The Growth Rate of the Danish Wind Industry As Compared to the New Finnish EPR Nuclear Reactor. [View all]
Last edited Sun Mar 27, 2022, 08:25 PM - Edit history (1)
Earlier this month, Europe's first EPR reactor, Olkiluoto 3, was connected to the grid.
The reactor took a disappointing 17 years to build, construction having begun in 2005. Some of this might be excusable as the reactor was subject to FOAKE (First of a Kind Engineering) constraint, and some other delays may have involved communication between the French speaking and Finnish speaking engineers and construction crews; nonetheless, as professor Phyllis Gardner remarked when discussing Theranos founder and convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes, "Excuses are like assholes; everybody has one."
(For contrast, Taishan 1 and Taishan 2, EPR's built in China started construction after Olkiluoto 3, in November 2009, went into commercial operation in 2018 and 2019 respectively.)
Nevertheless, rote anti-nukes and "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes like to claim that "nuclear energy takes too long to build."
Of course, as I never tire of pointing out, the United States built over 100 reactors essentially in 20 to 25 years while providing the lowest priced electricity in the industrial world, with many of these reactors still operating 40 years later, despite endless criticism by people who, in my opinion, care far less about climate change than they do about Fukushima, the latter being a case where close to 20,000 people were killed by seawater and forgotten and almost no one was killed by radiation although radiation is still widely discussed ad nauseum.
And of course, China is about to pass France as the second largest producer of nuclear energy. Last week China connected to the grid the second of a new class of nuclear reactors, first approved in 2015:
Second Fuqing Hualong One enters commercial operation.
As the article notes, its sister reactor, authorized at the same time, came on line in late 2020 and reached full power in January of last year.
China has built 56 reactors in this century. This is not quite the rate that the United States achieved between 1960 and 1980, but it is also nothing at which to sneeze.
Still one can often hear - I hear it all the time - that "nuclear energy takes too long to build; wind and solar can be built faster."
This seems to be a common chant, a mantra, and I wonder whether anyone is inclined to ever bother to look to see, given that the so called "renewable energy" industry is now a trillion dollar industry, if any data supports this notion.
I'm sure that some people may disagree with this, but I hold that data overrules mantras. That's just me of course.
Data...
Before going into the very detailed data provided by the Danish Energy Agency in connection with its wind industry, it is useful to look at less detailed data covering the whole world. A world standard for analysis of the current state of world energy production and use, as well as soothsaying, based on "scenarios," is the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook published annually. There have been some changes in format over the years, one of the happiest in my opinion has been a change of units in the most recent edition from the pixilated unit MTOE (Million Tons Oil Equivalent) to the SI unit Exajoules. I have in my files every copy from 2006 to 2021, with the exception of 2020; I also have copies of the 1995 and 2000 editions. The current edition, 2021, does it's best tabular analysis using the "stated policies" scenario and a portion of the table doing so, Table A1A found on page 294 is reproduced here:
A few comments:
First, let's be clear on something; at the outset of the half a century of cheering for solar and wind industry, going all the way back to the energy clown Amory Lovins' insipid 1976 treatise that made him famous, Energy Strategy: The Road Less Traveled the goal of hyping these forms of energy was never about climate change. Climate change is and was an afterthought. The goal was to attack nuclear energy.
The worldwide result of buying into Lovins' unreferenced soothsaying, which has proved to be as valuable as reading Tarot cards might have been, and was punctuated by criticism of a technology he has never been intellectually capable of understanding at any more than an extremely superficial level, nuclear energy, is clear from the table above and from something far more dire: Climate change.
All the cheering for half a century for wind and solar devoted to "nuclear phaseouts" has neither met its originating goal: Combined, wind and solar produced in 2020 10.4 Exajoules of energy (as opposed to the abused word "capacity" ) compared to nuclear's 29.4 Exajoules. In all of the editions of the World Energy Outlook in my possession, nuclear energy, using reactors, the majority of which were built in the 20th century, has never fallen below 28 Exajoules. After 50 years of mindless cheering, wind and solar are only able to produce 1/3 of the energy produced by nuclear energy operating in a universe of catcalls and vituperation which to my mind exactly parallels the popular, albeit minority, opinion leading to the refusal to be vaccinated for Covid. Both activities kill people, since nuclear energy saves lives.
