Effectively the time when it is useful is "when we don't have cheaper alternatives yet". We still should strive to make renewables and storage the cheaper option though.
To get really pedantic our 20th century understanding of power and energy are exactly backwards colloquially from what is really provided. Power is energy over time. The "power" infastructure was actually largely an energy infastructure with the exception of say hydro electric dams - you can only burn fuel once no matter how clever your ability to extract it. Meanwhile "renewable energy" provides power over its period of existence.
Coal is a different thing. That said, I think that it's not necessary to have very cheap coal and oil energy to have technological advances.
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/04/facts-fracking-chemical-di...
Where I live is a perfect microcosm of this - in the summer, we get ample power from our solar array, but in the winter, when it can be dark and raining for weeks on end, it doesn’t come close - so I’m building out hydro and wind, as when it rains, a stream appears that we can harness, and the wind blows.
The same applies to renewables at grid scale - overdependence on a single source is absolutely risky, which is why most renewable energy efforts involve quite a bit of diversification.
“It can't work if you do it that way" is a pretty bad argument if nobody actually does it that way. Maybe you are accidentally misrepresenting reality in order to support your world view here, but if not please go somewhere else, where facts don't matter.
As others mentioned: every nation that does renewables is looking into robust energy mixes and this (at least in industrial nations) includes catastrophic scenarios as well).
If there was no sun at all, do you think the temperatures would only drop 1-3° as mentioned in the article?
There will plenty of metals on the surface. Use the wood to melt iron. Use iron to make saws. Use saws to cut trees into beams and planks. Use beams and planks to build windmills. Use windmills to generate power and electricity. Etc.
Using coal and oil we went through the part from using mills for power to where we are now in about 250 years. On the one hand, if knowledge is retained, that can be sped up. On the other hand, it will be a lot harder to go through that process without coal and oil.
I would guess the net effect will be that it will take longer, as one of the effects of not having coal and oil will be lower yields in agriculture and, hence, a much smaller world population that also has to make a bigger effort to produce food.
we've even brought a lot of them closer to the surface, refined them, and alloyed them!
Not just that, but there's no way to sustain the level of human development (and population) we currently have without continuing to feed the energy beast. Our daily burn rate on oil/gas/coal is so profoundly high, and growing, that a) nothing can fill the gap; and b) it can't be shut down without condemning further development (esp. in Africa, India and China). Two disconnected factoids to illustrate the level of dependency and consumption we have today: without ammonia synthesis from fossil fuel, worldwide organic fertilizer stock could sustain only about 4bln people - globally; China in-serviced more cement (which requires fossil fuels) in like five years than the US did in the last 100 years.
To reduce carbon output, you need to switch coal use to natural gas where possible. That's the best near term solution right now - isolate coal and oil consumption to the industries that really need them - e.g. transportation, manufacturing - and work on alternative sources of electric generation, i.e. hydro where available, nuclear where not, unless some miracle net-positive and reliable electric generation method becomes available in the meantime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&list=WL&index=5&...
EDIT: I mean, you guys are downvoting these comments, and I'm sorry to tell you things you don't want to hear, but would prefer that you respond with contrary information rather than downvoting. Happy to alter my views and engage in information sharing.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewables is altogether more practical and economical than doing so with a combination of new nuclear and renewables. This wasn't true even ten years ago, but the costs of renewables have fallen so fast that it's now the case. At the same time, the supposed "Nuclear Renaissance" was revealed to be an illusion. Nuclear is now a dead technology walking. And renewables (and associated technologies like batteries and electrolyzers) continue to show cost declines at a rate nuclear could only dream of.
BTW, summarize the argument in the video. I don't waste my time watching video links.
If I've misunderstood this somewhere, I would love to learn more.
Going forward, even France is having a very hard time building reactors, and is finding renewables are cheaper. This is one reason why France's nuclear industry is in such trouble.
Germany deliberately pushed renewables in order to send them down their experience curves. This was spectacularly successful, but it has come at a high price to their consumers, who are still paying that down. The rest of us have reaped the benefit of far lower renewable costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan#/media/File:Ja...
