Of course, if it's doable in practice I'm all for it, and if clean energy is really as cheap as they claim, then we'll get there pretty soon just on economics.
Most people think "clean energy is just about building solar panels" - it's viewed as this linear process. I think the media often present it this way.
But in fact, between us and a society run by clean energy is all sorts of huge technical hurdles we haven't solved yet. Adding 10,20% renewables is simple enough - but 100% renewables without daily blackouts is incredibly hard. We need many orders of magnitude more battery storage to get there (or some other storage technology).
It's the same for electric cars. The cost of electricity to run an electric car is small, so people assume that if everyone has an electric car, running costs will be low.
But currently electric cars are subsidised by fuel taxes, and low emissions vehicles are encouraged by low vehicle taxes. When every vehicle is low emission, we still need to get the cost of maintaining the roads from somewhere. And electric car charging at home works because only a handful of people do it. When every car on the road is plugged in every night the distribution networks to every street will need to be massively upgraded.
It's a problem because it means most people don't appreciate how far we have to go before a clean energy society is possible. We need to increase investment into this technology by an order of magnitude to have a hope of implementing before climate change has significant effects.
- 100% renewables is hard. 90% renewables is straightforward.
- electric cars generally charge at night and use about the same amount of power as an electric oven. Distribution network changes are not required.
That does not sound right. Napkin math: A tiny Renault Zoe has a 52kWh battery. Even assuming 100% charging efficiency, charging for 8 hours over night you’re looking at 52/8=6.5kW per hour. That’s already more than twice as much as an oven, and an extremely conservative approximation.
edit: thanks for pointing out what I missed. I was somehow fixated on full recharges.
A Zoe has a 245 mile range on said battery, but assuming you drive at 25% efficiency for 20 miles to and from work, you'll use about 30% of a zoe's battery in a day, which spread out over our 11 hours from earlier gives about 1.5Kw per hour.
- My EV has ~30kWh battery
- I charge about twice a week, overnight, from around 50% to 100%, if I drive to work every day
I have a relatively short commute to work. So this is may be a lower bound. But charging 52kWh every single day is definitely an extreme case on the other end.
Where I'm from, EVs typically charge at 10A-32A at 220V, or 7.4kW to 22kW with level 2 chargers. That means you can't charge a Tesla from 0% to 100% over night, but then I haven't heard of anyone who actually needs to do that every day, if ever. The closest I've done personally is charge a Tesla I borrowed from around 30% to 100% at a cabin, but then I started when we arrived in the afternoon and we left just before noon.
It's weird that you'd call a 52kWh Zoe tiny btw. 52kWh is quite respectable. It's only half of the largest EV you could possibly buy now, and I'm guessing 50-70kWh will be the standard mid/entry level battery size for a long time.
30-40kWh cars might disappear. That'd kind of be a shame, because it's a useful size for many people. And having a larger battery than you need is a huge waste unless you have vehicle-to-grid to get more value out of the battery capacity you're not using. But then again, maybe the 30-40kWh market will be taken over by second hand 50-60kWh cars with reduced capacity.
I am sad that there are so few good subcompact/ truly low energy options in this market. There is a tiny Chinese car coming to the US, but right now it seems like it's only going to hit a few markets.
The American (genital) size contest for SUVs and Trucks has sucked a lot of oxygen out of what is a much more interesting variety in EV production for Asia and the EU.
Average drives do more like 12,000 a year, not 80k miles.
I believe most wind power curtailment today happens overnight.
TANSTAAFL
My point isn't that fuel taxes pay the full costs of the road, but that electric cars in many countries receive favourable taxation (which significantly reduces the cost of ownership) which is only possible because they are a minority of vehicles.
This actually depends largely on the country you're in. In the UK (where I live) the effective tax rate on gas is around 68%, and there's lots of tax breaks for electric cars. The effective tax rate on electricity is 5%, and the cost per MJ of electricity and gas is about the same. Effectively the government tax revenue per mile of electric cars is drastically lower than that of gasoline cars - not a sustainable situation for widespread adoption.
It looks like the tax on gas in the US is significantly lower than in European countries, so the same situation probably doesn't exist to the same degree.
> electric cars generally charge at night and use about the same amount of power as an electric oven. Distribution network changes are not required.
Yes, average power consumption is quite low. In fact over a year the average car (if it was electric) would probably only consume a few hundred watts.
But that's not the problem. The problem is peak demand. A usable electric car charger draws 7kW for a sustained period of time. That's a very different use case (distributed across every house in the country) than currently.
