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University Study Confirms Renewable Energy Isn’t Economically Feasible

No Dead Presidents were harmed during the creation of this study

By: NightTwister (Diary)  |  December 28th, 2010 at 12:05 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

From the diaries by Erick

Colorado State University recently completed a study on the economic feasibility of increasing the usage of renewable energy. The results of this study were published in the world-renowned science periodical, The Coloradoan. Another stimulus-funded study of the obvious? No, what we have here is simply a heavy dose of reality for academicians who aren’t willing to match their rhetoric with their pocketbook. Some of the quotes in this article are quite humorous.

Fort Collins campus President Tony Frank acknowledges that the 2008 plan to “rapidly” become carbon-neutral won’t be a reality for decades because the university can’t afford to make major changes right now.

It took them two years to figure this out? Business owners have been saying for much longer that forcing draconian cuts in emissions would harm their bottom line. Apparently it’s acceptable for businesses to absorb the increased costs, but not a university.

One major challenge for CSU is that its emissions have actually been going up in recent years. In fiscal year 2006, CSU emitted 217,070 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Those emissions rose 7 per-cent by 2009.

An expanding business generates more emissions. Who knew?

For us, you’d have to really jack up tuition and put it toward plans like that.

Really? You mean mandating a huge reduction in emissions would require a business to pass on those costs to its customers?

We could save a lot of energy by sending the students home, sending the researchers home. But that’s not what we do here.

Colorado State University learned more about basic economics here than they ever could have from a government-funded study. While I’d love to believe that this knowledge will be passed on to the greater academic community, I just can’t imagine that it will. The irony of their own comments are completely lost on them.

Night Twister

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  • http://www.buckforcolorado.com bjwilson83

    I didn’t see the Coloradoan article but most of that was in an email from Tony Frank to CSU students as well. CSU just likes to put on a good show so they can call themselves the “green” university. They put a solar panel on top of the engineering building but I don’t think it really makes much difference. And I think I a proposed CSU wind farm was just canceled. The one thing that does look promising is biofuel from algae, which is being developed by CSU’s Dr. Bryan Willson (not me, despite the similarity of the name), but of course that doesn’t apply much to campus energy use.

    • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister

      The Coloradoan article is linked in the diary. The article was about the cancellation of the wind farm.

    • http://seekingliberty.wordpress.com fmaidment

      …doesn’t make much difference. For solar panels like that to make any difference at all, they have to be, well, everywhere. On top of every building, generating hundreds of kilowatt hours each day in thousands of locations all over the country. It’s called “distributed generation”.

      It can augment the electrical grid and reduce overall energy costs, but such solar panels on roof-tops will never replace the energy needs of an entire university. Given time, investment in such technology can pay itself back, assuming the university doesn’t pay too much for them in the first place.

      And that should be the goal of such technology: Not reducing carbon emissions (that’s simply a side-effect “benefit”), but reducing the university’s overall cost of operation. Clearly, CSU has discovered that a large wind-farm is actually more costly than the existing electrical grid, and has wisely chosen to drop the plan.

  • http://theminorityreportblog.com Repair_Man_Jack

    It all depends upon who is practicing good business sense…

  • boxedquad

    Wind resource in Colorado have been known for 20+ years to be too great most of the year to ACTUALLY BE USABLE. It gets too high in wind speed and too variable to make it worth while. Only use has been to develop turbines and test in limited time trials. The government had a test site near Boulder and a local manufacture had a test site, for 2 blade turbine, with down wind props. I put up 10 of 120 units in a CA install, they all failed. Same for San Griognio (sp)
    To my knowledge that company is out of business or should be.

    Solar and wind have unique requirements and I doubt CO is viable, you just can not DEGREE THAT SOMETHING WILL WORK, its physics you know… Just go Nuclear and be done with it.

  • NeoKong

    If you know where to look.
    Why waste time tilting at windmills…?

    I think what he was really admitting was how friggin’ stupid windmills are when you compare the cost to output.
    There is a reason they call them farms. Because that is about all they can power. Maybe a sleepy village on the coast.

