Solar Power/Batteries are 60% of planned new U.S. electric generation capacity | Hacker News Reader

Solar Power/Batteries are 60% of planned new U.S. electric generation capacity

eia.gov

233 pointsbelter350 comments

Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that when you're trying to displace existing technology that was built to have 50 year lifetimes, this is kind of a drop in the bucket. Slowly growing, but a drop nonetheless, compared to the whole.

The generating capacity in the US is approx. 1100 GW, of which 80% is coal/NG. [1] This press release talks about this year's installed 50 GW, 60% will be renewable. And the 40% added this year is still fossil fuel, which is designed still to last 50 years.

You run into the same issues when talking about EV adoption. Yes, it's good that they make up say 10% of cars sold this year, but you're still selling 90% gasoline fleet, and it lasts 15 years and it takes a long time to displace.

The best place to have an effect is to be absolutely sure to get into the markets where they're about to start buying the old technology and help them switch to new technology as soon as possible. China/India. Getting old countries to pay to replace what they already bought is just too hard.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

Coal + gas is no longer 80% of supply in the US. Your numbers are out of date: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php

A lot of coal disappeared in recent years and there are quite a few more coal plants closing soon. Coal is not economical anymore. Even keeping existing plants running has become uneconomical.

So, it's more like 58% for gas and coal combined at this point. Some of the coal capacity is replaced with gas but actually most of it is replaced with wind/solar. Gas is actually declining as well the last few years because not all planned gas plants actually make it to completion and some plants that do get built basically are reduced to the role of a peaker plant that only runs when there's a shortage.

Some plans for new plants actually got shelved entirely and there are also some older plants that are no longer economical that are actually getting shut down. Hence the net decline for gas power generation.

So, take that 40% new gas generation with a grain of salt. That might not actually happen. There might be permits and plans for this but that doesn't mean they'll actually build the plants. My guess is that nobody is in a hurry to build new gas power plants right now given the current gas prices. The cost just doesn't add up anymore relative to cheap wind and solar. Even before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Anyway, according to this, renewables grew from around 5% in 2005 to about 13% this year. It will swap third place with nuclear in a few years and number two position shortly after when coal continues to crash.

People are mixing up multiple different numbers and statistics, one being capacity vs generation, and the other being nuclear missing from both posts.

Nuclear stands for 10% capacity, but 20% generation. It do this because nuclear is expensive to build, but once built the operational costs is fairly fixed with low fuel costs. Fossil fuels plats are generally cheap to build but has high fuel costs, and renewables is dependent on weather. As such they both have higher capacity than generation. Coal is slightly the odd one in the mix in that their capacity and generation is about the same.

In term of energy generated, about 60% is fossil fuel, 20% nuclear, 20% renewables (using 2021 numbers).

In terms of capacity, we have 66% fossil fuel, 9% nuclear, 25% renewables.

The prognosis is that in terms of generated power, fossil fuel will decrease, renewables increase, and nuclear stay about the same with a tiny decrease that is related to the overall increase in energy usage.

The prognosis for capacity is an increase in both fossil fuel and renewables. Coal is and has mostly already been replaced with gas. The total capacity is steadily increasing for fossil fuels, while the renewables are increasing also at a slightly faster speed.

40% increase in fossil fuel capacity is still a very bad thing. If the market is investing in increasing the capacity to burn fossil fuel then there is a reason for it. They are intending to burn fossil fuel, and that for several decades into the future. At the same time we will see a higher portion of the generated energy coming from renewables since it is more economical to generate energy from renewables during optimal weather conditions. Any gas being burned during a windy/sunny day is an unnecessary expensive source of energy, unless the initial construction costs of renewables is greater than the profits of the total periods of optimal weather conditions.

I didnt see where your 40% fossil generation increase was sourced, but if that is being used to replace fossil burning cars and fossil burning heating, then its still a positive. And, if it doesnt actually get used much, thats even better. And, if when it does get used its burning green hydrogen then thats pretty good.

A lot of this is wishful thinking, as are many green initiatives.

Hydrogen is very much not green right now. There's a ton of research into practical green hydrogen but at the moment it's not and it's at least a few years off because you know, research.

Thanks for that link, pretty illuminating.

For anyone curious, breakdown of US power generation in 2021 was (4200 TWh total):

  Coal : 22%
  Natural Gas : 38%
  Nuclear : 19%
  Hydroelectric : 6%
  Other Renewables : 14%

Curiously, hydroelectric power production has been flat for the past decade. Is that because we've already tapped out most places where hydro can be productive?

There are also projects to tear out hydro dams, especially smaller ones, because they are ecologically destructive. So while huge dams may generate enough power to justify the ecological cost, a 1MW dam on some relatively minor river may not justify its existence and so it gets torn back out to enable the river to be restored. You can put a bunch of solar panels on malls and office blocks and make up a big chunk of that power without destroying a river, the malls and offices are already our fault because we put them there, so adding solar panels probably doesn't worsen the impact.

A lot of the small dams are also very old and would require a lot of money to keep them running so just tearing them down often turns out to be cheaper long term.

I found it most interesting that "Other Renewables" (i.e. solar and wind) went from ~5% to ~15% in just 10 years. If we can triple capacity again in the next 10 years, we could completely eliminate coal (assuming storage can solve load issues).

Two issues with hydro:

1) Most of the obvious places have dams already and building new dams is a combination of expensive and disruptive.

2) Droughts and water shortages make the existing hydro plants less productive. E.g. the hoover dam has some issues with that in recent years.

> So, take that 40% new gas generation with a grain of salt.

It's not 40% new gas. It's 40% new "not Solar/ Batteries". From the article:

> The remaining 34 GW of planned capacity additions over the next two years will largely come from natural gas (16 GW) and wind (15 GW)

In both cases these are subject to permission fights, because almost the same NIMBYs who oppose a gas plant will also oppose a wind farm, only the locations and arguments are different because in practice these groups tend to be BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone).

The fossils generation assets that have 50 year lifetimes and financing structured over that period are called stranded assets. Calling for an early retirement of these assets is not easy, but there are policy levers in the US, which can be employed, to accelerate the transition.

Carbon pricing would make coal and NG less viable long term and motivate early retirement, despite financing.

Locally, cities and counties in 10 states are using Community Choice Aggregation to decouple electricity generation from utility monopolies and are buying their own renewables off the wholesale market, on behalf of residents.

By making small policy tweaks and enabling more market based competition, will drive higher renewable adoption in the US.

>Getting old countries to pay to replace what they already bought is just too hard.

This is too defeatist. We shouldn't be building any fossil fuel based plants now and all those existing plants will need replacing in time.

Yeah poor people shouldn’t have cars built in the last decade or affordable energy bills. I agree!

Which poor person drives a car built in the last decade? The median car in Germany is approximately ten years old. Almost all the poor people I know ride the bus, but that's probably my city bubble. The remaining ones can't even afford that and ride a bike exclusively.

Also, renewable energy is cheap. That renewable energy is expensive is a meme that was born when the prices were ten times higher than today.

Don't forget, the US is a car-oriented country with inadequate public transit and rail infrastructure. Many poor people are forced to own a car because they can't afford to live near where they work.

No able-bodied person in an urban area should need to own a car, but that's not reality.

And this could change within a very short period of time if need be.

The current skyrocketing prices may very well be that need.

Change how? EVs? EVs are expensive cars and our production capacity for them is limited, despite the growth. For the average poor person an EV is 5-10 years into the future.

Good public transportation is even farther away, you need a ton of committment, which many places don't even have, and then a good network takes 30-50 years to build.

Does "a very short period of time" means like a few decades?

Your argument is incoherent, we are talking about electricity generation and you started ranting about cars built in the last decade.

Anyway I love how the pro fossil fuel people claim to be thinking about the poor. In general the policies that reduce carbon emissions will make life a lot easier for the poor (better public transport, support for cycling, cleaner air, etc).

Original OP:

> You run into the same issues when talking about EV adoption. Yes, it's good that they make up say 10% of cars sold this year, but you're still selling 90% gasoline fleet, and it lasts 15 years and it takes a long time to displace.

The problem in home energy is no different than in EVs. If you make no gas cars... poor people are still stuck using whatever gas cars they can still afford (since they will be instantly high demand = you get expensive or really old) and there wont be a widespread solution to powering all of those EV vehicles the middle class gets for at least a decade.

The reason it's not happening is because it's very very expensive not only for the cars (lithium/cobalt/etc costs would ramp up really fast) but there's no good solutions to charge your car in most places like apartment buildings, where in my city most poor people live.

Telling them all to sit for hours waiting for a charging station that is hopefully near your apartment building is crazy, even if current numbers only hit 2-3x, not 10x. And multi-level underground parking lots aren't going to have plugs available for every car. Mine had 2 plugs available and it was used 100% of the time.

But most relevant that adding supercharger/any car chargers to homes everywhere is also going to apply tons of pressure on... you guess it home energy demands.

> but there's no good solutions to charge your car in most places like apartment buildings

Sure there is: add chargers to more parking spaces. They don't even necessarily need to be fast chargers; cars parked at apartments will typically be parked for multiple hours at a time (heck, possibly even days). There are benefits for non-EV owners, too (namely: that power could just as well be used to run a battery tender or block heater).

Yeah, it ain't cheap (yet), but when you compare to the cost of gas (even without wars in Eastern Europe), it pays for itself.

Not sure if you have encountered this yourself, but achieving this is a huge problem and has many, many issues.

Apartment buildings not built with EVs in mind are notoriously hard to retrofit to enable charging. And I don't simply mean the wiring from some central electrical room to parking spaces -- that difficult part is actually the easy part.

There are endless issues in getting such places wired up:

-- Which spots get wired? When every parking spot is owned by someone, whose will it be? How is the ownership of the charging spots determined?

-- Who will pay for the spots to be wired? Who pays for upgrades to the building infrastructure (and structure) that needs to be upgraded or fitted with central equipment (i.e. non-specific person owned)?

-- How will the electricity be billed and paid for? This influences how the wiring and hardware upgrades need to be designed and built.

-- How is liability and insurance for the equipment's operation handled?

These are truly non-trivial questions that have to be answered. Inability to answer these questions to the owners of a building's satisfaction actually stops progress on this topic.

> Which spots get wired?

All of them.

> Who will pay for the spots to be wired? Who pays for upgrades to the building infrastructure (and structure) that needs to be upgraded or fitted with central equipment (i.e. non-specific person owned)?

The landlord.

> How will the electricity be billed and paid for?

Included in rent.

> How is liability and insurance for the equipment's operation handled?

Same way it's handled for every other amenity.

> These are truly non-trivial questions that have to be answered.

And yet they're demonstrably answerable in all of 2 minutes. They're "non-trivial" only because landlords are cheapskates.

Renewables at present cost more than dirty energy. At least in capital costs. You're not going to get poor people affordable energy that way.

Your best bet is to develop the technology in the countries that can afford it. Then introduce the renewables when it's affordable. That's not far off.

Because world gas prices are so high, renewable energy is by far the cheapest option for new electricity generation in the UK already.

Let's take this morning's peak, electricity wholesale spot prices were £600 per MWh. A "subsidised" wind farm in the North Sea might be paid £150 per MWh, which ordinarily is indeed very expensive, but right now that means £450 per MWh comes to the government as the other side of the "subsidy".

There's maybe 13GW of wind power this morning (of maybe 35GW used in Britain). If that was all gas power instead, it would have cost us almost £1M every ten minutes extra on top of what will be on bills anyway.

Even at "normal" prices recently, those wind farms are basically free. Only in the middle of the night when there's no power need and the reservoirs and batteries are full do they drive prices briefly negative and thus their subsidy actually pays them, all day the prices are above subsidy levels and they pay us.

It's been the cheapest for a decade, even when gas prices were low.

You need to include health costs etc. in that, but if we're worrying about poor people, then simply ignoring the pollution that will make them sick seems weird.

That's much harder to quantify and neither regular people nor governments work like that.

Unfortunate, but that's how it is.

If your in a poor part of the world can installing new renewables + storage really compete with plants that burn fossil fuels?

