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Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks has today given the go ahead to Thor Cogeneration Ltd to construct a 1,020MW gas-fired combined heat and power station at Seal sands, Teesside. He has also given deemed planning permission for the development having agreed planning conditions with Stockton on Tees Borough Council.
The Government's plans for a low carbon future took another step closer today as Energy Secretary John Hutton announced the approval of the UK's fourth largest offshore wind farm.
San Jose's Nanosolar, a manufacturer of thin-film solar panels, said Wednesday that it has raised $300 million to help it complete production lines in Silicon Valley and in Germany. It's the largest amount of money raised by a solar start-up this year, and confirms that investors see the company's technology as ready for prime time.
"It's obviously a huge win for us," Martin Roscheisen, Nanosolar's chief executive, said in an e-mail from Europe.
The company, located in South San Jose's Edenvale clean-technology development district, uses copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) rather than silicon for its solar panels. The promise of thin-film solar is that it will be much cheaper than traditional panels. Previously, Nanosolar talked about being the first company capable of profitably selling solar panels for 99 cents a watt.
Describing the investment as "one of the larger funding rounds we've seen in the solar energy marketplace," an industry observer noted that big dollars are flowing into solar now as the technology moves from the lab to the factory.
"Nanosolar has plenty of company in the photovoltaic and concentrating solar power start-up space," said Michael Bates, managing editor of Solar Industry magazine. "Companies such as HelioVolt, SolFocus and Suniva have all taken part in investment rounds exceeding $50 million."...
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today joined Colorado Governor Bill Ritter and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers via satellite to launch the EcoDriving program-a comprehensive, nationwide effort to save consumers money at the gas pump, reduce fuel use and cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
"We are here today to side with the people and to help them save at the pump immediately," Governor Schwarzenegger said. "This program is no substitute for a consistent, long-term national energy policy, but it provides immediate and tangible relief from high gas prices. Just by following some simple recommendations, drivers can get 15 percent better gas mileage, save money at the pump and reduce demand for foreign oil. During the transition to more renewable and secure energy sources, we'll all benefit and save money from the most efficient use of gasoline."
The Alliance's EcoDriving consumer awareness campaign centers on an interactive website, www.EcoDrivingUSA.com, to help drivers learn practical tips to improving their mileage and reducing their carbon footprint. The site includes a video guide to EcoDriving, an "EcoCalculator" to determine benefits for individuals or states, a virtual road test and a variety of educational tools.
By following a set of easy-to-use best practices for driving and vehicle maintenance, a typical EcoDriver can improve mileage by about 15 percent. In addition, EcoDriving produces the highest mileage from every single vehicle, regardless of vehicle size and age, so it offers an unmatched reach in addressing energy and climate issues by potentially affecting the nation's entire fleet of 240 million automobiles.
California alone has 32.5 million automobiles on its roads. If all Californians practiced EcoDriving, they could save money while cutting CO2 emissions by 23 million tons a year. That is equal to the CO2 emissions from powering 2.2 million houses, or all the households in Los Angeles.
Sample EcoDriving practices include:
Sample maintenance practices include:
In January 2007, the Governor announced the world's first Low Carbon Fuel Standard for transportation fuels that requires fuel providers to reduce the carbon intensity of transportation fuels sold in California. This first-of-its-kind standard firmly establishes sustainable demand for lower-carbon fuels without favoring one fuel over another. The already-developing market competition to meet this new standard is key to reducing oil dependency, boosting alternative fuels and giving consumers a weapon against escalating gas prices. To start, the standard will reduce the carbon intensity of California's passenger vehicle fuels by at least 10 percent by 2020 and more thereafter.
08.18.08
The problem, he decided, was oil-consuming, CO2-spewing cars. The solution was to get rid of them. Not just some, and not just by substituting hybrids or flex fuels. No half measures. The internal combustion engine had to be retired. The future was in electric cars.
This was hardly an original insight; electric cars had been the future for over 100 years. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Electric Vehicle Company was the largest automaker in the US, with dealers from Paris to Mexico City. But oil, in the end, supplanted volts on American highways because of one perennial problem: batteries. Car batteries, then and now, are heavy and expensive, don't last long, and take forever to recharge. In five minutes you can fill a car with enough gas to go 300 miles, but five minutes of charging at home gets you only about 8 miles in an electric car. Clever tricks, like adding "range extenders"—gas engines that kick in when a battery dies—end up making the cars too expensive.