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
Secondly, it's useful to look at the IEA's soothsaying about what the world will look like in 2030, 2040, and 2050, with particular focus on so called "renewable energy." Two of these somewhat rosy predictions depend directly on climate conditions for which so called "renewable energy" has proved incapable of arresting dire change: Hydro and "modern biomass." I assume, without looking too deeply into the matter, that "modern biomass" includes things like the Drax powerplant in the UK which has switched from burning coal to burning wood "harvested" from North American forests and transported, using diesel powered rails and/or trucks to seaports to be loaded on to ships powered by petroleum based bunker oil. This is taking place at the same time that North American forests are spontaneously combusting - far removed from power plants - because of extreme climate changes, or dying because of the failure of cold enough winters to kill parasites, or droughts, or combinations of all three. It is therefore questionable how much wood for "modern biomass" will be available in the next three decades. As for hydro, the Himalayan glaciers on which major Asia hydroelectric facilities depend, are dying and in places like the American West it is becoming clear that facilities like the Glen Canyon dam that created Lake Powell - environmental disaster that it's been since inception notwithstanding - may soon not have enough water to run, calling into question, over the long term, the viability of Lake Mead. Since the approach to climate change has consisted of little else than wishful thinking and denial, the similar situations may be expected to get worse all over the planet.
Thus the soothsaying about 2030, 2040, and 2050 by the IEA may be, in my view, a tad overoptimistic.
Similarly the expectation of the growth in the use of dangerous natural gas and dangerous petroleum blithely predicts that these fuels will even be available as we race, "by 2050" in this soothsaying, toward 3/4 of a billion exajoules of energy each year as human energy demand. As for the predicted decline of coal, 2022 has given lie to that claim, Germany and other countries thinking along the same lines have been burning coal all winter to power their grids because of the politically driven inaccessibility of Russian gas, which is not to say that they aren't still burning Russian gas, they plan to phase it out "by 2027" by building new liquified natural gas terminals. To them, but not to anyone who gives a shit about climate change, dangerous natural gas is "green."
As for the IEA prediction for solar energy; it's possible they may be close to the truth, since the result of the fondness for solar energy is climate change and desertification of once green ecosystems, making plenty of former wilderness available for industrialization. The issue is to find enough coal, oil and gas to continue to reduce silicon dioxide to elemental silicon and then to refine it. We'll see, well not "we" since I'll be dead in 2050 whether or not the planet also is.
Now about wind energy:
The purpose of this post is to produce some deeper data, focusing on the Okiluoto 3 EPR reactor, with a power rating of 1650 MWe electric expected to be reached in the next several months as it reaches full power and all of the wind turbines in that offshore oil and gas drilling nation of Denmark. The reason for choosing Denmark, besides all the hype directed at its wind program over the later parts of the 20th century and the early parts of the 21st, is that the Danes maintain a very detailed readily available database of every wind turbine ever built in their country going back to the late 1970s.
Although I personally abhor their energy policies, in this respect, it's good on them.
This data can be accessed here: Master Register of Wind Turbines on the Danish Energy Agency's website. I downloaded the spreadsheet accessed on the link therein, this one: Data on operating and decommissioned wind turbines (ultimo 01 2022). Uploaded March 17 2022. I accessed it about three days ago and have run a number of calculations using common Excel functions. I last went through this exercise in 2018; it's time for an update.
The spreadsheet has two tabs, one of which is for existing reactors (the Danish word seems to be a sort of double negative, ikke-afmeldte, "non-decommissioned" ) and the other for decommissioned wind turbines (afmeldte). The spreadsheet is labeled in both English and Danish. There is probably a reason for the use of the double negative term "ikke-afmeldte," as opposed for the Danish word for existent, eksisterende. (No, I am never going to try to read Kierkegaard in the original Danish.) As of January 2022, the last data entry for the performance of existent wind turbines in Denmark, 134 of the 6,296 ikke-afmeldte ("non-decommissioned" ) wind turbines in Denmark produced zero electricity. Perhaps there is some hope of repairing some of these: For example, the ikke-afmeldte 11 kW wind turbine connected to the grid in November 1979 produced zero electricity in 2006 and 2007, and 1 kWh in 2008, and nothing since. I assume it's not been decommissioned because it's being allowed to rot in place; it is now 42 years old. It is the second oldest ikke-afmeldte wind turbine in Denmark. The oldest, a 400 kW turbine located at Madum by, Madum is operating, but it's a decrepit old thing. It's capacity utilization in the very windy month of January 2022 was a mere 4.33%. It is almost to the point of rotting in place as much as those producing zero electricity are also rotting in place.
