Texas has enough sun and wind to quit coal, Rice researchers say
houstonchronicle.com
houstonchronicle.com
2,000 km transmission lines are now routine.[1] They've taken 2-4 years to build in Brazil and China. So this is quite feasible.
Politically, building long-haul transmission lines in the US is a huge hassle. Efforts to build a 730-mile line between Wyoming and Nevada (where it can attach to existing lines to California) have been underway since 2013, one jurisdiction and landowner at a time.[2] And this for something which is completely non-polluting. It's DC; you don't even get induced stray voltages.
[1] https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-...
[0] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T01.01#/?f...
https://globalsolaratlas.info/
Its very likely the first metro area in US to live off Renewables is going to be Dallas-Ft.Worth. Of course, Austin is close too.. but all those wind farms are closer to Big D than Austin.
Suprisingly Colorado is amazing for solar because of elevation and low precipitation.
By coincidence, that's the average number of overcast days in the part of Western Pennsylvania I grew up in.
Thus, while it's great that more cities are going to all renewable, that doesn't mean we're much closer to solving the storage and stability problems with renewables.
http://www.industrytap.com/giant-hanging-concrete-blocks-cou...
There's a reason gravity batteries usually use large bodies of water for their mass.
However, there are some markets that are ripe for roll-out and Texas actually has a surprise advantage in the energy storage market. Many of those natural gas or oil wells are suitable reservoirs for compression storage of energy once they run dry which significantly lowers the capital costs of setting up that type of energy storage. Hell, some of those wells are even deep enough that they could be used to generate geothermal power in the future.
Seattle is more or less entirely powered by renewables, with 97% of Seattle City Light's energy coming from Hydro, Nuclear or Wind: http://www.seattle.gov/light/FuelMix/
Norway still has us beat, however.
However, producing oil from the excess energy is also a form of energy storage. And Texas already has the infrastructure to refine and distribute oil. Since the produced oil would pull CO2 from the air, it would be effectively carbon neutral.
What if Texas blankets the state in solar and wind? They could continue to be a oil producer, but with the additional benefit of producing carbon neutral fuel. With a carbon tax, this fuel could become quickly price competitive with traditional "fossil" fuels (pulled from the ground). And even without a carbon tax, it's possible a significant percentage of the population would be willing to pay extra for carbon neutral fuel. Or another way would be for government to require a certain percentage (such as the current 10% ethanol, they could say 10% must be carbon neutral fuel source). There's a lot of possibilities and potential to much more quickly address climate change than waiting for EV cars to become the majority.
On a related note I began watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okkupert yesterday.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/sunnova#section-over...
The oil and gas are going to be extracted as long as the global market prices make it worthwhile to do so. The only way that changes is if renewables come down in price enough to make fossil extraction uneconomical. So the more we build out, the better, even if it happens at the same time as fossil extraction.
We need to increase capacity of renewable energy production, of course, but that is the easiest part of the whole equation. We also need serious investment into energy storage, by orders of magnitude more than what we have today. That will be at least as large an investment as building out the base capacity. And we need massive improvements to the power grid to make it possible to transmit power from where it's generated to where it's used, which will be at least as big an investment as either the capacity or storage problem.
Fortunately, all of these problems will benefit from technology advancements, and all of them can represent capital investments which provide lasting long term value (not just in CO2 emissions reductions but also in improving the resiliency of the power grid). There are tons of people working on the generation problem. The storage problem is about in the same state that generation was maybe 20+ years ago. And the grid problem? You could fit everyone working on it into a conference room, a small conference room. We desperately need to amp up investment in every aspect of this field ASAP.
However, if that's true, we could see pipelines and tanks of ammonia criss-crossing Texas and the rest of the US, allowing us to fungibly transfer renewable energy. Basically, we could use the systems and techniques we have already developed for doing this with Natural Gas, including the kinds of interfaces those systems have with the current power grid.
Unfortunately, a cursory search for this technology seems to contradict this.
https://www.chemengonline.com/worlds-first-successful-ammoni...
The headline is a misnomer. Renewable ammonia was made from electrolytic hydrogen via hydroelectricity in the 20th century. Ammonia-fueled generators have been demonstrated before too. Even the new low pressure catalyst has near-identical antecedents.
All that said, putting existing ideas together in an evolutionary way can yield revolutionary outcomes. In the past 40 years there has been no revolutionary change in terrestrial photovoltaic cell technology, but continuously compounded evolutionary changes have taken the industry from kilowatts to gigawatts of annual cell production.
Because the steel pipes transporting natural gas throughout the US are under pressure, they are subject to a peculiar form of degradation, stress corrosion. Normally, steel can rust or corrode when exposed outdoors. Simple coatings of paint, tars, polymers, etc. can protect steel, and natural gas transport pipes are coated on the outside to protect them from moisture, air, and the natural PH variations found in different environments. These pipelines and their coatings are examined periodically to prevent catastrophic failures. The pipes are perhaps one-half to two meters in diameter and have a wall thickness of one to three centimeters if I recall.
