Monday, January 29, 2018

Utqiaġvik, where the climate has already changed

Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska.  Source: Anchorage Daily News



Two things happened on top of the world this week. In Utqiaġvik [formerly Barrow, in Alaska] on Jan. 22 the sun topped the horizon for the first time since mid-November.

The day before that, Jan. 21, was the first time since Halloween that the town's thermometers recorded a below-normal daily average air temperature.

The returning daylight for the country's farthest-north town is due to a predictable nod of the Earth back toward the sun. Utqiaġvik's second day of direct sunlight, Jan. 23, featured almost an hour's increase from the day before. The town will have four hours of daylight by the end of January. By May 11, there will be no night.

Just as dramatic are the recent warm autumns and winters in Utqiaġvik. While many people worldwide sense their favorite places are changing, residents of Utqiaġvik use the past tense.

"The term is no longer 'climate change' at Utqiaġvik. It is 'climate changed.' No doubt about it, based on my 40 years," said biologist Craig George, who studies bowhead whales and other animals from his home in Utqiaġvik.

George remembered back to October 1988, when three gray whales became trapped in Beaufort Sea ice just north of Point Barrow. The whales became a worldwide news story, as local rescuers used chain saws to cut circular breathing holes in the sea ice, trying to lead the whales to open ocean.

"This year, we had crashing waves onshore and 34 degrees F on winter solstice," he said. "It's almost like a different planet."
 
In December, NOAA scientists looking for the latest temperatures from Utqiaġvik sensors found computer algorithms had flagged and removed November readings because they seemed so far off.

The average temperature for October through December 2017 was 15.6 degrees F, 12.2 degrees above normal and highest for that span in the last 98 years, according to NOAA climatologist Rick Thoman.
 

Since 2000, the average October temperature in Utqiaġvik has increased 7.8 degrees F. November's average temperature has increased 6.9 degrees and December's, 4.7.
[Read more here; hat tip to Wayne ]

How much longer must we wait for serious action to avert catastrophic climate change to start? What will it take for our politicians to stop paying lip-service to initiatives to de-carbonise economies?  How much longer will right-wing parties continue to deny that global warming is happening right now?

Sunday, January 28, 2018

Trump and the truth

A cartoon by Rick McKee


All renewables to be competitive with fossil fuels by 2020

Source: IRENA



From EcoWatch:

According to a cost analysis from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the best onshore wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) projects could deliver electricity for $0.03 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) [$30/MWh] by 2019, much lower than the current cost of power from fossil fuels, which ranges from $0.05 to $0.17 per kWh [$50 to $170/MWh].

The analysis highlights the dramatic dip in solar and wind prices over the last decade. Onshore wind has fallen by around a quarter since 2010, with solar PV electricity costs falling by 73 percent in that time. Additionally, solar PV costs are expected to halve by 2020.

In the last 12 months alone, the global weighted average costs of onshore wind and solar PV have stood at $0.06 and $0.10 per kWh [$60 to $100/MWh], respectively. Recent auction results also suggest future projects will significantly undercut these averages—onshore wind is now routinely commissioned for $0.04 per kWh [$40/MWh]. Additionally, record low prices for solar PV in Abu Dhabi, Chile, Dubai, Mexico, Peru and Saudi Arabia have made $0.03 kWh (and below) [$30/MWh] the new benchmark.

Other types of renewable technologies—including hydropower ($0.05 per kWh) [$50/MWh], bioenergy and geothermal ($0.07 per kWh) [$70/MWh]—have also been cost competitive with fossil fuels over the last 12 months, the report found.


[Read more here]

These are ranges reflecting different conditions in different countries round the world.  For example, high interest rates favour fossil-fuelled power stations, because more of their costs are in the future, which at a high discount rate have a lower present value than they would at a low discount rate.  Wind and solar, on the other hand have no fuel costs and low maintenance costs, so they are favoured by low interest rates.  There are also learning curves--some countries just starting out on the path to renewables will have higher renewables costs than those which have learnt how to install and integrate renewables into their grids.  So it is possible that in some locations, new coal is still competitive with new wind and solar.  The problem for an investor is that the price trends are obvious, which combined with how long it takes to build a new coal power station plus the lengthy life of such a power station, means that they risk being uneconomic.   By 2020, this will be even more obvious.  It's hard to see how coal power stations won't be losing money hand over fist by the mid-2020s.  Meanwhile, gas will likely be retained only for peaking power and emergencies.



Friday, January 26, 2018

The top 1%

A cartoon by Matt Wuerker.



Carbon capture & storage horribly costly

Source


What carbon capture and storage seeks to do is to capture all the CO2 emitted by burning coal to generate electricity and then store it safely underground.  But it turns out that it would  significantly increase the cost of electricity generated by coal-fired power stations.

Capturing the CO2 from the exhaust of coal power plants requires energy in the form of steam and electricity. Because some energy is used for CO2 capture, CCS reduces a power plant’s electric power output and/or increases its fuel input. This creates an “energy penalty” for power plants that increases their operating costs. In addition, there is the large capital costs of building the CCS system.

