The worsening nuclear crisis in Japan raises questions. What would be the consequences of shutting down nuclear reactors in the U.S.? In light of fresh doubts about the wisdom of nuclear power, is swapping out the U.S. vehicle fleet with all-electric vehicles realistic?

The chart below shows what the U.S. energy mix is today, and what the U.S. Energy Information Agency projects it to be over the next 25 years. The nuclear and coal part of the mix are expected to drop only a bit, coal from 45% to 43% and nuclear from 20% to 17%.

[Note that 43% of 5+ trillion kilowatt hours per year is a lot more than 45% of the 4+ trillion kilowatt hours coal accounts for today - meaning coal consumption in electricity generation is thus expected to increase substantially.  So much for doing anything about global warming.]

The University of California, Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology has published a technical brief which considers three scenarios for “maximum penetration” of electric cars into the market, projecting market share of new cars at 2015, 2020, 2025, and 2030 under differing cost assumptions.

The “market” in the above chart is defined as those likely to buy electric vehicles – 20% of the total market is excluded as not likely to buy electric vehicles.

Under the baseline scenario, 81 million electric vehicles would be on the road by 2030; under the operator-subsidized scenario, 151 million.

The U.C. study calculates that by 2030 the fleet of electric cars is estimated to require between 190 and 350 million megawatt hours of electricity per year. Currently, electricity generation in the U.S. totals around 4 billion megawatt hours per year. Powering an electric car fleet would require that the U.S. increase electricity generating capacity by 4.75%-8.75% by 2030. And that’s assuming no growth in electricity usage elsewhere in the economy, despite population and presumably economic growth.

In 2009, U.S. nuclear plants generated 798.7 billion kilowatt hours (or 7,987 million kilowatt hours) from 104 commercial nuclear generating units; “nuclear generating units” in the U.S. thus average 7.68 megawatt hours per year in output. The 602 coal power plants in the U.S. produce on average ~3.88 megawatt hours per year. Powering the projected U.S. electric car fleet would therefore require building 25-46 additional “nuclear generating units” by 2030. Or 50-90 coal-fired power plants.

Renewable sources, including wind and solar, currently account for about 10% of U.S. electricity generation – but two thirds of existing renewable capacity is hydroelectric, which is about tapped out and even under threat of decline. Solar and wind together account for only a little over 2% of renewable electric energy – about 72,000 megawatt hours per year. Powering the projected electric fleet from solar and wind alone would require increasing our solar and wind capacity by a factor of 2,500 – 5,000. Just to power electric cars,  nothing else: no growth, no phasing out of nuclear or decommissioning aging plants, no shutting down of CO2-emitting coal plants.

Phasing out nuclear power while we are still able so to as avoid catastrophic accidents, and phasing out coal to save the planet as we know it, would seem to be of a bit higher priority than powering our go-carts.

Challenging times indeed. Replacing our gasoline-powered cars with electric cars is about the last thing we should be focusing on.

Luis de Souza at The Oil Drum: Europe writes that, rather than thinking of electricity generation load regimes as “base load” and “peak load”, it’s more accurate and useful to think in three categories: base load, intermediate load, and peak load. Electricity demand is not constant, but varies over the course of the day and over weeks and months. Variability of demand over time can be foreseen rather well: the daily, weekly, and seasonal fluctuations are very pronounced and predictable. Thus, the bulk of load-following can be planned long ahead, making it a scheduled form of operation. For the power plant operator, scheduled operation also means that the plant’s average load factor, even if well short of 100%, is rather stable and predictable.

The three-part scheme can be laid out as follows:

1. Base load: plants operated at constant power output, at maximum whenever possible
2. Intermediate load: plants operated with slow variation in power output on regular schedule to follow expected variation in demand, to cover the gap between expected demand and expected base load
3. Peak load: plants operated with fast variation, responding to minute peaks in demand above or below the pre-planned part of supply

. . . and is illustrated in this graph:

If the majority of the lifetime costs of a power plant are upfront investment costs, then the unit costs of electricity produced will be the lower the more the plant is operated and the operator will want to operate it at maximum whenever possible (the very definition of base load).

