The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet | Hacker News Reader

The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet

rameznaam.com

443 pointskickout338 comments

(disclaimer: I am part of a Climate&Energy research group that does this sort of economic modeling)

I would say that the author's broad conclusions are actually likely to pan out (albeit on a different timeline).

However, the individual arguments are cherry picked (e.g. specific utility decisions that do not generalize) and do not necessarily support the conclusion. So, please ignore the graphs as just visual candy. Also, their conclusions around wind are likely incorrect, given the learning curve and deployment rates for solar vs wind.

Some problems:

- The author skips over the difference between dispatchable and non-dispatchable power. The article alludes to it with the discussion of storage, but the nuances are actually very important.

- There are graphs comparing solar and coal. Coal is already dying, and not going to get serious traction by any investors in the future. It is a high capital, low marginal cost plant with expensive cycling for shutdown/turn-on. With today's renewables, the variability in grid demand is too high to make it economical. Even if that wasn't true (which it might not be in the future with sufficient storage), natural gas is strictly cheaper with fracking, and likely will be for the next 50 years.

- The author states that renewables are on the verge of being "cheaper than the cost of continuing to operate existing coal- or gas-fueled power plants". They support this argument with some cherry-picked examples. Realistically, that is not true, nor will it likely every be true. The marginal cost for natural gas is roughly ~1.8 cents/kWh today (including O&M), though NG is very cheap right now. With a capacity factor of 25%, solar would have to be ~$0.50/W including ammortized O&M (so call it $0.35/W. With a ~20% learning curve, that is ~5 doublings from today, so more than net electricity demand). On top of that, that power is mostly useless without storage, which adds additional LCOE (e.g. amortized battery capital and RTE derating).

- Much of the authors argument would require full electrification of transportation+commercial/residential heating, which is unlikely to really pick up steam until the 2030s. Industrial heating will likely be the last holdout (barring some regulatory pressure like a carbon tax).

Anyway, after years of research I would say that I am actually optimistic (I did not used to be) about renewables+storage with sufficient regulatory pressure to get us over today's cost hump (e.g. tax credit, RPS, carbon tax, anything), but take this article with a grain of salt.

Edit: I should say that NG prices vary dramatically by location, and Europe will likely see a very different path forward than the rest of the planet (they also get to cheat with storage with the Norwegian Fjords), so they may push us down the learning curve significantly faster than the US/Asian market. China seems to be doing things by fiat, too, which is always handy.

Is that an american or global perspective? Specifically the natural gas part. Not all countries have the same resources available.

That is an excellent point, and very difficult to model.

Maybe more importantly, the supply curve for natural gas is also very difficult to model. In Europe NG is expensive, but as the demand drops the price will likely decline sharply (the infrastructure is mostly built, and the current costs are highly skewed towards amortizing investment capital). There are also geopolitical concerns which may play out very differently than expected.

I’m not sure that anyone in Europe is happy about their dependency on Russian NG.

There are other potential sources, most notably, Iran. That comes with its own geopolitical issues, such as US throwing a fit about it. But from a purely European perspective, it's probably better than Russia, since there are fewer conflicting interests.

Your post doesn't discuss demand response. How would you refute the claims of someone like Jigar Shah who often states that cheap renewables will not need batteries if flexible demand is implemented, examples being heating and cooling electrification and demand flexibility...if the sun and wind are providing extra, use it to super heat or super cool preemptively before the weather shifts.

Because if your approach is to dramatically change the most complicated part of the electrical grid, consumption, and you haven't exhausted the supply side improvements, then you're probably not going to succeed.

I think a lot of that controllable consumption could be done by the computing power of a $6 ESP8266.

It shouldn’t be hard for my fridge or hot water heater to buy a kwh of electricity anytime over the next 7 hours to do it’s thing.

Same for dishwashers and clothes dryers: I’m 100% okay with pressing “Clean/dry within 8 hours” setting.

Same for electric cars: I don’t care if it charges between 2AM and 4 AM or 7AM and 9AM, as long as it’s topped off by 9AM.

I wouldn’t mind a piece of code on my laptop that would switch to battery when the electricity price became massive for a small period of time.

Hot water heaters are effectively thermal banks.

It shouldn’t be hard to convince people to replace their AC with a unit that makes ice overnight if it cuts their electricity bill in half.

If it’s exonomically viable, you’ll have people knocking on your door trying to sell it to you while still being beneficial to the buyer.

I am probably similarly placed - but I am also going to be able to afford to renew things. I'm wondering whether the 99% will be incentivised enough though.

Going forward, it’s simple: Charge the operations costs up-front.

IE: charge up-front for the first 5 years of expected electricity use of the device.

Then it goes against your bill over the next year.

Now everyone buys the cheaper to own+operate one without thinking.

That seems like it would make low income people even less likely to upgrade.

Depends on the design life of the thing. And how expensive it is to operate to begin with. And whether its even a thing that low income people would generally have in the first place.

This is unrealistic:

>It shouldn’t be hard for my fridge or hot water heater to buy a kwh of electricity anytime over the next 7 hours to do it’s thing.

Fridges lose a ton of cool air when you open them. You're going to end up with bad food if refrigeration can't kick in for 7 hours.

>Same for dishwashers and clothes dryers: I’m 100% okay with pressing “Clean/dry within 8 hours” setting.

Waiting 8 hours to dry clothes is a great way to end up with dirty clothes again because of the moisture trapped in from the washer.

>Hot water heaters are effectively thermal banks.

Not really. Unless you effectively turn them into boilers, you max out at boiling temperature. Given that's barely twice the normal setting, it's not going to last for any long period of time that way.

>It shouldn’t be hard to convince people to replace their AC with a unit that makes ice overnight if it cuts their electricity bill in half.

Ice is useless for people that need air conditioning. I think you vastly underestimate how much ice it would require to replace a large air conditioner cooling a single family home by 30F or so for 6+ hours.

For the fridge: you use excess cooling in the freezer to keep the whole thing cool. Or a reservoir of compressed refrigerant. Or phase change materials.

The point wasn’t to be off for 7 hours, but to look at the current and projected prices and decide when to run at a normal rate or when to kick into overdrive (2C fridge and deep freeze) or when to run at normal rate (maintain 4C and -18C).

For the dryer, depending on electricity price, you run it at a slower or faster rate. Indeed, when I line dry, it can take a while, without the issues you bring up.

If there’s a gust of wind, dial it up. When it’s calm, dial it down. Since wind goes in a direction, we have some idea of when turbines will put out more power that’s cheaper.

Hot water heaters here have thermostatic mixing valves, so as long as we’re not boiling, we have a lot of margin to work with without scalding anyone.

Finally, the nice thing about ice is that water is cheap. It’s already a commercialized tech, just not cheap enough for residential use.... yet.

The point isn’t to use these reservoirs for 100% of needs, but size them up to be fully utilized on a regular basis buying electricity at low prices to offset higher prices.

Sometimes that’s less efficient from a thermodynamic standpoint (the hotter hot water heater does shed more heat), but made up for in reduced op costs.

Fridges: energy loss isn't that bad, especially when your fridge is decently filled. Most of the heat capacity is in the contents, not in the air. My current fridge is already off for multiple hours at a time. With a couple degrees of margin and a little bit of high-heat-capacity padding, this is realistic to do.

Clothes dryers: Agree, don't start a wash cycle, then wait 8 hours after finishing to start the drying cycle. But delaying both at once does work.

Hot water heaters: Already being done at a smaller scale, look up Quooker. Given known usage pattern, the replenishment of hot water can also be delayed.

Ice cooling: The math checks out. The temperature difference of 200 gallons of water from 5F to 70F provides over 400.000 BTU of heat capacity. A quick Google tells me that the upper size of air conditioning capacity is 14.000 BTU / hour, so that's more than enough. Given proper isolation, this can probably be lowered by at least an order of magnitude. 20 gallons isn't that much, in my opinion. Besides, this is already being done in practice, using the underlying soil as heat buffer. It has enough capacity for a whole season.

It's not ideal, but mathematically it checks out.

> It shouldn’t be hard for my fridge or hot water heater to buy a kWh of electricity anytime over the next 7 hours to do it’s thing.

I think you'll find the idea of exposing the electricity market directly to consumers is not highly popular with consumers. Not that this is necessarily a bad idea, but definitely not popular right now. If you can think of a good way for the signalling layer of that to work, and find a utility to work with, then certainly it could help, but it isn't going to do everything you want.

> Same for dishwashers and clothes dryers: I’m 100% okay with pressing “Clean/dry within 8 hours” setting.

Maybe you don't do laundry that often, but leaving wet clothing in a dryer for eight hours is not a good idea, in my experience.

> It shouldn’t be hard to convince people to replace their AC with a unit that makes ice overnight if it cuts their electricity bill in half.

Due to thermodynamics, this is not helpful.

> Same for electric cars: I don’t care if it charges between 2AM and 4 AM or 7AM and 9AM, as long as it’s topped off by 9AM.

That's mostly new load (as far as the electrical utilities are concerned), so it isn't helping reduce peak demand.

Flexible demand doesn't go far enough. There are very cold weeks with little wind or sun (the sky might be clear, but because of angles there isn't much sun anyway). We would have to heat our houses to over 100C to keep the pipes from freezing before the end of the cold spell. Similar problems exist in summer.

Demand can help a little in that we can heat houses warming in the evening while the wind is blowing and let the house drift down all night.

Of course better insulation is assumed, but then you need an air exchanger which needs power to run as well.

How do you do industrial heating without natural gas? Last I heard heating with electricity was ridiculously expensive.

High temperature nuclear reactors?

More likely process heat from SMRs and other compact nuclear reactors.

Hydro is an option, albeit limited by location

Define industrial heating?

Low grade heat can be got from heat pumps. It can be topped up to a higher temperature with resistive heating.

You can also lower demand for heat with heat exchangers, insulation and such.

So a chemical process that required 50c would be fairly easy to do. Smelting metals gets harder.

That's an interesting topic. I wonder if the cooling down of steel in a steel mill can be used to increase the temperature of the smelting pots.

For an integrated Steel mill most of the heat comes from chemical energy (i.e exothermic reactions).

In the blast furnace this comes from Coke, in BOS/LD Converter alloys such as ferrosilicon or silicon carbide "heat raisers" can be used to increase the temperature.

Modern plants have things like cogeneration and recovery turbines to produce electricity from the off gas.

Biggest electricity usage tends to be from things like extraction fans and conveyor belt motors.

If we're going to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, we'll probably have to replace blast furnaces with something like hydrogen direct reduction, which needs boatloads of electricity to produce the hydrogen.

There's an aluminium smelter a 100kms or so away from where I live which is using electricity for smelting. It does use a lot of electricity but by being such a large consumer, it gets very large discounts.

But for this same reason, we have deliberately built them in places where electricity is cheap, often right next to hydro power plants. I don't think existing factories that are converted could get deals that are quite as good.

Industrial heating is one of the solutions to the problem, because a lot of processes are not that time-critical. Some processes already require electricity, such as arc furnaces. However, as the process cost is dominated by the electricity usage, they are already being run at times when the electricity cost is very low, that is, when there is overcapacity. This makes it easy to absorb overproduction of a grid which is intentionally oversized for peak demand. It's already not unheard of for industries to get paid to consume electricity.

Definitely nuclear. But you need to have a plant size that is right. That is, you shouldn't have grid scale reactors for this, as the power source has to be within a couple of miles of the factory/process location. So the size of the reactor has to be on the order of 10 to 50 mW. And you need a good method for getting the heat there - probably a molten salt intermediate heat transfer system... There are a couple of nuclear companies doing this seriously.

> With a ~20% learning curve, that is ~5 doublings from today, so more than net electricity demand

Just to pick up on that point, electricity demand will have to be a lot higher in future, because we're going to need to electrify transport and heating. That would be worth perhaps another doubling or more in electricity demand. And road transport at least looks like it's locked in to happen over the course of 2-3 decades through pure market forces.

Global electricity demand will skyrocket as places that now have less than ideal grids come online and local proliferation of cheaper electronics continues.

"proliferation of cheaper electronics"

Electronics use very little electricity.

The biggest users of electricity are things with motors or heaters. Washing machines, dryers, ovens, kettles, etc. Electronics by comparison are a rounding error.

Except for places where there are a LOT of electronics, like datacenters.

Even there - the lions share of electricity is consumed COOLING those electronics, but it is a fair point.

That is not correct, cooling uses maybe 20% of the electricity used by the electronics themselves.

But aren't all electronics just converting 99% of electricity to heat? Electronics don't just consume electricity by themselves -- they convert it to heat/light or noise.

True, but an air conditioning system removes multiple kWhrs of heat for each kWhr of electricity.

See for example here: http://www.currentforce.com.au/coefficient-of-performance/

As I understand it, cooling the data centres uses as much electricity as the servers themselves use[1].

Of course you could make a very good case for including that in the electronics usage totals anyway.

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph240/mangu2/

> The biggest users of electricity are things with motors or heaters

I'd guess it's something industrial. Chemicals, in particular, are energy-intensive processes.

Most of the energy in an industrial process would be heat? With second being mixing and other movement?

So that's back to motors and heaters. I cant think of any exceptions apart from electrolysis.

> Most of the energy in an industrial process would be heat?

I don't believe so. When industrial processes require heat, I've usually seen the fuel burned at the plant. Electricity is used for compressors, pumps and such.

You said energy, I assumed electrical energy. So yes most heat probably comes from burning fuel direct.

Would be interesting to know what proportion of electrical energy is used in heating. I would guess its non negligible.

Edit: Making make sense, and addition.

Aluminium production requires lots of electricity. Other metal recycling and heat treating processes too, not to mention extrudation processes.

AFAIK a lot of steel recycling around the world uses electric arc furnaces.

Yeah, electrolysis of aluminum is a huge user of power. You've got the heating to several hundred degrees Celsius and electrolysis combined.

Aluminum smelters. The Hall-Heroult process alone accounts for something like 2% of worldwide electricity consumption.

"Electronics by comparison are a rounding error"

Big rounding error!

