More wind energy was installed in 2020 than any other energy source
energy.gov
energy.gov
What about capacity utilisation factor of newly installed turbines? Does it trend downwards? Which means, are we close to exhausting potential of wind?
PS: It's not, it's actually trending a bit up. Which is explainable because average capacity of a turbine trends up -> the turbine is bigger and taller -> wind blows faster and more consistently on higher altitude.
Scaling is extremely lucrative. And break even for these turbines is aroun 5 to 8 years, with active life of around 30.
They are around 0.5 on offshore installations.
Theres a lot of other small things contributing to the capacity factor increases too: computer modelling of how the wakes of different turbines interact with each other and the labdscape, energy market changes to penalise slow reacting coal plants and or reward flexible demand, better weather prediction, grid and battery integration, HVDC, marginal engineering and business process improvements as you get companies, technicians and tools dedicated to this industry.
Having said all that, I'm not sure how useful a number it is, but nice that it's going up as generally it tracks the price going down as fixed costs get spread further.
But if the price is low enough, then low capacity factors still make sense. Not sure if theres a stat that captures both of those things at the same time though and also considers the full system costs.
There's almost certainly times and places that a low capacity factor producer that hits your system peak is going to be the best option. Demand response, for example, could be modelled as very low capacity factor generators that only supply when you actually need the extra power.
First, it only refers to the US, while the headline makes no such qualification.
Second, this refers only to electricity generation, which is roughly 25% of US energy use, or 20% if you include energy embedded in imports, mostly fueled by fossil fuels in China.
Third, this refers only to gros capacity. For those who have been asleep, the effective energy capacity is far lower for renewables than for stable power sources due to intermittency.
inb4 By referring to facts you have shown you are clearly on the wrong team.
The url gives you a good hint.
Even if you know that only US agencies use .gov, it's not like an American agency wouldn't publish a report on a worldwide trend, is it?
This isn't a rule by any means but seeing .gov usually translates to "pertains to the US"
True, but it is easily overlooked. A qualification in the title would be nice.
> The Land-Based Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition provides an overview of developments and trends in the U.S. wind power market.
> A record 16,836 megawatts (MW) of U.S. wind capacity was installed in 2020, bringing the cumulative total to 121,955 MW.
Asking a US government to put in the headline that the report is about US stuff is a bit surprising.
PS: I am sorry, I was sure that HN policy is not to editorialize/change the title. I did not suspect this was done here.
It is. I'm sure 'dang will fix it when he sees it :).
Yes the title should be "Land-Based Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition Released" but it still won't say US cause it's not in the title.
> Second, this refers only to electricity generation, which is roughly 25% of US energy use, or 20% if you include energy embedded in imports, mostly fueled by fossil fuels in China.
Of course it's only about electricity generation?
> Third, this refers only to gros capacity. For those who have been asleep, the effective energy capacity is far lower for renewables than for stable power sources due to intermittency.
That's what you usually mention when you build something that generates energy. Nothing unusual here either.
> inb4 By referring to facts you have shown you are clearly on the wrong team.
What's with this unhealthy polarization? What teams are you talking about?
This latter number is about 3x higher than the useful output since if you need something other than heat, say a car to move, or grid electricity then 2/3rds of the energy will be lost as heat while converting the energy to motion (and then to electricity).
And if you do need heat, then an electric heat pump will provide 2-5 times the heat if you feed it one unit of energy.
This is why electrification of everything that can be electrified will reduce total energy requirements substantially (while increasing the amount of electrical energy we need slightly).
> The average 2020 capacity factor among projects built from 2014 to 2019 was 41.4%, compared to an average of 29.0% among projects built from 2004 to 2011, and 25.2% among projects built from 1998 to 2001. This improvement among more-recently built projects has pushed the cumulative fleet-wide capacity factor higher over time, reaching 36% in 2020.
So wind is number one and solar is the next one? That's great news!
Yes, as well as country interconnects so that excess wind generation in one region can be distributed elsewhere.
(Kind of a bummer that only U.S. agencies of government can use .gov)
With today's rate structures in CA you have to choose between a plan that is optimal either for your EV or for your house but the load profile of these are very different from each other. Without 2 separate utility meters, you can't have separate rate plans.
