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Nuclear – critical choice for 2050

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Nuclear - critical choice for 2050

by Matthew Wald, Nuclear Energy Institute
January 14, 2019

As the urgency of the climate crisis becomes more obvious, nuclear power is drawing another look. The power sector needs to develop to meet climate targets. Renewables (RES) have taken significant share of the energy mix in recent years but going further means securing far more investment and solving the complex challenge of integrating variable power. There is a need for alternatives to run alongside RES, keeping us on track. Matthew Wald from the Nuclear Energy Institute (Washington) makes the case for nuclear as an essential part of a clean energy future.

Zero-emissions

Nuclear energy provides well over half the non-emitting electric energy in the United States. Nuclear displaced 547 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2017, the last full year for which data are available. Hydro was second at 203 million metric tonnes, wind at 175, and solar at 37 million metric tonnes.

More dramatic is what happens when a nuclear plant closes. In the United States, it has generally been replaced by a mixture of natural gas and wishful thinking. Vermont Yankee, a 42-year-old boiling water reactor near the Massachusetts border, was replaced entirely with gas two years ago. New England was, and still is, negotiating to bring in replacement hydropower from Quebec, but has been unable to reach agreement on the necessary transmission lines. As a result, carbon emissions in the year following the shut-down jumped by 2.5 percent. To mitigate against the effects of climate change, they should be falling by that amount each year.

Credit due on climate

The way government has structured the electricity markets not enough credit is given for nuclear power’s contribution to climate stability. As a result, we’ve seen this shift to natural gas in the United States, because the price of methane is down by approximately 75 percent over the last 10 years, the result of hydraulic fracturing in shale (“fracking”). This is not a climate solution; gas produces about 55 percent as much carbon dioxide as coal when burned at the end of a pipeline, or more if it is liquefied, shipped and re-gasified.

At the moment, five nuclear plants in the biggest power market in the United States, called PJM, are scheduled to close. Together they produce more electricity than all the wind and sun added in the region in the last 25 years.

Fresh eyes, fresh support

The mathematical realities are beginning to sink in, in new places. The Boston Globe said recently in an editorial that Massachusetts, its home state, was going to have trouble meeting its ambitious carbon goals because of two nuclear plant closures. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a group better known for its scepticism about nuclear, recently said that the “sobering realities” of climate change “dictate that we keep an open mind about all of the tools in the emissions reduction toolbox—even ones that are not our personal favourites”—including nuclear. Google, trying to match zero-carbon generation to its 24/7 server farms, attributed part of its success to nuclear power on the grid.

Framing the discussion as a choice between nuclear and renewables is not helpful. Even if wind and sun were a replacement for nuclear energy (and recent experience is that they are not), why are we even talking about deciding between the two? Replacing zero-carbon nuclear with zero-carbon wind or sun does nothing to reduce carbon.

There is an adage in American English called the Rule of Holes. It says that when you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging. The climate problem is urgent, there is no faster solution than preserving existing nuclear in the intermediate term, the next 15 years or so. The next step is to pursue more.

Nuclear’s capacity factor far better than RES

Solar and wind are growing but it’s important to use the right metric to measure them, which means taking account how often they run. A megawatt of nuclear, preserved or built, produces far more energy than a megawatt of sun or wind.

The reason is capacity factor. Capacity factor means looking at the production that would result from full output, 24/7, for a year, compared with actual output. U.S. nuclear plants have capacity factors in the range of 92 percent. On-shore wind runs at about 30 to 40 percent, and sun, outside desert areas, around 15 percent. So 1,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity produces about 2.5 times more carbon-free electricity in a year than 1,000 megawatts of wind, and about six times as much as 1,000 megawatts of solar.

Variable RES a headache for grid stability

An additional challenge for solar and wind is that they produce on their own schedule. In the U.S., this does not mesh well with peak demand which is mostly driven by weather. Peak air conditioning is in late afternoon, when the sun is too low in the sky to produce much energy. Wind produces mostly at night, but that’s generally a low-demand period.

Meanwhile, solar growth is producing big surpluses, which is a sign that the grid faces limits on how much electricity it can successfully integrate from intermittent sources.

In California as an example, energy prices are often pushed far below zero, so customers in neighbouring states are getting paid to take California’s surplus energy. Surplus wind produces negative prices in the American Midwest. As wind and solar grow, the fraction of their production that is unusable will rise.

And as Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist put it in their recent book, “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow,”prices may fall but value may fall faster. Electricity costs from solar panels might be 3 cents a kilowatt-hour, which is wonderful if the market price is higher than that. But if the solar surplus has pushed prices to zero or lower, it doesn’t matter what the price to produce it was. “A cheap ice cream cone in a remote desert would be a bargain, but 1,000 more would be worthless unless you had a freezer,” they write.

