Fallacies I have encountered when disccusing 100% renewable energy
danieldwilliam.dreamwidth.org
danieldwilliam.dreamwidth.org
The article contains a number of strawman fallacies that the author then boldly defeats. I do try to read about renewable energy - never encountered the statements that OP claims to be pervasive:
- "Fallacy 1 - Fix It All, Fix it Now or Fix None Of It"
what? who claims this? it is evidently not feasible.
- "Fallacy 2 - 100% Lemon or 100% Lime or Bust"
(only one kind of renewable can be successful) ... again, who would ever claim that?
- "Fallacy 4 - Nothing Less Than Perfection, All the Time"
...
and so on, one strawman after the other...
"A straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy of having the impression of refuting an argument, whereas the real subject of the argument was not addressed or refuted, but instead replaced with a false one. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man"."
> the typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition
It defeats anti-renewable fallacies, by making up some easy to defeat fallacies.
I can show you examples of every single one of these if you want. This #2 example is interesting as it specifically excludes hydroelectric which is a common refrain in 100% calculations: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20022019/100-percent-rene...
Now having given an example can I mention how modeling the grid without hydroelectric power is a fallacy?
Essentially asking how much X do we need then not minimizing X is not answering the question. 10^100 kWh of storage would work, but so would 10^99 kWh, 10^98 ... we care about the minimum not simply any number that’s sufficient.
A very pervasive argument against renewables is "but storage!!!".
That's one form of this type of argument. There isn't much storage needed for renewables unless you get to very large numbers. Germany is close to 50% renewables, and it barely built any storage at all in the past years. (There's some existing amount of storage, but that largely existed before renewables even started).
Every time you have a "but storage!!" argument, it's an argument primarily relevant for the step from 80% renewables to 100%. But it's very often brought up in situations where the question is rather how to get from 10% renewables to 30%.
but the OP does address that at all.
instead you get:"Fallacy 2 - 100% Lemon or 100% Lime or Bust"
I am not saying that the author does not make valid points,
I am saying that the valid points get lost when titled with evident nonsense
The issue with that article isn’t storage it’s the energy mix used and the lack of excess production. As #1 points out you get to 100% not by building that in a day you build more storage, more wind, more hydro, and or more solar and then figure out what else is cost effective to add. Currently there is seemingly excess solar in California with prices going negative except unlike what’s mentioned people are actually still building solar because it’s cheap enough that even without selling in the middle of sunny days it’s still profitable. It’s really not obvious that that’s going to happen just running some
Yeah, and at least solar is really easy to turn off so you don't actually have to pay the negative price, you can take zero.
"Surges of cheap electricity tended to push down prices in the common German-Austrian bidding zone, leading to a rise in demand and exports, something the two countries' grid connections were unable to handle."
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-austria-energy-europ...
Hydrogen is promising, but there are technical problems with transportation and storage. I'd like to see carbon taxes push us towards these types of solutions instead of burning 'renewable' carbon.
Hydrogen for load leveling can be stored underground as a pressurized gas, just as natural gas is stored. This is a demonstrated technology. Also, the US already has 1000 miles of hydrogen pipelines, so that too is a demonstrated technology.
The main issue is hydrogen embrittlement; where steel spontaneously weakens and fractures in the prescence of hydrogen. The problem is much worse with pure hydrogen than with methane (where even the low concentrations of hydrogen are enough to pose a serious problem). There is a lot of serious enghineering work being done on this front, but I don't think we have reached the ablility to scale by a factor 200k just yet.
The magical hypothetical world where nuclear is much cheaper is called "the 1970s." In this improbable scenario, first world countries like France completely divest from coal in favor of non-carbon-polluting energy techologies.
Hydrogen embrittlement is a known issue with known solutions. After all, the world consumes 700 cubic kilometers (at STP) of hydrogen each year. This gas is confined in tanks and pipes, which obviously have to be made of materials for which the problem is solved.
Otherwise at best you can adjust the output of your dispatchable energy sources (mostly coal and nuclear) to make up for the unpredictiveness of the solar and wind. But you still need the same capacity.
This is why Germany and Spain, 2 countries who invested a lot in solar and wind, continued to grow their use of traditional power plant at the same pace as before they started on renewable. For Germany it's even worse because they decided to stop using nuclear, so they burn even more coal than before.
This is the reason why electricity was traditionally cheaper at night.
