifically that numbers for France were "adjusted as if electricity from nuclear power was generated from natural gas." The report also includes, in footnotes, the numbers correctly calculated.

One of those same footnotes says that "without the adjustment, France would rank first with Germany." Unfortunately, this comment is not supported by either facts, or by the WWF/Allianz numbers. By any numeric measure, France is way ahead of the rest of the industrialized world.

Because I feel that this report is intentionally misleading, my wife and I are suspending our donations to the WWF until they amend their report to rank countries based on facts. We're also going to have a talk with a few friends who also donate to the WWF. We don't do business with Allianz, so there's not much leverage there.

Those of you who don't actually care that much about CO2 emissions or global warming can stop here.

The report ranks the 8 richest countries in terms of their "past, present, and future climate performance". Here I've listed their overall ranking, along with WWF/Allianz' calculation of their emissions per capita and per million dollars of GDP.

1. Germany (12 tons/capita/year, 384 tons/M$ GDP)
2. United Kingdom (11 tons/capita/year, 334 tons/M$ GDP)
3. France (9 tons/capita/year, 276 tons/M$ GDP)
4. Italy (9 tons/capita/year, 328 tons/M$ GDP)
5. Japan (12 tons/capita/year, 367 tons/M$ GDP)
6. Russia (16 tons/capita/year, 1140 tons/M$ GDP)
7. United States (25 tons/capita/year, 567 tons/M$ GDP)
8. Canada (24 tons/capita/year, 668 tons/M$ GDP)

France got dinged because they have not improved emissions much since 1990 (they'd already built most of their nuclear fleet by then). I notice they also got dinged for not having strong mandatory targets imposed on utilities to promote energy efficiency. The report fails to note that in France, saving electricity doesn't significantly reduce CO2 emissions, so there is no need for such mandatory targets.

The report completely failed to note that France is building new nuclear power plants on its borders to export more CO2-free power. Not only is this action going to cause more improvement in Germany's CO2 output than Germany's own utility policies, but it is also going to be profitable, which means that France is going to be able to do it AGAIN in a few years. Germany, on the other hand, is busy bankrupting itself with huge feed-in tariffs, and is already switching from expensive, imported aranthracite coal to cheaper domestic brown coal which emits more CO2 and other pollutants.

The United States clearly needs to clean up its act. Which country should we model our environmental policies after?

Germany: 51% of German electricity comes from coal-fired powerplants. They are building or planning another 26. These will add 23 gigawatts of production. Germany will be forced close its coal mines in 34 years when it runs out of coal, at which point their coal imports will peak until they will switch to imported Russian methane. Germany also produces 4.4 gigawatts from wind turbines. There is a lot of talk about wind turbines but the power comes and will come from coal.

France: France closed its last coal mine in 2004. 4% of its electricity comes from coal. 78% of France's electricity comes from nuclear, and produces no CO2. Most of the rest (11%) comes from hydro, and produces no CO2. France exports 18% of it's electric production, and most of that (5.9 gigawatts, more than $2 billion a year) is sold to Italy, which is one reason why Italy's CO2 outputs are low.

Bottom line: WWF/Allianz fudged the numbers to support a policy goal. That's wrong, and we're stopping our contributions until they fix it.

It's a shame, by the way. I liked some of the other stuff they were doing.

Why New Nuclear

Senator Alexander Lamar has a white paper which well summarizes how I feel about our desperate energy situation, and lays out a plan for how to fix it:

Blueprint for 100 New Nuclear Reactors in 20 Years

It does have a thought which was new to me, however: Russia, China and India, as well as a host of other countries, have already built out a fair bit of coal, and are beginning a large build of nuclear. If their nuclear build fails, they will fall back on coal, and nothing the US does will change the course of global warming. If their nuclear build succeeds and surpasses us, they will cement their existing lead in the next major source of energy, and they will end up owning the base of our entire economy.

And this base is enormous. The US GDP was almost $14 trillion in 2007. Generation of electricity, at about $40/MWh, was $170 billion that year. But that electricity sold for $90/MWh, for a total of $373 billion. Electricity sales are 2.7% of our entire economy.

And consider industries that are part of that industrial base. In 2007, the United States used 4.1% of our electricity (170 million of the 4156 million MWh) to smelt 23 billion pounds of aluminum. That aluminum sold for $26 billion. The aluminum smelters probably spent around $40/MWh for that electricity, so the juice was 26% of their cost of goods sold. Since aluminum is an easily transported global commodity, their profit margins are thin and small changes in their costs can lead to large changes in who makes the aluminum.

We need to own our energy supplies. We need our own large forge to build the reactor pressure vessels (right now we depend on Japan). We need American companies to build, own, and operate these reactors. And we need it now.

What we really need is to stop the Waxman-Markey cap&trade bill, and adopt Alexander Lamar's plan instead. Write your congressman.

My Response to the New York Times

Here's a link to the New York Times article "Combative Start to Senate Climate Hearings".

And, here's my response:

I’m a Californian, I vote, and I want more nukes in my state. I’m fed up with the high cost of electricity. I’m pissed off that we switched from making plastics with our natural gas to making electricity — and shipped our plastics industry to China. That’s not environmentalism, it’s offshoring, as a direct result of public policy that my representatives voted in.

My power company is not incented to make good decisions about the power mix: when natural gas prices rise, they pass along the cost. When they look at natural gas they see a lower capital cost, and so they get the same return on less capital. Fine for them, but we get stuck with power prices that whipsaw our producers out of business. Ever noticed how inflation is quoted without the volatile food and energy component? We chose to make our energy prices volatile!