Coal in the US has been in long-term decline since around 2008. Natural gas seems to be holding fairly stable at the moment.
Depending on source, it looks like the US retired some 9 to 11 GW of coal power plants in 2020. However, China is attempting an energy-intensive recovery from the pandemic and put 38 GW of coal plants into operation in 2020.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal/chinas-new-coa...
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
Presumably China uses coal because it is most economical for them in the short term (not so good for the world!)
I feel like the drive to green energy is only to allow us to continue growth and consumption instead of saving the natural world. It seems short sighted.
Yes. In fact it's pretty much the only way to not destroy those remaining natural habitats so it's good were pursuing it if that's what your worried about.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but in most ways it could be interpreted, that's not true.
Copper doesn't require fossil fuels, and if it did then we'd come up with an alternative.
What about, how have recent changes affected the carbon intensity of the US electricity grid?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/the-u-s-electric-power-s...
Luckily the projections are for faster growth in the future as the fossil fuel groups political stranglehold gets loosened.
For example he claims that renewables can't replace fossil because of their unreliability. And shows a graph of global energy use that shows that overall percentage of renewables did not grow between 2009 and 2019 despite significant growth in total output. He the compares this to local data which shows that _locally_ turning on and off a nuclear power plant has a significant effect on the _local_ carbon emissions.
You can't really compare conclusions from global and local studies. By his own argument nuclear can't function without fossil either, because over the same time frame as the report he quotes nuclear energy output rose as well [1] (except for a drop due to the GFC).
What the global data really shows is that global energy demand has increased rapidly largely in countries like China and India etc. who build (cheap) coal plants to keep up with tha demand. It will be interesting to see developments now that China is moving away from growing at all costs.
Regarding the baseload myth, it has been debunked many times [2] [3]
[1] https://nwenergy.org/featured/debunking-the-myth-of-baseload... [2] https://nwenergy.org/featured/debunking-the-myth-of-baseload... [3] https://reneweconomy.com.au/dispelling-the-nuclear-baseload-...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-stories-michael-shel...
https://nuclear.foe.org.au/michael-shellenbergers-pro-nuclea...
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/07/review-bad-scienc...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/18/worlds-b...
It’s always windy (and sunny) somewhere. The combination of energy storage and grid transmission alleviates intermittency.
Chemical batteries are very useful, but far from the only way to store energy.
It's always windy somewhere, but that also might not be on the same continent as you need it.
So if you don't like gas peakers or don't run a nuclear baseload you need to bridge those short non-windy winter days or weeks with batteries. Multiple nation scale terawatt-hour batteries. Which means millions of Tesla li-ion megapacks or millions of pumped hydro plants - which gets expensive and unfeasible real quick as you run out of either the battery raw materials for the former or suitable sites for the latter.
[0] like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-diesel - the input is water, CO2 and electricity, and as such it's carbon neutral.
Hydrogen can be used directly, which skips one conversion step and doesn't need air capture for the CO2. These days no gas plant should be build that can't be converted to 100% hydrogen in the future.
We are discussing artificial fossil fuel production with terrible efficiency, in that context nuclear is very viable.
Nuclear is the good solution, not renewables.
Of course, this is assuming that the power to produce Hydrogen is from renewable sources.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/new-study-a-zero-emi...
Regarding clean seasonal energy storage - UK, French and German authorities all independently came with studies(1) that arrived to the same conclusion - synthetic methane is the only viable option. Very expensive, but the engineering is doable. Gas plants are here to stay.
(1) https://english.bdi.eu/media/presse/presse/downloads/2018030...
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1...
That would have massive (environmental and financial) costs.
Is a great video discussing the practicality and finances involved in hydro pumped storage.
I agree that such storage would require huge CapEx, but on the bright side OpEx will be relatively small. And no need to bother with recycling of megatonnes of batteries every decade. Also because stored energy is proportional to volume and height difference you it's possible scale such storage quite flexibly (assuming an affordable technology for creating such cavities will be developed).
Nope, but you still need to dig a lot in rocks, and divert water to fill up the reservoir in the first place, which aren't without environmental consequences.
