Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

"Natural gas provides the most cost-effective near-term solution for affordable, reliable, low-emission energy. Shifts from coal to natural gas have produced the biggest emissions reductions over the past 15 years. Natural gas produces only 10% of the air pollutants and 50% of the CO2 that coal does.[10] Natural gas also has many uses beyond providing power; fertilizers, computers, medical equipment, steel, plastic, mobile phones, cars, and most consumer products are currently made from natural gas and oil. In fact, even solar and wind require natural gas as a backup because they don’t operate most of the time.

Energy Capital Ventures (ECV) is one of the few VCs that sees the potential of natural gas. Instead of chasing popular trends, ECV correctly sees the path to achieving low-emission energy will come through investments in scaleable energy technology such as advanced leak detection and methane capture, process automation and controls, renewable natural gas, and synthetic microbes that absorb greenhouse emissions."

1. Wind + Solar are insured for 20 years but last much longer. They are still in their early phase of adoption and costs are still falling.

2. Of course energy isn't a one size fits all - so you need to be aware of all the different product attributes and comparative offerings. Just like you wouldn't deploy facebook on heroku.

3. Regulatory and political willpower take long periods of time to build/change.

4. Capital deployments in climate tech are very different than VC and returns are lower

5. Manufacturing infrastructure and business models take long periods of time to build out and get traction

6. EVs are going to change a lot of the emissions space

7. There are a lot of very entrenched companies who have been actively working to stop progress on this problem since the 90s and they remain in power. Tough inertia to break through.

8. I could go on forever.

I hear that he is no longer just deploying solar, wind and ESS and is feeling disappointed that he has devoted so much time. All of that work helps move the needle and build the infrastructure, talent and capital to start deploying and cleaning up the grid. When he deployed EE capital in 2008 there wasn't the political will power (ACES regulations collapsed) and technology (most utilities didn't have smart meters). While he may not have made money he certainly helped the industry along and that is an important part of trying to solve this multifaceted complex problem.

Agree with the sentiment let's not let "Perfect is the enemy of good". However let's not let these hard fought gains be for naught.

edit: The OP's argument is disingenuous he's a natural gas booster, annoyed I responded in depth here.

This is theorized. There doesn't exist a nuclear power plant that is even nearly that old.

The oldest still functioning reactor is the Benzau nuclear power plant in Switzerland. It started operating 53 years ago.

Meanwhile the oldest operating(IIRC), grid-connected array is the TISO-10 (also in Switzerland), which started operations in 1982.

Solar panels usually don't just fail catastrophically, but lose efficiency gradually. In the 35-year assessment of the mentioned plant it was noted that the rate of degradation was around 0.38%/year.

20 years is just the warranty period for a certain performance level.

Geothermal has been around for a long time and has problems like causing earthquakes and needing very specific geological formations that only exist in certain places. But these limitations are mostly due to the fact that we can't bore that deep.

Geothermal energy exists under every point on Earth, in quantities far greater than we could ever use, in the form of heat which can be used to run steam turbines that existing power plants already have.

The problem is that this energy lies deeper than we have ever dug. If we could dig deeper, we might be able to replace the fuel burning part of most existing fossil fuel power plants with geothermal steam. Deep boring is a hard problem to be sure, but is it harder than fusion? Seems unlikely!

Anyway, this startup https://www.quaise.energy/ was on HN a while ago, and while I have no idea if their specific technology works, it seems like we ought to be allocating at least a medium size fraction of the fusion research budget to deep bore geothermal research instead.

"#Bitcoin enables value to be sent instantly anywhere in the world 24/7/365 for almost no cost.

Bitcoin mining uses less than 0.1% of global energy & soaks up stranded & wasted energy.

Bitcoin is programmed to become more energy efficient as it grows.

https://lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/"

Oh goodness. Let's look at LinkedIn

"Energy investor & writer briangitt.com Nov 2020 - Present1 year 8 months

San Francisco Bay Area

I help investors in the energy sector maximize financial returns [...]"

> I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safest and most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.

These two points taken together make me wonder how many trillions of dollars would have to be invested in nuclear to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels from 84% to zero? Also, I wonder how nuclear holds up in the "Security: Does an energy source enable a country to maintain its autonomy" department. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p..., over 40% of Uranium is coming from Kazakhstan, which is itself not a democratic country and a close ally of Russia. And the countries with the most nuclear plants have next to no Uranium production of their own. So much for autonomy...

I am concerned that this article isn't expressing genuinely held beliefs and is instead part of a marketing effort (and not just for the author).