What we need right now are projects like the Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams: big, expensive government-funded projects that get lots of people working in well-paying jobs and deliver locked-in low priced power for a century or more. Nuclear plants are way better than hydro plants since they don’t kill fish (or anything else, for that matter).

I want to vote for a future in which energy prices are not volatile, and where the aluminum smelters and plastic plants come back to where we can regulate them and work in them. But I seem to be stuck between a choice between Green folks, who want to build temporary windmills which will kill our economy, and Conservatives who want to stick with imported fuels, which will kill our economy. Give me a third choice!

A professional look at The Day After

Here is a set of essays on the calculus of nuclear war, written by someone who used to plan nuclear war.  They are short, funny in places, reassuring in places, and generally scary.

http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_101.html

http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_102.html

http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_103.html

Of course, no mention of nuclear weapons is complete without directing readers to the Nuclear Weapons Archive, by Carey Sublette.  I remember first reading the FAQ in 1996 or so, and being astounded.  It changed the way I thought about The Bomb.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/

It's the physics bit that got me.  I had previously though of fusion bombs as being somewhat like the Sun, only, here.  But it turns out that fusion in the Sun proceeds along quite slowly, at comparatively low temperatures and pressures.  Fusion bombs operate at much higher pressures and temperatures than stars do, and (obviously) on much shorter timescales.  It turns out to be almost completely different physics.

For some reason that really bothers me.  The notion that we use physics that can't even be observed anywhere in the natural world seems odd.  Perhaps I'm succumbing to nuclear hocus pocus, since I can't think of anywhere in the natural world that we can observe hydrocarbon-oxygen combustion at dozens of atmospheres of pressure, and yet our cars and airplanes do that all the time.

National Organization for Marriage

I left a note on the National Organization for Marriage blog that I wrote carefully, in response to their ad.  Here it is:

One of the big problems I see is that when kids are taught that it’s okay for other people to marry anyone they want, they naturally apply that same logic to themselves. So teaching tolerance can end up advocating homosexuality. The big message of this ad is that gays aren’t just asking for tolerance any more, but instead want to evangelize their lifestyle in a (manditory) public venue.

I think the really scary thing happening in school is that we don’t have full control over the values that our kids develop. Some of them, exposed to a message of tolerance, are going to go past that tolerance and experiment with a homosexual lifestyle, against the wishes of their parents. It’s plenty hard just teaching kids the basics, like a sense of justice and fair play. State mandated messages in school open a can of worms that would probably be easier to deal with a few years later when the kids are adults and have their value systems more fully formed.

If we’re going to be teaching tolerance to the children of people of some faiths, who believe that homosexuality is an abomination, then we need to get the message in school clear that, while homosexuality should be tolerated and is part of the “normal” spectrum of human behavior in the larger world, it is NOT acceptable and NOT normal if you are going to be a member of these faiths. Then at least the kids can wrestle directly with the issue that their parent’s faith requires a stricter set of behavior than society at large does. That leads to questions of faith which can then be directed to a priest, elder, etc.

Theodore,

About the marriage license thing: you are part of many groups. Some large, like your state, which grants marriage licenses. Some less inclusive, like your faith. The norms of the more inclusive groups have to be broader. That’s why your faith can say no to homosexuality while your state may say okay. Since lots of people get married in a church, they tend to think of marriage as being something granted by the church. But that hasn’t been true for a long time. As my pastor pointed out, I was legally married to my wife BEFORE we got to church, just by the process of getting a marriage license.

Lighten up about the imprimatur of your approval. If people want to know how you feel about homosexuality they’ll look to your faith before they look to your state, and that’ll be clear enough.

Zubrin's Plan

Energy plans are like ..., well, everybody's got one.  Today I'll be looking at Zubrin's plan, as presented by Anne Korin.  Check out her youtube presentation.

Anne likes Robert Zubrin's plan of making lots of ethanol from corn or sugar, and using that instead of oil to run our cars.  Digging below the surface, the bottom line is that in 2008 we used 42% of our corn crop to reduce oil imports by 3.7%.  So, we aren't going to replace a substantial amount of oil imports this way.  But Anne didn't get into that aspect.

Anne's politics are certainly different than mine.  She likes to talk about having little or no government, and letting the free market work.  At the same time, the present crisis is so very bad, and OPEC is removing freedom from the oil market, so she says we need the government to fix it.  Okay, so she's libertarian except when things are bad.  A governing system that only works in good cases doesn't sound very robust to me, but that's not really the point of this blog post.

Another issue I have with her otherwise excellent presentation is that I don't follow how OPEC, which controls about half of the oil supply, can remove freedom from the market.  You can read a detailed analysis at WTRG Economics which suggests that OPEC does not have even rough pricing control.

But I think this is just her ideology, and I don't care about that so much.  What is more interesting is her presentation of Zubrin's plan (unattributed) for fixing our balance of trade / economic insecurity problem.

The basic idea in the Zubrin plan is to mandate that all cars sold in the US accept both alcohol and gasoline fuels.  This change can be applied to all cars sold within a couple of years because it does not require large changes by auto manufacturers (contrast with hybrids, or plug-in hybrids, which have a much longer and more expensive adoption curve).  Having made that change, within a few years a substantial number of consumers will be able to use high-alcohol-content fuels..  When alcohol is cheaper than gas, gas stations will offer alcohol, and so consumers will have an economic alternative to gasoline.