Previous studies typically estimated that the fuel cost of coal power plants capturing 90% of their CO2 emissions would increase by about 30%-60%. However, data emerging from recent pilot or small-scale commercial CCS plants have consistently indicated that in reality the energy penalty and fuel costs are much higher. So why the discrepancy?

Our research, which was funded by the US National Science Foundation, showed that the fuel costs of coal-fired power plants can increase by up to 136% with the addition of a CO2 capture plant. That is, the fuel costs, which dictate the marginal cost of electricity generation (and consequently profits) for a power plant, would more than double in a CCS future.

[Read more here]

The percentage cost of fuel as part of the total cost of coal-powered electricity varies a lot depending on the age of the power station (is it fully depreciated?  Does it need lots of maintenance because it's old and worn out?) to the contracts the power station has with coal suppliers (some power stations are next to coal fields, so transport costs are minimal, some have specially low contract prices).  For new coal power stations in Australia, the cost of the fuel as a percent of total cost is over 50%.  At 50%, the additional cost of adding CCS to a power station would therefore increase the cost of the electricity produced by 50%.   That's why there are virtually no coal power stations globally currently using CCS.

Coal is already more expensive than renewables.  Adding CCS to coal power stations, to reduce their CO2 emissions to those of renewables would make coal even more uneconomic.  Even if you argue that renewables are too variable to be relied on, the fossil fuel we should use to "firm" renewables output should be gas, because it can be easily dialled up or down to complement changes in output and demand.   Burning gas instead of coal produces half the CO2 emissions of coal.  A grid with 75% renewables and 25% gas would still slash emissions by nearly 90%.  And ultimately we could produce the gas via the Sabatier process.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Patriotism

Nick Anderson




“It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.”
Voltaire

“The feeling of patriotism - It is an immoral feeling because, instead of confessing himself a son of God . . . or even a free man guided by his own reason, each man under the influence of patriotism confesses himself the son of his fatherland and the slave of his government, and commits actions contrary to his reason and conscience.” and "“To abolish war it is necessary to abolish patriotism, and to abolish patriotism it is necessary first to understand that it is an evil. Tell people that patriotism is bad and most will reply, ‘Yes, bad patriotism is bad, but mine is good patriotism.’”
Leo Tolstoy

“One of the great attractions of patriotism—it fulfils our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.”
Aldous Huxley

“Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.”
Bertrand Russell

“In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.”
Mark Twain

"Heroism on command, senseless violence and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism.” Albert Einstein


and of course the all time classic:

"Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel"
Samuel Johnson

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Don's Dream

By Christopher Weyant



White Christians

By Pat Bagley


Why Norwegians don't immigrate to the USA


Concentrated solar power getting dirt cheap

Concentrated solar power (CSP) can produce power 24/7, just like a coal or nuclear power station.  It does this by heating molten salt to 1000 deg F (538 deg C) during the day when the sun is shining then using the molten salt to drive a turbine overnight when it's dark.  Its costs have fallen by 2/3rds over the last 4 years. CSP in sunny places is now cheaper than coal, produces no emissions or pollution, yet nevertheless provides base-load electricity. 


Source: Big Think

It's not 100% "firm", because prolonged cloudy weather will impact production, but then again, coal power stations often "trip" without warning.  The way the grid has always coped with this in the past is to have excess capacity, so that the loss of one generator can be offset by turning on another.  And the risk is reduced by having diversified supply sources.  For example, the wind often blows when the sun isn't shining, and it blows more in winter when sunlight is less.


Rise in atmospheric CO2 level still accelerating

Not only is the level of CO2 in the atmosphere continuing to rise, it's rising at an accelerating pace.

Source: Open Mind
Remember, even if annual CO2 emissions peak, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will continue to rise, though the rate at which it rises (shown in the chart above) will level off.  To stop global temperatures from continuing to rise, we need to stop all CO2 emissions entirely.  In the context of the chart above, that would mean that the black line goes to zero (below the bottom of the chart area) and the red line changes trend.  BTW,  an  El Niño year (1998, 2016) causes the rate of increase in CO2 levels to spike up.

No signs of a slow down yet.

Cutting your electricity bill to zero

 
Source: Energy Matters


For a while now, households have been trying to reduce their electricity bills by installing rooftop solar.  Now it's the turn of big businesses.

South Australian water and sewerage utility SA Water is hoping to cut its electricity bill from an eye-watering total of $55 million in 2016/17 to a net total of $0 in 2020, after announcing plans to install up to 6MW of solar PV across a number of its large metropolitan sites.

Having ramped up its renewables rollout with a tender for a solar and battery storage system in July of last year, SA Water last month revealed plans to invest another $10 million on an initial 6MW of both rooftop and ground-mounted PV across its operations, with the first installations expected to begin in the first half of this year.


