The world’s biggest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 2, generates first power | Hacker News Reader

The world’s biggest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 2, generates first power

orsted.com

200 pointspmlnr159 comments

Renewables and electrification are the primary solution to the climate change problem.

This book contains a very practical roadmap on how we can do this quickly, cheaply and practically: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

In this thread from yesterday I answer most of the standard objections: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29721417

P.S. The people agreeing with me mostly got upvoted and the people disagreeing mostly got downvoted, so read from the bottom if you want to see answers to objections.

> Renewables and electrification are the primary solution to the climate change problem

Not until grid-scale energy storage is widely available and affordable.

One might reasonably consider "grid-scale energy storage" to be an implicit part of "renewables and electrification".

I don't think that is reasonable as an interpretation because grid-scale energy storage doesn't yet exist.

An assertion that "renewables and electrification" solves our energy problems is just circular reasoning. It requires a non-existent technology (grid-scale long-term energy storage) and so doesn't fall into the category of "solution" and more into the category of "speculation".

What do you mean when you say grid-scale energy storage doesn't exist? Is this different from utility-scale which has existed for many years?

What exactly are these 2.2GW of battery installations in California then?

https://www.energystoragejournal.com/southern-california-edi...

Or the 1GW they already have?

The power (in W) isn't the relevant value when talking about batteries, it's the stored energy (in Wh) that matters (it's the opposite for dam storage, where energy is plentiful but power is limited). Just do the math and check how many minutes the installation would stay up under significant load from the grid.

BTW I'm baffled to see a website called “energy storage journal” mixing up energy and power like this …

We certainly do have grid-scale technology.

Whether it can be, or is, or will be deployed is another question.

> grid-scale energy storage doesn't yet exist

The New Zealand south island electric grid is almost entirely grid-scale energy storage, in the form of hydro. Easy to recharge (pump water uphill, although NZ doesn't need that), easy to tap (open gates).

Yup, that's in the book I linked.

A lot less storage is needed than most people think. We only need about 3 hours worth of storage. That's a lot, but it's feasible.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

> We only need about 3 hours worth of storage

This doesn't align with the analysis that I've seen. For example in this post (https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/the-disastrous-economics...) the analysis shows that California would have to spend about $5 trillion on battery storage to have a solar+wind+battery grid.

If the book you reference was accurate we would be seeing headlines about power companies bragging about these new grid arrangements but instead I just see headlines about how India an China are moving ahead with enormous amounts of coal power plants, rapidly increasing energy costs where intermittent power generation is a significant fraction of power capacity (i.e. Germany), and power outages when base load generating capacity isn't sufficient to keep the lights on when the sun sets and the wind dies.

Is there even enough lithium on earth for global grid storage, nevermind electric vehicles?

stationary batteries do not need to be from lithium. please search for iron or rust batteries.

There is a good chance that batteries for grid storage will be from different technologies than lithium.

For instance:

https://ambri.com/

Yes. Worst case, lithium can be extracted from seawater: https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectiv... - but it's currently cheaper to get it from somewhere else. And lithium can be recycled. In the near future, I think most cars will use LFP batteries.

> Due to seasonality of the availability of the wind and sun, most locations require a month or more of battery capacityto get a fully-wind/solar system through a year.

Yeah if their assumptions include a month or more then you can end up with an astronomically big sum. Also you don't need batteries for all your energy storage and they use todays battery prices to come up with that number.

That article summary says:

> Yet even in systems which meet >90% of demand, hundreds of hours of unmet demand may occur annually.

and

> satisfy countries’ electricity demand in 72–91% of hours (83–94% by adding 12 h of storage).

So not 3 hours and still significant number of days without power.

You back that up with combustion turbines burning some renewably-sourced fuel.

Capital cost of a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant: $500/kW Capital cost of a nuclear power plant: $10,000/kW

So, one can have this backup sitting there ready to go for just 5% of the cost of an all nuclear grid. You do need the fuel, but if it's only used a few hundred hours per year the fuel cost will be minor.

That's without overbuild. Look at the graphs at the back, the ones with 3x overbuild and 3 hours of storage. Small countries still have unmet demand, but Russia, US and Canada do not.

Oh, please. Up north, like here in Finland, you’d be hard pressed to get by with 3 months of storage.

This is really thinking it backwards. You don't build the storage before you have the renewables to store. And almost no country is at a point where they need storage in large amounts (as long as that's an option it's cheaper to add flexibility by exchanging with neighboring countries).

E.g. hydrogen electrolyseurs + gas plants that can use H2 exist and aren't particularly challenging. The reason you don't see that yet is that we don't have the huge amounts of renewables that would need this infrastructure yet.

The UK pipeline for battery storage is over 20GW.

I don't think the units are correct here. My observation has been that even reputable news sources seem to go all wonky with energy units.

I believe the appropriate units for consideration would be GWh = gigawatt-hours.

This article, https://www.environmentalleader.com/2021/01/worlds-largest-u..., suggests that the largest battery storage system is 1,200 MWh or 1.2GWh of storage (at a cost of $400 million)

For comparison, all generation capacity in California is 272,576 gigawatt-hours https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

A grid battery has two numbers that are of interest

One is how many Joules it can deliver in a second (Giga/Mega/Kilo/watts)

One is how many Joules it can delivery completely (Giga/Mega/Kilo/watts) it can deliver

If I'm running my 10kW shower for 5 minutes, I can do that from a battery that only has 1kWh of storage, but I can't run it from a battery that can only deliver 1kW.

This is all high-school level science, and it's an indictment on the lack of diversity in news reporting how badly they get it wrong

https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

Germany: 2x the French nuclear capacity in wind and solar + coal and gas (edited): 398gCO₂eq/kWh

France: nuclear + a bit of hydro and renewables: 46gCO₂eq/kWh

The thing is that coal+gas ist still a massive driver for German electricity generation. Goal is to get coal off the grid until 2035 but has to be seen how they actually handle this has to be seen.

The nuclear part in both countries also face the problem of long term storage that isn't solved by either one of the countries.