We can make alcohol from corn or coal, or we can import alcohol fuel.  There are a lot of hazy details: corn-ethanol may be soaking up so much corn that we're starving people to death worldwide, corn may be crowding out the use of land for food, and it may be impossible to grow enough corn to matter.

The flex-fuel vehicle part sounds really good.  There are a few other details which sound really good to me as well:

• Eliminate the tax on imported ethanol, so that it competes with imported oil (which has no tax).
• Eliminate the tax on imported sugar.  Sugar cane is supposed to be a better feedstock for ethanol production than corn.

In the presentation above, one of the audience members asks if ethanol from corn replaces more oil than it consumes.  Anne says yes, and it appears she is right.  Here's a study of corn-ethanol production efficiency:

• Each BTU of corn-ethanol produced in the U.S. requires an average of 0.14 BTU of gasoline, diesel and fuel oil.
• This factor does not support the conclusion at the top of the study, that each gallon of ethanol displaces 7 gallons of imported oil.
• Correcting for the energy density of ethanol and gasoline, each gallon of ethanol produced domestically displaces 0.57 gallons of imported gasoline.
• The U.S. produced 13 billion gallons of ethanol in 2008, which displaced 7.36 billion gallons of gasoline, and reduced oil imports by 167 million barrels.  We imported 4.39 billion barrels over the same period, so the oil imports reduction was 3.7%.
• The U.S. used 5.1 billion bushels of corn in 2008 to make that ethanol, which was 42% of the total of 12.3 billion bushels grown that year.

Bottom line: we aren't going to displace more than, say, 10% of our oil imports in the future by using corn ethanol.  There just isn't enough corn.

The reason the question gets asked is that there is a different issue: does making corn ethanol yield more fuel energy than fossil fuel energy used?  The answer here is: it's close.  When you make ethanol, you make electricity along with it.  When you add in the energy value of the coproducts, a little more energy comes out than fossil fuel energy went in (this energy was supplied by the sun).

So, the right way to think of ethanol production is as a coal-to-liquids system.  It has the consequence of increasing the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted for a given amount of energy delivered to the automobile.

"we want these detainees broken"

From "SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY":

• Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora: “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."
• Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel to the CIA’s CounterTerrorist Center: "If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong."
• In mid-August 2003, an email from staff at Combined Joint Task Force 7 headquarters in Iraq requested that subordinate units provide input for a “wish list” of interrogation techniques, stated that “the gloves are coming off,” and said “we want these detainees broken.”
• JPRA Commander Colonel Randy Moulton’s authorization of SERE instructors, who had no experience in detainee interrogations, to actively participate in Task Force interrogations using SERE resistance training techniques was a serious failure in judgment.
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.
  

I think at this point I'm just sick of all the damage that has been done to my country by Bush and his team.  I doubt that throwing many of them in jail will do much to improve the behavior of similarly-minded people, but I'm all for prosecutions so long as they don't shift attention from the job at hand, which is to fix the economy.

Prediction

That white paper got me thinking: what if the government made a bunch of other sensible decisions?

• They might shut down Yucca Mountain, and require that all nuclear waste be stored on the site of the reactor for 300 years. Nah, won't happen. [Update: They did it!]
• They might just have NASA cancel Ares-I and Ares-V, and leave it to SpaceX to provide a launcher. This might actually happen. All those folks in Florida and Utah that used to work for NASA contractors? Learn to build windmills. Some of you can learn to build Dragons and Falcons. [Update: Holy crap! They did it!]
  
• They might require all air conditioners and heat pumps to have short-term demand management controls. As the newer air conditioners got deployed, we'd have a lot less need for online throttled-down combustion gas turbines to back up all these new wind farms. I've not seen any rumblings of this yet.
• They might even standardize form factors for rechargable batteries... [Update: Um, they sort of did it! (Europe hsa standardized cellphone recharging plugs)]
  

Going Nuclear

Stephen Chu, the current director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the guy that Obama just fingered to be the new Secretary of Energy, signed this paper in August of this year.  The paper is a short, very high level, but clear and broad statement of why and how we should invest heavily in nuclear power.  Usually, statements like this come from people with no clout.

Holy crap.  This Barack Obama guy seems to be making at least some decisions I agree with.  I'm confused and unused to this feeling, but I think I like it.

-Iain

Spend, spend, spending our way out of recession

We have a consensus among politicians in this country that we must spend our way out of this recession.  Of course, there are many things to spend money on:

• For the last six years, the neocons within the Bush Administration have spent around 700 billion dollars of our money on wars, and committed another trillion or so to the aftermath of those wars (caring for the permanently maimed American soldiers).
• This March, the idea that everyone jumped at was spending money on consumer goods, so every American got a check for $400 from the government, and was exhorted to spend it on consumables.  Pfft!  Just like that, $80 billion gone.
• In just the last month, the Federal Reserve has spent hundreds of billions by buying stock in badly run banks whose value is justly plummeting as people realize how stupid their management was.

All of these have been colossal failures from an economic point of view.  And I do mean colossal.  The U.S. economy is about $13 trillion a year, and has a historic growth rate of about 3% per year.  It is the most awesome generator of wealth ever.  The economy usually generates about $400 billion a year in growth.  And our government is now throwing away money at a rate which entirely negates the economy's ability to grow at all.  The current trends guarantee that our children will be worse off than we are.  We are within a single order of magnitude of blowing away the entire output of the U.S. economy, which would reduce us to hunter-gatherers amid fancy energy-starved infrastructure within a year or two.  Lest you think that an order of magnitude increase in government spending is preposterous, consider that one department, the Fed, is now spending more than 1% of the U.S. GDP per month propping up just one industry.  The auto industry is lining up at the trough, and others aren't far behind.

