Limits to green energy are becoming much clearer | Hacker News Reader

Limits to green energy are becoming much clearer

ourfiniteworld.com

21 pointscribbles36 comments

This, unfortunately, reads like FUD to me.

There are limits to solar and wind, both in terms of their carbon footprint, their operating window and their storage, but all these costs are quickly dropping and availability is quickly ramping up. Solar and battery technology are experiencing a similar "Moore's Law" of their own (Swanson's law [0] for solar and Wright's law for the more general scenario [1]).

Solar is at $.75 at the consumer level and sub $0.30 at the commercial level, with costs only going down (exponentially so). Deep cycle lead acid batteries are available, right now, at the consumer level, for $0.15 / Wh with LiFePo4 sub $0.10 / Wh in some cases. I would expect non lead acid batteries to also undergo exponential decay in price.

I unfortunately don't have the talk I saw it in, but there's a cute anecdote they give. They show a picture of a busy street in the middle of New York city, with the street filled with horses, carriages and only one or two cars. They show the same spot 10 years later filled with cars and only one or two horses and carriages. Where I live (upstate New York state in the USA), I see solar farms popping up. My expectation is that solar will become widely deployed and adopted in the next 10-15 years.

The author looks to dismiss ideas of exponential growth and adoption. I also am finding more and more FUD against solar and other "green" technology, falsely claiming the coal and the carbon footprint in it's manufacture is commensurate or outweighs the fossil fuel equivalent (it doesn't).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.

Better to bury the waste than to pump it as CO2 into the air, no?

Pointing out that exponential growth will hit resource constraints soon, or already does (like copper which keeps getting more and more expensive) is just a FUD for you...hard to have sane discussion then.

Everyone sane understands that unfettered exponential growth hits limits quickly.

Exponential is a short hand. We're on an S-curve and during the ramp up, the curve looks exponential.

Now the question is does the exponential growth of renewables allows for stopping CO2 emissions before they undo our civilization? I have not seen any credible analysis that concludes that. Only possible with major downgrade of our lifestyle. The copper shortage is only one of the bottlenecks.

> Now the question is does the exponential growth of renewables allows for stopping CO2 emissions before they undo our civilization?

I know this is not equivalent by any means, but the most pressing aspect of it is answered by CO2 (and other GHG) emissions, and relative savings compared to fossil alternatives.

The key thing here is that most pollution is more or less local. Burying turbines we can't recycle yet, releasing chemicals during the mining, all those other fair criticisms which are slowly being addressed, as much as they suck, don't suck as much as emitting GHG that affect the planet as a whole and every living being on it. The other big one is plastics pollution, specifically micro plastics, but let that be a separate topic for now.

The rapid change in CO2 levels fucks with every environment in which life exists. The acidification of the oceans, desalination through glacier melt, its long term warm up, warm up of the atmosphere and the resulting changes to climate and weather will grind down every ecosystem we rely on to not have our civilization undone. Food supply, quality of life, long term stability will deteriorate as time goes on, that's the risk we are dealing with when it comes to emissions. The longer we do nothing, the greater the risk that these things spiral out of control. Another forest gone, or another lake poisoned, as much as it sucks, and it really does, is a drop in the bucket compared to Pandora's Box being opened by polluting the atmosphere and fucking with the oceans to the degree that we are.

That's why we focus on reducing emissions and why I think the emissions question has enough overlap with the 'undoing civilization' question that, to answer your one question, you may want to look for answers to the other question, which is much better explored.

I have no idea what you want to say here. Which question is better explored?

We have here the viewpoint presented by article "renewables are and will stay limited", and another viewpoint "but renewables are exponential!" I believe the former is based on facts. Are there other facts I am not aware of? Exponential growth extrapolations are not facts.

Battery costs are already going up due to demand far outstripping supply and the exploding costs of raw materials ( nickel, copper, lithium, etc.).

The only way to know is to have a valid model, and do the math... Swanson's observation/hypothesis of linear continuation on a few data points is far from a solid model, definitely not going to be added to thermodynamics just yet! You need World-3 and much understanding of the EROEI of everything, intermittency, and so on. My readings lead me to believe that the current batch of renewable energy is heavily subsidised by many still-functioning CO2-producing activities, and a true renewable-based world looks a lot more like that street with horses than what you believe.

I can't help but feel the views of the author are carefully crafted to support the agenda of lobbyists and pro fossil fuel groups. The logic is really quite weak and doesn't support the current situation.

The author also posted articles that are anti-vax.

A comment left on this blog post:

  Interesting that we think we can substitute millions of years of natures energy (fossil fuels) with a few techno gimmicks; solar wind, nuclear. 
  Similarly we think we can substitute millions of years of immune system natural evolution with a techno gimmick; mRNA injections. 
  Both are woke ideas from the asleep who rule over us.

The author responded

  Good way of putting the problem.

Yeah these people are no better than Guy McPherson. Let's all give up and become mars. I say we fight like Zelenskyy and try to solve the climate crisis.

As the original submitter, I will one-up your ad hominem by pointing out that the blogger was an enthusiastic booster of peak oil theory in the mid-00s (as one might infer from the domain name). I don’t endorse her analysis, but I nevertheless found the data compelling and was interested to hear others’ perspectives.

