Natural gas energy can be transported much more easily than solar or wind. As more export capacity comes online in the US I would expect natural gas projects in the US to continue apace even if domestic consumption stays flat or declines.
Anywhere besides Canada and Mexico requires liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, which are very expensive and have low capacity compared to a pipeline. You'd need a lot of them to make up for the lost demand from even a relatively small percentage of American natural-gas power plants shutting down. So if production is really going to continue apace, it depends almost entirely on Mexico's demand continuing to increase.
The US doesn't have all that much export capacity, though it does seem that more is under construction. From what I can find, current US LNG terminal capacity is around 2 billion cubic feet per day (Bcfpd), equal to a bit under 3% of domestic production. But projects under construction will raise that to about 6 Bcfpd in the next few years. That's more than I would've guessed, and at ~8% of domestic production that's starting to get into a serious potential outlet for gas. Although still not enough to absorb a huge downturn in domestic demand, if there were one.
(Side note: The abbreviation Bcfpd sounds like a parody of US customary units, but it does really seem to be in common use.)
[1] http://visual.ons.gov.uk/uk-energy-how-much-what-type-and-wh...
LNG tankers are freaking scary though, they are like mini-nukes, approaching 1 megaton equivalent.
[1] http://www.mhpa.co.uk/uploads/Marine_docs/lng_carriers.pdf
So it's nothing to do with vapor cloud detonation, that's pretty much irrelevant compared to the destruction of the rapid phase transition from liquid to gas.
Maybe you start with a minor eruption/earthquake, and the LNG disaster breaches a larger magma chamber to cause a larger eruption? Then you can blanket Europe in ash and start up the typical disaster movie plot, where you follow the Chicken Little and their family as they try to escape the disaster radius.
It happened in Brenham, Texas, in the 90s.
http://www.theeagle.com/blogs/fajitas_for_one/salt-dome-expl...
> Vapor cloud detonation has never been considered particularly likely, and never documented as far as I know
This is an example of a vapor cloud detonation. I'm just pointing out that it's happened, so I'm not sure why you're saying it's never been documented. Unless you just meant in the context of a tanker, but that's not how you phrased it.
As it happened, I lived in the area at the time (about 40 miles away on the back side of Cypress, Texas). I didn't think so much about it being an earthquake, but instead thought a large airplane had crashed nearby. I ran out into the street expecting to see fire and explosions and whatnot within a block or few of my house ... only for there to be _nothing._
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_East_Ohio_Gas_explos...
The industry has every incentive to do a careful job with the safety features of these ships and the terminals they unload into, but the trouble with ships is that things sometimes run into them... sometimes really big things.
It's a pretty awesome way to carry around a lot of portable energy, though.
I find the fear of flammable gasses to be irrationally excessive. Sure there's more stored potential energy than the batteries under the floor of your Prius or the smartphone in your pocket but by nature of being compressed the storage tank is very robust and unlike batteries they do not include their own ignition source.
http://www.transelectrica.ro/widget/web/tel/sen-harta/-/hart...
hmm, wind is quite slow today, normally blows about 1.5gw. biomass is a nice surprise.
I guess this is down to the inclusion of solar power which was cursory a few years back. Do they now aggregate all of the roof top solar and add that in?
Snooping around Glastonbury and my great Aunt's old town I've noticed a number of Solar farms in the countryside:
The result would be a cloud of gas that burns violently for several minutes, depending upon wind and the speed of the leak. Not the instantaneous, crater-making release of energy that a thermonuclear device produces.
If the vaporising gas was ignited, some of the heat from that combustion would certainly be transmitted to the pool of cold, liquid gas by radiation which would increase the vaporisation rate. The net result would still be a release of energy into the surroundings over probably tens of minutes (as opposed to microseconds in the case of a nuclear bomb).
https://web.archive.org/web/20001204191400/http://www.lhpo.o...
and specifically:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010215034409/http://www.lhpo.o...
"2.3 Gas installation:
The LHPO runs only on propane, at full bottle pressure (that is, five to ten bars, depending on ambient temperature).