Although the things the government spends money on now are crippling the economy, this is actually a good time for government spending to grow, so long as we spend money on the right things.  Private sector returns on investment are low, so the cost of borrowing has dropped, which means investments have longer to make a return.  This is a great time for the government to spend money on things that will cause the economy to grow in the long term:

• Domestic power infrastructure, like wind farms and nuclear powerplants.  These will make the cost of future energy more predictable.  Predictability means less risk, so that the cost of capital for energy-intensive manufacturing, like fertilizers and aluminum and steel and plastic, will be lower in the U.S. than in other countries without the same infrastructure.  That will give our descendants decades of competitive advantage, which is enough time for not just businesses but industries to grow.
• Health care efficiency.  I'm not suggesting we spend more on health care itself -- we're spending too much on health care.  I suspect that a huge amount of operational expense can be slashed from health care through radical restructuring without large amounts of investment.  The restructuring will be radical though.  Imagine the number of people put out of work if drug advertising stopped.
• Electrified transportation.  Hydrocarbon-based transport will always rely on imported fuels subject to ever-more volatile price swings.  The value of real estate depends in part on the cost of transportation (if you drive 40 miles to work at 20 mpg and $4/gallon and 3% discount, that's $100k present value), and so volatility in energy prices causes volatility in housing prices which caps the house value that people can afford.  Worse still, we get situations like the current housing bubble, caused by just 2 million people simulaneously finding out they bought way too much house.  (That's just 1.7% of the 116 million homes in the U.S.!)

At least the president-elect seems to have the right idea.  I heard him refer to investment spending as a "two-fer".  I was disappointed at his notion that half the good idea of a "two-fer" is just spending the money at all.  But at least he's looking for the right kind of thing to spend on.

Grove's plan

Now I've read Andy Grove's plan (at The American, or via Wired) to fix our energy dependence national security mess. Mr. Grove thinks, as I do, that national security is the most immediate problem we face.

There are flaws in both Grove's and Pickens' plans, but we can take good ideas from both and act on them immediately.

There are two steps to either plan:

1. Switch our vehicles to a non-petroleum energy form
2. Make that energy domestically

With Pickens' plan, we switch to natural gas to power cars (step 1), and simultaneously free up domestic methane production by building wind turbines (step 2). If we do step 1 without step 2, we end up switching from imported petroleum to imported natural gas, which suits Pickens quite well because he has lots of gas to sell us.

With Grove's plan, if we do step 1 without step 2, we've got a bunch of electric cars which will plug in at night. The extra demand at night will drive utilities to produce more baseload power -- coal, wind, or nuclear, in that order, all of which is domestic. The advantage of Grove's plan is that step 2 is handled by the market.

The problem with Grove's plan is that converting cars and trucks to electricity instead of natural gas is more costly. The added cost will cripple the plan in two ways:

1. It is so much more costly that the conversion will happen more slowly. Per year, less petroleum imports will be displaced.
2. Fewer vehicles, in the end, will be converted.

I think there are good ideas in both these plans that we should isolate and exploit immediately.

There are no forseeable battery technologies that will work on long distance trucks. The obvious substitution here is to move long distance freight by electrified train. We already have most of the rail infrastructure (rights of way are the big issue here), and the nation is already switching some cargoes back to rail. But railroads have been sick for a long time, and we have to fix them before they can help America.

Rail's crushing disadvantage compared to trucking is it's capital structure -- the fact that the same companies own the road and the trucks. Long distance trucking works because multiple companies run trucks over the same routes, which are owned and paid for by the U.S. government via tolls on the trucks and taxes on the diesel they burn. We should change rail to use this structure. The rail infrastructure should be electrified in the process, so that the independent trains can choose to run on cheaper domestically produced electricity where it is available. All the technology necessary is already developed and in production.

The good idea in Pickens' plan is to build lots (many tens of thousands) of wind turbines. Wind turbines displace imported natural gas with domestic labor, and that is the most useful part of his plan. If you then convert cars to run on natural gas rather than petroleum, you in turn displace some imported petroleum with some imported natural gas. This second step is a fine thing too, as petroleum costs more than natural gas per unit energy, but the first step is what is most important.

The United States made a terrible mistake during the 1990s by building nearly a terawatt of natural gas-fired turbines. The choice was driven by utilities who know that fuel costs can always be passed to the consumer, so that cheap gas turbines minimized investment and so maximized return on investment. The problem here is that utilities were allowed to make investments with large externalized costs. Market forces do not work to the advantage of most citizens unless the market is set up to internalize the costs that matter to the citizens. Because utilities have no sons and daughters to send to war, they cannot be allowed to make investment decisions that force us to send our sons and daughters to war.

Electric freight trains and wind turbines will not fix America's imported energy problem. Both, however, can be pursued immediately, are solid steps in the right direction that will not have to be reversed, and will make market-affecting changes in our consumption of imported energy. Both options will buy us some time during which we must develop better options.

In the medium term, we can build more nuclear power plants. These take longer than wind turbines to come on line, but the eventual impact can be much larger. The public discussion of our nuclear options is becoming more sensible, and I am beginning to hope that we may be able to begin building this infrastructure again after a two decade hiatus that has cost us terribly.

