Al Gore’s nuclear hypocrisy

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of reading Al Gore’s latest volume, The Future. This not particularly tightly written book has among other things a section on biotechnology that shows that Gore’s attachment to science is somewhat fleeting. I may touch on that in a later post, however let’s consider a comment Gore makes about nuclear power.

In the climate change section entitled False Solutions, Gore expresses some scepticism on nuclear power, and says the following:

There is still a distinct possibility that the research and development of a new generation of smaller and hopefully safer reactors may yet play a significant role in the world’s energy future. We should know by 2030.

Similarly, in a Reddit Q & A, Gore bemoaned new reactor designs being long in the future:

New reactor designs hold promise but they are all at least 15 years away.

So, new nuclear reactor designs are 15-18 years away from coming about. Certainly not a good situation.

However, instead of moving the clock forward 18 or so years, let’s move it back 19 years. In 1994 the Clinton-Gore administration shut down work on the Integral Fast Reactor, the very type of reactor Gore is complaining about being years away. If this decision had not been taken we would not be looking at new reactors by 2030, but instead new reactors up and running right now, and also capable of running on nuclear waste.

So, what we have here is Al Gore using a situation he helped bring about as a reason to be skeptical of nuclear power. Instead what he ought to do is apologise for the wrong headedness of the Clinton-Gore administration on the issue, and support calls for the Obama administration to restart the IFR programme. Gore, unfortunately has long had a blind spot on nuclear power.

A snapshot of German wind power

Media reports on renewables like to focus on record highs in output (if you wish to promote renewables) or record lows in production (if you want to denigrate renewables). In the long run, averages are probably what really matter. The medium term problems (until storage can be figured) are most commonly thought of as being caused by very low wind output. However the last two days of wind power output in Germany offer a nice snapshot of how highs in output are probably a greater medium term limitation.

Wind power yesterday:

 

Wind power today:

 

 

So, pretty stable at around 22 GW all day yesterday. But a large drop from 22 GW to 5 GW in about 12 hours today. How does this output compare to demand? Total power supply is shown below (green stuff is wind, yellow solar, and gray is everything else.)

 

 

So, the percentage of Germany’s electricity coming from wind peaked at about 43%. Not bad, however let’s try projecting wind power into the future. Currently Germany is getting 8% of its power from wind. Let’s say we wanted to push that up to 20%. In this future scenario German wind production at 2 am this morning would have been almost 10% higher than total demand. So, a way of storing this power is going to be needed to get past 20% without significant problem, be it batteries or building a large number of inter-connectors to Norway to use their hydro plants as batteries. Germany could, for a while, just export the power. However their eastern neighbours are currently not so enthralled at the prospect.

How much are US carbon emissions declining?

I have argued before that America is not doing as bad compared to Europe as many believe, however instead of comparing America’s recent emissions reductions with other countries let’s consider if it is on course to meet its targets for 2020. In straightforward terms this is for greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 to be 17% lower than they were in 2005.

The Guardian recently reported that official projections indicated emissions would be down 9%, and not 17%. Official projections however are always buyer beware, and are often dangerous material in the hands of someone with an agenda and an unwillingness to bother figuring out the purpose of those projections.

So, where do America’s emissions stand right now? Is America on course to meet the 17% target? Let’s look at the numbers.

(Unfortunately, as Hans Rosling points out here, carbon emissions data is in desperate need of a shake up, and official US emissions figures do not appear to go beyond 2010. So, I’ll have to get estimates from a few different sources, and combine. All of the estimates will be based on carbon dioxide emissions, so the overall percentage changes in GHG emissions may be slightly different, but I expect not by much.)

Let’s begin with the International Energy Agency’s figures. They reported in early 2011, that the US’s emissions had dropped by 7.7% between 2006 and 2011. For some reason the IEA has not published (or I cannot find) a continual time series between 2005 and 2011. However, their other data indicates that emissions were 1.5% higher in 2005 than in the 2006. So, the IEA is saying that there was a 9.1% drop in US emissions between 2005 and 2011. The IEA however has not produced estimates for 2012, so I’ll use something else for that later.

