Category Archives: climate change

The LDP race and the clean energy transition in Japan

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The outcome of the leadership race of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan will determine the next prime minister. Failing an electoral defeat of the LDP, which has been in power for most of post-war history, this will also determine the direction of Japan’s future energy policy. Japan is currently trailing far behind most of Europe, the US and China in replacing fossil fuels for electricity production.

According to the Japan Times they face these two choices:

The first is to continue with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s plan to increase the use of nuclear power alongside that of renewable energy.

The second is to reduce nuclear power’s share while moving more toward renewable and ammonia- and hydrogen-generated electricity.

This is a uniquely Japanese framing of the options because if you look around, no other major country is even talking about ammonia-generated electricity. Hydrogen plays mostly a peripheral role in their discussions. That is because these two substances are not really energy sources but energy carriers (just like a charged battery). To produce them you have to use some other form of energy, such as by steam-reforming fossil gas or coal or by hydrolysis of water using wind or solar electricity.

If you use fossil fuel to make hydrogen (or ammonia, its more easily shippable cousin), that does not solve the problem you are trying to address in the first place, CO2 emissions from fossil fuel. If you use renewable electricity to make hydrogen, ship it for thousands of km and then turn it back into electricity, a large part of the green energy will be lost in conversion inefficiencies.

Where do the candidates stand on the issues? Japan Times explains:

Of the nine LDP leadership candidates, three — Takayuki Kobayashi, Taro Kono, and Shigeru Ishiba — have been particularly vocal with their views.

Kobayashi, a former economic security minister, is strongly advocating a new strategy that emphasizes nuclear’s role in meeting future demand.

“The current energy plan is too biased toward renewable energy. We should work toward restarting, replacing and building new nuclear power plants that have been confirmed as safe,” he said during a Sept. 14 debate at the Japan National Press Club.

Former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba, however, favors a future that brings the share of nuclear power close to zero. But he also has a preference for two forms of renewable energy in particular because they are ideal for Japan given its geography.

“Japan has the world’s third-largest potential for geothermal energy. We should also maximize the potential for small-scale hydroelectric power generation,” Ishiba, a former LDP secretary-general, said during the same Sept. 14 debate.

They do not explain where Kono stands, but it was previously reported that he had softened his anti-nuclear stance and now wants to restart more of the reactors shuttered after the Fukushima disaster.

None of the above candidates seem to really have a realistic solution.

Restarting nuclear power stations that have been upgraded to higher safety standards post-Fukushima, may be the low hanging fruit of carbon-free energy generation, but we are only talking about at best adding maybe 10% of total power demand through restarted reactors.

Construction of new reactors could take over a decade, even if sites without seismic risks and with local support could be found quickly, which is far from certain. Recent reactor projects in Europe and the US have been a sobering experience. Olkiluoto 3 in Finland took 17 years from start of construction to electricity production, with costs ballooning from 3 billion € to 11 billion €. Construction of Flamanville 3 in France started in 2007. It went into commercial operation this month, 17 years later. Cost estimates increased from an initial 3.3 billion € to 13.2 billion € two years ago. Hinkley Point C construction started in 2017, with an operational date estimate of 2029-2031 and cost overruns almost killed the project.

If we want to cut out a significant amount of CO2 by 2030, as would be required to have any chance of meeting the Paris climate goals to avoid the worst of the climate disaster, new nuclear reactors aren’t going to cut it, simply because they’re unlikely to have much of an impact before about 2040 and even then they will be very expensive.

So what should the LDP candidates propose, what should Japan do? Japan has a long coastline that can be harnessed for onshore and offshore wind. Solar is one of the cheapest forms of electricity generation available now, cheaper than coal, if the variability of output can be addressed through storage or over-building of supply. The costs of wind and solar power have been falling dramatically for several decades. The cost of battery storage has decreased significantly over the past decade. It’s not rocket science and other countries have already been doing it at a large scale.

Germany, with a much shorter coast line and a more northerly latitude (the latitude of Tokyo is comparable to Gibraltar and Germany’s southern border is further north than Hokkaido) produces the majority of its electricity from renewables, as does Denmark.

Ishiba is not wrong in encouraging geothermal power, which can steadily produce electricity 24 hours a day all year round, or small scale hydro, but it’s neither the cheapest nor the easiest to build energy source.

In terms of cost effectiveness, solar and wind are really without competition. What holds back their use in Japan is a grid that is under-dimensioned for moving large amounts of power around the country because it was designed for a system where generation and consumption are relatively close by, under control of the same regional power company.

This will be different with renewables, where generation could take place more than 1000 km away from consumption and output could shift around the country depending on seasons and weather conditions. Thus what Japan needs is many more high voltage direct current (HVDC) lines that can move a large amount of power over long distances, something that China has invested in heavily in the last two decades. On top of that the permit process has to be streamlined.

All this talk about hydrogen and ammonia has been a huge distraction, perhaps by design. Currently these energy carriers are connected to existing fossil fuel companies. Importing hydrogen (or ammonia made from hydrogen), though quite expensive, would benefit shipbuilding giants and trading companies now handling coal, oil and LNG imports. It’s not really about stopping the climate disaster but about keeping some very large corporates in business.

When will Japan get a prime minister who understands these issues and is bold enough to address them?