The LHPO may be run from either a bank of propane bottles feeding into a manifold and then proceeding along a main gas pipe to the organ, or from a single propane tank with either liquid or gas feed. If liquid feed, a gasifier must be provided with sufficient peak capacity (see below).
If a single tank, the tank must have at least a three ton filled capacity, to provide enough thermal mass for the required gas delivery rate (see below). The tank connection must be at least 1 1/2 inch inside pipe diameter, to provide for sufficient gas delivery rate.
If a multiple tank installation, at least 28, 33kg capacity bottles are needed. The bottles may not be all close packed into a rectangular array, but must be in one or two rows, with adequate air circulation around the bottle area to provide for heat transfer to the bottles.
If a liquid phase system and a gasifier are to be used, the system must be able to deliver the peak delivery rate (see below) for at least ten minutes continuously."
I guess a big enough rocket could blow the liquid out of the tank, or rupture a large hole in the hull of the ship causing the LNG to dump into the (relatively) warm water and boil off faster. But at some point the real question is: How did the bad guys fire rockets into a secured unloading station?
For those interested, Hiroshima was ~20Kt. Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt.
I'm more worried about the glasshouse effect of so much LNG.
IIRC US (and other Western ones as well I guess) ICBM warheads are about 300Kt, Russian ones about 1Mt.
The Russian did test a 50Mt device (Tsar Bomba) during the cold war (technically, there's apparently no upper limit how big you can make them), but such large devices are not really militarily useful to the point of justifying their bulk/weight/expense.
IIRC, the biggest the US ever deployed operationally was 9Mt, and those have since been retired. The common strategic warheads now deployed are, IIRC, 100-350kt range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
1000 kg of natural gas has a lower heating value of 47.1 gigajoules, much greater than the 4.18 gigajoules per 1000 kg TNT equivalent.
The lower heating value of 67,000,000 kg of natural gas is 3.16 * 10^15 joules:
http://hydrogen.pnl.gov/tools/lower-and-higher-heating-value...
So more like 750 kilotons TNT equivalent.
There are multiple factors that give rise to natural gas's much greater energy density:
- TNT carries its oxidizer internal to the molecule instead of getting it "free" from air
- TNT equivalent energy does not include full combustion of the oxygen-deficient detonation products, only instantaneous energy release during detonation
- TNT has a lower hydrogen:heavy atom ratio than natural gas
An economic point of view is a different question, though.
Here's how it's done (it's pretty darned fascinating):
Okay, maybe a little flexible would be good!
http://www.technip.com/sites/default/files/technip/fields/pu...
But I've long thought that underground high voltage power transmission built underneath interstates would fare much better than overhead poles.
The reason it's a holy grail is because there are some major materials science breakthroughs that need to happen before it's feasible. Since the sun's energy cycles rapidly on the minute/second timescale, whatever receiver you're using to convert inputs to syngas needs to not be destroyed by that periodic, rapid temperature (and thus stress) cycling.
Presumably you meant LPG. LNG is another thing entirely..
What do you mean here? What aspect of the sun's energy cycles on the minute/second timescale? And why would variability at that time scale do anything to a solar thermal system?
I'm pretty sure the reason it is hard is because you need to go above and below phase transitions that change the oxidation state, achieve high rates of oxygen absorption and release, and maintain a high enough surface area to not lose your oxygen diffusion rate.
Or are you talking about some new issue?
Last time I worked in solar, the processes needed for the conversion typically worked above 600C (or much higher). If you can do conversion at atmospheric pressure, then you don't need pressure vessels (which are susceptible to fatigue because of cycling from 100C to 600C+ when a 5 minute cloud passes overhead, for example), but then your gas is at a lower density and now your process is less efficient.
Also, the higher the temperature, the higher the radiative heat losses become. T1^4 - T2^4 = much much higher. So you want to minimize the view factor of the heat transfer tubes/materials. Which means you want a cavity receiver...yada yada. Google solar air receiver and you'll get some interesting reading material, for example:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876610214...
