India's richest man pouring $80B into green energy, including new ventures
cnn.com
cnn.com
Public infra wise, it would be great if the government spends money in several directions
1. Setting up solar farms in the deserts of North west - Gujurat, Rajasthan where the land is obviously not being used for agriculture or industrial buildings. The industrial footprint of Gujurat will no doubt be thankful for the renewable power during the operational hours of the day coinciding with solar power generation.
2. Set up solar panels atop irrigation canals which not only generate power for agriculture, but also reduce fresh water evaporation.
3. Strengthen the power grid in populated areas to handle power generation from roof tops and let people make money by sending solar power into their grid. The Indian entrepreneurial public will find creative ways to generate power and make some money for themselves.
4. Add buffers that can absorb bursts in power production that can be used for later(or would have used peak power unnecessarily). Example - run drinking water pumping and filtration systems, sewage treatment systems, seawater desalination plants etc during peak solar production times of the day.
Easier said than done I know. But that’s what leadership should look like. Not triggering political divisions and trying to exploit emotions to stay in power.
Otherwise, a lot of focus has been put by the current government towards renewal energy.
You mention strengthening the power grid - this is one of India's biggest choke points to domestic energy generation. their transmission grid is truly world-class but their distribution grid is regularly on the verge of collapse and power cuts are frequent. Before someone chimes in with "batteries" those are expensive and the Indian government already subsidises fuel - something that already works well. Batteries are not a solution to rickety distribution infrastructure in the developing world.
I mean, it's good that he's doing this. Whether one person should have the financial resources to make that decision by himself is a different question.
For example if French just guillitoned one bad guy per year, it probably would not be called French Revolution
Car manufacturing is a highly oligopolistic market, with almost impossible barriers to entry. If somebody irrational enough to push it didn't appear, those manufacturers would have their way for as long as they wanted.
Not to praise him too much but the Tesla he bought and the Tesla that exists today are 99.9% different. You have to have some major chops to take a small start up poking around with the Tesla Roadster concept and make it to factories on three continents producing 1,000,000 cars a year.
I think Musk is a huge ass but also that Tesla really proved that EVs work and mainstream* people want them.
He was Tesla's primary funder at founding and then stepped into the CEO role when he determined the founder wasn't getting it done. 99% of the amazing engineering, design, and, most importantly, sales, occurred after Elon took over as CEO.
This implies 1) a belief that wealth accumulation is zero sum, which is false, and 2) a scary conception of how property rights should work.
I didn't interpret it to have anything to do with changing property rights. We just shouldn't have a single, unelected person who has the power to make decisions at the level of a major nation-state.
Regardless of the reasons it happens, no individual should accumulate that much power. If that means we need to reduce the amount of power someone has based on the amount of property they have, fine. There are many solutions to it. It's still a problem though.
I mean, it depends on the problem and alignment of interests, but if I had to make a blind choice knowing only that it was a public policy problem then any of the last 4 American Presidents (though Trump is a close call), any of their major party opponents, any of the top 3 primary opponents to any of them in the season in which they were nominated. Also, any of the members of the US Senate, and any but about dozen members of the US House of Representatives, and any of the 50 US Governors, any of the chief executives of US Territories, and most mayors of major American cities.
Elon Musk is a childish narcissist whose chief skills are being rich, ignoring laws, and promoting himself. I would leave the US permanently if he ran it.
That's a bad interpretation. I said is no one should be allowed to accumulate that much wealth.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, intentionally confusing one with the other is a basic tactic to defend unfair divvying. "Well, you must hate business, then!"
So take a high profile example, say, Elon Musk: explain to me how he is "screwing over" the "aforesaid people".
Because, from my perspective, he has produced massive wealth for many, many people: retail investors, anyone with a 401k, employees, etc. etc. Not to mention, Tesla is almost single handedly responsible for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.
The real problem is that if the employees themselves try to organize and ask that question for reals, they get stomped on hard. That is basically the definition of "screwed over". You are allowed to take what is given, but any questioning of the fairness is met with resistance, up to and including state force.
The actions that result in the harshest punishments are the ones the state/baron/company/etc fear most. Empirically, the thing they fear most is workers organizing to negotiate a better deal. Not to get a better deal, simply to ask whether it's possible. As some people say, hey, they are just asking questions.
It is not communism.
