Costa Rica has run on 100% renewable energy for 300 days
vt.co
vt.co
> This month, officials in Los Angeles, California, are expected to approve a deal that would make solar power cheaper than ever while also addressing its chief flaw: It works only when the sun shines. The deal calls for a huge solar farm backed up by one of the world's largest batteries. It would provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery. That's cheaper than any power generated with fossil fuel.
http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
Currently, electricity is generated by "peaker plants", which spin up when the price of electricity goes up, and then spin down when the price of electricity is low. Consumers are often passed the buck: peaker-plant electricity (usually natural gas) costs more than baseload electricity (usually nuclear or coal)
Utility-scale batteries are competing against the Natural Gas peaker plants. The question is if utility scale batteries can make as much money (ie: provide the power at low enough costs) to be worthwhile.
A huge part of what caused the Enron California electricity crisis is the utilities were unable, by law, to adjust consumer prices as wholesale prices changed. The utilities were required, by law, to provide whatever consumers demanded whenever they demanded it, at a fixed price, regardless of what it cost the utilities to provide it.
If this has changed in California, that's for the better. In Seattle, the price of electricity is the same, 24/7.
Consider gas prices at the pump. They vary every day, based on demand and supply of gas. Gas prices go up over Memorial Day. They go up when a refinery burns down. They go down in winter when people drive less. It works very well at matching up supply with demand.
It broke down completely in the late 1970's when the government imposed price controls and allocation controls at the pump. When Reagan repealed all that, things worked fine again.
The other meter is attached to the heater system, only works off-peak, and charges a discounted rate.
The heater is basically a slab of steel, wrapped in heating elements, surrounded by insulation. It heats up when the power is on, and temperature controlled vents let air circulate when it's cold in the house. Works ok, but I'll probably change it out for a heat-pump soon.
Finally, a point to having internet connected appliances!
This is false.
Source: I'm a California resident; it's not true here.
There seems to be an increasing use of Time of Use plans, which will help with the battery problem. But they're a poor match, still being fixed rates for fixed times.
I do want to follow this up saying that I fully support building as much solar and wind as we can. Not doing so is kinda dumb. Just saying it isn't a cure all.
I don't think anyone is saying we're replacing natural gas to cook and heat with.
(At least I hope not, cooking with gas is an indulgence I partake of regularly.)
In cold climates, it's far cheaper to use gas heating.
Is electricity really cheap in France?
Most people I know have abandoned gas hobs and replaced them with induction hobs - they feel a lot like cooking with gas (unlike halogen or ceramic ones), but are a lot more practical (e.g. cleaning, extra space etc) and better for air quality.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/13/hammond-...
This really depends on the hobs. Bad ones are nowhere near gas quality and trend to regulate the heat by going a few seconds full power then few seconds off. Good ones regulate in a much smoother / more consistent way. We can't compare generic "induction hob" - it doesn't exist.
("primary" means I directly cause it; if I drove a car that would probably be my #1).
In theory there's lots of controls and oversight and everything, in practice the nuclear industry has waste products that are suitable for military purposes, and so they can get away with rather a lot as their watchdog ultimately also owns a military.
These campaigns to "end nuclear" might have less traction if the owners managed their systems properly.
I know that a few thousand years still feels like a long time, but with nuclear fission, it is truly the most non-renewable resource, being formed only in stellar explosions. Let's put aside the science fiction of asteroid mining nuclear fuel for now; I think a reasonable argument could be made to not spend nuclear fuel for our primary energy needs. If we have dreams of ever being able to do mass interstellar travel, nuclear material is the only fuel we have so far with reasonable energy density for the speeds and distances involved. (Of course some will say "nuclear fusion" or "light sails", to which I say, we should defer mass consumption of fissile material until we have a reasonable expectation that those methods are viable).
Now if was even vaguely cost competitive with battery backed up wind and solar then that’s a reasonable argument, but until then I just don’t see the point.
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2016/10/03/nuclear-power-becomes-c...
Humanity in Y12019 might be exactly where we are now.
Scientific progress is not a law of nature. It needs very specific environment to thrive. Before scientific revolution kicked in the pharaohs would have easily adjusted to europe and elsewhere.
No one can predict whether there is an infinite amount of scientific progress ahead of us or will we hit a wall.
While I too am hopeful that humanity will be able to crack cold fusion in the next few hundred millennia, it should be noted that cold fusion is something which has simply not occurred in our universe before. Yes, fusion is the most commonly-occuring process in the universe, but all of it runs hot. It is possible that net-positive cold fusion might never come to pass and we'll have to go back to solar panels so we can exploit the output of already-existing hot fusion from the Sun.