By 2040, computers will need more electricity than the world can generate

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/25/semiconductor_indus...

Double check the table on that article, particularly the scale.

Then as a quick sanity check, consider whether the thing you are actually predicting will in fact use more electricity than the world uses, and still carry on growing exponentially.

Double check before you post if you are really smarter than the guys at ITRS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Technology_Roadm... ) or if you are just maybe incapable to understand the graph.

The scale on the left is orders of magnitude 1.00E+3 is 1000, 1.00E+4 is 10000, do you have a different interpretation?

The benchmark line on the graph shows that by 2040 we'll be using 1.00E22 electricity versus 1.00E21 world usage. So that means we'll be using 10 times more electricity on computing than everything else. And the lines seem to cross at about 2037. Do you think we can increase electricity production 10 fold in 3 years?

We're talking as you say a doubling or tripling of demand for electricity in that case.

The costs to replace the current transmission and distribution grids in the US are estimated at $500 billion and $1800 billion, respectively.

So we're talking ballpark $5 trillion to enable a tripling in electricity demand. Over a ten year period, this corresponds approximately to the entire US defense budget.

We're literally talking about digging up all of the streets, everywhere. I don't want to be negative, but that's what we are talking about.

> We're literally talking about digging up all of the streets, everywhere. I don't want to be negative, but that's what we are talking about.

Aren't the vast majority of power lines above ground?

I was thinking about this very problem the other day and I think it actually may be the best reason why residential storage batteries (as opposed to grid-scale) make sense. It might be easier to keep your transmission system and then trickle charge a whole bunch of small batteries to power end uses.

The increase wouldn't be evenly distributed though. Industrial areas where huge buildings need to be heated and a lot of freight traffic happens might see a much larger increase in power demand than a remote farm.

If we manage to coordinate the charging patterns of cars (for example with electricity prices that change by the minute based on local demand) we might not even need to replace most of the residential grid: Personal vehicles are mostly charged over night when load is currently at 1/4 of the peak handeled in the evening. A lot of other uses like heating can also be shifted with the right incentives to not occur at times of peak usage, further reducing the load increase.

I don’t think that’s actually true, transmission grids are built to handle peak demand, and a doubling or a tripling of total electricity use does not mean a doubling or tripling of peak usage.

In temperate climates for instance charging of cars will almost entirely happen overnight, with a significant rate discount. The basic existence of such a large battery will smooth out the peaks as well as add to them. In fact you’re likely to get far better utilization out of the existing infrastructure, and any new infrastructure which is built, which will bring the per unit costs down.

And in any case, the electricity grid pays for itself, if people are willing to pay the going rate then the infrastructure can be built to satisfy that demand. What is the amount of money spent each year on maintaining and upgrading oil and gas infrastructure? For that matter what is spent maintaining the existing grid? These are huge figures, electricity companies will not be doing this for free, they are happy to maintain the grid in exchange for the revenues that come from it, and they will be only too happy to grow into competitor markets and use what was their competitors’ revenues to fund their expansion.

> transmission grids are built to handle peak demand, and a doubling or a tripling of total electricity use does not mean a doubling or tripling of peak usage.

Well, in theory no. But in practice, if you look at the duck curve [1] of any electrical distribution system, you find that the difference between lowest and highest load during the day is pretty small, maybe 30% of peak load. So really there is a very limited potential to be had by smoothing out the curve, maybe you can get a 20% increase in total electricity use, but certainly not a 200% increase.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

> What is the amount of money spent each year on maintaining and upgrading oil and gas infrastructure? For that matter what is spent maintaining the existing grid?

Annual maintenance cost for the US T&D grid is $40 billion. We're talking "increase it by a factor of 10". If you assume the power companies pass this cost onto customers with zero profit margin, it's an increase in the electricity price of 9 cents per kWh. Current national average price is 10 cents per kWh. So it's doubling the price of electricity, while saying "we will use 2x-3x as much of it". An increase of 4x to 6x in your electricity bill.

To estimate out how much slack there is in local distribution systems, you want to look at the demand curve rather than the duck curve. Further, you want to look at the peak of this curve on a high-demand day -- for California, that means a hot summer day. For northerly regions it will be a cold winter day.

http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

It looks like the minimum CAISO demand today -- during the shoulder season -- was 19 gigawatts.

Here are the CAISO historical peak loads from 1998-2018:

https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...

The peak last year was 46 gigawatts on July 25. The peak in 2017 was 50 gigawatts on September 1. So I do think it's fair to say that there is a 2x factor of minimum:maximum use on at least some existing grids.

There's one more issue, of course: how much minimum-period slack is left on the day of high demand conditions? Using the date picker on the demand curve to go back to July 25, 2018, it looks like demand bottomed out at 26 gigawatts around 4:00 AM. There is still a significant diurnal variation in demand that could be used for several hours of nighttime EV charging without increasing system capacity.

The difference between peak load and lowest load change a lot depending on where you look. Geography plays a huge role (heating/cooling running in the night?).

The effect on the individual subgrids can also be much larger than on the grid seen as a whole. For example if you look at [1] (a graph of a hot California day in 1999 taken from [2]) you have commercial peak load at 3 times the low point, residential peak at about 4 times the low point, and industrial peak and agricultural peak at maybe 1.3 times their low points. However because of the way the peaks are offset from each other the total demand only varies by a factor of two. So the spare capacity in off-peak times of any individual power line might be much higher than a graph of total demand suggests.

1: https://www.mpoweruk.com/images/elec_load_demand.gif

2: https://www.mpoweruk.com/electricity_demand.htm

"Current national average price is 10 cents per kWh"

That is amazingly cheap compared other places around the world.

> Annual maintenance cost for the US T&D grid is $40 billion. We're talking "increase it by a factor of 10”

You quoted $2300bn to replace the transmission and distribution system, you say you’d need to increase the $40bn maintenance figure tenfold to replace the grid, but $400bn a year would mean doing that in five and half years. In reality whatever increases turn out to be needed have to happen over thirty to forty years.

And of course doubling demand would be accompanied by huge extra revenues, the electricity system takes in on the order of $400bn a year, doubling the unit production of electricity would mean $12tn of extra revenues, $24tn in total revenues over a 30 year timescale, relative to this it’s difficult to see how $2tn of extra costs on its own can mean a doubling in electricity rates, as you suggest.

That's really not the case, and plenty of utilities have come out saying that residential electric cars won't cause much issue for them. That's not to say there won't be some costs, but it's not nearly so dramatic.

The main issue is peak vs. base load on the grid. BEV charging affects base load, and with variable pricing, won't affect peak load much at all. When you further consider that most infrastructure has some margin to accommodate increased loads, along with on-site generation with rooftop solar and 'powerwall' batteries, you'll see that there's a lot of room for growth.

Even in cases where substantial capacity increases are required, it doesn't amount to a wholesale replacement of current infrastructure. It means adding more 'backbone' transmission capacity, some substations, and a few key distribution overhauls. The expensive 'last mile' stuff won't need significant changes.

Disclaimer: I helped create those Carbon Tracker graphs.

> - The author states that renewables are on the verge of being "cheaper than the cost of continuing to operate existing coal- or gas-fueled power plants". They support this argument with some cherry-picked examples. Realistically, that is not true, nor will it likely every be true.

In the case of coal, it certainly is true in many regions. Natural gas I agree is quite different, particularly given the role it will play providing flexible capacity as renewables penetrate further. But across Europe new renewables are cheaper to build than to operate existing coal, due to ageing fleets, tightening air pollution regulations and the carbon price. Same for the US, except without the carbon price. [*edit - And obviously the rapid cost reductions in renewables!]. And we see quite strong trends for Asia, SEA etc.

You can find more detail on the coal trajectories in our global report, Powering Down Coal and online portal [0].

[0] https://www.carbontracker.org/reports/coal-portal/

Apologies :).

However, you really cannot compare coal to renewables directly, since it's an apples to oranges type comparison. If you include externalities like a carbon tax in the cost curves then the you really need to understand the nuances to properly interpret those graphs.

I should have said please keep the nuances in mind when trying to interpret the graphs, and thank you for your efforts!

And are you including subsidies when you plot your cost of solar?

are there even subsidies left on solar on commercial installations?

No worries at all!

Regarding the technology comparison, that is true from a power system point of view - but for a utility which is making investment decisions in new generation capacity, it isn't so different. We include carbon taxes because coal power operators suffer that tax, it isn't an assumption about future policies. And equally to someone else's question about whether subsidies are included in solar costs, the answer is no. Because the LCOE is calculated from current module, balance of system and soft costs, and that while subsidies have brought the costs down, they aren't a component of the LCOE. As for system costs which perhaps you are referring to, that is fair from the system viewpoint but not particularly for the marginal unit of new capacity. UKERC have done some good research in the UK on system costs of renewables integration which perhaps you are referring to [0].

But you're absolutely right that there is a lot of nuance, especially around regional power market differences.

[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-whole-system-costs-rene...

> but for a utility which is making investment decisions in new generation capacity, it isn't so different.

You are probably familiar with all of this, but that's a tricky one since dispatchability puts those into different equivalence classes. California ISO has negative LMPs right now, which means building additional solar provides little marginal value to the utility. As a result, even if the "traditional" LCOE for solar (just using capital cost, O&M, and capacity factor) is lower than coal, coal would technically still have higher value to the utility.

You'd have to model real-time demand and fratricide to get a average marginal rate (almost impossible to predict for a 20-30 year horizon right now, given rate of innovation), and then compare that against the amortized capital cost and O&M to get an expected ROI for the plant. An LCOE comparison wouldn't really make sense from a decision making standpoint.

That wouldn't be true if they were both closely equivalent (say NGCC vs NGCT, or coal vs nuclear). Then a strict LCOE comparison would be useful.

Fair point about California's negative LMPs, but I think for a lot of regions in the US there is still a lot of room for renewable growth.

But it is fair to compare LCOEs because solar usually gets its value through long-term PPAs; either utility to generator, or even through the rate-base, and the price of that is effectively set by the LCOE. Despite missing out a lot of the other factors that you reasonably bring up, from system costs to locational factors.

When articles say energy source X costs Y per kilowatt hour, do those costs include cleanup? For example, does the $0.10/kWh for offshore wind in 2020 include tearing down that nice clean windmill when it wears out?

Grid-scale bids are generally full lifecycle costs. It includes construction, operation, maintenance, and EoL.

do you publish reports / models / analysis ? I've been eager to find such documents for years

With some personal interest and research I've judged for two decades, (before the IPCC managed to reach consensus) that the potential economic performance of wind and solar is constantly under-estimated and this belief, (admittedly partly intuitive) has year after year been proven true. Even while lacking investment programs of trillions of dollars into R&D which would have been entirely sensible and affordable, proven by greater amounts spent on conflict in the name of security.

I find it beyond justification or excuse how major official forecasters can year after year be so vision-less and pessimistic. We can make floating deep-sea wind farms - and floating solar. We can make better and better batteries and storage facilities as soon as dispatchability and curtailment are close to being a significant cost in a handful of places. Cost of renewable energy has cruised downward with tepid incentives provided by governments. It can plummet within years of serious international public investment in R&D.

There's really no excuse for persistently pessimistic predictions like this [1], from major and professional industry forecasters -

[1] http://www.mining.com/web/charts-energy-experts-hilariously-...

You claim the author is cherry-picking, and then you say this:

> The marginal cost for natural gas is roughly ~1.8 cents/kWh today (including O&M)

I am assuming you worked this out using the Henry Hub prices of circa $2.50/mmscf - yes? But hardly any gas consumers pay these prices, even in the US. In Florida and New York, for example, the prices are more like $5.00/mmscf, and can be even higher. And in the rest of the world - which accounts for the vast majority of electricity production - the prices are far higher still, commonly around $10/mmscf, today.

>solar would have to be ~$0.50/W ... ... that is ~5 doublings from today

Not really sure what $0.50/W means here - is it $0.50 CAPEX per "peak watt"? If so: The cost of utility scale solar power plants today is around $1.00/peak watt, so with your assumption of a 20% learning curve it will only take 3 doublings to reach that.

Since you seem to actually know what you are talking about, what do you think about nuclear power?

I am pro-nuclear myself but that's mostly because I think it is cool rather than for rational reasons. The problem is that I have a lot of trouble finding reliable data. What I have gathered so far is:

- The capital costs are ridiculously expensive.

- Decomissionning is also ridiculously expensive, and so is maintaining older reactors.

- Fuel is cheap and plentyful.

- The ecological footprint is low, possibly the lowest, except when it goes boom.

- Waste management is an overblown problem.

- It is great for base load (very high capacity factor), not economically viable otherwise.

- Doesn't play well with wind and solar for the previous reason.

Modern plants don't need to be decommissioned. All parts are fully replaceable. Additionally, the point about maintaining older reactors isn't entirely relevant if we are talking about building new ones.

With regards to capital construction costs, there are a number of factors in western countries that seem to drive up costs, and there is a lot of debate around the relative impact of unnecessary litigation that delays project construction, and the enforcement of safety regulations that were designed for older reactors.

There is no arguing which energy source China is investing in most - they have approximately 25 reactors under construction right now.

> Modern plants don't need to be decommissioned. All parts are fully replaceable. Additionally, the point about maintaining older reactors isn't entirely relevant if we are talking about building new ones.

That was my point. You can either extend the life of reactors almost indefinitely, which is very expensive. Or you can build new ones, which is also very expensive.

I heard that new reactors are indeed easier to maintain but to what extent? When every part becomes a radioactive mess, it may be a better idea to properly decommission the plant and build a new one with new technology rather than to change every single part, even if it is possible. There will be a point where it will happen, and it will be expensive, and hopefully, properly budgeted.

Politics certainly play a role in the costs but the plant itself is inherently expensive. For example, the reactor vessel is single 500 tonne part made of a special kind of stainless steel. In fact every part inside the reactor has to be designed to resist radiation. And of course, the safety requirements are huge. I think the EPR has 4 different cooling systems, for redundancy and to avoid having to deal with another Fukushima disaster.

As for China, AFAIK, not only they are investing a lot in nuclear power, but they are very good at it.