I'm a lot more familiar with salt systems, tbh:
http://www.esolar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/SolarPACES-...
Yeah, the stuff I'm familiar with is solar thermal water splitting using iron oxide at ~1000C, though I can see why the Caltech group preferred ceria (my favorite ceramic).
I think my favorite cute trick with solar thermal is solar thermal reforming of biomass. By piggybacking on the existing chemical reaction you actually end up with solar energy directly added to the chemical energy! First time I saw that I was struck by how clever it was.
I imagine using CO2 as a reactant is a lot more difficult, that's not a simple molecule to break apart so I very much appreciated that the solar thermal reforming process takes advantage of the plants to do the hard part while extracting even more solar energy.
Yes, but not easier than it is to transport electrons. And solar and wind energy can be converted into electrons and then transported across vast distances using existing infrastructure.
A tanker with LNG is much more flexible and denser form of energy than photons to electrons.. Once electrons out they need to be consumed asap!
Sure the grid is a bottle neck, but it is a bottle neck that can be fixed. Aging infrastructure is the problem, not the grid per-se, it just happens to have older and less well maintained segments.
> The Grid has to match the production and demand
No, the grid transports power from places where it is generated to places where it is consumed. Whether the consumer is local or remote is not that important other than that you'll incur some more losses.
Demand matching is the job of powerplants that can change their output power quickly.
> and at times that is why CA gives away electricity to AZ and pay for AZ for consuming its electricity.
That's because there simply is an excess of power in CA and shedding it to AZ is cheaper than shunting it locally.
> A tanker with LNG is much more flexible and denser form of energy than photons to electrons..
Of course it isn't. That LNG tanker needs a port and it needs a plant to convert the LNG to electricity. LNG is hamburger, electricity is steak.
> Once electrons out they need to be consumed asap!
There also exist load leveling measures using superconducting loops, these are used for windfarms whose output can change very rapidly especially when they're on the end of anemic grid infrastructure (remote location), these can be used for solar as well.
And 'damn hard' is not the same as impossible, there have been studies done on how to ship electricity from Africa to Europe.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-north-africa-...
That's not quite Japan or Europe from the US but it would be intercontinental. The biggest hurdles are political rather than technical. For the really long haul (say, US to EU) I doubt it would be economical, but as a way of leveling the day/night difference it would be an awesome way to make solar power more feasible for base load generation.
Long before that happens though we'll see windfarms in the Atlantic and in the Pacific.
Energy is still largely in the domain of geopolitics. Russia can turn off gas shipments to Europe. Qatar can be blockaded. Entire governments can veer towards collapse threatening supplies (Venezuela). Coalitions may decide to forcibly remove another nation's supplies from the market, as was the case with Iran.
That leaves international energy markets inherently inefficient and susceptible to disruption (not the SV kind). When those disruptions occur, the ability to quickly ship vast quantities of energy becomes absolutely vital.
This has been best demonstrated during periods when OPEC refused to supply certain countries because of their ties to Israel. The ability to quickly shift supplies from non-OPEC sources around the market, due to the fungibility of oil and the ease of shipment, kept the lights on across much of the world.
A fair counterpoint to this argument is the reduced dependency on energy produced by potentially hostile powers that could come about with the advent of renewables like solar and wind. However, as technology improves to allow electricity transmission across greater distances (like, say, the Mediterranean), do we really reduce dependencies on potentially hostile nations? Electricity isn't fungible if it can't be transmitted to the markets where gaps are created by geopolitics.
If, say, Tunisia decided to cut off France from a hypothetical trans-Med grid, would France be able to find enough energy from neighboring grids with excess supply? I don't know.
So long as energy decisions are inherently political, the market needs the ability to ship energy quickly and on-demand to fill gaps created by the whims of politicians and autocrats.
Finally, I'll note that the Allies won World War II in large part because of their superior ability to ship energy wherever it was needed in any theater of operations and moments when those supply chains broke down often led to significant Axis advances and prolonged the war, such as Eisenhower's difficult decision to deprive Patton of gasoline in order to keep other parts of the Allied advance moving across Europe.