    If they were serious about cheap renewable energy they would be looking at Hyperion mini reactors which would light their campus up so bright you could see it from space.

    A tiny nuclear reactor developed in New Mexico could light up installations at the U.S. Department of Energy?s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., in as little as three years.

    Los Alamos-based Hyperion Power Generation Inc. signed a memorandum of understanding in September with the DOE?s Savannah River National Laboratory to establish the company?s first 25-megawatt mini-reactor as a demonstration pilot plant. The reactor will be located at the lab?s research and development energy park, said Hyperion President and CEO John ?Grizz? Deal.

    Three years is a lot sooner than 2020 and if you look at the cost over a ten year period it is not too bad.

    Once finished, the reactors will be about the size of a refrigerator, and will be shipped to sites for installation. The units, which will be made in factories and sealed before delivery, can supply enough electricity for about 20,000 homes for up to 10 years before needing to be refueled. They will sell for about $50 million, or $100 million if a full power plant with a turbine generator is included.

    I doubt their campus is larger than 20,000 homes. They could sell off the excess electricity and reduce their ten year cost.
    Compare that to what they were thinking of spending on the wind farm.
    These things are going to be the future and if the United States wasn’t so friggin’ faggy about nuclear power we wouldn’t have to wait so long for them.
    Other countries won’t.

    Hyperion expects to enter foreign markets before it gets NRC approval in the U.S. It?s pursuing partnerships with developers and suppliers for a factory in the U.K., where the regulatory process can be faster.

    ?We?re going to assemble as close to customers as possible,? Deal said. ?We see the U.K. as a great place to export to customers in Europe, the Mid-East and North Africa.?

    I encourage people to read the whole article.
    These things sound amazing.

    • doubledok

      me in the world of TSA efficiency, crazy comments from regionally elected individuals (. . .if we put too many people there, the island might capsize. . .), Islamification by radicals of US territory, etc. NeoKong, I appreciate your purely technical analysis of the efficiency of such devices. Regulating their weapons potential, especially as a series of “dirty” bombs, should make them woefully expensive. I am not even remotely secure that the big nuclear power plants are well -enough protected. This is especially true of spent fuel storage.

      Plus you have the inherent inefficiency of government run facilities. Looking at the bankruptcy status of current mandated pensions, incapacity of elected persons to prevent cost-overruns, future destabilization by debt, burgeoning welfare commitments, security failures like wiki-leaks. . . all technology needs to be analyzed for costs of perpetual security as well as efficiency.

      In short, global perspective should lead to moderation of enthusiasm.

  • http://pocketchangeproductions.net/ anotherindyfilmguy

    Cold fusion and all that technical stuff…

    • Xasteius
  • williamjameson

    By now you’d think people would listen to the mistakes made by others in CO but it should come a little faster. Oh well, they can hold their breath and reduce the menacing carbon output. Maybe they should read some studies that prove liberals are slow and shouldn’t be spending lots of money without guidance. They could read their entitlement bills then go study the results in the slums they created.

    Soros is a Nazi collaborator, his mom taught him to admire Germans so he got to know the Nazi’s and choose to stay behind after his family left for Hungary. Soros has been deemed an “economic war criminal” in Thailand and he’s behind 5 other currency schemes that wrecked economies including England. I wouldn’t want to be Soros but if I could be Obama for a day………I’d eat 1 more $100 steak, resign from the presidency and fly back to Chicago.

  • http://xmmlbchat.blogspot.com katesmith

    * 12/28/10, “In percentage terms, how much electricity do Britain?s 3,150 wind ?turbines supply to the ?National Grid?Is it: a) five per cent; b) ten per cent; or c) 20 per cent?…

    The correct answer is: none of the above. Yesterday afternoon, the figure was just 1.6 per cent, according to the official website of the wholesale electricity market. Over the past three weeks, with demand for power at record levels because of the freezing weather, there have been days when the contribution of our forests of wind turbines

    * has been precisely nothing.