He should distribute and be taxed no doubt. But I do not want a world of equals. Sone basic income for all yes. But all equal. No. Not even if forced 5-6 times unequal.
One Steve …
One E…
That coops haven't been doing very much makes me inclined to believe that there's something fundamentally wrong with them, either in incentives or organizational cruft.
Aren't workers free to not take up job offers, or to change jobs (which they have been doing at record levels recently), which, in effect, would mean they are rejecting the employer's proposed wealth distribution scheme?
I think Noam Chomsky would respond to my question with a resounding "no" (haven't read deeply, but I believe he supports "abolishing the Job Contract as it stands today", or something like that). I'm genuinely curious as to what you think about this.
1. Solar plant planned in Desert, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park
Mostly organised by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Energy_Corporation_of_... and installed by private players.
2. Floating solar power on top of dams. https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/in-other-news/300416/...
3. This is also for state of Kerala. grid connected systems are available.
"Consumers have the option of choosing from two models of power generation. In the first model, the energy generated is fed into the grid for 25 years and 10 per cent of the energy is given to the premises owner. In the second model, the energy generated is sold to the consumer at a fixed tariff for 25 years. In both models, the total cost of the installation is borne by KSEB, while the premise owner gives the rooftop for installation. "
https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/2020/feb/29/ks...
If you are at all concerned about the future of our planet, IMO this is required reading!
Many countries have passed laws to make selling new fossil fuel powered cars illegal within the next couple of decades. You might argue that's too slow, or even not possible, but the intent to reduce reliance on ICE transport and move to electric vehicles is definitely there.
Boats and aircraft are more difficult, but there are a range of viable options for each. For example the US uses a little over 18 billion gallons of aviation fuel a year and produces 17 billion gallons of ethanol per year. It’s not a drop in replacement, but it is much easier than hydrogen or batteries.
In principle sure[0], but the devil is in the details with anything like this. You could also solve the intermittency of PV with a planet scale HVDC grid, much cheaper than batteries, but doing so would need a long time just to mine the metal ores out of the ground (someone asked me to do the math, and I did, it’s hiding somewhere in my comment history).
[0] of course Tom Scott did a video about this, in some ways he is the vlogger equivalent of xkcd: https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg
Indeed, I expect the battery market to grow as fast as the factories can keep up, and for some fossil mining workers to switch to other minerals important for renewable power (not all of them, because we don’t burn the stuff when we’re done so demand ought to be lower when the energy transition is complete).
But the point remains that the details do matter. This stuff may, like code, even remain experimental until it’s obsolete.
On a second though, transportation modes tend to fall on a curve where the more relevant are the fuel costs, the harder they are to electrify. Cars and buses are just on a sweet spot of the curve.
The extreme end is icebreakers which actually sometimes use nuclear power because even fossil fuels have energy density issues. Not that we need to replace nuclear icebreakers, but many countries use the non nuclear version, and when you start talking ~100MW * weeks the batteries needed get crazy.
Cars will electrify far faster than busses and trains in North America.
Wouldn't heating and cooling be more efficient if done through architectural approaches?
For example, for cooling Persians use "cooling towers" called Windcatcher[0]. I know that there's a lot that can be done through design both for cooling and heating.
Also, organising the public spaces and infrastructure must be much more productive than aiming for changing the energy conversion systems(i.e. switching away from combustion propellers to electric ones). I' m very sceptical of the idea that electric cars will solve our problems. Just recently Elon Musk demonstrated that electrification of cars and taking the traffic underground simply creates underground traffic congestion[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher [1] https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1479153917749600257
Because it demonstrates the exact thing that sceptics said it would happen?
Think a perpetuum mobile company having a demonstration of their machine and it stops. Would you be able to use the excuse that the demo was about showing that they can build machines and not the machine that they promised?
Demonstration that they can dig tunnels? Why would that need a demonstration and even if they wanted to demonstrate it why would they demonstrate it with cars inside and then say that the cars part doesn't count.
Digging tunnels is a very old thing. We know it can be done and we know it works well when you run electric vehicles inside it(All underground systems already run on electric cars), it's just that it doesn't solve congest any differently than the one on the ground. Two cars can't occupy the same volume and it holds both over ground and underground.
Sometimes the difference between Elizabeth Holmes and Mus*k are negligible. She should just failed to kick can down the road for long enough I guess. She should have imitated Mus*k instead of Jobs, then people would have been saying thing like "The tests not producing correct results doesn't mean anything, it's just a demonstration that they can build machines".