Climate change is a problem. Just because gas, oil, and coal are cheaper and made improvements doesn't change a thing about that.

But once you transition to natural gas, you can't go any lower with fossil fuels, while to stop warming we need to get to zero human-caused CO2 emissions, so clearly natural gas is not a viable solution.

> I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and > batteries. This, too, was false. Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and > solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil > fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.

Sorry, that does not make it false. During those 20 years, energy production rose, mostly in emerging markets, while the transition to cleaner sources happened mostly in developed markets.

Yeah I see a big push for nuclear in the last few weeks/months... only the proponents always fail to mention the huge delays and cost overruns associated with those projects. Like the nuclear power plants currently being finished in European Union (Finlad, France, Slovakia) cost between 3-5 times of the original budget while taking about 15-17 years to build. And China is building nuclear power stations too and also seems to always be too optimistic about the costs and the time, while also building loads of renewables.

Actually the nuclear push seems to be too intensive this time to be random, so maybe it is coordinated - or is it just me?

We have not leveraged yet the potential solar and wind have. They are easy to build easy to understand, make you self sufficient and are now the cheapest option from all.

In parallel there are plenty of countries who have lots of space and uran and could do more nuclear (ignoring the storage issue).

And geothermal is a good option in plenty of countries as well.

But funny enough people still think that nuclear IS THE solution while ignoring that the thorium reactor is still not viable, that we don't have enough uran and that they are highly dependent on water for cooling which becomes a big problem in the summer for plenty of countries.

Let's finally stop talking about our future energy mix and trying to do the best option for were you are.

We need to get a ton of energy changed from high co2 production to the lowest possible very fast.

And btw. Whoever this dude is he is probably not someone who would be able or allowed to build a nuclear reactor so his best option is probably to still be in the solar business.

https://m.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-dea...

Germany's nuclear waste disposal will end up costing over 100 billion, the companies themselves shelled out a mere fraction of it, and the public is now officially on the hook for the rest.

I really don't get the nuclear argument. We are in a crisis, and yet it's being argued for a very expensive solution that will come online ... in a decade or two. If all goes according to plan, which currently is not really the case. We do not have the funds to go 100% nuclear now, so why not do the cheap and fast version that reduces the carbon footprint almost immediately? If it turns out 100% renewable is not possible, then build nuclear. Like I said, they won't all built in one go anyway.

A lot of that money was spent on R&D. Tens of billions of [inflation-adjusted] dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project, but the net effect on fossil fuel usage was zero (outside of two cities in Japan).

If this is the author's key argument, he's just wrong, plain and simple. For context, I support investment in nuclear energy, precisely because it offers the fastest replacement for fossil fuels. But that doesn't mean I think you couldn't do it with solar and batteries — you absolutely could — but the technology needs time to mature.

>1. Security: Does an energy source enable a country to maintain its autonomy? Controlling access to critical minerals and natural resources to make affordable, reliable energy is a precondition for liberty and self-determination. Relying on energy imports or minerals from other countries puts a nation at risk.

It's painfully ironic to read a paean to nuclear power that leads with this as its highest priority! Sure, this is perfectly valid for nuclear energy in the United States, or in India, China, Russia, the UK, France, Pakistan -- you know the list. But the modal nation cannot produce fissile material and maintain its autonomy. It will be sanctioned or worse. Just ask Iran, South Africa or Libya.

>7. Land use: What are the energy source’s effects on wildlife, habitat, farmland, viewsheds, and coastlines? For example, a typical 1,000-megawatt US nuclear power plant needs little more than 1 square mile to operate. Solar farms need 75 times more land to produce the same amount of energy. Wind farms need 360 times more.

This is largely a red herring. Actual land use is driven by the regulation of land use, and any energy-related uses are a small fraction. If solar farms displace agricultural usage in the Southwest, that could actually be good for the environment by reducing irrigation! Also, wind can be trivially co-located with agriculture, while for solar this is difficult, so a simple area comparison is not apples-to-apples.

>I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissionsduring the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas.

Upgrading coal to gas is a great intermediate step. However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited. Plus, many countries have already done it.

>I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillionsof dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.

We increased global generating capacity from 15,000 to 26,000 TWh. So green energy has supported economic and social development through electrification without adding new pollution sources.

>I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safestand most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.

Nuclear is the safest way to generate electricity, but that safety comes at a financial cost. Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper.