You are probably looking at wholesale electricity production. At the retail end of the line things look different. But first a disclaimer: I'm an Australian, and we pay around AUD$0.27/kW hr. It varies a bit - one state it's closer to AU$0.36/kW hr.

Right now if you buy a PV + battery system that will cover all your usage, you are looking at $20K before rebates [0]. If that drops to $10K it becomes better for households to switch from being users to generators - where "better" means better than investing the cash and getting a 5% return after inflation over 10 years. In other words it's a no brainier. If a household doesn't choose to do it themselves, someone will come knocking on their door and pay them to do it.

For Australia that is the tipping point. Once we cross it the electricity market will change forever into something unrecognisable. There are 9M houses in Australia which when fitted with today "standard" 6.6 kW system with 5 kW inverter will generate 50% of our daily electricity usage. But it won't just be profitable for houses of course - it's not like businesses don't have roof space too. It's not too hard to see that other 50% disappearing too.

The thing preventing it from happening right now is battery prices. Battery are ignored as far too expensive by people looking at grid storage and right now they are too expensive for households too - but if that 8% per year improvement figure being bandied about is correct we will hit that $10k threshold in 10 years.

It won't suddenly happen in 10 years. We've are seeing close to EOL coal fired generators bought by purchasers saying they would squeeze another 20 or 30 years out them later shut down not long after. I'm not sure why, but the pattern has been repeated several times now. I do know in Australia the wholesale electricity price used to go negative most nights. Now we don't know if that still happens because our conservative government shut down the reporting of the wholesale price, however I suspect it's worse - not only does it go negative at night, it must also go negative at when the wind blows hard. Having to pay others to dig the coal out of the ground because you can't adjust quickly enough must be painful.

Regardless of why they're shut down, it's now pretty obvious every time a coal fired plant shuts down the prices go up the next year because it's happened several times. And so more people buy solar - we have the highest household solar penetration in the world. While the price goes does up less people pay it, overall less money comes in and around and around we go. The pace seems to be accelerating, and it will continue to accelerate until the wholesale price starts dropping. When most of your existing generation comes from coal, and coal generators are being retired every couple of years, it's hard to see that happening any time soon.

I don't know why the focus is always on the prices wholesale end of the chain. The big change isn't that renewables are slowly catching up to wholesale prices - the big change is they have already passed retail prices. While putting a coal fired generator or wind turbine in your back year was never feasible, throwing a few solar panels on your roof and installing a battery is feasible. Sure, the power generated costs 2x what a wholesaler can generate it for - but in Australia the price the wholesaler gets jumps by a factor of 3x to 4x. If battery prices keep dropping, there will be enough space for them to fit right in.

[0] It's actually used $20K for this type of system right now. After rebates it's about $13K right now, but when households are threatening to wipe out 50% of the generation market I expect the rebates will disappear.

[1] Average wholesale price: AUD$0.073 https://www.aemc.gov.au/energy-system/electricity/electricit...

[2] Average retail price: AUD$0.27 https://www.canstarblue.com.au/electricity/electricity-costs...

These trends are excellent and impressive.

> But these problems are distant. Renewables will start to encounter them in earnest when solar makes up >20-30% of electricity and when wind makes up >40-50% of electricity. Today, worldwide, solar is only 2% and wind is only perhaps 6% of global electricity. Cheap multi-hour storage will arrive before that (indeed, in the next few years), lowering the price of using solar to meet the evening peak, and of dealing with intermittency on the order of minutes to several hours. Only seasonal storage (and perhaps the political challenges of long-range transmission) seem to be truly difficult problems. And we have time before they begin to impair the growth of renewables.

This is where things get hard. Besides electricity, we also have to clean up all transportation, industrial, and space heating. This isn't so distant in an energy systems perspective. This is where having things like nuclear power plants with district heating will likely be important.

Until then, it's great to see wind and solar performing so excellently.

I still can't believe San Bernardino county already NIMBY-banned more large solar installations in the California deserts.

With electricity going towards renewables, it seems clear that the best strategy will be to get the other major uses of energy on electricity as well.

Vehicles have a clear (if long) path to electrification. But what about heating buildings? My understanding is that electric heating is not cost effective compared to carbon based fuels. Lower costs driven by renewables can help here, but will it be enough? Are there alternatives being developed to tackle this major energy use?

A lot can be done just by upgrading technology, regardless of the energy source. For example, heat pumps achieve more than 100% (!) efficiency (i.e. by exchanging heat between outdoors and inside of the building, you can heat it up more than you could by just converting the spent energy straight into heat). I imagine similar can be achieved with better insulation.

I don't think that's quite the right energy balance for heat pumps ;)

You can upgrade equipment but that's not even remotely a solution to decarbonize at the rates we apparently need. There are lots of quadrillion BTUs that need to be decarbonized, and upgrades alone won't get us there. We need clean energy sources to ramp up and replace natural gas, oil, and coal.

A modern furnace is only expected to last 20 years or so. Upgrading equipment is a solution is the upgrade isn't too expensive. I've looked into geothermo heat pumps a few times in the past, and they never worked out because of cost. I'm thinking seriously about replacing my current (working) furnace with a heat pump though just because I want some zoning that the natural gas furnace cannot do.

> I don't think that's quite the right energy balance for heat pumps ;)

It's exactly right. A good heat pump will have a coefficient of performance (COP) of 5, which means for every watt of electricity put in, 5 watts of heat is moved from outside to inside - effectively an efficiency of 500%. While resistance electric heat and fossil fuel can never give more heat than the energy put in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Performance_consider...

5 is highly optimistic. Real world average efficiency is closer to 2.5 (lower in colder climates) because there are a lot of variables you have to get exactly right to hit that 5 COP, and they very rarely line up.

Source: I have a Fujitsu 36K BTU cold climate 4-zone system installed two years ago to replace electric baseboard heat. [1]

[1] - http://www.fujitsugeneral.com/us/products/multi/2-3-4rooms/a...

Better building codes for insulation & air sealing, and air source heat pumps, which can provide 5kW of heat for 1kW of electricity depending on the weather & unit.

As far as I hear the operating performance is mostly there with the heat pumps, now they just need to bring down the unit cost (and do a little more work on performance in very cold weather)

There's still the problem of powering the heat pumps with clean energy in winter. It has to come from somewhere. These polar vortices aren't getting any milder. This is a massive slice of the energy pie that requires discipline and planning to decarbonized. I worry because I perceive complacency due to cheap natural gas and I fear we won't come close to decarbonizing enough unless we're serious and quantitative. How many new kW of heat pumps would it take to heat the US Midwest through a winter?

I'm not close enough to the problem to identify the solution with authority, but there are many options. Most significantly to me, long distance transmission lines will hopefully allow sunny Arizona to sell power to wintery Minnesota. But I do agree about the pitfalls of complacency.

The beautiful thing about electrification is its source agnosticism. You can put in heat pumps today, power them off natural gas turbines for now, and switch out to something better in the future at will. As long as your heat pumps can achieve COP of ~2 or better for most of the winter, they should have comparable overall efficiency if we assume the electricity from the natural gas plant is in total about 50% efficient.

Or a home natural gas turbine that also runs your heat pump compressor. And condenses the steam for high efficiency.

Over here heat pumps are quite popular (both ground source and air). Problem is people size them so they can get through most of the winter, but for cold spells they're not enough and you need supplemental resistive heating.

Sure, cost optimal for the individual consumer, but for the entire grid?

Depends where you are: in a lot of places, it only gets cold when a weather system moves in, which means lots of wind power available.

The backup power could be propane, but electric-resistive is still cheaper.

The other issue is that air source heat pumps should really create blocks of ice from municipal water and then dump them in the yard, instead of trying to squeeze heat out of cold air.

Where I live, cold spells unfortunately tend to coincide with very low winds.

And yeah, adding a supplemental resistive heater to a heat pump is certainly a lot cheaper than adding a separate combustion based backup heating source.

For some reason, we don't really use propane over here, except for running grills in the summer, or for boat stoves etc. Fossil fuel heating for houses tends to be fuel oil, though that is on the way out.

30-50% of electricity is going to renewables, and how. Above that, intermittency and storage is significantly challenging.

Don't forget jets. Jets are mega-emitters and have very few electrification options because lithium-ion has about a 50th the energy per mass as jet fuel.

For heating, cheap, fracked natural gas is dominating in the US, with a battle cry of "better than coal"! Unfortunately it's still extremely high carbon. They do amazing PR though.

China is building a few supercheap swimming pool TRIGA nuclear reactors specifically for district heating in northern regions for winter, where coal is the only alternative. This is wild, but makes sense. They aren't usually used commercially because the temperatures are too low for conversion to electricity. But for straight heat it makes plenty of sense.

Also heat pumps can help but won't get you there alone.

Other than being super explosive would liquid hydrogen work for an airplane?

Even if the safety issues could be resolved, the cooling requirements and high volume make liquid hydrogen impractical for commercial aviation.

The most likely carbon neutral solutions for aviation fuel are either algae produced bio fuels, or synthetic hydrocarbons manufactured using renewable energy.

*Manufacturer using low-carbon energy.

At the moment, biofuels are renewable but high-carbon and nuclear is low-carbon but not (considered) renewable.

I know nothing about the topic, but there seems to be a nice Wikipedia article that your question prompted me to find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-powered_aircraft

I'm suddenly imagining a hydrogen balloon-plane at take off that uses up the hydrogen in the balloon as it flies, until the balloon has been fully reeled back into the plane and it lands on a runway like a normal plane, with reserve hydrogen in its wing-tanks.

If you time it right, it just slowly drifts to the ground and lands vertically with a slight jolt.

Depends on your definition of aeroplane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_%28spacecraft%29#SABRE_...

Regarding aviation: worldwide and in the EU, transportation accounts for about 25% of energy consumption [1].

Aviation accounts for 10-13% of transportation [2]. (global data looks similar, although I don't have a link at hand)

So while 2.5% is not nothing, it is only a small fraction of energy consumption and could remain Kerosene based in the medium term.

Also, a lot of flights could theoretically be shifted to high speed rail.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#By_se...

[2] (2016) https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/transport...

If we can use electricity to turn atmospheric CO2 back into jet fuel it could still be net zero emissions. At that point the planes are just using hydrocarbons as a means of dense energy storage.

Technologically-speaking, been done; the economics aren’t quite there yet, but there are some promising noncarbonization paths that potentially could scale to price-parity, depending on global fuel costs.

Going into the future, I think the assumption that one needs to hit exact parity with existing fossil fuels at their current price point will be re-examined. The economic comparison should be conventional extraction fossil fuels + externality costs vs cost of a scaled carbon neutral jet fuel production.

One could already see maybe small scale operations capturing niches - maybe if a corporation that operates a private jet wants to further a reduction in their carbon footprint.

Completely agree that the best and most market-friendly path is to take socialized CO2 costs and apply them to point-of-emission prices — though I doubt entrenched interests of the iron triangle variety will allow that to happen. Nonetheless, if we assume Johnson and Hope (2012)’s range of $55-$266 social cost per ton of CO2, even current capture-and-sequester methods look price-competitive, which is encouraging!

Politically, I wonder if the best solution is the approach the other end of the development cycle, with dynamically scaling investment incentives that expand your "credit limit" to lend more if your projects successfully reduce carbon, but overall scale back as total carbon emissions reduce. Sort of a Green New Deal Fannie Mae type entity. Add in incentives to retire stranded fossil fuel centric assets like fracking rights, etc. This creates a psychologically different environment, more like a Fear of Missing Out on the development rush instead of a Fear of getting a Big Stick regulation.

Sounds like an approach that would coexist nicely alongside technology funding efforts! ARPA-E and EERE have done some great work in that regard; thankfully and a bit surprisingly Congress has so far declined to defund them, despite the Trump administration’s consistent efforts to shut them down, so hopefully they’ll continue to support innovative and incremental advances. Adding carbon incentives to a tax-and-rebate scenario (should we ever get to that) would seem prudent.

I not intimately familiar with ARPA-E and EERE funding programs, but if the follow the common model of selection of funding to a expert tech evaluators, they are a bit different from what I was musing about. They aren't bad, just far too constrained for what we need.

Instead, I'm for transferring funding decisions under the program to a much more open set of actors to originate investment loans (much like mortgage brokers). The investment performances are evaluated on their successes/feasibility, the loans purchased from their originators with high feasibility (i.e. we're scaling known limits), as well as opening up higher origination limits (if they prove out better carbon negative/netural tech). It's more of a financial tooling solution than a tech centered solution. This increases the possibility of failures, but provides a regulated scale out needed with a optimization criteria to keep scaling along successful lines with more organizations rewarded who make successful carbon investments. Experts like ARPA-E could definitely be involved in assessment, but the scale would be completely different then what has gone on before.

The economics are extremely attractive if you have an abundance of electricity production at unpredictable times with build electricity rates tending negative occasionally. Turn that excess electricity into kerosene for jets and ocean travel and turn a profit!

This is discussed in this headline article on carbon capture developments on the BBC today. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47638586

Check out carbon engineering[1]. They are using direct air capture and hydrogen to create synthetic fuels using a fischer-tropsch like process.

https://www.carbonengineering.com/

Could we power airplanes with ethanol? I've heard that we couldn't realistically grown enough corn/canes to produce ethanol for all cars, but if cars are electric, could we potentially produce enough ethanol for airplanes?

If we can't make enough ethanol for all air travel, I'm still optimistic. It's likely that battery densities will become good enough for us to have electrically powered regional jets within the next decade. Then only long flights would need liquid fuels. As a last option, we could also switch to high-speed trains for continental travel.

Piston-engined aircraft, which are basically just light general aviation aircraft, can and have used ethanol.

Most commercial aircraft use jet engines. Other biofuels that are chemically closer to kerosene can be used in most existing jet engines in blends; use of 100% biofuels for hasn't been extensively tested-- but it has been tested![0] This is also the highest-hanging fruit and I wouldn't worry about it in 2019.

[0]https://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=96702

Turbine engines in theory can run on almost any flammable liquid. However in practice they would need substantial re-engineering. Also ethanol is less energy-dense than kerosene/jet fuel.