In early June, Wired's Daniel Roth talked with Israeli president Shimon Peres about Better Place, the greening of Israel, his obsession with Israel's burgeoning solar industry, and the problems that come with turning a vision into a reality. An edited excerpt:
Wired: Was the message of getting off oil something you were concerned about before?
Peres: I thought that the greatest problem of our time was oil. Oil on one hand is polluting the land, and on the other hand it's financing terror. They say jokingly that the Middle East is divided into these kind of countries: the oily countries and the holy countries. We are obviously a holy country. We don't have oil. We don't have water.
Wired: You brought Better Place and Renault together. Did you expect them to form this partnership?
Peres: I never worried about it. My great advantage is that I'm ignorant. My own mentor was David Ben-Gurion. He used to say all experts are experts for things that did happen. There are no experts for things that may happen.
Wired: Before Israel publicly announced its Better Place rollout, I was told that you and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were going to announce that Israel was going to declare complete energy independence. But the announcement was much more modest. What happened?
Peres: It's not the end of the story. I am now pushing solar energy and introducing the new environmental approach to life. It's foolish: Why should we hang on oil when we can hang on the sun? The sun is much more permanent, more democratic, and there's plenty of it. I'm feeling that our technology will miniaturize the equipment of the solar energy and reduce the cost. So I'm very glad that we started. Israel is going to be a green country. That's our ambition. And our ambition is to do it as soon as possible.
Wired: So can Israel become a clean tech global power?
Peres: Israel, you know, is too small of a country to become a world market and too small a country to become a great world producer, but we have enough scientists per square kilometer to become a world laboratory. And smallness has its own advantages; when you are small you can be really daring, you can be a pilot plant. You cannot, for example, try a car like Shai Agassi's in Texas. It is too large and would be too costly and complicated. Here we can do it on a human scale and eventually extend it and expand it.
Wired: Do you see any "peace dividends" coming out of the clean tech push?
Peres: Oh yes. Ecology forces us to cooperate. Water is not disciplined, the air doesn't ask for visas to fly from one place to another place, and if seas are beginning to die, all partners have to save them. So today the economy is very much a matter of environment, and environment is an independent force that is not committed to borders or rules or conventions. And nature is impatient. You cannot say: I'm going to negotiate pollution for 10 or 20 years. Pollution won't wait for you. Pollution is not a political force; it's a force of nature.
Agassi dealt with the battery issue by simply swatting it away. Previous approaches relied on a traditional manufacturing formula: We make the cars, you buy them. Agassi reimagined the entire automotive ecosystem by proposing a new concept he called the Electric Recharge Grid Operator. It was an unorthodox mashup of the automotive and mobile phone industries. Instead of gas stations on every corner, the ERGO would blanket a country with a network of "smart" charge spots. Drivers could plug in anywhere, anytime, and would subscribe to a specific plan—unlimited miles, a maximum number of miles each month, or pay as you go—all for less than the equivalent cost for gas. They'd buy their car from the operator, who would offer steep discounts, perhaps even give the cars away. The profit would come from selling electricity—the minutes.
There would be plugs in homes, offices, shopping malls. And when customers couldn't wait to "fill up," they'd go to battery exchange stations where they would pull into car-wash-like sheds, and in a few minutes, a hydraulic lift would swap the depleted battery with a fresh one. Drivers wouldn't pay a penny extra: The ERGO would own the battery.
Agassi unveiled the outline of his vision for the crowd at the Saban event: a new kind of infrastructure, with ubiquitous charge stations, that was not only simple and logical but potentially profitable, too. As he talked, he read the body language of the audience—they were leaning forward, they were nodding—and he fed off it, layering on details. A country like Israel, he told them, could get off oil by simply adopting his new business model. No technological breakthroughs were necessary. No new inventions. It was as if he'd discovered a trapdoor beneath both the gasoline industry and the auto industry, a combined $3 trillion market. It sounded easy and unavoidable. Even Daniel Yergin was amazed. Shai Agassi had stolen the show.