Taking this study for example: "32% of low voltage (LV) feeders (312,000 circuits) will require intervention when 40% - 70% of customers have EVs, based on 3.5 kW (16 amp) charging." http://myelectricavenue.info/
Bear in mind that's for 3.5kW charging, whereas anyone installing a charger today is putting in 7kW+ charging.
The only way to mitigate distribution network changes is by smart charging on the car side - basically reducing charging rate or times to spread the load. Fortunately that's fairly doable, but it's not necessarily a panacea - if there's a couple of days where many people do higher than average mileage (eg a national holiday) you could find that there's simply not enough capacity locally to sustain charging all the cars on the street.
The problem is that we need to be adopting electric cars _now_ to make a dent in emissions, but there's all these infrastructure problems (I haven't even mentioned on-street charging or long distance journeys...) that will become evident when we do. We need to be fixing them today. Claiming they don't exist is naive. Remember that there's just over 1 million electric cars on US roads today, out of 273 million vehicles. The infrastructure needs to grow by 2 orders of magnitude to support that.
Diminish need for air conditioning by adding blinds or other sun shades on the appropriate sides. Use air foils on cargo ships, making them follow trade winds and sea currents (trading polution for increased transit time (increase crew cost)).
Make people commute less (works for white collar jobs, but blue collar?).
Increase veganism.
Look into having agriculture require less chemicals through use of perennials or alternative varieties and crop rotations.
I don't know enough about other industries to do more than yell "electrify all the things" and mandate factories to use renewable electricity, put solar panels on the roof etc...
Increased transit time for ships is from month to many months. Not worth it.
Veganism faces a big problem with water use.
Agriculture is being looked into all the time, but cheap always wins. We need to feed these billions of people somehow, and crop rotation won't do.
Mandating greenwashing is what we have now. The area to cover with renewables to power just a single smelter is huge.
That would be an issue only if that prevented the land from being used for other things. Wind power generation doesn't prevent farming on the land or prevent fishing on the ocean. Solar can be deployed on rooftops or parking lots. Solar developments often support grazing animals underneath the solar panels.
Fish are not uniformly distributed, however, so the fishing impacts of offshore wind farms can probably be reduced by not installing wind farms in fishing grounds.
How? Electrical systems (e.g. cars/heat pumps etc.) are much more efficient than fossil fuel equivalents. An example, most new gas cars get ~30 mpg today, but a Tesla model 3 gets 141 mpge. So switching from a gas-powered car to a model 3 results in a 75% reduction in energy usage (as you advocate) with the identical ‘lifestyle’. [1]
This effect is found far more generally. Quoting from a detailed report [2] on how to decarbonize America, “One key aspect of electrification makes this transformation possible, and it represents perhaps the most astonishing finding in Griffith’s modeling: Large-scale electrification would slash total US primary energy demand in half, from around 100 quads to about 45-50. This a huge deal — it means America only needs to produce about half the energy with renewables that it is currently producing with fossil fuels.”
I strongly support, dense walkable cities and public transit, but for the first time in history we’ve separated the task of reducing energy usage from convincing most Americans to give up the lifestyle they’re used to. It’s incredibly promising news for the energy transition!
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2020/02/19/the-epa...
[2] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21349200/climate-...
It actually a bit above 100% to the point where the price can go into negative during optimal conditions. This has put a damper on the enthusiasm for further expanding beyond 100%.
By my estimates, with land wind parks operating on an average ~30% capacity per year and ocean wind parks at around 60%, the average during a year is about half the energy grid generated from renewable and the rest from fossil fuels.
Going beyond that is going to be hard.
The continental European grid is massive and Denmark has power lines to Germany, Sweden and Norway. The Nordic grid has massive amounts of hydro power.
Not every country has such access to allow them to go all-in on renewable energy.
The real poster-child for large-scale renewable integration is the UK.
We're already at the point where it makes more economic sense to build renewable than it does to build infrastructure to support non-renewable energy (in most locations, there are exceptions). In many places, it's more affordable to replace existing, functioning non-renewable generation with clean energy (either solar, wind, or a combination of the two). This is without considering environmental costs, when you consider the externalized costs of environmental damage, the case is even more lopsided.
Maybe we won't be at 100% renewable without massive battery systems, but 70-80% is reachable without a huge investment, particularly in solar rich or wind rich locations. We're not even at 50% at the moment so we have a long way to go before we hit that last 20-30% where it's going to be most painful. Even if we accelerate adoption massively, we have a lot of time to work on that problem.