Stress corrosion is not like normal rust on the surface of steel. It happens inside the steel, along the inter-granular crystalline boundaries within the steel itself. Somehow, the stress inside the steel produces higher rates of corrosion (there is a large literature on this subject, google "stress corrosion"). This type of corrosion can be dangerous because pipes can burst without visible warning of their condition. Detection of stress corrosion requires inspection systems that are much slower (ultrasound, electromagnetic induction measurements, etc.) and less practical than simply looking for corrosion on the outside of the pipes.
Unfortunately, ammonia is corrosive to steel and the insides of existing pipelines and the valves and other fittings would not be prepared to handle ammonia. So ammonia wouldn't be able to utilize the existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure.
I'm not a metallurgist nor even someone that remembers much of my university chemistry classes so I welcome comments from a more informed HN reader.
That's not what I'm advocating. I was talking about the precedent of companies that know how to run pipelines, do transactions with storage pools, and scheduling. Of course the physical pipes and other equipment would have to be different. But all of the commercial contractual, financial, and legal frameworks are all pretty much worked out.
El Paso isn't in ERCOT, but is connected to the Western Interconnection
The Solutions Project[1] is developing roadmaps[2] for transitioning the entire planet to 100% renewable energy. My college advisor[3] is the lead scientist and one of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered.
[1] https://thesolutionsproject.org
[2] https://thesolutionsproject.org/why-clean-energy/#/map/state...
The state is also a huge technology sector (aerospace, chemical, semiconductor, and software) does a lot of manufacturing, and operates 2 trade borders, the Gulf ports and Mexico.
That's something of an old myth, perpetuated by people still remembering the soap opera "Dallas," and assuming that applied to the whole state.
There's a reason that Houston calls itself "The Energy Capital of the World." Lots of energy companies there, not just oil companies.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/places/tx/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_U.S._states...
CPS energy (Our big power company) keeps sending fliers that i can be on wind power, the catch is it costs more. Seriously, i can pay more to ensure my power comes from (or is offset by) wind production.
I hope Texas does do more Solar and Wind power. Solar water heaters would be nice here too.
Under ideal conditions, or even on cloudy, calm days?
If it's only on certain days, the headline and this quote are misleading.
Here's one disastrously-over-budget attempt at a coal plant with CO2 capture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemper_Project
Had they forced the plan to completion, it would have generated more expensive electricity than a new nuclear plant. More expensive than battery-backed solar. More expensive than any other utility scale electricity source in the United States.
Of course it isn't cost effective when you can just dig the finished product out of the ground, but conceptually it is easy.
Natural gas peaking plants make up the difference when demand modulates.
In the last 30 years, mankind has gone from 90% fossil fuels to 89% fossil fuels usage.
To make solar, wind, and other renewables, you need lots of liquid hydrocarbons and their counterparts.
They explicitly say this in the 'garbage' article that's talking about coal, not liquid hyrdocarbons.
FTA:
> Weather, however, remains unpredictable. Texas would still need battery storage and natural gas-fired power plants to fill in gaps when, for example, winds might slacken earlier than expected.
I am sure it will be a rare event and probably preferable to continued c02 emissions. Probably will encourage more investment in energy storage.
Exciting time to be a power engineer!
I honestly don't think this will happen. There'll at least be nuclear plants, and if the nukes aren't enough they'll spin up natgas peaker plants.
Gas plants can be peakers...maybe an expensive unit that can move fast and is reserved for emergencies, but in general the gas prices are so low that the units are very economical and we therefore run them as baseload.
Im pro nuclear but the whole situation at SONGS is a slow moving disaster.
>...Long phases of no or little wind power are a potential thread to future energy systems with a high share of renewable energies. A frequently cited example observed in Germany was a whole week with very little wind power due to temperature inversion in January 2009.
>...We find the average duration of low wind power feed-in phase to grow linearly with the threshold: Phases with a wind power feed-in of less than two percent of installed power are typically four hours long and phases with less than five percent feed-in are on average seven hours long. However, a period of wind power feed-in below eight percent of installed power that lasts one week occurs every two years and a period of more than ten days occurs every ten years.
https://tu-dresden.de/bu/wirtschaft/ee2/ressourcen/dateien/l...
Well... the original poster was referring to the potential problem where you don't get any electricity from wind for several days, so it might have been better if you dealt with that issue rather than speaking of wind in absolutes since utility grade windmills need at least roughly 13 MPH winds to generate power.
>...even then it produces 3% which while not adequate unless massively overbuilt is still something.
No, not really.