Of course, there is a risk there that we will hit some fundamental efficiency limitation that simply makes it not worth it. But st least it's not known to be a physical impossibility, like cold fusion is believed to be.
In fact, more than cold fusion, I think there is a reason to hope for warm superconductors at some point in the future.
I believe the main losses are plasma instabilities, rather than the energy cost of the containment. This is somewhat secondhand knowledge though, I merely used to hang out in a pub with someone who worked in this field.
Basically there's lot of research into how to do containment that's far more efficient than Tokamak reactors that suffer from the problem you mention. A 100 years is a really long time to bet against given how the pace of our innovation is constantly increasing, let alone 3000 years. Keep in mind that thorium has 3x the capacity & we don't even have reactors to process that so even "regular" has a very long shelf-life. Uranium scarcity isn't a thing when compared with global warming & meets our energy needs drastically better than solar/wind & even hydro while having a much more compact ecological foot-print.
Scientific progress may not be law, but there isn't a thousand year period where humans haven't advanced.
Point is: you can't really put a deadline on R&D. We won't really know when it works, until, well it does. And who knows how long it will to take commercialize once we do get it working.
I mean, Musk said fully autonomous vehicles in 2015 were easy and would be solved in 2 years. 4 years later, Tesla'd are killing people by driving into highway barriers or broadsiding a semi trailer. Ambitious? Yes. Are we there yet? No. I think autonomous driving is a worthy goal and we should keep working at it. Same with fusion. But do I believe the projected timelines? No. Doubt that I'll see fusion as a power source in my timeline. Maybe never fully autonomous vehicles (I mean trully fully). And I'm still under 40. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I think a lot of people underestimate the true difficulty of some of these projects.
Fusion is an amount of money away more than an amount of time.
Construction costs alone for ITER are estimated to be $22 to $65 billion dollars. This doesn't even factor in the cost of actually running it after that or the cost of feeding all the scientists involved in it (which receive government funding through their respective countries).
You can probably count the amount of companies with enough cash lying around to finance this on one hand. And then they'd still need the people for it.
Even once ITER is completed you still don't have a realistic product to sell. ITER is of no use besides getting us one step closer to fusion energy.
And at the end of it we may just realize that fusion is never going to be cost efficient compared to other energy sources.
That's no risk any sane company will take.
As always the free market will wait until all the groundwork has been laid by taxpayer funded scientists, and even then only make a move if there are massive government subsidies - as has happened and is still happening with fission energy.
The free market is much better at low-risk and incremental innovation. Stuff like this? Not so much.
That being said, I have friends in fusion. I know plenty of others that work in various areas of it. No one thinks iter isn't going to work. All the major problems have been solved. The infighting you see is about money, because there isn't much going around for this because the gp is right that this is a difficult problem and we thought it was easier. The argument now is that some think we need iter to prove that it works and that will cause more funding to come in and then we can build the nice fancy power reactors. The other camp is that we don't need iter and that we should put that money into <insert popular method> (most will probably work). This is a very different conversation then what it was 20 years ago. 20 years ago we had neutron problems.
The risk calculation is: expected cost minus expected reward. The expected reward is astronomical (no pun intended!), so you're simply restating my point: fusion is not likely to work regardless of how much money we throw at it. Amazon's R&D annual budget exceeds $20b. That's one company spending half an ITER a year. The private sector has no problem coming up with those sums for ideas it deems promising. The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas.
No it's not even close to the total cost of ITER. It may just pay for the cost of actually physically constructing it.
The R&D that got taxpayer funded scientists to the point where we are able to construct it at all is going to be a multiple of that.
> The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas.
So you're saying that things like fission reactors, spaceflight and GPS, treatments for some rare and not-so-rare diseases, the Human Genome Project, ARPANET, everything that came out of CERN, etc. were bad ideas just because no private company could be assed to develop and build those first?
No. It's a fact that all of these were vitally important to get our species where it is today, even though they would have looked like a terrible investment of time and money from the perspective of a private company. Today private companies have happily entered some of those spaces that have been pioneered by government funded scientists.
It's true that many moonshots fail. That's why they're called (sometimes literal) moonshots. But it's important to try anyways so we can advance as a species.
And most of the time we learn a lot even if we fail.
Quoting Musk is probably the worst example you can give. His track record for prediction isn't great.