Electric cars, of course, do share the same issues cars have (extremely space inefficient meaning the throughput of people through over a distance is lower than most other transit options). But the roundtrip efficiency is about three to four times better than a regular ICE (most of the energy goes into producing heat, not locomotion). So they're generally better than ICE cars. You are right that the Boring company seems to have basically solved no problems, and the Vegas system could have hundreds of times more throughput just using light rail (either underground or overground). But the rolling stock of the light rail would be electric - so that better solution would be electrification too!
I haven’t seen very many analyses pencil all this out. I’d assume the greenest thing would be to drive your current car for the rest of your life.
The average age of vehicles around where I am is 10.6 years, so it is unfair to pretend as if people don’t scrap most vehicles already after 15 or so years. I think a lot of the transition will not be forcing people to replace their cars but just phasing out new ICEs from being sold. The ones that were being driven by those who buy electrics will get sold into the used market and replace older, even less fuel efficient cars that are naturally scrapped.
My understanding around EV production is that it currently takes something like 3 years to cross the total lifecycle energy curve of a conventional car, and then every subsequent year is better for the electric car. Things are improving too as energy grids get greener and battery production gets more efficient.
As I said, cars still have many problems and are a quite large amount of embedded energy and anything we can do to reduce the number of cars around and shift journeys to other modes (walking, cycling, busses, trams, trains) is better again.
The book is quite thorough in laying out all the challenges (eg, handling variable production from renewables, how to get buy-in from existing fossil fuel stakeholders, etc) and presents realistic solutions for each. I recommend you pick up a copy and read it!
The problem we on this side of the pond are facing now is that the electrification is going too fast; people installing solar panels on their roofs, getting an electric car, companies putting solar panels on every building and unused patch of land, people electrifying their house by replacing their gas boilers and stoves with pure electric alternatives is all well and good, but the infrastructure can't handle it, and they need YEARS to upgrade said infrastructure, to the point where they are forced to refuse to connect new businesses (that produce or consume a lot of electricity).
It's great, but it needs big investment in the electricity infrastructure.
And of course, better guarantees for energy production. We're facing an energy crisis over here, due to fuckery with Russia, the gas supplies are running out and prices of gas have gone way up, which is causing electricity prices to go up as well. As a country, you need to be able to give guarantees about the stability, availability and cost of electricity. It's not something fixed overnight.
Because I haven't heard of too many solar panels or electric cars causing any issue anywhere in europe just yet.
The book is quite thorough in laying out all the challenges (eg, handling variable production from renewables, how to get buy-in from existing fossil fuel stakeholders, how to rearchitect the grid from hub-and-spoke to something more like the internet, how to finance the massive upfront cost in a way that will actually save money, etc) and presents realistic solutions for each.
Please don't take my word for it, just pick up a copy and read it.
That's especially true with houses. However, speaking as someone who has renovated their home for extreme efficiency (and now uses 75% less energy than their neighbors) the problem is that the upfront cost of efficiency - both economic and in learning curve - is still very high, at least in the US.
Unless one is willing/able to take on a big and expensive project in home building or renovation, it's hard to make big leaps in efficiency. This is compounded by the reality that the construction industry is very conservative and doesn't like doing things in new ways.
AFAICT, the only "easy" efficiency change that is close to a "no-brainer" is replacing your existing gas or electric water heater with a heat pump water heater, because it generally doesn't require replacement of an entire system, just one appliance.
The other things that make a big difference to efficiency: sealing/insulating building envelopes, installing heat pump HVAC, are much more invasive procedures.
There is a small industry of tools and contractors who specialize in those, but there's not a lot of standards or cost-efficient ways to achieve high efficiency yet. And at least in the US, high home efficiency and comfort are targeted primarily at wealthier people, and the goods/services are priced with that demographic's means in mind. Unfortunately, a few thousand wealthier people with efficient and comfortable homes does nothing for the grid or the climate.
Europe seems much further along in this area, with efficient technology and design being better captured in building codes and off the shelf technologies, and with a focus on energy efficient multi-family buildings.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/560927/us-retail-electri...
Electricity production represents 25% of GHG emissions in the US:
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Direct residential GHG emissions (i.e. from burning natural gas) are also significant.
