Some technologies (PV, batteries, wind) have improved by an order of magnitude - and swamp out all other considerations.
EDIT: to be clear, i loved the original book, and have re-read it several times over the years.
I think that updating this book is not pointless, but more importantly doing the same for more countries is really important.
For example, the Stanford/Jacobson study on powering the world with wind/solar/water.
Some results were famously silly, such as filing Finland with solar panels, or adding the cost of nuclear war to nuclear reactors. Jacobson sued other academics then backed down.
The point is, 5-10 years on, these models turned out to be over pessimistic! Australia doesn't need fancy modelling - simple roof top solar there is on target to meet full day time demand in 2-3 years.
Conversely we still dont really know how to meet the last 5% of outlier energy demand scenarios.
Is that really silly? The incremental increase in the risk of nuclear war for each gigawatt of civilian nuclear power generation might be small, but the costs of a nuclear war could be quadrillions of dollars (for example if it set the world back by 100 years).
Obviously measuring that risk is difficult, but to give an example, imagine that civilian nuclear power were limited to just the countries which currently have nuclear weapons. That would greatly reduce the proliferation risk and the chance of nuclear breakout in countries like Iran.
The urgency of addressing climate change may take precedence over these concerns in the short term, but if we do manage to reach net zero with a mixture of renewables and nuclear energy, then it's not inconceivable that over-provisioning renewables might allow us to phase out nuclear energy later on.
Suppose it would take 50 years to build up that renewable energy capacity, and 10 years to build a new nuclear power station. That would mean the nuclear power station would only be useful for 40 years, which limits the amount of time they'd have to recoup their costs over.
Hydrogen w. combustion turbines. When a simple cycle turbine power plant is 5% of the cost of a nuclear plant of the same output, we can back up the entire grid and not have it be too expensive.
Massive +1. And i agree that perhaps "reusing" the book would be useful. E.g. take the key factual approach and update analyses for particular technologies and then plug those together - which to some extent is what the pathway calculator did which is why it is worth trying to get the source for that https://github.com/life-itself/climate/issues/2
While MacKay's work is excellent for a general lay audience to understand general scales of the issue, there are now far more advanced models for this that do things like replay historical weather and demand, down to 15 minute scales, to more least cost systems for zero carbon grids.
They are also so advanced as to take into current grid structure and generation resources, and the cheapest way to transition to zero carbon from our current resources.
Christopher Clack's models are probably the most advanced. The latest iteration has the very surprising finding that deploying lots of grid-edge solar and storage right now will save us a ton of money because it will use current transmission and distribution assets more effectively and reduce the need for future investment in these assets (T&D is the majority of our electricity bills, not generation!)
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/56/1/jamc-d-...
But it isn’t particularly helpful when trying to explain policy imho.
It has also undermined a lot of business plans - even those based on renewables. For example the Xlink project in the UK - this involved building a huge solar PV plant (with complimentary wind and battery storage) in Morocco where panels are twice as efficient and an underwater HVDC cable to the UK. The problem is that panel prices have dropped so much, that it's now cheaper, easier and quicker to just buy twice as much PV panels and site them in the UK - compensating for the relative lack of efficiency in northern Europe by volume of panels.
This is why there's huge growth in utility solar PV in northern and western Europe in the last year or two despite the less-than-ideal conditions there - the panels are just so cheap that the lack of optimal efficiency becomes a non-issue.
My prediction is that wind, solar and batteries will dominate because they're riding on the benefits of mass-production - the capital cost for these is dominated by off-the-shelf component costs - installation is relatively trivial. This has delivered continuous and steep price declines while the prices for other forms of generation are stagnant (coal) or rising (nuclear). And there's no sign that the fall in prices is stopping at the moment so their price/value advantage will only grow in future.
Also because one needs to keep in mind that renewable electricity is only about 10% of the energy demand. I sometimes see headlines like "61% of electricity in Germany came from wind last month!" which kind of miss the point, as that means we have only 94% to go. We really need a huge amount of surface area if we want to go for a monoculture of wind and solar power with battery storage.