Have high-power turbocharged piston engines been run on ethanol in service? I’m not aware of any. GA piston fleet has the common property where 20% of the fleet burns 70+% of the fuel as they are working airplanes. (Think CapeAir and similar in passenger service.) Those highly stressed turbocharged engines have lower detonation margins, currently requiring tetraethyl lead additive to meet worst case detonation margins.

The US DOD has a project which qualifies what is essentially biodiesel (bio-derived JP8) for use in jet aircraft.

There's not a lot of work to do, just the details of making a mil-spec standard and then doing the testing in each engine type. In other words, everyday blocking and tackling not scientific breakthroughs.

A lot of companies are working on electric planes for short haul flights:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/08/the-electric-aircraft-is-t...

And what fraction of aviation emissions are short haul? My hunch is not much. Factor of 50x in energy density really matters in the air.

It’s closer to 19x when you consider engine efficiency. Heat is not that useful on it’s own.

Considering jets already do 9,500 mile flights a 500 mile range seems viable. But, if you start talking significant amounts of electric aircraft, very short landings for battery swapping are also possible. That's not going to get you to Hawaii, but it's still faster than taking a high speed train.

PS: You can also push these numbers as electricity is much cheaper than jet fuel. Electric engines also weigh less than batters which allows for a higher mass fraction for fuel. Shorter flights also have lower penalties for going slower. So, an optimized electric aircraft could probably make 800 miles with similar costs to current jets without any major breakthroughs.

Yes, and it could be viable for short flights with mountains between, where it's hard to build high speed rail, like flights LA<->Las Vegas.

Ops: Electric engines also weigh less than jet engines which allows for a higher mass fraction for batteries.

Really? I thought turbines were really excellent in terms of power to weight?

Currently you can get 10kw/kg turbines and 10kw/kg electric motors so they are close.

However, the turbines require more infrastructure around the turbine. Put another way, simply comparing fuel vs batteries ignores the weight of fuel tanks, fuel pumps, etc. We care about the system not just individual components. That said, the fact that burned fuel reduces aircraft weight is a huge advantage over batteries.

Building science has been stonewalled and ignored by regulators who work closely with property developers. The efficiency of US buildings/homes is abysmal, and because energy is relatively cheap, there is little economic pressure to invest in efficiency upgrades.

It’s because of AC too. In France buildings have to be more efficient else you die in the summer.

Europeans also need to understand that A/C does not make you ill.

It’s killing the planet and making you less aware of your surroundings though.

Most buildings aren't new. They're old. My house is over 100 years old, and it could still be standing in another 100 years. The neighborhood is mostly these old houses, and lots of the people living here are retirees or young couples who simply don't have the money to do massive renovations on their homes. And frankly, there's an upper limit to the energy efficiency of a drafty old bungalow.

Speaking as someone who spent a good part of my life renovating homes, I can tell you that there is not much of an "upper limit" to the energy efficiency of an older home. If you're already planning on renovating a home, there is an incremental $25-$50k energy efficiency improvements that you can make to turn the house into a nearly net-zero energy home.

The issue is that the young couple who do renovate their home have a far better ROI on updating the kitchen + bathroom than the efficiency of the house.

As half of a young couple that's at the cusp of starting a remodel (focusing as you point out on bathrooms and the kitchen), I'd be very interested in your thoughts on what's possible in terms of efficiency.

We're replacing the insulation in the attic and getting mini-split based cooling/heating. We also replaced the windows and briefly considered blown-in insulation for the walls, but weren't convinced that it would be worthwhile.

Sure! Email is in my profile. Happy to nerd out over building efficiency and help out.

For home heating, heap pumps are generally cost competitive with carbon based fuels in temperate climates. They become less efficient as the temperature drops until they are equivalent to resistance electric heating. However, they can be extended via ground source heating at reasonable cost.

Turning sunlight to heat directly is both cheap and efficient. Most often seen in greenhouses and solar pool heaters, but similar tech works on homes and hot water just fine. This does require sunlight so while it can work as far north as Maine it falls off in the Artic. Luckily a relatively small chunk of the global population lives that far north.

Electric heat pumps + insulating to PassivHaus standards is very much competitive with carbon based fuels in colder climates. The operating cost is very low. But the up front investment can be steep.

The insanity is that tons of houses have central air conditioning systems installed without a thought, and those are just heat pumps that can only be run one direction, for cooling.

The problem is that heat pump based heaters and cooling devices are still produced, marketed, and priced for the green and well off crowd, not the general public.

In the general public has no concept that the same technology they use for cooling could be used to heat their homes.

So far the manufacturers of heat pumps seem content with their well-off niche, and don't seem interested in scaling production so that the technology is available to regular folks.

Perhaps the margins on heat pumps aren't as good and they don't want to cannibalize their existing businesses selling natural gas powered heating systems, which they probably manufacture for a song (recall how Carrier ended up moving their home furnace production to Mexico anyway despite the political show that was made of them supposedly staying in Indiana)

In other parts of the world many split heat pump systems are much cheaper.

Or an air conditioner along with a separate pool heater.

Or a fridge/freezer that dumps out heat indoors during A/C season, and/or a hot water heater that isn’t combined with the refrigeration system.

A single heat pump could run it all: fridge, freezer, pool, HVAC and hot water. Maybe even a pre-heat element on a stove top.

>Maybe even a pre-heat element on a stove top.

Going a little far there. The preheat loop would have to survive regular heating element temperatures, and most common refrigerants decompose above 500C.

More like a keep-warm element on the stove top. Maybe it’s too close to the heating elements. Dunno. Would probably be fine for an inductive range.

Stovetop elements get over 900* F? That doesn’t seem intuitively right to me.

Both electric and infrared stovetops can get hot enough to glow red, which means they have to be at least 550C: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_heat

The problem is that heat pump based heaters and cooling devices are still produced, marketed, and priced for the green and well off crowd, not the general public.

When I was growing up I lived in a suburban American house that was built in 1982 and had a heat pump. It was a middle class suburb and none of the adults were environmental activists. Every house in the neighborhood had a heat pump. I thought this was totally normal.

With hindsight, I see that there was significantly more American concern about energy efficiency in the late 1970s and early 1980s than in the early 1990s, probably due to resumption of relatively low oil prices in the mid 1980s. It's sad that the attention to efficiency did not continue after the immediate crisis had passed.

The concern for energy efficiency died in the mid 1980s because there were a lot of badly done improvements. Many houses were insulated better - with a foam that had hazardous off gas problems. New homes were often insulated well and rotted away because the insulation trapped moisture. Heat pumps sounded good, but were useless on the cold days and so people paid huge power bills in January for electric heat.

None of the above problems are inherent in energy efficiency, but they did give the whole field a bad name.

In the UK, electric heating also got a reputation for not really having working temperature control. Because it was expensive to heat using day-rate electricity, most UK homes with electric heating have some kind of heat-storage system that charges at night at the "Economy 7" rate. The apartment I lived in (built 1984) heated up something like 100 lbs (60 kg) of ceramic blocks, for example. You could sort-of regulate how fast this heat dissipated during the day by opening and closing a vent, but in practice the biggest usable knob was choosing how much to charge overnight. That meant you had to predict before going to bed how much heat you'd want the next day! One strategy is to go very warm and then open your windows to cool back down if you overshot. Another strategy is to somewhat under-heat and then have a portable electric space heater to add extra heat in your immediate vicinity (though this is a common source of fires).

> PassivHaus standards

The PassivHaus stuff is a really good example of the derangement you get when people try to optimize for only one metric. PassivHaus's are expensive, mandate the use of petroleum based insulation (you're living in a plastic burger box), prone to water intrusion mold and sick building syndrome and the supposed efficiency gains disappear when you open a window.

Telling is the PassivHaus nutters response to builders wanting to use solar panels to build houses with low external energy needs. AKA why spend $100k on insulation when you can put a $20k worth of solar on the roof and a ground sourced heat pump. PassivHaus response is to get regulators to ban that option.

Even a cursory investigation or education of passivhaus concepts would show this to be nonsense.

Passivhaus is not focused on one metric. To achieve passivhaus there are many metrics measured. Energy use, overheating, air quality, thermal bridging... The list goes on. I'm not sure what one metric you're referring to.

Passivhaus does not mandate plastic based insulation. Many are built with cellulose, wood fibre,straw bales...

They are not in any way more prone to water intrusion any more than any other building.

They are far less likely to suffer sick building syndrome because ventilation standards are far higher than for 'normal' houses.

You can open the windows if you want. Sure, if you do it in -10 temperatures you lose some heat.

Passivhaus 'nutters' are generally apathetic about PV. You don't need PV ; simplicity is part of the point. The marginal cost on insulation is generally pretty low. The difficult but it's getting builders diligent enough for the challenge.

Hope that helps to encourage you to continue researching the subject.

> Passivhaus does not mandate plastic based insulation... wood fibre,straw bales...

So, I presume that in the case of a fire, they go up like a match?

i think you're confusing a haystack with a compressed straw bale - IIRC the fire resistance of a compressed straw bale is excellent. it singes on the outside but it's v difficult to burn through.

Plus, regs in your locale should cover this, but always good to DYOR.

There's a lot of greenwashing in the insulation business. Rockwool uses coal to melt stone, binds the fibers with formaldehyde, and puts the coal ash waste in the final product. That's not something I want deteriorating in my walls.

It's amazing to me that aerogel windows/skylights/multi-panes haven't gotten more attention in this arena. What if your window was as good an insulator as your wall? What if it was better? What if you could have translucent skylights heat the house without losing any (effectively) heat through them?

What happens if you like having the windows open?

Where is your sacred R value now?

When you open a window, do you open every single window in your house? If not, the greenhouse effect keeps working through the others.

> PassivHaus response is to get regulators to ban that option

Can you clarify what specifically this refers to - i.e. a particular law or regulation?

I really don't like the idea of PassivHaus. I don't want to live in a hermetically sealed pod. I like a house with a very high rate of fresh air exchange with the outdoors. There are so many sources of odor in a house that need to be cleared out, not to mention CO2.

Yeah, you could have some sophisticated ventilation with a heat exchanger but that's one more piece of equipment to maintain and if it fails without you noticing it then the air quality could decline very rapidly.

The current recommendation here is to air out for 5-10 minutes, 3 times a day. Not just one window open, but full airing out with as many open windows and doors as possible.

It's a good habit to get into, no matter how old and drafty or new and tightly sealed your house is.

These objections make sense, and in the right climate open windows will meet most of your comfort needs. In other climates controlling the movement of air is the only way to control the energy needed to heat and cool.

I think you misunderstand PassivHaus. Ventilation and air quality are a big part of it. If there are smells or high CO2 levels, it's not up to the standard.

Heating buildings is where passive unsexy solutions like insulation will work very well.

Insulation will not deeply decarbonize space heating worldwide. It can help, but you still need trillions of BTUs.

A house insulated to PassivHaus standards will drastically reduce the carbon footprint of space heating. Reducing your energy needs by 90% makes the origin of said energy largely irrelevant.

If you don't count the energy expenditure of either replacing or renovating 99% of the world's housing, sure.

It's a given that all of our renewable infrastructure will have to be bootstrapped via our current system of non-renewable sources. So the fact that more efficient housing may do so too is not disqualifying.

The question is how much bootstrapping you need. Synthesizing liquid fuel from atmospheric gases and ocean water, for instance, requires only the bootstrapping necessary to build those facilities. Electrifying automobiles requires replacing all of the automobiles. Upgrading all housing to PassivHaus standards requires approximately enough construction to house over 7 billion people in new homes. Maybe half of that if you exclude people who don't already heat their homes, as well as the approximately tens-to-hundreds of thousands of Scandinavians whose homes already meet these standards.

I think you are suffering a little bit from analysis paralysis. I don't think anyone has a good answer on how much bootstrapping is needed. Even if we had a good estimate in mind, it's going to be wrong at some point. Even if we have a bad or no estimate, it is neccessary to move forward with an optimization method of following the derivative on actions that reduce carbon. It's not a closed form world, following promising trends is the best way to collect more information. And the world is a big place, we can trace multiple paths forward in parallel and continue to reduce carbon, as well as collect data to find more optimal paths.

I agree with that approach in principle. I don't think "let's immediately replace everyone's housing" is a good instance of that approach being followed rigorously.

I apologize if I've read too much into your comments, but I think you're the one making estimates replacing everyone's housing? It's certainly not something I'm suggesting.

I was replying to Tharkun's comment that upgrading housing to PassivHaus standards could "solve" the problem of generating energy for heating. It does no such thing unless you actually upgrade the housing, and there's a lot of housing in the world.

Depending on where you are and what your house is like, it could be feasible and financially viable to retrofit your house.

In other places (Japan comes to mind), houses have a relatively short shelf-life. Making passive the default could have a big impact there.

And in many urbanized areas, there is a housing shortage. This can lead to ridiculous price increases, or to a housing boom. Again, building new developments to passive standards could make a big dent.

I would love a magic wand to make every house passive, but I'm sadly aware that it's unlikely to happen. In many cases, the economics make sense.

I'm not sure the path to electric vehicles is that long. It follows the same pattern as the article.

Roughly now buying an EV makes financial sense due to incentives. In a couple of years it'll have a lower TCO even without incentives, then it'll be cheaper up front with continued savings, then it'll be cheaper to ditch an otherwise working ICE as even taking a loss on its resale will be better than continuing to pay more for fuel and maintenance.

And at each step the increase in manufacturing level drives prices down further.

Fairly certain similar applies to hearing too, some countries are already mandating that new houses are not connected to the gas grid for example.

Unfortunately for EV, they make the least sense for those who drive the most. When you drive 3 miles a day even a 12 mpg gas guzzler doesn't cost much (why they don't bike is a good question, but off topic). When you drive 600 miles a day EVs would make the most sense - but they don't recharge fast enough (fast recharge is not only longer than adding fuel, it also damages the battery and so isn't a normal solution)

Who drives 10 hours a day on a regular basis?