In the lifetime costs of both wind power and photovoltaics, fixed, up-front investment costs dominate, so these renewable sources operate as part of base load. But unlike conventional base load, wind and solar are intermittent sources: power output depends on weather, time of day, and season. Distributing these sources over a grid spread out over a larger geographical area can reduce weather-related intermittency, but can’t make it go away.

De Souza’s piece examines ways of de-carbonizing base load and intermediate load, including hydro and pumped hydro, biomass, demand management, natural balancing, solar thermal with storage, nuclear, stimulated geothermal, and distributed storage (including flywheels, batteries, capacitors, fuel cells, etc). His conclusion? None are completely satisfactory -and probably most will be needed.

Bloomberg reports unanticipated consequences of the push for plug-in electric cars:

California’s push to lead U.S. sales of electric cars may result in higher power rates for consumers in the state, as a growing number of rechargeable vehicles forces utilities to pay for grid upgrades.

Power companies including Southern California Edison, the state’s largest, have to install new transformers and meters to handle greater demand and prevent blackouts when autos are being charged at outlets. Utility rates will rise to cover the costs, said Travis Miller, a Morningstar Inc. analyst in Chicago.

“If you look at the kind of money that will be needed for a full smart grid and support for electric vehicles, then you are talking about a substantial amount,” Miller said in a phone interview. The spending may total “multiple billions” of dollars over a decade or more, he said.

Not to mention additional generating and transmission capacity.

Whocoodanode?

Says Edison CEO Ted Craver:

It’s important that the customer experience with plug-in electric vehicles be a good one.

What better experience for drivers than having their costs subsidized by the rest of us? Oh, that’s the way it has always been. Silly me.

A group of about 20 German firms are forming a consortium to build enough solar plants in the deserts of North Africa to supply 15% of Europe’s electricity needs.

The project could generate 100 gigawatts of electricity, the equivalent of 100 conventional power plants. The first electricity could begin flowing to Europe in 10 years.

Moving all that electricity around would require new transmission infrastructure such as the Supergrid.

The supergrid as envisioned by German energy consultant Dr. Gregor Czisch would stretch from Britain to Kazakhstan, and Scandinavia to Morocco, and transport huge amounts of renewable power back and forth to marry supply with demand.

Czisch has published a study titled Realisable Scenarios for a Future Electricity Supply based 100% on Renewable Energies that shows Europe could build an electricity supply based entirely on renewable energy by 2030.

The International Energy Agency is forecasting that global electricity demand will fall by 3.5% in 2009, declining for the first time since 1945 when records began.

The historic decline is being attributed to the global economic recession.

Electricity consumption in the rich countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development – which is composed of 30 countries in Europe and North America and includes Japan, Australia, and New Zealand -  is forecast to decline nearly 5%. Russia’s use will drop nearly 10%, China’s by 2%. India is expected to be the exception, with an increase of 1%. About 75% of expected decline is from industrial rather than household demand.

Albiasa Solar of Spain next year will begin construction on a 200 MW solar-thermal power – with thermal storage – near Kingman, Arizona. The Kingman area was selected because it is one of the few places with transmission capability on existing power lines.

The plant will use mirrors to focus sunlight on tubes containing liquid, heating the liquid and turning it to steam, which then spins turbines. Molten salt will store heat from the plant so it can keep generating power after sunset.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress has posted a schematic of the design:

There’s a new article in Environment 360 titled “A Potential Breakthrough In Harnessing the Sun’s Energy” on solar thermal. The article notes solar thermal projects are currently being planned or built in many regions around the globe, including North Africa, Spain, Australia, and the southwestern U.S.

While utility-scale solar thermal projects have provoked opposition due to the large land area occupied by the arrays, it’s hard to see how we’re going to solve our energy and climate change problems without large-scale concentrated solar facilities.

New research by the U.K. group Transport Watch finds:

The amount of energy used by coal fired power stations to create the electricity to recharge electric vehicles makes them half as efficient as diesel cars.