A week later, Agassi was in bed when his phone rang. He was asked to hold for Shimon Peres. At first he thought it was a joke.
"Now what?" said the familiar rumbling voice on the other end of the line. Peres said he had been thinking about Agassi's speech since returning to Israel. He wanted to know what Agassi was going to do about it.
"What do you mean?" Agassi asked.
"You spoke so beautifully, you have to make this a reality. Otherwise, it will remain a speech."
After that conversation, Agassi couldn't get Peres' voice out of his head. A few months later, when his boss broke the news that he wouldn't be getting the top job at SAP anytime soon, Agassi shocked just about everyone in the tech world by quitting. And not long after that, in May 2007, he launchedProject Better Place, the world's first global electric-car grid operator (he later dropped "Project"). He had no cars, no test site, and no electrical engineering or auto experience. It wasn't even clear that consumers wanted change. They were paying $3 a gallon, painful but bearable.
The relative costs of generating electricity from coal, gas and nuclear plants vary considerably depending on location. Coal is, and will probably remain, economically attractive in countries such as China, the USA and Australia with abundant and accessible domestic coal resources as long as carbon emissions are cost-free. Gas is also competitive for base-load power in many places, particularly using combined-cycle plants, though rising gas prices have removed much of the advantage.
Nuclear energy is, in many places, competitive with fossil fuel for electricity generation, despite relatively high capital costs and the need to internalise all waste disposal and decommissioning costs. If the social, health and environmental costs of fossil fuels are also taken into account, nuclear is outstanding.
See also the December 2005 World Nuclear Association report (pdf 310 kB) The New Economics of Nuclear Power.
External costs
The report of a major European study of the external costs of various fuel cycles, focusing on coal and nuclear, was released in mid 2001 - ExternE. It shows that in clear cash terms nuclear energy incurs about one tenth of the costs of coal. The external costs are defined as those actually incurred in relation to health and the environment and quantifiable but not built into the cost of the electricity. If these costs were in fact included, the EU price of electricity from coal would double and that from gas would increase 30%. These are without attempting to include global warming.
The European Commission launched the project in 1991 in collaboration with the US Department of Energy, and it was the first research project of its kind "to put plausible financial figures against damage resulting from different forms of electricity production for the entire EU". The methodology considers emissions, dispersion and ultimate impact. With nuclear energy the risk of accidents is factored in along with high estimates of radiological impacts from mine tailings (waste management and decommissioning being already within the cost to the consumer). Nuclear energy averages 0.4 euro cents/kWh, much the same as hydro, coal is over 4.0 cents (4.1-7.3), gas ranges 1.3-2.3 cents and only wind shows up better than nuclear, at 0.1-0.2 cents/kWh average. NB these are the external costs only.
The cost of fuel
From the outset the basic attraction of nuclear energy has been its low fuel costs compared with coal, oil and gas fired plants. Uranium, however, has to be processed, enriched and fabricated into fuel elements, and about half of the cost is due to enrichment and fabrication. Allowances must also be made for the management of radioactive spent fuel and the ultimate disposal of this spent fuel or the wastes separated from it.
In January 2007, the approx. US $ cost to get 1 kg of uranium as UO2 reactor fuel at likely contract prices (about one third of current spot price):
| Uranium: | 8.9 kg U3O8 x $53 | US$ 472 |
|---|---|---|
| Conversion: | 7.5 kg U x $12 | US$ 90 |
| Enrichment: | 7.3 SWU x $135 | US$ 985 |
| Fuel fabrication: | per kg | US$ 240 |
| Total, approx: | US$ 1787 |
At 45,000 MWd/t burn-up this gives 360,000 kWh electrical per kg, hence fuel cost: 0.50 c/kWh.
If assuming a higher uranium price, say two thirds of current spot price: 8.9 kg x 108 = 961, giving a total of $2286, or 0.635 c/kWh.
But even with these included, the total fuel costs of a nuclear power plant in the OECD are typically about a third of those for a coal-fired plant and between a quarter and a fifth of those for a gas combined-cycle plant.
Fuel costs are one area of steadily increasing efficiency and cost reduction. For instance, in Spain nuclear electricity cost was reduced by 29% over 1995-2001. This involved boosting enrichment levels and burn-up to achieve 40% fuel cost reduction. Prospectively, a further 8% increase in burn-up will give another 5% reduction in fuel cost.