Japan, one of the most technologically developed place in the world, cannot use renewables when they shut down nuclear. Instead they turn back to coal.
I'm not saying renewables are always inferior - e.g., California would be a perfect place for solar. But in every story I've heard of, when nuclear power is turned off fossil fuels pick up the slack.
First, 2011 is nine years ago. Utility scale solar has declined in cost by a factor of about 5 in the last decade. Decisions made even then do not say anything about how solar would compete today. Wind has also declined considerably in cost in that decade, although not as steeply.
Second, the argument I was making was that renewables beat new nuclear. I wasn't arguing that renewables beat fossil fuels unencumbered by CO2 charges, or even necessarily existing nuclear plants in which the construction and financing costs are sunk. So your observation is irrelevant to the claim I made.
I have to wonder why you guys never notice that the anti-renewables arguments you make are such non sequiturs. Myself, if I found defending my position required I resort to bogus logic, would reevaluate whether what I believed was actually true.
Now that nuclear power is fallen out of favor, they went back to fossil fuels, instead of renewables, because it's cheaper for them.
So apparently the advances in renewables didn't just make renewables cheaper: it also made nuclear more expensive than fossil fuels!
Or, maybe, nuclear is now considered "more expensive" largely thanks to the huge negative PR.
Also, I always assumed the lower renewable costs have come from economies of scale due mainly to China exploding it's energy production (which renewables makes a decent chunk of)
Also underrepresented are his comments on just how unrealistic the assumptions are in the models calling for temperature reduction, specifically about the implications for reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. Reducing energy consumption (whether through bans or price hikes) has a known humanitarian impact in present terms. The idea that you can convince your poor neighbor that he doesn't really need to eat better or have access to more resources is a tricky problem.
pfdietz, I think the case is made quite plainly in his presentation that renewables cannot catch up to much less displace ("100%") fossil fuels anytime in the near future. If you don't see that in the sum of what he presents in the notes, I'd encourage you to watch the source material to hear him say it, sector by sector. It's full of real data from a guy that's been studying energy use in human civilization for many decades.
This link has some of the same info in PDF form: http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/JPM.2019.pd...
Smil has argued that energy transitions happen only slowly, but I think he's being misled because the current rate of cost decline in renewables is unprecedented in its speed, as is the willingness of increasing numbers of countries to impose CO2 taxes or the equivalent.
And you're right about regulatory pressure being a big motivator.
"There is zero chance of 100% replacement of fossil fuels with renewables. Zero. Without a Thanos solution."
is utter nonsense. I mean, it's as if you're asking me what's wrong with a statement that the Earth is flat.
Developing societies such as Africa, India and China are increasing their consumption for the next few decades at least, radically accelerating the demand for hydrocarbons. India expects a quintupling of coal use in the next 4 decades. Airline miles will quintuple in much shorter period of time (like ten-twenty years). There is no shortage of hydrocarbons to naturally limit these demands. Politically there is no way to restrain newly developing nations. Technologically there is no net-positive energy generation source that competes on a density basis with fossil fuels. Again, the numbers tell the story.
I sincerely appreciate your frustration and hope for something different/better, but you need to come up with contrary data to argue these points. A hope in technical improvements year-over-year is all you've pointed to, and the trendline of capacity and efficiency improvements doesn't back that up. Further cost paid for a solar panel is not a benchmark. Energy intensity of its emplacement to bring it online is what its output needs to be balanced against. Its output, limited by useful life and useful operating hours really hamstrings its total lifecycle cost after the fossil fuel intense journey it takes.
That renewables are still a fairly small percentage of global energy demand is a good thing. It means that these experience effects still have room to kick in. Extrapolating the demonstrated experience curve gives that resistive heat from PV will be cheaper than heat from burning any form of fossil fuel, by the time PV has expanded fully.
The investment required to go 100% renewable will be many trillions of dollars. But the world GDP is $87 trillion, and the world spends about 10% of that on energy each year. There is enormous capacity to invest in energy infrastructure -- which is good, because enormous investment will be needed, regardless of what that infrastructure is.