Yes if they had the capital to go for the best option they might but I doubt they do.

There are two factors to consider:

1. Fixed v. perpetual costs

2. Negative externalities from pollution

Even accounting for one of these (let alone both) puts renewables in pretty favorable light.

The silver lining here is that it make energy storage economical without any subsidies. Looking at local Finnish spot prices - one could charge for 30e/MWh and discharge at 500e/MWh. Companies like GridScale tout 60% round-trip efficiency at a price of 60e/kWh. With such uneven prices, the installation pays for itself within a single year, which is crazy high ROI

You are not adding to the disucssion with this.

Yes this is a problem, but it has to be fixed different and should not block us to continue doing what is best for all overall.

Guess who is getting hurt most through climate change? the poor.

Are gas peakers built with a 50 year lifetime?

One part is generation, the other is consumption.

I did the math. I live in a European Country that wants to get rid of Russian Gas, and right quick. If every household would use the same amount of energy that we use (and used over the past years, 3 people, we average 2.4KWh per day - or the equivalent of a continuously burning 100W light bulb), we would not need 90TWh p.a. (the country produces around 490TWh p.a) - which would allow us to get rid of Gas for energy entirely easily.

This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike.

We live comfortably on low energy, we use modern appliances like a dish washer and $400 washing machine which has a good footprint (worked for over 8 years, only one cosmetic repair necessary). We have laptops, tablets, smartphones, router, I used to run a webserver 24/7 for a while too. There is nothing that we miss and our footprint is below average. It's not difficult, in fact, it's liberating.

I hope people start to wake up.

PS. I could go on how good it feels to live on a low profile. Lucky us, we never owned a car and require one only a few times a year, and we use a car share service for that. We care for our electronics and use smartphones and laptops for at least five years or more. I own two pairs of shoes and try to go shopping for clothing only once a year. We do not fly, unless absolutely necessary. We try to buy and eat local food, try to be low on meat consumption. And the list goes on and on and on. We are doing this for years and I could not be happier about it.

> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike

I refuelled the smaller of our two cars this morning and paid around €1.80/litre - there's our price spike. I certainly had a "Oh my $deity, this is expensive!" moment while standing at the pump.

On the other hand, my wife is taking our eldest child into town for a hospital appointment today. It's not as though we can choose not to make that journey (I dearly wish it weren't necessary, but that's another story). So, they have to travel. In round figures she can expect to use 5 litres of fuel in the car for the return trip, so that's €9 of fuel.

I'm absolutely aware that the car doesn't just have costs associated with fuel, but it's the cheapest smallest model that that manufacturer makes, it was around €10,000 on the road, all taxes included, and it's already several years old. Fuel economy figures are 4.5 l/100 km aka 52 US mpg aka 63 UK mpg "combined".

To make the journey by public transport would take pretty much the same time from our home to the hospital but the connection only works twice per hour, so that means she should expect additional waiting time at least on the return trip, which the car doesn't have.

The kicker? The train ticket for my wife would be €30 for the round-trip. My son would travel free but only because I paid for an annual railcard for him already, covering his journey to school.

So even with Europe at war, it's still apparently significantly cheaper for us to travel by (ICE) car. Which feels wrong :(

When I lived in Italy the choice of mode of transportation and whether to use the highway when driving was dependent on the number of occupants.

Choices, ordered by price ascending were:

1 person - train, backroads, highway

2 people - backroads, train, highway

3 people - backroads, highway, train

Also train was faster than backroads, but slower than highway.

Nevertheless with 2 people on board I often opted for the backroads, because then we could leave at e.g. 10pm after a long supper.

There's €2,43/Liter on the highway gas stations here in NL already...

For anybody in the US, we are talking about 10 dollars per gallon...

So that's about double US prices -- why is the price so high in Europe? Or rather, is it low in the US because we're a big oil producer?

> So that's about double US prices -- why is the price so high in Europe?

Mostly, high gas taxes. Gas taxes in some countries in Europe are as high as gas prices in some US states.

Federal gas tax is 18.4 cents a gallon, states add on top of that somewhere in the range of 18 to 67 cents, so under a dollar no matter where you are. The EU requires a minimum gas tax of $1.55 a gallon, but depending on the country goes over $2 a gallon.

Taxes: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/fuel-pric...

The US also has cheaper 87 octane gas. All gas in Europe is the US equivalent of "premium" 93+ octane.

Jesus. I paid $4.61/gallon yesterday and was surprised.

Right now Diesel (2.09€/l) here is more expensive than Super E10 (2.04€/l) ... that's like the first time during my 35 years on this earth that that has happened.

Here in Sweden Diesel has always been more expensive than petrol. Diesel is now over 25kr (€2.30), petrol around 22kr (€2.00). Electricity was €1/kWh this morning 07.00 - prices are set hourly.

Such sky high prices. Wholesale energy prices in my area (Texas) this morning was USD$0.075/kWh not including delivery, and that's a bit pricier than normal. 87 octane is running ~USD$3.89/gal, ~€0.94/L. Natural Gas costs me ~USD$1.36/CCF including delivery and taxes.

The really obnoxious thing is that Sweden does not use gas nor much oil for electricity production. Hydropower and nuclear form the base load, wind and solar add when available, the peak load is mostly covered through oil but this was only needed in times of peak demand - read very cold winter nights. The "party for the environment" has forced the closure of half of the nuclear plants leading to an increased use of those peak plants but this is not the only thing which has driven up the prices here. They went up because prices outside of Sweden went up and Sweden is connected to the European power distribution network, making it possible for Swedish power to be sold to other countries. This in turn has led to sky-high prices here, an enormous boon for the government and extreme power bills for the rest.

You mention elsewhere that your heat doesn't come from a heat pump.

It is absurd that you brag of low wattage when you're using gas directly to heat your home. A heat pump is one of two things a household can do to meaningfully reduce energy consumption, and the other one is not owning a car.

The rest of it is feel-good at best and self-righteous at the worst, when people start yelling at each other about imported food and aren't using heat pumps.

The reality is that fuel type isn't a choice for the vast majority of people. A heat pump installed is a year or more salary for most people if it's even an option.

Not owning a car is equally impractical in many parts of the world unless you happen to have considerable salary.

Everyone doing small things to reduce their overall impact during peak hours is something everyone can participate in at no cost and can have major impact.

> A heat pump installed is a year or more salary for most people if it's even an option.

I think nuance is required here. I installed what is called a "heat pump" in the US for $2500 USD this last summer. So you can see how claiming that $2500 is most people's salary for the year seems a little suspect from my POV.

How many btu? How many sq feet or meters are you trying to heat or cool? Are you in the U.S.? What brand? $2500 seems low or for a small living space.

copied from the web (so you know it's true.) "30 BTU of heating output per 1 sq ft of living space. For every sq ft of living space, you need about 30 BTU of heating output. That means, for example, that for a 1,000 sq ft home, you would require a 30,000 BTU heat pump (that's a 2.5-ton heat pump)."

Cost from 2021 (so it's more now with shortages and inflation.) For $2500 USD you are under 2 tons.

https://www.avsheatingandair.com/hvac-cost/heat-pump-install...

> Are you in the U.S.?

Indeed

> What brand?

Carrier. 2.5 ton.

In fairness, you reference a single retailer. And that's really important here - retailers will always have a significant markup. You want to go to a wholesaler like CE [1] for a good deal. Most HVAC wholesalers and suppliers will give walk-ins an above wholesale price, which is still less than retail.

> For $2500 USD you are under 2 tons.

Certainly not. Perhaps with installation, but not the equipment. Here's some super lazy validation https://www.google.com/search?q=carrier+2.5+ton+heat+pump&sx...

[1] https://www.carrierenterprise.com/search.html?query=heat%20p...

Bay Area heat pump install cost can reach 20k.

A new gas furnace plus A/C with the required high efficiency ducts will also cost about the same in the Bay Area. The 20k heat pump makes sense if you have to replace your entire HVAC system anyway due to age.

Cheaper options that work in parallel with your existing furnace are ductless mini splits with one or two indoor units serving main living areas.

A suit from Bijan also costs 25k. Am I supposed to extrapolate that all suits costs 25k? You are doing exactly this especially with the use of "can" which automatically implies an upper bar.

I was quoted more than $25000 to have one installed here on Vancouver island.

> I installed what is called a "heat pump" in the US for $2500 USD this last summer.

That sounds like a mini-split.

I'm in the US and to me a heat pump involves drilling a bore hole and installing a ground loop.

That costs anywhere from $1,500 to $10,000 depending on soil composition. Then you have the heat pump which ranges from $1,500 up to $10,000. Don't forget your home might have an older furnace, possibly gas or oil that probably needs to be replaced. Along with air handlers and any duct work. And that's only if your home is equipped with a conventional system.

For an older home equipped with radiators or baseboard heaters you're probably better off swapping out your oil or gas for electric but that comes at a cost.

You're thinking of a geothermal heat pump which I do not think is what OP was talking about. Heat pumps are ac/furnace 2 in 1 systems that run on electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump

This just isn't accurate though, you're using a definition of heat pump that's personal rather than shared.

Here let me prove it: https://www.carrier.com/residential/en/us/products/heat-pump...

If you're going to insist that air source heat pumps don't exist then yes, heat pumps are very expensive. They do however, and especially in non-Scandinavian Europe, they will work fine.

Sure, that's fair. But if you use gas for all your heating and cooking, you should not smugly post on HN about how you are below average electricity usage, its so easy, and everyone else needs to wake up.

what would be great is if we stopped amplifying misleading messaging from some of the biggest polluters on the planet - oil companies, shipping companies and agriculture. Personal responsibility is great but it's a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to what just one of these industries could do if they so wanted.

Shipping, for example, has great potential to reduce emissions yet most large companies do everything in their power to pass minimum standards in territorial waters and then it's a free for all on international waters.

Shipping is the most efficient mode of transport though?

Energy efficiency != green footprint. Gas is amazingly efficient, near 100%, certainly as good as a heat pump on 100% carbon neutral energy. However the green footprint it awful compared to an electric heatpump.

Amazingly a modern heat pump running on electricity generated by 100% gas is more efficient at heating than burning the gas for heat directly. Modern heat pumps are 5x efficient so you break even at even just 20% thermal efficiency of the power plant and gas plants are much more efficient than that. If you use the waste heat of the power plant for something else useful it's even better. Switching everyone to heat pumps would help even if 100% of your grid electricity was obtained by burning gas and obviously pretty much everywhere does much better than that.

> "Gas is amazingly efficient, near 100%, certainly as good as a heat pump on 100% carbon neutral energy."

Heat pumps achieve far in excess of 100% efficiency. You get several times more heat energy out than electrical energy goes in.

Of course, gas has in previous years been very cheap in many regions. So despite their efficiency advantage, often there hasn't been enough of an economic advantage to justify the upfront cost. But with the recent gas crisis, that might now be changing in Europe.

I'm intrigued by your number. That's less then 1000 kWh per year. Given that you say you do use 'modern appliances' like dishwasher and a washing machine it seems extremely low.

I have a fairly small house, with only 2 adults, that's full electric (appliances, cooking, hot water, heating). We have a dishwasher (used every other day) and we also use a washing machine (and sadly often the heat pump dryer because there is no space for a drying rack).

We use, all in, about 4000 kWh/year. About 750 to 1000 of that is for heating the house and hot water. My idle usage is higher then your average, which is somewhat crazy. I have about 30-40W for the ventilation system, about 20W for modem/router/wap, 10W for home server and the rest is for fridge/freezer I guess.

Even just cooking on the induction hob, or using the (electric oven) will already blow your entire day budget. Let alone a dishwasher or washing machine cycle.

I'm fully aware that the biggest improvement can be made in being aware of your usage (which I am, I monitor it carefully) and try to be more mindful about it. Yet it's not easy to lower the numbers significant.

Some years ago, as a single, I also was (well) below 1000 kWh/year. But that was without a dishwasher, or dryer. And generally cooking less often/fancy then my wife currently does. Work from home with 2 adults (with big monitors, a beefy desktop, etc) also adds energy usage.