Where do you count the coal?

Sorry, I didn't put it in the example. You have all the numbers in real-time on the link.

My point was more to show that even you have a huge quantity of renewable, that doesn't means that is the correct path to go CO2 wise. Except if you accept that your society adapt itself to a non planned and highly variable electricity production.

Partial data is equal to false data when you misrepresent it like that. I'm also pro nuclear power, but coal and gas are too big factor to ignore.

Just edited it ;)

Germany should have kept their nuclear power plants just a bit longer, just to get through the transition. Closing them all as fast as they did is just difficult to defend.

Tell that to Belgium. They are planning to close down all their nuclear plants right now. And replace them with gas.

Those LNG lobbyist from the US (or should I say neo economic-hitmen) are really worth their money. Would be shame if it backfired and the EU turned to Russia. Gas prices are through the roof, I really hope our politicians are going to think "EU first" for a change.

* Keep the nuclear plants open until we transition fully to renewables. In the meantime:

* Get LNG from the US or natural gas from the Russians depending on market prices. (Ignore those threats/boycots from the US wrt Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, show some cojones)

How hard could it be?

There is no such things as "100% renewable". The only countries that can do that already have and is because they have a lot of hydro-power or other controllable way of producing energy without emitting CO2 (Iceland, Finland...).

If you don't have way to produce in a stable matter, NOW (not in 20 years when we might have the tech to store a crazy amount of electricity across the months) your electricity you have to import it or burn what you have in your country. France choose to import uranium.

Or we go 100% renewable, but we need to start discussing about a society where electricity is not 24/7 available for a major part of the population.

Finland doesn't have a lot of hydro power. Most of its power comes from imports, nuclear and thermal power. Your claim that 100% renewable cannot guarantee electricity 24/7 to everyone is contradicted by countless reports.

I'd be curious to see those reports :)

"Despite some debate, most experts agreed that 100 percent renewable energy was feasible. Is it economically or politically feasible - that's a very different question." https://www.sciencealert.com/these-climate-experts-say-100-r... Also see the links posted by bryanlarsen.

> "The Earth receives 23000 TW of solar energy, while the global energy consumption is 16 TW. Therefore, [100 percent renewable energy] could be possible even if we capture only 0.07 percent of the solar energy" says Professor Xiao Yu Wu, an energy expert from MIT.

Sure, doesn't solve the night issue. Having energy is something, having a stable production from a very diffuse and non stable one (day/night) is something else.

> Iceland power near 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy, using their abundant geothermal and hydro supplies. Renewable energy can also dominate electricity needs for more populous countries too.

So geothermal and hydro.

> About 80 percent of Brazil's electricity needs for its 209million people come from renewable sources, biomass and hydro mostly. On average, however, renewables power ~29 percent of electricity around the world. So can renewables reach 100 percent for populous countries?

So biomass and hydro.

> He argues that *there is a heavy reliance on hydro and biomass sources* - while most countries don't have access to these, so would be reliant on sources like solar, wind, and storage. In those circumstances, it's highly unlikely for renewables to power 100 percent of the electricity supply he says.

Well thanks, the article itself is making the point I want to make.

The article claims that "most experts agreed that 100 percent renewable energy was feasible", yet you decide to quote one of the contrarian experts. Why? In either case, I have satisfied your curiosity; the article links to a number of reports claiming that 100% renewable electricity is possible.

The Earth actually received 100,000 TW of solar energy. The 23,000 must be that fraction that hits land?

We do have quite a bunch of hydro, actually.

Electricity consumed by source 2020: Nuclear 28% Electricity by combined heat & power production from central heating & industry and other thermal 25% (about 50% split bioenergy vs fossils) Hydro 19% Import 18% Wind 10%

Altogether electricity production is 52% from renewables.

Source: https://www.stat.fi/til/salatuo/2020/salatuo_2020_2021-11-02... And: https://www.motiva.fi/ratkaisut/energiankaytto_suomessa/sahk...

> Those LNG lobbyist from the US (or should I say neo economic-hitmen) are really worth their money.

They aren't the main cause here. Environmental parties in Europe have historically been built from anti-nuclear groups, and their involvement against commercial nuclear energy is ancient.

This is the sad truth. The green party in Flanders/Belgium is pushing hard to close our last nuclear plants. How they can rationalize replacing them with Gas is beyond me. They are running solely on ideology at this point.

The rationale is that this is a temporary measure, cheaper than building new nuclear plants, while the renewable buildout continues. It's likely true, but I doubt it's cheaper than running the current nuclear powerplants for longer than originally intended. I haven't looked at the numbers and the assumptions so I could be wrong in my assumption.

According to BBC: "The country will not turn its back on nuclear technology completely as part of the compromise deal, with 100 million euros ($113m; £84m) to be invested into research including on smaller, modular nuclear energy plants."

First that’s an instantaneous number not any sort of long term average.

More importantly “Capacity” isn’t a useful metric for comparison when nuclear costs are an order of magnitude higher for capacity. Even with a 2x increased capacity factor nuclear is still several times more expensive per kWh. So in terms of actual investment in carbon neutral sources France has spent roughly 4x as much as Germany to get that reduction. It’s an admirable sacrifice by the French people, but the ROI in terms of money spent vs CO2 reduction is quite poor.

This has been debunked and proven in various papers and scenarios. The latest one in France is by RTE (our national grid management company). https://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/les-futurs-energetiq...

They made 6 scenarios, from "100% renewable" (M0) to "50% nuclear-50% renewable in 2060" (N03). And here is there result cost wise: https://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/sites/default/files/...

N03 means we actually restart building nuclear plants and maintain the existing ones longer than expected. And yes there is 50% of renewable, because France didn't do anything for 20 years and it's "too late" to replace and extend the existing ones.

The wholesale price seen be RTE is post subsides. From their perspective nuclear is awesome, it’s also awesome for French consumers or would be if they didn’t have to pay taxes.