If nothing else, we can fill that gap with the least dirty non-renewables and eliminate a massive amount of emissions. Nuclear seems like a good choice, particularly some of the new, safer pelletized plants.
> But currently electric cars are subsidised by fuel taxes, and low emissions vehicles are encouraged by low vehicle taxes.
Personally, I think this is the wrong model. Since internal combustion engines cause tons of external damage, we should be taxing those vehicles based on that externalized damage rather than subsidizing vehicles. The fundamental problem with the current approach is the benefit runs out for the manufacturers who are reducing emissions the most.
> But currently electric cars are subsidized by fuel taxes
This is not remotely true. In fact it's the opposite, ICE vehicles are subsidized by externalizing the costs they inflict on society.
> And electric car charging at home works because only a handful of people do it. When every car on the road is plugged in every night the distribution networks to every street will need to be massively upgraded.
The average driver clocks around 10k miles/ year, a little under 30 miles/ day. That's less power use than a typical refrigerator. Much less than air conditioning a 2 story house in California. The energy grid can handle that.
> It's a problem because it means most people don't appreciate how far we have to go before a clean energy society is possible. We need to increase investment into this technology by an order of magnitude to have a hope of implementing before climate change has significant effects.
One of the bigger problems we have with getting funding for clean energy is exactly the sort of arguments you are making here. When you present clean energy like it's an all-or-nothing thing and paint a verbal picture like there is a big, insurmountable wall, people just throw their hands up and want to give up.
We do need to increase investment in this technology, but there are massive, incremental benefits which can be realized at nearly every step along the way.
> The average driver clocks around 10k miles/ year, a little under 30 miles/ day. That's less power use than a typical refrigerator. Much less than air conditioning a 2 story house in California. The energy grid can handle that.
And with delayed charging and Vehicle-to-grid, it could even be beneficial for the grid.
Add in transmission lines & a functioning energy market, and demand will timeshift where it can, and whatever arbitrage opportunity finally remains can be met with either storage or curtailment & further overbuilding, whichever is cheaper.
It's not like we need to run the whole grid from storage at night.
It's not a small land area by any means, but it seems a clear case of "lesser evil".
Rooftops, i.e. rooftop solar, are also already "lost" when it comes to nature.
See, even with superb photovoltaics only single story homes have the right area to power use ratio to make sense to use solar as main power source. These cause transportation problems that probably eat all the benefit...
But I cannot fathom how the entire total global roof area can only power 8% of Poland. Evidence?
I also don't see why farmland and solar can't live side by side. mixed livestock farming and panels higher above the ground seems doable.
I'm sure it's possible to grow crops under solar panels too provided you're not blocking all the light. Google shows there are some studies on it I don't have time to read right now.
This ignores cost of course. but I'm arguing against the idea that we don't have the space.
Well, maybe we should just get accustomed to daily blackouts? I mean yeah, it's inconvenient, but so is being choked to death by pollution and staring down a global climate catastrophe. Besides, being accustomed to blackouts would make us better prepared for other causes of blackouts, like a chaos monkey for our power dependency. And to top it all off: people will need to find something to do when their power is out, like maybe go outside and see what we've been working so hard to destroy with our giant SUVs and whatnot.
...I think I'm only half kidding, actually.
I hope we will see big advancements soon enough although I am cautious about this happening anytime soon in the US.
Storage options include pumped hydro, a proven technology for long durations, and some analysis like that done by Australia's national science agency is already finding that: "wind, solar and storage technologies are by far the cheapest form of low carbon options for Australia, and are likely to dominate the global energy mix in coming decades." https://reneweconomy.com.au/new-csiro-aemo-study-confirms-wi...
100% renewable is not really required and I think it's not so bad to use some fossil gas on occasion. In the future it may actually be renewable-generated hydrogen.
For countries with more population and less land it'll be more difficult to find room for massive wind/solar so I certainly hope the challenges with next-generation nuclear get solved soon as well..
Many of the problems related to storage don't seem like a technology problem. They appear to be a commercialization problem. We're not waiting on some fundamentally new tech. From elevated water to liquid metal batteries to compressed air, many technologies are all being commercialized right now. It feels like we have the ability to really push that forward in a big way.
I think you misunderstood what cheap means, in the context of public health and a nation scale economy. Cheap is code for "do we want to" and if you implement storage as a public utility there may be no price problem. It makes jobs, it fuels industry. Do you think building out coal and oil and nuclear power was "cheap"?