Same here. We have a modern heat pump water heater. It uses 2.6 kWh per day, set to cycle down at night and during the day. Three people, short showers every other day.

(I just switched it to always on. Trying to optimize water heating timing was just preventing it from storing solar electricity as heat, and didn't change daily energy consumption much.)

Edit: I should add we almost exclusively use a dishwasher to wash dishes (< 4 gallons a day). Laundary is probably our main water consumer. Showers have High Sierra shower heads. They're inexpensive, strong stream; 1.5 gpm (5.7 LPM)

Just piling on with more anecdata... This is for a roughly 2k sq foot house in the S.F. (East) Bay Area that was built in the 1970s with gas heat but electric clothes drier.

Early in the pandemic, we had a period where it was unoccupied but not really shutdown, i.e. refrigeration continued and lights were on timers for security. I can call this the baseline/idle load. It was about 9.2 kWh per day and 0.3 therms per day of natural gas for the pilot lights and tank-based water heater. When occupied in mild weather, our baseline moves to about 10.2 kWh per day and 0.5 therms of natural gas with cooking and water heater usage.

Our peak highest usage for electricity seems to be about 13.2 kWh per day in a summer month with terrible AQI where we had filtration fans running and even deployed a portable A/C due to not being able to do our normal natural cooling of the house. Our peak natural gas usage was around 5.2 therms per day for a cold winter month.

Edit to add clarification: these are averages over a 1 month billing period, not instantaneous peak power etc. When looking at finer grained usage, our electricity is quite flat over time with weekly spikes when we run our laundry and dry clothes with electricity.

My impression is that gas appliances are much more common in Europe. Gas stove, gas heating, gas water heater, washing machine, etc are all very common. Also insulation and windows are usually much higher quality, and the climate is a lot milder than northern America due to the Gulf Stream.

Even just cooking on the induction hob, or using the (electric oven) will already blow your entire day budget.

My thoughts exactly. Without any cooking at all (and exluding heating) we would do like 2.5kWh/day. But add a morning coffee (drip), noon thea (boil with induction), and a nice dinner to that (at least 2 induction plates, often oven as well) and that number simply doubles.

So OP: really curious to how you do the cooking, if any?

There are a lot of factors at play, climate is by far is the biggest. I moved from the east coast to the west coast of the United States and my home energy consumption was halved.

That being said, we still used 9600kWh last year which is more than double your consumption.

The two numbers are off because you're full electric and parent comment is likely gas+electric.

And the gas part is what's likely more of a problem in Europe - since a lot of that is coming from Russia (it's also non-renewable).

The problem is price spikes have a much lower impact on people who are reasonably well off, which is a lot of people with high consumption. They may reduce their energy usage a bit, but a lot of them will just take this hit financially because they can afford it. Frankly I'm in that category, a doubling of energy prices might reduce my savings for the year but by itself would be unlikely to affect my energy usage much. Meanwhile people on low incomes get absolutely hammered, and they probably have low usage anyway so there's not much they can even do about it.

In a situation like this price signalling isn't enough. We need to treat it as the emergency it is, and my family and I have got to do some thinking about our usage and how to reduce it, but that needs to happen across the European economies.

> The problem is price spikes have a much lower impact on people who are reasonably well off, which is a lot of people with high consumption. ... Meanwhile people on low incomes get absolutely hammered, and they probably have low usage anyway so there's not much they can even do about it.

That sounds like an argument for a progressive pricing structure with an even more extreme increase at the highest consumption tiers? E.g., would 10x increase in marginal cost affect your consumption? It would probably affect mine.

Robert Frank's progressive consumption tax proposal, https://archive.ph/AXDkQ

Another alternative is flat consumption taxes on climate damaging products combined with general wealth taxation and cash redistribution to lower the impact on low income/wealth households.

I'm a fan of flat income tax with flat, per-person guaranteed income. Set the tax rate and base income so that the changeover is revenue neutral, zero income people are a bit better off than currently, and the 90th percentile pays about what they pay now. Billionaires will end up paying way more. (In this proposal, capital gains are treated as regular income.)

The beauty of this is that now you can add astronomical consumption taxes, and just plow the increased revenue into the guaranteed income pool. On average, the consumption tax is revenue neutral for the government, and (as a percentage of income) disproportionately goes to the poor.

Also, you can eliminate 99% of the US tax accounting industry, food stamp program administration, and all sorts of other bureaucracies.

Yes to per-person guaranteed income. No to flat income (or wealth) tax (progressivity is better so no good reason to switch to something worse). Revenue neutrality: only if, and to the extent, it makes it makes the policy package easier to pass.

I do wonder if this has an effect of encouraging the segments of society that don't plan so well, ultimately undermining the goal of saving resources, in the longer term.

In my own country we see significant proportions of multi-generational welfare demographics that are incentivized to breed and often with multiple children, because someone else picks up the tab. However the working class who that try to get ahead under their own steam before maybe breeding are having children later, and less of them if at all.

> I do wonder if this has an effect of encouraging the segments of society that don't plan so well

From the POV of climate destruction the segments that don't plan so well, or to put it more bluntly, who plan and act so badly that they're strongly disproportionately responsible for the problem are those that the progressive consumption tax (and general wealth taxation) adresses: the wealthiest.

US style welfare provisions have three flaws at the same time. It is (1) not generous enough to escape the costly everyday scarcity tax* (2) spiked with time-wasting conditions and bureaucratic procedures and (3) politically and socially stigmatized. The US should transition to the northern european welfare state model which works better in all those three regards.

* https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/scientificam...

> multi-generational welfare demographics that are incentivized to breed

This is almost always a racial slur that turns out not to be true on closer inspection.

White people are the largest demographic of poverty in the US.

So racist against white people I guess?

Industrial consumption dwarfs the rest of us. We can fool around with 'energy theatre' turning off lights and walking to the market. But unless we can do 'big industry' more efficiently then it's all for show.

While I don't disagree with the need to make commercial and industrial industries more efficient, I don't think ignoring residential/consumer choices is a good move.

Industrial and commercial energy usage accounted for about 50,000 trillion BTU of energy consumption in the US in 2019. Residential used about 21,000 trillion BTU in the same time. [0] Definitely not insignificant in any way.

However! Transportation used about 28,670 trillion BTU that year. Somewhere around 50-55% [1] of that is from people driving around. I include that in residential/individual choice even if a lot of it is for commuting, because a massive amount of that number is driven by vehicle choice (people have switched to gas guzzling SUVs and trucks in droves as fuel efficiency has crept up, negating efficiency increases), housing type/density and location, etc.

This puts residential/individual energy usage at ~35,000 trillion BTU and commercial/industrial at 71,000. So individual usage is a full _third_ of total energy consumption.

That's massive, and a huge amount of that could easily be cut out if we stop subsidizing people driving trucks, SUVs, etc 45+ minutes each way to work so they can live in some mediocre suburb.

We could also not listen to a minority of NIMBYs and throw out the awful zoning laws that have swept the US over the last 50+ years to make it legal to build more traditional styles of homes and apartments to reduce sprawl and reduce infrastructure costs massively.

Industry still needs to be made far more efficient, but individuals are still a huge factor in energy usage. Other parts of the world have different energy numbers, but a lot of first world countries look fairly similar to what I just laid out.

0: https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T... 1: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/transporta...

My pet complaint, flaring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossmorran

It's pretty hard to care about saving energy when there's a hundred meter column of flame on the horizon. Mossmorran is an intermittent offender, but worldwide you would be appalled at how much gas is flared. It's probably enough to make up for the loss of Russian gas.

This. The oil shale fields in the northern US flared all their gas, because the fields were new and there was no pipeline yet.

The collection of flares could easily be seen from space. It resembled a large city in brightness.

I never understood the strong emotional reaction to gas flaring. I think there is likely some excess use on the fringes, but my understanding is that in most cases not-flaring would be more wasteful.

It's not complicated: it's wasting an irreplaceable resource (fossil fuel) and a difficult-to-replace resource (CO2 safe capacity), in large quantities, while at the same time everyone else is being asked to reduce their consumption.

It often costs more to not flare, which isn't quite the same kind of "wasteful", and sometimes it is necessary for safety reasons. But mostly it happens because gas is a "cheap" byproduct of production of other fuels.

> I never understood the strong emotional reaction to gas flaring.

Ignorance.

> my understanding is that in most cases not-flaring would be more wasteful.

Case in point. Why would not releasing something that could be captured and sold be more wasteful?

> my understanding is that in most cases not-flaring would be more wasteful

Can you explain this further?

It's not "all for show". House heating and cars are very significant polluters and energy sinks.

That sort of argument baffles me. Do they think industy just burns fuels for fun like some Captain Planet Villain and products automagically appear on store shelves?

Consumers are the ultimate source of funding for the industry through their purchases or purchases of their governments. That is what drives industrial consumption. They aren't rogue mining von Neumann machines who make more miners for the sake of it!

Is that true everywhere? Last year we went from -18c to 46c. It wasn't the demands of big industry that shut down our grid for a week, and dropped gas line pressures so low we couldn't turn on backup gas plants. It was residential heating. And in the summer, our load peaks because of residential air conditioning. Maybe the base load is mostly industrial and large relative to those peaks?

>Maybe the base load is mostly industrial and large relative to those peaks?

Exactly right. Residential usage tends to spike greatly during hot or cold events since a much larger portion of it is for heating and cooling. For industrial users, there is some heating and cooling component, but the industrial process is generally what's going to dominate.

So, if you look at extreme events, residential usage will dominate during those times. The residential usage total may spike up to 2x or 3x "baseline" usage, which industrial never will. However, if you look at sum totals across a year, industrial will typically be a much larger user than the residential sector.

We all depend on industry, yet the majority of people have zero idea how industry actually works. It is just there, and supposed to work. And yes, big industry is the key driver. They are also among the first to change when money is to be made, or saved.

One simple improvement would be labeling all consumer goods with their embodied carbon.

More ambitiously, the government could tax embodied carbon at the current price of atmospheric carbon capture.

Environmental impact is way more complex than carbon emission. Stop focusing on carbon emissions.

GHG emissions are the single biggest driver of climate change, which is the most significant environmental impact we are facing.

Steps taken to reduce GHG emissions (reducing fossil fuel use) also reduce other pollutants like local particulate pollution.

What more can individuals do? It sounds like the commenter isn't interacting with big industrial entities. Local produce, not flying / driving etc. Fighting with their wallet and personal decisions.

I agree we should be self critical and vigilant about calling out climate posturing but if we shame people / ourselves for anything short of al gore wetdream ecoterrorism aren't we in danger of creating a convenient nihilism narrative that justifies not doing anything at all?

Even if it's true I always see this excuse to not try to reduce your consumption as a pure cop-out. If everyone had this attitude then nothing would ever change.

This is absolutely correct!

Exactly, same goes for pollution, container ships, aviation..etc.

> we average 2.4KWh per day

Unless you're living on 5 m2 you're not including heating, which is the biggest consumer of energy.

And industry. And transportation. And commercial or public buildings. Taking into account only personal electricity consumption and disregarding all the rest that makes society work is deeply myopic

As a rule of thumb - electricity consumption in developed countries is about 1 kW per person, once everything is accounted for. Energy consumption is about 5 times as much

I was talking explicitly about electricity only. It's clear that I depend on so much more for all the surroundings to work. But the figures I pulled out are for electricity only and our country has 26% of its electricity generated by gas, which we could get rid of if people would use less electricity, which I believe is totally possible.

I haven't talked about anything else. But even this tiny area can make a difference. This is where people have most or even all the control.

Energy is energy whether it's electricity or something else. Europe's primary energy source is fossil based, either oil or gas, which of course mostly comes from Russia.

If you want to reduce your reliance on oil and gas from Russia, then you need to reduce your consumption of both materials regardless of how it's used. That means more than just converting your electrical supply to non-fossil source, it also means converting your heating supply as well (wood briquettes do horrific things to air quality, inner cities would become no-go zones for asthma suffers if we swapped gas for wood briquettes). Indeed the majority of household energy consumption in Europe is directly burning gas, not using electricity. So turning off light bulbs will have negligible impact on Europe's gas needs.