Zero-carbon heating and concrete production

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Today the New York Times discusses a project in New York City in which carbon dioxide is captured from a gas boiler used for heating a building, then liquified and shipped to a concrete factory where it is injected into a concrete mix to bind it into concrete blocks as solid calcium carbonate instead of going into the atmosphere.

“It creates this circular economy,” said Jeff Hansen, vice president of architectural sales and marketing at Glenwood Mason. “We’re taking carbon dioxide from a building in Manhattan, turning it into a block in Brooklyn and then sending that block out to build more structures in the city.”

While the technology described has some use, it doesn’t scale for the purposes described.

First of all, there is no place for fossil gas boilers for heating and hot water in a zero carbon economy. For one, carbon capture does not capture 100 percent of the carbon dioxide in the flue gas. Typically, only about as much as 70-80 percent are separated out while the remainder still escapes into the atmosphere. Carbon capture is costly and consumes significant amounts of energy. It works best at large sites such as cement kilns where the retrieved CO2 can be processed in a central location rather than at millions of dispersed locations where it would have to be fed into a pipeline network or transported by vehicle to take it to a central processing site.

As many of the reader comments below the article point out, electric heat pumps run on green electricity are the most viable way of heating buildings without carbon emissions. Heat pumps are like running a refrigerator in reverse, making heat flow from the cold side to the warm side. It’s mature technology, already manufactured at scale and it goes hand in hand with the decarbonization of the power sector. Regardless of how green or brown your grid is now, you can start installing heat pumps today and gradually switch the power generation from fossil fuels to wind and solar. It’s actually very efficient: 100 kWh used in a heat pump will draw about 300 kWh of heat from the environment to heat the building.

Heat pumps can be combined with geothermal, for example to draw heat from the cool ground instead of using icy winter air as a heat source (the smaller the temperature difference between the cold side and the warm side, the more efficient the process). The ground several meters below the surface stays close to the average annual temperature at that particular location, which for example in New York City is about 13 deg C. One benefit is that this also works in reverse: The same equipment can be used for energy efficient cooling in the summer. It takes a lot less electricity to cool your home using 15 deg C ground instead of 35 deg C outdoor air as a heat sink.

Many cities are exploring deep geothermal wells for district heating. Away from volcanic sites or tectonic plate boundaries the ground temperature rises by about 25 deg C for every 1000 m of additional depth so by drilling wells deep enough and pushing water through them, hot water can be brought to the surface. This works best where there are deep aquifers that can be tapped.

Back to the carbon footprint of concrete: The reason that concrete slurry can absorb and bind large amounts of CO2 when it hardens is that it is highly alkaline because of its high calcium oxide contents. When cement is produced in a cement kiln, limestone (calcium carbonate) is heated with other minerals to very high temperatures and it releases CO2, turning into alkaline calcium oxide. Fixating CO2 during the curing of concrete only reverses this process. This begs the question: Why do they want to truck CO2 from buildings all over the city instead of reusing the CO2 released when the cement for the concrete is made in the first place? That would be truly a “circular economy”. However, it would also highlight the carbon footprint of cement production. I can see why someone in the cement or concrete business would rather prefer you to think about the CO2 output of some other part of the economy for which they supposedly can then provide a solution when actually their industry is part of the problem. Worldwide cement production released 1.7 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2021.

There are some relatively easy to decarbonize sectors of the economy. For example, trains can run on green electricity. EVs are only a little more difficult, requiring battery production at scale and a dense charging network. Next in line, steelmaking and fertilizer production can use green hydrogen, made from water and green electricity. Some of the most difficult to tackle carbon sources are cement production, airplanes and ocean shipping.

Cement is difficult because CO2 is released not only from fuel burnt as a heat source (which could be replaced by electricity) but also chemically from the carbonate minerals. Airplanes and ships are difficult because of the vast distances covered that make batteries non-viable. There are some solutions for planes and ships, such as “e-fuels” (e.g. ammonia or methanol made with green electricity) but these will be expensive. For cement we will need to capture and store CO2 underground, such as in depleted gas wells. But first of all, we will need to price CO2 releases so that price mechanisms in the market lead to an efficient reduction in the consumption of cement and of ocean shipping and air travel. The smaller the volume left in these areas, the easier it can be tackled technologically. It won’t be easy.

While we develop the technology to take care of the final, most difficult 10 percent of CO2 output, let us first take care of the easiest 50 percent, then the next 40 percent. For power generation this means wind farms onshore and off-shore, utility scale photovoltaic, long distance power interconnect between regional grids via HVDC lines, battery storage for daily power fluctuations, etc. For power usage it means electrical vehicles, domestic heat pumps, etc. All of these we can already do now. We need to use technology that already works and deploy it at scale. Recycling CO2 in concrete plants will not clean up domestic heating and it can at best ameliorate but solve the CO2 problem of cement.

We must not let ourselves be distracted by greenwashing scenarios designed to protect old industries and their vested interests.

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Anti-battery propaganda on Facebook

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Perhaps one of your Facebook friends posted this piece of propaganda on their feed:

This machine is required to move 500 tons of earth/ore which will be refined into ONE lithium car battery.
It burns 900-1000 gallons of fuel in a 12 hour shift.
Lithium is refined from Ore using sulfuric acid.
A battery in an electric car, lets say an average Tesla, is made of …
25 pounds of lithium,
60 pounds of nickel,
44 pounds of manganese,
30 pounds of cobalt,
200 pounds of copper,
400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic etc.
That averages 750-1,000 pounds of minerals, that had to be mined and processed into a battery that merely stores electricity …
Electricity which is generated by oil, gas, coal, nuclear, or water (and a tiny fraction of wind and solar)….
That is the truth, about the lie, of “green” energy.
There’s nothing green about the green new deal… Just a lot of pockets being lined and our environment being destroyed by greed, wilful ignorance and selfishness.