Germany also doesnt burn more coal than before. The amount of coal they burn has been falling steadily since about 2010.
(I am curious about more details since the figure lack context. It is not clear whether the 80% applies to nominal power.)
Edit: the English wikipedia article on load following is actually much clearer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#N...
> Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope.
In any case, the problem with nuclear is that existing nuclear technology does not decarbonize the world. World primary energy demand is 18 TW. This would require 6000 nuclear power plants (3GW(th) each), if today's reactors are used they'd consume (the 235U in) 1.5 million tonnes of natural uranium per year. Total world uranium resource is a shade over 6 million tonnes, so it would run out in four years.
To power the world with nuclear one either needs seawater uranium extraction (scaled up by 12 orders of magnitude from what's been done so far; 170 km^2 of ocean area for each of those reactors; the power/area is much worse than PV) or breeder reactors (which France has given up on.)
The numbers you use for uranium resources, are the amount that is economically extractable right now at current prices. Given that only 14% of the cost of a nuclear plant is raw fuel we have lots of room to increase to increase the cost of extraction.
And many places abandoned breeder reactors because the cost of uranium is cheap enough right now that fuel efficiency doesn't matter.
France's abandonment of their breeder program is the tell that they don't think there's any significant chance that nuclear will scale to power the world anytime soon.
Roughly half of the primary energy demand isn't actually used, it's just wasted as heat. Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear or renewables would mean that much less primary energy would be needed due to the efficiency gains of electrification.
The real issue with nuclear is that it needs all the same stuff as renewables (better grid connections, pink hydrogen production, demand management, EVs, hydrogen based flight and shipping) in order to keep costs reasonable but still just costs more because solar and wind are much cheaper.
Of course the renewables are cheaper, but in addition to that argument the pro-nuclear argument is deceptive when it tries to portray existing nuclear technology as sufficient.
Worried about terrorists? The reprocessing plant needs to leave a few isotopes in the fuel it produces. Things like Co-60. The spent rods have it--the reactors and the shipping systems are built to handle it. The terrorist can't handle it, though--while some are willing to engage in suicide missions they're not going to engage in futile suicide missions. Stealing the material will just get you dead before you can deliver it.
In any case, breeders mean the claim that existing nuclear technology, and in particular France's existing nuclear technology, can do it are wrong. France's breeder effort was a spectacular failure that they've now abandoned.
Not arguing against renewables here but this 1+ day response time figure gets quoted a lot. (eg. my father-in-law uses it and I've always thought it was sketchy, your post just pushed me over the edge to go look it up. ;)
Source: Graph on page 10 of https://usea.org/sites/default/files/092014_Increasing%20the...
So, if you have medium amounts of solar and wind, it's fine keeping the gas plants in reserve and maybe having to use them on a particularly cold day once every other year. A gas plant is very cheap from investment perspective. From total emissions point of view it is also fine. (These exceptionally cold windless winter days are waved as examples of the unsuitability of wind and solar.)
Of course if your gas pipes leak like crazy, maybe it's best to turn to decommission the plants and network.
That said, storage is growing, a 1GW DC line to Norway was put into operations recently.
So an excess amount of renewables is not a big issue for the grid. Owners of renewable sources may be less happy to switch them off.
(In the EU) storage can take the place of fossil when fossil becomes expensive enough. No need to give more subsidies to storage than renewables would get.
Excess amounts of renewable can also be used for other purposes, such as producing green hydrogen.
Having a large capacity in the form of gas turbines that is only use occasionally costs money, but has to advantage that all extra renewable energy results in less use of gas and therefor less CO2.
So today, we can have a grid that consists of renewables plus gas turbines without any storage.
A combined cycle gas turbine power plant might cost 10% of a nuclear plant of equal output. So even if we have to back up the entire fricking grid with CC it's still much cheaper than doing it with nuclear.
So a windfarm backed up by hydrogen may need a significant fraction of the farm to produce hydrogen.
In the end, a nuclear power plant might be cheaper. Might be, because we just don't know. Nuclear power plants are insanely expensive at the moment.
And no, nuclear isn't cheaper, even if during the rare times you're burning hydrogen the cost/kWh is high. That's because nuclear needs to be selling at high prices most of the time, including when solar/wind/batteries are able to directly deliver.
It's possible other technologies (transmission, demand dispatching, other storage technologies, even natural gas with atmospheric CO2 capture) will be cheaper than grid hydrogen storage. That doesn't help nuclear.