True! Our heating is to a large part based on fossil sources, but we started to move towards more renewable sources, like wood briquettes - which would be CO2-neutral. Indeed we could switch at least 50% of our heating to climate-neutral sources right now.

The renewability of wood briquettes is dubious at best, it's not clear the carbon emissions from biofuels is being properly accounted for, because many place don't consider the carbon release at time of burning, but rather at time of harvest. Unfortunately the rules of accounting for carbon emission at time of harvest aren't great either, with it being possible to simple not account for the carbon emission by claiming a clear-cut forest is still a forest, so no land use change has occurred, and thus no need to account for carbon emissions resulting from land use change (which is the trigger point for computing the carbon emission of cut trees).

In addition burning biofuels like wood briquettes and wood pellets at home release horrific amounts of carbon monoxide and other small particulate from incomplete combustion. Stuff that does horrific things to local air quality, we'll see the return of impenetrable smog to our cities, and health warnings telling asthmatics not to go outside for risk of dying due to inhaling all the nasties.

The source of heating is not what's the most important (in any case an (electrical) heat pump is always going to be more energy efficient, everything else pales in comparison).

Insulation is really the most important thing to reduce a building energy consumption (some buildings are even built with zero heating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_heating_building), along with air-tightness and heat_recovery_ventilation.

Seriously. Modern insulation + heat pump/heat recovery ventilation makes it possible to heat a 140m2 house in the far north of Sweden for a whole year with a few thousand kWh.

Does no one else see the irony in cutting down forests, some of the very things we are trying to preserve by reducing atmospheric CO2, as a means to reduce CO2 emissions? The phrase "can't see the forest for the trees" seems very apt here.

See also: clearing land (including fragile desert ecosystems!) for solar farms vs residential/urban solar, biofuels in general, subsidizing EVs which encourage poor land use and sprawl vs legalizing denser housing and building better public transport, etc etc etc.

Forests are recyclable. Natural gas is not.

When you burn wood, the CO2 released into the atmosphere gets re-absorbed by the next batch of trees that you're gonna burn next year. The overall process can be carbon-neutral, neither increasing nor decreasing the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Once gas comes out of the ground, it's guaranteed to get into the atmosphere one way or another, and it's never going back down in there.

Are you heating/cooling on that 2.4kwh/day too? Or do you have gas heat/hot water? There's no way to heat my house (to even just hot enough to avoid frozen pipes) without using significantly more than 100w during the winter. Even "passive" houses here would use more than that for climate control.

No, 100W is without heat (I should have mentioned that) and without hot water.

So you're chastising everybody for not using as little "energy" as you (counting only electricity) so that we can get off of russian gas, while you're only able to get your numbers so low because 90% of your own energy usage is from gas?

You need around 1200kwh per month (annualized) heat a medium home. That's just the math. Whether that energy comes to you in the form of fossil fuel or electricity doesn't matter, that's how much you and everybody else is using for climate control. The fact that it appears on your gas bill instead of your electric bill doesn't mean you're using any less power.

Nobody's gonna save the world by turning off their 3-watt LED bulb an hour earlier each night, cutting a whopping 0.09kwh (0.009%) from their monthly usage.

>You need around 1200kwh per month (annualized) heat a medium home.

I can't believe this is true outside e.g. Alaska, Norway, etc. I live in an area with a lot of cooling needs and very moderate need for heating, almost all of both are done with electric, and 1200 kWh per month is a good guess for total average home usage, heating/cooling, lighting, video games, cooking, all the rest.

that is then extremely misleading. Try redoing your calculation assuming all heat is electric, be that heat pumps or an electric stove. Same for water heaters and EVs.

Your post, although interesting, is the edge case.

Consume less, on paper, is easy, in practice it depend. Personally I have a small f.v. (south France) with battery backup, in sunny days almost all the year I have enough energy to waste it. In other days I need energy as anyone else. No battery can compensate.

Doubling my battery capacity (witch is NOT cheat at all) just means having more energy from one sunny day to another. Survive just one day without sun means 4* the battery and I have to count the fact that does not have a reasonably good lifespan for the price.

Essentially: it's unfeasible. And I'm talking about a "A-class" (BBC) house, so with very little energy needs compared to old ones.

To go fully off grid you would need more solar and batteries rather than just more batteries alone. Panels produce some energy on cloudy days, suppose your deficit drops from -80% to -40%, now the battery which would last you 1 day lasts you 2 days, double your batteries as well and 2 days becomes 4 days. More critically many days that are moderately overcast go from a net loss to a net gain.

It’s just an optimization problem based on your local climate, the cost of equipment, and your willingness to reduce remain after multiple cloudy days.

So did you think it's practical buy a soccer stadium well-exposed south space and spend the money of a supercar just to be able to munge few more W in cloudy days? Of course also counting snowy days when you still get 0 output + you eventually need to clean-up your panels?

Beside the willingness and the price, who many in the world can do something similar? Especially in EU where most people live in dense city, so apartments?

Grid solar is more efficient in general and much safer to install than rooftop solar, some people simply dislike connecting to the electric grid for various reasons.

Anyway, you don’t need to face south if you just want more energy on cloudy days. As to more panels, it’s a question of how much you want to be off grid and how much energy you need. Normal solar installs cover a small fraction of the roof.

This is where the narrative about personal responsibility falls apart - when it comes to electricity and energy, everything is better at scale, and it's not even close. All the meaningful action is to be done on state, corporate and industrial level, individuals are a rounding error

Even with solar, where one might reasonably think the transportation costs would favor decentralized deployment - no, utility-scale deployments benefit dual axis tracking, amortization of fixed costs, integration with energy storage and economies of scale. We would all be better off as shareholders of utility solar than deploying rooftop + batteries, but that takes away the bragging rights

My utility charges about $0.30 per KWh right now and raises rates at about 4x inflation. Putting up solar panels is a no-brainer. The array I put up pays for itself in less than 18 months.

Until those economies of scale manifest as cheap electricity for consumers, the drive towards local generation is inevitable.

I think utility scale PV is more using single axis tracking, not dual axis.

IMVHO depend on where you are, for me no tracking at all means I still have more than enough electricity when the Sun shine, but I do consume it 24/7/365, regardless of the meteo....

But you (and I) could have a seasonal thermal energy storage, cooling the solar array in summer and removing the need of external heating in winter. Doesn't work for power, but does for heat.

I do something far shorter: heating water in the sunny days to have it in the cloudy ones, but that's definitively far from sufficient for heating the entire house and to scale at the entire house needs well... It's cheaper run on grid electricity, even these days.

How much energy went into the industry that made those appliances, your food, etc though? I think a lot of people underestimate that.

Yes sure. For example, I cannot even give you exact numbers of the footprint of the food we eat or the electronics we use. That would probably a good number to put on a lot of things, in terms of allowing people to make decisions not only on price and quality but hidden costs.

The problem is that externalities are what the name says: things you are not required to factor into your price (something or someone else takes a hit).

I guess that you don't cook a lot. Then you shall maybe take into account the energy used to produce the food that you order and to deliver it to your home.

I cook a lot. I don't even have a very efficient stove (it's on my todo-list to get an induction stove, but we're in a rented flat, so it's a bit complicated). I still have a really, really tiny electricity bill.

Cooking isn't a major issue in electricity use. It's the devices you buy and some basic behavior sanity (switch off what you don't use etc.).

My refrigerator, which is from 2020 and replaced a failed 1979 unit, uses about as much electricity as your flat. So does the pool pump. So does the network equipment. And if I were to run the heating system, it would too.

Using a toaster oven to bake a meal for two would consume roughly 15-30% of your home's daily energy budget.

I used 18.85 KWh yesterday, which includes running a load of laundry through a resistively heated dryer. 14.07 KWh of that came from my solar panels.

The goal of adding solar isn’t to use less electricity or less energy per person. Solar electricity is cheap and stable because it doesn’t have a volatile, margin-sensitive commodity as an input (as opposed to oil, ng, coal). Specifically, what is cheaper is midday units of electricity which have a direct impact on commercial and industrial uses (i.e. the largest uses). When you make something cheaper people use MORE of it. This is a good thing since, normalizing for efficiency, more energy use equals a higher quality of life.

The idea that renewables are associated with sacrifice should go away. Instead, in a number of realistic cases renewables reduce the cost/impact of living a better life.

I am setting aside the war component about which I am sympathetic (people should be cognizant of near term resource limits when they are in/adjacent to war).

Variable energy sources like wind and solar have a cost - a balancing cost that you do not currently pay. If you have solar panels, the grid buys all your energy, whenever you are able to deliver that energy. The rest of us subsidise your costs.

Renewables like domestic solar appear to reduce costs because those costs are socialized. Compare the cost of drawing power from the grid with the cost of generating all your energy via solar PV and storage batteries.

Who is the we? Different countries, states, and grid-operators have different policies.

Grid-scale renewables in the US are not ‘take it any time I have it’ to the grid, they are generally required to be able to dispatch down. This means when they are told the addition of those units of power will cause problems the units will be penalized for adding them.

Renewables also pay for interconnection costs, they pay for transmission costs (which pays for transmission equipment), and they pay the grid-operators for operations. To say ‘all their costs are socialized’ borders on dishonest. I am open to there being additional externalities and balancing is a real challenge. But you have to tell me what they are and price them rather than rely on sweeping generalizations which are prima facie false.

As the last autumn in Europe showed solar and wind were not stable when for months there were quite heavy clouds without wind. Big energy storage is required.

> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike.

I don't think you're going to get people to collectively reduce energy usage unless there is a direct incentive to do so, e.g. the price spikes you yourself mention.

The best way to solve this is probably through regulation. In the case of leaving the lights on, this has mostly been "solved" by banning incandescent light bulbs which use ~10x as much energy as the LED light bulbs that are in use everywhere now. I think this is as good as it's gonna get right now with light bulbs. Energy usage of household appliances can be solved in the same way (not sure if it is, I just know about the labeling) and—at least in my country—heating consumption is being solved by increasing insulation requirements pretty hard.

Even LED have more efficient designs, Philips makes the Dubai Lamp specifically for Dubai but you cannot buy them outside of Dubai.

https://www.mea.lighting.philips.com/consumer/dubai-lamp

Big Clive shows how to convert LED lamps to be like the Dubai lamp here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISTB0ThzhOY

The efficiency difference is very small; the main advantage of the Dubai Lamp is that it lasts longer.

How often do you shower? because according to google your 2.4kWh per day is good for 14 minutes of hot shower.

Just me showering alone would have equaled your entire energy budget..

2.4 kWh isn't much, but 14 minutes is also an absurd time to shower. Get wet, turn water off while soaping & shampooing, and rinse after. I haven't timed but feels like a normal everyday shower shouldn't have more than two minutes of running water.

> ”which would allow us to get rid of Gas for energy entirely easily”

Aren’t you forgetting about natural gas used for heating and for industrial purposes? In many countries, this is actually the majority of natural gas consumption, not electricity generation.

bragging about how little electricity you use, and then excluding heat and hot water from the equation?

I feel this will be the spring/summer of e-bikes. They are perfect, especially in Europe, for combating high fuel prices with the existing supply of batteries/goods/services. There's no way EV cars will ramp to address the oil spike. An e-bike gives a totally normal human being 20mph speed without heavy sweat, and effective distance to 8-10 miles, can deliver the power necessary to get up hills, fight headwinds, and tow a burly of goods. In a cheap, compact vehicle that only needs an LFP battery for 40-100 mile ranges, and simple outlet charge.

Likewise maximizing home solar installations would help as well. Since this is strategic, rather than a pure economic concern, home solar might be able to be rolled out more quickly with rebates/incentives.

Russia is enabled by oil and gas.

Beyond the mentioned "lots of energy use is actually gas for us", I think you likely have a bug in your calculations. Did you calculate this based on your expenses and back into usage, or directly from usage? (Or are you saying 100W per person?).