Fossil fuel companies have a lot to lose when the energy transition to renewable carbon-free energy sources takes place. Their whole business model of extracting, refining and selling fossil fuels will collapse. The longer they can delay that transition, they more money they can still make. That’s why they have an interest in spreading propaganda like that post above.

No verifiable source is given for any of the numbers in that text but here are some facts: Typical lithium ores (spodumene) in Australia contain about 1-2% Li, meaning for the 12 kg of Li in a car battery listed above you’d have to mine 0.6 to 1.2 t of ore, a far cry from the 500 t claimed. Since they gave no source it’s hard to know how they came up with such distorted figures.

Another major source of lithium are brines which don’t involve any hard rock mining at all though the quantities available are more limited and there are some issues with water consumption. Some companies are working on extracting lithium from geothermal brines as a side product of geothermal energy production.

The majority of Li-ion batteries produced in China these days are based on Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry, which unlike earlier Li-ion chemistries (NMC, NCA) do not require either cobalt or nickel (the C and N respectively in those acronyms).

In April 2022, LFP batteries in electric vehicles sold in China already outsold other types of Li-ion car batteries by about 2:1 (8.9 GWh vs 4.4 GWh). Tesla’s entry level models made at the Shanghai Gigafactory have switched to LFP too.

By the time most of us will switch to battery electric vehicles, i.e. within the next decade, LFP is likely to be largely superseded by sodium ion batteries. This new chemistry is technically very similar to Li-ion batteries. German battery expert Frank Wunderlich-Pfeiffer (@FrankWunderli13) estimates that by 2026-2028 sodium ion production will exceed lithium ion on a GWh basis. Why is sodium ion cheaper? Unlike lithium which only occurs in special ores that require processing, sodium makes up 39 percent of common table salt. A cubic meter of sea water contains about 14 kg of it. So any time someone says we don’t have enough lithium needed for replacing internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, they are not really looking at where the industry is heading over the next decade.

Talking about the CO2 output from electricity production is a distraction: Even in places like Poland or West Virginia where much of the power is produced from dirty coal, an electric car is responsible for less CO2 output than an ICE car because power plants are far more efficient than car engines. But the main point to remember is that the mix of energy sources will dramatically shift over the next 15-20 years, the lifetime of a car produced today. This will make BEVs cleaner every year. 20 years from now a gasoline powered car will still depend 100% on gasoline and emit as much CO2 in 2042 as it did in 2022. Meanwhile a BEV will run on a zero-carbon mix of solar, wind, nuclear and geothermal once the grid has been fully upgraded.

For those promoting hydrogen as an alternative to BEVs: That’s not going to happen. Hydrogen is not a viable alternative to BEVs, except maybe for trucks, ships and airplanes. There are several reasons for that. For a start, fuel cells are much more expensive than batteries. Battery prices have been falling faster than fuel cell prices which depend on platinum, a rare metal much more costly than any of the metals mentioned when people talk about batteries. Not coincidentally it is also the most widely used material for electrodes of electrolysers. Its second largest producer is Russia, a country now widely sanctioned because of a war that its government started.

BEVs have greatly benefited from demand for batteries by phones, laptops and other mobile devices that have paid for R&D, scaling up production and thus bringing down prices. In fact the first Tesla was based on the same battery cell type that laptops were using at the time. There has been no such synergy for hydrogen. It lacks economy of scale for fuel cells and its distribution system lags far behind while BEVs harness the existing electric grid.

The biggest problem with hydrogen however is the inefficiency of green hydrogen production: It takes roughly three times more electricity for making and consuming hydrogen than to charge and discharge a battery for a given driving distance. That’s because there are more energy losses turning electricity into hydrogen and back into electricity than there are in charging and discharging a battery. Because of this we’d have to build three times more wind turbines and solar panels to replace the same number of ICE cars with hydrogen cars than we would with BEVs. And it’s even worse with ICEs running on hydrogen, a concept promoted by some car manufacturers. On top of that ICEs burning hydrogen have higher smog-forming NOX emissions than ICE cars running on fossil fuels. BEVs don’t release any NOX. If you want clean air, BEVs beat hydrogen hands down.

In a world facing disastrous climate change that urgently needs to get down to zero carbon emissions, ICE cars have no future. Sticking with ICE cars isn’t an option. The choice is not between ICE cars or BEVs, it’s between either BEVs or walking, riding a bicycle or using public transport.

Japan’s new energy minister: More of the same

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In his initial press conference, newly appointed Japanese energy minister Nishimura Yasutoshi called for restarting nuclear power stations to secure stable energy supplies. He announced there would be no policy change regarding Japan’s involvement with the Sakhalin-2 LNG project in the Russian Far East.