You build more renewables than you need for electricity production and use it to generate hydrogen for agriculture and industry 99% of the time. When you really hit the yearly peak you can a) turn the electrolysers off and if that's not enough b) use some of the hydrogen to generate electricity.
Of course, if you're lucky, then you can get by with just the renewables and sell all your hydrogen for other uses but when that 1 in 10 year event happens you can get away without burning too much fossil gas and paying the carbon fee associated with it.
"What is expected to be the last new coal plant to come online in Germany entered commercial operation on May 30, more than a decade after it was first planned... The government last year said it would close all 84 of its coal-fired power plants by 2038 as the country moves toward cleaner sources of electricity."[2]
Spain is also in a similar phase: "Spain has recently made headlines with good climate news. In May, the government announced plans for full decarbonization. At the beginning of July, half of the country’s coal plants were retired. REN21 analyst Duncan Gibb explains why this is the moment for governments to understand that spending taxpayer money to keep fossil fuel infrastructure afloat is a sunk investment."[3]
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coal/germany-coal/
[2] https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-...
That's categorically false, and the article alludes to this somewhat. The biggest problem with renewables (primarily solar) right now is the "duck curve" [1]. That is, there is plenty of energy available mid-day, but then right when available solar starts to subside is also when you get a sizable demand increase in the early evening (e.g. people getting home from work, cooking, watching TV, doing dishes and laundry, etc.) The slope of that rise means that you not only need as much dispatchable energy sources as before, but you need to ramp them up and down much more frequently, which takes a higher toll on equipment.
Thus, there is a real immediate need for the type of "time shifting" storage the article talks about right now.
"This is the problem with renewables..." - this amusingly sounds a little like an instance of fallacy #1. It becomes "the" problem only when youve got way more renewables capacity than almost everyone has right now.
It doesnt exactly render the solar panels pointless.
All grids have a lot of excess production thats only used to meet occaisional peaks. This is not a bad thing in itself and not something new to renewables.
Other locations have more flexibility, either due to natural gas peakers or the prevalence of water (pumped hydro is the best battery)
Again, the source article talks about this, but this is also not just a simple problem that can be wished away, and the only "fallacy" is pretending this problem doesn't exist.
You're saying there's a need for storage right now because without it peak demand can't be met by solar.
They're saying you don't need it right now because if you're ok wasting some of the solar power you can still reduce non-renewable use further without adding storage.
It's just two different ways of looking at it.
No matter how many panels you add, you won't add any electricity at 7pm / 8pm (depending on time of year) because the sun has already set. There's still substantial demand for electricity.
This means to solve the 7pm / 8pm duck curve, you need to build natural gas peaker plants, or figure out a storage methodology.
That's it. Otherwise you get brownouts at 7pm every night and need to manage the lack of electricity. Maybe rolling brownouts is the solution people are proposing?
The other solutions are: figure out storage, or build a gas peaker plant to temporarily provide power in those few hours.
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We focus at the "Duck Curve", because that's clearly where the next brownout will occur without intervention. Secondly: environmentalists are going to block the build of any natural gas plant (even if its necessary), so getting "ahead of the argument" only makes sense.
Also, the duck curve problem isn't the need for gas peakers after the sun goes down, it's the speed at which you need to ramp them up from being switched off.
If they can't ramp as fast as the solar drops, then you need to start them earlier and end up producing extra electricity (and carbon) that you don't want.
The problem you are talking about is called "nightime" and I'll refer you to the footnote in the article that covers this.
Wind is certainly a thing. Its not perfectly reliable, even over large areas (ex: a hurricane on the East Coast would shut down turbines due to too much wind... over a large area). But wind is at least part of the answer to the duck curve.
And Hydro is great, but has a peculiar weakness, especially in the context of California's drought conditions. California has the problem of water-shortages as well, which means that hydro-plants are in "water management mode" rather than energy-management.
That is to say: Hydro serves two masters: energy management AND water management. If you're using the dam as water-management, you're not necessarily getting the electricity you want at the right times.
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I'm not convinced that anything aside from peaker plants really solve the duck curve frankly.
Storage will get there eventually. But not today: there needs to be more research and development into storage technologies before we have something large enough. (Either that, or we need to solve the West's water issues, so that hydro plants can be more into energy-management mode rather than the more pressing water-management issues)
The storage needs that OP mentioned...the kind that gets us from 80% up to 100% renewables is a lot of storage. We're talking multiple days, possibly weeks of storage.