It is well known that wind turbine performance degrades with age; the reason is aerodynamic. The tangential velocity of a rotating wind turbine blade, particularly a large blade, is rather high, on the order of hundreds of meters per second - translating into hundreds of miles per hour - and at these speeds, the polymer coatings on wind turbine blades can be shattered by the momentum of - believe it or not - rain drops, spewing microplastics into the air. (It should be stated that wind turbine related microplastics are almost certainly trivial compared to other microplastic sources in the environment.) These polymer coatings are designed to reduce aerodynamic drag, and their loss degrades turbine performance. These effects are described in an open sourced paper written by Danish engineers here: Extending the life of wind turbine blade leading edges by reducing the tip speed during extreme precipitation events (Jakob Ilsted Bech, Charlotte Bay Hasager, and Christian Bak, Wind Energ. Sci., 3, 729–748, 2018).
Some text from the paper's introduction:
I added the bold.
I note that I often heard in the early days of the scheme to replace nuclear energy with wind turbines the statement that wind turbines would be low maintenance, which panned out as well as the nonsense statement that "cheap" wind energy would obliterate the nuclear industry or the add on nonsense statement that wind energy would help address climate change. These statements have all been experimentally shown to have been glib wishful thinking.
A word on the accuracy of the data: In many cases the total energy - and they are in units of energy, kwh, not in units of power, watts - of an individual turbine is given, but in other cases, they are clearly given as an average for a particular facility. For example, it extremely unlikely that the 10 Bonus wind turbines in the Copenhagen area (København in the spreadsheet) each produced exactly 5,065,907 kwh of electricity in 2002 and then again, each produced exactly 3,356,086 kwh in 2021 as the spreadsheet indicates. Therefore, the average for the facility and type has been applied to each wind turbine. There are many other examples of this in the spreadsheet. I don't have a problem with that, but again, data in most cases seems to refer to distinct turbines.
All this said it is clear that merely reporting the average age of existing wind turbines in the ikke-afmeldte, "non-decommissioned," tab in the data base, which as of this writing is 17 years and 18 days, is a bit misleading, since it contains examples of wind turbines that should have been, but haven't been, decommissioned, as well as those whose performance has seriously degraded.
To understand the average lifetime of wind turbines, it is almost certainly better to look at those that have been decommissioned, those listed in the the afmeldte, "decommissioned" tab. Denmark has built 9,740 turbines and decommissioned 3,444 of them, roughly 35% in "percent talk." The average age of decommissioned wind turbines is 17 years and 317 days, slightly longer than the 2018 figure I calculated back then, which was 17 years and 283 days, an improvement of a whopping 34 days.
The total peak capacity of all the wind turbines in Denmark can be determined from the spreadsheet. For ikke-afmeldte, "non-decommissioned," wind turbines, is 7035.3 "MW." There are 31556927 seconds in a tropical year. The theoretical energy produced for reliable power that can operate at or close to 100% capacity utilization - nuclear plants are the only power infrastructure that have demonstrated the ability to do this for periods of a year or longer - is thus for all the wind turbines in Denmark to 5 significant figures is 0.22201 Exajoules. In 2021, the last full year for which we have the total energy output of all the wind turbines in Denmark was 0.057962 Exajoules, this on a planet where, as of 2020 - albeit constrained by Covid - was 584 Exajoules. Thus the capacity utilization of all the wind turbines in Denmark (to be fair, including the ikke-afmeldte, "non-decommissioned," turbines that were inoperable or marginally operable) was 26.1%.
I should note at this point that the capacity utilization for the single month of January 2022 for all the wind turbines in Denmark was 44.06%, which is unusually high for wind turbines, but would be considered very, very, very poor performance for a nuclear plant. Apparently January was a windy month in Denmark. I conducted analysis of this similar data in 2018 apparently in May of 2018, and thus monthly figures for capacity utilization were available for the months of January, February and March when I did so. The capacity utilization of all the wind turbines in Denmark operable at that time was respectively, 32.1%, 30.1%, and 30.8%.