Mandatory myth busting here: there is no subsidies on French nuclear which in facts yields billions in profit ever year to the French government, but a tons of subsidies on its competitors (and below-the-market-price access to nuclear electricity for them so they can “freely compete” with EDF. For those interested see ARENH).

There are compelling arguments against nuclear in France (namely the aging of the existing reactors and the industrial inability to ship new reactors because we've lost most of the learning curve after several decades without significant reactor construction) but imaginary subsidies ain't one.

I know Retric won't change their mind, but I hope other readers won't buy their bullshit.

> no subsidies on French nuclear

The most obvious French subsidy for nuclear is who pays for possible 500+ billion Euro nuclear accident. The Paris Convention and the Brussels Convention both require insurance for nuclear accidents, but cap liability to operators with the difference being made up by taxpayers.

That’s an easy to verify subsidy, as was the recent bailout for Areva S.A., I could go on but subsidies get convoluted. Pressure from the French government for people to use electric heating, well it’s in support of the nuclear industry but not really a “subsidy” or is it? Let’s say no.

What about low interest government loans? Sure that’s an obvious subsidy.

> The most obvious French subsidy for nuclear is who pays for possible 500+ billion Euro nuclear accident. The Paris Convention and the Brussels Convention both require insurance for nuclear accidents, but cap liability to operators with the difference being made up by taxpayers.

That's stretching the meaning of the word “subsidy” quite a lot…

> That’s an easy to verify subsidy, as was the recent bailout for Areva S.A.

Oh please tell us more it's gonna be funny because you obviously don't know what you're talking about.

> Pressure from the French government for people to use electric heating, well it’s in support of the nuclear industry but not really a “subsidy” or is it?

Oh you mean the type of heating that's been FORBIDDEN in new building for a decade? Please be serious…

> What about low interest government loans? Sure that’s an obvious subsidy.

Yes, too bad it doesn't exist. (In France, UK has some kind of state-guaranteed loan for Hinkley point, but that's not the right country and not “low interest loan” either).

Since when does free insurance stretch the definition of subsidy?

Clean up costs in Fukushima will total about $1 trillion.

Probability of a core melt accident in 1 year or reactor operation is apparently 1 in 3704.

Insuring for that much with zero profit margin would be $269 million per year per plant.

That's about 1.5x-2x the cost of operating a nuclear plant.

It's a lot of money to handwave away.

The heating thing seems like an odd bit of trivia today, but back in 1988 French nuclear reactors had a capacity factor around 60% and home electric heating such as heat pumps was considering one way of boosting consumption especially at night. Things have clearly changed over time, but I am unaware of any current regulations banning new homes with electric heating.

> obviously don't know what you're talking about.

Please enlighten us: European Union antitrust regulators approved the French government's plan to inject 4.5 billion euros ($4.8 billion) into embattled nuclear group Areva AREVA.PA, saying the rescue would not unduly distort competition. www.reuters.com/article/us-areva-restructuring-eu-idUSKBN14U1L0

PS: Hinkly is somewhat interesting as the French government has a major stake in the UK power plant. Digging into the financing gets rather interesting.

> The heating thing seems like an odd bit of trivia today, but back in 1988 French nuclear reactors had a capacity factor around 60% and home electric heating such as heat pumps(sic[1]) was considering one way of boosting consumption especially at night.

So, by your logic we were building new plants for no apparent reasons in the 80-90s, and to make it useful we decided to force people to use electric heaters to boost consumption. You couldn't imagine that there were no conspiracy to build nuclear plants for the sake of it and the logic actually went the other way around? After the oil shocks the French government decided to become more energetically independent. At this time most of the heating was provided via fuel oil boilers, so it was highly dependent on the international price of oil. So the government decided to encourage people to use electric heaters instead, and then built nuclear plants to provide the needed electricity. (the reader will note that this is a clear example of Brandolini's law, where the amount of effort needed to refute bullshit is significantly higher than to produce it).

> Things have clearly changed over time, but I am unaware of any current regulations banning new homes with electric heating.

So maybe you shouldn't talk about a country you don't know? “Réglementation Thermique 2012” (more commonly called “RT 2012”) is what you're looking for. And it was the biggest and most disruptive construction law ever, and was discussed in depth for years. Anyone with a least a minimal awareness on the French energy issues will inevitably be aware of it.

> Please enlighten us: European Union antitrust regulators approved the French government's plan to inject 4.5 billion euros ($4.8 billion) into embattled nuclear group Areva AREVA.PA, saying the rescue would not unduly distort competition. www.reuters.com/article/us-areva-restructuring-eu-idUSKBN14U1L0

Thanks, this cherry picking from the first Google result you could find illustrate my point about you not knowing the topic. Do you know the difference between a shareholder restructuring an asset and a state bailing out a private company? In the first case, the shareholder is actually rewarded the capital investment through its return on equity. Since Areva's restructuring, the French government has already been paid back through EDF's dividends. (of course these dividends aren't directly the result of the said restructuring, which is still bearing fruits, but simply the result of the recurring revenue that EDF brings to the French government ever year).

[1]: it was not heat pumps (which would be terrible for the job of artificially increasing consumption anyway because of their high yield) but plain convector, which where much affordable.

Réglementation Thermique 2012

It’s a little more complicated. RE 2012 arguably does favor gas, but it does not requires it. However RE 2020 as of 2 days from now changes things back to electricity and for homes under construction is what’s actually in effect.

Sorry, if you’re using outdated information but the industry has moved on.

Yes, RE2020 changes the calculation coefficients but no it doesn't allow electric convectors back in new buildings. And worse: it doesn't change the fact that between 2012 and today, electricity (and then nuclear) was actively discouraged by French laws, which defeat your argument about the government promoting it actively to help nuclear industry.

But interestingly enough, two comment above you were “unaware of any current regulations banning new homes with electric heating.”and now you've suddenly become an expert on the topic of French construction law… I like debating with people with opposing views, but discussing with people who are compulsive liars isn't my cup of tea. Good day.

I didn’t flip flop on anything my comments are quite consistent here.