 In the regional Victorian city of Portland, Wannon Water is building an 800kW wind turbine that it will use to power its water and sewerage treatment plant.

Also in regional Victoria, North East Water is in the process of installing 43kW of solar panels and 40kW of battery storage at its Yakandandah facility.


In Queensland, the City of Gold Coast is proposing to install a series of floating solar PV arrays on its network of wastewater ponds – both to help power the city’s wastewater treatment plants and to cut evaporation from the ponds.

[Read more here]

These large businesses can all do this because they own the property they operate from.  But it's a lot harder if you are a large business which rents the property, because the solar panels would belong to your landlord.  And if the landlord sells the output of his rooftop panels to you he becomes an "electricity retailer" with all kinds of legal constraints and obligations.  Installation of mid-sized PV would grow far more rapidly if this legal constraint were removed.  This is a similar problem to what's faced by community solar in the US, and prevents solar installations on blocks of flats.

Critics keep on saying that renewables are more expensive than coal.  And they are wrong--using renewables will cut our energy costs.

See also: Aussies turn to renewables to cut business power bills

Monday, January 22, 2018

Drill, baby, drill

A cartoon by Steve Sack


Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels

A 5 year moving average of the global temperature anomaly.  Source: NOAA 



Only a few dotty denialists continue to (or pretend to) doubt that global warming is real, it's happening, and we are responsible.

Fossil fuels are very convenient.  They are excellent stores of energy, conveniently transportable, and not variable like renewable energy sources (though fossil fuel power stations do have a nasty habit of breaking down in hot weather--Australia has experienced 6 major coal power stations tripping over the last few weeks).  But they produce CO2, which might be invisible and only a small part of our atmosphere, but traps outgoing infra-red radiation, causing the world to heat up.  And that process appears to be accelerating.  Fossil fuels also produce plenty of visible pollution, and burning fossil fuels leads to the deaths of 6 million a year around the world.  In the past, we put up with fossil fuels because they were cheaper than the alternative.

However, now fossil fuels have a second disadvantage, one which increases every year.  They are more expensive than renewables.  This is how coal dies — super cheap renewables plus battery storage shows how the costs of new wind farms with battery storage in Colorado are below the costs of running old coal power stations:

Solar, wind, and battery prices are dropping so fast that, in Colorado, building new renewable power plus battery storage is now cheaper than running old coal plants. This increasingly renders existing coal plants obsolete.

Two weeks ago, Xcel Energy quietly reported dozens of shockingly low bids it had received for building new solar and wind farms, many with battery storage (see table below).

The median bid price in 2017 for wind plus battery storage was $21 per megawatt-hour, which is 2.1 cents per kilowatt-hour. As Carbon Tracker noted, this “appears to be lower than the operating cost of all coal plants currently in Colorado.”

The median bid price for solar plus battery storage was $36/MWh (3.6 cents/kwh), which may be lower than about three-fourths of operating coal capacity. 

In India, nearly two-thirds of existing coal power generation is no longer price competitive with new solar and wind projects.  In fact replacing high-cost coal power stations would save Indians US$8 billion per year.

Over the last couple of years, in many countries new wind and solar farm have got cheaper than new coal power stations.  Now, renewables are becoming cheaper than existing coal power stations, even though existing coal power stations are cheap to run because they have been fully depreciated.  In other words, building brand new wind and solar farms would actually be cheaper than continuing to run older coal power stations, cheaper even after interest is paid and depreciation costs deducted.  Why would we continue to dig up, transport and burn coal, with all its attendant filth and impacts on a climate which is already heating too fast, when we can save money by building out wind and solar farms?

The answer, from increasingly desperate denialists and coal and oil interests is that renewables are too variable.  We need, they say, the stability of fossil fuels.  No we don't.  

This article from PV Magazine, Seasonal patterns show a need for more solar in the U.S. electricity mix, discusses the seasonal mix of wind and solar in the USA.  Solar is (obviously) stronger in summer, and wind complements this by being stronger in other seasons.  There isn't just a seasonal complementarity: wind in the mid-west "wind corridor" is stronger at night, when the sun doesn't shine, and dies down during the day when it does.  Using both wind and solar produces a much more stable total output than using either individually.  The PV Magazine article also talks about geographical differences in generation and demand:

For all of this to provide benefits on a wider geographical basis it will be necessary to have the infrastructure and market design to rapidly move and trade electricity across regions. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is tracking more than 4,600 miles of new transmission projects that it gives a high probability of being completed over the next two years. This is nearly 20-times the length completed in the first 11 months of 2017.

So, a mixture of wind and solar combined with long-distance power lines to bring power from windy or sunny regions to places where the demand is.  

But storage will still be needed, which might come from two sources.  The first is concentrated solar power (CSP):  

An hour away from Area 51 in the Nevada desert, a beacon shines inexhaustibly day after day. And while its proximity to the famous classified zone makes some travelers believe they have seen something alien, the artifact is far from being extraterrestrial.