Nuclear power generation, if pursued in a sensible way, can drive the cost of electricity in the U.S. down below the cost of coal power in China, in a predictable, long-term way, which I think should be an explicit goal of our national energy policy. This will have the effect of "onshoring" basic industries that we have been moving overseas for decades. The onshoring effect is actually more powerful than displacing imported petroleum, because the imports that are replaced for a given amount of investment have higher added value.

Unreliable Wind Power

The electricity that arrives at your home or business is extremely reliable (if you live in the U.S.). The electricity that comes from a windmill is unreliable -- it only comes 1/3 of the time, and you never know exactly when it's going to come or how much you are going to get. If you want to sell wind energy, you have to convert unreliable wind energy into reliable power. How is it done?

This paper explains how, but it's a tough slog. What follows is my summary.

The utility companies already solve a similar problem. Electricity is not easily stored, and in modern grids it is generally not stored at all. So, when you flick on a light switch, the immediate effect is that the power dissipated by all the lights in your neighborhood drops a little to compensate. Within seconds, some power turbine perhaps hundreds of miles away must twist a little harder on its generator shaft to get everyone's line voltage back up, and the extra thermal or hydroelectric power fed into the turbine to get this extra twist will be just about what your light bulb burns, plus the inefficiencies of getting the power from the turbine input to your bulb.

Turbines can only throttle up to 100% of their rated capacity, and they get inefficient when they throttle down too far, so utilities will shut down or spin up units to make larger changes. Changes like these take a long time, so utilities predict what the expected load at any given time will be, hours or days in advance, and schedule units to be on or off line to match the predicted load. Utilities keep some fraction of their turbines at partial output so that they can immediately crank up to match unexpected increases in the load.

The biggest increase in the load that they plan for is usually an unexpected dropout of one of the generators. If a 1 gigawatt generator suddenly goes off line, the grid controllers might respond by taking four other generators from 700 to 950 MW output. It would be impossible for this to happen instantly, but luckily, when most generators go offline, they do so gradually, and if they coast down over the course of seconds, other generators can crank up to match. If a circuit breaker pops or a line parts, or something else happens very quickly, then there is usually a temporary brownout as the line voltage drops down to the point where the loads match the generation. The backup generators usually ramp up within seconds, and many devices (like your computer or TV) can ride through a partial loss of power for a second or so.

So, the bottom line is that utilities predict the change in demand on their generators, and there is some variation from their prediction, and being ready for this variation costs money because some turbines (the spinning reserve) must be run at partial throttle which is less efficient than flat-out.

Just as an aside: consider how valuable it would be for the utility company to be able to instantly shut down your air conditioner for just a few minutes. This ability would act as part of their spinning reserve. During the summer, air conditioners are a substantial fraction of the total power burned. I'm pretty sure that for most of the U.S., the ability to shut down even a fraction of the air conditioners for 10 minutes would cover the entire spinning reserve requirement. That could save a lot of money, and PG&E (my local utility in California) is experimenting with just that through their Underfrequency Relay Option on the Base Interruptible Program. Anyway, back to the summary.

Wind farms produce electricity whenever the wind blows. Wind speeds can be predicted, and there is always variation from the prediction. When a wind farm is connected to the grid, the total variation in load on the load-following turbines is larger than without the wind farm, and so more turbines must be run in load-following mode, and these incur a cost associated with wind power that is real but not easy to predict before the wind farm is built.

For instance, part of Denmark's grid is connected to Norway's grid. Norway gets most of its power from hydroelectric plants. Hydroelectric plants are very good at load following and so they are usually the first choice of plant to handle variation from plan. Because Norway has lots of hydroelectric plants, and because it has high-throughput connections to Denmark, Denmark can hook up fairly high powered wind farms to its grid and incur relatively low costs for standby power.

Now that utilities are connecting large amounts of wind power to their grids, they are getting more precise numbers on the costs of doing so.

• Wind works well where you have year-round high winds near hydroelectric dams.
• The short-term variation from wind farms is usually quite small, since turbines are small (a few megawatts) and don't all shut off at the same time.
• Big storms give the worst case variation, since when a wind turbine goes too fast it feathers its blades and shuts down, going from full output to nothing, often in synchrony with other wind turbines around it.
• Wind farms spread over large geographic areas have less total variation (the wind doesn't die everywhere at the same time). Ideally the spinning reserve would thus scale up slower than the total windpower connected, making marginal wind power less expensive. Unfortunately Denmark is too small to see this effect, and it would require very high throughput long distance power distribution.
  

Wind turbine manufacturers are working on making their turbines play better with the grid. Variable-frequency turbines go offline more slowly by generating power from their blades as they spin down after losing wind. Many manufacturers are shipping wind turbines with extra-large blades, so that the turbine produces a larger fraction of its output more of the time. This reduces the cost of variability in exchange for an increase in the capital cost of the turbine, which is a tradeoff made possible by an understanding of the cost of that variability.

Wind turbines appear to work economically (when the utilities are prodded by a production tax credit, which I support). As more turbines are installed, the best windy areas are used up and the least expensive spinning reserve is committed. On the other hand, wind turbine costs might be coming down some day (maybe -- materials costs are going up), and the need for spinning reserve is decreasing. It's a fairly tense balance.

Personally, I'm happy to see more wind turbines getting installed, since it's domestically produced, mostly-carbon-free, low marginal cost power, and let's have more of that. There is going to be a limit to how much wind power can be installed, but we're nowhere near that limit yet.