A fair number of couriers, and delivery drivers. Over the road truckers as well, but even cars there are a lot of people who make a living delivering original documents where a copy is not legally valid.

>My understanding is that electric heating is not cost effective compared to carbon based fuels

Pretty much everyone is heating electrically here in Norway.

Good architectural design can also help a bunch here, having the majority of natural light sources on the southern wall (for us northern hemispherers) can drastically shift the heating profile of a building, especially when coupled with good insulation.

The bigger issue is that many buildings are built to be heat traps that necessitates active cooling in the summer, this is where architecture has long-known solutions but ones that haven't been well incorporated into modern styles, setting up buildings for consistent controlled cross breezes can, again, make a huge difference. A lot of actually traditional spanish architecture is a good reference for this since spain gets _hot_.

Would you have specific architecture ressources/techniques to avoid heat traps?

My experience in Spain is that comes winter time, flats are so poorly insulated that it is like you are heating a house windows opened.

I would recommend checking out the guidance and tips pages from the Building Science Corporation [0]

[0]https://www.buildingscience.com/

The path to vehicle electrification might not be that long: https://about.bnef.com/electric-vehicle-outlook/

Also, it's worth making the distinction between vehicles and vehicle miles travelled. We might not replace all the cars right away, but the majority of the miles travelled might convert pretty quickly if they're done via TCO sensitive fleet vehicles (Uber, Lyft, etc) and/or 2nd car commuter vehicles.

> Only seasonal storage (and perhaps the political challenges of long-range transmission) seem to be truly difficult problems.

Seasonal storage of heat is not that difficult a problem, given that you have large enough need of low enough temperature heat. Which at least district heating offers. And converging electricity to heat is not exactly expensive or difficult...

Can you elaborate? How many TW-hours of energy storage are you talking about being not difficult? Imagine for example the US Midwest and northeast from October through May.

Wikipedia has a decent article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag...

At least this one seems to be commercially viable:

https://www.solarthermalworld.org/content/denmark-52500-m2-a...

And here seem to be some numbers:

https://www.gsenergy.eu/central-solar-heating/

To me these numbers are a bit confusing, though, it seems like they are production and not storage numbers.

Anyway, heat storage capacity goes on third power of the size of the storage size while heat losses go only on second power. So after some point the heat losses are small enough. And as an order of magnitude, storage of tens of GWh seems to be in the commercially viable range. Today, that is.

Seasonal storage is a pretty huge issue which means some baseline capacity will most likely be kept, though not nearly at the same scale as today. Keep in mind that sometimes it's overcast/dark and the wind doesn't blow, and that this can occur for extended periods of time over large geographical areas. Demand response can help even then, by shutting down some energy-intensive industry - but you still need to provide a baseline supply for more critical stuff.

Seriously. I plotted these data in Dec. 2017 of the entire Pacific Northwest's wind resources drop to zero for ten full days. Not overly uncommon.

https://partofthething.com/thoughts/wp-content/uploads/decem...

I think that recently built gas-fired plants are going to be around for a long time. But like marginal coal plants today, they may shut down for entire seasons and only go to standby-active during high demand seasons. It's possible to reduce emissions a lot without entirely retiring combustion plants if the plants don't burn any fuel for 8 or 9 months out of the year.

That kind of duty cycle changes the economics of those plants drastically. The capital efficiency becomes much lower - basically turbines are very mature, efficient, but high capital. Then to only operate them 25-30% of the time seasonally, they lose even more economic efficiency. But, if that seasonal load becomes the operating demand, then certain kinds of other technologies like flow batteries become more attractive to the degree they can decouple the power regeneration equipment costs from the capacity of storage. i.e. if you only need to size the power generation equipment to the fairly small instantaneous demand, but have to some degree a separate capacity storage cost for the next added unit of run time.

I agree that lower duty cycles increase the per-MWh generation costs; I just think that there's going to be room for recently built plants to operate even with those higher costs.

The sunk costs of already-built plants don't affect whether they will operate going forward. It's even possible that plants would be mothballed for some years and then revived when the economics support at least part-time operation, as I expect to happen with the currently idled Irsching units in Germany.

New combined cycle gas plants are not terribly capital-intensive. Overnight capital cost is about $1/watt:

https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2017/index.html?t=cg

Since they can also be built quickly, overnight capital costs are relatively representative of true capital costs for gas plants.

I wish that the LCOE chart in the link above had included a scenario for "Gas combined cycle - low capacity factor" in the LCOE chart, because I think that's going to be how a fair number of plants end up operating: high CF in the peak demand season, but low annualized CF.

For new builds, I think we're beginning to see accelerating encroachment of renewable + storage on the low capacity factor natural gas plants. For short timeframes it looks like the existing cost reduction curves for PV, wind, and Lithium storage seem likely to grow to completely knock out the competition for hours to days level of intermittent supply.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/record-low-sola...

For longer time periods, and comparisons vs existing plants, I agree that the economic changeover point will be less clear except that turbine tech is basically on the matured portion of a manufacturing S-curve, while PV, wind, storage are riding the downslope.

Maybe biomass could help. Already now we put apples etc into cold storage to get them out duringtimes where there are no apples growing on the trees. Same could be done for biomass. Put into the fridge and gotten out when we need it. Of course, cooling down the biomass does require energy, not sure whether it requires little enough.

>and space heating //

Perhaps we can skip this and use wearables for "personal climate control" to some extent?

We manage a daytime domestic temperature range in the UK of about 20degC (14-34degC) just by changing clothes. Though if I'm sitting using a computer in 14degC then I'll stick a hot-water bottle up my jumper; and a paddling pool nearby is handy in 30+degC.

Better insulation/architecture can negate the need for Winter heating/Summer cooling in some regions.

In some regions, sure!

But in places like the US Midwest and northeast, no. We need massive and I mean massive conversions to clean energy that aren't even on the radar yet for heating. Natural gas does not count as clean in a carbon constrained world. It's -20C out there for many days in a row.

Not to mention heating greenhouses, hospitals, commercial spaces, etc.

Plus, convincing everyone to bundle up may be harder than switching to clean carbon free energy like nukes or wind+mega-storage

I did something like this when I got an electric mattress pad.

Don’t forget steel and concrete! Every pound of concrete releases 1 pound of CO2

I think you mean cement. Cement is only 10-15% of concrete. The rest is water and rock/sand.

Yes, I do.

Half of that is from the chemical transformation of limestone to quicklime, and half of it is from the fuel energy currently used to drive the transformation:

https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-...

So if carbon-neutral fuels or clean electricity were substituted in the calcination process, the CO2 burden would be reduced by half without any additional downstream changes.

I don't know if it's absolutely necessary to completely zero our carbon emissions. We're going to need to do some sequestration and other countermeasures anyway to lower the current CO2 levels to a safe level, and it may very well end up more cost-effective to continue using those countermeasures than to try to invent an electric jet engine.

If we manage to make that jet fuel from anything else but fossil energy that should do. The only issue is that the CO2 emission up there has so much more impact, but I think we should be able to manage if we have the rest under control.

I'll feel more confident when we have large scale sequestration methods that are beyond the drawing board. I loosely agree with your conclusion, but until we KNOW the numbers, it seems worth it to shoot for as close to zero emissions as we can get while figuring out the sequestration options.

The closest I've heard of is some seabed oilfield sequestering from Nordic countries, IIRC, but that has some built in limitations.

Are you aware of sequestering efforts I've missed?

There's new research that suggests that there are soil-based sequestration methods that work far faster than the well-studied approach of growing forests:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08636-w

We should invest the R&D effort into as many places as we can. I just have a hunch that "electrifying everything" isn't going to win out over, say, "use electricity to synthesize energy-dense liquid fuels", which can even be generalized to the sequestration strategy of "use electricity to synthesize liquid fuels and then store them in underground salt caverns like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve".

Though I have no idea if we can make enough salt caverns, at least it would be a fixed amount of salt caverns, since you could establish a closed-loop supply of liquid fuel this way that was long-run carbon-neutral.

No argument here - I'm just saying we shouldn't lay off the emission reductions BEFORE we have any technological answers. Likewise, we should research such options rather than assuming someone will.

I think we're in full agreement. It appears that we've figured out how to electrify automobiles already, for instance. That's a good thing.

It's just that some emission reductions are also open technological questions, and sometimes they're more or less open than the questions around sequestration, so hard-and-fast rules are hard to come by. Is it easier to sequester the emissions from space rockets than it is to build a Lofstrom loop? Is it easier to synthesize jet fuel from the atmosphere than to electrify jets? Where should R&D resources be optimally allocated, especially if we're taking a risk that certain approaches won't work out?

I would bet it is 100% about property values. If yourview has the disruptive harmony of hypnotically rotating windmills or solar panels lazily soaking up the sun embodying a rebellion and rejection of the economy you exploited to make your money, well, what rich people would want to buy your view that has such a noxious interjection into your narcissistic self-contained idyll?

Solar & wind are great, but no mention of nuclear? (look into Gen IV if concerned about nuclear's reputation)

That's looking like what we need most of all if we want to seriously tackle the problem.

If you're wondering why, Bill Gates argues a good case on why solar & wind are not enough: https://youtu.be/d1EB1zsxW0k?t=518

Problem is, there is no private sector money for that. You want that? You gotta figure out how to get government to pay for it. Investment in nuclear requires MUCH more captial than just throwing up some windmills somewhere. Even if you get rid of all regulation and taxes, it'd still be orders of magnitude more expensive. Private money would still rush into wind, solar, and storage.

Vogtle, the only nuclear power plant currently under construction in the US, is privately funded. The only info I see about government involvement is the guarantee of about $8B of construction loans, with a total cost of around $25B paid for by a few regional power companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

If it was economically viable, it would be done. Forget the US and complaining about the darn treehuggers. Look at countries that don't particularly care about the environment. Russia gets about 20% of its power from nuclear, and is currently scaling back expansion plans due to cost. India gets only 3% from nuclear, and new development will get that to maybe 5%. China gets less than 4% of its power from nuclear, and is backing off from new construction plans as well.

If nuclear were really cheap, and environmentalist resistance was really the problem, we'd see much more nuclear power in these countries, both existing and under construction.

> Russia gets about 20% of its power from nuclear, and is currently scaling back expansion plans due to cost.

Citation needed on scaling back.

Any way you slice it, Russia can't rely on renewables, it's either fossil or nuclear since most of hydroelectric is already harnessed.

Edit: I just had a cursory look of Moscow energy needs.

It has about 12GWe installed capacity in city limits, all natural gas. Up to twice that is used in distict heating in winter. I did not dig up how much energy is imported, but given how many high-voltage transmission lines come in it can't be trivial.

Replacing that with "renewables" is not possible.

12Gw == 12,000Mw. Off a quick lookup, 2Mw of wind requires 1.5 acres of land. A little arithmetic, some rounding up, and we need, say, 10,000 acres of wind power, around 15 square miles. But you'll raise an objection, so double that. And then you'll raise another objection, so double it again, and sooner or later, we're up to 100 square miles of windmills.

The city of Moscow alone is 970 square miles.

For point of comparison, Minnesota produced 3500Mw of wind in 2016, from wind farms mostly in the southwest part of the state. There's lots and lots of land left for more wind farms.

If Russia has plenty of anything, it's land. USA is in a similar situation. If politics didn't intervene, they both would naturally use more wind power than more densely populated nations.

>> Russia gets about 20% of its power from nuclear, and is currently scaling back expansion plans due to cost.

> Citation needed on scaling back.

[0] says 11% btw

[0] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/russia/energy-

Don't forget that many power plants are thermal combined-heat-and-power that utilize waste heat from power generation. If you replace them all with renewables, you'd have to compensate for that heat output, not just electricity.

France is 50% nuclear. Sweeden is 22%. Both have two of the lowest carbon footprints in Europe.

https://www.worlddata.info/europe/france/energy-consumption....

https://www.worlddata.info/europe/sweden/energy-consumption....

France is more like 80% nuclear.

Good catch, I posted 2014 numbers. WNA says as of November 2018 that France uses 75%[0]. They note two important things though. 1) France is one of the largest net exporters of energy in the world (citing the low cost.) 2) That they will reduce nuclear output to 50% by 2035. Bonus 3) 17% of energy is purely from RECYCLED nuclear fuel.

[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

> China gets less than 4% of its power from nuclear, and is backing off from new construction plans as well.

Do you have a source for that?

Wikipedia states that China plans to increase nuclear more than 30 times by end of the century [1]:

As of March 2019, China has 46 nuclear reactors in operation with a capacity of 42.8 GW [...]

By mid-century fast neutron reactors are seen as the main technology, with a planned 1400 GW capacity by 2100.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

Fact 1: Physics says it should be cheaper, because of massive energy density, as you need less stuff, and so less human effort to juice the energy source.

Event history: 1. lots of reactors in the 60s and 70s 2. reactors are water cooled and designed essentially like normal power reactors, meaning they are similar size and operate with little margin 3. accidents happen - accidents that were conceivable though beyond the design basis 4. environmental and mass resistance heats up in response to 3 - rightfully so 5. 3. also leads to pressure to make current reactors safer by adding safety systems 6. reactors turn into giant jumble of safety systems with massive man power and maintenance costs, costs that similar sized coal or natural gas do not have. The increase in safety systems enhances safety superficially, and costs increase until the plant is barely break even.

The key is that the accidents created a new and higher demand for safety that could not be economically met by the previous designs. But those previous designs were in place and had to operate, so they back-engineered a bunch of crap to make them "safe" at huge cost - a cost that basically annihilates all of nuclear's energy density benefits. At the same time, resistance was too high to build new reactor design concepts that could match the new safety paradigm, and so gen IV was not achieved.

What you say is true - "it is not economically viable." But you shouldn't bundle all of nuclear into that category. The crap from the past was not economically viable with safety standards we have today. What's coming is.

This all makes sense, but the public has been through this cycle with the nuclear power industry enough to be wary. "We'll get it right this time!" Maybe you would, but since we have options now, why would we take the risk?

