Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not upsetting. It interesting, really. Finding ways to economically rationalize good climate behavior. You no longer need to ask people to install renewables to save the planet; it just makes plain economic sense [1] [2].

Utilities need electrical usage growth to offset consumption stagnation (and occasionally, structural and energy efficiency declines). That growth will occur moving ground transportation off of oil. If that creates an unexpected coalition, why not roll with it? It'll increase the EV uptake rate, it'll ensure transmission infrastructure still sees necessary upgrades and investment, and because vehicle charging can be structured around time of day metering, they're a perfect mix for more renewables being added to the grid.

EDIT: OP I replied to should not be downvoted. The situation really is dire [3]. At our current renewables deployment rate, it will take 400 years to swap out all fossil fuel generation; we can and must do better, but we're going to have to properly incentivize action and rapidly increase the replacement rate of fossil fuel generation.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/FCYT1xa.jpg

[2] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-g...

>At our current renewables deployment rate, it will take 400 years to swap out all fossil fuel generation

This seemed off to me, so I checked the source. From TFA (in Technology Review):

>Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts. That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes.

>At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries.

Can anyone tell me how can this possibly compute? 94% of new electricity generation is renewable,[1] and it's not like power plants have a lifetime of 400 years...

edit: Of course, it was staring me in the face the whole time. They're using numbers from 2003! Essentially they're looking at the tail beginning of the logistic adoption curve[2] (the sloooooooow exponential ramp) and extrapolating it in a linear fashion. But logistic curves are "S-shaped," not linear.

[1] https://electrek.co/2018/01/12/94-percent-new-electricity-ca...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#Applications

Wind and solar need tons and tons of land to power our energy needs, and the developing world will need more and more power to escape poverty. Solar panels on every house might be sufficient, but it's far more expensive and consumes far more area than nuclear. We need cheap and abundant nuclear power to bring our carbon emissions down without wasting tons of acreage (something like an area the size of the US to power the world, per Steven Pinker) on power generation.

This comes up in every thread, but it's not realistic. It takes a decade and a billion dollars (at least) to build new nuclear power plants. It's not happening, at least not in the time frame we need to keep global warming below 4C (2C is a pipe dream at this point). [1]

It would only take 0.6 percent of total US land mass covered in solar to power the entire country (about 100 miles by 100 miles). The batteries to back that energy production would only be about 1 square mile. That doesn't take into account residential rooftop solar already producing. Nor wind turbine parks in the middle of nowhere that contribute to farmer and rancher incomes. Offshore wind can be sited anywhere along the costs outside of shipping lanes, far enough off in the distance to not be seen but close enough to keep transmission costs reasonable. We are awash in clean, renewable energy.

To your point about the developing world, India is aggressively deploying solar, and is 4 years ahead of its solar capacity targets.

Solar and wind are ramping on curves somewhere between linear and exponential. They can be turned up in months, not years. They can be sited almost anywhere. They are what is going to win the day.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/has-us-nuclear-powe...

Mass-produced tiny reactors reduce capital cost and construction time. Even without that, energy for 10 years from now still matters.

Show me a mass produced tiny reactor in production. If not in production, provide a solvent business that can produce and maintain these reactors.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/mike-jacobs/solar-vs-nuclear

"In comparison with nuclear, the amount of solar power built in 2016, taking into account how many hours each can operate each day, is the equivalent of more than 3 new nuclear plants.

To dive in a little deeper: let’s use a 25 percent capacity factor for new solar, making the 14,626 MW installed equivalent to 3,650 MW of theoretically perfectly running nuclear plants. The Westinghouse AP 1000 units under construction for the last 7-10+ years produce about 1,100 MW. So, in one year, solar additions were equal to what takes more than 7 years to build. The difference in speed of deployment is why UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) is clear that nuclear power isn’t a near-term climate solution."

So if you're not going to take my (rando HN poster's) word for it, the Union of Concerned Scientists seems somewhat reputable.

Mass-produced tiny reactors exist in sci-fi, and maybe some potential long-term future. What we have now are ‘renewables’ so let’s be realistic.

And also US Navy submarines and large surface vessels.

Those are neither mass-produced, nor tiny - they produce 50-500MW of power.