Unless you do not own a refrigerator, or have an incredibly tiny RV-style unit (36-50W!), you probably average 100W for your fridge alone.

Charging the devices you wrote your comment with is another 10-90W (when charging), and then your router is at least 5-10W continuously. Same thing with a television or computer monitor: pretty good when idle (<5 W) but likely high when in use (30+W for an efficient monitor, but more like 150+ for a larger television even if modern).

I don't see how your average could be 100W.

>modern appliances like a dish washer

Dishwashers actually save energy and water vs. hand-washing. Maybe you save a little energy if you handwash in cold water, but nobody does that and you would need a lot more soap.

If you run them when they are full ;)

One issue in this calculation is that you'd need to increase the amount of electricity generated to replace heating and other work done by fossil fuels. From Saul Griffith's book Electrify, "Electrifying everything will require three to four times as much electricity." [0].

490 * 3 = 1470TWh capacity, or I guess about three 100W light bulbs per day?

[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

What coefficient of power does the book assume for heating air and water?

Our water heater is a heat pump, and draws about 100w on average. It has a COP of 3-4. The house idles at 500w, with it on. I probably have about 100w of computers, and the balance is probably refrigerators (still optimizing the house...)

Anyway, switching to a heat pump changes heating from the dominant load to "maybe I should power down the backup NAS and a switch or two".

Going to comment here as it's on topic with books.

One should also read "Without Hot Air" [1] and "Heat"[2] to understand the math and psychology of sustainability . the Tl;dr; being we'd need to cover an area, iirc, the entire Sahara desert with solar to provide solar for humanity (ignoring the problem of distribution, cost, how long it would take to do, maintenance). And then you also have to account for the psychological effect of "green" energy whereby people end up consuming _more_ because in their minds they discount the ecological cost to 0

My main conclusion (not the authors') is that we need nuclear[3] (maybe thorium). It's the only thing that scales the way we need.

[1]: https://withouthotair.com/

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1114270.Heat

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BybPPIMuQQ (and the rest of gordonmcdowell's channel

Just curious, why would you make a cosmetic repair on a washing machine? Mine has a few dents and scratches from various moves (it's about 15 years old at this point) and I never cared at all about what it looks like, just whether it worked or not? I've never actually done anything to it. I've been single most of that time though, so washing duty is pretty lite.

The sad truth is, it's practically unfeasible to have pure renewables.

Even most wind/solar plants have a peaker gas plant somewhere, for when demand surpasses available resources. Sure batteries are nice, but you need huge amounts to smooth out the grid.

That said, it's possible to use excess electricity to create some form of gas (like hydrogen or hydro-carbon).

> The sad truth is, it's practically unfeasible to have pure renewables.

It's more feasible than nuclear.

But we do not need to go to 100℅ renewable right away. 80% would be great already. Yet Europe in total is at less than 50%, and there we are only considering power. We'd be so much more flexible both in regards to Putin and climate change if we just reduced our demand by 50%. Step by step, not all at once. And then power-to-X can do the last bit.

> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike.

That's why there should be a price spike. For all a free market's faults, one thing they're good at is finding the right price for goods with elastic demand.

I also live a low consumption life and think others need to adjust as well but residential energy consumption doesn’t include industry or commercial usage which also needs work.

Here residential energy accounts for 26% of the overall energy consumption - but even if we only adjust in this field, we can already make a difference.

Im making progress towards the same lifestyle and Im surprised at how good it feels just on a personal health level. Your success is re-inspiring me to push further!

Meanwhile villagers in Bangladesh have 1/10 the carbon output you do. Why not go all the way?

The cost of solar and wind energy production has been falling at a surprising rate: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

These rates are somewhat useful if you have a flexible fossil backup, as wind and solar are not always available. If you are going 100% wind and solar, you need to factor in the cost of energy storage as well as efficiency of storage. Then they will be much more expensive than gas.

Which is why the title calls out battery storage, and the article spend about a third of it's word count talking about it. The price of battery storage has also fallen dramatically.

One knock often made against solar+battery is the cost of replacing battery storage over the lifetime of the plant, but such criticisms often don't take into account the fact that replacement batteries in 5 and 10 years will likely cost a fraction of what they do now.

The fact is a lot of countries already have enough gas plant capacity to act as 'peaker' plants to top up solar+battery.

The optimal energy mix from a cost perspective is probably not 100% wind and solar so this doesn't sound like a realistic scenario. I am not aware of any good research that has tried to model that scenario but it probably exists. Some of the assumptions, like how much storage you would need, will have a huge impact on the outcome.

You can start doing some interesting things if the cost of wind/solar is a half or quarter of regular power. Like using it to refine aluminium and then using that in batteries to generate energy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26463249 That can store pretty much unlimited quantities though is not very efficient in terms of energy in and out.

please factor in the damage done by emitting CO2 into the atmosphere

Regarding battery storage I would like to know how many gigawatt hours are going to be added.

I assume grid-scale batteries usually don't discharge at more than 1C, but what fraction of C we're talking about is what makes all the difference.

In any case the peak-shaving market is in for a disruption. I wonder how that's going to affect the economics of gas peakers?

It also irks me that GW is used as a "capacity" figure, meaning "production capacity" or rate of discharge, when a battery's capacity is actually its stored energy (measured in GWh).

Here are more details: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/batterystor...

Looks like in 2019 they added about 400 MWh and they provide 150 MW.

In the "Full report" PDF, I see they are overwhelmingly (93%) Li-ion, which would be about 3.7V, so the capacity translates to ~108MAh and the current to ~40.5MA, giving you a C-use average of 0.375.

Edit: I just realized I could have skipped conversion to amps, since the voltage simplifies in the fraction.

I find it strange that Li-Ion is used, given that lead-acid can be much cheaper. Perhaps lead is not so environmentally friendly?

Li-Ion has dropped in price to the point where it is cheaper than lead-acid. To come up with a realistic lifetime cost you have to factor in:

- Cycle count (lead-acid ~500, li-ion 1000-3000) - Usable capacity (lead-acid 50%, li-ion 80%) - purchase cost (lead-acid $n, li-ion > $n)

I'm about to over-generalize, but to get good lifetime out of your batteries, you only discharge lead-acid to 50% of its rated capacity, whereas li-ion has good cycle life working between 10-90% state of charge. You have to buy more lead-acid than you do li-ion to get the same usable storage. Then, your lead-acid batteries will degrade significantly after 500 charge-discharge cycles. The li-ion batteries will tolerate 2-6 times more cycles before significant capacity loss.

Environmental friendliness is sort of a wash. Lead-acid is more toxic, but recovery and reuse is like 99%. Lithium is less toxic, but recycling is difficult.

Perhaps lead is not so environmentally friendly?

Here [1] are some of the reasons li-ion is currently preferred. This will change with time. I am holding out for the 3D printed solid state batteries which are not mentioned on that page but soon to be in mass production.

[1] - https://news.energysage.com/lithium-ion-vs-lead-acid-batteri...

Cheap, insolated land and a positive correlation between insolation and electricity demand makes PV just a no-brainer in the US.

Indeed. AC typically needs to run when the sun is shining. A perfect match.

for hot countries, yes

But "heat pumps" (which is exactly like AC, but in the UK 3x more expensive because its "renewable") need to run for heating.

So I agree with you, solar and AC are perfect for cooling, heating might need other sources of electricity.

Sounds like a profitable niche.

But I suspect heating is more expensive than cooling.

In Romania (45-46 degrees latitude) I can tolerate up to 25°C, and an uncooled room (that is not directly below the roof) only ever gets to 28°C, so it'd need 3Δ°C.

Whereas in winter, an unheated room can get to 14°C or lower, but the lowest temperature that doesn't affect me working from home is 23°C, so it would need upwards of 9Δ°C of heating.

Therefore, a heat pump for heating needs more power than an AC for cooling, which is why it would be more expensive.

How are there so many trolls on places like Twitter that go on & on & on about nuclear or coal or whatever... the facts speak for themselves. solar + batteries is the obvious future.

Would be great to see some robots get made that can much more rapidly install solar in big solar farms. I suppose most of it is mechanized already... but maybe robots could help automate it more.

Solar doesn't work that well the further you get from the equator.

Nortern Europe? Freezing in the winter (so lots of heating necessitating more electricity), and generally poor weather, plus the daylight hours can be incredibly short.

I'm not sure how solar works in places like this unless you massively overbuild (not exactly appealing, efficient, or environmentally friendly), and/or rely on electricity transported over vast distances (which I understand is not particularly viable).

>Solar doesn't work that well the further you get from the equator.

This simply isn't true outside of artic zones. While it's true the panels become less efficient in a $/kw basis, the cost of panels is already so low that the increase is negligible.

These dark, barren areas also tend to have a surplus of surface area so adding an extra 20-30% in panels to account for the disparity isn't an issue.

Let's take the UK as an example.

Densely populated, so there's not lots of "dark barren" land.

Energy consumption rises considerably in the winter, just as sunlight hours reduce, and the weather gets cloudier.

Even assuming there was lots of free surface area, I would assume that the extra number of panels would far exceed 20-30% when you consider the disparity in energy consumption alongside when it happens (after the sun sets, and before it rises).

The only way it would work is with a very large surplus of panels (quite how large I can only guess, but 20-30% seems incredibly optimistic to me), alongside a very significant storage mechanism. And even then, I'm not sure if that would insure against a severe cold patch coinciding with a few days of cloudly, dark weather.

UK is better off with a combination of offshore wind, onshore wind, solar and pumped storage.

Solar is still good to have coz the spells of low wind tend to coincide with having lots of sun and coz if youre putting up a roof, the costs of adding some panels up there while youre at it are fairly minimal.

What the UK really needs is to fix its near universally shit insulation, though. In terms of "green" ROI nothing else comes close to making buildings hold more heat.

Northern Europe thankfully has alternatives like hydro, geothermal, their own oil reserves..

Some countries yes, but what about others? The UK, Ireland, the Baltics (I was thinking of the Netherlands and Belgium too, although they don't strictly fit in the definition apparently) - not all of these countries have oil reserves or good sources of hyrdo/geothermal electricity.

The UK currently has about 15GW of grid wind power (and maybe 4-5GW privately owned that is not attached to the grid it's just used to avoid buying grid electricity). There is no reason whatsoever that can't be 45GW, and more, except that until now it was not politically desirable apparently.

It's very windy here. On the mainland, especially in summer, it might be calmer for days or even weeks so you would need a lot of storage, but you probably can power the UK on wind if that's what you were determined to do, and when it's really blowing (much of the winter) you can export that cheap wind power too, offsetting the price of buying some of say Spain's solar power or France's nukes when the wind is calm.

Most of today so far for example grid wind was steadily about 13GW. Here on the mainland it seems pretty calm, but I guess out in the ocean it is plenty windy enough to turn those blades and make electricity.

I think we're very fortunate in the UK to have a great mix of wind/solar/tidal to utilise for power generation (although I don't think solar is as appropriate for our situation as wind or tidal). TBH I really wish our politicans would actually do more to advance both wind and tidal generation in this country.

But it still doesn't significantly help countries like Belgium or the Netherlands, or even Germany.

I'm actually very interested to see how Germany tried to decarbonise over the next couple of decades, as I think they've managed to get most of the low hanging fruit (for example, from what I've read, I don't think there's really anymore space for them to install offshore turbines without quite significant difficulties).

When going for serious global scale stuff you put the panels in sunny places and run gigantic cables to the places it isn't sunny. Again, possible to do but massive scale infrastructure projects that take time, money, and political will.

I'm not an expert at all when it comes to this sort of stuff, but don't you lose quite a high percentage of the electricity generated when you move it over the vast distances needed for that to work?

>but don't you lose quite a high percentage of the electricity generated when you move it over the vast distances needed for that to work?

No. 1-2MV DC transmission lines can move power 3000+ miles at >97% efficiency.

This isn't directed at you, but I'm starting to get super frustrated with this myth that transporting electricity is inefficient. I see it almost everywhere these discussions take place and I don't know why.