The problem gets worse as policies push the system towards 100 percent renewables. Build enough solar to supply a system in the short days of December and January, and the waste in June and July will be enormous.

Don’t assume storage is the answer

Energy storage can help manage the fact that solar and wind production don’t synchronise with demand. But nearly all the storage in the United States is still pumped hydro, and it’s very difficult to build more of that, for environmental reasons.

California will use batteries to help manage the afternoon transition when the sun goes down too low to be useful, and there is a scramble to start up gas generators. But the Tesla “Mega-battery” in South Australia, at 129 megawatt-hours, is said to be the world’s largest, but it stores an amount of energy that a large nuclear plant produces in six or seven minutes. More batteries will be built but their price at present doesn’t make them practical for bulk storage. It’s much cheaper to back them up with combustion turbines running on natural gas, which are not very carbon-efficient.

The price of batteries will go down, but decreases are constrained in part by the cost of raw materials. We can all hope for breakthroughs, but this problem hasn’t been solved yet.

Climate stabilisation is not the only reason for retaining and building reactors. Nuclear power reduces the output of mercury, soot, and the pre-cursors of ground-level ozone, or “smog.” And being near a fully-fuelled reactor is far more secure than sitting at the end of a very long natural gas pipeline.

Nuclear is evolving

Nuclear technology is evolving. Existing reactors are operated much more efficiently than thirty years ago and the reactors running today, and new models, will use more robust fuel. Some new reactors will take advantage of factory fabrication. Others will get away from the light-water models we’ve used for 50 years, and operate at lower pressures but higher temperatures, making their heat more efficient and useful. Designs that will enter the market in the 2020s will be better at tailoring their output, to mesh better with varying demand and varying production from intermittent sources, as nuclear complements the attributes of wind and sun.

As we consider the future, we must bear in mind that decarbonisation, to the extent we achieve it, is going to mean using more electricity. Home heating, heavy industry and transport will all need to be converted to electricity. And with all the work required to build batteries, manufacture electric cars, sell them to the public and build a charging infrastructure, how much more effective is all of that if they are charged with zero-carbon energy, not from a mix that is heavy on fossil fuels. And if Hydrogen turns out to be the fuel of choice for EVs – nuclear can provide that too. Zero-carbon electricity will give electric cars more bang for the buck. “Bang for the Euro” doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it’s just as true.

How sustainable is nuclear?

Unlike fossil fuels, sustainability isn’t an issue for nuclear. MIT said in in a 2011 study that “There is no shortage of uranium resources that might constrain future commitments to build new nuclear plants for much of this century at least,” and that was not counting the possibility of nuclear recycling or breeder reactors. And the study was published before a breakthrough in recovering uranium from seawater, which vastly extends uranium reserves. Beyond that there is thorium, and other technologies. And nearly all energy technologies rely on mining minerals from the earth, many of them with constrained supplies. This includes building solar panels and wind turbines.

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Matthew L. Wald is Senior Communications Advisor at the Nuclear Energy Institute, Washington, US, Twitter: @mattlwald

Hy-Society – flexible hydrogen’s winning formula

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Hy-Society

flexible hydrogen’s winning formula
by Mike Scott
January 11, 2019

Open the papers and you’ll see that hydrogen-based transport, mobility and infrastructure are securing serious investment. In the past, the high cost of fuelling infrastructure – and “stupid” concept of using electricity to make hydrogen to make electricity – have stalled the advancement of this ultra-versatile clean fuel and energy storage solution. However, thanks to the availability of surplus power from RES and hydrogen’s remarkable flexibility, the numbers are beginning to add up and that means competition for batteries. Mike Scott explains why the money is finally moving hydrogen’s way…

The hydrogen economy has always been a bit like a mirage in the desert – hanging enticingly before us, never seeming to get any nearer. In some ways, this is surprising as it has so many advantages as an energy carrier. There’s lots of it, it produces only water vapour when it is burned, it can be stored for long periods of time – unlike energy stored in batteries– and it’s flexible.

It can be used to produce electricity in fuel cells, it can be used as a transport fuel either by being burnt or in fuel cells and it can be injected into gas grids and so used for heating. When renewable energy is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, it is an emissions-free fuel. The technology is well-known, long-standing and proven.

“When renewable energy is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, it is an emissions-free fuel”

Given that the focus is now turning to decarbonising heating and transport, where cutting emissions is seen as a much greater challenge than electricity production, it’s amazing that we don’t have a hydrogen economy already.

That phrase, “the hydrogen economy”, illustrates the problems the sector faces though. No-one talks about a battery economy, and yet the battery is spreading like wildfire through the energy landscape. For all their faults of limited duration, expense and the amount of time it takes to charge them, batteries are incredibly convenient and modular – they can have an immediate effect when added to a house, a hotel or a factory with minimal infrastructure.