The supply/demand graphs for the California grid are public for all to discuss. We can look at 9/05/2021, and see that 25GW was demanded at 12-noon, while 36GW was demanded at 7pm at night (hour 19 on the graph).
The energy required between 5pm and 10pm on 9/5/2021 (from 17 to 22) is ~37GW per hour.
That's 185GW-hrs of energy. Exactly what technology can both store-and-output 185GW-hrs each day, and every day? The "Tesla Megabattery pack" in Australia is 0.3 GW-hrs FYI, to give you what a "very very large" battery can do.
California already has 4500 GWh of storage. They don't have those peak power levels (currently, 4.5GW) but that's a matter of capital investment into pumps and generators.
Not that that is even needed. California has a very large coastline with extremely reliable wind power. For example, there isn't a single spot anywhere along the coast of California that is forecast to have <8kts of wind for more than a day this month. Overprovisioning of wind power is a much bigger part of the solution to the duck curve than storage is.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2020/12/f81/SETO%20P...
This scheme would also allow backstop generation by using a fuel to reheat the storage material, potentially useful for "black swan" prolonged outages.
The fluidized bed heat exchangers seem particularly interesting to me, if sufficiently low escape of particulate matter can be achieved.
Firstly, you are correct that on most days, demand peaks around 7pm when solar output is tiny.
Source: http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html
However, on most years, demand often peaks around 3pm-5pm, not 7pm (and note that in late summer in California days are longer and solar noon is roughly 1pm, so output is not bad at all). The reason for this is that the days with the most electricity consumption tend to be hot with large AC loads, and those loads tend to be higher during midday.
Source: https://www.caiso.com/documents/californiaisopeakloadhistory...
So when you say solar output is 0 at "peak demand", it's worth mentioning whether you mean the daily peak or the annual peak or a peak measured over another timeframe.
For utility capacity planning, we use the annual peak, not the daily peak, because we want to avoid blackouts most years, not most days. Therefore, adding solar - at today's margin - still does reduce our capex and need for gas peakers.
The math gets a bit more multidimensional when you do this for real and consider aspects beyond peak demand (like ramping, fuel, current generation fleet, tradeoffs in characteristics of new gas plants, geographic spread, congestion, etc.), but the main point remains true and important: the daily peak is not the annual peak, and it's a clear mistake to use the daily peak to conclude that solar doesn't help with peak demand.
In fact, at today's margins, solar both helps with peak power and with energy generation. It's fantastic. (And of course it gets less and less fantastic the more you add.)
Anyway, this is a common misconception I've seen a lot, so I've added a new section to the Duck Curve Wikipedia article you cited above to help explain it.
As long as you come out ahead overall its still a good idea.
It's like saying gas flaring is a problem and we have a desperate need to solve that before getting rid of coal. Well, it would be nice, but overall swapping coal for natural gas is a good thing regardless.
Can you explain this? How does “wasting some solar” solve the problem when your max solar output is 0 at peak demand?
Fits with a "solar and wind will be too cheap to meter [the amount of cost and materials going into manufacture]" paradigm.
That makes 0 sense. If you have 3x needed capacity at midday but 0x capacity at midnight, you could over-provision by 100x - zero times a hundred is still zero.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/3/20/1712847...
This features some slides from the original use of the term. Note the repeated reference to "Ramp" since that's what the problem was.
> We have to be really careful when we talk about something breaking. The only thing that’s going to break is the economics of solar. The lights are gonna stay on. All it comes down to is more curtailment.
One of the other solutions was asking the gas plants to ramp faster. The specs said the equipment could do it, it was just institutional inertia as they hadn't needed to do it before and so weren't prepared for it.
Even then it was one of those "good problems to have" as it meant you had an unimaginably high (at that time) level of solar. Some places arent as lucky as California when it comes to solar provision.
The fix for the totally seperate "nighttime" problem is some mix of oversupply of wind, hydro, demand management, transmission lines, batteries etc. but we only need to continue with the next low hanging fruit at the moment as we've not even maxed out solar pv (fallacy #1 in the article is expecting instant perfection and having solutions to all the problems we haven't actually hit yet)
Yes, that is the exact point. Unless storage capacity is introduced to the system:
1. It becomes uneconomical to add any more solar plants, because the time when the solar plants can produce already has demand fully met by other, existing solar/wind plants.