In the case of that LNG tanker, yes. But for electricity the majority of it is consumed relatively close to where it is generated in the case of renewables and waste as the source. There is an obvious economic incentive to transport it across larger distances if and when feasible but for now there does not appear to be a huge need for this. For natural gas and coal fired plants the distance tends to be much larger, but this goes for any fossil fuel production / consumption setup.
To your other points: it is exactly this independence of geopolitical factors that make renewable energy so attractive.
If there ever is another war in Europe (this could easily happen) I suspect that it will be fought with fossil fuels rather than electricity as the dominant power source for prime movers so in that sense not much will change.
However, we could cheaply ship electrons to Russia, after that it's just a question of displacement. Aka, does energy from powerplant X get sent east or west. Net result you can send elections from US to EU for vastly less than you might think.
Granted, there is no such undersea cable today and US and Russian grids are limited in those areas, but the undersea distance is not actually that far relative to other undersea projects.
Undersea HVDC lines are nothing like the undersea fiber optic cables. The problem isn't whether or not we can create a cable like that, it's the transmission losses that long-distance power lines have. Even for HVDC you're dealing with ~3.5% loss per 1000km.
Shipping electrons over the oceans is only going to be a "question of displacement" when we have superconducting lines, but right now those need to be chilled with liquid hydrogen or nitrogen along the entire length of the cable... Meaning the infrastructure and operational costs are even more than the cost of the lost electricity.
On both sides there are people who use power. Now if 100,000 houses in Russia get power from the US and zero changes Russia could then supply ~100,000 houses with power outside of Russia. Now sure, you need the right substation setup to get this to work out, but a modern grid can quickly route power in response to both changing demand and internment supply.
US already sends and receives power from both Mexico and Canida, and Russia and EU have similar relationships. We don't do this with Russia because there is so little demand in those areas. But, the artic is rapidly warming so that may change fairly soon.
But, in terms of current technology it's viable even if economically/politically it's not.
Europe is handling it well: http://www.powermag.com/europe-rebuilds-grid-to-accommodate-...
America will probably lag significantly in this regard because too much of the grid is owned by companies that also own coal/natural gas, etc. and have a strong incentive not to upgrade.
Those regions still have a large chunk of their power infrastructure dating back to the communist times, power consumption in those regions is up considerably compared to the time when those grids were sized and that combined with the fluctuating supply caused by wind farms has caused some issues that can't be mitigated easily.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/how-germa...
I would argue that “immediate” action is unnecessary as the economics gradually improve, so will infrastructure. It isn’t like these changes are needed right now. The data doesn’t support the idea of impending catastrophe, unless your business is profiting from such a catastrophe.
The market will solve this. We are already using more renewables when it makes sense and that percentage will organically grow as renewables become more efficient. Eventually oil and coal will be less profitable than renewables and when that happens, the market and infrastructure will naturally evolve.
Innovation rarely happens because the government wills it. The markets drive innovation.
For the market to create the incentive for renewables the price of power would have had to go up a lot, or the externalities like pollution applied to gas/coal so that the price would go up, but still generation takes so long to plan approve and build and then so long to pay back that markets with varying prices are a bad mechanism. The price would have to be too high for too long than is politically palatable to encourage construction of new generation, and even then why not just build a gas plant.
Not everywhere. In Texas companies that do transmission are forbidden to own generation and vice versa.
Which causes problems for grid battery storage. Is it generation or transmission?
This is more likely due to subsidies. The government wants more solar so it pays the producer to make it. They can sell it for any price down to the negative of that subsidy (i.e. pass on 99% of the subsidy to someone else) and still make money. If it displaces fossil fuels then the government has succeeded in achieving their aims with the subsidy and everyone is happy.
I believe solar (and wind) can generally curtail themselves, so if they are exporting power to the grid then it's because it's in their economic interest to do so.
Some in depth info here: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/An-Illustrated-...