> it doesn't allow electric convectors back in new buildings.

What part do you think bans electric heating? It’s simply not there in RE2012 or RE2020, hell people are actively talking about how RE2020 is switching to electricity from gas in new construction. I can’t prove a negative here, if you think something is banned you’re going to have to show where it’s banned.

The wider context is France is primarily on electric heating be that ultra efficient ground source heat pumps or more traditional regular heat pumps. So yes they changed the regulations recently RE2012 after achieving the desired effect and are now changing them again in RE2020.

PS: This comes back to a winder context the legacy of past subsidies don’t go away. When someone builds a wind farm or nuclear reactor with government backing even just for R&D costs and thus ends up with lower payments those lower payments stick around. Just as someone being given a house avoids mortgage payments for the next 30 years.

RTE is pushing a lot for renewable to be deployed as well as more nuclear. More renewable means more grid deployment, so more work for them. Don't shoot the messenger.

Alright, I’ve got one that I don't see on your list, it’s been on my mind for years. What about the goldfish problem?

Goldfish grow to fit their containers. Keep a little 1-inch goldfish in a bowl, it’ll stay that size. Toss it in a koi pond and in no time you’ll have something approaching the size of a housecat.

People are like this. A family might be scratching by on $40k/year. Dad gets some windfall or promotion and is making $60k/year. So did he finish out the year in the same house with $20k in the bank? Of course not, he’s paying for all the clothes and goods that he couldn’t afford before.

Ten years later he’s gotten promoted to making $120k/year. Now is there money in the bank, or are they living in a bigger house and driving a nicer car?

This is what worries me about any climate plan that is only based on clean energy. If driving, for example, gets cleaner, do we use 50% less petroleum, or keep burning the same amount of petroleum on different projects? (And what about all the non-tracked pollution caused by tire wear?)

This problem is even more stark when people talk about atmospheric carbon capture. If we're emitting X tons of carbon per year, and recapture Y tons, will we continue to emit X, or start emitting X + Y?

None of this is reason not to pursue renewables and electrification, but I think it’s inescapable that any "primary solution" has to be a reduction in consumption.

Big +1 on that one.

France goal to meet Paris agreement is actually to reduce by ~5% per year ALL energy consumption. -5% is roughly what we had with 3 lockdowns in 2020. So it's basically a COVID added to a COVID each year, for 30 years.

That's no matter what you do in your actual energy deployment and investment.

This is all fine as long as all externalities are included in the price of consumption. Currently burning fossils is just way too cheap for the damage it does.

> This is all fine as long as all externalities are included in the price of consumption.

Just like a software team scaling a product is going to discover new scale issues, we discover new externalities on a regular basis.

Hoping that we can discover all externalities ahead of time and price them is an impossible objective.

In the context of energy, this is known as the "Jevons paradox": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It’s a great question, but if resources are genuinely clean, ethical and renewable, is it a problem to consume them? Perhaps the question is how to determine whether the things we consume genuinely are clean, ethical and renewable or not.

The issue is that nothing is really cost free. Windfarms are better for the environment than alternatives, but they still have a significant impact. And that will increase if the best (low impact) sites get used up, and we still need to find space for more.

I think reduction in consumption has to be part of the solution too.

> Keep a little 1-inch goldfish in a bowl, it’ll stay that size.

In much the same way that keeping a puppy in a tiny kennel full of it's own filth will stunt it's growth.

https://www.tfhmagazine.com/articles/freshwater/goldfish-myt...

What do you think about ocean thermal energy conversion plants [1]. It seems to be a promissing technology that both produces energy during whole day, and captures carbon by increasing the biomass of the ocean.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_convers...

The UK is doing pretty well today - 39%/13GW Wind energy at the moment which is great; but we have whole months when we'll have near to nothing when there is very little wind (e.g. less than 2GW for a long time), when that happens in the winter when we've not got much Solar, I'm not seeing how Renewables keep us going - maybe if some of the tidal systems get working. Energy storage works great for daily peak/troughs - but not for weeks. So, at the moment I'm assuming we're going to need more nukes to get rid of gas. Roll on Fusion.

It is one of the reasons for the new undersea cable to Norway. When we have excess wind then we can pump water up a mountain there, and when we don't the we can release it and recapture some of that energy.

Problem is, that is currently only 1.4GW of capacity. We'll need a whole lot more of it to get fully off gas or nuclear.

I really have no idea if this is possible, but is there any possibility that with enough wind turbines, we might discover a down side to them?

Each wind turbine essentially transfers power out of the wind and into our electric grid, right? Is it possible we could build enough turbines for that to be a problem?

Yes, there are significant downsides: https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/10/2053/2010/acp-10-2053...

The short of it is that since wind exists because of temperature differentials, each wind farm increases them.

>Using wind turbines to meet 10% or more of global energy demand in 2100, could cause surface warming exceeding 1 °C over land installations

Thanks for taking the time to write these comments.

In my opinion, existing tech is able to solve the climate crisis. Breakthroughs can make the solution cheaper and sooner.

In my view the main problem is the attitude of doom amongst the general population. If people felt there was a solution, and were excited and energised by the challenge, they'd be more willing to support political changes. I.e. pushing back against entrenched obstructionist industries, pricing externalities, and investing in infrastructure.

Apologies for the cynism, but I wonder what big-tech firm bought the emission rights for this to expand their data hunger even further while "staying green". Here in the Netherlands we have a fierce discussion raging on the placement of a newly proposed "hyperscale" from Facebook/Meta. The datacenter would consume more than the power of Amsterdam as a whole, yet we have a lot of trouble finding the right grounds (and communal common ground) on where to place these enormous turbines.

and off-topic:

I bet that this entire windpark can be offset by disallowing arbitrary Javascript code to be ran in every advertisement, and all the wasted cycles that follow. In the same vein, I wonder how much CO2 a regular citizin saves per year by running an adblocker.

Somebody in my university did their PhD thesis on that. Let me see if I can find it.