Vogtie is the example that proves the rule. Originally, it was supposed to cost right around USD14 Billion. Cost overruns have pushed that, not to USD25 Billion, but USD28 Billion. (And the online date has been pushed back from this year, to 2022.) Keep in mind, the DoE was supposed to back USD8 Billion of the original USD14 Billion price tag. So needless to say, the financials have changed considerably. So much so that the consortium behind Vogtie nearly fell apart due to the latest cost overrun combined with the fact that they could not pass any more cost overruns on to their customers. (The customers under state law are not allowed to switch energy suppliers.)

Vogtie is a slow motion train crash. When it comes online, the customers will be forced to pay more than wind power customers BECAUSE the government intervened and prohibited any customers from changing suppliers. And I suspect that's gonna go over about as well as a fart in church.

But there isn't much private sector money in windmills either and solar isn't going to deliver enough energy.

So that leaves us with oil and coal and wood. Whatever the third phase of clean energy will be it won't be disrupting anything fundamental, it can't and it isn't as clean as we like to believe.

> Even if you get rid of all regulation and taxes, it'd still be orders of magnitude more expensive

Are you sure about that? There is a company in upstate New York [1] that quietly builds about one nuclear reactor per year. You don't hear much about it because that reactor goes to power a submarine. The safety record of these reactors is unbelievable; after all some people spend weeks at a time within meters of them. Here's a quote from a US Navy spokesperson: "We have never had an accident or release of radioactivity which has had an adverse effect on human health or the environment" [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knolls_Atomic_Power_Laboratory [2] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun...

Compare the cost of just one of those reactors...

to the cost of a fully installed windmill in Iowa.

Heck, go ahead and compare the cost of one of those reactors to a fully installed wind FARM in Iowa, or Wisconsin, or wherever. There's just no comparison. Some of these windfarms are producing at, what? $0.02 a kWh? Maybe $0.03? And that's before you even count subsidies or tax breaks. It's no wonder some go to $0.00 a kWh, and some even go negative.

You sound like you know something about what it takes to build a reactor. So I'm assuming you understand the costs there. Which likely means that you think a windmill costs far more than a windmill actually costs. Nuclear is MUCH more expensive in terms of capital outlay, and it is prohibitively expensive in terms of operating costs when compared with wind or solar.

The only reason the reactors we're discussing are being built is because the government is doing it. This is what would have to happen to make nuclear a reality in our future power mix. The government would have to pay for it. It's too expensive for anyone else to try without government assurances.

When people talk about cost of nuclear vs wind the issue is that you can not go to a wind farm and get a contract that give 24/7 energy at a set level for $0.02 kWh. What you get is a contract that give you $0.02 kWh when the wind farm is producing at peak capacity, and then you have to buy the somewhat more expensive coal and gas produced energy whenever the wind is not at peak capacity.

It is like comparing the transportation cost of rail vs trucks. It is obvious that the price per km is cheaper for the rail. If what you want is to transport goods between two railway stations that has excess rail capacity it going to be extremely cheap compared to have a truck driver.

$ per kWh is not relevant. $ per contracted supply of continuous power 24/7 is.

The video even mention the wind + solar + battery, but is questionably if the average output of all three puts it better than nuclear. A benefit however over nuclear is that such constellation can be created independent of each other with shorter investment spans that nuclear.

> Compare the cost of just one of those reactors...

It's very likely the cost and various other pieces of information about US Navy nuclear reactors is classified, but estimations exist. I found in [1] that a submarine reactor costs about $100MM and a carrier one about $200MM. The S6G reactor that equips the Los Angeles class submarines (very popular, 62 built, 32 still active [2]) appears to have a power output of 165 MW thermal, and about 30 MW electric. This makes it roughly $3MM per MW, not counting the fact that much more of the thermal power could be converted to electricity if that was desired.

> to the cost of a fully installed windmill in Iowa.

What I could find online [3] is that the cost of utility scale wind turbines ranges between $1.3MM and $2.2MM per MW. This is the same order of magnitude as the $3MM/MW for submarine nuclear reactors.

>Nuclear is MUCH more expensive in terms of capital outlay

Sure, but the question was if this capital outlay is because of some inherent technological difficulties, or because of regulations. Since naval nuclear reactors don't appear to be expensive, the natural hypothesis is that the capital outlays are driven primarily by regulations.

> prohibitively expensive in terms of operating costs A naval reactor is either refueled only once during its lifetime or not at all. The main operating cost is the final dismantling. The running cost is virtually zero.

>The government would have to pay for it.

Bill Gates decided to just spend his money on this, and he found China as a willing partner. He figured he didn't need government assistance. Money wise he was probably right. But the DOE killed his project in October for national security reasons [4]: "TerraPower, the company I started 10 years ago, uses an approach called a traveling wave reactor that is safe, prevents proliferation, and produces very little waste. We had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely. We may be able to build it in the United States if the funding and regulatory changes that I mentioned earlier happen. The world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change. Advanced nuclear is one, and I hope to persuade U.S. leaders to get into the game."

The government doesn't have to pay for it, but it would be nice for it not to stand in the way of people who are willing to pay for it themselves.

[1]http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%2... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles-class_submarine [3] http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost [4] https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Year-in-Review-2...

Any reason storage + renewables + well connected ‘super grids’ between countries cannot work out? Why do we have to have nuclear?

Because reliable intermittent (what we should call pv/wind + storage or gas for redundancy) pollutes multiple times more than nuclear. Nuclear is the cleanest form of electricity generation that we can produce in scale, and the cleanest one for the amount of fossil we want to get rid of. Quick reminder: more than 60% of the world's electricity is fossil-based. To replace that only with nuclear would need 1500 new reactors. Do you really think it will be feasible to do that with wind and/or solar?

Also: the physical footprint of nuclear is tiny compared to energy harvesting + seasonal storage. This really matters at the scales we need. Not that nuclear is free from nimbyism, but its small footprint still counts.

Electric heating, even with heat pumps, is still a massive inefficient power sink in terms of overall power required when compared to direct heat conversion. As nuclear energy is one of the few renewable heat sources that work independent of weather, it will be required if we want to make district heating carbon free (that being said I believe getting electrics/transportation carbon neutral will be good enough since burning NG purely for heat is efficient enough that we can justify penciling it in under the earth's natural carbon recovery budget)

It’s not really independent of weather a lot of European plants had problems in the drought last year https://www.energy-reporters.com/environment/drought-forces-...

> Why do we have to have nuclear?

It's a good question. Really.

The reason why is that current renewable tech cannot handle our energy needs. Technology for a "well connected `super grid'" just doesn't exist either. The battery tech isn't there.

But don't just believe me. Look at Germany[0]. Many point to it as the leading example of adapting renewable technology. They have some huge advantages places like the US, India, and China don't have: being small and more dense. This means you can have less power loss in transit (theoretically). But you have to ask yourself, why is Germany's use of renewables skyrocketing but their carbon footprint is relatively stationary? Hint: What are they replacing their nuclear with? It isn't just renewables, and there's a reason why.

Remember, no pro nuclear person is anti renewable. We just believe we need to act NOW and not when renewables become advanced enough. Personally I just don't think we have the time.

Edit: Wanted to share a link I was sharing in another thread. France, which has about 75% of its energy produced from nuclear also has one of the cheapest electricity costs in Europe. [1]

[0] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/germany/energy-consumption...

[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

> What are they replacing their nuclear with?

Russian gas. That's why they're building a new pipeline in the Baltic.

Of cause the carbon footprint is stationary, since both nuclear and renewable are good on that front. Replacing nuclear with coal wouldn't be stationary and graphs [0] look like renewable has decently taken over former nuclear. I don't understand where you see something not working. I do understand nuclear advocates arguing the carbon footprint could be even better.

Also keep in mind some rural areas fighting tooth and nails to keep brown coal use/mining running, since these areas don't have much other economic prospects.

[0] https://energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&perio...

My issue is that the reason to switch to renewables is to reduce your carbon footprint. If you aren't reducing your footprint, why are you investing that money?

I should rephrase my statement. They are replacing nuclear with coal AND renewables. But to me the better strategy is to replace coal with renewables first. Then you can reduce your nuclear production. Get to the problem.

The priority should be to reduce the carbon footprint.

> The priority should be to reduce the carbon footprint.

This. After you reach carbon neutrality (or realistically, we're gonna need negative emissions), fine, go ahead and replace those pesky nuclear plants with hamster wheel power, for all I care.

No, reducing carbon footprint is not the only priority. It is an important one, but doesn't top everything else. I don't want emergency responders driving slowly just because its for the environment.

Nuclear, especially the waste management, was an another priority here in Germany. Apparently a priority our politicians (and industry) were unable to solve satisfyingly in another way. So they took the opportunity and boldly went against nuclear, even if overall results won't perfect immediately. Just like they decided to do that plan pushing renewable energy regardless of how imperfect (how crazy is doing solar that far up north?!) and eventually helped jump-start the solar and wind industry for everyone else to benefit from.

But i do understand nuclear enthusiasts having different views/priorities, so we'll probably never agree.

> Nuclear, especially the waste management

I think there's a big misunderstanding of waste that the public has. Even though it is toxic and radioactive the amount of waste matters. For example, if I throw out a coke can of the most toxic stuff on the planet yearly or throw out train loads of waste daily. That's really the comparison we're making with nuclear waste and coal waste. I always get a little ticked off when people ask "what do you do with the waste" because the answer is the same with what you do with coal waste. You bury it. But in this case we have to bury a lot less material (and remember, coal waste is also radioactive and toxic). Even though there is a danger issue difference, let's call it two orders of magnitude, there's a huge difference in scale (>>2 orders of magnitude). Frankly, that matters.

Some side notes:

In France ~15% of their total power comes just from recycled nuclear waste (remember, their entire grid is ~75% nuclear and they have one of the lowest carbon footprints).

Not all nuclear "waste" is waste. A lot gets used in things like medicine and a bunch of sciences.

The fundamental problem is that the carbon impact of electricity just doesn't matter that much. It's only something like 24% of the total energy used in Germany. If the renewable electricity share is 50% then that means total renewable energy share is only 12%. Transportation and heavy industry still depend on fossil fuels. Innovation in these sectors is far more important now than more investments into renewable electricity (which is still welcome of course).

> Innovation in these sectors is far more important now than more investments into renewable electricity (which is still welcome of course).

Like the innovation of electric cars? Or are you saying we should ditch electric cars and focus on hydrogen fuel cells?

If these innovations follow the common trend, they will convert from combustion engines to electric engines. Bearing with me, this means that the more things switch to electric means that the carbon impact of the grid becomes more important.

Yeah, some things can't become electrified. You can't make an electric cow. But lab grown meat has much higher electric costs than grass fed cows.

First problem is storage. We simply don't know how to do it and there is nothing even remotely resembling a solution in the work.

Second renewables are not going to produce enough energy, currently, they only produce around 1% of the worlds energy needs and that's with a heavily subsidized and politically motivated backing.

Third, the cost of these super grids is going to be astronomical.

Nuclear is the only optionon of the clean energies that are both:

Green (no CO2), cheap and plentiful, scaleable and reliable.

The capacity factor of nuclear is handsdown unbeatbale compared to wind

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=14611

The idea of wind and solar being effective is based on the in my opinion faulty idea that energy density isn't the most important factor.

Nukes cost more https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/new-y...

Yes, but climate change costs even more.

There's a few things to unpack here. But I won't talk about why nuclear costs so much. I'll just point out that if you look at countries like Germany and Japan which are turning off nuclear plants and targeting renewables are also turning up their coal usage. The big issue here is that battery technology just isn't there yet.

No pro nuclear person is anti renewable (maybe they exist, but I have yet to find one). They just don't want to see nuclear replaced with coal. They care about the environment. Many believe it is too late for any other option and we need to just aggressively go to net 0 (or less) with current technology. The truth is that we just can't meet these goals with current renewables and batteries. We're all for funding battery and renewable tech. But we also believe that action has to happen NOW.

> and targeting renewables are also turning up their coal usage.

Germany is actually turning OFF coal. There is a new plant right now which will never produce power. Others are being turned off. Coal is clogging the lines for renewable power.

Meanwhile costs for nuclear waste disposal and decommission of nuclear plants cost the taxpayer money because of failed ideas of a safe mine in the past and heavy lobbying today.

Well Germany has some explaining to do [0]. Their carboon footprint is stagnant and renewable production/usage is skyrocketing.

[0] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/germany/energy-consumption...

As you can see below in those old numbers the amount of renewables is rising constantly. The actual number is now at 37,8% [0]

The fact that deals which have been done decades ago are something very hard to get rid of. It was very expensive with nuclear and it will be likely just as expensive with coal etc. but it's happening as I wrote above. All the more reasons why nuclear is just nothing to even mention if you consider energy in the future. It's a dead technology from the past and we'll have to face the remains of it for decades to come. We'll have to deal with it when the last coal power plant disappeared.

[0] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/klima-energie/erneuerb...

Here is a chart which includes nuclear and other zero emission technologies. A 7% difference is nice but it's a drop in the bucket when you're increasing the renewable share by 5% annually. Even if you consider that Germany shut down 75GW out of 150GW then a 15% difference is still just not very important but it makes Germany look very bad in the short term. Give it 10 years and the zero emission share will be somewhere around 90%, meanwhile any nuclear plant planned today will only be finished in 2029 only to become obsolete the same year.

[0] https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?source=ren-share&...

The thing is that if they didn't shut down the nuclear reactors they could have shut down more coal plants. Doing so would be more environmentally friendly. And I doubt there's any serious academic that would disagree. Shutting down coal before nuclear.

They wouldn't.

The reasons to shut down coal and why it goes so slow are political. It's jobs in the east where right-wing populists are already taking over for example. Same goes for the region in the west where shutting down heavy industry and coal has been a continues issue for politicians for the last few decades. There is also the matter of contracts and reimbursing plant owners.

Honestly I don't see anything to explain other than maybe Germany is basically trying to accomplish it's goal on nightmare difficulty. (almost no sun, south is far away from offshore wind, shutting down nuclear, no hydro)

The next step is reducing the carbon impact of transportation but that is something that hugely relies on battery prices falling over the next decade.