The SG9 in the latest Virginia class submarines are only 30MW. As of 2001 The Navy has constructed over 235 nuclear reactors, with many more since. An average of >5 per year. For Nuclear reactors that is mass production.

Also because of the way the Navy works their reactors are less bespoke for each ship than traditional land based reactors - and better fit the mass production model. This is something that could scale.

1. http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%2...

Nuclear power is simply too expensive.

And how are you going to grow a hyothetical "tiny nuclear reactor" buisiness faster than solar and wind are growing right now? By the time development is done, operating permits are sorted out and production is ramped up the idea will hardly be profitable, and certainly not nessesary anymore.

Both Wind and Solar can in many cases be co-located with other land usage.

Wind farms go great on agricultural farms - they tend to have wide open spaces, and the actual footprint of a tower can have minor impact upon the productivity of the field.

Solar generation goes great on both residential and in particular - commercial buildings, over the tops of parking lots, etc - which has the dual effect of producing power and reducing the heating of the underlying building/parked cars (great for reducing the need for air conditioning)

Your average suburban home has enough roof area to produce either all of, or a significant fraction of, it's own energy for a moderate household.

Marginal-use land (hilly areas), coastal areas, and off-shore are also generally good areas for windfarms too.

Wind and solar need tons and tons of land to power our energy needs

Elon Musk begs to differ. Here's something he said: “If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,” Musk said at at the event in Rhode Island. “The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile.” https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-...

something like an area the size of the US to power the world, per Steven Pinker

Not to slag on Pinker, but Musk has proved himself to be a hell of a lot better visionary in the real world than most anyone else, and that includes pop authors.

Somewhere else I saw a claim of 0.6% of US land area needed for US power needs. Even if it's 1%, no BFD. Let's assume that many areas of the world don't have as good solar irradiance as the USA. So maybe it's 2% in some other places. Still, no BFD.

IMO the biggest problem with current nuclear is that it's run by utility companies. Those places aren't staffed by the world's brightest bulbs (heh heh). Allowing morons like that to build and manage nuclear plants is akin to allowing toddlers to play with live hand grenades. Most of the time they don't pull the pin, but when they do the results aren't pretty.

PV solar is simplicity itself. No moving parts. Linear economies of scale: 2x the panels means 2x the cost and 2x the power.

OTOH Southern Co. is now saying that the two nuclear reactors they are trying to complete will cost more than $25 billion. https://www.myajc.com/business/southern-says-vogtle-costs-ex... Oops.

There is no exponential when it comes to renewables. The only source of energy we have that provides exponential is nuclear but unfortunately, there is a lot of pushback although it's both greener and provides more energy than wind and solar can ever do.

Furthermore, while they are renewable to they are also unreliable and need to have backup sources which makes them unfit as a enegy base. Remove the subsidies and you will see just how problematic they are.

And then we haven't even looked at the problem with producing them, maintaining them etc.

http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/topics/encyclopedia/so...

The thing that drives climate change is the burning of fossil fuels needed produce electricity in the first place. Keeping the rate of electric production constant will not help us. The fact that electric energy usage is dropping is a good thing and we should keep a negative derivative, not increase it! There needs to be a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, keeping it constant (or even worse, increasing it) will not help this.

I really think everyone needs to take a step back from the HN ideology and think this through. Here climate change has a chance to essentially kill our grand children or at the very least leave them with a much more barren of a planet and a life. But somehow, the issue of a single institution's profit is somehow more important than actual people, children.

The free market is a tool, it shouldn't be more important than human lives.

I think your points are important separately, but the crucial missing part is that electric energy production is rapidly becoming decoupled from greenhouse gas production. It is no longer an either/or situation.

Exactly! Well over 90 percent of new generation coming online is renewables, and the cost decline of renewables shows no signs of stopping [1].

Fancy real time viz: https://www.electricitymap.org/

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/16/1689559...

Worldwide, most of the energy that comes from wind and solar is a tiny fraction of the primary energy supply mix. Where it's growing it's mostly used for additional energy, not to replace the exisiting fossil-fuel consumption. This does not help one bit for climate change.

First graph at the top left (which is actually energy consumption, close enough): https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...

The important thing in this grap is the absolute values of each source, not their relative importance. You'll note that despite renewable growth (of which solar and wind is only a fraction, there's also biomass and various other stuff), fossil-fuel consumption is still growing faster. Indeed, historically, new energy sources have never really replaced 'older' ones. Each time, the new sources just provide additional power on top of the old ones.