Build an electric car, put a battery in it and it’s ready to go. Sure, you need charging points, but in extremis, any plug will do. Build a hydrogen car, and you need billions of euros of fuelling infrastructure – which is why you get talk of hydrogen highways and the like.

And yet, these are a long way from reality. As Clean Technica reported in September, “with 21 hydrogen fuelling stations, the greater Los Angeles area has more hydrogen fuelling stations than any other metropolitan area in the world today”. Indeed, all of the 36 hydrogen refuelling stations in the US and Canada are in California, while Hydrogen Tools says that as of the end of 2018, there were just 277 stations globally. The IEA reported that “the global fuel cell electric vehicle car stock reached 8,000 units in 2017, with the United States and Japan accounting for nearly 90% of the global fleet”.

Another problem is that while hydrogen can be produced cleanly, at the moment, much of it is produced using fossil fuels. The only way to make hydrogen produced in this way low-carbon is to use carbon capture and storage technology, which is progressing at a snail’s pace.

Hydrogen has some fairly high-profile detractors. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, famously said that hydrogen as a vehicle fuel was “incredibly dumb” – although as a maker of electric cars, you would expect him to say that. But a more dispassionate observer, Michael Liebreich, founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, agrees, saying that “If you have electricity and you want to drive somewhere, wasting half of it generating hydrogen to turn back into electricity is a supremely stupid thing to do.”

But there are signs that hydrogen is slowly starting to gain traction. In Germany (and coming soon in UK) Alstom has launched the world’s first hydrogen-powered trains, while South Korea’s Hyundai is to test a 1,000-strong fleet of hydrogen trucks in Switzerland and Scotland is building the world’s first hydrogen-powered ferry.

South Korea is to spend more than $2 billion over five years to create hydrogen infrastructure to enable fuel cell vehicles, including 310 hydrogen stations by 2022 to supply 16,000 fuel cell vehicles, factories to build fuel cell cars and buses, fuel cell stacks and hydrogen storage systems. It joins Japan, which is planning to use the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games to showcase its own hydrogen vision, with the city’s governor Yoichi Masuzoe saying: “The 1964 Tokyo Olympics left the Shinkansen high-speed train system as its legacy. The upcoming Olympics will leave a hydrogen society as its legacy.” Toyota, Honda and Hyundai are the only major carmakers currently investing heavily in fuel cell vehicles.

“hydrogen technologies are reaching maturity – in or around 2025, clean hydrogen could be cost-competitive with existing industrial feedstocks such as natural gas and batteries” CSIRO, Australia

The UK, France and Australia have also announced hydrogen programmes, with CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency saying that “hydrogen technologies are reaching maturity, with the narrative now shifting from R&D to market activation. In or around 2025, clean hydrogen could be cost-competitive with existing industrial feedstocks such as natural gas, and energy carriers such as batteries in many applications.”

Scientists testing Power-to-X technology at the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden Württemberg (ZSW)

In the past, hydrogen has been a victim of its own versatility, a jack of all trades but master of none. But now its wide range of uses is starting to work to its advantage. As well as being a long-lasting store of energy and its utility in heating, transport and power, it is a solution to the problem of what to do with surplus renewable power that would otherwise be spilled; it adds weight to the case for carbon capture and storage; it can help oil and gas companies to make use of their existing infrastructure – whether that is fuel stations or gas pipelines; and it provides a solution to issues such as air pollution and how to fuel long distance heavy transport in an environmentally-friendly way.

But as the UK’s Policy Exchange think tank said in a recent report: “The versatility of hydrogen offers big opportunities to help overcome some of the challenges the UK faces when transitioning to a low carbon economy – but we are far from realising them yet.

“Two issues need addressing. Firstly, we need to focus on getting cost-effective, scalable and sustainable production methods to reach mass market. Targeting investment towards reducing the high cost of producing large volumes of low carbon hydrogen is crucial. Secondly, we must decide the most appropriate applications of hydrogen within our economy, given potential uses are likely to be highly interconnected and this will have implications for the energy system.”

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RES market share to reach almost 80% to achieve 1.5 degrees

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ENERGY WATCH #4 - December 20, 2018

RES market share to reach almost 80% to achieve 1.5 degrees

by Tom Idle

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The European Commission has just published its annual scenarios report including its projection as to when greenhouse gas emissions need to drop to net zero. For the past four years, the average global de-carbonisation rate showed a 2.6% per year drop. Even the best performing economy in 2017 in terms of carbon intensity reduction – China – only achieved a drop of 5.2% (source: PwC). This won’t get us to 1.5 degrees. What’s needed is a strategy that includes the implementation of renewable energy sources on course for 78% of total power. That will enable the de-carbonisation rate to rise to 9% per year, which is required. EPW considers the implications to the power sector of staying within the scientifically preferred 1.5 degrees of average temperature rise.