In total, residential energy use of all kinds accounts for 20% of US GHG emissions:
Specifically, your bottom line ("In total, residential energy use of all kinds accounts for 20% of US GHG emissions:") is still considerably less than upstream industry, logistics, etc and especially considering the misleading framing of "US GHG emissions" which don't capture the much larger share of emissions that are outsourced via trade (i.e., America buys a lot of shit from China, India, etc and those countries' industry is even less GHG-efficient than US industry). Note that I don't mean to imply that you intended to mislead.
Maybe we're just agreeing here, and you're throwing out extra context?
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Beyond residential, private consumer choices in general - and importantly the incentives that drive them - have massive effect on upstream industrial and commercial energy uses, far greater than the 20% "residential" piece of the pie.
60% of the "transportation" sector comes from light-duty vehicles [1], which is why electrification of passenger cars is so critical.
And by the same token, we absolutely should look into the GHG footprint of imported goods from overseas or domestically produced. Carbon taxes - phased in, and with rebates to lower income quantiles - are a simple way to handle that.
1. https://www.c2es.org/content/regulating-transportation-secto...
Edit: And of course that ignores that I have the condensing gas heater and I don't have the heat pump, so there's capex to cover as well.
I pay the same electric rates as you - $.29/kWh (PG&E). For my family of 4 using 1.024MBTU/month of heat for water, the amount of electricity consumed by the heat pump hot water heater is about 100kWh/month, which works out to or $348/year.
Furthermore, in my area, I have access to a municipal utility program that will pay me $60/year to automatically run my heat pump water heater when renewables are in over-supply, thereby functioning as a kind of capacitor for intermittent renewable supply on the grid, and lowering my water heating electricity cost to around $.25/kWh.
With my previous standard gas water heater (efficiency 65%), I was using 20 therms per month for water heating. At my current local natural gas prices of $2/therm, that would have been $480/year for hot water heating if I kept that equipment. With a condensing natural gas unit at 96% efficiency it would cost $250/year, $90/year less than the heat pump - not a huge difference.
Remember that there are a lot of old standard gas water heaters out there that are only 50-65% efficient. A heat pump water heater is very competitive to replace those.
Natural gas prices also aren't going down, and are far more subject to geo-political supply shocks, as we've seen recently, resulting in winter natural gas rates recently going as high as $2.25/therm. That's a far greater jump than electricity rates vs last year. In places like the Pacific Northwest, or Sacramento CA with clean hydro power, electricity rates are $.09 to $.18/kWh haven't budged much at all. Heat pump water heaters are even better in places like that.
Heat pump water heaters also have the ancillary benefit over natural gas of removing a major source of combustion from within your home/garage, which is better for air quality, and also removes a source of depressurization of your house's air if the water heater is contained within conditioned space.
See slide 16, which already looks quaint just a year or two later. https://autl.assembly.ca.gov/sites/autl.assembly.ca.gov/file...
That's nothing.
PG&E's natural gas rates have gone up 400% since 2008 (inflation since that time has been about 30%): https://www.pge.com/tariffs/Residential.pdf
The huge jump happened in 2016, and it's stayed high since. The jump reflected increase in natural gas prices and also costs for PG&Es San Bruno pipeline explosion and the resulting higher cost of maintenance of natural gas infrastructure. It was a clear demonstration of the hidden liabilities in old natural gas distribution infrastructure.
It's interesting to note how PG&E's stock price also fared from 2016: https://www.google.com/search?q=pge+stock+price&oq=pge+stock...
which also is when they stopped paying a dividend: https://www.streetinsider.com/dividend_history.php?q=pcg
This is a shame because I strongly prefer electric everything, but not enough to make uneconomic decisions.
I don't believe we've paid anywhere near the full cost of upgrading/maintaining the gas infrastructure yet. It continues to age and will require ongoing and increasing maintenance - and expensive maintenance since lines are buried.
Furthermore as more customers switch away from natural gas, the remaining customers rates will rise to pay for the infrastructure maintenance as this paper from the Haas School of Business describes [1]:
"As Figure 4 shows, this percentage rise in bills is small when only a few customers exit the natural gas sector, but bills rise substantially if many customers exit. To understand why this relationship is non-linear, imagine that all customers but one exit, and that remaining customer must cover all of the utility’s legacy costs."
You're right that we will likely pay higher costs for electric infrastructure upgrades also - or alternatively experience more fire-avoidance PSPS events, or a bit of both.