Certainly they must be competitive in terms of energy density otherwise how can they substantially displace another energy source? Today renewable tech is not energy dense enough.
> Once renewables are sufficiently cheap
..cheap in total lifecycle cost (not end user cost of panel), carbon negative and sufficiently energy dense (transportable at light weight/low volume relative to stored energy)
> it's just building more of them.
For all of this, please remember we're talking global scale for electricity generation (<30% of fossil fuel use today), plus transportation, and manufacturing, not just electric use at my house or even a small country.
Straight cost - you mention taxes and regulation. This implies regulatory disincentives to produce and consume fossil fuels. It's relevant to note that at no time in recorded human history have humans backed off the consumption of an energy source unless a better replacement (more dense) was found. We nearly deforested the US east coast and almost killed off a whale species until coal came along and saved both (true story). Now we couldn't go back if we wanted to because civilization assumes a certain amount of energy input. Reducing it would have huge humanitarian impacts. Stabilizing it would be good, but this unfairly puts a huge burden on developing regions who would likely not tolerate it anyway.
Technology improvement - Look in the graph below at where diesel is relative to a Li-Ion battery. That's the gap it needs to make up at 5% efficiency gain per year (many orders of magnitude). It's beyond optimistic to say that would be covered any time soon barring a miracle (the track record shows that Moore's law doesn't apply to solar cells and batteries).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene...
Even if you doubled the rate of efficiency improvements to 10% annualized, it's still an unrealistically wide gap to make up in my lifetime at least.
Fundamentally, for your position to be true you have to assume a miraculous leap forward in technology. And/or you have to assume some global-scale rational decision making (or force) to reduce consumption voluntarily (or involuntarily :/), in contrast with the whole of historic human behavior regarding energy consumption. Seems like there's a lot of hope involved there.
We have plenty of examples of humans forgoing technologies that turned out to have downsides. And it's a near universal truth that dire warnings were given about these restrictions, warnings that turned out to be vastly overblown. Technology does step up to the plate when market incentives are in place.
> Look in the graph below at where diesel is relative to a Li-Ion battery.
Li-ion batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel for fossil fuels to be displaced. Some applications don't require that energy density. We are already seeing battery electric buses, for example. In other cases something other than batteries can be used, for example hydrogen. In the worst case, net zero CO2 diesel can be made synthetically, using energy from renewables (and carbon from either CO2 capture or biomass; use of biomass would be limited to these edge cases.)
We are already at the point technically where a great deal of fossil fuel for transportation would be displaced if transport paid the true cost of CO2 emission.
> Fundamentally, for your position to be true you have to assume a miraculous leap forward in technology.
No, the roadblock is not technology, it's proper carbon pricing. That is the biggest obstacle.
I didn't say technologies, I said energy sources.
> batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel
We need a storage mechanism that allows the energy gained from renewable sources to power things without interruption.
Two examples illustrate the problem today - for renewables to power a cargo ship the battery load-out required to move that loaded container ship would materially reduce its cargo capacity because it's wasting so much space and mass on literally tons of batteries. Compare the capacity, speed, and installed power of MV Yara Birkeland (electric container ship) to the OOCL Hong Kong (diesel powered cargo ship) for an idea. Another example is Tokyo suffering a predictable 3-day cyclone every year, where 27 million people need 22 gigawatts of electricity. Imagine the battery array needed for that (with its inherent cost, maintenance, limited lifespan and acres of space in a space-constrained land). So these are two easy examples of why storage density needs to increase by orders of magnitude to meet the bar you set of 100% replacement.
It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet and the track record of an annualized 5% efficiency improvement for storage tech (which is generous but imagine even doubling it to 10%) per year won't catch up in our lifetimes. The math speaks for itself.
> roadblock is not technology, it's proper carbon pricing
If it were just pricing, it presumes that I have equivalent systems to implement and I just need to pay a premium for one vs the other. But that's not the case as illustrated in the examples above (and there are many, many more - airplanes, continuous smelting) where the existing energy storage tech doesn't work. So technology is an enormous roadblock.