(But the answer was yes. If I remember it correctly, 10% of all IT infrastructure energy consumption goes for displaying ads on web pages)

Found it.

"The online advertising ecosystem resides in the core of the Internet, and it is the sole source of funding for many online services. Therefore, it is an essential factor in the analysis of the Internet's energy footprint. As a result, in 2016, online advertising consumed 20–282 TWh of energy. In the same year, the total infrastructure consumption ranged from 791 to 1334 TWh. With extrapolated 2016 input factor values without uncertainties, online advertising consumed 106 TWh of energy and the infrastructure 1059 TWh. With the emission factor of 0.5656 kg CO2e/kWh, we calculated the carbon emissions of online advertising, and found it produces 60 Mt CO2e (between 12 and 159 Mt of CO2e when considering uncertainty). The share of fraudulent online advertising traffic was 13.87 Mt of CO2e emissions (between 2.65 and 36.78 Mt of CO2e when considering uncertainty)."

The paper was: "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019592551...

It was the one of the five papers included in the authors PhD thesis, "Towards Sustainable Data Centers and ICT Services" https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/38725/i...

Here’s a paper from a few years back with a low end estimate of 11MTCO2e for a year of digital advertising https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019592551...

For comparison that one year is about the same as the entire history of ethereum, which gets a lot of criticism. Or about 4 world cups.

And a crazy 10x that on the high end of the estimates. Be interesting to see some new numbers on this.

> I wonder how much CO2 a regular citizin saves per year by running an adblocker.

Compared to hauling about 1 000 kg around daily for the office commute and compared to sending an airplane into the air one or more times per year, the advertisements aren’t too bad.

Really open for any feedback and pointers on the below calculations:

The average citizen of Chad emits 60kg CO2 per year, according to World In Data 2020 [1]. Of which roughly ±3% are current Facebook user [2]. Facebook is pushing hard on the "Open Internet" initiave to capitalize on this market, too [3]. If they succeed in doing so, and say, reaches 80% market penetration in Chad, I'm really curious to hear what percentage would be attributable to rendering javascript advertisements. I tried to look up some numbers but they vary widely and it becomes a heavy guessing game. One could argue to simply divide the amount of active users by the total power consumption:

The energy consumption of Facebook has grown somewhat exponentially over the years, reaching 5.1 TWh in 2019. While there users are growing too (9% from 2018 > 2019, it seems there energy consumption is growing more quickly). Regardless, they counted a rough 2.5B active users at the end of 2019. Giving a rough power consumption per user over 2019 5.1TWh / 2.5b = 2Kwh. To put that 2 Kwh in perspective, according to Forbes a phone uses on average a year 2 Kwh of power.

Looking up the average Co2 emissions per Kwh I find 475gram of CO2 / Kwh [6]. Adding that up gives a rough 1kg of Co2 emissions per Facebook user.

Given the extremely low emissions from Chad (DRC is even lower with 30kg / capita, but strongly doubting that). The market penetration of Facebook alone in Chad might be able to bump the actual emission from 60 > 61 kg, a near 2% increase per capita, just for Facebook. Which is a rough 30% of the advertisement market globally at the moment.

That 1000kg vehicle hauling for a rough 1000km is equivalent to a year of a Chad living, too.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

[2] https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-...

[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-use-of-fac...

[5] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

[6] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-co2-status-report-...

I remember doing some math on youtube forcing vp9 on hardware without acceleration was wasting as much power as tiny country.

All because licensing.

An insatiable market of deep-pocketed buyers hungry for renewable rights is exactly what we want right now, no matter what they use it for. Demand will drive us further up the learning curve, bringing down cost & building momentum.

According to this article https://www.offshorewind.biz/2020/10/02/hornsea-two-offshore... construction of Hornsea 2 began in 2020 and is on track to be completed in 2022. That's less than three years construction time. Quite impressive considering the pandemic.

And hella impressive compared to any nuclear project!

Nuclear is slow and massive to build indeed :)

However, the few last nuclear plants in Germany produced more power than the 250B€, 20 years planned, solar-panels German total farms in 2020.

Those plants are planned to be closed down this year and next year.

20 years ago nuclear was cheaper than solar.

Today, solar is cheaper than nuclear.

P.S. And a large part of the reason for that is because Germany and Denmark invested heavily in wind & solar while it didn't make economic sense. They really helped bump us up the manufacturing learning curve. Thanks, Denmark and Germany!

When you're comparing cost, are you comparing the total system?

This means backup + grid + management of intermittence?

Because comparing the cost of a solar panel and a nuclear power-plant is like comparing apples and bananas if you actually want to power-up your computer 24/7.

Yes. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

Nuclear is also pretty bad at 24/7 power. It produces steady power, but what we really need is dispatchable power, to match the peaks and valleys in demand.

The intermittency of renewables can be solved with batteries or other storage. We only need about 3 hours of batteries, a little bit of overbuilding and a good grid to handle its intermittency.

Yes. Grid scale batteries and solar have plunged precipitously in price. While solar has bottomed out, batteries look to fall still further.

Nuclear hasnt. It currently requires pretty lavish subsidies to be built on top of the ones they already had.

(this is not true in the UK, but in the UK hornsea's lower intermittency + batteries will likely beat out hinkley point C on cost even though solar + batteries probably couldnt with the UK's weather)

But is solar + batteries cheaper than nuclear or solar + long duration storage cheaper than nuclear. This is the real question.

Solar’s great, but the grid has to be balanced 24/7/365. If we are going to electrify, will we need massive amount of electricity in old wind months when the sun isn’t necessarily shining and the wind isn’t necessarily blowing. We need a diversity of options so the grid is robust.

Probably yes, especially if one looks at 2030 (or later) when a nuclear plant whose planning started today might be ready.

We do not need nuclear for diversity. Nuclear is utterly terrible at acting as a backup power source for a mostly renewable grid. Nuclear will either be most of the grid, or it will be pushed out entirely.

> Today, solar is cheaper than nuclear.