You're right that it is hard to predict how long R&D takes, but governments are different than companies. Companies have a lifespan in decades, possibly a few centuries (if you're REALLY really lucky and pivot a lot). Profits are focused at the yearly level and long shots are decades out. Governments on the other hand generally have much longer lifespans. Decades are short periods of time for them. Investing in things that will pay off in a century is great business here (lots of science and math falls into this category). This is the problem. People are comparing how companies operate to how governments operate. They have completely different agendas, priorities, and operate at completely different time scales.
The cause of USS Scorpion’s sinking is unknown so it may be related to the reactor or it may not.
If you read the page about USS Thresher then it clearly explains it had nothing to do with the reactor and was a "high-pressure water spraying from a broken pipe joint may have shorted out one of the many electrical panels, causing a shutdown ("scram") of the reactor, which in turn caused loss of propulsion" followed by other personnel and procedure issues that led to a sinking.
Sure it did not blow up, but that does not mean the reactor was safe to use as a critical piece of equipment. Loss of power is a huge deal and the reactor being unable to recover in that situation is a major design flaw.
Again, if you read that page then you'll find several other causes like faulty ballast tanks that didn't eject, isolating the steam system too quickly and eliminating potential energy from the turbines, and inexperienced personnel not restarting the reactor after shutdown. If just the ballast tanks had worked then the sub would be safe for rescue, if the steam was used then it could continue to drive to surface.
According to an official report [1]: "U.S. Nuclear Powered Warships have safely operated for more than 50 years without experiencing any reactor accident or any release of radioactivity that hurt human health or had an adverse effect on marine life. Naval reactors have an outstanding record of over 134 million miles safely steamed on nuclear power, and they have amassed over 5700 reactor-years of safe operation." and this is from several years ago.
1. https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/fact0604...
I absolutely agree it was not the single cause of failure, it was even recoverable in theory. But, if the reactor had continued to supply power, like large result battery systems tend to, then it would have likely made it. That directly means using a reactor was less safe to put on the sub.
If an aircraft lost all engine power over the ocean because of a defective engine design and thus crashed. Well you can bet the navy would blame the engines, but with nuclear power they care about perception. The loss of a crew is acceptable risk, the loss of nuclear reactors from a public backlash is a loss of capability.
PS: They can and do mitigate this risk by having large battery systems for redundancy, it’s only a few hours of power. But, it can run a redundant electric engine to move the sub, and that’s an important lesson learned.
The fact is that the reactor didn't fail, it worked normally. The steam system didn't "fuck up" but was used incorrectly. The part that did fail was the ballast tank safety system. Diesel-electrics aren't a magical answer and have major disadvantages (like the need for air intake in a submarine).
It seems you're arguing that nuclear-powered designs aren't good, which is an entirely different topic than the safety record of the reactors themselves. Bad design of a system is not an argument that that core principles are inherently wrong, which is exactly the same thing any nuclear expert will tell you about Chernobyl.
Anyway, I think this is more a case of disagreements about what constitutes a system than about what happened. I would say if the design of a critical system lets people mess up then that’s a failure of the design and the system. Chernobyl was very much a case of operators doing a long series of dumb things as people do. Similarly, the operators caused an issue with the steam system, but that just means the system and it’s design was also faulty. (IMO, the steam system should be considered part of the nuclear power plant as civilian nuclear power plants also use a steam loop for similar reasons.)
I would rate the US Navy highly on nuclear safety operations especially over the last 50 years.
[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
In addition to having a far more plentiful fuel source, a LFTR runs at ambient atmospheric pressure so it's not necessary to have a massive containment dome surrounding the reactor in case of a core loop breach. Also, the chemistry of a LFTR tolerates the addition of partially spent uranium fuel (popularly mislabeled as "nuclear waste") which is then consumed in the normal fuel lifecycle of a LFTR. Why this wonder of chemistry isn't more commonly known is beyond me: we could simply solve the Yucca Mountain problem by recycling the partially spent fuel stored there into liquid metal reactors like the LFTRs. The downside is that if you have to scram a LFTR the core chemistry solidifies (it's liquid metal, after all) and restarting is time and energy intensive.
Ultimately, though, because the LFTR didn't produce plutonium for bombs the Department of Defense didn't have interest in running it.
The real reason that we don't have thorium reactors is that it's difficult. All the kinks aren't worked out. Compound that with that it's hard to implement new reactor designs and the process becomes really slow to work out those kinks.
