Researchers: World can reach 100% renewable energy system by/before 2050
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Technology isn't what's stopping us from saving the planet, greedy corporations and corrupt politicians are.
Most governments are not deploying storage solutions that would allow continous energy supply irrespective of intermitent renewable energy generation.
Neither of the above has anything to do with NIMBYs and everything to do with spineless anemic Energy Policy.
NIMBY is the town folks who have to look at them, but don't really get any benefit from them. A few farmers refuse to lease their land for wind turbines, but there are a lot more who have run the numbers and are trying to get someone to lease their land for wind turbines.
The deniers updated their messaging too, so you regularly see (and see in these comments today) people saying "Yeah, renewable energy is cheaper and cleaner but ... desperately makes up something to justify their believing lots of obvious lies ... in 2050 when we have lots of cheap, clean renewable energy something vague and bad will happen so we should just slow down and burn more fossil fuels for reasons.
So it's good to recognize that we now have better answers for the delaying tactic questions.
This will impact their ability to do public relations/lobbying and that will lead to more taxes and lower profits which will impact their ability still further and so on.
I dont think it'll be a linear decline - there is a political feedback loop here.
At some point after that deniers and skeptics will likely cease to be a thing as the money to push it will dry up.
He said we shouldn't roll out more solar and more wind, because they are never going to be cheaper than fossil fuels. How does that claim stack up today?
He also really doesn't like EVs. Imagine a German (and global) car industry that was making as many EVs as it is today, and growing every year, but 8 years ago, what would that would do to Russia's geopolitical strength.
2 years ago the price of oil dropped below $0. Don't believe the hype about oil policy being predictable.
However, the reason oil prices dropped below 0 for a short while was due to the pandemic and temporary slowdown of the economy of course. So I don't think that's indicative of long-term trends either way.
In contrast, oil and electric markets are actually some of the most predictable markets that exists today. Renewables and the weather are actually the most unpredictable factors involved.
It wasn't exactly voluntary.
All the more reason for haste in replacing&phasing out of fossil fuels.
It's better to do it on one's own terms.
I'm failing to derive meaning from that sentence? The feeling is wrong - they're not actually feeling it?
Europe is very clearly ramping up energy alternatives to fossil fuels, for very sound reasons. They not wrong about that.
No, there isn't enough to replace fossil fuels yet; yes, it's an abrupt transition due to external events. changing that is the plan. The plan's not wrong.
But the idea that "this fossil fuels thing is not something that is going to last" and that depending on importing it in years to come, has been demonstrated to be bad idea, is IMHO not wrong in the slightest. It's a matter of security not profits.
My understanding is that the European Union has had 2 options:
a) pay dictators for non-renewables, or
b) switch to renewables and not pay dictators.
It is a fact that European countries have been slow to adopt renewables, and have continued to pay dictators for access to fossil fuels. Due to the situation with Ukraine, this has now been shown to be an untenable position.
The remaining option is for West European countries to adopt renewables as rapidly as possible. This is now not (just) for moral reasons, but rather it has now become a national security imperative.
For most politicians, recommissioning those plants seems to be off the table. But why? Yes, it is expensive and not "green," but it will save the EU a lot of potential human suffering (and death) over the next year if they can do it. It only seems to be off the table because the politicians are unwilling to admit that they were wrong. The option you are not considering is to eat crow, turn the coal plants back on, and save lives.
Switching to renewables as fast as possible is literally not an option without the batteries, and there are not enough batteries to solve the problem. Switching to renewables too quickly is what causes the dependence on dictators, since the remaining plants are natural gas fired, which needs oil. Going "all in" on renewables in a more serious way will not improve the dependence on dictators for natural gas.
There is plenty of coal in the EU and plenty of fissile material. Turn the reliable energy sources back on.
* The EU needs to import Gas to run the gas plants. As it turns out, the EU is indirectly paying Putin to use it to blow up their own weapons supplies. Hence this needs to stop as soon as is practical.
* The EU actually needs to import Coal to run all the current coal plants it seems. Lessons Have Been Learned about the import of strategic energy supplies; so I presume that any plans leading to a long-term increase in coal imports would be a hard non-starter. Short term the EU is indeed increasing coal imports for extant plants.
The EU is stuck between a rock and a hard place here. I agree with you that the only way out will need to include very large investments in storage. I also think we both agree that batteries are not a viable solution for large-scale long-term storage, I don't think many people seriously propose them for that purpose though?
> The EU had a third option: hold off decomissioning the "dirty" plants (nuclear and coal) until the renewables could actually handle the load.
These are the same? I'm not seeing the difference between "as rapidly as possible" and "when the renewables could actually handle the load" ? That's pretty much when it's possible, isn't it?
The rest (e.g. oil vs coal vs gas, how much exactly to try to buy from Russia) is manoeuvring and details towards that goal.
I do not agree that this specific and silly thing about "before it's ready" is "what Europeans have been feeling". It seems like a straw man construction. ASAP means as soon as possible, not sooner.
But yes, war has been good for the carbon industry, both in Russia and the US, and no doubt both are keen to perpetuate this war as it gives them a new lease of life.
German nuclear plants are a blip. The amount them getting turned off get talked about is baffling, frankly, given their extreme high expense, the need to plan out decades in advance, the fact they can only do baseload and how little they actually contribute to german electricity. The current german gas crisis wouldnt be much different if the government made the decision 10 years ago to not kick off the shutdown process.
We have pretty much the same situation in Europe with Denmark, some parts of Spain, etc... Which still don't help with a big Germany or Poland in the middle.
Grids aren't easy !
But.
Europe knows which way to go - away from fossil fuels and being beholden to petrostate dictators, and is going in that direction, faster than ever (1).
I have heard it described as a a shift "on a war footing" (2) . The next winter will be cold, for sure - even on a war footing, these things take a long time. But the idea that this cause is harmed, especially in the time frame longer than 12 months is, I think, very wrong.
A "war footing" implies not just the investment in scaling up production that is not typically seen peacetime, but also that what's at stake is more than free markets and profits. Sure the fossil fuel industry has even more money because of the circumstances; war footing implies that for once profit is not the main concern, security overrides it.