But electricity as a medium for delivering energy offers more technological opportunities for addressing these issues and the very pressing issue of decarbonization than natural gas does going forward. Batteries and municipal microgrids are some of technologies that can help with this going forward.
Just as an example, it seems that the Pacific DC and AC Intertie's go through some pretty remote places that could be prime candidates for solar installations.
If energy prices were 10x, it'd make sense to invest in energy generating capacity (and lobbying for allowing to build it).
In the 2010s the efficiency of solar cells have been so exaggerated that some scientific journals felt it was necessary to enforce rigorous checklists and guidelines on that topic:
Why not just have more capacity than we need, and a grid to redistribute it.
I would think energy storage is harder to solve than building more transfer capacity?
You can't just leave critical infrastructure like power generation up to chance, even for once-in-a-century events. You must always have some kind of buffer to make sure there is no chance you will have to shut down industry and hospitals for a week (barring maybe war conditions).
Additionally small wind mills don't make economic sense and that is why they are getting bigger and bigger. This limits where you can install them and make the approval process a huge burden. Compare this to solar which can be installed on almost any size house.
We can easily store this energy with hydro storage and hydro damns. Hydro storage is an amazing thing as it requires very little maintenance and can go from 0 to 100% in seconds which is great for areas that require a lot of power in a short amount of time. Even nuclear power doesn't have such a quick ramp up/down.
Norway is a huge energy exporter, but regularly imports because of reduced hydro generating capacity.
Expanding storage capacity is generally a problem because of the massive environmental impact.
I have recently come to the conclusion that hydro is a very good complement to wind because the hydro is dispatchable when the wind doesn't blow. As long as the average wind and hydro together exceed needed capacity, things should be good.
As I understand it, this is what Norway is doing. Importing wind from Germany when there is excess and exporting hydro when there is a shortage.
Meh. It could be put completely underground. (We could put nuclear power plants hundreds of meters deep underground too.) People don't want to spend on it is the real problem.
Viewing the different technologies on the grid as isolated competitors in which one must "win" over the others as if they were Walmart vs Costco is a mistake. E.g. nuclear providing 20-30% of the load is a must, but providing more than 60% is a drag. The trick is to get, slowly evolving, a good mix in the grid that is reasonably cheap and green (wind and solar) and reasonably stable (nuclear, hydro and gas). Too cheap and you get blackouts. Too stable and you get high prices and CO2.
On top of that, the ongoing release of e.g. methane for years after construction coupled with the environmental cost of the construction materials means it takes a long time for dams to even pay off the environmental debt they create.
The death toll from hydro is also not all that reassuring. Even if you subtract the Ban Qiao dam failure, the single most destructive power plant failure in history[1], beating e.g. Chernobyl several times over, construction accidents and the like adds up, and contributes to a lasting maintenance burden where guaranteeing sufficient maintenance becomes a growing risk to downstream downstream populations for as long as the dams exist.
I'm sure there are places where dams are still reasonable choices, but they're no unambiguously good choices.
Don't live in the middle of a grain field surrounding a wind turbine then. Seriously, I live around tons of these and you can't hear it until you get near and they're almost always in the middle a field or between several fields, so you can't really get near. Are there louder ones in different countries that can be heard further away or something?
[1] https://www.dlr.de/content/en/articles/news/2019/01/20190326... links to an English-language interview.
[2] https://bergenhusen.nabu.de/imperia/md/nabu/images/nabu/einr...
Tbh: it does feel like you are moving goalposts because the studies do not show what you'd like them to show, that wind energy is green and ecologically friendly. We see that a lot.
>> Noise doesn't only affect humans.
> Well, let me know when you have a study showing how the mice and vipers in those fields are affected.
This part of the thread is about noise. I'm not moving the goalpost, you're just off topic.
"From the currently available figures and the DLR model calculation, we cannot conclude either that wind energy plays a significant role in the reduction of insect numbers, or that it has no impact. "
Needs more research.
I walk through one of these eyesore fields regularly, and I can hear them easily from 200m away.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivi...
There recently was a bit of a scandal in Germany because for years a major government authority has reported levels of "infrasound" from wind turbines far above what was physically plausible. A lot of the fearmongering relied on those numbers - yet it turned out they were due to a calculation error.