Are you counting the generation capacity that has to exist to backup the solar? If not, then you are comparing apples to oranges.

Not exactly. A coal or gas plant is cheap up-front but has high operating costs. Solar is the opposite (as is nuclear). With Solar + backup peaked plants you do need to have two systems, but energy is gloriously cheap when the sun is shining.

> but energy is gloriously cheap when the sun is shining.

This seems like a misunderstanding of how to evaluate costs. You can't selectively ignore some costs and then assert that the energy is "cheap". Well you can do that, but it is an entirely unconvincing argument/analysis.

Well, afaik energy produced from wind & solar is being sold with higher priority on the common EU market.

So Germany is making tons of cash selling their energy and when they close all nuclear plants, they plan to import energy from other EU producers. That includes brown energy which is cheaper.

If you ask me, this makes perfect economic sense.

I think the real point is less about the cost than about time and budget overruns when comparing nuclear vs. renewable projects.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a single solar or wind project that's run late or over budget, whereas I'd be even more hard pressed to come up with a nuclear build that has not run late and overbudget, and usually by large margins.

In today‘s news, the new German minister for the environment:

“ He does not see the consensus on the nuclear phase-out crumbling. "I have never heard from a politician from a democratic party that he is calling for the reconstruction of nuclear energy," said Habeck. "Then he would have to say that I would like to have the nuclear waste repository in my constituency. As soon as someone says that, I will deal with the subject again."

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/habeck-klimaziele-verfeh...

p50 on nuclear is 6 years, FYI

If this had been done in America it would just be finishing the planning stage, 500 million over-budget, with a optimistic completion date of 2028. Likely 2032

The planning application was submitted in 2015, with several years preparation before then.

This is great news. Wind turbines make a lot of sense for the windy UK.

The problem of energy storage when the wind isn't blowing, remains.

The energy storage section in "Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air" [1] gives a good overview of how storage could work in the UK.

What I don't think it covers, however, is creating hydrogen through water electrolysis, which Siemens Gamesa are looking at, even integrating the process within the turbines themselves. [2]

The hydrogen could be stored, or used in the UK's heating system that currently runs mostly on natural gas. There have been some pilot projects introducing a hydrogen mix into the existing gas system. [3] Lowering dependence on natural gas would be good for not only the environment, but also for energy security, thinking about the recent issue with getting gas from Russia.

Hydrogen-blend boilers are already on the market. I don't know how much work it would take for an 100pc hydrogen gas system. I hear there would be issues with the smaller hydrogen molecules escaping from our existing gas pipe infrastructure.

[1] https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_186.shtml

[2] https://www.siemensgamesa.com/en-int/products-and-services/h...

[3] https://www.energynetworks.org/newsroom/hydrogen-blending-wh...

There are better ways to use hydrogen than burning it in boilers. Check out the hydrogen ladder https://mobile.twitter.com/mliebreich/status/142690073731398...

While storing electricity is very hard at grid scale at the moment, another approach to solve the intermittency problem is using interconnectors. By connecting to other grids using uncorrelated energy sources, we can balance energy supply and demand across space rather than across time with storage.

I believe the idea is that it solves two problems simultaneously, using excess wind when it’s available and making our domestic gas supplies “greener”.

The vast majority of uk homes have gas powered central heating (hot water radiators), there is no good route forward to upgrade/replace all of this infrastructure to make it “green”. You can’t economically run a hot water central heating system using an electric heat pump, the required temperatures are too high, so you either need to rip it out and replace the whole system with a modern one or at least either replace all the radiators with underfloor heating or masive wall mounted radiators (very expensive for the 10s millions of homes, this isn’t just a new boiler).

A hybrid hydrogen/natural gas or synthetic gas is a way to go green but keep the existing infrastructure either with a new boiler or hopefully minor component changes.

So while it may not technically be “best usage” in the academic sense, it could be argued that it is a sensible use economically for the UK.

If you have to use electricity to produce hydrogen it is more efficient to instead use that electricity directly for hot water and a heat pump for space heating. There is no need to 'rip it out and replace the whole system' to use a heat pump; an air to air heat pump as used in many Scandinavian homes can be fitted at much lower cost without disturbing the existing central heating at all.

I don't understand why heat pump solutions in the UK are so expensive. An air to air heat pump from Samsung can be had for a thousand pounds and installation for another five hundred here in Norway; see https://www.elkjop.no/product/hjem-og-husholdning/oppvarming... for instance.

This is rated for room areas up to 100 m2 so plenty enough for the average UK home. Buy two if you want the upstairs heated separately.

That heats one 100m² room, doesn't it?

A typical English¹ house has several rooms, and is heated by a central boiler and a pump circulating hot water through radiators.

Converting the house to air-based heating would require several such units, or else some other type of unit and pipes to move the air to the various rooms.

¹ Used intentionally, I know electric resistive heating is/was more common in parts of Scotland.

> That heats one 100m² room, doesn't it?

A lot of both Norwegian and UK homes have open plan main floors.

Just leave all the internal doors open. The average family home in the UK is less than 100 m2 all told. A pair of air to air heat pumps would easily heat the two floors.

And of course the UK really should insulate houses better.

> I don't understand why heat pump solutions in the UK are so expensive. An air to air heat pump from Samsung can be had for a thousand pounds and installation for another five hundred here in Norway

Hot air heating is missing in discussions in the UK. I don't know why; I speculate that it's because it got a bad reputation in the 1980s when it was fitted to new build houses and is perceived as ineffective. Certainly the conversations I've had with people all go "I ripped out the hot air system and replaced it with (conventional) hot water radiators and a gas boiler and the house is toasty warm". The draughty nature of UK housing may also be a factor.

What's the situation in Norway and other countries? Is hot air heating widely used? In what kinds of properties do you use air to air heat pumps?

US single family homes are, by a large margin, primarily heated via the central air system (the same ductwork that supplies cold air in summer).

My experience with both is that I prefer central air heat. That said, they will perform worse in a drafty house- air is a very poor carrier and storage medium for heat compared to water, so if you have a room with a draft away from your thermostat, it'll get colder faster; a radiator in the room would essentially act as a heat bank.