The main hope is that the lessons learned in 2022 are not forgotten quickly, that the direction of travel remains in place, instead of reverting to increasing reliance on imported hydrocarbons.
1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-war-in-uk...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/how-t...
2) https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/russias-invas...
https://fortune.com/2022/03/09/europe-wean-1-billion-russia-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P...
You'll notice a lot of the political arguments are around will we hit the 2 degrees target, is the 1.5 degrees target now impossible etc. That's not what we'd be arguing about if 8 degrees was looking more likely.
storing energy is an unsolvable problem
Yeah sure. But if you have an abundance of electrical power you can literally lift up concrete blocks with a crane and generate electricity by letting them down. You can pump water up and use turbines. If you live in a flat area you can do the same in mine shafts. A German guy developed a way of cutting huge granite cylinders out of solid rock that you can lift up and let down producing high pressure waterflows that can be used to store energy. You can split water into hydrogen and oxygen and run turbines off of it, you can charge batteries. You can warm up sand in insulated containers and use the heat to power turbines. There is so many ways to store energy it is hard to enumerate them.
And if you have much more wind and solar power than you need you don't even need to worry that much about the efficiency of the storage system. Sure, you're gonna select the one that you can finance, maintain and find the space for, but a lot of that stuff could be built literally everywhere.
Storage is no argument any serious engineer would pull out. Serious engineers would say that our electrical grids are not capable to deliver that much energy if we try to replace every form of energy with electrical energy — and they would be right. But this is again not an impossible problem to solve. We know how to transmit electricity pretty well. We just need to build the infrastructure.
That doesn't seem like the best idea if you think about it: https://youtu.be/iGGOjD_OtAM
Pumped hydro or compressed air is way better on every front.
This illustrates, btw, that compressed air doesn't actually storage energy! The energy content of a gas is the kinetic energy of its molecules (and some small contribution from the potential energy of molecules at the moments they bounce off each other, but that's typically minor). The kinetic energy of the molecules is a function of temperature, but not of pressure.
What the air is doing is acting as a store of reduced entropy, which can later be exploited to convert that separate heat back to work at high efficiency. However, one could also do this by PTES, Pumped Thermal Energy Storage, where a reversible thermal cycle produces heat and cold, which are stored separately, then brought back together to recover the work. This is like adiabatic CAES, but instead of storing the cooled compressed air, it is expanded through a turbine and the cold of the resulting expanded gas is stored (say in a tank of mild cryogenic hexane).
Like you might not know what your going to eat next Friday, you don't know if the cafeteria might sell out of chicken, or if they'll be doing a special on your favourite fish. But that's different from "I will starve next Friday" or "I am allergic to nuts, and there will be nothing but nuts to eat" and it certainly doesn't mean you should put poison in your food today.
It's not physics that the limit, it's economics that suggests green hydrogen will probably be the winner, since as well as storage it has other uses. Similarly for batteries, the dual use tips the balance economically.
And the above commenter's point is that it doesn't actually work.
The fact that so many support and energy policy that amounts to "whatever, we'll figure out storage eventually" is astounding. If that's the mentality you're going to take, just let fusion solve all our problems.
But that is the nice thing going forward: there are many different ways of storing electricity and many of them will be tried. I am sure there will be a lot of new feasible ways of doing so in the market soon.
The question I've been asking myself in case we were to go for battery energy storage: would we be better off using decentralized system with solar + battery on every home / small community or just make massive installations and keep using existing power grid to move energy to homes?
Fully decentralised solar + battery might be the best option for rural / semi-rural settings, but even low-density suburbia somewhere sunny could likely benefit from having all those batteries and panels working together via the existing grid.
Yeah, another example that comes to mind are flats - the roof is a bit small to cover all residents' energy needs.
As always in life it seems that "it depends" but I think you are right about remote places. It is of course always better to have electrical grid since you shift the maintenance to someone else (as long as the power delivered is reliable and cost effective).
The one issue I can think of is current grid may not be able to handle many small energy producers - they can be cut off when peak power is a problem. In those cases individual prosumers would benefit from having a local battery storage system that fit their needs, even when connected to the grid.
I think we will see mostly utility scale storage. Most people will have an electric car that they can plug into, but that will only be done to keep the fridge cold when the utility goes out.
The other idea is having small communities that manage their own energy needs. Meaning 1MWh energy bank for 100 homes instead of 1GWh for 100 000 homes.
I don't know what the limits of different battery chemistry is, but I suspect it won't work. Though 10 years was just a number I made up, I think it is reasonable for discussion.
I am just trying to think about different possibilities, they pros, cons and what might be net win in this case. Your remark on people not wanting to service yet another thing is spot on, grid always works for them.
But local storage usually will be more expensive per storage capacity vs. larger storage facilities. This means, a large amount of storage will be there, because it is cheaper. Also the power company can control it better than home systems.
And of course there the electric cars which could partially contribute to the grid storage.
The incremental cost of a ton of mass and a ton of buoyancy are probably gonna be a factor of 2 to 10 less than lithium batteries. For any storage project: if it needs $1B of infrastructure costs for wires, dynamos, robots etc. just to start then you must be talking about building at least 10GWh before it is practical. so probably millions of tons for an oceanic gravity battery
It's a hard problem. Hopefully one of those magic battery tech from the past will be ready at some point.
On the contrary, the difficulty of switching to full electricity is very country dependant: some countries rely heavily on gas, some use electricity for everything. I didn't have gas in any of my houses for the last 10+ years.
On the automotive front, you already have the market and the high price of EV to make sure EV adoption will be gradual. I'm sure over time we can adapt to the increased demand with incremental improvements.
Is the technology not viable? Seemed to me like a green solution that is working ok and can be used now.
You’d probably be better off assuming no new grid connections tbh. You can effective force a distributed energy network. It just wouldn’t work for cities.
I don’t think a lot of people outside of homesteaders or people working in energy understand.
I can spend $25k for the solar I need for my house, but I’ll be spending another $50k for energy storage. And I’m in a more southern region… if you live somewhere in Europe, particularly the north, you’d need $50k solar and $50k storage.
Btw that $50k only covers batteries for 36-48 hrs of usage. Have 10 days of heavily cloud cover, gotta pull out the diesel engine.