As to carbon pricing - carbon pricing regimes require world-wide cooperation. IF you can get that, it effectively means limiting fossil fuel usage, right? Otherwise why are we doing it?
So limiting fossil fuel usage in a situation where there is no suitable replacement as described above, ultimately means you need to tell some guy in India that he can't have an air conditioner and some family in Africa that their agriculture development programs need to take a hit for lack of synthesized ammonia. This is a very unequal proposition. Alternatively, you can preserve that growth rate in the developing world and tell people in the developed world that they need to rewind their lifestyles in all ways (housing, vehicle mass, etc) to the early 1960's, which is when the US last had a consumption rate at the level needed to impact global warming. This is probably the preferable solution, but how tenable do you think either of these propositions really are?
There are undeniable humanitarian costs - not just monetary costs - to reducing fossil fuel use today when there are no (at scale) suitable replacements.
There have only been a handful of energy sources, so this argument is lame. I'll also note that it's an example of "nothing can happen for the first time".
> It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet
Hydrogen. Ammonia. Synthetic hydrocarbons (which I explicitly listed). These are demonstrated technologies.
It's a common canard that anti-renewable polemics make to represent batteries as the only storage option. And you've continued to make this argument even after I listed alternatives earlier.
When you make an argument that no solution is possible, it puts the responsibility ON YOU to rule out not just batteries, but every conceivable solution and combination of solutions. You can't just adopt a lazy attitude of lousy engineering to make your case.
> As to carbon pricing - carbon pricing regimes require world-wide cooperation. IF you can get that, it effectively means limiting fossil fuel usage, right? Otherwise why are we doing it?
It will likely involve carbon tariffs. If some country refuses to control CO2 emission, trade with that country will be blocked. This will coerce the holdouts.
Your attitude there also smacks of fatal defeatism. What is your alternative, burning fossil fuels until we have a replay of the end-Triassic greenhouse mass extinction?
A matter of fact isn't an argument, it just is. It's usefulness here is that IF your solution depends on humans doing something for the first time ever in not just recorded history but also in the entire archeological record, it's a big assumption to be weaving into a proposal and weakens (but granted does not make impossible) the idea that you may be on the right track in assuming it will happen now. It's like the famous "How to draw an owl" meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl
Are miracles possible? Sure. Should you bet on it in your planning? No.
> Hydrogen, ammonia
Both of these require fossil fuels to synthesize in quantities to meet today's needs, let alone new at-scale quantities. Hydrogen certainly may be better than burning coal or even natural gas, but it still would require fossil fuels. The amount of organically sourced ammonia we have on the planet _in total_ is only sufficient to support crops for ~4 bln people globally. There is no solution right now to synthesize enough ammonia at scale without hydrocarbons.
> [embargoes] will coerce the holdouts
We'll not get a chance to test this, but as a thought exercise let's consider how well embargoes work today. Then consider who the embargoes will be placed on from a justice perspective or from an effectiveness perspective. You are either advocating a form of colonialism in the developing world or telling your French neighbor to pay way more for heating, cooking, driving, etc. Both these things have taken place in isolation, and both had bad outcomes. Scaling it up doesn't make a good outcome any more likely.
> What's your alternative?
Rational thinking isn't defeatism - it's application _is_ the solution.
I would gently ask - very gently and politely as I would a friend - that you to re-read your initial response to my statement. You said it was "utter nonsense" and equated it to saying the earth was flat. I'm sure you can appreciate now with more data how the critique is actually the reverse. Your response to my points assumes a miraculous technological development at an indeterminant future date whose likelihood is not supported by existing efficiency improvement data. It disregards the voraciousness with which the planet is consuming fossil fuels today, the future burden forecasted by developing economies, and the insufficiency of current technologies to scale.
I empathize with your sense of hope and am similarly shocked at the risk we face as a species, but people typically do two things in the face of this shock that are equally irrational: deny global warming or believe the solution for energy transition is easy.