At the same time, it's sobering to consider that the United States once built almost 100 nuclear plants in about two decades, bringing new power online at the average rate of 5 gigawatts a year, at a time when our economy was one-third to one-half the size it is now, in real terms. At it's peak, we were building much faster than that. This economic explosion was driven by the business fundamentals as much as it was by overexcited businessmen jumping on the latest bandwagon. And the fundamentals were and are that if we decide on a reactor design (like Palo Verde), we can build and operate them cheaper than coal plants.

To match this performance, and get to 20% of the U.S. grid in 20 years, the wind industry would need to install about 300 gigawatts of nameplate capacity. That would require getting to a peak of 30 gigawatts a year, up from 4 gigawatts in 2007, which is 11 years of sustained 20% growth. The fundamentals for wind are not as good as they were for nuclear in the 1960s. It won't happen without a major breakthrough.

Constraints to wind power

Jesse Ausubel has a pretty good essay which describes what he thinks the future of power production will look like. It's a somewhat rosy picture, and although I'm also optimistic (but not for the next few years), I disagree on a couple of points.

He, like I, thinks that we've got to get away from coal. I don't follow his reasoning for why he thinks we have to get away from coal. It seems he has identified a long term trend towards fuels with less carbon and more hydrogen, and he thinks we should make choices to perpetuate that trend. As near as I can tell, he's skipped the part about why the trend is a good thing. Perhaps he thinks consumers like lower carbon fuels because they tend to burn with fewer combustion byproducts, but he doesn't back this claim up with any market analysis.

I think we as a country need to stop burning coal because

• we import a lot of oil to burn coal (we spend almost as much on oil to move the coal as on the coal itself), so that the price of coal-fired power is quite sensitive to the cost of oil,
• it is politically possible to install lots more windpower, but coal is seeing opposition, and it is vital to our economic health to get a lot more electric supply,
• wind power is inelastic supply, whereas coal power is elastic. That is, a coal plant will shut down if the price of electricity falls below it's operating costs, but a wind turbine costs almost nothing to run and will keep generating through a larger swing in electricity prices, which will make our electricity supply more predictable,
  
• and finally and perhaps most importantly, because climate change matters.
  

My biggest point of disagreement is with Jesse's assertion that windpower is impractical due to land use constraints. Other, perhaps clearer-thinking people have made this same point. Jesse makes a very sobering calculation: he figures a wind farm produces 1.2 watts per square meter, average. To produce all of the U.S. grid's 450 gigawatts (average), you'd need a lot of land. Jesse calculates 780,000 square kilometers. The area of the U.S., for reference, is 9.16 million square kilometers, with 1.75 million square kilometers of cultivated cropland. I don't get quite as large a number as Jesse, but we'll take his 780k km^2 for now.

He figures that's just too much land. But this argument is trite. I'll skip over the point that farmland with wind turbines is still farmed land, and instead focus on a more basic question: How much is too much? I think too much is when the next wind turbine to be installed is projected to make no money. That could be all the farmland plus a lot of offshore turbines, or it could be just a few places in North Dakota. It won't be decided by people getting scared of erecting some more infrastructure on 44% of our existing cropland. Farms in the Netherlands in the 1800s were dotted with windmills, because that's what drove the pumps to keep the water out. Farms in the U.S. in the late 1800s were dotted with windmills, with parts shipped at enormous expense across the continent, because that's what pumped the irrigation water wells. Modern farms aren't currently dotted with wind turbines because they've been using oil instead.

Jesse's argument is also trite because it ignores the huge variation in windiness around the U.S. In North Dakota, the entire state is class 4 or above. That means the power available at 50 meters above the ground is 400-500 watts/meter^2. Even during the summer doldrums, the average power available is 300-400 watts/meter^2.

Jesse's 1.2 watts/meter^2 number comes from a wind farm in Lamar, Colorado. That wind farm has 108 1.5 MW turbines spread over a 11840 acre area. Multiply by a 30% capacity factor, and you get 1.01 watts/meter^2. (I'm not sure how he got the extra 20%.) Why is this number so low?

It's economics. The company that owns the wind turbines pays the company that owns the land on which the turbine is sited approximately $3000 to $6000 per year per turbine. The net present value of that payment stream is $60,000 to $120,000. The turbine costs $1,500,000, which is a lot more. Spacing the turbines farther apart slightly increases the power from each turbine, at small increases in royalty payments and road and cable construction costs. If land scarcity ever becomes an issue for wind farmers, I would expect $ per watt and watts per km^2 to go up. Note that $/watt may go up slightly, while watts per km^2 may go up a lot.

Consider that the first big wind farm, on the Altamont Pass, has a power density of 0.86 watts/m^2, which is lower than Lamar's density. If you follow that link, you'll note that wind farms vary from 0.24 watts/m^2 (Pierce County, N.D.) to 5.3 watts/m^2 (Braes of Doune, Scotland). I think land prices, more than turbine capability, is driving the energy density of these farms.

Note that the wind power map above quotes wind at 10 and 50 meters above the ground. Back when the Department of Energy began collecting data for these maps, those were considered the likely bounds of practically sized wind turbines. However, the Lamar turbine towers are 70 m tall. It turns out that the tower costs are mostly just steel, and the higher up you go, the faster the wind blows. After the industry got experience with the costs of siting, permitting, building, bird strikes, aesthetics, and so forth, it turned out worthwhile to spend more on steel in the tower and concrete in the foundation. As a result, watts per km^2 has gone up.