People get a bit excited about negative prices, as if it heralds the end of sanity. But it's usually a very sensible, market-driven response to either subsidies (which to be clear, think are a good thing) or to inflexible coal generation which would rather pay money than throttle down for short periods.
There's also this idea that it'll destroy the grid by overproducing. When really the worst that'll happen is something like the infamous duck curve, where gas plants can't ramp up as far and as fast as needed. The shocking solution? Just turn them on early so they've got time to ramp and curtail the solar being produced at that time.
Since a bit of extra curtailment in Spring is such a boring solution I have to wonder at the motives of the people who report on the Duck Curve as a looming threat to the grid.
The plant, the ship, the terminal and the rest of the infrastructure aren't free either.
The good thing about LNG is that it can be converted into electricity, the reverse is rather harder :)
Nobody is trying to run submarine cables across such distances because there is absolutely no reason to do so, all you'd do is hook up nearby power grids using much shorter runs of cable.
So nobody in Romania or Greece is consuming power generated in Norway or Sweden directly but the effect of adding renewable power to the grid in say Norway will usually offset a little bit of fossil fuel generated power elsewhere in the grid.
Electrons are very friendly in that sense. They also don't explode.
Natgas exports may increase, but it appears everyone is getting off of fossil asap.
You cannot compete against an energy source with no fuel cost.
I take issue with "of course". It will be always be wildly more economic to produce solar power in places with a lot of sun. And without checking, my ballpark guess would be that you get at least 10 times more solar energy out of a panel in Texas than a panel in, say, Canada. Our eyes are just so good at adapting to different light levels that we don't notice the different energy densities that much.
Should have checked. "Canada" is pretty vague, but if you mean the southern part where people live you're waaay off. It's only a factor of 2.
http://solargis.com/assets/graphic/free-map/GHI/Solargis-Wor...
That's the problem with not checking and using your intuition. The difference between Florida and Toronto is only x2. Not x10.
And it can actually be less efficient if there's too much sun, solar panel efficiency decreases with temperature. Solar thermal also depends on temperature differential, so if the environment around the plant is too hot the efficiency drops.
Of course you can. The technology to turn photons into useful energy is heavy, complex and reliant on rare elements. In any case, one could flip the analogy by branding coal as photons freely stockpiled by dead trees and algae.
When you generate using a fuel, your margins are dictated by power market spot prices (prices occasionally go negative; do you continue to generate and pay for someone to take your power while you're also paying someone for a fuel? In some scenarios, you must), depreciation, and your fuel costs/contracts.
The cost of wind and solar never fluctuates.
Assuming they don't degrade completely in those 30 years. Also, I still wonder what's their EROI if you count in their manufacturing, transport and installation costs?
This doesn't take into account the ridiculous cost decline curve we're seeing in solar, and that'll be a fraction of the cost to replace degraded capacity decades from now.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf
EROI has been positive for quite some time.
If you consider the likely energy need growth of society, exponential maybe, it is really hard to see how solar and wind will cut it.
Personally i think a full embracement of gen 4 or better nuclear power generation is the only way truly bring energy security.
Nuclear is already dead at current wind and solar generation costs.
Considering that PV's capacity factor is around 15%, that's around 26 PWh of annual (electric) energy production, around 50% of the electrical energy we use up in a year today, nevermind what we will actually need in 2050 thanks to the neverending growth we're apparently trying to go for.
IIRC, electricity represents 20-25% of our civilization's energy use mix, so solar should solve around 10-15% of our needs in 2050 under extremely optimistic assumptions and ignoring ALL of the variability, energy grid, energy storage, solar panel production issues, none of which are minor limitations.
2050 is around 10 years beyond the date we need to be carbon neutral to stay below 2°C [2], if we were to peak in 2020 and quickly ramp down our emissions. It's 20 years too late in business as usual scenarios.
[1] http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication... [2] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/06/why-gl...
I agree with you that the exact same fact is true of nuclear. And wind too, while we're at it.