This choice of main topics of the news conference is typical for the public discourse here about energy policy and security:
1) Talk about whether to restart nuclear power or not
2) Talk about securing fossil fuel imports
3) Do not mention investment into offshore wind
4) Do not mention investment into grid expansion

Topics 3) and 4) are critical for weaning Japan off fossil fuel. 1) is a mere stop gap solution at best. Many nuclear stations shuttered after 2011 are too old for operators to make the necessary investments to bring them up to current safety codes. It wouldn’t be economically viable. The reactors whose restart is being promoted are equivalent to about 1/3 of the pre-2011 nuclear generation or roughly 10 percent of the pre-2011 annual electricity generation. While not trivial, it’s not a game changer. For that, Japan would have to embark on construction of new stations, which would be likely to run into political resistance at the local and national level.

Construction of new nuclear power stations will run into cost issues (see Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, Flamanville/France, Plant Vogtle/Georgia USA, Hinkley Point C/UK, etc). Many of these high profile nuclear projects by different companies in various countries have been billions of euros, dollars and pound over budget and years behind schedule. This seems to be a common theme. To build nuclear power stations takes a decade or more, which means capital is tied up for years and years before the first power flows ever into the grid. For example, construction at Flamanville started in 2007 while fuel loading will not take place before 2023, i.e. 16 years later. Or take Olkiluoto 3, where construction started in 2005 and as of 2022 i.e. 17 years later it still is not operating.

By contrast, large solar or wind projects tend be completed in 2-3 years at most.

As a country with a long coast line Japan has huge wind power potential which will complement its solar potential but it is way behind the curve compared to China, European nations or the US. Almost all renewable energy other than hydro power in Japan has been photovoltaic.

To maximize the potential of renewal energy which will often be found far from population centers, Japan needs to build long distance High Voltage DC (HVDC) lines so power from Kyushu and Hokkaido can supply Tokyo and Osaka.

Offshore wind and HVDC are near absent in the public energy debate in Japan. The Japanese economy suffered “lost decades” after the burst of its 1980s’ investment bubble. Unless it invests in offshore wind (and also geothermal power) and a HVDC grid backbone, it will suffer another lost decade in a delayed energy transition.

So why is the government not acting? The interests of Japanese utility companies on one side and of Japanese power consumers and of the planet as a whole on the other are not aligned and politicians of the ruling LDP-Komeito coalition are picking the wrong side.

Japanese utility companies own existing assets such as old nuclear power stations and thermal power stations. The longer they can utilize these assets to generate and sell power, the more money they will make. If they were forced to buy zero-carbon wind power from third-party offshore wind farms in Hokkaido or Kyushu they won’t be able to sell as much power from their own coal-burning or nuclear power stations in the Kanto or Kansai. Utility companies are still building new coal-burning power plants today. They don’t want to see these plants shuttered but to contribute to their profits for the next 20 years and more.

If we let them get away with it, it would be disastrous for trying to minimize the scale of the climate change threat. Climate change will devastate Japan through hurricanes, flooding, landslides and rising sea levels. The political leaders of Japan need to prioritize the interests of the power consumers and of everyone threatened by climate change. Currently they are acting as lobbyists for the utility companies.

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Tokyo in a power crunch

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On March 22, 2022 the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (Tepco) warned electricity consumers in east Japan about the risk of rolling blackouts from a tight supply situation. The recent M7.3 quake near Sendai had knocked several of Tepco’s thermal power plants offline, which left the company in a difficult situation when a cold spell with snow flakes hit the region of the capital. Demand at times exceeded generation capacity and only the availability of pumped hydro storage saved the day before measures to curb demand such as turning down heating and switching off lights averted an outage.

No doubt this experience will increase pressure to restart more nuclear power stations that have been shuttered since the tsunami and nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima in March 2011. Before the nuclear disaster about 30% of Japanese generating capacity were nuclear; now only about 10% comes from restarted nuclear reactors. The current high prices of natural gas will further enhance the attraction of nuclear, at least in the eyes of anyone whose financial interests are tied to the balance sheet of the utility companies, such as their individual and institutional shareholders.

However, that is not the whole story.

While eastern Japan was in a power crunch, western Japan has ample spare capacity, as did Hokkaido. Why could this power not be used in Tokyo? You would have thought Japan would have learnt its lesson from the 3/11 disaster in 2011 and addressed it in the decade since then, but you would be wrong: Japanese electricity markets are still split between a handful of regional near-monopolies with minimal interchange capacities between them. For example, the Hokkaido grid has a generating capacity of 7.5 GW but only 0.6 GW of interchange capacity with Honshu (8% of the total). Tepco supplies up to 47 GW to customers in its area but can only exchange up to 1.2 GW with major utilities in the west of Japan. This leaves little margin when earthquakes or weather events with a regional impact hit supplies.

By contrast, China has built huge high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines between the industrialized coastal cities on one side and hydroelectric power stations near the Tibetan plateau and solar and wind farms in the arid north on the other. Many of these lines are longer than the distance from Tokyo to Hokkaido, let alone Tokyo to Kansai. The Chinese government understands that if it wants to wean itself from the dependence of dirty coal or imported oil and gas then it will need to vastly increase power transfer capacity from the interior of the country where renewables are available to the densely populated urban areas near the coast lines.

Japan is actually in a similar situation. The elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about is offshore wind. While European countries and the US are building up tens of Gigawatts of offshore wind power capacity, Japan has very little installed capacity, particularly offshore. The entire conversations seems to be about nuclear vs. solar vs. gas vs. coal, leaving out one of the most promising renewable energy sources available to Japan. So far the regulatory hurdles for erecting and connecting wind turbines in Japan have been high and that has left wind as an also ran compared to much more widely deployed solar. However, solar does not provide power at all hours. Wind would complement it.