2. Since you reach peak daily demand when solar and wind approaches 0 output, it means you need just as much fossil fuel plant generation capacity as before - you can't decommission any of those plants (or, at present, perhaps you just convert them to natural gas).
I'm not sure how this thread went off the rails. All I was originally responding to was the sentiment that "you don't need to worry about storage capacity until you already have the vast majority of your energy met by renewables", and that statement is easily provably false because there are many areas of the world that still have relatively low levels of total power generation from renewables, but until the "time shifting" storage problem is solved it will be uneconomical to add more solar to the system.
> you don't need to worry about storage capacity until you already have the vast majority of your energy met by renewables
This, on the other hand is true.
There are places where incentives (planned or accidental) make batteries a useful, profitable thing to do right now, but only in very small numbers.
For example, some gas peaker plants installed batteries because it let them respond faster to market changes and so earn more money. Does this mean batteries are required for gas peakers? No obviously not.
We need some kind of storage, at a fairly large scale to meet the final 20% or so of going 100% renewable. My bet is green hydrogen is going to be the winner here. We'll also have a bunch of lithium batteries connected to the grid (EVs etc.) because they're useful for other things and will help out in getting to 100% if they have some grid intelligence.
But, nowhere in the world are we at a place where installing solar and/or wind is anywhere near maxed out. And when we are, the fix will not be batteries but things like grid interconnects, demand response, targeted efficiency improvements and a hundred other boring technologies that we already understand.
It's generally cheaper to build more renewables and just find a use for the excess than it is to build batteries.
This is why people who don't like renewables have consistently, for years now, pretended to think that you need to install exactly enough renewables to get 100% of your needs and then use as much lithium batteries as you need to shift that power from the time it was produced to the time it is needed.
This is stupid, and at least some of them know it is stupid and are just saying it for effect.
It is not true, and the numbers they come up with using this model are meaningless.
(And annual peak demand is the correct timeframe to use, since our system targets reliability on the scale of years not days.)
Today's peak: http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html?fbclid=I...
Annual peaks: https://www.caiso.com/documents/californiaisopeakloadhistory...
I wrote a detailed version of this comment later in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436432
When evening dusk envelops Boston and New York, there's still plenty of sunlight near Chicago or Saint Louis. Conversely, when it's still morning dusk in Chicago and Saint Louis, sun is already shining over Boston and New York.
We of course already have transmission lines all over the country. They can help, given some coordination between energy companies, and maybe upgraded in the east-west direction to help deliver solar energy when its generation increases.
This goes with my issue, emergencies. I expected to see that in the article.
When you absolutely MUST have power absolutely right now, renewables don’t cut it with current storage options. Think disaster or pop-up energy needs.
I’m just really skeptical that the hard pushes for renewables are taking into account we should have excess production options in coal and NG going forward.
Anyways, things may or may not work if other countries go into renewables. They may have different spike times - but I kinda doubt it. Most Europe wakes up and plugs its kettles at about the same time. And it's small enough that being windy or cloudy will happen in most of it, at least some of the time.
https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/20180302.h...
https://knoema.com/atlas/Germany/topics/Energy/Electricity/E...
In any case it seems like an unreliable source.
Example of German power imports:
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_trading/chart.htm?l=...
I don't think the but storage is used to argue we shouldn't build renewable resources.
I see three parties to this argument in the states.
1. Climate change deniers - These people don't ever really ever argue about storage in good faith. Because they don't believe climate change is a problem.
2. Pro-Nuclear climate change believers - People who believe climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed and believe nuclear is probably our best bet. This is the group that brings up "but storage" all the time.
3. Anti-Nuclear climate change believers - These people believe that storage isn't really an issue or will be fixed shortly. They believe solar and wind is the solution to our climate change problem.
Group 2 is believes in replacing fossil fuels with renewables. But when it comes to finite amounts of attention, and funding they believe nuclear is a better option.
1. People who don't or won't believe that renewables work
2. People who believe they do.
So whether you like nuclear is irrelevant. If you like nuclear but hate renewables you're in group 1 with the climate change deniers, if you like nuclear but believe the general reality based consensus on renewables costs and viability you're in group 2 along with the people who don't like nuclear.
- air quality, radiation from burning stuff
- noise, pollution
- accidents(mines, oil rigs etc.)