Is there a limit? Placing turbines closer together can collect more wind energy, but fundamentally most wind power is still being dissipated as turbulence and then heat higher up in the atmosphere. Bigger wind turbines reach farther up to capture more energy. It is hard for me to imagine that ground-based wind turbines are going to get substantially taller than they are now, and so I do not expect the average power yield to increase much beyond, say, 2 or 3 watts/m^2 average. 2 watts/m^2 across all of North and South Dakota would yield 750 gigawatts, which is why you hear wind advocates claiming that the Dakotas can power the rest of the U.S. They could, if you could transport the electricity to market.

Finally, I doubt very much that, even if windpower is wildly successful, it will ever account for anything like 100% of the U.S. grid's production. If many coal plants are forced out of production by lower cost wind plants, I would expect that some very efficient mine-mouth plants will remain. I will be astonished (and pleased) if wind ever produces half the U.S. capacity. If that ever happens, wind turbines will be a familiar sight, but not an overwhelming use of land.

Jesse also complains that wind turbines take significantly more steel and concrete than nuclear powerplants. Obviously the steel and concrete are factored into the current prices of turbines, so it's already part of the price comparisons being made. There are two future risks to large use of concrete and steel, however:

• Wind turbine prices in the future could be more closely tied to raw material prices (which in turn depend on the cost of energy) than on the price of labor (which depends on the state of the economy). This question resolves to whether future wind turbine prices are more sensitive to the cost of imported energy than electricity from coal is. Coal fired electricity is fairly sensitive to oil prices, so I doubt this is a problem.
• A large bump in wind turbine construction could use so much concrete and steel that it would distort the markets and cause large price increases.
  

The second issue got me to pull out the calculator again. Here are Jesse's numbers, actually Per Peterson's numbers, in context of the production necessary to build a 250 GWe average windpower grid (about half U.S. electric consumption):

• Steel: 460 metric tons per MWe. The U.S. produces about 90 million metric tons of steel every year. Over the 30 years it would take to build a new US grid, wind turbines would require 1.3 years' worth of production.
• Concrete: 870 cubic meters of concrete. The U.S. ready-mix industry produces about 350 million cubic meters a year, so we'd need 0.6 years' worth of concrete production.
  

These constitute a nice bump to domestic production, but are significantly less that ordinary year-to-year variation.

The bottom line: if the price is right (or even close), let's have all the wind turbines we can build, because it really could help with our foreign trade deficit, economic sensitivity to energy prices, and global warming.

The Pickens Plan

Check out the guy's website, if you haven't already. There is not a lot of meat there. Basically, the idea is that if we build enough wind turbines to provide 20% of our electricity, we can reduce the amount of natural gas that we burn to make electricity. This natural gas can be used to power special new cars, which will reduce our imports of petroleum.

Mr. Pickens' chief aim is to reduce U.S. petroleum imports. That's great, because that's the energy policy issue I care about most, too. However, I see two problems with his plan:

1. As things stand now, large fast changes in wind turbine output will have to be accomodated by throttling natural gas turbines. Gas turbines cannot throttle down to zero power efficiently. So, even when the wind is blowing a large amount of power will have to come from gas turbines running at partial throttle ready to take over if the wind cuts out. If wind is supplying 20% of our domestic power, these partial-load gas turbines will have to supply some similarly large amount, and as a result there may not be a large amount of gas actually saved.
2. I don't forsee a switch to compressed natural gas burning cars. I suspect it would be cheaper and have a larger, more immediate impact to convert the natural gas (and some coal) into gasoline in a refinery, and then feed that into the existing transportation system.
   

I have two humble suggestions for Mr. Pickens, or energy policymakers.

1. Switch home heating to electric heat pumps.

In 2006, 5 billion gallons of distillate fuel oil was sold to residential users, almost all of it used to heat their homes. Ignoring refinery gain, this is 160.8 million barrels, or about 3.6% of the 4.5 billion barrels of oil imported that year.

Nearly all the houses heated by distillate fuel oil have grid electricity. These houses can be upgraded to air-source heat pumps for a few thousand dollars each. Electricity can come from coal or natural gas, either one of which is better than petroleum. The economics are probably already there for the switch, so some public education and low-cost financing should push homeowners to embrace heat pumps en masse. This can happen a lot sooner than moving the U.S. car fleet to compressed natural gas.

This switch can reduce our oil import bill without requiring the first step of lots of wind turbines. Maybe I'm just nitpicking, but $21.4 billion dollars per year (for the 160.8 million barrels imported) seems like an interesting amount of money.

2. Make air conditioners work on intermittent electricity

This is also known as "Direct Load Control" or "Demand-side Management".

One of the problems with wind energy is that it's intermittent. Increasing the amount of wind generation in the national grid will increase the variation in load that the other generators must accomodate. This will cost money. It will cost less money if the other generators have 10 or 15 minutes to accomodate variation.

Air conditioners and heat pumps naturally store energy. It takes time to cool or heat a building. Usually, the pump cycles on or off every few minutes. If the utility has a fast way to shut down large numbers of compressors for a few minutes, it can filter out much of the short-term variation in load and supply. Instead of throttling gas turbines from 50% to 100%, a few minutes' notice gives the utility time to turn on gas turbines -- from 0% to 100%. That means that the 50% rated capacity that was otherwise being produced by a gas turbine can be produced by a coal-fired turbine instead, which is much cheaper.

This change is a good idea regardless of whether a massive wind turbine build happens, because it will allow utilities to use less natural gas and more coal. That may alarm some folks. Some may see a hidden agenda here. I think if the same bill in Congress mandates Direct Load Control on HVAC devices, and guarantees a production tax credit for all non-carbon domestic sources for a decade, that should assure doubters and put some real fire in the market.