If the subject doesn't practise deliberate reprogramming of their mental architecture, it doesn't matter much whether the illness is in the more or less pliable medium, because they don't have the tools to reshape it either way. I guess one could run an experiment by seeing whether it's amenable to talk therapy and categorise the issue that way, but it would still depend a lot on the therapist in question and the subject's willingness to participate.
May as well tell them to avoid tundras.
That’s not to say that India doesn’t produce a lot of wind energy, though - it’s the second largest source of renewable energy after solar according to the most recent source I could get (Feb 2020) [2].
[1] https://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=199780
[2] https://cea.nic.in/dashboard/?lang=en check “Renewable Energy” under “Generation”
Hydroelectricity also kills the nature, I heard that some argue that hydroelectricity shouldn't be classified as environmentally friendly.
According to a French study ( https://www.lpo.fr/la-lpo-en-actions/developpement-durable/e... ): 0.3 to 18.3 birds/windturbine/year 5.2 according to Loss et al, 2013 and 8.2 according to Zimmerling et al. 2013.
A news article (in Turkish) substantiating what I'm talking about: https://www.sozcu.com.tr/2021/gundem/kuzey-ormanlari-simdi-d...
That is a long-since debunked myth. In the US [1], 2.4 billion birds are killed each year by cats, 600 million die in collisions with glass buildings, 214 million in collisions with cars... and not even 250.000 due to wind turbines.
If you really care about birds, go and argue for cat TNR programs and for restrictions on glass usage on buildings. Otherwise, you're just using a strawman argument.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...
An article (in Turkish) substantiating what I'm talking about: https://www.sozcu.com.tr/2021/gundem/kuzey-ormanlari-simdi-d...
Wind will always produce noise. The rustling of trees, the whispering of grass, or he howling though narrow streets. Might as well capture the energy from the wind.
If the wind "turbine" produces noise, this should be solveable by noise insulation. (which likely isn't done because it's not a large enough issue.)
Wind is a better fit for Europe where there are far fewer sunshine hours but fairly constant wind due to macro-scale atmospheric weather patterns.
With that said, the cost of PVs is dropping so fast - faster than wind power - that I expect solar to become more important in Europe as well. Even in northern latitudes, solar farms are popping up on land that was previously used for agriculture, and I expect this trend will accelerate. If you're a landowner, you can potentially make more money using the land to generate electricity with PVs than with agriculture.
You mean Northern Europe.
If I'm reading this correctly they want to build 100GW worth of solar capacity and a hydrogen plant for $67.7bln.
That's actually pretty cheap.
I'm aware of the term, 'green hydrogen', which is in contrast to 'blue hydrogen' (or as I prefer to call it 'dirty hydrogen') which is a product of methane gas extraction and allows some of that methane to escape.
> but could be used for heating or for hydrogen cars.
I'm under the impression that hydrogen ICE vehicles at scale is impractical due to lack of infrastructure, safety issues etc, at least compared to batteries
Or potentially methanol (and better yet, butanol, which is easier to deal with than methanol, less corrosive, less hydroscopic).
Hydrogen, or zero net carbon hydrocarbons synthesized from it, is a good fit where energy density exceeds what current lithium chemistry batteries can provide, like aeroplanes, or rockets.
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/glasgow-to-be-home-to-fir...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-11/qld-hydrogen-capacity...
I'd imagine there's a certain size above where nuclear becomes cheaper even with the added costs of mining for fuel, waste management, etc. (Eg. the manufacturing, setup, maintenance, decommissioning of millions of solar panels and wind turbines, distribution network to connect them will be offset by a few very large nuclear plants. Especially if they are fuel efficient [eg. fast reactors].)
I hope this is the beginning of a major transformation for India and continued global progress!
“Over the past two years, more than 200m Indian phone users have flocked to take advantage of arguably the greatest corporate gamble in the country’s history. Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, has spent $32bn building up his telecoms company Reliance Jio — the biggest private sector investment in India’s history — as he fights for dominance in the world’s second-biggest telecoms market by user numbers. Much of that money has been spent giving away free access to what Jio says is now the world’s largest mobile data network, with its clients consuming about three times the amount of data of an average European customer.
The launch of Jio has helped to engineer a socio-economic revolution in India. For the first time, millions of Indians are able to access the internet to register for benefit payments, download school textbooks or simply watch India beat Pakistan at cricket. The rapid growth in the telecoms network has encouraged some of the world’s biggest retail and technology companies to plough money into the country. Walmart this year announced the world’s largest ecommerce deal by buying 77 per cent of Indian online retailer Flipkart for $16bn. Google is beefing up its India team, while Netflix says it hopes to add 100m customers from the country.”