I don't think there's a way out of it: our technological civilization lives WAY WAY beyond its means, and that is made possible only by burning through fossil fuels, among many other non-renewable resources. When that dries up (economically speaking) or enough ecosystems have been damaged, our civilization will most likely fall apart. It'll be a slow and ugly process, it'll happen over decades, and it's already under way.
Renewables would have been great in a simpler and slower world. Hopefully, that's how the next global (if any) civilization goes in a few hundred or thousand years.
Whale oil and ambergris where replaced by Fossil fuels.
Ivory for billiard balls was replaced by plastic.
Cigarettes are being replaced by vaping.
Look at the amount of people skipping out on bike helmets and car safety belts. People don't do it even when there is literally no downside and it could literally save their life.
The pace of the world is here to stay, people will just figure out how to sustain it with new stuff. There might a turbine in every backyard, I don't know what the solution will look like. But the extinction of several whale species wasn't enough to put lamplighters out of business coal and transmission lines did and the world got ever faster.
I don't know how you can think that. The pace of our world requires incredibly huge amounts of energy, which we get from finite fossil fuels. Either they become economically unavailable or climate change becomes so severe that we can't use what remains in the ground. Oil companies don't go to ultra-deep water wells and shale gas just because they are evil money-eating bastards (which is the prevalent narrative). They exploit these economically mediocre sources for the same reason garbage starts to look appealing when you are starved: you are hungry and the good food has run out.
Too many people assume that technology alone is what has allowed us to reach 7.5 billion people. This misses a significant piece of the puzzle, because in reality it's fossil-fuel powered technology. It's a crucial distinction, as shiny but empty trucks and tractors won't help you feed billions of people. Without fossil fuels we have no realistic idea how to feed that many people. So we'll probably continue burning them as long as we can, because the alternative (mass starvation) is even worse.
If we were a rational species, we could fix all of it. We'd massively slow down our economies, have very few kids for some time to reduce our population to more sustainable levels, rely on local food, stop traveling all the time, and so on. Doing it smart, we could reach a relatively slower but very nice and sustainable way of life, augmented by sparse but useful technology. Something a lot more sustainable that the Rude Goldbergian machine we call "modern life".
Since we're not rational and obviously won't do the smart thing, instead it'll degenerate to resource wars (over food, water, gas, etc.) and massive refugee crises way beyond what we're already seeing. Our civilization will stumble from one crisis to the next, blaming this or that ethnic group for what is happening, each time cobbling a half-solution together that seems to work for a time, but gradually it will sched most of the modern things we currently take for granted.
The myth of humanity going from caves to space is just that, a myth. In the real world, countless civilizations have risen and fallen, gaining and then losing most of their culture and scientific knowledge in the process. We've done it bigger than anyone before due to fossil fuels, which for a limited time have replaced our need for human and animal labor, but it is unsustainable and soon it will go away. Human ingeniosity plays a small part in the real story of our world.
The real story is that nature has kindly stored millions years worth of solar energy as fossil fuels and we've gotten so drunk on it for 200 years that we've started to think that we've mastered the universe, with soon to come galactic civilization, godlike AI and the end of death itself. The hangover is not going to be fun for a lot of people, and these delusions will not survive it.
You see what exists and presume it is all that can exist. You are limited and whether or not it is rational human ingenuity is not limited. Only those civilizations that slowed down as you advocate "failed", and even then they still innovated just in different ways.
You are wrong because you make the same argument as people of yesteryear and they were wrong for reasons unknowable to them but obvious to us now. The future is unknowable to us but it should be obvious that some group of people will do better with some technology or process that seems obvious to them.
Human ingenuity is definitely limited. There are levels of complexity we probably won't manage to get past. More importantly, physical laws have limits, and these are not negotiable. For example, we very probably won't ever get beyond the speed of light. We won't produce energy from nothing. We won't cancel gravity. We won't stop heat death. We won't travel in time. We won't teleport, or beam up as they say. We know that with a relatively high degree of certainty because science has progressed a lot, so we know a lot more about what this universe can do for us, but also about what it cannot do. This is not comparable to a few centuries (or even decades) ago, because then we knew a lot less about both.