I’ve looked at alternatives energy stores and nothing really has capacity we need. There’s ways to cut energy usage, there’s other forms of energy capture, but battery storage is basically it for single homes.
Fly-wheels and what not might work to stabilize grids for 24-36hrs. But I highly doubt on a week of energy, for instance. So you still have the same issues as single homes. You need the ability to start up engines (so to speak).
So it can be done. The problem is the higher cost than fossil fuels.
I can fly to the moon, if I had a hundred billion dollars. That doesn’t mean “I” can fly to the moon. These theoretical cases mean nothing.
> Australia's growing hydrogen sector has an investment pipeline of A$133–A$185 billion ($92-$128 billion), equating to 35% of the country's total non-renewable energy and mineral resource investment, state body Geoscience Australia said July 19.
Even producing the hydrogen is a challenge. Almost all hydrogen is produced via steam reformation, which emits carbon dioxide. Producing it through electrolysis remains difficult because electrodes corrode and lead to high maintenance costs.
We didn't wait until low air pollution technologies were cheaper than just dumping soot and SOx into the air, we acted to stop the pollution. Because negative externalities are a shining example of where government action benefits society. CO2 also presents large negative externalities. This is why you see climate deniers try to argue there are no such externalities from CO2 emission, because they understand the logic for regulation becomes inescapable otherwise.
In fact, read what TFA actually says about storage;
> Key pillars of this new energy system are solar and wind energy, energy storage, sector coupling, and electrification of all energy and industry sectors implying power-to-X and hydrogen-to-X solutions, complemented by upcoming carbon dioxide removal.
I chuckled when I read "Power-to-X". It's a pretty funny way of saying "we no idea how to deliver storage at this scale".
Power-to-X is using technologies that are mostly off the shelf. The particularly important one that wasn't, low cost electrolyzers, has seen tremendous progress. The Chinese are now selling these for < $300/kW, a fraction of the price assumed in the 2030 assumptions in that modeling site I like to point to.
Keep stanning "Power-to-X" solutions. But until you actually have a solution for X that works at grid scale, there's no real solution. Just empty promises.
You edited your post after I replied:
> Power-to-X is using technologies that are mostly off the shelf. The particularly important one that wasn't, low cost electrolyzers, has seen tremendous progress. The Chinese are now selling these for < $300/kW, a fraction of the price assumed in the 2030 assumptions in that modeling site I like to point to.
Except none of those systems scale. If they did, the article would have actually specified the storage system. But then they'd have to stand up to scrutiny over whether that storage system can actually deliver at the promised scale. Because it can't, they use ambiguous language like "power to X".
I'm sure you can remember many episodes in computing where the price of something (DRAMs, GPUs, whatever) temporarily went up because of supply constraints. It would have been deeply foolish to proclaim this mean price declines were over.
A similar thing happened with PV back around 2009 or so. The long term decline trend appeared to stall, because of poly-Si shortages. Dishonest skeptics claimed PV cost declines were over. What happened then? The prices provided incentive for more manufacturing capacity to be added, and the decline tracked back to the long term downward trend line.
You know what we call it when factories and raw materials can't keep up with the demand and lead to skyrocketing costs? A system that doesn't scale.
DRAM and GPUs aren't bottlenecked by raw materials the way energy storage is. It was a shortage of electrical components, not a shortage of copper. It is a very wrong assumption to think that resource extractions behaves like semiconductor manufacturing.
I will further say that for your argument to be correct, it must be correct not just for Li-ion batteries, but for all possible storage technologies. You have not, and indeed cannot, make that argument with any level of honesty, since you do not know the bounds of such technologies. This does not stop you from making it though, which is very sad.
By comparison, the world uses 60TWh of electricity daily.
There is no realistic plan to build this amount of storage. You have not, and indeed cannot, honestly make the argument that it's within our capacity to build storage at such a scale. Hence why you point to untested storage systems like compressed air or hydrogen electrolysis. We don't know that they will scale, since we have not attempted to build them at scale. You take this absence of evidence as proof that they will scale instead of recognizing it for what it is: and absence of evidence since hardly any of these storage systems have been built. This is your pattern of commenting: you concede that the storage systems that we have built at scale don't work. Then you point to the storage systems that we haven't built at scale and assume they will work at scales dwarfing anything we've built so far.
We do not have the capacity to build storage to make intermittent sources viable. You just assume that every new and untested storage system will be super cheap even when it's built by the terawatt hour. And then you call people dishonest when the point out that you're the one being dishonest about our experience with energy storage.
They said that with only solar, wind, and HVDC but no batteries you could get 80% renewable.
Or, with 12hr of battery but no HDVC you could get 80% renewable.
And, if you used only batteries, you could get the last 20%.
Which, is pretty good? They're not recommending you ignore other technologies, they're just trying to establish rough costs for simplified models.
They seem to think so back in 2018 anyway:
> “The fact that we could get 80 percent of our power from wind and solar alone is really encouraging,” he said. “Five years ago, many people doubted that these resources could account for more than 20 or 30 percent.”
>But beyond the 80 percent mark...Options could include nuclear and hydroelectric power generation, as well as managing demand.”
Here's where it gets cited in the current work (footnote 275):
> Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[281][282]; storage [40]–[41][42][43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[91][92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive.
E-fuels and "ptx" are ambiguous terms for energy storage. That plan is making the same allusions to storage systems that do not yet exist. What is "X"? Can it actually be built as cheaply as people promise? Until that's answered, this is just wishful thinking.
Here's a thought: we don't need fission nor renewables nor storage. Fusion will give us unlimited cheap energy! Now you have to refute every possible implementation of fusion energy - even methods we haven't built or tested - otherwise you're lying. Step up and do your job refuting all possible implementations of fusion!
This is the kind of logic you're making with energy storage, and it's faulty logic. If someone wants to claim the viability of fusion, they actually have to deliver a working fusion reactor and at a viable cost. It's not the burden of other people to disprove every possible implementation of fusion.
The Sabatier process (aka power to gas) requires hydrogen as an input so it shares all of the above. It also requires a source of carbon dioxide to fix into hydrocarbons. Usually this is only done opportunistically when industrial processes produce carbon dioxide as a byproduct. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at too low a concentration to be useful. This could be delivered through biofuels but there's not much energy density in them.