Right now, hydroelectric turbines are the cheapest load-following generation around. They produce just 7.1% of the electricity in the United States (2006). Unfortunately, all of this load following capacity is already used.

For comparison, HVAC uses more than 29% (page 44 here, plus this, both from the EIA) of our generated electricity. Instantaneous control over this much load would be sufficient to accomodate any amount of wind power that we care to build. Of course, the utilities (really the system operators) can't control HVAC, yet. I don't think this is a problem, because we don't have 450 gigawatts of wind turbines yet either.

I suspect the average lifetime of HVAC equipment is around 20 years. If the government mandated that all HVAC equipment sold after, say, 2009 had Direct Load Control features, then we'd see about 15 new gigawatts of Direct Load Control every year. There is little danger of us building wind turbines faster than that in the near future.

Subsidizing wheat in Afghanistan

Afghanistan grows most of the world's opium. Opium is technically an illegal crop there, and it is one of the few crops that makes enough money to support a farmer in Afghanistan. If you grow opium, the central government is officially supposed to stop you, and the local official will probably look the other way if you pay him off. It may seem cheaper and easier for the folks growing opium in the Taliban-controlled areas, since the Taliban actively helps farmers sell their crop, in exchange for some of the profit. I'm sure many farmers prefer the Taliban for purely economic reasons.

If wheat sold for more money, perhaps 3 times the world price (which is around $350-$400/metric ton), some folks think the value of the wheat crop would be large enough to encourage many farmers to switch to wheat production. Wheat is legal to grow, so their is no disadvantage for a wheat farmer to having a functional Afghani government. Foreign aid organizations could run grain mills which bought wheat at $1100/ton and sold the flour for $350/ton. Bread prices would presumably stay low as flour flooded the market, and Afghanistan would presumably become an exporter of flour.

Folks in Pakistan and Iran would be encouraged to sell grain to Afghanistan for milling. I'm not entirely sure this is an entirely bad thing. Presumably economic conditions do not vary dramatically as you cross the border, so that areas outside Afghanistan are probably also growing opium. And, as long as we stop bulk cargo deliveries of grain to Afghanistan, one would think it would be expensive to move large quantities of grain by, say, mule across the border. There is some subsidy at which it is not worth moving grain by mule. Hopefully it's cheaper for small Afghani farmers to get their product to the mills than it is for Pakistani importers.

So, how much would this cost? Afghanistan produced 4.4 million metric tons of wheat in 2007/2008, so someone would have to cough up $3.3 billion/year to carry this subsidy. That's real money, and apparently we'd have to keep it up for a decade or so. If there are not large agribusinesses in Afghanistan now, there will be within a year or two. These businesses will get efficient at growing grain in Afghanistan, and start to produce the majority of the grain there. The subsidy on grain will decrease over time, large efficient businesses will capture nearly all of it (as they capture farm subsidies in the U.S.), and the marginal farmers will move back to poppies. I don't have a great deal of hope for this effort.

By the way: anyone have a clue what this is?

Why are there no GTCC plants doing CO2 sequestration?

Rod Adams makes an excellent point here. Go down a bit. 11th paragraph:

If it is relatively easy to capture the CO2 from an IGCC [Integrated Gasification and Combined Cycle coal-burning plant], why wouldn't we start working to prove that assumption by capturing the CO2 from at least several of the existing GTCC (gas turbine combined cycle) plants that use natural gas as their heat source?

CO2 sequestration for coal-fired powerplants is held out as the major way that America will reduce it's CO2 emissions significantly over the next two decades. But, CO2 sequestration requires a lot of tinkering with the plant. An IGCC is nice for efficiency, but is not required. Several other really serious pieces of equipment are required, however:

• Sequestration costs big money. Since you really don't want to unnecessarily sequester 4 times as much nitrogen as CO2, you seperate that nitrogen and vent it. Since you don't want to seperate nitrogen from the exhaust gas (you'd have to cool it), you seperate it from the incoming airstream. Thus, the air filter on an ordinary plant is replaced with an expensive and energy-hungry plant with cryogenics, multiple turbines, and heat exchangers galore.
  
• The exhaust must be compressed and liquified to inject it into the ground. Most of the heat must be removed from the exhaust in order to compress it. In a normal coal-fired powerplant, a large fraction of the waste heat is rejected by simply venting the exhaust into the air. In a CO2 sequestrating facility, you need a big heat exchanger and a cooling tower to do that work. Oh, and a larger fresh water supply.
  

Rod is right, the economics of all this stuff could be proved out on an GTCC plant, or even a plain old combustion turbine fired by nearly anything. I think it's pretty obvious that the carbon-burning electricity producers (coal and gas) benefit from deferring the installation of CO2 sequestration equipment. And, no better way to defer installation than to defer development until after the development of a brand-new burner technology (IGCC) which will take a decade or two to roll out.

So, they talk about sequestration while they defer it as long as possible.

Interestingly, one of the side effects of concentrating the oxygen in the gas being burned is that the operating temperature increases, which could improve efficiency. Unfortunately, combustion turbines already run at temperatures higher than the melting point of the turbine blades... and probably cannot be run hotter. My guess is that exhaust CO2 will be cooled, recirculated and recompressed, and then used to dilute the oxygen in the incoming stream to lower flame temperature.

[Update: check the comments on this post. Harry Jaeger makes some nice points.]