Furthermore, as the video i linked explains, you need very specific conditions for pumped up hydro to be viable (size, height, water, etc.) which IMHO makes it a non-starter in many places.
In my mind, solar energy creates wind by heating up the surface of the earth, which then heats up the air above it, which then moves around to even out the temperature differences.
Therefore I suspect that in the long run (10 years? 100 years?) solar energy will be more common than wind energy. Similar to how solid state drives are overtaking spinning drives.
What do you guys think?
Then there's offshore, where there's a higher likelihood to be more consistently windy just generally.
The problem with wind is dealing with the huge uptick in energy coming down the pipeline during a major wind event. Last I checked, this was still not a solved problem but I haven't been keeping current like I used to.
So in practice they shut down some windmills during major wind events to protect the system. The other issue both wind and solar have is storage. Though we've seen substantial gains in battery storage in recent years, so there is good news but I don't know if we are really "there" yet.
They have a max amount of power they can generate per turbine anyway, and I would imagine that's designed around.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/how-do-wind-turbines-su...
Right now everybody is focused on getting to 100% carbon neutral. However, the question must be asked: why stop there and not go to something like 500 or even 1000% energy generation.
There will be plenty of things we can do with the excess energy. I think this will play out over the next few decades. Mass produced solar will go on any available surface just because we can. There are already some lower efficiency but potentially very cheap to produce solar systems based on e.g. organic materials that can be printed on flexible surfaces (i.e. not glass). Having that stuff put all over the place is going to make an impact.
Solar is already regularly creating surpluses regularly. It's a huge problem for energy providers because they have to shut down more expensive to manage production when that happens. Any time you see a wind mill not spinning, don't assume it is because it is broken and instead consider that there might be too much wind power temporarily.
A structural surplus will create supply of very cheap (often negatively priced even) energy. There are all sorts of valuable things we can do with that.
Most new capacity will either be new players (e.g. Tesla is planning to be a virtual power provider) in the market without a sunk investment legacy or existing players that compete on divesting/isolating their sunk investments the fastest. Either way, this pushes a lot more renewable energy in the market. That in turn accelerates the demise of more expensive things in the market. Including plants that are still under construction which were financed under the assumption that they would operate for a few decades at high price points for energy. I don't think that industry can afford a major drop in cost for renewables. Yet that seems exactly what might be happening.
https://www.rethinkx.com/implications Rethinkx published an interesting perspective on this recently. They point out that the financial incentives of new technology are making this happen much faster than many incumbent players have planned/hoped for. They are calling out a feasible date of decarbonizing 90% by 2035 using existing technology depending on how governments incentivize and stimulate scaling and deploying that. It's a very aggressive and provocative timeline. But the reasoning behind it has some merit. We can haggle about how far they are off but I doubt it will be measured in decades.
Carbon neutrality involves most of those things happening on a very large scale. Our current electricity demand is a small portion of that overall future demand.
This doesn't follow at all.
Even if solar was 100% efficient there would still be many cases where wind power would be preferred. Overcast days, night, and very high latitudes where seasonal effects means there are months where solar isn't very useful are just a few cases.
The fact that they’re stored energy is what makes them particularly useful, though. If we were exclusively using solar directly then we’d need to store it ourselves, or build a global distribution grid to move energy from where it’s sunny to where it’s needed.
(extracting kinetic energy from the orbiting moon)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Formation: “Although coal is known from most geologic periods, 90% of all coal beds were deposited in the Carboniferous and Permian periods”
That was 300 million years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Origin: “uranium is only naturally formed by the r-process (rapid neutron capture) in supernovae and neutron star mergers”
That happened 6,5 billion years ago.
Geothermal is about 50% radio-active decay and 50% left-overs from when earth was formed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget: “Earth's internal heat budget […] comes from two main sources in roughly equal amounts: the radiogenic heat produced by the radioactive decay of isotopes in the mantle and crust, and the primordial heat left over from the formation of Earth.”
The wind will blow whether you use its energy or not. You're not "more efficient" if you use solar instead of wind. You're just making use of energy at another place in the system where it would otherwise go unused.