If they can actually deliver these systems at viable costs, great. But no one has accomplished this so far.
But right now, renewable electrolytic hydrogen would be far cheaper than natural gas in Europe, where NG prices have reached 8x those in the US.
Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS) per MWh:
- CO₂ battery: $50* - Lithium-ion: $131 - $232 - LAES (Liquid Air Energy Storage): $300 - PHS (Pumped Hydro-Energy Storage): $186
*Estimate by Energy Dome.
These costs would skyrocket if the world actually tried to deploy them at grid scale. The entire world only puts out 300 GWh of lithium ion batteries. By comparison, one hour of electricity storage is 2,500 GWh. You'd have to direct all battery Production to storage for 8 years, and pause the production of all EVs and electronics that use batteries. This drove the cost up above $500/KWh in New York for example: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...
Similar story with pumped hydroelectricity. You need the right geography to build pumped hydro. Most of it is in remote inaccessible places (Tibet has huge pumped hydroelectricity potential). The only economically viable sites are the ones that are close to transportation infrastructure. Once those are developed, the cost climbs as more and more remote sites need to be developed.
Liquid air was promising, but the pilot plant took $600/KWh just to build. And who knows what the maintenance costs will be and if it'll live up to it's promised lifespan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#/media/File:A...
Let's say you have a medium city, like Columbus, OH. This city purchases about 890 GWh of electricity per year [1] for costumers and street lights. Let's say they need to store 100 GWh. A kg of matter raised 1 meter stores about 10 joules, or watt-seconds. We need to store 100 times 3600 billion of watt-seconds, which is 360 trillion. You can trade mass for height. For example you can raise 36 trillion kg to a height of 1 meter. That's 36 billion tons or gigatons (GT). Or you can raise 3.6 GT to a height of 10 meters, just 36 MT to a 1km hight.
Let's say you want to use blocks of stone. The total US production of blocks of stone in 2021 was 2.3 million tons [2]. You need 15 times as much to only cover Columbus, OH, and only assuming a 100% efficiency in the conversion of the energy from electricity to gravitational potential energy and back.
The only substance that can be useful for this type of storage is water. But even for water, you need the same huge quantities. 36 million tons of water is a lake with a surface area of 1 square kilometer and a depth of 36 meters. If you have some mountains around you, then you can do it. But Columbus, OH is out of luck. It does not have mountains, or even hills around it. Building an artificial hill that's 1000 meters tall, that has a 1 km2 lake at the top with a depth of 36 meters is a monumental undertaking, that was never attempted.
Of course, you can try to play around with the tradeoffs. Maybe you build a lower hill with a larger footprint. But how long is it going to take to offset the emissions from such a huge construction project?
Bottom line: pumped hydro makes sense, if geography allows you. If not, it is uneconomical by many orders of magnitude.
[1] https://www.columbus.gov/greenpower/ [2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-stone-dime...
I think the point is that what we do right now and what has been considered good practice is extremely inefficient, engineering-wise and economically.
Why do they need to store over 1/9th of their yearly energy usage?
Do you really need to have a store of 11% of the city’s entire yearly energy usage? Like, 5 (almost 6!) entire weeks of energy? That seems ludicrously high to me.
But, yeah, on the whole you’ve convinced me. This does seem like a ludicrously inefficient form of energy storage.
But since you challenged me on the 11%, I did some research, and now I think that storage may not even be needed (aside from the day-to-night storage via batteries, which is already economical nowadays).
The EIA gives [1] the US electricity generation by month and source for 2020 and 2021. Solar and wind are small nowadays, but if you were to scale to cover the entire annual needs of the US only with solar and wind, you'd get a profile where on some months you get more than you need and on some months you get less. The longest stretch is in the Summer months (presumably because of AC). During those months, for 3 or 4 months in a row you produce less than you consume. You need about 6% or 7% of total annual consumption in storage to make up for the deficit. If we include conversion losses, and an additional buffer, then my original 11% sounds about right (although I just pulled it out of thin air).
However, if your just use natural gas for those 6-7%, then you don't need storage at all. Cutting the fossil fuel generation from the current 60% to 6% means reducing emissions by more than 90% (lost of current generation is from coal, which emits about double the CO2 than the equivalent gas generation).
You can also overbuild solar and wind a bit, let's say by 20%, and the deficit gets reduced from 6-7% to less than 3%. You can then balance the load using the hydropower that we already have.
So, I think the whole storage problem may not be such a big problem after all.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/us-energy-sto...
> The research house expects 9.4GW of energy storage capacity to come online this year and a further 15.6GW in 2023 ,with nearly 60% to be co-located with other – chiefly solar – power plants.
> Developers added 1.33GW of energy storage capacity in the fourth quarter of 2021, exceeding the previous two years combined, and energised more than 3GW last year.
No solution we have can deliver even remotely close to that amount of storage. Sure, you can build giant flywheels or pulleys or what have you. But can you build them at the required scale? What is the rate at which you can build them?
> Sure, you're gonna select the one that you can finance, maintain and find the space for
My point is that this is way, way harder than you seem to think.
But, it's still good to acknowledge progress from "We know that we could roll out renewables today to 80% within a specific timescale and actually save money, lives and ecosystems doing so based on proper research" to 100%. It destroys even that tiny kernel of truth that they'd built a very big lie on top of.
Hint: it’s not, it’s a massive failure, and stupid countries like Germany are now paying the price.
Once you account for these, renewables are far cheaper.
All the green movement is really doing is calling for better accounting standards for energy.
It is also a lot to blame the previous government for, who curbed the roll out of renewables, or otherwise germany would be much further ahead with its transition as it is. Nevertheless, producing over 50% of all electricity by renewable sources is an achievement for a large industrial nation.
Just look at France on how cheap and available nuclear energy is for instance.
Germany is paying the price because politicians blocked green energy they effectively hindered the expansion of solar and wind energy.
Take Bavaria as example they don't want wind turbines and prefer nuclear energy but the don't want power lines for wind energy from north Germany or a nuclear repository. Instead their Minister President suggests fracking, not in Bavaria of course.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20200825/france-authorities-shut-dow...
That's on top of several major aging and maintenance issues which arose some months ago:
https://news.sky.com/story/nearly-half-of-frances-nuclear-re...