- with every gallon/liter of oil you buy, you send at least 50% of those money to a foreign despot.
Being a climate change "denier" is mostly irrelevant for this discussion.
If you (correctly) think coal causes lots of pollution and fossil fuels have issues and need replaced then whether you end up in group 1 or 2 still depends on whether you agree with the general consensus that renewables are better/cheaper than nuclear or not.
Because they have French nuclear power to back them up. And fucking German coal.
It is also a good primer to relate his experiences to daily work as well. Like fallacies in software engineering. Similar to the encouragement vs. Disencourigment: instead of telling someone 'dont do it's vs. 'sounds interesting. What would be a good easy to do first step to see if it is good'
I encounter “wind mills cause cancer” less often now, but still encounter “kills billions of birds” all the time.
Do you actually converse with people who are against renewables energy? Or even people who claim “it’s not ready”?
The article starts with:
" I was reading this post https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/09/fossil-... on Charles Stross' blog, and the comments, and ... "
So I assumed that some comments there are at least similar to what the author is discussing.
> it is evidently not feasible
No one who has ever incurred in fallacious arguments starts them like that, by naming the fallacy they are about to incur in. But it would be nice.
no, you are wrong, at least in my country.
These arguments are either outright stated or HEAVILY hinted at in the Murdoch Media, and in arguments put together by right wing politics in Australia.
the level of dishonest discourse in green resources and climate change is absurd
So, it seems like a fallacy to think that increasing wind and solar power will have not influence the climate.
Is this line of thinking present in the current discussion, or is it not valid?
I suppose 'covering the Sahara in solar panels' might need a little thought in regards to how it affects weather patterns across North Africa and Europe, but we're a wee way off from there yet.
Again, probably not much, mind!
There is also the effect (the name of which I currently can't remember) that consumption increases when people think it does no harm. Like when LED lights were introduced, energy usage allegedly actually increased. Because people were using LED lights for all kinds of things that were NOT using incandescent lights before, as the energy used was thought to be negligible.
This is not true. More lights might be on, but the total energy usage for lights is currently falling with increased LED production. You can find lots of stated fears and speculation on the internet that it could happen - FUD - but not evidence. There is some indirect evidence not specific to LEDs that people sometimes do use more energy when the cost goes down. But LEDs are an order of magnitude more efficient than incandescents, and there has been no such 10x increase in lighting use. Per-capita electricity use in the US is currently falling slowly.
Aside from that, I took the first couple of sources I found googling as roughly accurate, and I see estimates of about 35B-45B tons total C02, where around 3B-3.5B might come from 8B humans breathing. So assuming those numbers are anything close to accurate, we are perhaps slightly less than 10%.
As for the energy required to make the concrete, steel and glass that made those same buildings, that has increased the amount of wind that New York has to deal with so indirectly - 'yes', in answer to your question.
I think OP means more 'at the hugely massive scale we appear to need' which I don't think is as neuron-murdering a thought experiment as you so unkindly suggest.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/10/large-scale-w...
Basically, yes, wind power can have effects on the climate, and we should be aware of them and use them to weigh tradeoffs with other power generation options. This is a reasonable question to ask!
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-resear...
Solar panels are also on a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface, the rest receives and treats radiation the same way as always.
And of course a thermal source like nuclear pumps out 3x as much heat pollution (2x at the plant, 1x at the place the power is used).
Direct thermal pollution is still very minor globally, compared to heating from increased greenhouse gases.
One reason is that, as other commenters pointed out, the total volume of wind and solar is currently tiny compared to the energy delivered to the Earth’s surface from the sun. So the size of the effect is not large enough to be noticeable, or probably even measurable.
The other reason involves the mechanics of how wind and solar work.
Solar (photovoltaic) converts electromagnetic energy that would otherwise heat the atmosphere, directly into electricity. But, it converts probably less energy than you think (solar panels still get hot in the sun, i.e. they still radiate in the infrared). And, once the electricity is used by people to do work, the energy is converted back into atmospheric heat. No heat is lost; energy can’t be destroyed.