The beacon is part of a revolutionary solar generating and storage technology that may finally make solar power an undeniable competitor to coal and nuclear. With the first utility-scale facility already operating in Crescent Dunes, Nevada (and several more under development around the world), we are hopefully seeing the beginning of a new era in energy production.

The technology is called concentrated solar power (CSP) and uses a system of mirrors to concentrate solar energy and turn it into thermal by heating up a medium. The Crescent Dunes Power Plant, developed by the company SolarReserve, uses salts to capture and store the energy from the sun. The result is solar power available 24 hours a day, that can meet utility demands just like a conventional fossil fuels, except without any emissions or hazardous waste. 

[Read more here--it has a nice explanation of CSP]

CSP has fallen in cost by 2/3rds over the last 4 years, from 15 cents to less than 5 cents per kWh ($150/MWh down to $50/MWh)  It's still more expensive than wind and solar, but they can't provide power 24/7 like CSP can.  To smooth out a blended output from wind and solar (PV) farms, CSP will be very useful.

And of course, there are batteries.  The "Big Battery" in South Australia has already proved itself again and again over the last six weeks since it was opened, by helping to stabilise the grid when coal power stations repeatedly tripped.  But it's not big enough to provide substantial time shifting, not yet.  Battery costs will halve over the next 3 years, and probably halve again over the subsequent 3 too.  At that point, batteries will become ubiquitous, both behind the meter and at wind and solar farms and on the grid.  

The intrinsic variability of renewables is manageable.  Using different sources of green electricity--wind, solar PV, and CSP--from geographically separated weather zones connected by HVDC lines, and stabilising the grid with batteries will reduce overall variability of supply, and at a lower cost than continuing to use fossil fuels*.  

Converting electricity generation to renewables is key.  If we can do that, almost all other industrial processes can be electrified using green electricity.  For example, we can switch land transport (cars and lorries and trains) to run off batteries.  We can convert all heating to electricity.  Even where it seems impossible, for example in air transport, we can in principle produce methane from CO2 and hydrogen using green electricity via the Sabatier process, or we can produce a whole range of hydrocarbons via the Fischer-Tropf process from seawater.  It's energy inefficient but it doesn't matter if green energy is cheap enough--and it's getting cheaper every year.

Even 5 years ago, wind and solar were more expensive than coal and gas.  Now they're as cheap as or cheaper than fossil fuels, and their costs will go on falling.  Electric cars are within a couple of years of matching the buying cost of petrol/diesel cars.  Green electricity and green transport are or soon will be cheaper than fossil fuels.  Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels will prove surprisingly easy. 



* We might keep existing gas peaking power plants going for emergencies, but instead of using natural gas (methane) to run them, we could instead use synthetic natural gas produced by the Sabatier process produced with green electricity.

2017 hottest year adjusting for ENSO

2017 was marginally cooler than 2016, which was an El Niño* year.  The fall from 2016 was much less than the decline after the last El Niño in 1998**.  The chart below shows the temperature record adjusted for El Niños.  Adjusting for the impact of El Niños, 2017 was the hottest year.  Note how major volcanic eruptions cause temperatures to drop for a couple of years.  This is because eruptions release particulates (mostly sulphur dioxide) into high altitudes, which reflect incoming solar radiation.  If you fitted a long-term moving trend to the data from 1950 onwards you would get a steadily rising curve:  the rate of increase in temperatures appears to be accelerating.





[Read more here]


* ENSO stands for El Niño Southern Oscillation

** a favourite start year for denialists wanting to "prove" that temperatures haven't risen over the last X years.

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Another problem for coal

Coal is filthy.  Filthy to dig, filthy to transport, filthy to burn.  And burning coal is the major contributor to CO2 emissions which threaten to burn the word too.

Source: How coal is deepening the water crisis in India


But there's another problem for coal.  Coal power stations guzzle water, and in countries prone to drought, that's a problem, especially since global warming is worsening drought.

India’s lack of water will drive the need for solar and wind energy more than concerns over climate change will, according to a report released Tuesday.

More than 80 percent of the subcontinent’s electricity comes from power plants that require freshwater cooling, which presents a problem since a lack of water was the prime culprit for some power plants shutting down over the last five years, according to the World Resources Institute, a nonpartisan environmental think tank in Washington.

The plants include both coal and nuclear generators, called thermal plants because of the heat they produce to make electricity. “Thermal power plants have been forced to shut down due to inaccessibility of cooling water, losing tens of terawatt-hours of electricity generation in recent years,” the report said.

The report is the first comprehensive study of how access to water is affecting India’s energy needs. India lost about 14 terawatt-hours of power generation because of water shortages in 2016, which canceled out “more than 20 percent of growth in the country’s total electricity generation from 2015,” according to the report.

The scenario will only grow worse as India’s economy grows and the demand for fossil fuels and nuclear power increase, putting utilities and industries in a fight for water. One of the ways for India to avoid the increased water scarcity is to meet its aggressive goals for building photovoltaic solar panels and wind turbines, the report recommends to the Indian government.