No offence taken, I'm happy to learn! It seems like I need to go and do more reading about this.

I suppose efficiency aside, the next big problem(s) would be of a political nature? Having no control over your power supply (which is hosted in a foreign nation) is quite a big geopolitical risk?

You lose some but it is manageable, there are already private projects to do things like this, including undersea cables!

Because people correctly point out that if you had literally 100% solar (or near it) the amount of battery you would need is of completely impractical scale in even the medium term future. More reasonable approaches would include many massive lakes with pumped hydro stations. I personally think it is entirely possible but the scale of the operation is a massive undertaking similar to the sum total of fossil fuel extraction infrastructure built up over the last 100 years. We are talking trillion dollar scale. Can the USA summon the political will to do it fast? Probably not. Building more nuclear power plants for base load is probably easier.

You need to overbuild solar with a factor of 5 to get to a practical amount of batteries. See https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1441605024887427073?s=21

One side benefit of that is that energy will be free 90% of the time. Great for carbon extraction and desalination.

That presumably ignores the fact that other industries would adapt to respond to energy that was essentially free for even shorter periods. The economics of heavy industries might change if the energy input was free for 3 hours a day (e.g. offsetting great capital spend to overbuild infrastructure there).

Overbuilding by 5x means you also need to multiply the cost by 5x. Is solar still cheaper than nuclear once you factor that in? (Not to mention the cost of energy storage.)

In Iceland probably not, in Hawaii hell yes.

Has he never heard of power to gas [0]? We already have lots of storage and generators for natural gas. I doubt you'd need more than twice the capacity using power to gas.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

The usual con to get to the conclusion you reached is to assume batteries are used to get to 100% renewables. But batteries are terrible for long term storage and rare event backup, so this is just bad engineering. Batteries + hydrogen does much better in most places, especially at high latitude.

And hydrogen comes with it's own challenges, as a large % of energy is lost in the conversion to and from. This multiplies how much solar you need appreciably. There is no easy solution here, many hard ones. We can do it but need to be willing to do that hard/expensive work.

Yes, hydrogen comes with its own challenges, but batteries and hydrogen are synergistic. Each covers the weak point of the other. Most of the energy stored goes through batteries (efficiency), while most of the energy storage capacity is in hydrogen (capital cost). So the system ends up being cheaper. You do not actually increase the needed generation all that much, because most of the stored energy is still going through batteries, not hydrogen. And in particular, unlike the only-battery solution you don't need to ludicrously use batteries for seasonal energy storage or rare event backup.

Most of the hydrogen produced would, anyway, be used immediately in industry, excepting only when the storage tanks need topping off. The electrolyzers would never, ever be idle.

We need the hydrogen regardless, so its usefulness to store surplus energy besides is a bonus.

Renewables are a technology for a civilization that has decided to accept being in a state of slow decline. Higher stages of civilization will require more power, which can be practically provided only by nuclear. If the west goes all-in on solar, China’s investments into nuclear will give it the opportunity to become the dominant civilization.

You state this with no evidence provided.

Nuclear isn't cheaper now, and won't be any time soon. If we want more cheap energy then renewables _are_ the right solution, especially in places like the US where land is cheap and there is plenty of sunshine. It makes less sense in Europe, but if the Chinese make substantial advances in nuclear tech then great — we can build new reactors in 10/20 years when they do make economic sense.

Utter nonsense. Judging by all evidence, renewables will provide more high quality energy (that is, looking at work rather than thermal energy produced, since renewables produce the former directly) more cheaply than nuclear. Even China is emphasizing renewables over nuclear, you know.

> renewables will provide more high quality energy (that is, looking at work rather than thermal energy produced, since renewables produce the former directly)

I have no idea how this makes electricity from renewables “higher quality”.

In the sense that 1 joule of electrical energy is inherently more valuable than 1 joule of thermal energy. A current commercial nuclear reactor requires 3 units of the latter to produce 1 unit of the former.

This issue comes up all the time in energy analysis where you need to carefully distinguish between "primary" (i.e., before conversion in a heat engine) energy to zero-entropy energy (electrical energy, work).

> In the sense that 1 joule of electrical energy is inherently more valuable than 1 joule of thermal energy. A current commercial nuclear reactor requires 3 units of the latter to produce 1 unit of the former.

When people are talking about 1 GW nuclear reactor, they mean that reactor is generating 1 GW of electricity, so that the reactor is in fact >3 GW thermal. Nobody is comparing electricity from renewables to thermal energy from nuclear.

In fact, this actually makes nuclear superior: you can use the waste 2 GW of heat to run district heating in nearby located cities. Pretty popular in Europe, though with coal/gas plants. There is no similar useful byproduct to solar/wind.

> Higher stages of civilization will require more power

If anything, a "higher stage" of civilization would be perfectly sustainable and highly energy efficient.

There's nothing civilized in being a parasitic species.

Renewables + storage will provide a solid, low-carbon baseline until He3-he3 fusion is commercialized and we use that energy to dominate the solar system.

By using their data [1], you can also calculate the percentage of planned Wind generation capacity:

2022: 20%

2023: 14%

[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/xls/december_ge...

Also you can calculate all no greenhouse gas emitting planned capacity:

2022: 79%

2023: 80%

I don't understand how the math adds up. If we all move to EVs, the demand for electricity will go up (a lot!) But I don't see how we're planning to meet such demand with our current power grid. Which of course in turn means that your electric bill will be in for a shock. Furthermore how will this work for emergency situations when power is out for days (think emergency services, police, etc.)? How about the military? How about portability? Being able to store fuel in 5 gallon increments in a cheap container has no equivalent in the EV world.

Maybe I'm just getting older and 100 years ago I'd have said "Well, I don't have to fill up my horse with gasoline to get him going..."

If we all buy EVs we'll build a better grid.

Just like how we built gas stations when we all bought cars.

EV adoption is a curve just like anything. There isn't going to be a switch where yesterday there were few EVs and today everyone had them. Its a function that can be predicted and prepared for.

Also you can carry small batteries or generators. It won't be as portable as a 5 gallon can of gas. But so what, not everything will have a 1 to 1 analogy with gas cars. But small problems like that will be solved or worked around, people are smart and are always looking for new products to develop and sell.

This. I will take more than a decade of majority-sales being EV to convert the fleet. That's MORE than enough time to steadily upgrade the grid.

> But I don't see how we're planning to meet such demand with our current power grid. Which of course in turn means that your electric bill will be in for a shock.

We are definitely going to use more electricity — that's why everyone has been planning for major upgrades — but that's part of why solar is so useful since a lot of the existing grid demand is used at times when solar is generating peak capacity (i.e. summer air conditioning), and we've seen a lot of efficiency improvements which are reclaiming some existing capacity (e.g. at the turn of the century, a desktop computer used 1kw, your lighting was 10x more wattage, your AC, fridge, etc. were far less efficient, etc.) — that doesn't solve the problem but it takes some of the sting out of it.

In the case of an EV, my house is entirely electric including a heat pump + resistive heating. Charging a Tesla Model 3 completely is somewhere around one day's usage in the winter (~20℉ outside) and since that's a 200-350 miles range you're unlikely to be doing that every day or every other day. Most importantly, that seems well within the power output a solar array can provide — since cars are idle something like 95% of the time, you have plenty of opportunity to charge them off peak or when renewables like solar or wind are producing well.

That to me doesn't seem like an intractable problem but rather something which can be done incrementally along with other desirable work such as upgrading the grid to be more resistant to things like storm conditions.

> a desktop computer used 1kw

Desktop computers didn't use 1kW on average back in 2000. That would have been an insanely high-end machine and nothing like the average home PC. A lot of components were passively air-cooled or had a tiny heatsink with a small fan, you're not running 1,000W on something that may or may not even have a fan. Most computers I had back then had 200-300W power supplies. Add another 100W for a CRT monitor and that means each desktop really used something closer to 400W max. Usually you don't run at the max rating of your PSU, so really something less than that.

EDIT: The TDP of a Pentium III (released 1999) was 30W. Add another 20W for a hard drive, another 10W for an optical drive, and 100W for the motherboard and RAM, and that's ~160W for a basic home computer in 1999. AGP allowed for ~50W of power, extra power connectors on GPUs back then was pretty much unheard of so even with a fancy GPU you're only looking at ~210W of power for a decent 2000s era PC.

There were plenty of 400-500W power supplies in use back then, and 100W was on the low side for a non-tiny CRT. Don't forget that people commonly had multiple hard drives and/or external drives because storage hadn't saturated for the average user yet (oh, so many people learned the hard way that Iomega was not the answer…), and things like personal printers were more common since home networks weren't. I'm probably biased a bit as the home users I knew were mostly professionals rather than hobbyist but when people were speccing out UPSs they tended to assume numbers which these days we'd only see for beefy servers.

The bigger challenge is that while EnergyStar made a big improvement, it took a number of years to become something you could assume. Problems with firmware and software support meant that a lot of people disabled it to avoid problems and systems didn't spend as much time in lower-power states.

Restoring power to emergency services (or even ensuring they don't lose power in the first place at some expense) is already a thing. Your hospital is in pretty rough shape without electricity today and likely has stand-by generators. Those could run on Green Hydrogen in some Zero Emissions future.

However in respect specifically of electric vehicles, remember ICE vehicles are not efficient. The motor in your petrol or diesel car is optimised for size, weight and acceleration, not for energy efficiency, because nobody would buy a car that's the size of a house, or weighs twenty-five tonnes, or takes an hour to get to walking pace from a standstill. You may have noticed from household appliances that electric motors are small, light and have great acceleration, but it's less obvious they're also very efficient. So this means an EV only needs maybe 60% of the energy you needed for a petrol or diesel vehicle, reducing the demand on electricity compared to what you might expect.

We might well end up with more load management to reduce the "duck curve" but there is a lot of unused capacity at off-peak times, charging your EV at 1800 when you're also cooking food, cooling or heating your home and so on may not make sense, the pricing incentives can strongly encourage you to tell it to wait until say 2300 when you're in bed and the grid load is lower to fill itself back up for tomorrow.

> Furthermore how will this work for emergency situations when power is out for days

As someone who has been through multiple emergency situations where power has been out for days, a gasoline engine doesn't help the average person a ton past their current tank of gas in their car. Most people don't have gas generators, they don't have a 50gal drum of petrol in their garage, and if there was a disaster big enough to wipe out power for your home for days chances are a lot of gas stations are either without power or often without much gas to sell you.

Meanwhile, if you had a decent solar install and if whatever calamity took out power for days didn't also destroy your panels, you could potentially recharge your car if its still sunny out. EV + solar could mean you can be self-reliant on your transportation energy instead of relying on trucks making it into town, delivering it to the few distribution points still operational, and hoping you were one of the ones that made it after waiting in hours long lines. Obviously several big if's on that one.

While there is definitely a push for more EVs to be sold, I can't imagine there's really that many people pushing for truly 100% EV only on the road anytime soon. Even if 90%+ of passenger cars are EVs there will still be a place for petrol/diesel. I'm overall pretty skeptical on battery-powered long haul trucks largely due to trade offs of energy storage mass vs payload mass when thinking max weight ratings reducing the effective amount of payload per trip. Emergency services vehicles are expected to be pretty self-sufficient and carry massive amounts of energy with them for potentially long periods of time, diesel and petrol is way more energy dense even if you're only getting 30-40% efficiency in getting the energy out of it. So this "all move to EVs" is really more like all the sedans and crossovers, a decent chunk of medium-sized vans/intra-city trucks, and maybe the daily police patrol cars not necessarily all the heavy trucks used by emergency services.

Who knows though, maybe we'll see some bigger breakthroughs and quick field-deployable solar + battery or nuclear emergency service base stations will become a thing in the future which could mean after an initial truck delivery that field station becomes power self-sufficient which would be nice as that's one less thing to worry about logistics-wise. Otherwise you end up needing the constant supply of fuel to keep those emergency services operational after a disaster which can be challenging.

> If we all move to EVs, the demand for electricity will go up (a lot!) But I don't see how we're planning to meet such demand with our current power grid.