Wind turbines do absorb energy from the wind, but only from the wind they can reach, which is mostly regional. There is a boundary layer close to the Earth’s surface (below a few thousand feet above mean ground level) where air movement is relatively slow and chaotic. That’s what we experience as “wind” and what wind turbines can reach. But most atmospheric heat transport happens via extremely powerful and persistent air currents higher in the atmosphere. You may have heard of the “jet stream” for example. Wind turbines in high enough concentration could conceivably have a regional effect on wind patterns (just like tall buildings do) but it’s basically adding a small amount of local chaos to a part of the atmosphere that is already small and chaotic, like adding a couple new rocks to the bottom of a river. You might create some new little eddies along the bottom, but you’re not meaningfully affecting the main flow.
1- wind and solar (and hydro) are so much better than coal when it comes global warming and other negative environmental impact, the main reason to bring up “concerns” is entrenched economic interests, and not real fears of increased warming. The fact is that renewable sources are net cooling - and not by a little - compared to the warming we’re already causing with coal burning and CO2 emissions.
2- The scale of the earth’s atmosphere and surface area are “very large” compared to our solar and wind farms. So large that it might seem funny at first to think turbines or solar cells would have any effect. One way to think about turbines is that they’re somewhat comparable to trees, and we’ve lost many times more trees in the last 50 years than we’ve added turbines. Another way is to compare the height of a turbine (say, 100 meters) to the height of the wind (maybe 400 km, depending how you measure), so the turbines touch maybe 1/4000 of the vertical air, and across the world cover very little of the total land area, meaning the total volume of air impacted by turbines is ‘tiny’.
According to my internet searches just now, the earth’s land surface (1.5e14 m^2) gets, on average, 2.4e16 watts of solar power. [1] The total solar power production today is just less than 800GW, or 8e11 watts. [2] So solar might be capturing one thirty-thousandth of the surface energy, or 0.003%. (And that actually seems surprisingly large to me, it’s possible I’m missing more orders of magnitude somewhere. I don’t think solar farms are covering anywhere near as much as 0.003% of the surface of the earth.)
Atmospheric energy is about half of the surface energy, and wind is currently capturing roughly the same as solar [3], so maybe we could estimate it about 0.006% of the wind energy.
[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/EnergyBalance
There are far more important barriers in the way of 100% renewable energy than these strawman arguments.
I'm very skeptical about renewables ability to address any of our climate problems, but that stems more deeply from the clear observation that globally, we are not replacing fossil fuels with renewables, but rather supplementing fossil fuel energy. Globally all sources of energy production have continued to rise. And to preempt any "but Germany/Sweden/etc!?", the planet does not care about some local success if globally emissions rise.
The problem is that most renewable advocates argue that renewables will solve our energy and carbon problems so we don't need to consider any other method of decarbonization that will necessarily result in economic contraction.
Our way of life is absolutely unsustainable. I would certainly hope that renewables would allow us to have a less severe economic contraction then without, but the idea that we can just keep on with current economic growth and that renewables will magically allow this to happen without permanent and catastrophic impacts on our climate is dangerously naive.
The original argument for renewables was that they would help us with decarbonization. They objectively do not. We do objectively know that reduced economic activity does reduce emissions. If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change we need immediate and aggressive decarbonization. Maybe renewables will have a major part to play in our less industrial future, but alone they have proven incapable of even mitigating this problem.
As the author said, we don't need 100% today. And he acknowledge that problems exist, and they have to be solved. Wehn reading him, i have the impression that he acknowledge that some issues/blocks can take some time to clear. Why gamble? Just take nuclear as a crutch, plan for 100 year of pilatable nuclear + hydro baseload and 30 year of gaz peakers, to clear the blocks in front of renewables, and if the issues are fixed in the next 30-50 years, great, you can decommission the nuclear plants early!
If you really think GW is the biggest issue of this century, not using all available tools, however dangerous you think they might be, to help you with your issue is plain dumb.
"I think the renewable industry will end up better and cheaper than the current system but if I'm wrong about the renewables industry being good at optimising that bundle of benefits, problems and"?
As far as I know, nuclear fuel is rare and we don't have a solution to thorium reactors yet.
I would personally not mind more nuclear were it makes sense though. Germany is not very suited though as it's quite populated but there is plenty of empty space in USA.
There is a risk though as current nuclear power station have issues in drought situations.
Nonetheless I haven't read is arguments. Perhaps he wrote about it.
I think GP might refer to footnote 1 in the article:
> [...] one could technically replace fossil fuels with nuclear power. it would just be more expensive, more dangerous and slower - so probably only a few billion dead.
