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Power too Cheap to Meter
Reading Churchill’s 1931 essay about the technology of the coming half-century, I was struck once again by the failed promise of the Atomic Age. Churchill speaks of bringing Newton to a contemporary undergraduate physical society, and the reaction he would have had to Churchill’s world. If one had whisked Churchill ahead to 1981 he would have been astonished — not at our taming the atom, but at how little we’d done with it.
Churchill predicted we would harness nuclear energy like this:
The discovery and control of such sources of power would cause changes in human affairs incomparably greater than those produced by the steam-engine four generations ago. Schemes of cosmic magnitude would become feasible.
And this:
Communications and transport by land, water and air would take unimaginable forms, if, as is in principle possible, we could make an engine of 600 horsepower, weighing 20 lb and carrying fuel for a thousand hours in a tank the size of a fountain-pen.
Have we changed human affairs so very much? Nuclear weapons aside, the world is pretty much the same. I single this out not because Churchill got this wrong, but because the story of nuclear age’s failure to come to fruition is fascinating.
“Wait!” I hear you cry, shaking your monitor in frustration, “We already know why it never happened. It was those lousy greens and peaceniks. They conjured specters of irradiation, and worries about how we could possibly store radioactive waste. As if Utah wasn’t full of perfectly worthless uninhabited mountains to bury it under.” That’s certainly true, but it’s hardly the only reason. Let’s run down them, shall we?
Radiation
Well, it’s scary. Much like your garden variety ninja, it’s totally invisible and can kill you without you ever noticing. In the public’s mind (to the envy of ninjas everywhere) it can cause mutations worse than death and permanently poison the countryside beyond all memory of man. Ignoring radiation’s ubiquity as a bad plot device, it’s still clear that nuclear energy needs some selling to the public.
Radiation puts a practical limit on how small you can make these nuclear piles. Consider the engine example, from the second quote. Such a thing would be impossible to build not because the physics disallows it, but because a device that small can’t possibly shield the user from radiation.
Regulation
Nuclear reactors are dangerous in more ways than one. It’s even possible — and my libertarian nature recoils at the suggestion — that the nuclear industry should be regulated as heavily as it currently is. Regardless, it’s heavily regulated now. Consider what effects that has.
Regulation stifles innovation faster than anything else. Suppose I had a genius idea to smash atoms on the cheap and provide discount electricity to widows and orphans. It ain’t gonna happen unless I’ve got major corporate money to back me up with the NRC. Suppose I have that, too. Why would they take the risk on a regulatory fight when they can make money on the tried and true? It’s not like someone can come in and take their business.
Never you mind the inexplicable array of regulations surrounding electrical utilities regardless of how they produce power. And the whole state of California can jump in a lake.
Power
What exactly does nuclear power do that coal doesn’t? It’s marvelously useful if you’ve got an aircraft carrier to move around. It’s vital if you’re France, concerned about the strategic weakness of fuel importation. As a practical matter, a civilian nuclear reactor in America is similar to any other power plant. Greater startup costs are balanced by fewer fuel costs down the road.
Churchill was right that the ability to produce massive amounts of energy cheaply enables us to do new and interesting things. For example, it’s possible to synthesize gasoline out of air and water. Hydrocarbons burn with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water. You can drive that reaction backwards with enough energy. You could build an oil well. All you need for it to be economical is for gas prices at $5 a gallon. (Is that iWe I hear laughing?)
Economics
You could build the power plant first. People are clever. They’ll find ways to use ever-cheaper electricity to do ever cooler things, even if we can’t tell what those things are ahead of time. If there’s money to be made, people will find a way to finance new and mindbogglingly expensive power plants. An army of bureaucrats or a squad of lobbyists can be hired to deal with regulations. Slick ads and good jobs can placate public fears.
All of that depends on money to be made. But what was the central promise of the Atomic Age? Power too cheap to meter. Why was the steam engine still a more important technological development to the world than the fission pile?
Because power too cheap to meter is too expensive to sell.
Published in General, Science & Technology
A nuclear / hydro grid could actually sell power by maximum demand as opposed to usage – in other words, it would be too cheap to meter. So much of their cost is capital and fixed costs that they are always run at full power.