“Water consumption from India’s thermal power generation rose steadily every year between 2011 and 2016 but would stay below its 2016 level by 2027 if the country’s most ambitious renewable goals are successfully achieved,” the report stated.
Read more here.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Denier

A cartoon from Steve Sack



Kentucky coal museum installs solar panels



Deep in the heart of coal country, a very unexpected business is going green.

The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum is adding solar panels to its building.

The museum, located in the southeast Kentucky town of Benham, aims to shine a light on the important role coal played (and continues to play) in meeting our energy needs — which makes it worth asking why it's moving away from its namesake fuel source to suit its own power needs.

The answer is actually really simple: Solar is cheaper.  The irony certainly isn't lost on the museum's owners, but there's no denying that solar power just makes sense from a financial standpoint.
  
[Read more here]




Getting to Mars--cheaply

Asteroid mining. Source

NASA estimates a cost of $100 billion for 5 astronauts to get to Mars and back. $20 billion per person!  It's no wonder the date mankind will reach Mars is always 15 years from today.  No government will fund that kind of expense.  But what if the cost could be dramatically, massively, cut?

If SpaceX manages to make the BFR and BFS reusable, even for just 10 times, the cost of getting to Mars will be 4 or 5 orders of magnitude less than NASA's mission.  (An order of magnitude is a 10 fold increase or decrease)

There are three parts to the Falcon 9: the first stage, or booster; the second stage; and the payload which is protected by a fairing.  Already the Falcon 9 first stage is being used twice, and with each successful launch and relaunch, the steps needed to reuse the first stage have been reduced and the speed with which SpaceX can reuse them rises. But the second stage and the fairings are discarded, and allowed to fall back to earth where they burn up in the atmosphere or crash into the sea.

We know from SpaceX that each launch of the Falcon 9 costs $62 million, and the launch of Falcon Heavy costs $90 million.  Musk has said that the fairings cost several million, but he has also said that the first stage is somewhat less than 75% of the total cost.   Reconciling these two statements is beyond my skills.  So let's assume that the second stage plus fairing costs 1/2 the first stage.  That gives us 3 equations, where A = the cost of stage 1, B=the cost of stage 2 plus fairing and C = profit margin.

(1) A+B+C=62
(2) 3A+B+C=90
(3) B=A/2

Three variables, three equations--hey, I can solve that!  And the solution is:

A (cost of stage 1)=$14 million
B (stage 2 + fairing)=$7 million
C (profit) = $41 million

The high profit margin (66%) explains why SpaceX is still going despite its heavy outlay on development, and despite frequent predictions that it was in imminent danger of bankruptcy.  (In that sense it's not really a profit margin, rather development cost recovery)

Undoubtedly I've got things wrong, but it gives us some reasonable guesses.

Let's use the number of engines as a proxy for the cost of the BFR vs the Falcon 9.  I know that's far from exact, but the engines are a big part of the cost and if they are all the same size, the number should be proportional to the size of the rocket, and therefore its cost.  The BFR (i.e., stage one of the Mars Transporter) will have 31 Raptor engines, compared with the Falcon 9's 9 Merlin engines, so a very rough calculation would put the cost of a BFR at 14/9*31=$48 million.

The BFS (the upper stage of the BFR, the proper "spaceship") will have 4 vacuum Raptor engines and three smaller atmospheric "sea-level" engines) The BFS will cost much more than stage 2 and fairing of the Falcon 9--it'll be much bigger and will have life support (though the tanker and cargo versions won't.)  To get some idea, let's again assume the rule of thumb we used with the BFR.  That suggests the BFS might cost 14/9*7=$11 million.

Now, profit/development costs.  Much of the development cost has already been spent, with the development of the Raptor engine and the composite-fibre fuel/lox tanks.  But this still has to be redeemed from future launches.  Let's assume that the profit/development costs are 5 times the profit on the F9, or roughly $200 million.  That gives a total cost of about $260 million. That's for ONE use: if the BFR/BFS combo can be reused just 10 times, the cost per launch drops to $26 million.

Musk thinks the BFR can be reused 1000 times, the BFS 20 times.   But BFS reuse assumption is low because it's being used for Mars journeys, which means 2 years between journeys because Mars is only in opposition to Earth every 26 months.  If it's used for journeys to the International Space Station, the moon, and to launch SpaceX's fleet of satellites for its world-wide internet system, its reuse will be greater.  On the other hand, maybe it's just impossible to actually reuse spacecraft several times because the rigours of launch and re-entry are too great.  I've seen estimates of 12 reuses of stage 1, followed by a major refurbishment.  Refurbishment will however be expensive.  So let's ride with 10 reuses.  Even that will be enough to make the BFR/BFS combo ridiculously cheap.  And 12 reuses will cut the cost another 20 percent, 20 reuses by  50% more.