Personally, I think modern nuclear reactors (that are optimised for safety and efficiency, not for generating nuclear weapons material) and a tad more sensible regulation could make nuclear power safe and cheap, and turn nuclear (together with renewables, of course) into a formidable weapon against global warming.
1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C...
It would be nice if manufacturers had to make them easily replaceable too.
EDIT: Posted to wrong story by mistake.
There's also a decent (especially compared to the market share) community so it has good support for various roms if that's your thing. By default it's a normal Android with Google stuff.
They'll introduce a new model with 5G some time this month, in case you're in the market.
(I'm not affiliated by the way, just a fan)
1. effort is put into abating the issue to some degree.
2. billions of birds are killed due to human activity. Number one is house cats, but impacts with windows and cars is orders of magnitude more than due to wind turbines.
3. wind power displaces gas and coal power. the effects of pollution (particulates, mercury, etc) is far worse than wind turbines for birds. not only that but it is better for anything that breathes oxygen, including humans.
So if the "what about the birds" crowd actually cared about birds, they'd push for wind power over coal. But it isn't about the birds; it is a pretext for keeping the status quo.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encina_Power_Station#Retiremen...
I lived there. I believed the 'environmentalists' when they said that SONGS would be replaced by renewables. I am not falling for it again.
Not to mention, the comment is practically a truism aside from the locations mentioned:
"Wind only displaces gas and coal when governments aren't shutting down nuclear to persue [sic] it..."
If a nuclear plant were shut down and replaced entirely with wind, then that necessarily means that coal and gas are not displaced.
"Wind only displaces gas and coal when governments aren't shutting down nuclear to persue it like in Germany, California, New York, etc."
Notice that word "Germany"?
The "nuclear waste" is still mostly fuel, it can be processed and burned further. But this involves, among other things, producing and extracting plutonium (which itself is a fine nuclear fuel), and thus some suspicion of producing more nuclear weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
Not sure how valid it is, but I thought it was interesting and hadn't heard it before.
In a real encounter with friction, some of the KE is lost to heat.
The initial source of the particle's KE was heat from the Sun causing weather. So the net energy is constant, the local temperature is higher because the blade has heated up at the cost of the air particle's motion, but overall temperature is the same because more heat from the sun will be needed to restore the air particle's motion that was lost to friction. It all balances out in the end.
The fact that the total energy is the same doesn't necessarily mean it's okay. Hypothetically if wind turbines set up a gradient so that the first few meters of atmosphere become hotter and the rest of the atmosphere becomes colder, total energy is conserved, but it's not a desirable outcome. But I don't know if humans can build enough wind turbines to make that possible; the Earth is very big and the atmosphere has a lot of mass.
I'd expect several components of a wind turbine to require power. Its electronic components may need power for cooling or heating depending on the season. The motors that change the blade pitch need power.
Some of these things need to work when the blades are stopped. One way to do that would be to power them from the grid instead of from the turbine.
If those things are grid powered, then a wind turbine might actually very very very slightly raise local atmospheric temperature.
Anyone here happen to know if they actually do power anything in the turbine from the grid, or if they do something else like power such things from batteries that get recharged by the turbine when it is generating power?
If this were happening at a significant scale, it would decrease atmospheric temperatures, because the energy that ends up heating the blades would have to come from somewhere, and the air would lose some of its kinetic energy.
Am I missing something?
Compare an EV and a petrol one. If you want to go from Lisbon to Vladivostok, this will be a breeze with a petrol car and a headache with an EV (I'm not sure it's even possible, good luck charging it fast in the deepest parts of Russia).
Fusion and nuclear count too imo. Those work rain or shine.
Whether someone cares about wildlife does not affect whether a logical argument is true or not.
That's a logical fallacy. You already lost me.
nuclear in the only viable green energy, and the EU is on its way to recognize nuclear as green energy.
renewables at a large scale is not worth it because there is just not enough copper on earth for it, and same goes for batteries.
Only a portfolio of all sources can enable a transition and time required to debug all the problems with the new technology. But Green Absolutism has no room for that. The fact is: We Will be using fossil fuels in the next 50-100 years still. It may become smaller or more limited but it will NOT be zero. If you try to force the issue to absolutely, we will end up with NOTHING - either from Green or from Fossil because the system will break. Just like supply chains have broken recently, fossil fuels are just as deeply intertwined into the supply chain network FOR EVERYTHING that is post-1800 technology. It's like a jenga pile or pick-up-stix situation.