So much for 'decoupling'.

Edit : the US energy article on Wikipedia has an interesting graph that shows something similar (except for a partial switch from coal to NG): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m...

> Indeed, historically, new energy sources have never really replaced 'older' ones.

We don't use whale oil anymore.

You are constraining your history in a single century, and "older energy sources" in a single set of mostly equivalent ones.

The volume of whale oil used back in the 19th century is laughably anecdotic compared to petroleum.

When we talk about our energy needs, scale matters a lot. So yes, when it comes to climate change and energy use, you can ignore the rest of human history completely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/fossil_fuel?wasredirected=tr...

You mean that whale (and vegetal) oil wasn't replaced?

No, I mean that the scale of whale oil use was very very small compared to the scale of fossil fuels. So small, in fact, that if whale oil was on the graph I've linked above, you would barely see it moving above 0 in the 19th century.

Also, whale oil was not really used as an energy source anyway, except in lamps.

So it's completely irrelevant to my original point, which is that by and large, until now, in the thermo-industrial civilization, new energy sources have not been used to replace exisiting ones. They have been used to 'grow' the economy (more machines, more people, more production).

Maybe this graph can convince you: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/global...

For sure, fossil fuels will still be around for a while. But renewable sources are absolutely going to replace existing fossil-fuel consumption. The economics of it make it an inevitability. Aside from a few niche applications (industrial heating perhaps), there's nothing better about fossil fuels. They've just been the best we had for a long time. Some of this will be sooner (because you decide to buy an EV next month), and some later (because a coal plant gets decommissioned 10 years from now), but the writing is on the wall.

If only HN had a remind-me bot, I'd like to set a notice: oil demand will plateau within 5 years.

> If only HN had a remind-me bot, I'd like to set a notice: oil demand will plateau within 5 years.

http://longbets.org/

It is a lot easier to decrease CO2 from electricity then from heat.

It is possible to decrease the actual consumption of heating, though. Insulation in many houses across the frigid Midwest and northern plains is pretty bad. Trailers in trailer parks often have almost none and draughts besides. Unfortunately the free market already hands people a big monthly incentive to insulate their properties; the problem is education and technology adoption, which can take a while for markets to correct without a centralized "nudge", and the people who need it the most are precisely those most resistant to government intervention.

Most of the people who own poorly insulated buildings do not just have thousands of dollars laying around to insulate them, regardless of how good the ROI is. It is far more a lack of money than lack of education, many poor people are fully aware of the money-saving opportunities afforded to people with access to more capital. And of course many people live in rental properties where the landlord would pay for the insulation to save the tenant's money on HVAC bills- the economic incentives are not aligned at all.

You can provide low cost or free insulation (including fitting) to poor people.

This is one way to make welfare payments more effective. People are spending their money on food, and not as much on heating.

If you live in a country with denationalised utility companies you can get them to pay for this from the profits they're getting after denationalisation.

But, even when you do this you find people have different reasons for not accepting the offer.

The UK "Nudge Unit" found that the thing that drove more signups to loft insulation wasn't just free insulation, but offering a free loft clearance service too.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/may/02/nudge-unit-...

> For years, by offering financial help to insulate people's lofts, thereby reducing their energy consumption and their bills, successive governments had been trying to give money away – and failing. But in 2011, the nudge unit realised that money wasn't the problem. What held people back was all the clutter that they knew was stored up there.

> So in a trial, people were offered not subsidised insulation, but subsidised loft clearance – with unwanted items being taken to local charity shops – on the condition that they got the space insulated afterwards. The scheme cost people more, but they loved it, and uptake rates tripled. If the insulation was subsidised as well, it became a fivefold increase. Another approach was less successful, but equally revealing. When offered a still greater discount for every friend or neighbour they roped in, people took no interest. You cannot put a price, it appears, on being seen to be a loft-botherer.

This is exactly what I was thinking of, thank you for dredging up the source. Interesting that cleaning the attic is the real barrier at the end of the day.

This is why we need a government imposed carbon tax to price in the externality of carbon emissions. Then we can let the free market loose to do its thing without the perverse incentives that encourage carbon-emitting energy sources today.

Not everywhere burns fossil fuels to produce electricity though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com