Edit to be clear: I'm not against wind or solar or batteries. We will most definitely need it and must invest in both building them and innovating them further (in that order of priorities). But I also think we cannot just rely on them solving the whole problem. (Sometimes it is also assumed that this plummeting price curve will continue at the same rate for at least another decade, which I suspect is also not going to materialize.)
The battery land requirements are approximately 1 square mile.
And wind requirements are effectively 0 since wind can very easily co-exist with other land usages.
I think switching consumption to forms that don't cause climate change is more realistic. Failing that, mass carbon capture is still more realistic than getting people to consume less, as far as I can tell.
Has anyone, anywhere ever had political success saying that everyone's living standards must decrease?
Everyone universally hates that, and working from home for office workers would greatly reduce consumption (of oil) while increasing living standards.
I think you’re right. But I think Physics is going to show us the bill at some point and we won’t have a choice. When blackouts will be the norm, people will probably be very angry, but there won’t be much to do.
It is interesting to think about the perspective of e.g. a farmer during the fall of the western Roman Empire. I am certain that none of them wanted it, and it was actually quite violent at times, but there wasn’t anything they could do to stop it.
> Has anyone, anywhere ever had political success saying that everyone's living standards must decrease?
None (that I know of). It is already happening, though. Energy production in Europe is plateauing. Standards of living are already stagnating. Just like politicians cannot will away systemic technical problems in the economy or industry, they cannot change the laws of physics.
Our best bet is to use everything we can. Nuclear base production, as much wind and solar as we can, batteries and hydro to smooth out the peaks. We need to go all out. Even then, it would probably take a global industrial effort of the magnitude of the war efforts during WWI and WWII, just to get everything up and running. Let’s not kid ourselves: the world is burning, a mass extinction is under way, and there is already no way we meet our own bar of 1.5°C, and even 2°C requires immediate action.
100,000 TW of sunlight hits the Earth's surface. Global primary energy demand is less than 20 TW. There is no global shortage of energy. If there are local issues, well, that's why we ship energy from one place to another, as is already done on a massive scale.
The very reason I'd like to see it updated is to see whether the conclusions change materially when we take into account technological progress.
As far as I understand it, whilst costs may be substantially lower that he envisaged, MacKay argued there are fundamental physical constraints on solar and wind that mean they still are unlikely to be able to provide all our energy needs (in the UK at least, without piping in energy from e.g. the Moroccan desert a la Xlinks).
(Yes, I realise solar can do an awful lot if you're willing to 'go big' and have huge batteries. https://www.robinlinacre.com/fill_country_solar/)
Network reliability has actually increased in many European countries despite the increasing reliance on intermittent sources.
The current approach certainly depends on having back-up deployable generation capacity (natural gas) but that was always required for demand following even with thermal sources so most grids already have the infrastructure to incorporate more intermittent generation.
But assuming no technology advances in this area for 30 years time seems implausible. What has happened with price/efficiency of solar, wind and grid-scale batteries in the last 10 years provides a lesson. None of these were practical even 10 years ago and now they represent 90% of newly installed capacity globally (2020). And this is happening all-over whether with or without government support.
For example, new-build, grid-scale battery storage is now cheaper on an LCOE basis than new build open-cycle ("peaker") natural gas plants. This has only happened recently - about a year ago. I was completely skeptical that this could happen a few years ago.
I urge any/all hackernews readers to read more about _recent_ developments in de-carbonizing energy. It's fascinating and it has become clear to me that we're living through one of the great technology revolutions of human history. It genuinely is a Kodak/smartphone type moment with even bigger implications for human wellbeing.
It's amazing that by being cheap enough, all the disadvantages of a new technology become less relevant. A bit like how the PC displaced "real computers" (i.e. mainframes) even though at the time they were little more than microcontrollers integrated with a terminal.
Volatile renewables don’t effectively help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
As the renewables share of generation has been increasing, the CO2 intensity of electricity generation in Germany has dropped from 542gCO2/kWh in 2000 to 296gCO2/kWh in 2020[1].
Btw, your link brings me to a table on agricultural CO2 emissions?
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/development-o...
True. It’s very easy when you can tap your neighbour’s power plants when you need. The problem is a bit different when all the neighbours have the same problems at the same time.
And there are cases like Ireland which has its own grid - with very limited external interconnection - and yet achieved 42% renewable share last year.
