Today the British Government formally announced that it will permit the major energy companies to squander billions on nuclear. Not a penny of taxpayers money we are assured, although quite how that squares with the current £72 billion clean-up of existing nuclear committed so far I am unsure. Not that this decision will make the slightest difference to the impending energy gap as the current nukes and dirty coal close down over the next decade; after all there is unlikely to be a single kWh of nuclear electric generated much before 2020!
That is the big difference between the megalomaniac nuclear industry and micro CHP. Whilst nuclear takes decades to build before producing any power at all, micro CHP can be installed 1kW at a time, producing power from day one. In terms of capacity, if we replaced all domestic gas boilers (as they reach the end of their useful life) with micro CHP , we could in theory install 1.5 million micro CHP units every year. That is equivalent to 1.5GWe, or not far off the size of one nuclear power station in 2008, another in 2009, in 2010 and ...you get the picture. By 2020, we could have the equivalent of twelve nukes powered by micro CHP. And if it didn't work out for some reason, we could just stop installing them; on the other hand, with nuclear you have to commit to the whole £2billion (or more) price tag for a single station and if, after 10 years construction, it doesn't stack up, you have absolutely nothing to show for your money...which would you invest in?
Against this dismal background, it is encouraging to hear that Ceramic Fuel Cells have delivered yet another micro CHP unit to be tested by E.ON in the UK; that is in addition to the units recently shipped to GdF in France (home of European nuclear) and EWE in Germany. I am pretty sure that they will be producing low carbon electricity some time before 2020.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
What and excellent article with very interesting facts. I am currently doing a research assignment for my MSc and am looking at micro CHP in the domestic sector. I am comparing micro CHP potential with other centralised energy generation mostly coal and nuclear and your article strikes me as it agrees with me enterely. Would you mind if I referred to some of your comments in my paper, with full acknowledgement of course. If you have other article links I would be very interested in learning more. At present micro CHP has a huge potential to displace around 15-20% of centralised energy generation from the domestic sector alone yet the technology is held back...why/
Thanks for your comment; of course you are ewelcome to make use of this information as well as that published on www.microchap.info where you will find numerous papers which discuss the role of micro CHP in more detail.
It seems as though, after many technical and commercial setbacks, micro CHP products are actually starting to enter the market. In Japan there have been thousands of products both ICE engines and fuel cells introduced in homes to provide heating and hot water, although these have been heavily subsidised by the Japanese government. In Europe, Baxi and Remeha are launching their Stirling engine units based on the MEC engine, whilst EHE/Whispergen are launching their products in Germany, Netherlands and UK.
However, as you point out, micro CHP does seem to have had more than its fair share of setbacks. Part of the reluctance to embrace micro CHP relates to the bizarre focus by technically illiterate eco-fashionistas on trendy "renewable" technologies at the domestic level in the misguided belief that technologies such as PV somehow deliver zero caron electricity, conveniently ignoring the Life Cycle Assessment of these technologies not to mention their outrageously high cost to society. Although micro CHP delivers CO2 and other benefits and is the lowest cost carbon abatement technology (alongside other energy efficiency measures) it is somehow cast in an unfavourable light simply because it consumes fossil fuels to deliver energy and carbon savings. If the same rationale were applied consistently to other measures, then you would not be able to support insulation in homes heated by natural gas!
The problem with CHP is that it is NOT a great deal more efficient than conventional fossil fuel plants.
A gas plant operates at 60% electrical efficacy (ie 40% is wasted) while the best CHP I know of (the fuel cell BlueGen you refer to) is 60% electrical plus 25% thermal efficient.
So you go from 60% efficient to 85% efficient. Or in total you reduced RESIDENTIAL consumption of gas by 30%. Not bad until you consider the cost.
It costs zero subsidies to build the gas fired 60% efficient station. It runs at a profit.
The BlueGen unit however would require a subsidy of some £10k a unit.
So to replace ten 2GWe gas plant with BlueGen units would require £100B in subsidies and still consume lots of gas!!
How are you going to pay for that? shut down the NHS?
Not to mention the gas fired station repairs itself from profits, replaces itself from profits, works well and is reliable.
Ironically enough, the only CHP that would work is nuclear/coal CHP on a large scale. But im sure you are against that.