Comparing electricity generation
For nuclear power plants any cost figures normally include spent fuel management, plant decommissioning and final waste disposal. These costs, while usually external for other technologies, are internal for nuclear power (ie they have to be paid or set aside securely by the utility generating the power, and the cost passed on to the customer in the actual tariff).
Decommissioning costs are about 9-15% of the initial capital cost of a nuclear power plant. But when discounted, they contribute only a few percent to the investment cost and even less to the generation cost. In the USA they account for 0.1-0.2 cent/kWh, which is no more than 5% of the cost of the electricity produced.
The back-end of the fuel cycle, including used fuel storage or disposal in a waste repository, contributes up to another 10% to the overall costs per kWh, - less if there is direct disposal of used fuel rather than reprocessing. The $26 billion US used fuel program is funded by a 0.1 cent/kWh levy.
The cost of nuclear power generation declined over the 1990s and into the new decade. This was because declining fuel (including enrichment), operating and maintenance costs, while the plant concerned has been paid for, or at least is being paid off. In general the construction costs of nuclear power plants are significantly higher than for coal- or gas-fired plants because of the need to use special materials, and to incorporate sophisticated safety features and back-up control equipment. These contribute much of the nuclear generation cost, but once the plant is built the cost variables are minor.
Long construction periods will push up financing costs, and in the past they have done so spectacularly. In Asia construction times have tended to be shorter, for instance the new-generation 1300 MWe Japanese reactors which began operating in 1996 and 1997 were built in a little over four years, and 48 to 54 months is typical projection for plants today.
US cost figures for 2007 published by the Energy Utility Cost Group showed nuclear utility generating costs averaging 2.866 c/kWh, comprising 1.832 c/kWh operation and maintenance, 0.449 c/kWh fuel and 0.585 c/kWh capital expenditure (NB apparently not amortisation of the plants). US figures from a different source for 2007 published by NEI gave 1.68 c/kWh for fuel plus O&M.
Note: the above data refer to fuel plus operation and maintenance costs only, they exclude capital, since this varies greatly among utilities and states, as well as with the age of the plant.
Electric power transmission, a process in the delivery of electricity to consumers, is the bulk transfer of electrical power. Typically, power transmission is between the power plant and a substation near a populated area. Electricity distribution is the delivery from the substation to the consumers. Electric power transmission allows distant energy sources (such as hydroelectric power plants) to be connected to consumers in population centers, and may allow exploitation of low-grade fuel resources that would otherwise be too costly to transport to generating facilities. Due to the large amount of power involved, transmission normally takes place at high voltage (110 kV or above). Electricity is usually transmitted over long distance through overhead power transmission lines. Underground power transmission is used only in densely populated areas because of its high cost of installation and maintenance, and because the high reactive power produces large charging currents and difficulties in voltage management.[citation needed]
A power transmission system is sometimes referred to colloquially as a "grid"; however, for reasons of economy, the network is not a mathematicalgrid. Redundant paths and lines are provided so that power can be routed from any power plant to any load center, through a variety of routes, based on the economics of the transmission path and the cost of power. Much analysis is done by transmission companies to determine the maximum reliable capacity of each line, which, due to system stability considerations, may be less than the physical or thermal limit of the line. Deregulation of electricity companies in many countries has led to renewed interest in reliable economic design of transmission networks. However, in some places the gaming of a deregulated energy system has led to disaster, such as that which occurred during the California electricity crisis of 2000 and 2001.[citation needed]
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Transmitting electricity at high voltage reduces the fraction of energy lost to Joule heating. For a given amount of power, a higher voltage reduces the current and thus the resistive losses in the conductor. For example, raising the voltage by a factor of 10 reduces the current by a corresponding factor of 10 and therefore the 
losses by a factor of 100, provided the same sized conductors are used in both cases. Even if the conductor size is reduced x10 to match the lower current the losses are still reduced x10. Long distance transmission is typically done with overhead lines at voltages of 115 to 1,200 kV. However, at extremely high voltages, more than 2,000 kV between conductor and ground, corona discharge losses are so large that they can offset the lower resistance loss in the line conductors.
Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995 [2], and in the UK at 7.4% in 1998. [3]
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