Techniques/engineering/theory for integrating intermittent sources has advanced considerably in the last ten years.
It’s more than a little help. Just imagine how a blackout involving 10% of the population or Germany would look like, never mind the EU.
> And there are cases like Ireland which has its own grid - with very limited external interconnection - and yet achieved 42% renewable share last year.
You cannot really compare Ireland with many of the other EU countries, either in term of population or industry, though.
> Techniques/engineering/theory for integrating intermittent sources has advanced considerably in the last ten years.
They have. And it is a good thing, because it really should not be a competition between nuclear and renewables. They still have several issues, which are very difficult to solve without either a massive reduction in consumption, or a massive increase in price.
I really struggle to understand how almost all mainstream “green” parties see fossil fuels as a lesser menace than nuclear. The truth is, if you read their manifesto, that they don’t care about particle pollution beyond “cars are bad” (which is true, but insufficient) or climate change.
It is not a competition, it is a struggle to get rid of fossil fuels, which are an existential threat to our societies. We can sort that out and talk about fusion once we’ve done it. In the meantime, getting rid of fossil fuels is a massive undertaking, and we would be stupid not to use every card in our hand.
We live in a world of finite resources. When considering the significant task of decarbonizing energy, there are lots of technologies potentially available. But some deliver more value than others.
Unfortunately nuclear is not _currently_ one of the options which delivers value in this regard.
Flamenville 3 - the newest French reactor will cost $22B to build 1.6GW of capacity and will have taken nearly 20 years from the start of construction to deliver a watt. The same amount of money could deliver over 20GW of wind capacity which could be deployed almost instantly as it's an easily parallelizable low-risk, relatively low-tech engineering task relying on mass-production for most of the installation. None of these benefits are available to nuclear reactor construction. Even with a capacity factor of 40% for on-shore wind vs 90%+ for nuclear, nuclear just isn't close.
I'm not against nuclear. If the nuclear industry can step up and deliver reactors on time and on budget which can provide power at competitive prices, then I'd be all in favour. It would be wonderful to have an alternative in the race to decarbonize energy. But all I see is a long trail of massively delayed or abandoned projects with incredible cost-overruns (Flamanville, Olkiluoto, V.C. Summer, Vogtle, etc). These failures are hard-engineering failures, nothing to do with politics.
With such a litany of recent failures, the incredible capital expense, the extra security required, the slowness of delivery, it's clear why resources have been directed away from nuclear toward other technologies which are quick and easy to roll-out and have already significantly contributed to reducing the the CO2 intensity of Europe's electricity (which is now less than half of what it was 30 years ago).
Btw, it isn't just nuclear that loses in this regard; bio-fuels, domestic-solar PV, green hydrogen, etc. all fail to compete in the new world of ultra-cheap solar PV and wind.
Nuclear is bottlenecked by the availability of properly trained engineers (and you really need those for such projects). The need in resources would not impact installations of either wind turbines or solar panels.
Nuclear+renewables is not more expensive than all renewables, particularly if you consider the fact that at the moment renewables benefit from an industry that is entirely dependent on subsidised fuel. And that nuclear reactors would be much cheaper per unit if we stopped building only a couple of each class. Also, a nuclear power plant is expensive, but so is the equivalent capacity in wind turbines plus the required storage.
A nuclear baseline mitigates the issues of wind turbines, and wind turbines are a good complement to nuclear. Both are mostly mutually exclusive for political reasons.
> Flamenville 3 - the newest French reactor will cost $22B to build 1.6GW of capacity and will have taken nearly 20 years from the start of construction to deliver a watt. The same amount of money could deliver over 20GW of wind capacity which could be deployed almost instantly as it's an easily parallelizable low-risk, relatively low-tech engineering task relying on mass-production for most of the installation. None of these benefits are available to nuclear reactor construction. Even with a capacity factor of 40% for on-shore wind vs 90%+ for nuclear, nuclear just isn't close.
The same reactor was built on time and on budget in China, and is currently operating. Hinckley point is also going more or less as planned. Areva/Orano’s abysmal performance is more related to their mismanagement than the reactor itself. You also need to factor stuff like storage, and the fact that we have a limited shore length to use.