    It gets better. As the temperature has plummeted, the turbines have had to be

    * heated to prevent them seizing up.

    * Consequently, they have been consuming more electricity than they generate.

    Even on a good day they rarely work above a quarter of their theoretical capacity. And

    * in high winds they have to be switched off altogether to prevent damage. ” 12/28/10, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” UK Daily Mail, Richard Littlejohn

  • gafisher

    “Colorado State University learned more about basic economics here …”

    Sadly unlikely — CSU would undoubtedly tell you that their problems with energy costs are all the result of insufficient public funding. If those greedy businesses would simply open their magic money drawers (everyone knows Mean Old Corporations wouldn’t really /have/ to pass costs on to customers) and contribute more taxes, why, we’d all be living in an Algoric Paradise watching magic windmills lazily churning out all the power we’d ever need.

    The irony of the school’s own comments is doubly so, because they reveal cluelessness even about their own cluelessness.

  • astrolite

    Do you really think those professors are worth $200,000 a year? And of course the administration is overpaid too! It’s just a haven for old communist liberals!

  • http://www.helpawhiteguy.com livefreenh

    I was going to say “then maybe they should send everyone home until they figure out how to solve the problem, like they recommend for businesses.” Then I see at the end of the article that they figured that out themselves. Must be sort of like looking in the back of the teachers’ edition of the textbook, where they normally find all the answers.

    What these teachers don’t seem to understand is that they are teaching young people about how business works so that they will be successful in human society. If they want to know how that can be done they could ask a successful businessman, I guess.

  • indyrational

    The article linked was the first of several published, apparently rushed on deadline. Follow-ups with considerably more detail are here and here.

    I was surprised to find that the article reported that putting a solar farm on the CSU ranch would have generated sufficient power for the university to sell the excess on the open market. However, the project was determined to be economically infeasible due to the cost of bringing it from the ranch to the main campus.about 30 miles away.

    What does that say about the economic imperative to make it easier to overcome the regulatory barriers to power distribution?

    • indyrational

      In the second paragraph I should have said “wind” rather than “solar”. Sorry about that, my multitasking skills apparently need a minor tune-up :-)

      The reporting does cover a solar facility being completed on an satellite campus, but that generates only 1/3 of the power requirements for that campus. In contrast, the wind farm was reported to have significantly greater capacity, from 65 to 200 megawatts.

      • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister

        Xcel Energy is trying to increase the size of a solar “farm” in the San Luis Valley, but the there are landowner issues, and the cost of running the transmission line that has delayed the project. This is what happens when the voters vote for mandatory minimums on renewable energy.

        Costs are allowed to be passed onto the consumers immediately, whether the project is successful or not. Xcel customers are expecting a minimum 30% increase in costs, I would expect it to be 50% or more. Maybe when people can no longer heat their homes or turn on their lights they’ll realize the foolishness of this and rescind the mandate.

  • tomtito

    Hidden subsidies have skewed our decisions on energy use and promoted waste. The more we allow the market to work the better.

    The cost of oil would be much higher if our taxes didn’t pay to secure the Persian Gulf and defend us from Saudi funded terror. Other costs include our national trade deficit and pollution. CSU may produce value in energy independence for America but not enough value to pay for this project.

    My business cut 10% of our electric bill with little cost or effort and then ran out of money to invest in further gains. Like CSU we would like lower electric bills but we are not in the business to invest in energy production.

    A university is different than a business. Business depends on university research to advance technology so that we can commercialize it and compete with the rest of the world. A comment from England said of their wind farms, “Even on a good day they rarely work above a quarter of their theoretical capacity.” If this is true it points to the value of more research and the potential to make wind power profitable.

    Ideally utilities will offer us investments in new renewable power generation and pay us back with profits from the sale of electricity. Wind and solar won’t be competitive until greater use produces economies of scale and pays for R&D. Its a tough call on which technology to scale up. That’s where risk comes in.