Add in the current European wide-risk of the military destruction of the largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine, and the balance sheet for nuclear relative to solar/wind/storage looks more and more negative.
When I play with my favorite modeling site https://model.energy/ the place with the lowest cost to get to 100% renewable baseload is... Greenland!
(These assume the cost to install a wind turbine is the same everywhere, which obviously isn't right, but it does give an idea how good the wind resource is in these places.)
Renewables require immense amounts of storage to even out intermittency. Even just building one hour of storage is 2,500 GWh globally. We'll need around 3 weeks of storage to make a completely renewable grid: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
We have no feasible way of delivering that much storage. Wind and solar are cheaper to make small reductions in a grid that is mostly fossil fuels. Their intermittency isn't an issue there because it's just opportunistically shutting down the fossil fuel plants when wind and solar are producing. But actually delivering a 0% carbon grid with intermittent sources is not just hard, it's not possible.
Our problem isn't energy production, it's energy production with the least damage to our environment.
Trying to shut down nuclear because a river gets too hot is the kind of faux-environmental that's hampering out efforts to combat climate change.
Some people are also interested in not destroying the environment they live in, though. They are interested in acting as a global society to stop destroying the planet.
To that end, they want to pass laws that force corporations to clean up the messes they make and include the cost of that in their energy production. If they had to pay for the mess they make, it might very well make "green" energy more profitable and also help our environment. At the very least, they'd have to stop destroying the environment.
You should inform yourself before making wild claims. Fossil fuels are cheap mostly because of government subsidies.
Reminder that 6.8% of the world's entire GDP (5.9 trillion US dollars) was spent on subsidies for fossil fuels just in 2020. [0]
[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
Making statements that imply that the "cost" only boils down to "fuel cost" is essentially lying.
Calculate how much it will cost to power a city 100% with renewables for a week. Oops, you can't, cuz we don't have the technology for uninterrupted power draw from non-nuclear renewables.
And yet this is exactly how fossil fuel companies and their proponents (even individuals outside the industry, if you can believe it) justify their "lower cost". The true cost of fossil fuels is hidden due to extreme externalities such as their impact on the climate, ecology, and human health.
There's also the possibility of using both nuclear and intermittent sources. But between the fact that peak demand happens when intermittent sources are at their lowest production in the evening and the fact that nuclear is just as cheap to run 100% of the time as it is to run at 50% of the time, renewables become redundant. If we're building enough nuclear power to fill in the gaps of intermittent sources' periods of non production then we're building enough nuclear power to fulfill 100% of grid demand anyway. So just skip the intermittent sources.
Oh, but it is. It is such a common trope, always trotted out as a reason to keep using coal or natural gas. Often it is paired with appeals to nuclear power which isn't being built, leaving us with fossil fuel energy while we wait for something to not happen.
> So just skip the intermittent sources.
Let's say we spend $100B on new power generation over the next 10 years: $50B for nuclear and $50B for wind+storage. Which do you think will produce more watt-hours during this 10 year period? Which will reduce dependence on fossil fuels more? We both know the answer to this so consider it rhetorical.
Arguments against renewables are arguments for the status quo, which includes some imagined ideal that won't happen.
Solar and wind are good for the short-term goal of small fossil fuel reductions. They are not very good at actually providing the bulk of a decarbonized grid. Storage remains a fantasy, so that leaves nuclear and hydroelectricity as the only non-intermittent carbon-free sources of energy. For places with the right geography for dams, great. For everywhere else, nuclear is the only option.
There's a few other sources of energy like geothermal and tidal power, but those are similarly geographically limited.
Recently, energy prices in Europe have (roughly) doubled [1].
And suddenly -by comparison- that same ROI starts to look very interesting to a lot more people.
[1] (YMMV, check your local energy spot prices for actual numbers)
Heat pumps and solar everywhere!
And as the summers get hotter, everyone wants solar + aircon. It's crazy!
The demand for new heat pumps is very high at the moment
frankly dealing with a monopoly and a bit of corruption is better than dealing with the effects of climate change.
Coal industry: we are heating people's homes.
They’d just pocket the monopoly and continue BAU. More profitable in the short term.
and the anti-nuclear crowd that has been brainwashed for 50 years
In both cases, the problem is explainable - here's a person sitting on an oil well that brings them US$10 million per year (or equivalent), resulting in a lifestyle of relative luxury and abundance, and you say to them, shut down that oil well, use your saved resources to put up solar and wind turbines and batteries to meet your regional energy needs, and reduce your yearly income by 90% as a result, because no more exports!
Short-sighted greed is certainly a universal phenomenon, we can conclude.
Lol
It's almost like it was never about the economy, but just about keeping the existing set of corporations raking in the profits and protecting them from disruption.
Repaving the highway every six months would "create" lots of jobs too.
First, the current technology is already breaking. It needs to be updated and maintained. So why not invest the same money in the newer tech.
Two, the current technology is way better. We will be able to get more bang for our buck with the newer technologies AND they have the benefit of not poisoning our sky.
Initially, not a lot of people believed this and it was kind of expensive to e.g. put solar on your roof and even make the argument that it was at all economical to do so. That changed a few years ago and people around the world are doing the math and coming to the conclusion that these systems pay for themselves in well under half their supposed life time. Ever since that became obvious, there is a lot of demand for solar panels. Companies building more or better panels are popping up everywhere. There's a lot of innovation happening. And the net result is better, cheaper, technology produced at a rapidly expanding scale. We have already hit the point that even the subsidies and incentives that are available for this are not technically needed any more.
IMHO, learning effects, and ongoing research will cause cost to drop much further still. We have nowhere near reached the point of what is technically feasible here at all. What happens when you drop the cost of energy by about 100x in a few decades or so? An economic boom is what happens. Things that used to be prohibitively expensive now become cheap to do. And people start doing these things as quickly as they can.
You might think 100x is an exaggeration. But actually, we've already experienced that with solar in the past 20 years. Price parity was reached more than 5 years ago. I'm actually talking about another 100x improvement So four orders of magnitude in total. About 2 orders relative to fossil fuel powered energy, which is a fair benchmark because that's what we are trying to get rid off. At some point renewables are going to be so obviously cheaper that they start pushing out anything more expensive out of the market. The cheaper things get, the faster that happens. The more it happens, the faster learning effects, R&D, etc. will happen. That massive acceleration is basically what is causing people to move targets.