The default should be let’s not burn things. While we deploy the nuclear powered negative CO2 technologies

Sure, but that's not a long term solution. Eventually we will have to entirely rid the system of fossile fuels. Had we not invested in, an continued to develop wind and solar these last 20 years, and only focused on natural gas, would our chances to prevent global warming be any better? I don't think so.

> I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillionsof dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.

How much was invested in fossile fuel energy during the same period? Many times more! If investments in fossile energy continues at high levels, why would the worlds dependency on them decrease?

You are too pessimistic about the outlook for solar and wind. There are problems with renewables such as variance in production. If nuclear is competitive let's us have some of that as well. No reason to only have one or the other.

Because unfortunately most nuclear waste is stored on site because of the NIMBY problem.

So every nuclear power plant is a giant liability in case of conflict.

That one needs a citation to back it up. It might be true, but natural gas leaks a lot of Methane (CH4) into the atmosphere, which way stronger greenhouse gas effect than CO2. So it might be worse than coal actually.

My sources:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54 (around 16:11)

* https://www.nature.com/articles/493012a

I don't even have a larger point here...but I swear the loudest most passionate commentary on energy comes from people with no expertise. Nobody should hold dogmatic beliefs without demonstrable knowledge in the area.

I have a few buddies who work as electrical engineers designing power systems. I've witnessed them receive lectures on energy infrastructure from people that have backgrounds in completely unrelated fields like sales, law, marketing...etc. It's bonkers!

None of these results are materially affected by Brian's effort over the last 20 years. Federal and local government regulation and investment as well as corporate business decisions are responsible for reducing coal plants, constructing nuclear plants, and incentivizing "utopian energy". Brian's effort mostly falls into the corporate business decision category, but all we see of this in his article is a statement that his company failed to fulfill a $60M government contract. This experience really stands out as Brian's real inflection point, but the results of this effort are not only NOT discussed, they are--by his own admission--completely opposite of the government's perception of the results.

Can someone explain the chemistry of this ? I thought perfect combustion produces CO2 and that burning natural gas is closer to that ideal than what you get with coal (where you also get CO and probably lots of other stuff). So I would expect that producing a given amount of energy by burning natural gas would produce at least as much CO2 as that some amount produced from burning coal.

Up front, I get it. Wind and solar are likely a large part of how we avoid burning down the world. Without it, Climate change hits this area just as hard.

That said, wind farms built to preserve the environment aren’t exactly preserving natural spaces themselves.

They occupy huge acreage, and whatever unfortunate (read: low income and remote) town they get installed in is bearing the costs of a major environmental change by installing them.

During the day, 100s of these things occupy every horizon for about 30-40 mins of driving. During the night, they all (so all 300 of them across acres and acres and acres) blink red lights you can see for miles and miles.

It might be the only way out, but it’s not like a smoke stack or two occupying your skyline. The windmills become the skyline, and ruin the night sky which is part of what makes these places worth living in.

It comes down to I really dislike that the rural west and all its beauty is the location paying for the costs of a nationwide carbon mistake, and it’s paying in the way that changes completely what makes this area special.

If this is what it takes to not boil the ocean, these wind farm better go up in New York and Boston Harbor, Miami coast line, around DC, and in the Bay of the Bay Area. Or, we do solar farms. You’re going to have very disgruntled western states otherwise.

Make all energy sources comply to the same safety standards (like $X in taxes per 1 million expected lost life-years, from radiation, air polution, floods, etc)

THEN make the free market sort out how to produce energy.

It releases less radioactivity than coal, just to make things clear.

The only way I could imagine someone being an expert, work in the industry so many years and hold this false assumption just as long is to be motivated to not know.

Thanks Obama.

If he has such issues with how wasteful his own company did with the $60M they got, perhaps he should return some.

> yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.

Given the vast growth in energy consumption, what would that number have been without solar & wind?

There are lot of very powerful interests behind the "energy industry", roughly divided into four large sectors: fossil fuels, nuclear power, renewables and electrical generation itself.

At this point in time there exists a multitude of cross-investments and interdependencies, so it becomes increasingly difficult to clearly seperate the interests as it is quite lucrative to just play all sides, a convergence. There is actually a lot to gain from this stragetic move.

The technocracy movement in the 30s[0] as a third way (to capitalism and communism) had in its heart the replacement of the "fiat system" through "energy certificates" literally denoted in energy units of kWh. In some way or another these ideas are slowly creeping up to the surface in a transformed landscape as a way of allocating resources, governing, controlling.