>has to happen NOW

Here in the UK they OK'd the Hinkley Point reactor in 2010 and it will probably produce electricity around 2025, fifteen years later at a cost of around £22bn cash and £50bn in raised electricity prices. These things are not fast or cheap.

I'm kind of optimistic that renewables will grow exponentially and solve things but we'll see. Whatever works best I guess.

And this is extremely unfortunate. Some of the reasons are logistical some political. But even with this I'll still take the bet to build nuke because what if we don't have good enough battery tech in 15/20 years? You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket, especially if that basket is a gamble.

I guess and I'll give you Hinkley seems a particularly inefficient example. Probably what they more want to do is take a proved reactor design and mass produce them.

> take a proved reactor design and mass produce them.

This is the tricky part. The key word is "proved". Currently that means an actively running reactor that is part of the power grid. But that clearly means there can be zero innovation, if we're considering that research reactors can never be considered "proved". Even if they have been running for years. But that's only a small part of the problem, even though this is usually pointed out as being a big part of the problem. It is convoluted.

I believe the short to medium term future of nuclear is SMRs, not necessarily utility scale nuclear reactors. SMRs are basically naval scale PWRs that can be transported on a truck and deployed in batches. Most nuclear "waste" from these could then be further burned in fast breeder reactors, which are indeed more expensive but they solve the waste problem and create new fuel for conventional thermal reactors.

Nuclear cost more because of the extreme regulations put around it, not because of the actual creation of the facility or the production of the energy.

Neither solar nor wind can deliver anything close to the amount of energy we need and they aren't reliables which means that you either do coal or oil.

Solar and wind worldwide is less than 1% of the actual energy consumption.

It is so clear that nuclear is dead. The US has abandoned the only two it has tried to construct since the 1970s, after pouring in billions.

Like or it not, I don't think we'll ever see another new nuclear plant constructed outside BRIC countries.

There are 50 reactors under construction in 15 different countries.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and...

I don't believe that list is accurate, the US abandoned construction of the two it was building [1]

Also, very few of the reactors on that list are in OECD countries.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-pro...

So more accurately: nuclear is dying (slowly) in OECD countries.

...which is exactly what I said originally...

"I don't think we'll ever see another new nuclear plant constructed outside BRIC countries. "

Vogtle is still underway, as another poster pointed out.

I never see intermittency addressed sufficiently. Early this year, I noted the US was almost entirely covered with clouds for a week. Will these renewables really have enough battery (or other) storage capacity for prolonged solar/wind insufficiency? There's a lot of "well, with enough batteries or smart grids..." but not enough even back-of-napkin calculations for what such cases would require, likely cost, and consequences of outlier environmental happenings.

It's easy/cheap to pile up coal, or fill giant buckets with oil, but batteries are expensive .

>I never see intermittency addressed sufficiently.

Even with storage the cost is falling fast & will approach coal shortly

You can have a few coal or gas plants on standby for those rate occasions when reserves are insufficient.

Problem is you need enough "on standby" to run full-output indefinitely ... at a cost high enough that you may as well just use them instead of unreliable renewables.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for renewables. Run my office near 100% on solar in summer, and run my home partly on year-round. My experience convinces me that while it's nice/fun/clean/etc, it's also painfully unreliable. People talking about renewables while living on coal/etc energy don't seem to grasp this.

I don't get your argument. In NZ, were very largely running on renewables. Hydro filling in the rest. There's a coal plant in Huntly which can be fired up to fill in any gaps. Most of the time it's not needed and this isn't a big deal.

> Problem is you need enough "on standby" to run full-output indefinitely ... at a cost high enough that you may as well just use them instead of unreliable renewables.

There are two components to the cost of a generator: fixed costs and variable costs, the later being mostly fuel. Even if you have enough standby generators and could run them all the time, if the "unreliable renewables" allow you to reduce their power (using less fuel) or even power some of them down completely, it can be a huge cost advantage.

It's even better if you add a bit of storage to the mix: since most generators can't power up instantly, with enough storage they could all be completely powered off instead of idling, saving even more fuel and wear.

If you look at any one solar setup's output, yes it varies wildly every time a cloud goes by. If you're off-grid and responsible for your own power, this is a huge problem. You would need a fairly large solar array and some also fairly large batteries to keep you supplied with power. With a large, geographically distributed grid of different types of generation (Wind, Solar, Hydro, Nuclear, maybe a bit of fossil generation, and battery storage to sop up the excess), these problems become much more manageable.

Where are you looking for these discussions and calculations of capacity and reserve power?

In every popular discussion advocating "renewable energy".

Let's give it a spin.

Given a solar operation that can produce 1MW continuous (under normal best conditions, including buffering for night, angles, etc), what happens when it's seriously cloudy for a week? we need to continue that 1MW output for 7 days. That requires 168 MW/h of storage. That would require 800 Tesla PowerPacks, totaling $116,080,000.

$116M just to make sure a 1MW provider (which really isn't much) can run a week with insufficient light (hey, sometimes it rains for a while).

Then, if the storm continues another day, all the power goes out. To keep electricity on for just one more hour would require another 5 PowerPacks @ $725,500.

What people don't seem to grasp about solar/wind + batteries is: when the battery is drained, you're done. No more electricity until the sun pops out again or the wind picks up enough, and no more buffer until those energy "buckets" can be refilled.

At this point, optimistic advocates will jump up with "but smart grids!" Yeah, well, show me the numbers. Convince me the national cloud cover I saw a few weeks back (lasting a week) won't promptly shut down the "100% renewables" providers in short order, leaving (say) Chicago completely incapable to achieve the needed 100 degree differential between outdoors and in (that was a very cold week).

The value of coal, nuclear, etc is that production keeps going regardless of weather. Renewable energy is absolutely subject to weather, and when the batteries run out, the lights go off.

I like that you are running these numbers. However, solar and wind will be overprovisioned when costs are low enough, so they will not run at capacity when the weather is sunny and breezy. Also, they do not provide zero output when it is cloudy or calm. Output should not drop from 100% to 0% in this example.

The residential battery cost is significant, but should be broken out by home. A home generator would be more appropriate for several days of emergency power, just as now. These cost about $3,000. Anyone willing to buy a Tesla power pack should not find this cost objectionable.

Also, I would not look at popular discussions such as the one we’re having as representative of government and private sector ability to plan renewable energy capacity.

If you're interested in some real world napkin math data points. I live off grid in the bay area and on the worst case rainy day around the solstice I made about 2/3 of the wattage of my solar array in watt hours. That day was in the worst week and I made about 7x the wattage of my solar array in watt hours over the course of the week.

LiFePo4 storage cost me about $3/Wh including BMS, solar cost me about $0.7/W including charge controller.

You can also just turn on your gas plants (which produce less CO than coal plants) instead of using obsolete technologies like coal or nuclear that are not capable of load following. After this step you can start investing in infrastructure to create your own carbon neutral gas because you now have an oversupply of renewable energy.

I don't think this article does quite enough to address all the concerns but it is pretty deeply researched and outlines a path to 100% renewables by 2050. It's also from 2015 and LiIon battery costs have fallen by 50% since this article was published.

http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USSta...

I'm completely ignorant about this field, but I've heard Bill Gates and others say there are many problems with clean energy, such as land-efficiency (particularly in the case of solar), of course storage, etc.

What might be some counterpoints to these objections?

Storage at nation-state levels is largely solved by pump-storage hydro[1]. Yes, its expensive, especially if you lack natural reservoirs to convert into pump basins, but the economics of it are well known, the technology is mature, and implementations already exist. The real barrier is the chicken and egg problem that until there is urgent need for such storage it won't be built and building it will be time consuming and centralized-cost expensive to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

That's only where a mountainous area is close enough. There are limits to how far transmission losses allow you to go.

> There are limits to how far transmission losses allow you to go.

These limits are higher than you might think. The currently longest HVDC link in Brazil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Madeira_HVDC_system) is 2300 km; there is another one being built that will be over 2500 km. For comparison, a quick web search tells me that the "width" of the USA (from the east coast to the west coast) is only 4500 km.

For the US, at least, land efficiency is not a huge deal since the places with greatest solar intensities are largely also the areas with the fewest other uses (i.e. desert).

For most other countries it's a much harder problem. Northern africa may be fairly close geographically to Europe, but the political climate is such that Europe probably won't want to rely on power coming from Africa.

What seems to make the most sense currently as far as solar goes for places that don't have cheap sunny land is distributed PV plus large scale concentrated solar. CSP is about twice the power density of traditional PV in terms of land use, but typically requires a much higher capex.

If battery storage continues to improve at the rate it has for the past 10 years, the storage problem will solve itself fairly quickly, though the economics are hard to figure: if NG becomes used only for peaking, then the price of NG will probably drop substantially making the target for battery pricing much lower than todays costs of NG generation. If NG keeps being used for heating (which seems likely in the near-to-medium term in the US), then that will help to keep the costs of NG up.

No mention of possible resistance from fossil fuels interests? They have trillions of $ of assets to defend, so I would expect some unconventional methods to prevent renewable from growing quickly: buy some media, disrupt elections, promote FUD, get some big countries into war (an autocracy like Saudi Arabia certainly have this capability, or Russia since its regime also massively relies on gas to keep its economy afloat), etc.

Energy is not just about cost, it's a huge power that can make and destroy countries and empires. They will certainly not die without a fight.

Watching the following TED talk, I was surprised to discover that gas compagny such as Total are actually promoting renewable energies because they currently need to be complemented and gas is the main solution used for that purpose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w

Forgive me if this is an utterly ignorant question, or already answered: but with the plan to make 40-50% of power wind-based, is there any potential impact on the environment? Intuition tells me that if wind is able to generate so much power, the energy is coming from somewhere.

For solar, the power is coming from “waste” energy from the sun, but wind takes all its energy from the natural activity of our climate, which is more or less a closed system is it not?

If we’re extracting all this energy from our weather systems, could we not in theory cause some major disruption?

It's not a closed system, the wind patterns on the earth are due to heat differentials which are constantly being created due to... the sun. You can think of it as a way of harvesting more concentrated solar energy

If that were true, wouldn’t the weather get progressively more energetic over time? Wouldn’t we now be living with constant planetoids storms?

No, because the friction between the air and itself/the rest of the planet slows down the winds and dissipates the energy as heat

Aaahh, I see; thanks.

Also, *planetary.

Where do you think does the energy in fossil fuels come from? It comes from the same place wind energy and solar energy come from: The sun.

The part about renewables suppressing prices is already and has been a thing for awhile. We even see $0 prices in some market intervals because wind is so highly subsidized. This causes some issues as the market prices don't reflect the actual need.

It often goes negative, which is really backwards. This pulls the rug out from generators that don't like to reduce in power because fuel is a small fraction of their cost. Good old production tax credits.

You don't need subsidies for the price to hit $0. The power must be removed from the grid.

That is not true. Where are you getting this from? Maybe I misunderstand you. Low prices generally come from when you have a very low marginal price (often because a windfarm can put in a $0 offer and still make a profit due to subsidies). Note that I'm not against the production tax credits, but the market distortions are very real and can impact decisions to build more generation.

Surely in a free market the cost of renewables would just track fuel prices. You would have to sell your renewable energy for slightly less than the cheapest fuel based source. That would make it very difficult to get finance because the rate of return would be unpredictable. So in a market dominated by unpredictable fossil fuel generation it makes sense to set a minimum price. And the government has to act as the buyer who agrees a price ahead of time.

See here for a detailed explanation: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-...

Here's an excerpt:

> There are several reasons why conventional power station operators, which are either losing money or at least losing profit during times of negative prices, keep their plants running (See study by Energy Brainpool, page 4-5 and the 2016 results from Consentec). They can be technical, for example the power plant can be too inflexible to change its output, or the ramping or costs for shutting down and starting up can be too expensive. Another reason for keeping the plant running can be the obligation to provide contracted balancing power to keep the grid stable or provide re-dispatch power. Alternatively, it may be that a certain production has to be kept up to provide heat for a town household heating network. Those plant operators which have already sold their power at the longer term futures market face no extra costs when they let their units run – they are merely losing the profit that they could make by buying cheap power to supply their customers instead of producing their own.

No disagreement. There are a lot of unit characteristics such as the minimum amount of time for how long the unit can be online. This was also good at pointing out long term contracts and agreements that are not seen by the market.

Wind can put electricity on the market even without subsidies. They have every incentive to do so, since it costs them absolutely nothing to put energy into the grid while forcing fossil fuels to pay a premium.

If the government didn't subsidize renewables when the grid is oversupplied, then other resources would pay them anyway. Prices would even go negative as transients would still exist. Since the subsidies are far less than the premium made by fossil peaker plants, renewable resources are still the first to turn off and the time difference is negligible.

Not to mention that in most countries the subsidies are by FAR the least distorting legislation. Most often (eg the US) renewables get first bid on contracts. That means they are guaranteed to sell their electricity even if the price goes negative; the onus is on fossil plants to turn off. This is a dumb, possibly unnecessary bit of rule. It ensures renewables are used, but it means they aren't well utilized as peaker resources. Renewables are orders of magnitude better for the grid than any other type of generation, but if they wanted they would never be used for anything but baseload.

In addition to the other replies to you, my understanding- low prices come from a glut, simple as that. If the wind is blowing strongly at night, or the sun is shining especially brightly, there can be an excess of power, so much that there isn't enough demand to remove that power from the grid (which would damage it).

Fossil fuels have input costs, but wind & solar have zero or nearly zero operating cost, and shutting them down incurs cost. So while fossil fuel is hurting, they are happy to sell power for $0 for a few hours if that's what it takes to get someone to take it off their hands.

IMO it basically looks like what you'd expect to see in a market in need of storage operations to perform arbitrage & smooth the price curve.

Or someone who has some power intensive but not capital intensive project ready to go for when electricity is cheap. Splitting water for future generation of ammonia or methane, say.

Aluminum smelting is the poster child for this; ~14MWh per ton of aluminum produced; managing electricity costs is the primary business of Alcoa.

No, that is a simplistic explanation that misses the key concept.