Plus to the Guy doing his Msc, WTF are you citing speculation on a blog as science?
Heres betting $5 you don’t approve this comment
Firstly, you may donate the $5 to a charity of your choice!
I am happy to enter into reasoned debate and do not pretend to have the "perfect truth". However, you do need to look a bit further than the simplistic "CCGT gets no subsidies". Just one simple distortion is that, if EdF builds a nuclear power station, or CCGT or anything else, they will be able to offset the cost against their taxable income, as they will for maintenance etc. If I were to buy a micro CHP I would first have to earn enough to pay 40% tax and would not be able to recover a single penny of this against the investment.
My point about incremental risk stands and, whilst I concede that SOFC micro CHP has a way to go in reducing capital cost, the nuclear industry has hardly been devoid of cost overruns, massive subsidies, sovereign insurance underwriting...how much is Olkiluoto over budget so far? $1.5 billion? And wasn't that meant to be up and running by summer 2009? Now 2012? And that is after decades of research, development, billions of taxpayers support for the existing fleets. This was meant to be "the one we got right at last"!
And, finally, no I am not against large scale CHP where there is a high enough thermal load density (e.g. as in Copenhagen), but it is highly questionable where the thermal density is lower and the system incurs high thermal distribution losses (typically >10%). The whole point of micro CHP is that it avoids heat and power distribution losses as it produces both at the point of demand!
Oh, by the way, micro CHP installed in a home does not displace CCGT at 60%, it displaces whatever comes in from the grid, on average a lot worse than CCGT (average ~35% less 10% losses, so lower 30's!). In fact, the micro CHP unit I run is actually displacing coal-fired (Ratcliffe) as, unable to defy the laws of physics, my power comes from the nearest plant!
$5 to hati on its way
No your power doesn’t come from the nearest plant. It is a combination of all plants.
However our “marginal production” largely comes from coal so you would be displacing a coal station.
BTW coal stations exist that give 45% efficiency although I think most the ones in the UK are about 35%.
But the point is, you can build say a million BlueGens (some £20B + maintenance and replacement) or you can build a 2GW gas fired station running as baseload as the BlueGens would (some £1B). The gas station would be 60% efficient, the BleGen would be 85% overall efficient. The 1 million BlueGen units would save about 0.8GW of fossil fuels out of the UKs consumption of about 300GW or a decrease of only 0.3% of our total fossil fuel consumption for £20B plus costs and another £20B to replace it every 15 years.
We couldn’t afford it and it is near useless so I do hope the government doesn’t give mCHP a FIT
We could achieve more for free if 5% of households chose not to heat their homes in the winter
Sorry @cells, but electricity does what it does best...follows the path of least resistance, so I do get my power from Ratcliffe. However, that is a distraction from the main point which I agree with you on, namely, that any additional form of generation will have an impact on the overall mix and it is horrendously difficult to identify the exact impact of any one source, due to the way that marginal plant is used to balance the system.
I am not advocating the application of FiT to SOFC indefinitely; at best it should kick start the industry and rapidly bring the cost down. I also agree that long term subsidy (which has made the PV industry into subsidy junkies) is a futile and ultimately self-defeating exercise; experience has shown that subsidies such as FiT simply maintain prices of products in the knowledge that consumers will get the subsidy and continue to pay inflated prices as seen in Germany with PV. However, if the UK taxpayer supports SOFC micro CHP for say 3 (maximum 5) years, the volumes will be relatively low, although sufficient to get achieve some economies of scale and should provide confidence for investors.
The other point you seem to have overlooked is that micro CHP cost needs to take account of the alternative, that is a gas boiler. So when you come to replace your gas boiler, you can either install another gas boiler (costing £2-3000) or you can install a micro CHP system costing say £3500-5000 (once scale has been achieved). The "cost" to the consumer and to society is thus the additional cost of, in this case, £1500. The true value (without FIT!) of the output is between £4-600 per year, depending how much is consumed on site, so quite decent, unsubsidised paybacks should be achievable.
BTW, not sure where you get your numbers, but UK does not have anything like 300GW central plant capacity or demand.