Much of the European wind power capacity is installed offshore where wind speeds tend to be high and more consistent than onshore. This is where the largest and most economical turbine models tend to be used. By contrast, almost 99% of Japan’s wind power capacity is still onshore. A cumulative total of only 51.6 MW of offshore wind capacity was installed at the end of 2021 while total installed wind power capacity was 4.6 GW. Meanwhile the UK had 24.7 GW of wind power capacity, Spain 27.1 GW and Germany 62.2 GW. China is in a league of its own with 282 GW, more than all of Europe combined. Japan’s installed wind power base is less than that of small European countries such as Belgium (4.7 GW) that have relatively short coast lines and tiny EEZs: Japan’s EEZ of 4,479,388 km2 is over 1000 times larger than Belgium’s at 3,447 km2!

Japan is really only starting to build up offshore wind capacity, with projects off the coasts of Akita, Chiba and Nagasaki getting under way in the last two years. By 2030 its goal is for 10 GW of offshore capacity either installed or under construction which is still tiny compared to the already installed base of Germany, Spain or the UK.

Unlike fossil fuel or nuclear power stations, wind turbines are not location independent. They will be installed where wind conditions are favourable, where the sea is not too deep and connections to the coastal grid are cost-effective. To make the most of the wind conditions, the grid will need to be greatly expanded to allow large amounts of power to be transferred from regions with plenty of wind to regions with many consumers. This will be quite different from the current model where utility companies try to generate all the power they need within their own region, which is why there is only limited interchange capacity to help out if one company loses a large part of its generating capacity as happened in the recent quake or after 3/11.

Japan needs to start building high capacity long distance HVDC power lines like China has in order to enable a transition to zero carbon electricity. The fragmented power markets dominated by local utility companies are an obstacle to this transition as the interests of the regional companies seeking profits from existing investments in their area are not aligned with the interests of the consumers who want reliable green energy regardless of where it comes from.

Japan quickly needs to remove regulatory obstacles to expanding wind power and then invest to build a HVDC backbone to connect renewable power generation with consumers.

Hokkaido wind power for Japanese energy

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Nikkei reports (“Japan pushes for undersea cables to solve wind power puzzle”, 2022-01-02) that the government is allocating 5 billion yen (about US$43 million) in its supplementary budged for a feasibility study for a 4 GW high voltage direct current (HVDC) link between the power grids of the northern island of Hokkaido and the main island of Honshu, where most of Japan’s population lives. This would be by far the biggest HVDC link ever built in Japan. The Japanese government wants to generate 45 GW of power from offshore wind in 2040, up to about a third of which (14.65 GW) is to be produced in Hokkaido. The development plan lists several promising offshore areas along the southwest coast of Hokkaido.

For this power to be available to consumers outside the northern prefecture, it would need to be exported via a HVDC link. This is the preferred technology for shifting large amounts of power over long distances, especially between AC grids not synchronized with each others or operating on different frequencies. Since 2019 there have been two 300 MW HVDC links between the two islands. Their combined capacity is to be doubled to 1.2 GW by 2028.

Japan has relatively little capacity for transferring power between its regional grids. This is because its grids used to be operated by regional monopolies that had little incentive to ever import or export power. This lack of interconnect capacity became a major problem following the power shortage after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami when less affected areas could not help out the most affected region. There is a conflict of interest between the local utility companies and the country as a whole. Tepco owns a lot of nuclear power stations, expensive infrastructure with huge sunk costs. It would rather generate power from these plants than pay another supplier from outside its area for renewable energy. However, many of these power stations have yet to be restarted since their shutdown following the Fukushima meltdowns. By restricting how much power can be imported from other grids, Tepco can put pressure on regulators to allow it to restart more reactors to ensure a stable supply of power. On the other hand, expanding interconnect capacity would ease the pressure. Which side will the Japanese government take?

A related issue is the variable output of renewable power sources. Long distance transmission will make it easier to compensate for local weather patterns by shifting power between different regions, which allows a larger share of renewable energy to become part of the mix without having to resort to either energy storage or peaker plants (e.g. gas turbines to cover peak loads). That again means Tepco loses leverage to maintain coal and other fossil fuel powered generating capacity as insurance against shortfalls of renewable energy.

China, one of Japan’s main economic rivals in the world, has pursued a completely different course. Over the past decade it has aggressively expanded long distance HVDC links to stabilize its grid. Japan operates a single HVDC link of at least 1 GW, a 1.4 GW link between Honshu and Shikoku that started operating in 2000. All other links are only in the several 100 MW range and most of those are not long distance lines but back-to-back local interconnects, for example between the 50 Hz grid of eastern Japan and the 60 Hz grid of western Japan near Nagoya. By contrast, China has built over 20 HVDC links over 1 GW, mostly with a capacity of 3 GW or more. Many of the biggest projects cover distances of 1,000 to 2,000 km. This allows China to supply it coastal megacities with hydroelectric power from its southeastern mountains or from other power sources from its arid central parts. China is the world leader in wind power. Its windiest parts are along its border to Mongolia and on the Tibetan plateau. Large scale HVDC is key to China’s energy policy for the 21st century.