The answer, unsurprisingly is extremely complicated but certainly isn't just because it doesn't produce Pu, or rather creates low yields. This myth needs to die.
If we went all in with fission we still have thousands of years before it's an issue, by which point we'll probably have figured out some even better alternatives.
And I’m not sure how you think it’s the most non-renewable. How much oil do you think we have left?
If it makes you happy, i’m willing to ration the uranium so the earth’s supply lasts 10,000 years. If our exponential knowledge curve can’t solve the problem by then we might be in trouble.
The singularity should be within the next 10,000 years.
> If we have dreams of ever being able to do mass interstellar travel
We probably should put aside the science fiction of mass interstellar travel for now too then?
Especially given that asteroid mining (or lunar mining) is relatively achievable in the near term compared to interstellar travel...
3,000 years is a long time at our current rate of scientific discovery.
If we can't make any improvements or find an alternative energy source (like fusion, who's fuel is essentially limitless) then we probably don't deserve to live anymore.
The assumption that we'll make absolutely no technological progress in a (at a ridiculous lower bound!!) 3000yr time frame (and that we shouldn't use an energy source because of that) is laughable! Let alone calling something the least renewable because of it. Specifically with nuclear we've made tremendous progress in the last decade alone. There is no evidence to support this kind of thinking. Let alone that humanity won't make any progress.
If we took this kind of thinking to any other kind of problem we'd never make any progress. There's reasons to not use nuclear (I'm pro), but this isn't one of them.
Not quite so fast. A nuclear power plant under the hood of a car may be unfeasible for a long time to come, but what is becoming feasible is electric cars. Right now, a Tesla is still powered by coal in most places for now, but as more renewable energy sources come online, they magically get switched over to being solar powered, and then they become "nuclear powered", if/when that time comes.
Perhaps the climate would be in a non-crisis mode.
Sadly we live in a world were future risks are ignored and lessons from the past, be it nuclear bombs or warfare in general, are forgotten and ignored.
Not the only source but I couldn't bother to search more.
EDIT: this article says 90 years normally and 5 years if everything was run on nuclear power https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm...
If nothing else, people havn't seriously looked. For example, in Australia, the state of NSW "proclaimed on 14 September 2012 ... [the removal of] the ban on uranium exploration" [0]. Australia has worlds most extensive uranium resources in the world, although not in the state of NSW for obvious reasons. Possibly we can extend our lead.
But practically, the 'resources' definition that that article is relying on (going purely off the Australian legal framework) likely involves investment on the part of companies to be able to advertise. We've a lead-silver mine in Australia that have '20 years of resources' on the books over 80 year periods, because every time they need a mine extension they go out and 'discover' a bit more of the resource that everyone knows is there but havn't officially measured yet. The current 20 years of resource is a polite lie as well, they've got lots more.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Australia#Re...
There is a false dichotomy of renewables vs nuclear. Pursuing these options are not mutually exclusive. Only in so far that we want to devote limited resources to the problem.
The real solution is that we should pursue both. Nuclear so we have a back stop to the problem. Renewables so that we have hope for the best case clean and safe energy future.
It is foolish to believe the projections on renewables will absolutely happen. There are a lot of problems that can happen with technology at scale. Nuclear is a surefire bet, with risks being nuclear meltdowns and improper waste management.
There are multiple typos in the article itself (the last word is "recieveing"). The homepage headline as of writing this comment is grammatically challenged: "The ‘Black Mirror’ tech billionaires are investing in to try and live forever"
This article provides no sources, no footnotes, no authoritative evidence other than "purportedly..." It editorializes throughout and reads like it was written by a Romanian SEO bot.
Do we have any standards on HN anymore, or do we just post and promote articles with clickbait headlines that make us feel good?
Also, the post is from 2017. Come on, people.
Usually smaller countries that have the resources can pull it off. (hydric in the case of Albania, as it is 70% mountainous and has a lot of rivers crossing it).
The downside is that is very much rainfall dependent. There are years where it could actually export energy, and there are years that it has to import it to meet demand.
https://i.redd.it/ul78e5rqdvt21.png
For more in Europe: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/bg6hnz/electricity_...
Though it's not quite 100% renewable energy unless the energy being imported is also renewable.
I don't know what the current ratio is, but I do know that Rainfall directly affects the GDP of the country by almost +/- 1%.
Yes: the net impact on the environment is likely to be equivalent if imports and exports balance.