> I see is a long trail of massively delayed or abandoned projects with incredible cost-overruns (Flamanville, Olkiluoto, V.C. Summer, Vogtle, etc). These failures are hard-engineering failures, nothing to do with politics.
Olkiluoto and Flamanville are all the consequences of mismanagement coupled with politics. They re-designed Olkiluoto whilst it was being built to adapt it to changing regulations, it is obviously a recipe for disaster. Most of Flamanville delays are due to poor quality control and issues with contractors and suppliers, i.e., mismanagement.
The problem with nuclear is that it requires a high initial capital investment, this is not a secret. This is also why private companies are not suited for this: they don’t price national interest and reliability of the energy supply at the scale of a continent. Nuclear programmes that do account for this (like France in the 1970s/1980s and China today) are massively successful.
Look at it this way: no more fossil fuel means that you can divert a sliver of the money that’s being spent on the military to secure oil supply to large infrastructure projects. You could build nuclear power plants with the yearly increase of the US military budget. It is only a matter of strategy.
> Btw, it isn't just nuclear that loses in this regard; bio-fuels, domestic-solar PV, green hydrogen, etc. all fail to compete in the new world of ultra-cheap solar PV and wind.
Well, good riddance to bio-fuels (which cause soil degradation, deforestation and dangerous monocultures) and green hydrogen (which is just greenwashed fossil fuel at the moment and does not make much thermodynamical sense in most scenarios).
Super-cheap wind turbines won’t be super-cheap anymore if they are the only tool we have.
> Wind turbines are getting bigger all the time. Do bigger wind turbines change this chapter’s answer?
> Chapter B explains. Bigger wind turbines deliver financial economies of scale, but they don’t greatly increase the total power per unit land area, because bigger windmills have to be spaced further apart. A wind farm that’s twice as tall will deliver roughly 30% more power.
So, did wind turbine production actually increased by an order of magnitudes since the book ?
Turbines have gone from 1-2MW to 10-16MW
Capacity factors have gone from 20% to 50%-60%
Annual additions gave gone from sub-GW to 70GW last year
And with turbine spacing of 1km you can actually do stuff with the land in between.
On the other hand, transmission projects still take 10-20 years, and new transmission projects are often over booked by 300%-400% before they are even started.
Electric cars are ridiculously efficient. A 100kwh tesla drives approx 500km. So 50km/day/car needs just 10kwh. The UK also has 2 persons per car (plus additional cats and dogs..)
So just the on-shore book projection is already enough AND only requires a tenth of the turbines.
Lets keep nuclear as well. Invest in efficiency. Lots of hard work ahead.
But we are probably closer to "problem solved" than to "civilization collapse". Cheers.
For what it's worth "In 2019, the average car in the UK drove 7,400 miles"[0] which works out to 33 km/day/car. It's probably much less now due to working from home (and fuel shortages, and the collapse of the supply chain...)
[0] https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-car...
Okay, but GP's point was that these bigger turbines need to be spaced further apart instead, so we can place fewer of them. That we could build bigger turbines was not in question I think. Do you happen to know whether the MW per km² increased more than the 30% expected amount that GP cited?
And regarding doing things between the turbines, I wasn't "awake" yet in 2006 so I don't remember how it was then, but were they ever placed so close together that you couldn't have farmland in between turbines? The problem seems to be that people don't want to live near them and find nature filled with wind turbines ugly, not so much that you can't do anything else in between.
(Just to note, I don't find them that ugly (even if, of course, nature would be prettier without them... but that's not an option) and I also didn't find them to be very loud when I visited some nearby wind turbines. Perhaps it's different at night when it's all quiet, but personally I don't think I'd mind living next to one. The blades are a bit scary though, I can't help but imagine the consequences if one of them lets loose... but that's like being afraid of air travel I guess.)
What will be a problem if our energy consumption increases by an order of magnitude or two, and we take all of it from the wind. Currently, the entire question is about financial ROI.
> but were they ever placed so close together that you couldn't have farmland in between turbines?
Not since the modern turbines were invented. The first ones were placed in somewhat compact lines, with enough spacing between the turbine lines that you could raise a few lines of any crop. (The lines can't be too close anyway, as that would reduce the turbine efficiency and harm financial ROI.)