A second source of emissions estimates is the EDGAR data set produced by the European Union. Their estimates are very in line with the IEA’s: an 8.9% drop in US CO2 emissions between 2005 and 2011. Again, they have yet to produce estimates for 2012.

Let’s split the difference and say US CO2 emissions decreased by 9% between 2005 and 2011.

What happened in 2012?

Let’s start by considering energy use. For the first 9 months of the year  total US energy consumption was down 3%. Full year figures do not appear to be released so far, however it is almost certain that energy consumption has gone down in 2012.

A key, if controversial, cause of the decline in US emissions has been the switch from coal to gas generation for electricity. What happened this year? The switch was in fact the biggest on record. Coal use decreased by 11% and gas went up by about 22%.

So, the decline in energy use and reduction in carbon intensity in the electricity sector should have reduced US CO2 emissions this year. How much? The EIA estimates CO2 emissions from the energy sector went down by 3.4% this year (see page 11). Based on the current split of US emissions by sector, below, we can take 3.4% as a very good estimate of total CO2 emissions decline this year.

So, if we combine this with the estimates for 2005-2011 emissions reductions, we get an overall estimate of US emissions going down by 12% between 2005 and 2012. Now, there is a serious debate over whether these reductions can continue, but it is important to recognise the real progress America has made in reducing emissions. And that these reductions are currently greater than more or less any country in the world.

(My own view is that the pieces are now probably in place for America to turn that 12% drop into a 17% drop by 2020. That’s probably worth a separate post, but debate is welcome in the comments section.)

I’ll finish by making an observation. US emissions are on the decline. Yet in more or less every op-ed piece berating Obama for inaction on climate change this decline in emissions does not even warrant a mention, let alone some consideration of its causes. The unwillingness of people to talk about the decline in emissions is baffling. This quite obviously should be used as political leverage, and as momentum to build on. And as I said earlier the US’s carbon emissions are now declining faster than most of the countries US climate commentators say are showing the US how things should be done.

Thanks to Jonathan Foley for prompting this post during a Twitter conversation.

[Correction: earlier version said America's emissions declined more in percentage terms than any other OCED country since 2006. Now corrected to be total emissions. A handful of countries reduced their emissions more than the US since 2006, however most of them appear to be countries that suffered severe economic collapse post 2006, such as Ireland and Spain.]

Thanks to Lindsay Wilson for pointing out the mistake.]

Is wind power stable?

This week’s New Scientist has a comment piece entitled Wind power delivers too much too ignore. Written by Reg Platt of the left of centre think the IPPR it perpetuates a number of not quite true talking points that wind advocates for some reason think are worth airing.

For example, in response to claims about intermittency, Platt writes the following:

Output is surprisingly stable across the country’s entire network of wind farms: when the wind isn’t blowing in one area, it usually is somewhere else.  The relatively small changes that do occur are well within the capabilities of existing systems for balancing supply and demand on the grid.

The “when the wind isn’t blowing in one area, it usually is somewhere else” line is a horrid cliché, and I find it hard to take seriously anyone who uses it. It should be the reserve of waffling politicians, not policy analysts. And how about the surprising stability of the output from the UK’s nature of windfarms? Well, below are 6 consecutive months of hourly output from the UK’s wind farms from October 2011 to March 2012

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One would have to set the bar rather low to call this stable. Yet Reg Platt says it is stable, and The New Scientist saw fit to publish this claim. There is a good case to be made for wind power in the UK, but wind advocates continue to prove incapable of making it.

How many children are women having?

**This is the first of a few posts on population growth and climate change.**

For the human population to not decline you basically need each woman to, on average, produce more than two babies. In rich countries the figure needed is about 2.1, in poorer countries it’s a lot higher, for the simple reason that children are much less likely to reach reproductive age. In technical terms this is referred to as replacement level fertility, go above and population will increase in the long term, go below it then population will decline in the long term. Of course this only refers to the indigenous population. Population increases due to immigration can offset this.