Bill Gates said in a talk at Stanford a few months ago that the "easy" people are a bigger barrier to decarb progress than the deniers. I don't know if I would agree in the ranking (or care), but agree that neither are helpful. The problem is enormously difficult (as befitting a planetary emergency). My view of solutions is informed the same way as my assessment of current energy use is. Seek knowledge, be rational, be very skeptical, watch out for the hucksters, support what's left over.
Proposed new offshore wind farms cost £40/MWh, operational from 2023/2024
Nuclear was the answer 15 years ago. It's not now.
Battery storage is possibly going to fit in there, but it doesn't do it yet.
Tidal, ground source, gravity/momentum/compression/latent-heat storage solutions, some of these might do.
I think we need at least one more cycle of Nuclear power plants.
Perhaps then we'll have workable fission.
Sods law will say if you don't invest in nuclear, you'll be using a lot more CCGT because storage or large-geography interconnects won't be there
But if you do invest, you'll end up being stuck with something costing far more than commodity renewables+storage
We have "workable fission" now, it's just very expensive. Workable fusion is always a generation away.
It does feel like Tokamak will never arrive. An acquaintance did their doctorate last year on modelling some aspect of the containment; they didn't seem hopeful.
If you go to https://model.energy/ and optimize such systems in various places, using real weather data, you find nuclear (called "Dispatchable 2" in the advanced options) get optimized to 0%. It's just too expensive. That site uses plausible cost numbers, except electrolysers are already cheaper than their target cost for 2030.
Nuclear requires a lot of dereg and testing that will be decades out if we start today. This assumes the barriers of popular rejection can be overcome. China might pull it off, but I don't see the US radiating enthusiasm for it. But yeah, since few places on earth can take advantage of hydro, I don't see any long-term alternative to nuclear.
The key parameters in a nuclear build are:
1) the construction time (impacted by regulatory regimes)
2) the cost of capital (interest rate of tying up money)
3) an uncertainty factor about getting shut down (impacted by regulatory regimes)
In China, 1&2 are 3-4 years and 2% respectively. In the US they are 8-9 years, 15% and maybe 50% chance you'll be shut down before you can finish. [0]
The nuclear plant has a strike price twice as high as the offshore wind.
Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.
It would almost be reasonable to say "They are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine".. whoever they are. The ones with cocaine mustaches presumably.
EDIT: Someone paid a lot of money to make this not an "our" choice but instead a "their" choice. If you feel like this is something you have any real control over, I urge you to change things.
If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what is a koch brother then? A monster made up of a thousand scarfaces all shouting say hello to my little friend in unison?
If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what about someone who works at Greenpeace, doesn't have a car and lives frugally? Probably scarface in comparison to the average untouchable in India but I don't know enough to make that comparison.
Warren Buffet has roughly 100,000X the wealth of the average american (~700k), but Warren buffet does not produce 10^5 as much co2 or consume 10^5 as much iron.
Seph-reed posted: >Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.
This begs the question of what the threshold is for when it stops being a collective "us" problem, and becomes a "them" problem because of "their" disproportionate contribution to the problem. This [1] suggests that the richest 20% of americans account for 30% of US carbon emissions, or about 1.5x the average. If the bottom 80% are still emitting 70% of the emissions, than I would say it is still a collective "us" problem. If you somehow reduced the emissions from the top 20% richest americans to 0, the average american would still emit 300% more than the global average.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...
Pick amy product on a supermarket shelf or on Amazon, and you wil find that raw materials account for maybe 20% of its final price tops. They are called commodities for a reason, and its production of those raw materials that does the lions share of pollution. You could replace all manufacturing with a combonation of nuclear power and reneables, and youd hardly change the price of the final product.
So that seems to imply to me that ordinary people (in the rich countries) shouldn't be underestimated from an environmental perspective, and because our morality is pro-consumer it reinforces waste. I don't think that's brainwashing by the rich, I think that's just how people are, in Western society at least.
A more equal society would probably have a greater chance of enacting Pigouvian taxes anyway because political power and economic power would be less intertwined.