More generally on the Wind/Solar question: They complement each other quite well. Most of the time when there's a lot of sun there isn't a lot of wind and vice versa. Therefore building up both reduces your needs for flexibility and storage compared to only using one. Also of course there's a bit of location dependance, there are places where wind works better and places where solar works better (sunny). But still in almost all places you can use both, but you probably want a different mixture depending on the location.
The demand peak tends to be later in the afternoon than the noon-time peak of solar, but 4-hour batteries would cover that.
Fortunately nuclear has no similar issue, right?
On top of that wind being intermittent you need gas power plant to provide.
France power provider RTE estimated that if the country moved to 100% renewable it would need 12 times its gas capacity or 10% of ALL lithium available on earth for battery.
1st gen renewable are far from a panacea.
/s
https://www.lazard.com/media/451446/grphx_lcoe-07-07.jpg
From:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Some industrial processess, such as smelting, crushing, etc can be incentivized to do that.
At domestic levels, its more difficult
Not sure if this is correct. Once power cost is reduced, the cost of investing equipment dominates still further. Industrial processes are designed to operate 24/7 and when they don't, they are uneconomic.
Domestic power consumption is never 24/7 on any major device and there is some discretion over scheduling. Even fridge/freezer has some flexibility
I really doubt this is true in any meaningful sense. First of all, I'd expect the majority of all turbines ever produced to still be in their useful service life. Second, many of the materials are valuable as scrap. It would be blatantly idiotic to just destroy and bury these materials, even if your goal is to spite environmentalists. Third, even the unsubsidized cost of wind turbines is not that high. These materials don't just appear out of thin air, they're accounted for in the costs.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... “Companies are searching for ways to deal with the tens of thousands of blades that have reached the end of their lives.”
In Sweden we are making wind power company owners very rich with heavily subsidies, wind power is far from cost effective and at least here it’s not even close to covering its own.
That’s a far cry from “no way”.
Those 85% are actually 15% in effective.
Best examples would be devices like phones/microwave/tv they contain lots of those rare materials.
Industrial simply prefer to sell junks for cheap in bulk to the African continent where very poor people burn those junks to extract the rare minerals.
It’s not as simple as « 100% recyclable = Always Recycled »
The wind power industry cares and is actively asking for political incentives to change this: https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/wind-industry...
And it begs the question, the waste was a known factor before even starting building turbines, why start asking for this now instead of twenty years ago. To me it feels very much like a problem once wanted to be swept under the rug now becoming too much to handle.
How much of the inputs into fossil fuel generators are recycled? Massively more coal, gas, oil etc. is consumed than the amount of wind turbine blades that will go to landfill. Then there’s the byproducts - in Australia, coal ash is literally 22% of all waste generated across the whole country per year. It just goes to landfill!
This is certainly not universally true...for example: https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2019/07/10/vattenfall-...
[0]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8294057/Hundreds-no...
That being said, yes, the recycling (and presumably also the environmental impact while they are running and constantly weathered) of these composites remains problematic. But they don't end up in land fills in Germany, at least:
https://www.energieagentur.nrw/blogs/erneuerbare/beitraege/r...
For materials like the blades, we need to compare this to alternatives. The lack of recycling may be insignificant compared to the amount of materials consumed by non-renewable power sources (e.g. coal, oil), purely in terms of environmental impact from mining the materials, let alone GHG emissions.
[citation needed], careful you're not falling for a disinformation campaign.
The counter argument is clearly made here: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/06/whats-the-carbon-...
Also, what about wind turbines that use less/almost no rare-earth materials? Could these be produced at sub-optimal efficiency but still be viable?
https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg24332461-400-what-is...
This will likely go down over time though, as steel and concrete (which are both very much recyclable today) are big parts of wind turbines so as those become "greener" so will the wind turbines.
Yes the blades are not currently recycled, but like most things, this is because it's cheaper to produce new than to recycle. If it became economically viable or government's mandated it, then it would happen. There are already some processes to recycle glass fibre composites:
https://www.materialstoday.com/carbon-fiber/features/recycli...
Nuclear is much greener that renewables, nuclear emits less CO2 per watt.
Building a wind turbine on a large floor of concrete, building batteries and solar panels all the material that comes with it...
Fossil fuel benefits from renewables.
Also it might be a cloudy area.
Inert wind turbines in the ground? bad