Perhaps more directly relevant for the HN crowd, Tom Greenwood's book "Sustainable Web Design" [3] provides simple strategies for reducing the climate impacts of the software systems we build.
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/WWSBook...
Is model code available so that it can be run by any of us?
I found the source code for the LOADMATCH model [2] used in the studies which can run on a laptop. You can email Mark about data, source code for the GATOR-GCMOM model [3], and advice on running it.
And here's a talk [4] he gave on the topic at NASA Ames Research Center a few years back.
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/WWS-...
[2] https://github.com/mzjacobson/Public/blob/main/powerworld.f
[3] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/GATOR/GATOR-GCM...
If you remove researchers who have differing opinions *of course* you’ll get the claims you want. Particularly, when those researchers are funded in a way that incentivizes particular claims.
Now to these easily debunked claims, look at energy production vs capacity vs consumption in Germany:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables.
This is every country. Because renewable energy comes in bursts. This also doesn’t include the fact it costs a ton of fossil fuel energy to produce a lot of these renewable systems (solar, wind turbines, batteries).
I’m not saying this isn’t a “doable” goal, but only way you might get there by 2050 is destroying quality of life, population reduction and investing all resources into this space. You’d also have to force countries like China and Russia with force… so good luck.
Renewable energy also doesn't come in "bursts". Yes, the maximum available production varies over time, for that we need to compensate. By storage, by grids, by having more flexible loads (for many decades providers worked hard to make loads non-flexible to make their jobs easier, now it is the other way around). And of course, some amount of power2gas will provide us with perfectly renewable gas which can be easily stored for whenever it is needed - we only want to limit that because it uses more power than using the electricity directly.
And no, to get there we are not "destroying quality of life". There is no idication it would even compared to our current quality of life. Quite the contrary, as cheap, clean energy will improve quality of life. You are also missing, that our quality of life isn't given. It currently is constantly reduced by the effects of climate change we are already experiencing. Europe is going through a catastrophic hot and dry summer. With ironically energy shortages as the water cooling for nuclear power plants is failing.
Just being able to maintain todays quality of life would be quite an accomplishment, which can only be achieved by cutting CO2 emissions very quickly, if at all.
>Heat pumps
Most governments seem awfully eager on pushing the costs onto individuals. With big inflations and a breakeven point anywhere between 5 and 20 years case-by-case, that's a hard sell for individuals and causes no end of political pressure. In practice, a lot of people are not eager to move to heat pumps in older houses, while (re)building is still severely hampered.
>Similar numbers for electric cars and many other usages.
Same as above. Electric car subsidies are incredibly limited, used electric cars still have to flow to the market at a rate they become affordable for the less fortunate. At the same time, there's not a whole lot being done about the short duration of generations which is part of what causes environmental issues (goes for everything, not just cars). Of course, combatting that means products have to become more expensive to keep the current cashflow alive, something most stakeholders aren't willing to bet on. Alternatives are cheaper public transit (which would beat out EV altogether, especially if the used vehicles become electric themselves), but again, governments don't seem too eager to invest into it beyond some token experiments.
And you can say this for anything. We already have solutions. We have tons of solutions, some for individuals, some for entire communities, some for the rich, etc. We're just not implementing them or trying to implement them without hurting the status quo (or pushing the pain onto specific groups). Which makes everything just not work in practice and we're waiting for the theory to magically solve our disputes, instead of adapting to the theory.
Case in point: remote work. If the environment was our biggest concern, remote work wouldn't be a discussion.
And of course the end user pays the costs. But if heat pumps are cheaper over the life time than gas, they are cheaper. And they were already pre-war and now are drastically so. By the way there are huge subsidies for heat-pumps in Germany, the state really helped there.
Not sure how remote work fits into the discussion about which are our energy sources. Obviously, we should also try to not waste energy - at least until we have a surplus of renewables. Doing more remote work can certainly help with that. Less traffic would be beneficial beyond carbon emissions. Remote work is one thing we should do more, but it isn't applicable in all case and only a part of the solution.
You'd think so, but the evidence is less than clear with some pre-corona studies suggesting WFH resulting in more emissions: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13762-014-0556-5
And some people involved in the transit space think that corona didn't change that: https://twitter.com/alon_levy/status/1538697382958968834
The basic gist is, the best way to reduce carbon emissions from transport is to drive less. This is most easily accomplished by being poor/expensive fuel (slightly unpopular) or living somewhere central with short distances and good alternatives (like walking, biking or transit). People switching to remote work tend to move out of dense locations, increasing the distance they need to drive for non-work activities and to the time they do drive for work.
lol what? No, energy shortages are occurring because of government rationing of fossil fuels.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/20/europe-to-ask-countries-to-r...
I can debate the other points, but the fact remains — 12 years into Germany “going green” and hundreds of billions of dollars and all they can show for it is… drum roll… 10% of their energy consumption and they’re currently rationing energy.
There is no shortage of electricity in Germany and energy is not rationed.
However, due to the need of filling gas stores till the winter, the government strongly campaigns on saving energy, especially any use of gas. There might be rationing of gas, if Germany fails to refill the gas storage (they are at over 70% right now) and if Russia cuts its delivery entirely. That doesn't mean there is a shortage of electricity.
https://news.sky.com/story/nearly-half-of-frances-nuclear-re...
The government is advising against walking in the river beds, as people might step on WW2 ammunition which had not exploded.
There is also some reason to assume Russia isn't completely stopping gas delivery to Germany. They need the money, the don't want to damage their own infrastructure, which could be the result of stopping gas export entirely for a longer time span. Finally, if they stop gas export entirely, it is unlikely that Germany ever would consider buying Russian gas again.
He really should be considerate whether he wants to cut off Germany from gas supplies.
Would be fine if your comment would actually criticize something not mention.
But it states that they include energy storage.
You 'facepalm and laugh ' while probably only skimming the article.
I don't know where you are taking renewable energy capacity from and what are you trying to say. Same goes for producing wind turbines, which actually doesn't require fossil fuel at all.