How much does the average number of children per woman vary by country? The graph below shows average number of children per woman versus population in every country on earth in 2010. (I have logged the population axis because India and China skew it)

Surprisingly, there are 79 countries that average less than 2.1 children per women.

Which countries are these? Below I have plotted a word cloud of all of these countries.

Many of these are developed countries, which have gone through what is called the demographic transition. Exactly why birth rate is so slow is something of a mystery. In blunt Darwinian terms you wouldn’t expect women to lack fecundity when they are wealthy.

There are some surprises here. Iran averages just under 1.7 births per woman. Italian women, it would appear, do not listen too closely to advice of the Vatican. They average just over 1.4 births per woman. China’s one child policy has also put it on the list, with an average of 1.6 births per woman. Who is the lowest? Taiwan with 0.9 children per woman, though they recently boosted this a little bit.

We are also looking at a very heft chunk of humanity. Adding up the populations of all of these countries and we get a total of 3.3 billion. A simple lesson here is that when we are looking at the environmental impact of population growth it is not really a good idea to look simply at the global population. Countries vary massively in how much their population is growing, and by how much their citizens impact on the environment, in particular their carbon emissions.

(All of the data used here are taken from the excellent Gapminder website.

For the statistically inclined,the wordcloud was made using the R package “wordcloud” )

Germany’s Nuclear Folly

In the aftermath of Fukushima, Germany took the decision to immediately shut down eight nuclear power plants, and announced that the rest would close by 2022. The pros and cons of this have been debated continually since, and often without any regard for the basic facts.

Shut down a nuclear power plant tomorrow, and your only choice is to burn more fossil fuels in its place. Renewables will not help you, it all just feeds into the grid and can’t be pushed up or down. Yet we still hear attempts to make it seem that Germany can shut nuclear power plants without more fossil fuels being burned.

Despite being debated for nearly two years, people have rarely discussed the actual increase in carbon emissions that have resulted from Germany not having those eight nuclear power plants on the grid. Let’s consider what these actually are.

Total emissions in 2011 were 917 million metric tonnes. How much lower would Germany’s emissions be if they had decided to keep those nuclear power plants running?

We need to know two things: How much power would those plants produce in a year, and what emissions would result from what is now generating that power?

There are two ways to work out the amount of power the plants would have generated: a) use historic load historical load factors to estimate power generation, or b) look at the drop in nuclear power output since the plants were shuttered, and assume that all of this is the result of the shut down.

A look at the IEA’s electricity statistics indicates that the reduction in nuclear generation since the shut down is between 30 and 35 TWh per year. This is about 10 TWh lower than the load factor approach. I don’t want to be accused of cherry picking to make the nuclear shut down seem worse than it is, so I’ll use 30 TWh as the amount of production that needs to be made up by other power sources.

Where has this 30 TWh of electricity come from? There is more or less nothing in Germany that could provide it other than fossil fuels. The real issue is how dark brown these fossil fuels happen to be. The rapid increase in coal use in Europe indicates that this lost nuclear generation is being replaced by one thing: coal.

What are the carbon emissions as a result of this? 30 million tonnes of CO2, or 3.3% of Germany’s annual emissions.

If it was all being displaced by gas the figure would be about 15 million tonnes, or 1.6% Germany’s annual emissions.

Now compare this increase in emissions with what has been achieved in Germany on renewables. The graph below shows total renewables output in the last decade.

How long is Germany taking to increase renewable generation by 30 TWh? At its current rate of development this is about 5 years. So, lots of hard work to reduce emissions cast aside as a result of a quick fire political decision.

Let’s think more broadly. Germany still has about 100 TWh coming from nuclear each year. This is all coming offline by 2022. Can Germany replace this with wind and solar? As I outlined in an earlier post, Germany has to exceed its renewable energy targets if it simply wants to keep the emissions from electricity where they are today.