> What's the situation in Norway and other countries? Is hot air heating widely used?

Central heating of any kind is rare in Norway. There is widespread use of underfloor heating (either water borne or electric) in bathrooms. Its fairly common in living rooms too but definitely not the majority.

Most people use electric panel heaters and a wood burner. In the past we used quite a lot of paraffin burnt in a pot burner in the centre of the house which could keep most of my 130 m2 house warmer than we wanted. That's no longer allowed so I burn wood (compressed wood waste from sawmills).

> In what kinds of properties do you use air to air heat pumps?

All kinds of free standing houses, terraced houses. My next door neighbour has two, one for the ground floor and another for the bedrooms in the floor above.

The only thing holding me back from getting a heat pump is that the wiring in my house is not up to it so it would be a substantial extra cost to get that upgraded. That's not a problem for most UK houses or recently built Norwegian ones.

In this small town of 6000 people I think that probably one in four of the detached and semi-detached houses have air to air heat pumps.

> There is no need to 'rip it out and replace the whole system' to use a heat pump; an air to air heat pump as used in many Scandinavian homes can be fitted at much lower cost without disturbing the existing central heating at all.

I understood that heat pumps work more efficiently in homes that are a) well insulated, and b) where the heating system is designed to work at lower temperatures (bigger radiators/underfloor heating and appropriate pipes). Whether or not a & b are must-haves or nice to have I'm not 100% sure about - I guess it depends.

(see e.g. https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/advice/in-depth-guide-to-he... - Designing and operating your heat pump system)

Homes that use gas in the UK typically have a gas boiler that provides both hot water for heating and domestic use (taps). They heat the water on demand, there is no facility for storing the water. Heat pumps as we have now cannot be used like that, they will slowly extract heat from the source (e.g. the air) and use it to heat up water in a buffer tank (typically a few hundred litres) - so retrofitting would mean not just replacing the boiler, but finding space for a large water tank.

A better alternative is thermal batteries, which can charge when electricity is cheap. This has actually been around for a long time in the UK as storage heaters, but now systems are coming to market that can be used to replace traditional boilers and provide hot water:

https://sunamp.com/residential/

Fascinating product that I did not know existed. Am I reading the specs correctly they these only lose about 3/4 a kWh every 24hrs without energy?

I looked into Sunamp last year as they sounded idea for us when redoing our heating. They seem to have had many teething problems, including the control circuit boards having fundamental problems, and people having the battery contents expand and warp the cases.

If you're interested in going that route, have a look at https://www.google.com/search?q=sunamp+review+site:forum.bui...

I think the interconnector approach is strategically infeasible for most countries.

Without hot air is pretty badly dated. I kind of wish people would stop referring to it.

The author died before the economics of wind (and more recently, batteries) started making sense. In the book he persisted in sarcastically calling them "windmills".

True, although still worth reading albeit with that in mind.

There is a project to get it updated (was on HN last month)

https://climate.lifeitself.us/without-hot-air/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29056343

There are some parts of the book that are perennial, namely discussion of the UK's geography, which is relevant to energy storage.

Some parts are perennial but he still uses math that mixes in 15 year old assumptions with unchanging assumptions.

Aren’t they windmills? I’m not familiar with this being derogatory. It’s all I can think to call them.

They aren't milling...

Are they actually farming?

The cheapest, most well understood way of handling “when the wind isn’t blowing” - which is almost a red herring given how different weather patterns are across a grid - remains building more wind farms and variably pricing electricity.

Batteries also have started to make sense due to recent plunges in their cost. Hawaii / California are doing this.

Hydrogen makes negative sense due to insane storage costs but gas/oil companies still like promoting the idea, probably due to their sunk costs in natgas investments.

Could you post references regarding the issues you have raised, as it contradicts other claims below that sees hydrogen storage as unavoidable.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

You have inserted this link about 10 times in the last 24hrs.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

Please stop.

Also - the book, while correct, is not terribly original. It does not really address the more difficult segments.

I wish I could link to specific chapters. That's the thing about books vs articles, they tend to touch on a lot of subjects.

> It does not really address the more difficult segments.

Like what?

Hydrogen only makes sense when you get to around 90-95% decarbonization of the grid.

Even then it might make sense to make hydrocarbons that are easier to store!

Perhaps, but you’ve increased the capital cost of the fuel production system (you need CO2 capture now) plus significantly reducing energy efficiency of fuel production (and possibly conversion efficiency back to mechanical or electrical energy).

Not quite as much of a red herring as you might imagine, I don't think. There are days when the wind generated power across the grid really is quite small. Always fun to keep an eye on http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk

That’s because only a tiny, tiny fraction of areas with great generating capability have been built. The more we build, in more areas around the UK, the smaller the proportion of dip is.

Much less storage is required than most people think. Battery storage is entirely economically feasible. Cheaper ones like hydro are even better.

Norway & Britain just completed a new interconnector so that Norway can use Britain's cheap wind power and Britain can use Norway's cheap hydro storage.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

Offshore wind is also a lot less intermittent and tends to produce when onshore isnt (& vice versa).

This wind farm was about half the cost per MWh of hinkley point C as opposed to onshore which is 1/4-1/3. However, the output is a lot more stable than onshore.

> The problem of energy storage when the wind isn't blowing, remains.

Any thoughts on trying to exceed average demand & sell off excess at lower costs to services that can be ready & waiting for excess lower cost electricity?

To me this makes more sense than investing in storage resources. Obviously some storage resources would be needed & you couldn't only rely on a single type of generation from one geographical location.

There's lots of great research and progress on all kinds of energy storage solutions, my current favorite is the iron-air battery:

https://youtu.be/Ui6wWzxCrQ8

The market might step in. If you can buy cheap batteries, buy cheap surplus energy, and sell at a profit to stabilize the grid…

Large wind turbines are interesting, because due to the lower friction from the ground winds are stronger up there so the capacity factor is appropriately higher.