> I’m not saying this isn’t a “doable” goal, but only way you might get there by 2050 is destroying quality of life, population reduction and investing all resources into this space.
You couldn't make less baseless comments
Any engineer could have told you that switching to renewables requires grid expansion and ideally energy storage with renewable overcapacity generation. The more grid expansion, the less storage you'll probably need and vice versa. Germany is just another case of politicians not listening to experts.
The politicians pay the “expert”. So unfortunately, I think you’re mistaken. This was my primary point, you get what you pay for.
I totally agree any engineer or frankly anyone with baseline competency and a minor amount of research would come away with the same conclusions. The challenge is these “experts” have every incentive to push the political agenda. Further, they’ll ban anyone who disagrees. How many “global warming deniers” (99% of whom just believe humans aren’t the primary cause) are banned from discussion? All of them. They are all ridiculed, banned, and many can’t get grants or publish.
Th challenge is even with storage capacity (even a hell of a lot of it), you’re still going to get issues on the edges. For instance, if a volcano erupts and blacks out a region relying on solar… you’re out of luck.
You only have so much time for nonsense. There's no question that humans are driving climate change at this point. Might as well ask why we don't accept papers arguing for flat Earth.
> For instance, if a volcano erupts and blacks out a region relying on solar… you’re out of luck.
What happens if your primary natural gas supplier starts a war and you have to sanction them? As you can see this is not a problem with renewables so much as with single points of failure. Volcanic eruptions don't stop wind power, or tidal power, or geothermal power, or nuclear power.
First of all, it doesn't matter if humans are the primary cause. Any negative consequences of climate change affect us exactly the same way regardless of the cause. We are in fact much worse off if humans aren't the primary cause, because it would mean simply reducing human emissions would not be enough. We would need to do things to actively reduce greenhouse gas levels from non-human sources too.
Second, humans are in fact the primary cause. We know this because (1) we know what role greenhouse gases play in warming, and (2) we know that the rapid increase in greenhouse gases over industrial times is due to human activity.
We know the role of greenhouse gases because we can measure incoming and outgoing radiation at the surface, at various levels of the atmosphere, and in space. We can measure temperatures at those places too. We can literally see incoming radiation heating the surface, being reemitted as infrared, and getting blocked from leaving by gases in the atmosphere. We can measure the spectrum of the radiation at various levels to find out how much is getting absorbed where, and we can look at the absorption spectrum of the various gases there to see which ones are responsible.
We know humans are responsible because we can look at the gases involved and check the isotope ratios of the carbon in those gases. Carbon from living or recently living sources has a different isotope ratio than does carbon that has never been involved with life or has not been involved with life for a very long time. This is because cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere convert nitrogen into C14 which gets distributed throughout the atmosphere, and gets included in living things, and gets put back into the atmosphere when living things that breath exhale or when they die and decay unless the die someplace where they won't be eaten or used as fertilizer by some other living thing.
Carbon that is not involved with living things has its C14 decay (half life 5730 years). By looking at the fraction of the atmospheric carbon that is C14 we can determine how much of the carbon came from ancient sources. There are geological sources that put ancient carbon into circulation, mainly outgassing from mid-ocean ridges and volcanoes, which do put a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. But their activity has not changed much in industrial times. There is a human source that puts ancient carbon into the atmosphere: burning fossil fuels. That has changed massively over industrial times and correlates nearly perfectly with the increases in ancient carbon in the atmosphere. Hence we can include that the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change in fact come from human activity, specifically burning fossil fuels.
Enough for what? I'm not convinced the climate changing is a bad thing. Nor have I seen evidence it in fact is changing at any alarming rate (and I worked in this space for a while).
Increasing the temperatures and increases in carbon mean more food and more habitable land. "Global warming" is the best thing that has ever happened to humanity. The world has been warming for around 20,000 years and even if we take the argument "global warming" is bad at face value... Supposedly, there is no evidence we caused global warming until the industrial revolution -- right?
Recall history class, when the North American continent was covered in a sheet of ice. Recall history class, when you learned the largest dessert in the world was a green oasis until the last few thousand years.
> We know humans are responsible because we can look at the gases involved and check the isotope ratios of the carbon in those gases. Carbon from living or recently living sources has a different isotope ratio than does carbon that has never been involved with life or has not been involved with life for a very long time. This is because cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere convert nitrogen into C14 which gets distributed throughout the atmosphere, and gets included in living things, and gets put back into the atmosphere when living things that breath exhale or when they die and decay unless the die someplace where they won't be eaten or used as fertilizer by some other living thing.
Oh boy... C14 comes from nuclear reactions and atmospheric production. If we get hit with a solar storm you're going to see an increase in C14. You'll also see a spike after nuclear testing. I see what you're saying regarding the idea that we can see how much carbon came from ancient sources, but IMO that is pseudo-science. The baselines simply aren't there.
Which brings me to my next point, you say a very authoritative statement "Second, humans are in fact the primary cause." --
Again to my parent comment, politicians are using this "science" to hammer home their political agenda. They aren't funding contrarian research and if you share an alternative, research backed view, you wont get published. It'll be blocked by the editors of the journal (who happen to also be publishing research on how climate change is dire & are often political ideologues).
Having read a LOT of these "research papers" and having worked on climate models. I can tell you, at least I am highly unconvinced. Often these papers will cherry pick their results that they want. In simulations they'll modify their variables and make assumptions. If you read the papers you can see these curves that look too perfect for their theories. Then in a decade or two they don't pan out. The reality is "science" is hard. Anything said with certainty is almost certainly an opinion or belief.
You want to know how I know the authoritative statement "Second, humans are in fact the primary cause." is unknowable? Because we only have ~100 years of measured data. We have statistical reasons to believe certain things (like temperatures in particular regions), but we don't have proof. It is conjecture. It could be right, it could be wrong. Frankly, I don't know. I also know no one else actually can prove their correct -- so all theories should be on the table.
As for having only ~100 years of measured data, around 70% of the increase in atmospheric CO2 in the last several hundred years has taken place in the last 60 years. We have much more than enough measured data to say that nearly all of that increase in the last 60 years is due to human activity.
BTW, that also matches very well the curve you get when you try to calculate human CO2 emissions over time by looking at the known sources of human CO2 emissions and estimating their growth over time by looking at the economic records. Most of the human sources are commodities and there is extensive historical data on their markets.