Hell of a legacy.
We already see what car lobbies do to cities like Pune with a terrible public transport infra. We want a more reliable rail network and a useable metro for all important cities.
And no, we can't have both, I don't want the car lobby to get stronger that it is.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/pune-news/inauguration...
I seen documentary where they covered river with solar panels. It reduced evaporation of water by significant amount. And it did not occupy any arable land.
And big parts of India have underdeveloped electricity grid. Solar is easiest way to bring electric infrastructure there.
That's a terrible idea, unless I am missing something.
Why not cover the vast amount of uninhabitable land in solar panels, rather then what small amount of precious resource land that exists.
But I still cannot wrap my head around this being a good idea, destroy the ecosystem of rivers, provide next to zero power (compared to resources required to build and maintain), require a HUGE investment as it's fast moving water and everyone knows fast moving water destroys material, have to deal with overflowing from rain, drought, etc.
Way too many factors for this to be a good idea.
It could probably if it was a man made canal or something with a set amount of water, but that still destroys any chance of an ecosystem.
Only in arid regions. Specifically Thar desert of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Doesn't make any sense in other places.
> it does not snow there
Oh it does! Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh come to mind [1]. India has all seasons and all types of weather.
> big parts of India have underdeveloped electricity grid
What do you mean by an "underdeveloped" electricity grid? India recently achieved 99% electrification target. Only 31 million out of 1.3 billion people have no/non-continuous electricity. I wouldn't label it "big parts of India".
[1]: https://www.happyeasygo.com/travel-blog/travel-tips/best-pla...
It is so sad and so bad for our planet that for instance Germany decided to spend billions of billions on renewable energy plants while spending the same amount on nuclear power plant would made Germany zero emission economy.
The storage is limited only by tank size, and we already know how to store and use large quantities of hydrogen. The hydrogen produced from the process can be pumped elsewhere by pipeline and used as fuel for gas turbines to balance the grid, or combined with carbon dioxide or nitrogen from the atmosphere to produce zero net carbon methane and ammonia for use as denser fuel sources, or feedstock for industrial processes. You can even make zero net carbon synthetic jet fuel this way.
You're of course free to believe that countries will build 3 times the capacity of their energy production to compensate for that inefficiency.
* Currently a grid => hydrogen => grid round trip is 40-45% efficient.
* A grid => battery => grid round trip is 90-95% efficient.
You can recover 2x more energy by NOT using hydrogen. There is no competition. Unless the lost energy from green hydrogen production can be recovered somehow (co-generation)...
Many applications (transportation, industry...) can use it as such, without any way from hydrogen to electricity, and more and more probably will.
There are surprising new ways (offering an impressive efficiency), such as: https://www.slb.com/newsroom/press-release/2021/pr-2021-1118...
At a glance: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-el...
In-depth take: https://assets.siemens-energy.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:53...
But we won't need 3 times the amount - hydrogen will only be used to balance the grid. Most grid energy will come direct from renewables. Most of Europe would only need about 20 days' worth of hydrogen as insurance against a lack of wind or sun.
Green hydrogen has only become viable to replace hydrogen-from-fossils within the last few years as the cost of renewable energy has plummeted. That drop in renewable energy costs is what has changed recently and what has taken so many people by surprise.
I also don't think that "but what about space requirements" is an argument with enough weight to dismiss the long list of advantages given by the GP. We have so much unused space on roofs. We could get rid of a few parking lots if you're concerned for ground.
[1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/worlds-uranium...
Power generation is only a small part of Germany's emissions. Germany would still be a large CO2 source with full nuclear power generation, just like France is because of transportation, food, heating, industry, etc.
This is mostly a myth. The actual reason nuclear powerplants run at max power all the time is that nuclear fuel is very cheap compared to operating costs, therefore it is more economical to follow load variations on the other plants.
Here is an example of high-amplitude and relatively high-speed variation (10GW over a few hours) : https://twitter.com/TristanKamin/status/1102625880520699911
What is true is there is little expertise in load following with nuclear powerplants because it is uncommon. Areva has been developing and exporting ALFC (Advanced Load Following Control) technology for automated load-following operations.
https://new.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi...
https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power...