It worries me that this kind of top-down-single-linear-metrics social engineering isn't openly and broadly question anymore (except in "conspiratorial" niches) , quite to the contrary it is embraced by a lot of ordinary people (who have nothing to gain from it but a lot to lose) to fight climate change. In a sense arguing over possible "clean" energy sources in the future and carefully weighing the pros and cons only touches the surface level without the actual governance model for its implementation. It is quietly and skillfully circumvented. Democracy Dies in Darkness.

[0]https://archive.org/details/TechnocracyHowardScott-ScienceVs...

There are a couple things to take into consideration when you go to design energy and food production systems for human communities from scratch - conservation of energy should probably be at the top of that list. Then you should lay out a list of goals:

(1) Minimal side effects: I've never met a person who wants to breathe dirty air, drink filthy water, or eat food contaminated with toxins, heavy metals, or fecal matter. This is where purely electrical systems really have the advantage over anything involving combustion - although of course combustion, fire, is among the earliest human technologies, along with tool-making (although tool-making is found in other species). Indeed, I'd argue for renaming the human species Homo ignis for this reason.

(2) Reliability: You don't want power to go off at random times when you need it the most. If you're in agriculture, you need to be able to plow and seed fields right when environmental conditions are optimal for planting, and the same goes for harvesting food. Industrial operations can't just be halted randomly either, and of course hospitals and emergency services can't be allowed to go down during natural disasters. This means you have to think about storage of energy - as electrical, physical or chemical potential energy - as well as having the means to utilize that stored energy.

(3) Independence: having something as fundamental as your communities' basic food and energy supply be entirely reliant on long-distance transport from some other part of the world is reckless and irresponsible. Interruptions are inevitable and anyone looking at the world today will realize that supply chain fragility is a major problem. Hence you want to have primary sources of power that aren't subject to such interruptions. When it comes to obtaining equipment that can utilize power, well, trade is not such a bad idea, there are things like Ricardo's notion of competitive advantage that make perfect sense.

Now, let's do a thought experiments: take 1000 communities of 1,000,000 human beings (1B people), and plop them all over the world, in randomly chosen locations that have access to farmland and water and raw materials, and ask what their optimal energy supply strategy would be.

Well, sunlight is clearly something they'll all have access to, and wind is something they'll all have access to. Uranium ore? Relatively few will be anywhere near high-grade uranium ore deposits. Coal? Coal is fairly common, but burning coal for power is a dirty business, see (1). Oil and gas are not as widely distributed as coal, see (1) and (3). Wood? Wood is actually a pretty dirty fuel source when burned at scale. No, we really want a fully electrified system if (1) is a primary goal.

So, the conclusion I come to is that you need to manufacture tons of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery electric storage for each of these communities of 1,000,000 people. The scale needs to be GwH of power, but if we look at sun and wind inputs, then there's an adequate supply for 24-7 power using this approach - with exceptions as you move towards polar regions, where long dark seasonal effects make nuclear power plants more attractive as a niche option.

You then find: https://briangitt.com/how-to-win-the-energy-war-tell-better-... where he basically admits it, "When it comes to ideological warfare, whoever tells the best story wins. Energy companies need to stop fighting a defensive battle and go on the offensive. Recapture the narrative high ground and craft compelling counter-narratives to highlight the essential contribution of fossil fuels to human well-being"

For another taste of this, https://briangitt.com/solars-dirty-secrets-how-solar-power-h... "In fact, solar panels require 10 times the minerals to deliver the same quantity of energy as a natural gas plant" Which is just a bald-faced use of misinformation there. I think a comparison to ongoing use of natural gas would look better, instead of "minerals". Intentional apples-to-orange comparisons are another part of misinformation techniques.

Fortunately, he has a sloppy social media history - https://mobile.twitter.com/BrianGitt/status/1516098825449971...

"Thanks to @AlexEpstein I had an amazing weekend discussing the future of energy with @peterthiel , @ShellenbergerMD , & other energy leaders.

I'm excited to watch Alex's book Fossil Future open people's eyes to the critical role energy plays in making the world a better place"

It's clear if you go back in archive.org and look at his podcast history, it seems that he is very interested in communication and media. I would not be surprised, based on his site and social media presence, if he was being compensated in some form for improving the image of the fossil fuel industry.

I don't disagree with him on every point, either. He's not wrong about nuclear and he's not wrong that renewables are a cure-all. That's the point of good misinformation, mixing truth in carefully to create certain outcomes.

This is frightening though, it is crafted misinformation for a HN audience.