300GW is the UKs total fossil fuel consumption not its electrical power generation. The UK has the ability to produce 60GWe but on average does about 43GWe of electricity. 8GWe from nuclear, about 20GWe from gas and 15GWe from coal (of course it varies throughout the day and year but those are rough yearly averages)
Yes electricity does follow the path of least resistance but it doesn’t mean your getting the power from the station most closest to you. Anyway it’s a moot point because in the UK coal provides most the marginal power so in effect no matter where you live when you turn on the lights a coal station is working that little bit harder.
The nukes act as base load and the gas fired stations ramp but are more base load like throughout the year than coal stations are.
If you want to reduce overall consumption you have a choice.
Build a 2GW gas fired station which will run for decades (replacing a coal station), repair itself from profit, maintain itself from profit, very reliable, can ramp if required and is 60% efficient all for the princely sum of £1B
Or the alternative. Build a million blue gen units. Costs money to service, need to replace stacks every 5 years, need to replace units every 15 years. Will operate mostly as base power so wont really ever ramp. Overall 85% efficient. All for the huge sum of £20B.
Your replacement figures are also optimistic. To replace a boiler costs more like £1.5k unless your replacing a very old boiler. Plus the £5k figure for a BlueGen is speculation. It may be reached or more likely it wont be reached. Even at £5k a unit it is probably more wise to build a single 2GW gas fired station for £1B than to build a million blue gens at £5B (plus a big sum to replace stacks ever 5 years and then another £5B in 15 years when it breaks down).
And all this for a tiny tiny tiny overall saving in fossil fuel consumption.
A million BlueGens would save (over a gas fired station) about 0.8GW of fossil fuels out of a total consumption in the UK of about 300GW. Even 10 million units would only save 8GW of fossil fuel out of 300GW or less than 3% saving at a cost of £100B plus!
I don’t know about you but I don’t fancy spending £100B to lower total consumption by 3% (and then another £100B in 15 years time when those units break down and you need to replace them).
You may believe that saving 8GW of fuel (not a unit I am comfortable with, TWh might be more appropriate as we are talking energy saving not capacity saving) is trivial, but then would you consider that the total UK nuclear capacity (15GWe) is also trivial?
You seem to be ignoring the key point on cost, which is that it is marginal, not total cost which matters. I think you will find installed gas boiler costs are as I say; go get a quote! It is true that the micro CHP costs are targets, but not quite speculation! However, if they cannot achieve those costs, then no-one will buy them!
8GW would be the saving if 10 million BlueGens were installed which is a huge number that won’t be achieved. (ie 70TWH per year out of total UK consumption of 2700TWH).
Yes the marginal cost is important. If your boiler is bust then you can get one for, lets use your figure, £3k.
Currently you would need to spend £20k to buy and install a BlueGen. The payback time is, never, not even considering that most people don’t have £20k savings in the first place.
Even at £5k they will not be very population (without a FIT) as that is £2k more to save very little money. Plus you need to spend money every 5 years on a stack and then spend another £5k to replace it in 15 years time. a conventional boiler can last 30 plus years (my one is >30 years old)
mCHP sadly has no future without a huge subsidy. And as you point out these subsidies often turn out to be a very bad idea.
As for our nuclear fleet. In the UK we produce about 8.5GW average and have 11GWe capacity.
If we didn’t have them we would need to have 8.5GW of gas or coal fired stations. To make 8.5GW of electricity from gas would take about 15GW of gas or about 22GW of coal. So the nukes in this country save 15GW of gas while 10 million BlueGens would save only 8GW of gas. The 10 million blue gens would require currently £200B in subsidies (an impossible sum of money to throw away).
Building 4GWe of nuclear (about the equivalent saving of 10 million blueGens) would cost in subsidies about £7B. ie 2p/kWh subsidy for 10 years.
So in a world with limited money, we could build 4GWe of nukes and give them a £7B bung. These nukes would last for 60-80 years. Or we could build 10 million blueGen mCHP saving the equivalent amount of gas at a cost of £200B and lasting only 15 years. Even if prices fall 75% and you take into account it replacing a broken boiler (ie £5k for a blueGen minus 3k for gas boiler = £2k a unit) it would cost £20B and last only 15 years.
And that before you even consider the cost of replacing 10 million fuel cell stacks every 5 years and replacing 10 million units every 15 years.
Overall the math for mCHP doesn’t add up. However distributed large scale heating or solar heating is closer to being feasible.
Post a Comment