We've got 20 years to address climate change and fossil fuel shortage, probably less, before they become catastrophic. There are reasons to think it may already be too late without active measures (carbon capture and so on). 20 years is less than the time it takes to go from brand new technology (let alone lab experiments) to widespread commercial use, which means that technologies that don't yet exist are of no use to address this problem, and that rules out fusion (which hasn't even proven it can produce more power than it consumes, let alone at economically viable scales), among others. I'd say thorium-based fission plants are the only semi-viable bet if we want to continue BAU, because uranium is probably a dead end (there's just not that much that can be exploited with an EROEI > 1).
Note that this is only the energy problem. We also need to deal with over-population, climate change, sea level rise, resource depletion, soil loss, aquifer depletion, species extinction, collapsed fisheries, ocean acidification and so on. At the same time, and at a time when our political institutions are reaching unparalleled levels of passivity and incompetence. If we solve all these problems, remember that our economists and leaders still insist on the need of exponential growth on a finite planet, which means it would soon prove not enough and the new problems we'd face would be even worse.
If you are part of the people who think we're destined to a Star Trek future, I can imagine that the thought of collapse can be painful to you. It used to pain me a lot, but now I'm okay with it. I'd prefer for our civilization to survive, but like with terminal illness, there comes a time when acceptance becomes the only good option.
Our civilization will fail, but eventually the biosphere will recover (though with the amount of damage we do, it'll take more time than with past collapses). Then life will go on for about 500M-1B years, after that it'll be toast and it will most likely be over for life in this corner of the galaxy.
In the SW United States, capacity factor for a ground-mounted system utilizing a single-axis tracker is between 28% and 35%.
Source: I am a developer of utility-scale PV power plants.
Emissions are pretty obviously not going to peak by 2020, unless there's some sort of civilization-smashing catastrophe in the next few years. Large scale active carbon dioxide removal measures will be needed later, or natural processes will eventually restore the pre-industrial equilibrium over ~100,000 years. We're not going to stay in the "safe" zone below 2 degrees. Reducing future emissions is necessary but not sufficient. I say this as someone who fully wishes that humans had cut emissions quickly enough to render active CDR measures unnecessary, but recognizes that we did not act in time.
I'm not convinced by carbon storage, though I don't know enough about it to be sure. It is my understanding that it is either energy-hungry (so useless because we don't and likely won't have enough carbon-neutral energy surplus) or pretty slow (also useless). And completely unproven at large or even moderate scales, too.
"Carbon storage" would normally refer to physically sequestering purified carbon dioxide or other carbon bearing compounds. I agree that storage of that type is not practical.
Enhanced silicate weathering is IMO the process with the best prospects for large scale atmospheric carbon dioxide removal. It is relatively slow but the thermodynamics are favorable and the kinetics are still orders of magnitude faster than waiting for unaided nature to restore the pre-industrial equilibrium. Enhanced weathering CDR just accelerates the kinetics of the natural chemical reaction that turns alkaline silicate rocks and CO2 into silica and alkaline carbonates. Doing it on a scale large enough to make a difference would be a gargantuan undertaking, of course, because the scale of the problem is also gargantuan.
Honestly, I am extremely pessimistic about mankind's ability to work on such a scale. Too many people seem to assume global warming is still a far-off problem, and that for some reason humanity is destined to "progress" forever, even though we know of many civilizations that have collapsed before ours.
I'd just like more people to grasp the dire reality of the situation, and stop assuming that somehow technology and/or progress will save us no matter what.
And carbon intensity -- tons of CO2 per economic activity -- should show an even steeper decline, as energy generation becomes less CO2-intensive. We're going in the right direction, and it would be great to go there faster!
How's that happen?