The cost of fuel is (relatively speaking) negligible in this context: $200K for a F9, so perhaps $1 million for the BFR. So the cost of each launch (with 10 reuses) would be $27 million. For a Mars trip, the BFS will have to be refuelled in space 7 times.  That suggests the total cost of the first Mars trip of $432 million -- $216 million each for one manned ship and one cargo ship, with 7 refuelling flights for both. Subsequent launches will require less cargo, because machinery will be manufactured on Mars using 3-D printing and local resources, so costs will fall sharply.  Each manned ship will be able to carry 100 passengers, so cost per passenger will be under $500K for the first few trips, much less thereafter. (This compares with $5 billion per person with NASA's current plans.)  However, Musk reckons the total cost per launch will be lower than the Falcon 1, which was $7.3 million in 2015 dollars. This is way lower than my estimates, which means he is assuming more reuses than I am--at least 30 or so.  However for the point to point rocket flights on Earth, to get the cost down to the price of a business class air ticket, you'd need to get 100 reuses.  Hmmm.

The key is reusability. If SpaceX delivers that, especially if they get even 100 reuses, the whole solar system opens up to manned exploration. People have consistently dismissed Musk's plans, with both Tesla and SpaceX. And he's achieved all his goals, though admittedly it's usually taken longer than he said ("Elon time"). Perhaps most significantly, where NASA, ULA, Ariane, Uncle Tom Cobley and all seriously doubted or even rubbished his efforts to make rockets reusable, he succeeded. The first few landings failed, right enough. But there have been 20 perfect landings in succession to date.

Musk has clearly dismissed any hope of finance from NASA.  SpaceX generates a "profit" of $41 million per launch of the F9.  That's $6.1 billion over the next 5 years with 30 launches a year (SpaceX will have half the market this year), enough for 26 BFR/BFS sets, assuming $200 million "profit" per set.  But of course, SpaceX will be selling the services of BFR when it is built, getting revenue that way.  When the BFR/BFS becomes the workhorse rocket within the firm, launching satellites and servicing the ISS, SpaceX will be making $20 million per launch.  And given the probable elasticity of demand for space services at much lower prices (remember the BFR/BFS will carry 150 tonnes to LEO compared to F9's 22.8 tonnes,  at a cost of $180K per tonne vs $2.7 million per tonne), there will likely be thousands of launches per year, not 60.   Development costs will be spread across far more launches.  Up until SpaceX slashed the cost of space launches, it cost $22,000 per kilogram, or $22 million per tonne to get stuff into orbit.

Why does all this matter?  

Well, there is already one spin-off.  Cheap satellite launches will make SpaceX's world-wide high-speed internet feasible.  In the past, the biggest component of satellite costs has been the launch.  A truly world-wide high speed internet, available in the middle of the Pacific, the Amazon jungle, the Sahara desert, Africa, outback Australia, etc, not just in wealthy cities in the West, will transform the world.   SpaceX envisages that you will need no more than a book-sized receiver on your roof to access internet speeds 180 times faster than they are on average in the world today. 

Another possible spin-off: to extract CO2 from the Martian atmosphere, SpaceX will need to develop its own machinery or use machines created by others. Just as they have with everything else, they'll cut costs and improve efficiency.  What works on Mars will likely work on Earth too.  This will be tremendously useful on Earth.

Probably, all the things we'll need to do to maintain life in our domes on Mars, and later on its surface, will have useful applications for Earth too.  NASA is responsible for a long list of useful inventions which are spin-offs of the space program.  Solar panels were first developed for use in satellites.  Now they will save the world by replacing fossil fuels.

The asteroid belt beyond Mars and near-Earth asteroids closer to Earth are a treasure trove of minerals, containing a planet's worth broken up into bite-sized chunks.  The BFR will make getting to the asteroid belt cost effective, and shipping minerals back will be cheap because the asteroids have hardly any gravity--a small push will send them on their way to Earth or Mars.  Mars will be a way station for miners in the asteroid belt, because it's much closer than Earth.  So they will likely also mine the asteroids for water and ammonium (for the nitrogen) for Mars, as well as minerals for the Earth.

When the mobile phone and the internet were invented, no one could foresee how they would revolutionise society, or how disruptive they would be to established industries.  Cheap space travel will change the world for ever.  We will start a colony on Mars, we will mine the asteroids, and the spin-offs from rapid technological advancement in space will change our lives here on Earth in ways no one can foresee.   That's if we don't blow ourselves to bits with nuclear war before that.  Or cause global temperatures to rise by more than 1.5 degrees C, which will lead to huge adaptation costs in low-lying cities as well as massive numbers of refugees. Or do something else stupid.  I live in hope.

[Update 21/1/18:  I found a news report where Musk costs the fairings alone at 6 million.  If you recast the equations so that the cost of stage 2 without fairings is 75% of the total cost before profit, the cost breakdown comes to something like this:-

Stage 1--$14 million
Stage 2--$4.6 million
Fairings--$6 million
Profit/Development cost--37.4.