I don't think anyone has proposed more EVs without an improved grid. In fact, this January, the DOE announced a "New Initiative From President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law To Modernize National Grid" [1]

> Being able to store fuel in 5 gallon increments in a cheap container has no equivalent in the EV world.

Batteries? I have multiple for my son's Peg Perego John Deere 12v [2]. My vacuum also has multiple batteries that I swap.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-launches-new-initiative-...

[2] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Peg-Perego-John-Deere-Gator-XUV-1...

A gallon of gas weighs 6.1 pounds. 5 Gallons + a container is ~35lb - highly portable. That gives me roughly 100 miles of range for my vehicle at a total cost of around $20 (plus the cost of the container, said another $20.)

A 50kW Tesla (model 3) battery is what, roughly 700lb and provides a range of ~220m miles if I'm not mistaken? Batteries of this size are simply not portable, nor are they cost effective to keep 8 in case of emergency. I live in an area that has occasional hurricanes and when one is threatening the area I go fill up 8 5 gallon gas containers and store them in the yard. Assuming the storm passes without major damage (power outages, etc.) we'll use that fuel to fill our vehicles' gas tanks. There is no equivalent of this in this new-fangled electric world. Until batteries become smaller, light and a hell of a lot cheaper, I'll be sitting on the sidelines.

Gas is very energy dense and gas engines/generators are very cheap, but in an emergency I would rather have batteries.

A large portion of cars are low on gas at any one time because it is customary to run your tank to near empty. During an emergency gas can be hard to get. Electric cars are almost always above 50% charge. Gas generators need maintenance and fuel just sitting there need stabilizers. During hurricanes and freezes a lot people can't even get their generators working and good portion of those that do, don't use them safely. A battery backup is expensive and won't power things as long but it is dead simple to maintain and use. If you have fixed or portable solar panels to pair with your battery it can keep the most important appliances and electronics in your house going for a while.

> There is no equivalent of this in this new-fangled electric world. Until batteries become smaller, light and a hell of a lot cheaper, I'll be sitting on the sidelines.

The entire premise of the discussion is a world where we have transitioned the economy completely to EVs. I think it's safe to assume that, in this new energy world, batteries would be smaller, lighter, and cheaper. This has been the observed trend since 1991 [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

Home solar. Reduces a huge (or all) of the grid need. It can be more organically rolled out than the cheaper but longer lead time of utility server.

Especially if the EV's massive battery can serve double duty as a "powerwall" type buffer as well. And if you have a two-car family, you'll have two buffers.

The military will use ICE/fuel if they need to. Or hydrogen + fuel cell would apply to them? Or methane + fuel cell? They'll do what they have to do, and there will be oil oversupply at that point.

What is the lifetime of the batteries, how finite are the materials used to make them, and how environmentally friendly is the process to recycle them?

The same question should be asked for the solar panels and the other components required, but at this moment, the question is simpler:

Can the materials for producing the required quantity be sourced from the current global market, and can they be expected to remain available for production of spare parts for the expected lifetime of the new systems?

The answers to these questions are mostly irrelevant since we are only seeing very early prototypes of what the storage industry will use 20 years from now.

The objective now is to demonstrate grid scale battery storage is an economically sound proposition, to create an industrial field.

With sufficient scale, satisfactory answers to these questions will be found. We know answers exist, for example sodium ion batteries use resources that are essentially unlimited - salt and carbon. It's just that their lower mass capacity, irrelevant in a grid scale battery, meant that they are not interesting for mobility applications, where all the research went until now.

The plant they're talking about near us in the UK says a 35 year operating lifetime.

No idea if they'd have to replace the batteries in that lifetime though.

60% of new generation is a good start but it should be higher than that. We also need to retire more old generation and upgrade our transmission lines / grid infrastructure for more efficient use of energy / lower our energy losses. Any major non-renewable investment stands to be at least 20 years of pollution before being retired unless it becomes financially ineffective.

Why build more when we have cost effective/low pollution energy available and we know that the costs of climate change are only increasing. It's a ridiculous economic bargain.

What we need is a 10-20MV DC national transmission grid that connects all 50 states.

States should be able to buy/sell power to/from this grid in an efficient manner at interconnect points. This lets a solar panel in Texas "power" a heat pump in Vermont at less than 3% loss.

Would be pretty helpful. I imagine the politics would be tricky given then the markets from local to federal. I can't see utilities and their politicians liking this idea or the ISOs for that matter.

Do you know what the CAPEX on something like that would be / return on investment? I.e. is it possible to build / financially viable?

I agree would be pretty fantastic and the dividends that we would get from lower costs GHG/$ would be strong.

Another factor to consider, especially with some countries currently facing the prospect of having much of their oil and gas supplies cut, is how fast you can scale up new forms of energy production and storage. Renewables do appear to be one of the fastest alternatives to implement, with some examples of 100Mw+ plants being designed and built within months, in contrast to e.g. nuclear which (at least in the UK) takes over a decade to plan and build.

Where are all these batteries and solar panels made ? How much GHG was emitted to build them, and how much GHG is expected to be saved by choosing this kind of electrical grid instead of alternatives ?

What are the alternatives? 100% nuclear with breeder reactors so that we don't run out of fuel in a couple of decades? How quickly can you build the required number of reactors? What do they cost?

Those cost greenhouse gases to build as well! The question is mostly a distraction, deliberate from some. We of course also need negative emissions; there is no way around humanity causing some greenhouse gas emissions in the foreseeable future.

A neat proxy is to look at costs.

For example, imagine a solar panel that costs $1000. They probably cost about $1000 to make, roughly. There may be some subsidy that allows them to sell at a loss but it’s safe to say it costs around $1000 to make, at a maximum.

You can also presume that energy is a factor in the cost to make a solar panel. So if 100% of the cost of the solar panel is energy, then some factory spent $1000 on energy to make that panel, max.

So that’s your hard limit on how much CO2 is being produced in the production of that solar panel: $1000 dollars’ worth.

I can't recall the source, IIRC it was EU research that looked at the lifetime carbon footprint of all energy sources. 'green' sources like wind and solar have a considerably lower footprint.

Which would make sense. At least in the UK, onshore and offshore wind are the cheapest sources going. Would suspect the amount of energy put into creating and maintaining them would mean that the LCOE is lower.

In a 100% renewable economy, where are the emissions coming from? Renewable sources don't create carbon atoms out of nothing. Cement production, maybe? Solar doesn't need cement!

If the economy is not yet close to 100% renewable, what matters is not small CO2 emission from making the renewable sources, it's how rapidly the remaining fossil sources can be displaced.

I'm not sure if there's such a thing as a 100% renewable economy, perhaps if you mean energy inputs yes, but there's always(?) going to be processes that involve emissions through 'work' as well as any emissions to create those renewable energy sources.

We can always offset. I mean, burning fossil fuels in itself is not a bad thing, but we know they're a finite resource and we simply have to offset those emissions with carbon sequestration.

Why shouldn't there be a 100% renewable economy? What energy inputs cannot even in principle be substituted for with renewable energy?

The reduction in fossil fuel usage needed to get to a climate-sustainable level is so large that any tolerable residuum could instead be handled by biomass.

The question is valid. But you need to ask the same question for a coal or gas fired plant which does emit GHG over its entire lifetime on top of what was needed to construct it and what will be needed to deconstruct it. I have heard that there are by now numerous studies that show batteries are better in cars as well as grid. Unfortunately I have no link handy

That's a good question that people use badly to sidetrack discussions about solar. The answer is that most research accessible online places the EROEI of PV solar at around 10. That places it in a firm "can be used" position, but too low for explosive growth, so any fast conversion into solar will need a large investment from some other energy source.

But notice that most research accessible online is old and solar is improving fast (while the fossil fuels can do nothing but get worse with usage).

There's a comprehensive comparison here that is interesting:

http://newmaeweb.ucsd.edu/courses/MAE119/WI_2018/ewExternalF...

>How much GHG was emitted to build them, and how much GHG is expected to be saved

While this is a fair question, I love how these types of questions seem to only pop up with solar/wind/batteries (and by proxy EVs).

Nobody ever askes how much GRG is used to produce an engine block, cooling tower, reactor vessel, etc etc.

US should start make solar panels then. Worryingly even LG (Korea) recently announced they are withdrawing from solar panel manufacturing.

Here's the thing: batteries only work for day-to-night storage. The math is simple: if you buy a Tesla megapack and charge it daily and sell the energy every night, then you need to charge 10 cents/kwh every single night for 10 years to break even. If you want to charge and discharge it only once a year (i.e. summer to winter), then you need to charge $35/kwh. The average cost of the kwh in the US was 14 cents in 2021.

That means we need hydrogen.

I also did a bit of math to estimate the cost of shipping from, say, Australia, to Asia. Assuming LNG carriers can be converted to liquid H2 carriers, with similar operating costs, then it comes out at about 2 cents/kwh.

If Australia and the US build lots and lots of solar capacity, then making H2 in the summer and shipping it to the other hemisphere sounds doable.

I think that multibillionaire from India is up to something [1].

[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/3165314/mu...

Hydrogen is one of many available solutions. Don’t make the mistake of getting too focused on one thing. Anyway the USA will have have such a percentage of solar any time soon that we need the more radical solutions imminently, though now is a good time to start planning

When addressing the "renewables can't do it" holdouts, demonstrating that a solution (hydrogen) exists is all that's needed. If there's a better way to get renewables to 100%, of course that's great.

Hydrogen will almost certainly be part of the solution, if only as a very dispatchable form of demand to supply hydrogen-consuming industries. And once you're storing hydrogen from that it's a small step to allowing some of it to be burned in backup turbines when very unusual situations occur (like that Texas winter storm.)

> Hydrogen is one of many available solutions.

There are many solutions, but they just don't work.

Here's a graph from wikipedia with alternative energy storage technologies [1]. On the horizontal scale it's the storage capacity, on the vertical scale the time horizon. All but 2 technologies have both capacity less than 10 GWh and time horizon less than one month. The only 2 technologies with both higher capacity and horizon are hydrogen and methane (both power to gas). If you care about climate change, hydrogen is superior, for the simple reason that LNG carriers lose methane during transportation, and methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. Hydrogen is superior for 2 reasons: any leakage is inconsequential, and any Exxon-Valdez type of disaster results in zero ecological impact.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#/media/File:Ava...

I am not an energy expert but isn't 50 gigawatts extremely low? Whats the path forward for replacing our energy consumption on a larger scale?

The entire UK uses 40GW at peak, or 2/3 of a kilowatt per person.

The US divides 1084.37GW among its 330 million people, which comes out at 3.2kw each.

There has to be significant room for efficiency savings there.

Some of that is industrial use, but yes the US also very inefficient at multiple levels.

For example in other contexts you'll see mention of a preference for single family dwellings. Unavoidably all the external walls of that property lose heat in winter. Even if they were well-insulated, which they usually are not, they're losing. Britain has a lot denser housing, with terraces (most properties share walls on each side with another home) or at least semi-detached (sharing one wall) being popular layouts. Obviously if the far side of the wall is just another home you're not really losing heat.

There is huge room for efficiency improvements. What we need is cheap, large-scale production of 24+ SEER heat pumps.

"IEA has launched 10-Point Plan to Reduce the European Union’s Reliance on Russian Natural Gas – heat pumps are part of the solution"

https://heatpumpingtechnologies.org/news/1/56971/

It is still speculative but this week I did a deep dive in to the SPARC fusion reactor from Commonwealth Fusion Systems [1] and it seems extremely promising. They recently proved out their high field magnet design and got 1.8 billion dollars in additional funding, and they claim they can demonstrate net energy gain (a world's first!) by 2025. This would pave their way for a larger production plant design ARC which they currently claim they can have running by early 2030's, though of course these things can be delayed.

But the major points are that the tokamak is a well understood design. Their system uses the same physics basis as ITER, but their more powerful high temperature superconducting magnets mean they can produce a machine with the same Q gain as ITER in 1/10th the total volume. That smaller size means that they can build the machine much faster.