All in all, load following with nuclear is a technologically much easier problem to solve than high-scale energy storage.
The real (observed and useful) ability to follow load at a useful extent is offered by the float (tens of reactors simultaneously active => more flexibility towards tweaking limitations).
At this game nothing beats a gas turbine (hydraulic dams are serious contenders).
That's a common assertion on that topic, but it is baseless. In fact, nuclear plants are routinely used for load following when needed [1].
[1]: https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...
The ability to load-follow is unrelated to energy price, but to grid stability. Regardless of what contract exists between a provider and a consumer, there is a third party, the grid operator, who can ask the generating parties to adapt their production to actual consumption.
> solar+wind + storage
Simply doesn't exist at scale currently. We don't really have good estimates of what a storage-balanced grid costs at scale, and we don't have the industrial bandwidth to build storage at scale with the current technologies.
To give you a back-of-the-envelope calculation, current estimates are that european countries relying on wind/solar would need 8 days worth of batteries to avoid most of negative-generation events. For a country like Germany which consumes 1.5TWh a day on average, that would be more than many thousand units of the large battery Tesla built in Australia.
As I said earlier, the theory may exist, but solving scaling problems isn't trivial, and is going to take some time.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/859104/hydrogen-producti...
Case in point: wind in Europe https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...
"the planned development around the North Sea means 100 GW (100 large power stations) would need to be turned on or off to balance out changes in wind power production when the weather changes. With a more cooperatively designed system, this could be reduced to just 20 GW across the continent.". Add solar, biomass... and storage, including a smartgrid enabling (for example) V2G: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid , then green hydrogen (boosting production units' output and reducing the amount of electric electricity needed).
Existing reactors also run on partial capacity due to lack of fuel. What little is produced in the country has to be rationed between defence and electricity generation.
The next decade may see rise of distributed solar based base load plants, where we have 3x capacity panels and 2x storage, delivering constant 1x power, all year round.
We need efficient panels, lower infra costs, etc
And, 2x storage is NOT dead easy or dead simple, especially with only 3x capacity, since storing the electricity will not happen with 100% efficiency, or anything close to that.
There's an alternative to storing energy from summer to winter: you simply overbuild solar capacity so that even in the winter you can produce enough during the day to last you through the night. At high latitudes, you need to overbuild by a factor of 10, and solar may be cheap, but not 10 times cheaper than other sources of electricity. However, if you find something to do with the excess summer energy, you may end up being profitable.
India, being at a lower latitude, has a much easier problem. First, it's very likely the demand during "winter" months is not much higher than during "summer" months if at all. Then the day length during winter is not that short. So the overcapacity that you need may be only a factor of 3x. This guy wants to manufacture green hydrogen. Even if he sells it at a loss, the overall venture may still be profitable.
I very much doubt this is "solved" at the scale of an entire country's energy needs for half a day, never mind the entire world's. Lithium and other materials for batteries are not that abundant, and definitely not that abundantly extracted.
Tesla sells Megapacks with a capacity as high as 3 GWh (but I'm sure if you're the richest person in India, they'll be more than happy to customize bigger solutions for you) [1].
You can head to their website and order right now over the internet a 15 MHh pack for $6.4 MM; the annual maintenance is listed as $21k. These things are supposed to last for 10 years, have a 90% round trip efficiency, and have a capacity of 70% left at year 10. So you can charge and then discharge (and sell) about 50 GWh over these 10 years, for a total investment of less than $7 MM. That is $0.14 per kWh. If you buy 1000 such packs, you get a 30% discount [1], so you end up with a breakeven cost of $0.10 per kWh.
As I said, Tesla offers now up to 3 GWh Megapacks. Would they be able to manufacture 100 such Megapacks over a 5y period? It does not sound that crazy.
[1] https://www.thestreet.com/tesla/news/new-tesla-megapack-deta...
Solar and wind you can start building straight away and can build small local plants that don't rely on long distance links of sufficient quality and reliability.
Hydrogen is trickier since you still need solar or wind and a production facility to make it and logistics to distribute it. Hydrogen seems a side show at the moment, since lots of people seem interested in generating Green hydrogen it but I don't see anyone actually wanting to make use of it. Maybe it is a good way of getting governments to kick in money.
https://engage.tesla.com/articles/1105-california-stop-solar...
https://www.ecowatch.com/rooftop-solar-florida-2656084105.ht...