So profit margin 60% not 66%.  The cost of the BFR/BFS doesn't shift much.] 

Sunday, January 7, 2018

Record temperatures in Oz

While denialists witter on about how cold it is in the USA ( Alaska is warmer than Florida) it's mid-summer here in Oz and we're having record, record heat.  That  by itself of course doesn't prove there's global warming, but if we know (and we do) that global temperatures are rising rapidly, then a record heat wave is significant.  And it's likely to be followed by more records being broken.  And then even more.  How long before significant chunks of the world become uninhabitable in summer?



Burning Nemo

From Jack Pratt



Electricity market ignores Trump


Source: CleanTechnica

The electricity grid is inexorably transiting to one powered by renewables.  The grid of the future will be mostly powered by a mix of solar, wind and CSP, with batteries, molten salt and pumped hydro for storage, and with HVDC (high-voltage direct current) power lines connecting places with different climates, so that output of the grid as a whole is stable. 

The cost of all these technologies is falling.  In some locales, renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels, and they will get cheaper still.  Even though their costs have halved over the last 3 years, batteries are still pricey, but their costs are likely to halve again over the next 3 years.  Ultimately, the grid will have battery storage in its transport fleet (an electric car stores 2-4 days of power demand for a typical home); it will have distributed storage at major substations and places where long-distance power lines meet and diverge; and it will have behind-the-meter storage in homes and businesses with rooftop solar.

Adding long distance HVDC connections to the grid makes a lot of sense.  Power losses are small, and having long-distance connections to other geographies means that even if the wind isn't blowing in your state, you can get power from two states away where it is blowing.  If the sun is shining in your area, and there is too much electricity, HVDC lines can convey it to where the sun isn't shining and there is a shortage. 

Wyoming is part of the US "wind corridor".  It has about the same population as South Australia, which also has excellent wind resources.  Wyoming has huge coal resources.  It also voted overwhelmingly for Trump.  Yet it is rapidly extending its wind generation capacity.  Politicians may make grand gestures (they do that a lot), but in the end wind is expanding despite political grand-standing because it's so cheap. Wind contracts in the wind corridor are being signed at $20/MWh or less.  Even better, Wyoming wind blows strongly in the late afternoon, just when Californian demand is strong.  To take advantage of Wyoming's wind resources, a new HVDC line is to be constructed from Wyoming to the edge of the Southern California grid in southern Nevada.

You can read a detailed account here, but what interested me wasn't so much the details but the principles.  Renewables are cheap and getting cheaper; when push comes to shove, the market shrugs off politics; the percentage of renewables is steadily rising; and the usefulness of wind plus long-distance HVDC lines is being recognised even in a state where Trump won 2/3rds of the vote.

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Alaska warmer than Florida

Anchorage Alaska warmer than Jacksonville Florida!!  The fact that it's very cold in the eastern half of North America  does not prove that global warming doesn't exist.  Because it's very hot in the rest of the USA, and the rest of the world.  Look how hot it is in Siberia relative to the average, for example (lower chart)



Source: ClimateCrocks




Source: ClimateCrocks


[Read more here]

The Transfer

A cartoon by Clay Bennett



Hydrogen-boron nuclear fusion


Source: ZME Science


For the last 70 years, nuclear fusion has always been 20 years away.  But maybe for the first time we might get it.

Most nuclear power comes from nuclear fission--heavy molecules like uranium or plutonium are split into lighter molecules and the process releases energy.  Alas, it also releases some very toxic by-products.  For decades, the holy grail has been nuclear fusion, which involves smashing together light atoms like hydrogen and helium and their isotopes to produces heavier atoms.  This is the process by which stars--including our own sun--produce energy.  But it requires the incredibly high temperatures and pressures inside a star to work.  The problem for nuclear fusion attempts so far has been that duplicating that high pressure and temperature here on earth has been hard.  It's been done--that's what a hydrogen bomb does.  But to do it safely and produce more energy out than we put in has so far eluded us.

Previous attempts to recreate the temperature and pressure inside a star's heart involved a tokamak--a ring which contains the superhot plasma inside a magnetic field in the shape of a torus.  The new technique, invented by an Australian scientist at the University of New South Wales, involves used very short ultra-powerful laser bursts to set off a cascading reaction.

From Space.com

The new hydrogen-boron reactor is potentially a game changer for a simple reason: efficiency.

A deuterium-tritium reactor faces two challenges on the way to producing electricity: A lot of the energy gets wasted as atoms shed neutrons during the reaction, and the remaining energy can't be converted directly to electricity. Instead, it's used to heat up water, which turns a turbine, which produces electricity. So, most of the energy put into the reaction can't be efficiently translated into usable electricity.

But in the new study, which was published Dec. 12 in the journal Laser and Particle Beams, Heinrich Hora, a physicist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and colleagues argued that they can sidestep these challenges by using a completely different fusion reaction.