The 2022 spreadsheet gives the total energy output for every year for all the wind turbines in Denmark going back to 1977, one year after the energy clown Amory Lovins published his unreferenced soothsaying article to which I referred above, an article that regrettably, particularly with his anti-nuclear rhetoric, helped to set the planet on a course leading to the climate disaster now well under way. From these totals one can calculate the average continuous power of all the wind turbines in Denmark with the understanding that this ignores the fact that sometimes they perform at very low capacity utilization and at other times better capacity utilization but never at the 100% capacity utilization that nuclear plants can achieve on a fairly regular basis.
In 1977, the average continuous power of all the wind turbines in Denmark for that year was 0.0138 MW. Ten years later, in 1987, the average continuous power power output of all the wind turbines in Denmark, which had excited the imagination of and was trumpeted by all of the world's anti-nukes, a class to which I belonged until Chernobyl established what remains the worst case for nuclear plant failure, had reached 45.7 MW.
The issue of climate change was well understood in scientific circles in 1987, but it had not reached general public attention, if I remember correctly, until the 2000 election, where Al Gore presented it as an issue in the Presidential election. Up until that time it had no political dimension, although the anti-nuclear movement was well developed by that time, and was, in fact, a key component of the 1988 Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis. Between 1987 and 1988 the wind industry - which at that time I was personally so ill informed as to support at that time - in Denmark had increased its average continuous power by 155% to 71.2 MW. This led to the rise of what I now mock as "percent talk," which has characterized much of the discussion of so called "renewable energy" for well over three decades. It is relatively easy to raise the amount of cash one has on hand by 155% if one has $100, but a massive effort is required to raise $1,000,000,000 by 155%.
Now it behooves me to note, once again, that the newly completed EPR in Finland is going to produce 1650 MW of average continuous power, reliably and constantly. The average continuous power of all the wind turbines in the entire nation of Denmark, both on land and at sea, first reached a number greater than 1650 MW in 2015 when it produced 1666.1 MW of average continuous power, but it is important to note that Denmark needed to burn fossil fuels whenever the instantaneous power - far different than the average continuous power - was much lower than 1666.1 MW, with much of the environmental cost obscured by the fact that one has to waste a certain amount of power, particularly in a coal plant, just to restart the plant. And let's be clear, the Danes burn coal. As of this writing, 22:44 (10:44 PM) Copenhagen time 3/27/22, dangerous coal energy is providing 19.54% of Danish electricity, (West Denmark) wind 30.61% (with a capacity utilization of 25.61%), while also burning dangerous natural gas (6.71% of the Danish electricity) while importing electricity from Norway and Sweden. The carbon intensity is 239 g CO2/kwh, more than double that of France, 107 g CO2/kwh, in "percent talk," 233.3% higher.
It is useful to note how much average continuous power Denmark was producing in 2005, when the problematic and often delayed construction of Olkiluoto-3 began. In 2005, the average continuous power of all the wind turbines in Denmark was 856.8 MW. By 2021 it had reached 1836.3 MW (slightly lower than the 1866.5 MW in 2020). Thus the wind industry in Denmark - backed by continuous access to dangerous fossil fuels - was able to grow in terms of continuous average power by 979.9 MW, in "percent talk," 59.4% as fast as Finland could grow nuclear power.
So much for that anti-nuke myth.
It is worth noting that for a nuclear plant, as opposed to wind plants scattered across an entire nation, average continuous power is pretty much the same as continuous power. Nuclear power plants are reliable, predictable and clean.
The EPR reactor has what I personally regard as overkill for safety, multiple heat loops, extra layers of concrete, overly thick steel, etc. If one considers the number of lives lost from radiation released as a result of the Sendai earthquake that destroyed the Fukushima reactors - the number of people killed by seawater dwarfs the number of lives lost (if any) from radiation in the event - one may wonder which might save more lives, preventing the leak of any radiation at an EPR by spending a few extra billion Euros, or spending the same number of Euros to provide Covid vaccines to Africa.
Finland, like Denmark and Germany, still burns coal. As of this writing, it is producing 714 MW of coal fired electricity, less than half the power the Olkiluoto-3 reactor will provide. The lives saved by not burning coal at all, will dwarf, by orders of magnitude, all of the premature deaths that may result from radiation releases at Fukushima, the second worst nuclear disaster of all time.
Facts matter.
Have a nice evening.
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