No: a major criticism of renewable energy is that it is less reliable. Achieving 100% is much more impressive without a handicap.
I'm still impressed though.
Costa Rica has high taxes specifically on cars. It’s a car import tax and every new car has to be imported. Someone there told me 20%, but a quick search looks like it’s 45-85%. Whatever it is, the result is most people are driving around in old cars that have higher emissions than newer cars. A lot of the stuff on the road is over 20 years old.
Also, Costa Rica has always been a low emissions country. In 2014 they had 1.6 per capita, well below the 4.3 world average.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Does this affirmation actually hold? Is it really easier just because it's smaller? In this particular case Costa Rica has a lot of natural resources that enable this. But in general I think that these changes depend more on willingness than country size.
Maybe the clue is here? Presumably the USA and China have areas the size of Costa Rica that are as rich in resources as it but those are averaged out by the rest of the land.
But every country has its unique features and must play with the cards they are handed. So this still is really neat.
> Because Costa Rica is located between 8 and 12 degrees north of the Equator, the climate is tropical year round.
>Mild climate and trade winds make neither heating nor cooling necessary, particularly in the highland cities and towns where some 90% of the population lives.
You don't say!
I was traveling the west coast and power went out nightly Quepos to Sierpe. I think 5 or 6 times during dinner in Playa Dominical.
100% renewable is great, but let’s not pretend they have even two 9’s uptime.
https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=...
It is far richer than Somalia or Bolivia.
Handling consumption peaks means either using fossil fuels, or vastly over producing electricity during non-peak hours (which in a free market can cause odd incentives such as negative energy prices). CR as an energy exporter, they generally produce way more than the country consumes, so they get to handle the peaks in a way that is unique to places that have energy importing neighbors.
I will add, this electricity is produced by a government run monopoly that keeps prices extremely high, which has chocked out much of the manufacturing done in the area.
Even tradition, old school Costa Rican brands which supply the local market have been moving to Nicaragua and Panama (Jack's snacks for example)
Still, the achievement is great news and commendable.
> Only with renewable energies, this country has been operating for more than 6 months. The heavy rains in the region have allowed the country to completely renounce fossil fuels, and to feed almost entirely on the electricity generated from 4 hydroelectric plants – with a little extra help from geothermal, solar green energy and wind projects. With a little more investment, this trend can be maintained over time.
https://thecostaricanews.com/costa-rica-is-running-only-with...
[0]: https://shiftwa.org/its-time-wa-considers-hydropower-as-rene...
It would be interesting to see what effects the New Deal had on our fish populations... https://livingnewdeal.org/new-deal-categories/infrastructure...
> The state applied to kill the sea lions “because their analyses showed that the high levels of predation by sea lions meant there was an almost 90% probability that one of the upper Willamette steelhead runs would go extinct,” the wildlife agency said in a statement.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/hunger...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/25/orca-sta...
Nuclear isn't renewable, either.
"Hanford also hosts a commercial nuclear power plant, the Columbia Generating Station, and various centers for scientific research and development, such as the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the LIGO Hanford Observatory. "
It's not the harmless cure-all that it's made out to be here at times.
edit: that said, CO2 levels are an immediate planetary crisis and nuclear is a tool we can and should use to mitigate it.
Waste storage can be handled quite easily by reprocessing fuel, the waste is very small in comparison to other types of energy. There's little to no relationship to arms proliferation, that's only a very specific type of reactor and fuel that's not in general use for nuclear power.
And finally there's a lot of water on the planet. Cooling isn't a difficult problem.
The bigger problem is that reactor research has essentially been stopped due to nimby problems, so we don't even know how much better we could make nuclear power.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/06...
Per capita investment will be the same whether the population is 5 million or 50 million.
Our Costa Rican economy is, more than ever before, based on providing services: customer support, technical support, financial services, web and games development, digital arts, ecotourism, etc.
See that's a force that has a daily purpose unlike a standing Army that waits for battle.
The 70-something strong UEI is something most countries have since the 70s to fight terrorism, like Germany's GSG9. Again, not a standing army to fight another army.
A standing army on the other hand is a very large and very powerful tool, either to fight outside armies or to impose internal repression. The whole point about abolishing the military was to take this force out of the larger equation. The UEI will never be a threat to Costa Rica itself, a standing army would be.
In my native Germany you can consider a chunk of the Bundeswehr to have a right-wing/extremist mindset (E.g. Franco A.) and I wouldn't trust it much in a situation like say a Green-party leader becoming Bundeskanzler.