If you fuse hydrogen-0 (just a single proton with no neutrons or electrons) and boron-11 (a version of boron with six neutrons) to make three helium-4 nuclei (each containing two protons and two neutrons), the researchers wrote, no neutrons get wasted. The atoms combine cleanly without losing any of their core particles. And in the reactor Hora proposes, the energy of the plasma could be converted directly into electricity without wastefully heating up water along the way, because the fusion's energy is released as a stream of electrically charged particles, which can relatively easily be turned into current in a wire.

Unlike deuterium-tritium reactors, which hold superheated plasma in place using magnets inside donut-shaped chambers, Hora's spherical hydrogen-boron reactor uses lasers to trigger and sustain the reaction. Those lasers are critical, Hora said: They waste much less energy heating up the atoms in the plasma and use less energy keeping the atoms in place. 


The lasers allow the hydrogen-boron plasma to reach temperatures of 5 billion degrees Fahrenheit (3 billion degrees Celsius) and densities 100,000 times greater than those of the plasmas inside a deuterium-tritium reactor. Those are much more intense reaction conditions than other projects aim for, but Hora and his team wrote that it should be easier to achieve these conditions given current technology, at least according to the researchers' early experiments and simulations.

The spherical shape, meanwhile, would allow the superhot plasma to retain a more efficient cylindrical shape at its core, which makes it an ideal target for the cylindrical laser. A spherical shape also efficiently retains the energy produced by the fusion reaction, the researchers said.
[Read more here]

One of the brightest burning dreams of sci-fi enthusiasts the world over is closer to reality than we’ve ever dared hope: sustainable fusion on Earth. Drawing on advances in high-power, high-intensity lasers, an international research team led by Heinrich Hora, Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at UNSW Sydney, is close to bringing hydrogen-boron reactions to a reactor near you.
Energy from scratch


In a recent paper, Hora argues that the path to hydrogen-boron fusion is now viable and closer to implementation that other types of fusion we’re toying with — such as the deuterium-tritium fusion system being developed by the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor under construction in France.

Hydrogen-boron fusion has several very appealing properties which Hora believes puts it at a distinct advantage compared to other systems. For one, it relies on precise, rapid bursts from immensely powerful lasers to squish atoms together. This dramatically simplifies reactor construction and reaction maintenance. For comparison, its ‘competitors’ have to heat fuel to the temperatures of the Sun and then power massive magnets to contain this superhot plasma inside torus-shaped (doughnut-like) chambers.

Furthermore, hydrogen-boron fusion doesn’t release any neutrinos in its primary reaction — in other words, it’s not radioactive. It requires no radioactive fuel and produces no radioactive waste. And, unlike most other energy-generation methods which heat water as an intermediary media to spin turbines — such as fossil-fuel or nuclear — hydrogen-boron fusion releases energy directly into electricity.

All of this goody goodness comes at a price, however, which always kept them beyond our grasp. Hydrogen-boron fusion reactions require immense pressures and temperatures — they’re only comfortable upwards of 3 billion degrees Celsius or so, some 200 times hotter than the Sun’s core.

Back in the 1970s, Hora predicted that this fusion reaction should be feasible without the need for thermal equilibrium, i.e. in temperature conditions we can actually reach and maintain. We had nowhere near the technological basis needed to prove his theory back then, however.
 [Read more here]

I have no doubt we will one day get fusion.  It will be essential to our exploration of the solar system.  In the mean time, back on earth, we'll continue to rely of the giant fusion reactor in the sky, via solar panels.  Solar now costs under $20/MWh.  But the time we get fusion, solar power will be down to below $10/MWh (1 cent/kWh).  But fusion will be extremely useful on Mars, where the insolation is less than half what it is here.  And if it works this time, it'll come on stream just when it's needed.

Friday, January 5, 2018

Tesla sales reach new record


You can see in the chart how Tesla's car sales had started to go exponential until late 2016, when the company started to retool the factory for the Model 3.  For the last year, production stagnated.  But in the last quarter, particularly in the last month of the blast quarter, production and sales came roaring back.  As the production bottlenecks for the Model 3 eased, production of the Model S and the Model X jumped.  The company stated that in the last 7 working days of 2017, Model 3 production averaged 100 per day (i.e., 2200 per month), and that they now forecast that production would hit 5000 per week by the end of Q2 this year (2018).  Only 6 months late--not bad for Elon Time!  I think this is at last a plausible forecast.  This will take total Tesla car production to over 100,000 per quarter.  In 2016, Tesla's car sales exceeded 100,000 for the whole year for the first time.  At 500,000 per annum, Tesla's sales will constitute 3% of total US car sales (though some of the production is for export)

Read more here:

Tesla delivers 1,550 Model 3s in Q4

Tesla Q4 numbers


Tuesday, January 2, 2018

The cult of ignorance

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:


There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (2 Jan 1920-1992) 

(Source: Wordsmith.org)


Isaac Asimov, scientist and author
I used to have one of these pocket computers.  It was programmable in basic,

The economy soars

A cartoon by Clay Bennett