I’m sure Bryan, iWe, and friends will disagree with me, but coal power is a massive sources of pollution. It produces vast amounts of nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, particulates, and some carbon monoxide. The smoke is radioactive enough that a nuclear plant would be shut down for the same emissions. That is in addition to the ash that contains heavy metals, and the ample emissions of mercury vapor out the stack.
Nuclear plants need government to ease up on the inquisition on new design approvals, and government that hates hippies in order to ignore their moaning during protests.
In a spot of irony, I read this comment initially on my lunch break around 11:00 pm at work. Factories generally work on a 24/7 basis, as long as they can keep up with sales. One can imagine some really interesting innovations if there was a serious price differential between electricity at two in the morning and one in the afternoon.
Not saying you’re wrong about wind and solar, or even nuclear. Just that having too much of a resource is always a better problem than too little.
Preaching to the choir. I didn’t write this post because I’m relieved we narrowly averted a science fiction future. As far as nuclear technology goes, I’m intrigued by the LFTR model.
Coal is worse than nuclear, by far. Natural gas is, by comparison, an awesome source – and we have hundreds of years of supply just stateside.
But even coal is FAR FAR FAR better than wind or solar (and probably Hydro as well, when one considers all the unintended consequences).
BTW, radiation is like anything else: too much is a bad thing. But background levels that are higher than we expect are GOOD for human health. Naval engineers on nuclear ships have lower cancer rates than those same engineers on oil-powered ships.
Again, preaching to the choir. It’s not even that I object to Coal, or Solar.
Jumping into the argument from the first page, I think iWe is correct that human capital is the fundamental limitation right now, but Mr. Stephens is also correct to note that energy is a constraint. I think of it like a limiting reagent in chemistry. A fire will burn until the fuel is used up, or the oxygen is used up, whichever comes first. Right now we’re up against the human capital constraint.
But that’s not to say that energy isn’t vital too or that producing more energy isn’t useful. I’d rather have cheap coal energy as well as nuclear than only the nuclear. I’d love to see solar panels that are more efficient. Acknowledging John Hanson’s objections, let’s also note what he grants; it’s useful where tying to the grid is difficult. The reason I object to solar energy is that it is, from top to bottom, back to front, alpha to omega, a thoroughly corrupt government boondoggle.
Of course, with more energy comes greater capacity for destruction. If you contain the power of a sun, then that power can be used for good or ill.
Can you supply a link to said articles?
A quick google overwhelmed me.
83 pages of blog posts here http://wattsupwiththat.com/author/weschenbach/page/83/
character assault here (didn’t take the time to evaluate) http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/10/who-is-willis-eschenbach.html
top results for my google search for Willis Eschenbach low energy prices:
Read THIS one. Wonderful, touching, and remarkable.
I work as a contractor for an energy company in North Carolina. They have a huge capital investment plan for the next 15 years, and very little of it is in generation, it’s in distribution, transmission, etc – grid improvements, in other words. Including the ability to accept feed-in power from homes and small producers, basically, the distributed energy resources model.
Keep in mind that for energy companies, some of the capital invested can be recouped in rates, and some cannot (recoverable vs. non-recoverable). So the incentives are there to invest in grid, and invest less in generation, other than what’s needed.
Oversimplifying, but the distributed model is a real thing. How it will actually work out is another. And there will always be backups ready to fire up at the drop of a hat, mostly gas-fired turbines, because they can spin up quick and shut down quick.
Several years ago (before the fracking boom and decline in the cost of natural gas) there was a significant differential in energy cost overnight, but the cost wasn’t passed on to the consumer (no smart meters back then). I imagine that’s coming. Instead it was handled by pumping water up hill overnight and bringing it back down during the day. Because the cost differential has decreased that isn’t done as much today. As far as having too much being better than too little, perhaps, but both are serious problems.
Sure. You mentioned filling caves with compressed air. I can tell you, as a factory worker, a significant part of our energy budget goes to compressing air for use in pneumatics or other such things. Ignoring the caves one can think about compressing the air into a tank overnight and dispensing it during the daylight hours.