They also scale in power with the swept area, so it pays to make them even larger.

IIRC the current state of the art is 14MW with a 60% capacity factor and that is not the manufacturers' last word.

Exiting times ahead for wind power because while it's still intermittent, it gets built so much faster than nuclear.

There is a few years before they get to that size, Siemens Gamesa have one of that size and that is not entering into serial production before 2024 [0]. That said the first one of those have just been set up this week, though not offshore but in Thy in Denmark [1] (Article in Danish) Siemens Gamesa and Vestas is in quite a competition about who can construct the largest windmill so it will be interesting to see where it gets us.

[0]: https://www.siemensgamesa.com/products-and-services/offshore...

[1]: https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/regionale/midtvest/verdens-stoerst...

Some of my fellow rope access technicians make their living on these things. They are employed full time going all over and patching blades damaged from normal wear and errant objects. The anecdote is that the engineers designed the blades to handle bird strikes and large objects, but didn't factor in the higher velocities as you go out from the hub being worn down by fine particulate like you get with sandblasting. Cool videos, but not for me. I do my ropework on buildings, towers, machinery, and theater. Do the costs below factor this in? I believe each blade costs a small fortune, but I am sure that is relative to other forms energy, so not so bad. BTW, I am a fan of nuclear since the 1980s, and it seems the costs both initial, during, and decommissioning are heavily hit by time and cost burdens due to safety regulations that didn't evolve with the newer reactor designs. I especially like the idea of 'backyard' reactors powering a house or block vs. central power distribution units.

The platform and cranes in the linked photo [1] give a sense of the immense size of the 8 MW wind turbines.

[1]: https://via.ritzau.dk/ir-files/13560592/4605/6023/Hornsea%20...

And now the largest ones are ~15 MW with capacity factors above 60%. Insane scale.

https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW

https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...

https://www.siemensgamesa.com/products-and-services/offshore...

All of these turbines feature rotor diameters >200 m.

If Hornsea 2 really produces anywhere near the nominal 1,4 MW and was built in three years, that is remarkable.

The Olkiluoto 3 nuclear plant here in Finland (1,6 MW) was just started. The construction took 20 years.

The price seems to be in the same ballpark, 5000 million euro was quoted for Hornsea 1, and 9000 million for Olkiluoto 3?

What about operating costs and decommissioning costs? I imagine that it takes a pretty substantial workforce to run a nuclear plant, and decommissioning is a pain, but not too sure about wind.

You mean GW? I'm confused

1. He does mean GW

2. Orsted will average around 60% of nameplate, with wide but predictable variance[1]

3. Nuclear averages 90% of nameplate, with a mix of planned and sudden large outages [op. cit.]

4. Nuclear has higher running costs but longer capital lifetime

5. We need to decarbonize aggressively on multiple timescales: get solar+storage (quickest), wind+storage(reasonably quick), nuclear (s-l-o-w), and advanced geothermal (in development; s-l-o-w then maybe reasonably quick) all deployed.

6. The broad path forward for industrialized societies is solar everywhere, TWh of hour-scale storage, TW of wind, and ~25% of electricity provided by "clean firm": some combination of nuclear, geothermal, H2, and fossil gas with CCS.

7. Electricity consumption will grow faster than the economy in industrialized societies, and as fast as the economy in the currently underserved global south (~3B people). Roughly 10TW today, 20TW in 2040, who knows after that.

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hornsea-spawns-...

I like the photo showing the blades labelled A, B and C. Makes it look like IKEA-style assembly, but with a massive Allen key.

Supply-side storage--batteries, etc.--is definitely part of the solution, but demand-side "storage" is even cheaper and better.

It's summer, it's hot, you set your smart thermostat to 72. It gets really sunny and hot, so excess solar is being generated, so your smart thermostat _lowers_ the temperature to 71. Your _house_ is the "battery"!

Cold weather, when you wanna generate heat, is more difficult to do demand-side, because most heat generation in the US is natural gas, propane, or heating oil (diesel).

But for a lot of U.S., heat pumps for heat make economic sense, and I already see a lot of them below the Washington, DC longitudinal line.

They'll make even more sense when lots of wind and solar come online.

---

This kind of demand-side adjustment got a really bad rap during the Texas power grid failure this past year. But that was the _reverse_ of what I'm talking about, _lowering_ the temperature during excess wind/solar generation.

This project makes me proud to be a human. I wish we could put money into things like this only.

IIRC a single turn of one of these turbines generates enough power for an average family house for one day.

This is so great.

1.32 gigawatts! 1.32 GIGAWATTS!

Have we solved the problem of propellers breaking a lot and being nob recyclable yet?

Yes, those are both solved problems. The blades do not in fact "break a lot" in the first place, and manufacturers can recycle old blades at the end of their lifespan into materials for new blades. See for example https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/end-wi..., which you could easily have found with a single google search.

> The new technology *will "be* a significant milestone

> The project *aims to develop* the technology for industrial scale production *within three years*

Still waiting for Elon Musk "next year AI will drive your Tesla" 2016 promise.

The paper you quote is a press release from 8 months ago that claims to have research project that allows blade recycling. It's far from a mature industry ecosystem.

Let’s say your an aluminum refinery. Would you rather process these propellers or raw ore?

Are these aluminum or some fiber-reinforced composite?

I read something recently that stated, if you take all the energy that is required to build a wind turbine and set it up. The cost includes the mining of ores, the manufacturing process, the transportation, setup and the maintenance costs. It can spin until it disintegrates and will never be net positive energy.

I don't know if it's true, it could be full of shit, wish I could find it again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Wi...

"In the scientific literature EROIs for recent wind turbines normally vary between 20 and 50.[11][better source needed]. Data collected in 2018 found that the EROI of operational wind turbines averaged 19.8 with high variability depending on wind conditions and wind turbine size.[12] EROIs tend to be higher for recent wind turbines compared to older technology wind turbines. Vestas reports an EROI of 31 for its V150 model wind turbine.[13]"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com