When you have a power "glut" you generally aren't decommiting many resources unless your commitment and forecast were insanely off. What happens is that the more expensive resources are sent to their minimum and are therefore no longer setting price. At that point, the cheapest units (wind and solar) are then setting price. No energy market in the US has logic to say "I don't need anymore and will then just go to zero". The linear programming problem is still looking at the cost to balance power and load (put simplistically).

Storage will help solve some issues, but will likely not be the short-term panacea people are making it out to be.

This is why I think that the solar investment tax credit is better than the wind production tax credit. The wind PTC pays $23 per megawatt-hour generated in the first 10 years of a wind generator's life, regardless of demand at the time of generation. The solar ITC is a 30% tax credit for building new solar plants, but built plants still have to find positive-price buyers for their output to be profitable.

The ITC encourages the development of clean generation without introducing any negative-pricing scenarios. During times of high output and low demand solar plants may bid prices very close to zero, but they won't go below zero. That encourages better matching of new renewable capacity with actual demand.

It’s a sad bit of economic reality to me that you can relocate computers with a good bit of flexibility, but you can’t afford to have them sitting around doing nothing for half the day.

If I built a data center near a wind farm I couldn’t afford to just turn the servers off when the wind dies down. I have to run them all day and site based on average cost and availability.

It's too bad they don't include post-use decomissioning/recycling costs. There is some really toxic crap in there Nuclear has to, so should solar.

They also forget that renewables are not that versatile and only address a small part of the big 4 carbon emitters (grid, industrial, cargo, cows). Industrial and cargo transport are going to require nuclear heat sources.

So while it's great that costs are coming down, they are not are not reporting the full cost, and it's only a partial solution to the big energy problems.

If we're going to count disposal cost, we should definitely count the externalities for other methods as well. Climate change, pollution, etc.

Demanding a TOTAL ENERGY SOLUTION OR NOTHING is an endemic problem in these comments.

Partial solutions rock.

Toxic crap in solar? For silicon panels, which are the vast majority of the market, what specifically is toxic in the panel itself?

I can only think of lead in solder, which is the same issue for all electronic devices.

There are toxic chemicals used in the processes for making the panel, which need proper environmental regulation, but that doesn’t mean the panel itself contains toxic materials.

There is one major manufacturer (First Solar) that makes CIGS [edit: should read 'CdTe'] thin-film panels which do have Cd, etc and need a waste management strategy. I believe First Solar guarantees waste recovery for their panels [1].

But you are correct, the vast majority of panels are silicon-based and have no significant environmental disposal issues. Leaded solder use is already quite low and is targeted for zero content in the near future.

[1] http://www.firstsolar.com/-/media/First-Solar/Sustainability...

I agree with your post in general, but as far as I know First Solar make CdTe panels, not CIGS.

Right, thanks for the correction.

If you only look at toxic solar waste you will only see CIGS panels. If you look at what is actually used you will see that CIGS is just a tiny minority of installed capacity.

Other than electronic components (where the rules for electronic recycling apply) photovoltaic cells are basically sand.

Also I would assume that the electronics in panels are RoHS compliant, which means no lead there.

The article mentions a utility in Northern Indiana and references a public presentation made last year that outlined various scenarios and chose a preferred path forward.

If you go to that utility's website, you'll see that they adopted the scenario of decommissioning 4 coal-fired generation units by 2023 and a 5th by 2028. They've begun the decommissioning process (apparently it takes a long time) and have a press release from February of this year announcing the signing of agreements for the construction of 3 wind farms totaling ~800MW.

Battery and storage technology is still the limiting factor in broad adoption of clean energy.

We need a Manhattan project for storage technology is we will every realize the conclusions in this post.

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Saul Griffith + Otherlab estimate that electrifying the US will reduce the total energy needs by 50+% as a result of reduced waste (among other reasons).

The headwinds mentioned should also include NIMBY. If you've ever driven through western Minnesota and the turbine forest that is out there, you'll realize there there is the potential for serious blowback if onshore turbine installation gets more widespread.

I just hope that less intrusive alternatives become more prevalent before that blowback causes a price increase that makes fossil fuels look good again.

I haven't seen serious blowback on our wind farms, and I live in MN. It's generally well embraced by the vast majority of the public and the political system.

That's good for now. I live in WI and the blowback is rising. I'm guessing one reason for that is because of the low population density there. Once they start creeping into more dense areas, or less dense but more ecologically sensitive areas, it could get interesting.

Also MN is a pretty blue state. I seem to remember that as soon as you crossed the red SD line, the forest vanished. Maybe that will change, but it's definitely a potential headwind.

It's not so much red vs blue as state policy. Iowa has even more wind power than MN, and it's a lot more red. SD is definitely backwards in that regard.

edit: Correcting myself, SD is getting 30% of its electricity from wind now. There's fewer towers because of a smaller population.

So, it's a non issue? Nothing to worry about?

https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2017/12/14/communities-fight...

https://www.thelocal.fr/20180807/why-do-some-people-in-franc...

https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/al-maiorino/just-how...

I think it is popular in Iowa because farmers see it as a source of income (thousands $$$/year each). Having just moved out of Iowa I can report that they are unpopular with town folks (population 300) who are near the turbines but don't get any rent from them. Hard to not like something when they are paying you a pretty penny.

I think Wisconsin is just dense enough that a lot of people who don't have potential to get rent income have to look at them, while Iowa is just sparse enough that most people who see them get income from them.

Will there ever be a solar panel that is so powerful it will just run s device all day? This would require a huge amount of storage of power.

I saw an HN article the other day about an American University developing paper thin batteries with superior power storage.

We are truly headed for a major leap towards being independent from non renewable sources of energy

Did a quick reply to his weak assertions and claims.

https://twitter.com/datarade/status/1113535596108992512

Ramez is much like Kurzweil, desperately needs to open a chemistry book.

> replace virtually all of that coal power with a mix of solar, wind, storage, and flexible demand

In the linked document I did not find any guarantees how flexible the demand has to be in worst case. It’s easy to run on renewables when you can just shut down everything.

It's not just shutting down everything, you can shift heating and cooling and battery charging loads to renewable rich times. Its economically incentivized to do so as renewables can drastically reduce wholesale prices at those times.

Eh, I didn't see any substantive treatment of one of the most disruptive aspects of solar: personal power generation that brings over-100% independence from the grid and can power local grids with surplus.

Virtually all residential solar installations today cannot function without the grid and would require much more expensive equipment to do so. It's not clear why that would change.

This is a really, really good news. However i really don't like the fact that again we talk that much about PV solar energy. As utility, spot electricity generator, they are fine (and way more effective than thermal), but as far as solar farm are concerned, we should lobby for thermal if the water supply allows it.

> we should lobby for thermal if the water supply allows it

Why?

Error establishing a database connection

Yup. Here's a mirror for anyone else looking: http://archive.is/ATJXq

Or via a proxy if you're in Australia, as archive.is is blocked.

> Finally, there will in fact be a Phase 4 of renewables, when their penetration has grown so high that they become limited by headwinds of their own creation: Value deflation

I hold the opinion that this "Phase 4" - or a relative slowdown in momentum of renewables is unlikely to ever occur for a sustained period of time (i.e. more than 2-5 years). Rather, I view value deflation as more of a resistance or "constant headwind" that, you could argue we even have today.

There are a few reasons I hold the opinion that this "Phase" will never actually become a phase:

- On the value deflation curve, where "energy" at certain times of day decreases in value as more solar is installed in a particular market that "can't be used" - batteries (or any kind of dispatchable energy storage) results in a "shifting up" of the curve. If for example a market had enough dispatchable energy storage to meet 10% of a grid's needs, energy deflation dynamics only start to kick in once demand exceeds the energy that can be stored (similar to the situation we have today)

- Value deflation (or moments where there is zero cost energy, negative electricity prices etc) is a market signal for "here is some free energy" or "I will pay you to take this off my hands". If you believe in markets, and innovations that emerge to capture value - I see technologies and businesses in due time stepping in place to take advantage of this underutilized value. We as humans are pretty good at finding ways to consume and use energy - particularly if it is nearly free. Large volumes of "low cost" energy could be used in multitudes of applications - think: desalination of large volumes of water, cleaning of water via reverse osmosis, hydrogen production for transportation or fertilizer production, operating most industrial applications etc.

- Given the above, and general political and market pressures developing over time to electrify and transition all uses of energy to become carbon free (industrial, transportation, etc) to lower carbon sources, I think you are doing the analysis injustice if you are only looking at the electricity sector (assuming you are looking on the decades timescale, which this author is). Energy is energy and can be transformed from one form to the other. If it is cheap enough in one form, that transformation can in situations become economical.

Regardless, I think it is a very exciting time and it will be interesting to see how things unfold. I am aware that there is a sizeable camp of analysts/experts out there that strongly believe in the value deflation risk - but I am a little more optimistic than most regarding the power of markets and human ingenuity. For anyone interested in the topic, I encourage you to do research on the value deflation of solar/wind.

Lots of arguments in this thread. Yet, there are few that are missing that I would like to add my two cents to.

1) People keep pointing out the need for batteries and yet keep forgetting that battery production is ramping up exponentially over the next few years because of EVs. Vehicle to grid power is technically feasible, obvious, and well on its way to becoming a thing in many places. So, EVs are not a problem but actually part of the solution here. Yes, EVs use a lot of power when they are charging and they use some of that power when they are driving. But most of the time they are not driving and plugged in to the grid. This means that lots of people switching to EVs in the next two decades is going to result in plenty of battery capacity that is already plugged into the grid that can absorb lots of the excess power generated during the day. It won't be enough by itself but it's a big factor.

2) The article is about grid solar and wind. However, lots of house holds are now technically capable of going completely off grid with privately operated solar and wind + batteries. In some places people already do this and in some places they even do it without subsidies. This is only going to get more affordable and common over the next few decades. Ironically the biggest factor slowing this down is not technology but legislation and the de-facto exclusive monopolies of existing energy players in a lot of markets. E.g. the US energy market is closer to a communist planned economy than anything resembling a free market right now: expensive, inefficient, and stupid. IMHO that is something that can be fixed quite easily and price pressure will make this a popular demand and basically irresistible for politicians to act on. I doubt this will survive decades in its current sorry state.

3) The key argument that Ramez Naam makes is about economies of scale driving prices down. This is true for clean energy and will continue to be true for some time as technology improves. You can bicker about the time lines of course but a 2-3 factor price drop is purely a question of when rather than if and there may very well be more in stock beyond that (5x, 10x, 20x?). IMHO we've seen nothing yet. It's worth noting that a lot of studies on this in the past have been systematically pessimistic on price levels and efficiency. E.g. a lot of coal plants are shutting down prematurely precisely because the economic studies that convinced their investors that was a good investment years ago were flat-out wrong by magnitudes. The current prices for clean energy are nowhere near as high as what people commonly believed would be the case even ten years ago. IMHO the combination of growing demand and the obvious VC investments at scale in this area are going to continue to yield results for decades/centuries to come.

4) Likewise, economies of scale provide little more benefit for non clean power solutions. Nuclear, coal and gas are not going to get massively cheaper in the next few decades and the latter two are arguably at risk of actually getting (much) more expensive as carbon taxation is becoming more of a thing and state subsidies for coal, oil, and gas are becoming much less of a thing at the same time their primarily fuel is actually getting scarcer. Also, price volatility for oil and gas is already a problem. Especially oil is going up and down like crazy. You can't do reliable price projections for even a few years ahead. Right now it seems world+dog is dumping oil thus depressing prices. But perhaps this is in anticipation of easy sources running out and demand collapsing: better to sell now at a low price while you still can. If it was a safe investment, people would be waiting for demand and prices to go up. That's not what's happening. Peak oil and coal is already in the past according to some and investors are already acting accordingly and they are primarily greed driven. Clean energy only has the 'problem' of getting massively cheaper than it is right now at a somewhat unpredictable pace for decades to come. Maybe someone will figure out fusion at some point. For that to be feasible, it will need to be cost effective with clean energy. I believe it is possible but might not happen until next century.

5) Batteries and grid are not the only way to use (excess) clean energy. Having cheap electricity means that you can do interesting things like desalinate seawater and store the resulting drinking water or use it for agriculture. You can also use it to generate all kinds of fuels from air and water. IMHO a potentially disruptive thing is the notion of actually generating methane and other carbon based fuels from basically air and water. Right now this is stuff that is feasible in labs and mostly not very practical, just yet. However, imagine this becoming actually cheaper than pumping oil out of the arctic, shipping it halfway across the planet, refining it, trucking it to your favorite petrol filling station, etc. The point I'm trying to make here is that excess energy has plenty of useful applications and is an opportunity rather than a problem. IMHO the vast majority of energy we generate in a few decades or so may not be for grid usage but this type of applications. We might still be burning diesel or gas in a century but I doubt it will be of the fossil variety.

6) The transport sector is electrifying. Ships already run of generators (see point 5) and increasingly also using batteries. Cars, trucks, buses etc. are well on their way of becoming EV only. Even short haul flight is likely to become electric in the next few decades (fuel cells & batteries). Most of that energy is going to come directly or indirectly from on site solar/wind. If you are going to be charging vehicles at an industrial scale, clean energy is what you will invest in to do it as cheap as you can. Buying it from a last century grid connected dinosaur plant burning oil/gas/coal from the Jurassic era (apologies for the bad pun), is not even close to being a plan. This is a cut throat business with super thin margins that is completely dominated by fuel cost. Clean energy is going to have insane cost effects here and anything that can't keep up will be out of business in a few decades.

"tl;dr: Building new solar, wind, and storage is about to be cheaper than operating existing coal and gas power plants. That will change everything."

Yeah, right Ramez.

Galactic-Scale Energy https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy

Interesting take. Very few are looking at future energy needs - we're mostly concerned about here and how.

> "Let me restate that important point. No matter what the technology, a sustained 2.3% energy growth rate would require us to produce as much energy as the entire sun within 1400 years."

1400 years seems like a perfectly reasonable timeframe to develop into a Kardashev II civilization.

It won’t unless it’s nuclear.

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