The infrastructure on the factory side doesn’t exist to do this just yet. But touching on Seawriter’s comment from the first page, we’re generating many multiples of what we were in 1945, and we’re using it. If you made electricity cheap enough, people will use it to do interesting things and drive the price back up. This is the “too much power” problem that I’m worried about. Less so on a day-to-day “We’ve got to do something with this built up potential” that requires active management of how many generators you have running.
I am not seeing how you can ever have too much power. More power is always better. If the demand is stimulated by the supply, then the supply will be simulated by the demand. Prices will rise and fall. It will be OK
I’m not in the industry so there is probably better terminology to describe this, but if you have something like coal that has been mined, it is ready to be burned anytime. You need to store it somewhere in the meantime, but I imagine that’s not too difficult.
It is more difficult with other energy sources such as natural gas (need to capture and store it and not let it explode) and gasoline (which goes bad after a … year?) and electricity.
This is related to the problems energy generators don’t work on-demand (e.g. solar, wind) – they generate energy when it is sometimes not needed.
If you have something like electricity that has been generated it has to either be used or be stored, but storing it is hard. Battery technology is not yet caught up to our desires, which is why it’s hard to capture solar and wind energy for later use, for example.
I welcome more knowledgeable comments, but this is what I have gathered.
Battery technology is like Brazil: It is the future, and always will be.
Again, I am talking at a different altitude. Thanks for clarifying.
I think we’re talking about different time spans. I’m referring to short term minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour generation. In that time frame I can assure you too much power is very much a problem. (I will uncharacteristically refrain from going into un-necessary details and boring anybody left reading this)
In the longer term, I agree the problem of too much power will take care of itself.
Feel free to go into un-necessary details. Anyone still reading is made of hardy stuff.
The grid can only support a certain load – there is a capacity limit. Having dozens of plants pumping out electricity to a grid that does not demand it based on usage means you run the risk of overloading the lines, transformers, etc. Think of it as too much water pressure in a pipe – sooner or later something bad will happen.
I think what everyone wants is relatively cheap power available whenever and wherever you need it – big power demands out in the sticks, for example, at a factory that’s sited away from residential/urban areas. That type of facility would benefit from a DER-type power source to augment and backup traditional power.
Power is a cost of doing business. The cheaper and easier it is to access the more a business is likely to b e profitable. Especially those industries that rely heavily on power (like microelectronics manufacturers, as an example).
Ok, I’ll go a little deeper. My apologies to those who know more about this than I do.
Generators take anywhere from 10 minutes to several days to start, so you can’t always turn them off when usage is low because you won’t get them started in time for the peak usage the next day. They also cannot be adjusted down to zero output. They’re unstable below a certain level so must keep producing something, usually a significant amount.
If you generate more than is being used, the frequency will go faster than normal. If it goes too fast the generators will trip off to protect themselves. If you can’t get them started back up in time you may have a shortage/blackouts when usage picks up again.
So if you’re just barely getting by when usage is low, then suddenly the wind starts blowing and wind turbines put out more power than you can handle, it’s a real problem. Its not uncommon under these conditions for one utility to pay another to take the excess. Nuclear plants move very slowly. They may take a day or more to adjust down to their minimum output–not very useful when dealing with erratic wind and solar power. Hopefully the next generation of nuclear (if there will ever be such a thing) will be able to move faster.
Nuclear reactors are generally designed for base load generation currently. PWR, BWR, CANDU – all of them are great for running as much as possible. Fuel cost for reactors is so low that even a tripling of the fuel cost would have a negligible impact on the use cost. Every outage is a frantic yet organized dash to fix as much as possible in the shortest possible downtime.
Gas turbine reactors like the Pebble Bed design are very scalable and can run really hot with high efficiency.
Thorium reactors are great, but there is no reason to make them an exclusive choice. There are many designs of reactors that are safe and generate tons of power.
I have been waiting a long time for Pebble Bed Reactors to work, and work well. To my knowledge, they are not viably competing anywhere. Is this incorrect?
Well, they haven’t been approved in the US yet. They are still in development like LFTRs and breeder reactors.
If they worked well, they would be in use all sorts of places that do not require US approval. Offshore power is not hard to conceive of.