An alternative to shifting power long distance is to use it to locally generate hydrogen from water (“green hydrogen”) and feed it into pipelines or use it to make ammonia. This makes some sense for applications that already use hydrogen, such as the fertilizer industry or for carbon free alternatives to existing technology, such as direct reduction of iron ore for steel making without using coking coal. However, it makes little sense to use green hydrogen for power generation: if you convert electricity to hydrogen which you then use to generate electricity, more than 70 percent of energy is lost in the process while less than 30 percent remains. By contrast, batteries are 90 percent efficient. Therefore, if excess wind or solar power is used to produce hydrogen, that resource should best be used by industries that directly consume hydrogen, until all fossil fuel currently used for such purposes has been replaced.

If Hokkaido had a surplus of hydrogen from wind power, it would make more sense to have it consumed by steel works and fertilizer plants built in the prefecture rather than sending it through a pipeline to Honshu.

Although green hydrogen or ammonia can be used as fuel in thermal power plants in place of coal or LNG, it would be a terribly wasteful use. Because of the huge conversion losses, we would need three times more wind or solar power to end up with the same amount of usable electricity than if we used grid-scale battery storage to absorb any surplus and make it available when needed. This advantage makes grid-scale battery storage a strategic technology.

Most existing Li-ion batteries depend on relatively scarce resources such as cobalt, nickel and lithium. Lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries only require lithium and widely available materials, while sodium ion batteries use only readily available raw materials. Japan will need to invest in high capacity long distance HVDC links as well as in battery storage to speed up its transition to a carbon neutral economy.

Toyota Hydrogen Combustion Engine Cars

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Since 2014 Toyota has sold a little over 10,000 Toyota Mirai, a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (FCV). The starting price of this 4 seat sedan model in Japan is about 7.1 million yen (currently about US$63,000) which is more than 50% more expensive than a battery electric Tesla Model 3 which seats 5 adults. And it seems unlikely that Toyota can make a profit on a car being made in such small numbers as the Mirai, unlike Tesla does with the cars it makes in large numbers in its plants on three continents.

Tesla sold about half a million battery electric vehicles (BEVs) last year and looks set to sell somewhere between 900,000 and 1 million cars in 2021. This means Tesla will have sold twice as many BEVs every week in 2021 than the total number of FCVs Toyota has sold since 2014. The sales gap between BEVs and FCVs is getting bigger and bigger.

Recognizing that the high cost of fuel cells makes it difficult to compete, Toyota has announced that it sees a market for cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) that burn hydrogen instead of gasoline. They should be cheaper to make than fuel cell cars and will not produce any CO2 if hydrogen is made from non-fossil energy sources.

It’s not a novel idea though. BMW tried it in its BMW Hydrogen 7 technology carrier based on its 7-series back in 2005-2007. It never went anywhere. Besides the absence of a fuel supply network, there were also issues with emissions. Hydrogen flames burn extremely hot, which means you end up with a lot of smog-forming NOX emissions — worse than diesels.

In terms of efficiency, hydrogen ICEs are worse than FCVs which are much worse than BEVs. While BMW used cryogenic tanks with liquefied hydrogen at -253 °C, Toyota most likely will use high pressure tanks like in its Mirai for its hydrogen ICEs. They hold hydrogen gas at pressures of up to 700 bar. Both liquefaction and compression require huge amounts of electricity that can not be used for propulsion but is effectively wasted. An FCV consumes three times more electricity for electrolysis to make the hydrogen fuel it consumes than a BEV uses to charge a battery to drive the same distance. A hydrogen combustion engine is even less efficient. Where will this hydrogen come from? We don’t currently have a surplus of solar panels or wind turbines to produce this electricity. That means a hydrogen economy will need significantly larger investments in renewable energy than with battery vehicles. Hydrogen for cars makes no economic sense whatsoever.

It makes even less sense for hydrogen ICEs than for hydrogen FCVs. Fundamentally, it’s no more than an excuse for not giving up on building internal combustion engines, pretending that nothing has changed even in a world that is facing climate change that we need to address as soon as possible.

I am afraid Toyota will not make a turn-around and face the reality that the industry is switching to BEVs within the shortest time possible until it replaces Toyoda Akio, its current company president. Mr Toyoda is the grandson of the founder of the company and a keen race car driver. He lacks the vision that Toyota will need in the transition to a carbon free future. Mr Toyoda needs to retire, along with the dead-end technologies he is committed to.

METI and Japan’s exit from the Carbon Economy

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On the eve of COP26, the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, the Japanese government took out a full page ad in the Japan times to talk about “beyond zero”, a series of events and initiatives related to Climate Change. It struck me that none of them were specifically about renewable energy, the essential ingredient for a carbon-free economy.

The title of “Tokyo Beyond Zero Week” already had me confused: It reminded me of the Toyota bZ4x, a battery electric SUV that is the first mainstream battery electric vehicle for the Japanese market that Toyota has announced. Toyota has become notorious for bucking the Battery electric trend by plugging hybrids and hydrogen fuel cells, despite hydrogen fuel from renewable sources being 3 times less energy-efficient than battery electric vehicles. The bZ4x is too little, too late when Toyota is telling potential customers that they should really be buying hybrids like the Prius or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles like the Mirai.