Solar PV power does not directly drive negative prices via the federal PTC in the same way as wind. Solar presently gets a 30% federal investment tax credit up front on the costs of constructing a solar farm. This tax incentive structure doesn't encourage generation during unprofitable times like the PTC. But a solar farm can curtail its output nearly instantaneously and at no risk to plant equipment. The same is not true of e.g. coal and nuclear generators; those facilities ramp output up and down significantly slower, and cannot generate at arbitrarily low fractions of nominal power. A cold start can take 15 hours for a legacy coal plant, longer for nuclear. Full shutdowns also impose extra costs due to equipment thermal stresses during restart. Slowly-ramping coal and nuclear plants may continue to generate negative-profitability electricity at some times of day because they can't adjust fast enough to be back at full output during profitable hours otherwise and because cycling reduces equipment lifetime.
"Impact of Load Following on Power Plant Cost and Performance: Literature Review and Industry Interviews" has a lot of good details on the impact on fossil plants from making additional adjustments:
https://www.netl.doe.gov/File%20Library/Research/Energy%20An...
One thing that really stands out, reading this 5 years later, is that measures to make coal more efficient (like integrated gasification combined cycle plants, IGCC, or going from subcritical to supercritical steam) also make it even less flexible. Plant operators will continue to extract what value they can from coal plants that are already constructed. But there's no plausible combination of factors on the horizon to encourage the building of advanced/new coal plants, even if Trump remains president for 8 years.
Beware of silver bulls proclaiming that silver consumption will "inevitably" grow alongside PV manufacturing volume. I think that the transition away from silver will be more like a ratchet than a floating level. If silver prices rise enough to spur high volume PV manufacturers to implement more complex metallization schemes using base metals, they're not going to switch back to silver pastes even after silver prices fall again.
[1] U.S. LNG exports shift to Europe from Asia http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-asia-lng-idUSL1N1FE4BG
Sure, but not to Europe and Asia.
http://wolfstreet.com/2015/07/21/its-happening-debt-is-teari...
...and that's before you take into account the massive cost of shipping it across an ocean.
By contrast Russian gas is already very profitable and shipped through a pre-existing network of pipelines to Italy.
Even if the numbers work now it clearly doesn't take into account the fact that Russia can undercut them forever.
It reeks a little of desperation.
In the case of fracking, everyone was scrambling to get extraction rights on any piece of land that looked promising. Often that involved massive speculation and debt.
Inevitably the downturn comes and shakes out the players who don't have the capital or discipline to survive. The industry consolidates and production continues. The cost of fracking has continued to decline as frackers learn how to be more efficient in order to be profitable with crude prices at their current low levels. Even if the current players went bankrupt, others will pop up once prices rise again.
American frackers have effectively replaced Saudi Arabia as the world's swing producer. Unfortunately for them that means learning how to withstand wild boom-and-bust cycles.
If so, this cost should be considered to be part of the cost of wind energy.
>...Solar can be produced anywhere of course.
Well sunlight does fall everywhere, but in lots of places it wouldn't make sense to depend on solar for much power.
>...Natgas exports may increase, but it appears everyone is getting off of fossil asap.
asap? From the article:
>...By 2040, renewable resources such as wind and solar power will supply just as much of America’s electricity demand as gas, according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance outlook.
The reality is that without some major advance in grid storage, we will, unfortunately, be very dependent on natural gas for a very long time.
>...You cannot compete against an energy source with no fuel cost.
That is kind of a silly thing to say - there is more to the expense of a power source than that of course.
That’s not a very realistic view of the globe. There are plenty of populous places with only 8-9 hours of total sunlight during winter months, assuming a clear day. Growing up in Vancouver, it wasn’t uncommon to go a week without seeing sunlight...
So is Elon Musk saying this just because it's convenient for him and Tesla? Or do we really need emissions penalties?
Bigger issue is winter time energy, aka heating. That one will be hard with current tech (storing energy for once per year use), though solar is getting cheap enough you may be able to use use solar generated electricity to heat -- you would need overcapacity of panels in northern climates -- but that's probably cheaper than moving the world's coastal cities.
Modestly more expensive up front, cheaper over the lifetime of the building.