CO2 emissions could actually go up if there is suddenly a big demand for electricity to recharge batteries, as it would have to come from existing fossil fuel power stations.

The researchers calculated that of the energy burned in a power station, only a quarter reaches an electric car after leakages and losses along the supply chain are considered, giving the vehicle an energy efficiency score of 24%. A modern diesel engine, by contrast, achieves 45% efficiency.

In the U.K. the bulk of the electricity used to charge the batteries of electric vehicles is generated by fossil fuel burning power stations. Only 20% of UK electricity is generated by “clean” methods such as nuclear power.

In the U.S., about half the electricity is generated by coal, and another 20% by natural gas. Like the U.K., nuclear accounts for about 20%.

This insight from a post by Big Gav at Peak Energy deserves to be widely shared:

The single biggest delusion in North America today is that the interconnected planetary problems bearing down on us can be faced with slight alterations to the current order; that a model of delivery prosperity based on suburbs and big cars and consumerism and profligate energy use and the careless spewing of pollution in all directions can be fixed through the swapping out of some of its constituent parts for slightly greener parts — that green-built McMansions and hybrid cars and compact fluorescent light bulbs will prop the model up indefinitely. They won’t, because we are in a situation where incremental reform has already been made meaningless by a revolution in context.

Big Gav has another post taking a look at a new green “supergrid” employing high-voltage DC current rather than the AC that is now standard in the U.S.  This type of grid would be essential to transmit power from renewable sources, tying the system together to provide ample, uninterrupted power over the vast and varied landscape that would be required for “spatial smoothing.” While expensive, it’s a fraction of the investment that would be required, anyhow, to provide needed power from dirty sources.

Energy consultant Dr. Gregor Czisch calculates the “green” system could deliver power for less than 4.7 Euro cents per kilowatt hour, roughly the price of German wholesale electricity in 2005 when the study was completed and competitive with electricity from current sources, even without factoring in a price for carbon.

Europe, of course, is far ahead of the U.S. in thinking about such things. Obama’s so-called “smart grid” proposal, rather than fundamentally re-thinking the U.S. electricity supply and distribution system, simply hands out billions to utility companies to continue business more-or-less as usual.

Last week I wrote a post on James Hansen’s open letter to President-elect Barack Obama, taking him to task for pimping nuclear and the chimerical “clean” coal.

Now Gar Lipow has posted a piece at Gristmill taking Hansen on from a different angle.  Rather than betting the farm on yet-to-be-developed 4th generation nuclear power and CCS technology, Lipow argues that our power needs can more quickly be addressed using already available wind and solar generation technology.

Where Lipow goes off track is in conceding that Hansen’s proposed solutions would be cheap. Nuclear will never be cheap – and neither will CCS.

There are some stunning figures and graphics posted at Prime Numbers: the Nuclear Option that illustrate the enormous challenge nuclear power faces in scaling up.

For nuclear to do nothing more than maintain its current share of global electricity to 2030 – 15% – a one-thousand megawatt reactor must be built every 16 days for the next 21 years. For nuclear to offset just a small fraction of the additional 7 billion tons of CO2 emissions expected by 2050 – say, one billion tons – a 1,000 megawatt reactor must come on line every 14 days now and 2050.

What I get from this is the sheer fantasy of thinking that any power source will enable our projections of future electricity use to be fulfilled. And on top of this, we fantasize that we can replace oil by electrifying our transportation systems?

A new study, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power by Craig Severance concludes that new nuclear power is not economically competitive:

Generation costs/kWh for new nuclear (including fuel & O&M but not distribution to customers) are likely to be from 25 – 30 cents/kWh.

The study clearly states all of its assumptions, and methods of calculation, so any reader can easily understand it. What jumps out at me is that the cost estimates of the study are conservative. For example, they assume that nuclear fuel processing will continue to be subsidized by the government,  that the intractable technical and political nuclear waste storage and disposal problems will be solved, that decommissioning and nuclear waste handling costs will continue to be heavily subsidized.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress observes that the cost of nuclear power is far higher than the cost of a variety of carbon-free renewable power sources available today – and ten times the cost of energy efficiency.