METI, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has been sponsoring vehicles based on hydrogen fuel cells using hydrogen made from Australian brown coal (lignite), with the resulting CO2 emissions sequestered using “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) and the hydrogen shipped to Japan in cryogenic tank ships developed by Japanese shipyards with METI funding. Essentially it’s a massive pork barrel project, designed to pay industry players to go along with a Rube Goldberg project that will not be economically viable. It’s a way of keeping ecological laggards such as Toyota and the huge Japanese shipbuilders and trading companies relevant. Some of the initiatives sponsored by METI are:

  • LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) Producer-Consumer conference
  • International Conference on Carbon Recycling
  • International Conference on Fuel Ammonia

There is no place for LNG in a zero carbon economy. “Carbon Recycling” aka CCS is a fig leaf to keep burning fossil fuels. Ammonia may be a necessary fuels for ships and airplanes, but if it’s made from coal it won’t be green energy.

Why is the METI ad not talking about offshore wind and geothermal power, two of the most important energy sources for green baseload electricity? It’s because they are primarily concerned about creating and maintaining business opportunities for Toyota, trading companies making profits from fossil fuel imports and other companies wedded to the fossil fuel industry and not about how to get Japan ready for the zero carbon age.

I find this very sad. As a country with limited fossil fuel resources, Japan could become a prime player in the post-carbon era, developing new technologies to help other countries move beyond fossil energy sources. Japan has huge opportunities in offshore wind, onshore wind, solar and geothermal but its government has been largely turning a blind eye to them because those energy sources can not be controlled by its big trading companies. Likewise, its biggest automobile manufacturer is a laggard in battery electric vehicles which is determined to sabotage the switch to BEVs.

The TerraPower Natrium Reactor – a Quick Review

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TerraPower, a company funded by billionaire Bill Gates, has teamed up with several partners to build a demonstration nuclear power station in Wyoming by the end of the decade. Several sites are under consideration. The plan is to re-use the grid connection of a former thermal coal power plant, of which Wyoming has many.

The Natrium reactor developed by TerraPower in cooperation with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy is quite a departure from the design of the light water reactors (LWRs) that produce the bulk of nuclear power worldwide today. For one, its output is highly variable because it incorporates gigawatthour (GWh) energy storage using tanks of molten salt. The design is quite innovative, which creates both upsides and challenges.

After reviewing the company’s website and watching a webinar, I am quite impressed but also concerned. The reactor will still run on uranium and will produce radioactive fission products that will need to be contained and stored safely for thousands of years. This is still a largely unsolved problem. Countries that have been generating power from nuclear fuels are today sitting on thousands of tons of waste kept in intermediate storage, still without a proven long term storage solution. Eight decades since the start of the “atomic age” with the Manhattan Project that gave us nuclear reactors and atomic bombs we are only now seeing the first permanent storage site being used in Finland. Some consider this the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry. Proponents of nuclear power will argue that, given we already have existing waste, this is a problem we will need to address anyway and that the volume of highly active nuclear waste will remain relatively compact. Nevertheless, there is a lot that can go wrong there, especially if the volume keeps increasing.

What most excited me about the reactor concept was its incorporation of the heat store using molten salt tanks, which it borrowed from concentrated solar power (CSP). Everything from the molten salt tank to the grid connection is basically the same as in this type of solar power plant. The major difference is that the heat source is not solar power focused onto a tower by thousands of mirrors but an underground nuclear reactor. This means the designers could use existing technology developed to maturity over the last 2-3 decades for use in solar projects in Nevada, Australia, Morocco and other locations.

This part of the plant is conventional technology that will not be subject to the same regulatory oversight as the nuclear portion, making it easier and cheaper to build. At the same time, the nuclear portion of the plant is much smaller and simpler, requiring a lot less concrete and steel than in a LWR per MW of output capacity.

By incorporating the heat storage, the electrical output of the power station can be varied considerably – the TerraPower presentation showed a range of about 240 to 500 MWe, with 345 MWe available continually without charging or discharging the heat store. Output that varies by 100 percent roughly covers the demand swing between day and night in many power markets. If combined with solar and wind, the stored heat can be used to smooth out fluctuations in power output from those natural energy sources. Heat from the power station may also have applications for desalination, industrial processes and residential heating.

Conventional nuclear power stations such as PWRs or BWRs can not vary their output very much. They basically can only run at 100 percent load or be switched off. Once shut down, bringing them back up again takes a very long time. That makes them suitable only for base load but not for demand peaks such as in the afternoon or evening. For that they would have to be combined with energy storage such as pumped hydro, opportunities for which are limited by geography. Due to the literally built-in output flexibility of the salt storage system, a zero carbon grid could theoretically incorporate a lot more Natrium output capacity than would be possible with existing LWRs. From an economic point, it means the operators in a competitive electricity market with bidding for supplies can sell more power at lucrative peak prices instead of having to try to find buyers at night when demand and prices are low.

So what’s the catch? The nuclear reactor itself is a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR), basically a Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR) without the breeding: Except for the absence of a breeding blanket made of depleted uranium that slowly turns into plutonium, the technology is very similar. Perhaps you remember the Monju reactor in Fukui, Japan that was shut down after a major accident in 1995. The operators attempted to hide the extent of a coolant leak and fire, which led to a 15-year shutdown. After a second accident in 2010 the reactor was eventually decommissioned. In 1966 the prototype Fermi 1 FBR in Monroe, Michigan suffered a partial meltdown. It was permanently shut down in 1972. Several other sodium-cooled fast reactors have been built around the world, such as the French Superphénix, the Prototype Fast Reactor in Dounreay, Scotland and the SNR-300 in Kalkar, Germany. All of the above have since been shut down due to high costs or troubles or, like the one in Kalkar, were never even started up.