A note on rationality: Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear power will cause more carbon dioxide to be pumped into the atmosphere. This is a simple question of arithmetic, and anyone who denies this should consider how seriously they treat climate change. However, could the events at Fukushima have justified Germany to phase out nuclear power. First, Germany does not have earthquakes. Fukushima did not change the safety equation in Germany at all.

Maybe there is a public health argument in the nuclear phase out’s favour. Consider the estimates of how many people die per kWh of electricity produced by different power sources (from a Lancet study):

By this measure nuclear power looks not too bad, at least compared to many things that will remain on Germany’s grid in 2022. However, we can see that Lignite in particular is particularly nasty stuff. What did Germany do less than a year after shuttering 8 nuclear plants? It opened a 2.2 GW lignite power plant. There are also over 10 GW of new coal power plants under construction in Germany.

Maybe I am wrong and nuclear power is worse than coal. Yet, what do the supporters of Germany’s nuclear phase out know that I do not know, and why they do not tell me what that is?

Is German solar power growing too fast?

Mark Lynas has posted a good, quick summary of the status of Germany’s Energiewende. Like me he does not believe the Energiewende is doing a great deal to reduce emissions. However, his assessment of German solar power is perhaps more generous than it should be:

Solar continued its enormous growth rate between 2011 and 2012. Production rose from 19.3TWh (terawatt-hours) in 2011 to 27.6TWh in 2012, representing an impressive increase of 47.7%. In terms of total electricity generation, solar’s percentage rose from 3.2% in 2011 to 4.6% in 2012. This is an extraordinary achievement by any standard.

I will agree that, looked at in isolation, the growth in German solar power is impressive. You may even be inclined to throw around words such as exponential growth to describe what has happened in the last decade:

Growth in solar power however does not occur in isolation. Money spent subsidizing solar is money not spent subsidizing something else, in particular wind. We can argue about the details, but I don’t think there is any real reason to not believe that onshore wind is a) a lot cheaper than solar and b) can provide a much higher percentage of Germany’s electricity supply. These two basic facts, and common sense, would indicate that Germany should be expanding wind much faster than solar. Instead the opposite is happening:

Remarkably wind production was only 15 GWh higher in 2012 than 2007, whereas production from solar was up about 20 GWh. Lower wind conditions may have pushed wind farm output below average, but it is clear that in the last half decade solar has grown faster than wind power. This should be seen as a complete misuse use of vital money, but instead Germany’s rapid growth in solar is regularly touted as an example worth following.

So, here we have an example of a government “picking winners,” but clearly not doing a very job of it.

(Thanks to Gustaf Rossell for pointing me to the data referenced above)

Greenpeace and Arithmetic

Greenpeace and other environmental groups have recently expended a great deal of energy trying to get the UK to commit to de-carbonizing the UK electricity grid by 2030. This hoped for target was for, on average, 50 g CO2 to be produced per kWh of electricity, which the government has decided to not include in its energy bill.

Instead of going over the debate over whether a target is a good idea, let’s instead consider whether the government would be wise to follow Greenpeace’s overall policy prescriptions. I’ll simplify these to three policies: the UK has a legally binding target of 50 gCO2 /kWh for electricity, no nuclear power plants, and no CCS power plants by 2030. So, how do we get to 50 g CO2/kWh in such a scenario?

Icelandic Dreams?

Reuters today reports that Iceland is considering building a subsea cable from Iceland to the UK. The gist of it is that there is far more geothermal and hydro energy in Iceland than its people need, and exporting it makes sense. Another media report from a couple of days ago said it was really just “pipe dream.”

So, who is right?

The illusion of fossil fuel cuts

The United Kingdom has had significant success in reducing its carbon emissions, and will almost certainly succeed in meeting its commitments under the Kyoto accord.

Long term the trend is clear:

Having said that, I am typing this on a laptop made in China, while listening to music on my iPod, made in China, using speakers, also made in China. Now, I suspect the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere when these products were manufactured are not on the UK’s books. In a world where anything can be made anywhere and consumed any place it is equally important to ask about the carbon footprint of our consumption.