A few youtube videos to absorb all of this:

[2] Is their original pitch lecture from 2016, and makes a compelling argument that tokamak is well understood and simply using new high temperature superconductors allows them to design better magnets to make a small reactor work. It’s the oldest but it’s my favorite talk on the system.

[3] Is from last year so is more up to date. It is a recorded video meeting so it is kind of boring, but the subject matter is very interesting. I actually got this funny feeling like "it is the future and we are discussing fusion power plants over boring zoom meetings". Like it feels more real because it is almost boring. But a good talk.

[4] Is a good 15 minute high level overview for a general audience. If you don't want long lectures, listen to this.

[5] Is a short 4 minute video with highlights from their event last september where they demonstrated a 20 Tesla field in a large bore magnet for the first time ever.

----------------------

[1] https://cfs.energy/technology

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKwWGUT8rCw

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KEwkWjADEA

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAv6p3grFVM

I'm a big fan of fusion research, but I strongly believe that fusion energy can NOT help with the climate crisis-- it's too late for it.

Because IMO ANY path towards commercial fusion (that is not a total moonshot) needs to go through:

1) small demonstrator (JET, Wendelstein 7-x)

2) scaled up research reactor (ITER-like)

3) demo plant capable of electrical energy generation (ITER successor)

4) Mass construction of a somewhat standardized design (kinda like EPR or APR-1400 construction)

IMO, considering somewhat comparable steps in nuclear fission reactor design it is SUPER unrealistic to expect steps 2, 3 and 4 to take less than 10 years each (and even that is EXTREMELY optimistic already).

Throwing more ressources at the problem might help, but not that much; IMO only step 4 is really amenable to parallelization...

You would be right if not for one thing. ITER and its planned successor DEMO take forever to build because they are huge. The whole point of SPARC and its planned successor ARC is that they use new high temperature superconducting magnets with a significantly higher field strength than ITER. This means they can build a machine with the same Q gain as ITER in 1/10th the size. Because of this they can go through steps 2 and 3 much faster. And they have already done step 1 in an existing reactor at MIT. They claim they can do step 2 in 3 or 4 years because the machine is so small.

They recently proved their magnets work in a demonstration last September or thereabouts. They have the strongest large bore magnets ever created, and this directly leads to a much smaller machine. That is why I say they are promising. Really, check out the links!

As optimistic as I am about recent developments, there is no practical path for fusion to be a path forward for replacing our energy consumption. Fusion will likely supplement the technologies that we instill to replace carbon-based energy, but will not itself be part of the replacement of carbon-based energy.

Well it's hard to say right now. It is hard to believe we could have working commercial fusion plants in 2035, but I do think it is possible. If the USA continues to drag our feet on switching to carbon neutral energy, that may unfortunately line up with our timeline. Especially if these fusion power plants are actually simpler to build than fission plants. Unfortunately it is very hard to plan for something that is unproven. But if we spend the next ten years going hard on renewables, we will then have an idea if CFS is going to succeed.

We could build out fission power plants, but if the Vogtle power plant in georgia is an indication of how fission build outs will go, it will be extremely expensive and take a very long time.

  > Especially if these fusion power plants are actually simpler to build than fission plants.

That really is the only hope. Even if the plant itself costs more money to build, the reduced regulation and ability to build almost everything on-site may greatly simplify the process.

I don't believe the hype yet. Fusion numbers do not represent the practical power output [1]. 2025 seems a bit too optimistic.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

Actually she never discusses the SPARC reactor. (I would love to see her discuss it.)

2025 is the date that they will complete their demonstration system and show net energy gain. But it will not be a fully functional power plant. Their slightly larger successor system will do that.

But you’d have to listen to their lectures to really understand. The tokamak is a well understood system. They are just using more powerful magnets than ever before, and they recently proved their magnets work. They published their physics basis research paper in Nature, and these are academics from MIT who have talked very openly about their system design. It doesn’t sound like there are any big unknowns remaining except the engineering design of the system itself which is well underway.

Maybe building this tokamak will be harder for some reason. But it really sounds like they can make it happen.

I'm cautiously optimistic about SPARC, but I don't believe it's going to be more than a footnote in the overall energy storage

At a fundamental level, our lowest cost energy options are really simple - wind blows and makes stuff spin, dig a black rock and throw it into fire, inject gas into fire, let sun shine on a blue brick, chop wood and burn, make water flow and spin stuff

Now compare that to - keep superconducting magnets 250 degrees below ambient temperature, inject high precision beams of deuterium and tritium into a vacuum chamber, capture escaping neutrons in blankets of pure lithium and berylium. Eventually, capture the generated heat in a primary-secondary heat exchange loop of pressurized water, generating steam and spinning a turbine. All of which requires thousands of highly specialized scientists and engineers to design and operate

I doubt it will ever be cost efficient. And we're not even talking about the cost of fuel. Tritium is mind-boggingly expensive - we need deuterium-deuterium fusion, tritium is just an experimental stepping stone

If fusion becomes a godsent reality, do you think we will see solar and wind companies fighting tooth and nail against it just like we see oil and coal companies fighting those today?

Considering that wind and solar is already cost-competitive with nuclear (fission) power, fusion power might never be viable (opinionated fusion fans often gloss over this possibility).

Sure, there might be potential savings compared to fission because less safety concerns, but the reactor complexity is an order of magnitude higher, and its far from clear to me that fusion power will even be able to compete with current (admittedly often state-subsidized) fission on price, MUCH less with the price of renewables now (or, worse, in 20 years)...

There will most likely be some sophistry/FUD on the part of lobbyists.

Fusion in the long-term answer will provide benefits far beyond just eliminating power station greenhouse gas emissions, I suspect, but there are many technical and economic hurdles that have to be overcome, any of which could be pointed to when questions about allocation of state funding come up.

This would / will still take ages / decades.

It could also be that it makes total sense to use 100% solar/wind + battery in everything not city and use fusion in city/for cities.

I would also argue that the 'no longer needed solar' will then be sold and used everywere else until all poor countries also are using solar energy.

Maybe. But oil companies were huge behemoths while solar I think is more smaller companies. (Though this may change in 15 years.) Plus the value proposition for fusion is so clear that it is going to be hard to argue against. We are going to need to use fusion power to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.

To me, it will basically be areas where solar and wind companies are weakest in a local market/jurisdiction where this will take off (as we've seen a lot of the newer solar MW capacity build out not in the US to date).

Also places that want to cater to industrial customers who may need access to continuous high power draw day and night. Like metal refineries etc.

Why having highly centralized power production when you can have it decentralized?

Are people unable to learn from Ukraine? Fission/fusion reactors are just one missile away from nation-wide blackout and panic.

With the new magnet engineering (basically the electromagnets are using some kind of metamaterial for the wiring that's needed to wrap around the toroid that's way better than copper, thus confinement is much easier with the stronger B field in way smaller space [the first research paper that talks about this being theoretically possible was back in 1987, but the engineering capabilities were not there to do such]), you are not limited by volume compared to strength of the B field, so you could have portable decentralized fusion reactors (they talk about this in the video).

Total power generation capacity in the US is about 1 TW, so it's around 5%. That doesn't seem extremely low to me for one year.

Global numbers from last year:

"A record 260 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable energy capacity was added worldwide in 2020, up 50% from the year before, ... Cumulatively, installed global renewable generation capacity amounted to 2,799 GW at the end of 2020, including hydropower. .. The share of renewables in energy generation worldwide now stands at nearly 30%, according to the International Energy Agency and other sources."[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/record-260-gw-new-re...

edit: removed a reference to wiki for global energy production (wiki is in TWh, not TW)

And assuming a near-linear adoption, 20 years sounds about right for replacing a nations entire power-generation industry. Even a bit ambitious for a nation of a few hundred million people with differing goals and viewpoints.

I think it's like 1000TW

From zero a few years ago it is amazing. This is an industry that is seriously scalable.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-unstoppabl...

50 gigawatts is equivalent to 156 million solar panels or 18,000 utility-scale wind turbines.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/how-much-power-1-gigawa...

total grid capacity listed here [0], looks like 4 million gigawatts, so yes 50 gigawatts is a small change.

edit: I'll never get this right. it's 4 trillion kilowatt hours of generation, not kilowatts of capacity.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

I think it’s 4 million megawatts, not gigawatts. Still a small change, but not as insignificant.

The problem is none of these articles provide numbers that allow you to grok what's actually going one. Probably because journalists are innumerate.

You have a total 4X10^12 kwh/year of production, that's energy. 50 GW that's power.

Wtf!!!???

Teasing it out I think. Solar you get probably 5 hours a day. Wind maybe more? eh, lets assume 5 hours. 5 hours a day, 1825 hours a year.

So 50GW... lets say 50Mkw instead.

50X10^6 kw X1825 hr/year => 91,250,000,000 kwh/year

How does that compare to current production?

Percent added is 9.125X10^10/4X10^12 = 0.0228 or 2.23%

Seems like a small amount but it's growing exponentially.

If it increases by 25% a year then you'll be adding 5% a year of renewables per year in 5 years.

I think you made a conversion mistake, that's too high. That's the equivalent of 4 million nuclear plants.

4 trillion kWh != 4 million gigawatts.

I really wish we would quadruple down on geothermal. I agree nuclear would be fantastic to add to our mix. However, it's so damn expensive and such a long process to build. I think we should go for geothermal instead.

We have plenty of dug wells and talent in the US for digging holes into the ground and pumping water into them; from the oil industry. Let's utilize the knowledge and people.

Does capacity here mean max output during best conditions or average over an year?

Usually it means "nameplate capacity", the maximum the unit is rated for, not what it actually produces during a year on average.

Edit to add: if you follow the link under the figure and see the "Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory", the Excel file that opens up has nameplate capacity as one of the key columns and I wouldn't be surprised if that were the source.

Also note, when calculating the economics (cost/benefit) of power plants, they do use LCOE (leveled cost of energy) which takes into account the cost of the plant over the energy it actually will produce, which would take into account those factors. But probably this specific metric in this article doesn't.

Then this headline can be really misleading.

multiply with 0.1 or 0.2 for the average annual output.

Remember: We need most of our energy in the winter, for heating, when there is less sunlight.

I'm a huge fan of solar, but until we have things like flow batteries, it's only a partial solution. (A flow battery would allow stockpiling charge during the summer to use in the winter.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery

sheesh. 2002 called, they want their fossil fuel talking points back.

A: Nobody is proposing making the grid 100% solar all the time.

B: there is no need for new magical technologies to make energy storage feasible. There are dozens of different battery technologies that scale well, including iron-air and zinc-hybrid, and grid-scale pumped hydroelectric storage has existed for over 100 years but has never been prioritized because emissions have historically been an unaccounted externality of generation.

Is it true that “most” energy is used for heating? I don’t think that’s the case.

If we are talking about just residential climate control, yes. If you include water heating with that even more yes. People don't think about the energy intensity of heating much since most people heat by burning things (natural gas, propane, coal or wood), as opposed to using electricity. Electricity is more efficient but not always as cheap as burning things.

So, no. “Most” energy is not used for heat. I imagine the biggest single draw is transportation.

If you are expanding this to include more than just residential, then still most energy is used for heat. Almost all industrial uses are heat based. Locomotion is number two.

With a heatpump it can be as cheap.

Fun fact.

Electricity is less then 20% of the US energy consumption and we are not even close to being able to replace the 80% thats relying on fossil fuels.

Furthermore the claim that solar is the cheapest form of energy is based on a very sloppy calculation.

The proper calculation when it comes to the price of an energy source is looking at it's capacity factor because that will indicate how reliable it is.

You can't use solar for baseload even for the 20% of energy that is electricity let alone the remaining. And if you are building batteries you are going to make solar many times more expensive than anything else.

The best way to think about progress in technology is to look at energy density. The higher the better.

Wind and solar are parasites on the existing energy net and makes every other energy form more expensive because they have to start and stop depending on when the wind blows and the sun shines.

Solar and wind is great for many things, but the idea of it being the baseload for civilisation is not just naive it's anti-rational.

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