While sodium has a high temperature range between melting and boiling point and is a good heat conductor, it also reacts violently with water and oxygen. Naturally, you can not put out a sodium fire with water. Normally the top of the reactor vessel is filled with an inert gas such as argon to prevent sodium fires but it needs to be opened for loading and unloading fuel, during which time the sodium has to remain heated above its melting point. You do not want to start a fire then.

If an LWR overheats, steam bubbles will form that reduce the criticality, interrupting the chain reaction. By contrast, control of the chain reaction in SFRs depends 100 percent on positioning of the control rods.

While the cooling pipes will not have to withstand high steam pressures as in a BWR, they will be subject to thermal stress: The coolant temperature in an SFR is much higher, around 550 deg C (1020 F) which is basically red-hot and hot enough to melt some aluminium alloys (and of course salt, for the heat storage). When SolarReserve decided to build a molten salt CSP solar power station in Nevada, it turned to Rocketdyne to make some of the metal parts, because of their metallurgical expertise in rocket engine nozzles that are also exposed to high temperatures.

There are other viable solutions for base load in a zero carbon grid, such as geothermal power, utility scale battery storage, thermal storage using rock heated electrically with surplus wind and solar or green hydrogen powering fuel cells or gas turbines. Costs for wind, solar and battery storage have been falling rapidly for years. Once renewables are cheap enough, you can partially address issues of intermittent output by overbuilding capacity and simply idling some of it when not needed. Or you can use spare output when supply exceeds demand to produce hydrogen, for making ammonia and for use by the steel industry.

Some of these solutions depend more on geography than the Natrium reactor, which can be installed on any continent and provide power at time of day and in any season. However, it would definitely need to be safe and reliable. Ultimately, this new technology will first have to prove itself.

Expiring the Internal Combustion Engine Car

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The US state of Washington has decided to ban sales of new cars with internal combustion engines (ICE, gasoline or diesel) by the year 2030. That is five years earlier than in the state of California.

There are two issues to overcome for a switch to battery electric vehicles (BEVs): supply and charging. Two common worries however will not stand in the way of BEVs replacing ICEs: cost and range. Let me explain.

Battery cost per kWh has been dropping for decades and this trend is expected to continue. This is highly significant: Most parts of a BEV car other than the big battery cost either the same as in an ICE car or they’re cheaper. As a result, the cost of batteries will stop being a major obstacle to adoption of BEVs years before the end of the decade.

The same is true for range. Cheaper batteries mean BEVs with more capacity will become affordable. The higher the capacity, the more km of charge can be replenished in a given number of minutes. For example, a Nissan Leaf with a 40 kWH battery will fast-charge from 0 to 80% in 40 minutes. The Volkswagen ID.4 First Edition with an 82 kWh battery (of which 77 kWh are usable capacity) will go from 5% to 80% charge in 38 minutes, essentially double the charging speed (kWh added per minute) for a battery with twice the range. If you can add hundreds of km of range in the time it takes you to use the toilet and get a cup of coffee then BEVs will be just as viable for long distance trips as ICE cars.

By the middle of this decade there is likely to be a wealth of different battery electric vehicle models on the market, with even BEV laggards such as Toyota, Honda and Subaru having joined in. Production could increase to about 50% of new sales of several large makers (e.g. GM, VW). It will have to scale up further, with the necessary increase in battery production capacity, by the end of the decade to make this happen but it seems eminently doable. Right now, the major bottleneck to ramping up production is not lack of demand but limited availability of battery cells. Every big car maker getting into BEVs will have to build Gigafactories churning out battery packs, or team up with battery makers who make these huge investments.

The more BEV there will be on the road, the more the impact on the electric grid becomes an issue. If you have a car that can cover 300 km or more on a full battery and you can charge at home every night then most likely you will almost never have to seek out a charging station, unlike drivers of ICE cars who regularly will have to fill up at a gas station. BEVs parked in a driveway or garage with a nearby wall socket are much easier to accommodate than cars currently parking in the street or on parking lots, who will require capacity at paid public charging points, which are more likely to be used at daytime. The grid has plenty of capacity for off-peak charging (e.g. overnight), but if a lot of people want to do their charging at superchargers or other fast charging points, this could require an upgrade in generating and transmission capacity to cover a higher daytime peak load. Vehicle to grid technology would help to make this more manageable, as cars sitting idle in a driveway could provide spare power for the few cars doing the odd long distance trip.

In any case, I see a date roughly around 2030 as the Goldilocks target for a phase-out of ICE-powered new cars. For high income countries this goal is neither too unambitious nor too unrealistically aggressive. Japan’s goal by contrast for a phase-out by the mid-2030s that still allows hybrid ICEs like the Toyota Prius after that date is quite unambitious. By setting the bar that low, prime minister Suga pleases Toyota, as expected, allowing it to keep selling dated technology in Japan that they will no longer be able to sell elsewhere. That puts Japan in the company of developing countries, which will most likely continue using ICE cars exported from rich countries for years to come.

The sooner rich countries switch to BEVs, the shorter the long tail of CO2-emitting ICE cars still running in poorer countries will be.