Isn't that an obvious red flag? Given the hundreds of years of oil reserves available in the oil sands, peak oil theory is complete bunk now, and only slightly less obviously so 20 years ago.

The theory didn't say we'd run out of oil. It said we'd run out of "cheap" oil that's easy to get to. Sands are harder to extract oil from at an affordable cost. They only became financially viable as the cost of oil rose.

Technology improved in drilling and exploration so the theory is less relevant today. Still the current cost of oil (due to politics mostly) is pretty much that.

That's not at all what the theory said, that's just pure goalpost shifting to the point of uselessness. Tar sands are profitable with $50 oil.

I guess you're younger than I am. I recall reading the articles about how the world will collapse with $40 oil...

As with any established industry there is going to be massive inertia in everything between the contractor supply chains and the executive gray matter. This is understandble as it makes the efficient and comfortable value extraction possible.

Maybe the current events are the black swan that forces deep changes, innovation and rethinking in the energy sector that may save the humanity from the Mad Max future.

It will be very painful, but there could be a silver lining. (I admit I’m desperately looking for one.)

I was expecting the post to mention how nuclear energy fits into this modelling somewhere, and I was surprised when it didn't. It looked to me that it could be at least a partial solution to most of the points raised.

Also, large-scale geo-thermal. We don't need volcanos like Costa Rica to do it. We will have to dig deeper so it will cost more but it's still a great solution. It might also work as a battery to store excess solar and wind energy for use at night and when the wind isn't blowing.

Eh, we haven't been trying very hard. Germany has essentially stopped building new wind turbines (1, second graph).

Even now, when its become blindingly obvious that massive reliance on fossil fuels from foreign dictatorships is an immediate national security concern in addition to a intergenerational moral hazard, there has not been a decisive push for more buildout. It takes half a decade to build a wind park, if you can find a place where insane NIMBY rules let you build one.

Generation has still gone up (the first graph), because existing turbines are replaced by more powerful ones. We could have been in an entirely different place if the government hadn't stopped pushing for it 15 years ago.

(1) https://www.wind-energie.de/themen/zahlen-und-fakten/deutsch...

It is a bit more complex as well (the load on a grid has a real and an imaginary component). Many problems stem from the fact that most solar inverters can source Watts (real) but not VAs (imaginary). That means where traditional generators are able to use their inertia to deal with sudden bursts of capacitive or inductive loads in the net, inverters need to become smarter (or better coordinated) to stabilize the grid in all situations. Four quadrant inverters exist (inverters that can deal with all four quadrants of the real/imaginary coordinate system), but they are not especially wide deployed. Inverters with electronic inertia are in developement.

This aside of course one issue is storage, but it is not unsolveable at all.

It took around 22 years for Finland to get their latest nuclear plant operational, that's a long time to wait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653220

Yes, the second plant should be built faster but right now nuclear energy is a very long game.

It was of an entirely new design, so the long wait time was to be expected. And it's projected life is in the multiples that of any solar or wind installation, so there's that.

I remember in one of my engineering classes, we did a depressing calculation. Even if we covered the entire earth with maximally efficient Silicon-based solar panels (that would not be feasible to make in reality), we wouldn’t even generate a tenth of the energy the world needs… and our energy demands only keep getting higher

Please provide numbers for this if you're going to make such an extroadinary claim.

I think you got that calculation wrong. Most estimates put it at about the size of the South Africa could power the world

Using the efficiency of solar panels available today and the current energy needs of the world you could produce enough power with an area the size of Arizona. Assuming you ignore losses from distribution, storage etc.

If you did the calculations say 30 years ago when solar was orders of magnitude less efficient you might have gotten to those numbers, but today we are in a very different situation.

Nuclear base load with solar and wind will absolutely provide the vast majority of clean energy for future generations.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+556.63+exajoules%2F%28...

1.6x total area of France

Sources (these aren't great, feel free to substitute better numbers from better sources):

175 kWh/m2 per year: https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_8/advanced/a8...

About 550 Ej world primary energy usage: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265598/consumption-of-pr...

Obviously this is ignoring energy storage etc etc

EIA says world primary energy usage was 6.346×10^20 J in 2020 for the year (https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/data/pdf/ref/A01_r.pdf)

The average peak solar irradiance is 1,000 watts/meter^2. Assuming we get that only for 4 hours a day and no sunlight any other time, that's 1.44×10^7 J/m^2/day, or 5.26×10^9 J/m^2/year. Dividing those numbers together, we get 1.21×10^11 square meters needed.

Texas is 6.957×10^11 square meters.

You might want to take that class again.

> and our energy demands only keep getting higher

That’s why a lot of environmentalist’s focus is on reducing energy consumption.

Which is a total nonstarter and dead on arrival. Focus needs to be elsewhere (like nuclear)

Could be both.. My power usage today is way less than half what it was 20 years ago.

With remote working, my travel consumption is way way down. Food delivery has all but stopped my need to ever get in my car.

I mean it's not the end solution, but it's not a non-starter

Nuclear though. 100%

Works for those that can work from home. Lots of people can't though.

> Food delivery has all but stopped my need to ever get in my car.

Is it better though? Depends on your car, but someone on a scooter loitering, then going to a restaurant/store for you, and then to your home, and then the same thing again, is drastically less efficient than you doing a round-trip.

Ah.. I mean groceries. I never "order in".. Can't be bothered.

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