Tensions were running high even before the latest UN climate talks had started following the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPPC) latest scientific report challenging the current ambition of global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

For many years, limiting global warming to within no more than a 2 degree rise in average temperatures, based on pre-industrial levels, was a de-facto target for negotiators to work towards.

Now, the IPPC – backed up by the views of 70 scientists – says that 2 degrees of warming is not a “guardrail up to which all would be safe”. Instead, the world should “push the defence line as low as possible” and aim to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.

The special report highlighting the likely impacts of 1.5 degrees warming, received short shrift from the US, Russia, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, among others, whose negotiators merely ‘noted’ its existence, refusing to ‘welcome’ it. Saudi Arabia’s senior negotiator Ayman Shasly said: “We all know it will cost the world a great deal of cost and all elements to achieve 1.5 degrees. The storyline of the entire report shows that it is achievable, it’s doable, let’s all do it together, which is not fair. What is the equity in this? Where is history in this?”

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre’s (JRC) latest analysis, also launched at COP 24, provides some of the answers in assessing the likely differences between meeting a 2 degree and a 1.5 degree rise.

Right now, emissions and energy consumption trends show we are not on track to meet either of the goals. But JRC’s Global Energy and Climate Outlook 2018 predicts that to hit the 1.5 degree goal, global GHGs have to drop to net zero by 2065, and by 2080 to meet the 2 degrees target – both of which are technically possible and at relatively low cost to the overall economy. “While this clearly would come with increased investment needs, the overall costs would be equivalent of less than one week of economic activity lost for a given year. The economy would grow, decoupled from greenhouse gas emissions,” it claims.

Comparisons made as to the economic impacts across regions between the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) and the 2 degrees scenarios it lays out shows that long-term decarbonisation goes hand-in-hand with high, yearly per capita consumption growth rates in fast-growing, low and middle-income countries.

Achieving higher ambition levels than the NDCs – which leaves the likes of Saudi Arabia and the US so nervous – “can be done at relatively low costs,” argues the report. “While GDP and consumption are expected to decline relative to the NDC scenario in 2050, investment will increase to build the capital stock required for a low emission economy.”

To achieve this, the global energy system and energy consumption patterns will need to undergo a “profound and accelerated transformation” to reach global annual decarbonisation rates of 6.1% per year and 9.0% per year during the period 2015 to 2050 for 2 degrees and 1.5 degrees respectively. During the five year period to 2016, this figure was 1.9% a year.

Central to mitigation efforts would be an expanding use of renewables and an increasing role of electricity in the energy being consumed. The analysis suggests that greater use clean energy sources will account for 27% of the required emission reductions, non-CO2 abatement for 20%, improved energy efficiency for 17%, and electrification of final energy demand and land use both for 10%.

In its scenario presentation for a 2 degree limit:

  • GHGs from the power sector would fall from 24% of the total in 2015 to just 11% in 2050
  • Almost a quarter of electricity was renewable in 2015 (23%); above a quarter would be non-renewable in 2050 (29%);
  • fossil fuel share (without carbon capture and storage) in power generation would drop from 61% in 2015 to 7% in 2050;
  • coal power generation would decrease by a factor of 9 over 2015–2050.

Should total installed power generation capacity increase from 6.5 TW globally in 2015 to about 9.7 TW in 2030 and 17.8 TW in 2050, as the report projects, so too will capital equipment demand. Total investments required in the energy sector for supply and energy transformation, including fossil fuel production, power, hydrogen and biofuels, would reach US$24 trillion during the 2010 to 2030 period and US$40 trillion over 2030 to 2050 in the 2 degrees scenario. Such investment still represents around 6-7% of total investment levels of the economy during the projection periods. The share was 7% during the 1990-2015 period, according to JRC.

Hitting the 1.5 degree limit demands a “deeper transformation” of the economy and the energy system. The analysis suggests that in terms of global GDP, the 1.5 degree scenario leads to a reduction of 1.3% relative to the NDC scenario. “In 2050, investment is 0.1% higher than in the NDC scenario, but a faster transition earlier on increases investment to 2.2% above the NDC scenario value in 2025,” it says, highlighting that the costs will vary from country to country. For example, India is one of the regions where the difference between achieving the 2 degree and 1.5 degree goal is more pronounced, largely because of the non-CO2 emissions impact of its agricultural sector, the abatement of which could be costly.

Clearly, JRC sees the power sector as an essential piece of the global decarbonisation puzzle, not just for its technological diversity but also its “strong and relatively quick reaction to climate policies”.

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