More CO2 actually decreases the nutritional content of grown food.
Also, if the climate changes faster than animals can adapt, it can lead to a collapse of a number of food chains that many people depend on.
Finally, I'm not sure why you assume more land would be habitable when some currently habitable zones are on the brink of becoming uninhabitable. You just seem to assume that we'll end up better off because…?
> Nor have I seen evidence it in fact is changing at any alarming rate (and I worked in this space for a while).
Surely you agree that temperatures are changing faster than at any point in history that didn't involve some ecological catastrophe.
> Recall history class, when the North American continent was covered in a sheet of ice. Recall history class, when you learned the largest dessert in the world was a green oasis until the last few thousand years.
So your argument is, "there have been significant natural climate changes that caused ecological upheaval, therefore we shouldn't worry about this climate change that is also sure to cause ecological upheaval "? I honestly have no idea why you would find that reassuring.
Best case projections are still quite disruptive, and worst-case projections are catastrophic. Maybe a little more caution is warranted when the survival of humanity may be at stake, don't you think?
> You want to know how I know the authoritative statement "Second, humans are in fact the primary cause." is unknowable? Because we only have ~100 years of measured data.
You really need to read some more if you think we don't have evidence of the temperature record before that.
You make a lot of unsubstantiated, untrue and misleading claims, but just to drill into this one for people who haven't seen this classic dodge before:
"Primary Energy Consumption" measures all the energy in fossil fuels. About 2/3 of that energy is lost as waste heat when generating electricity which isn't actually useful for "quality of life" but people love quoting it to make renewables seem ridiculous.
When in fact, it's one of the main reasons they're a good idea and we should Electrify Everything:
Or it is that these intermittency gaps can be closed using long distance connectors? Has anyone done studies showing exactly where resources would need to be located and the length of connectors, modelled against weather and demand patterns?
There are also tons of other short-medium term storage solutions, and we probably need all of them that we can get our hands on, but hydrogen and ammonia are the ones that feel most likely to operate at grid scale.
Grid expansion can average over regional lulls. Renewables also need to be built to provide significant overcapacity. Storage can help, but you can do it with only those two.
Wind has higher output during winter
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...
If you connect wind production across regions the lulls can be averaged out, but I want to know how reliable that is and what distances are required.
Suggests Great Britain would ideally have only 1% solar, and storing 8% of the wind production as Green Hydrogen
Doing it without Green Hydrogen, just solar wind batteries would double the cost.
Connectors help too, though they also cost money to build. As renewables and batteries have plummeted in price, connectors have become less necessary. Once you have Green Hydrogen you can ship it around and store it like LNG.
We have plenty of technical solutions, but they will all continue to face an enormous amount of friction due to Oil&Gas profits/lobby.
We need a political solution and we need to have an honest debate on how to sunset a trillion dollar industry without them putting up a fight.
Compared to the difficulty in getting these nations to play a full and productive part in any transition (requiring essentially restructuring a large chunk of their economies), settling up with extractor companies will be a walk in the park.
idk, to me saying that fossils can be replaced by 2050 is pretty much same as saying that climate change cannot be stopped. I think the discussion has largely moved from preventing the climate change to trying manage how bad it will be, as it seems pretty inevitable at this point.
For example, there is no need for war, we can feed everyone using the technology available today but it is almost certain millions will continue to die from hunger every year and of cause the peace is just a wild dream.
We all understand how difficult software development time estimation is, right?
> "Many young people are depressed because they feel climate change cannot be stopped. We want to offer them hope by showing that our world can get all its energy needs from renewables at a price below that of fossil fuels. When we first proposed this, we were ridiculed, but this paper shows our ideas are now scientific mainstream", says Auke Hoekstra from the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands."
The one (going to 100% renewables) no longer implies the other (stabilizing the climate system within the lifetime of anyone alive today). Hugely expensive steps must be taken - retreat from flood plains that will be experiencing 500-year floods every 5 years, securing water supplies to survive epic droughts (with the additional loss of much of the seasonal snowpack in many regions), building termite-mound like architecture to handle the record heat waves, moving critical infrastructure back from the coastlines to deal with rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion, dealing with insects that love these new warm conditions, etc.
On top of that, replacing the existing fossil fuel infrastructure is going to cost trillions and require a complete reorganization of the global economic system - just look at all the oil tankers, pipelines, internal combustion engines, gas-and-coal fired power plants. No time to watch TikTok videos, it's going to be work, work, work. Scaling up industrial production of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries by a factor of what, 100X? Better get busy, humans.
Think of it more as an exciting challenge, adapting to these frightening new conditions - interesting times!. Of course, we'll have to raid the wealth of the fossil fuel sector and their investors to pay for all this adaptation and industrial development. Sticking the major producers with the bill makes optional sense. Implementing a ban on the global trade in fossil fuels would also be reasonable under these conditions (note that this was the first major step in eliminating the practice of chattel slavery, for comparison).
Even if there was an agreement on 100% renewables, i m certain it would get squandered in silly but popular projects such as solar curtains or rooftop
Throw in a physicists who actually understands the difference between power, energy and time offset and the green grid plans that assume the sun shines at midnight underestimate the cost of replacing on demand power by two orders of magnitude.
It is rather surprising to me how people who used to rail against the "evil corporation" now love them some evil corporation simply because evil corporations have been created to pilfer society through renewable energy.
It could be a scene from 1984; yesterday the people hate corporations they always have been at war with and always will be, today they have been told to love corporations and they do so with zealous mania.
This is a common insidious tactic of the media…pay attention to how presumptuous they are especially in headlines. I can’t even keep track of how many baseless claims they make as if they’re accepted fact anymore.
Beside that: I doubt. Cyclically we see promise, like IBM research that cyclically say they achieve a hyper-big advances in storage, something that "in the near future" can store Zettabyte of data in a rice grain etc, and I still have to see anything even similar. I have built my new home, just six years ago, well insulated, airtight, with proper ventilation, recently upgraded from passive temperature recovery (classic VMC with a paper heat-exchanger) to a heat-pump one, with a small p.v. and lithium storage, all electric again with heat-pumps etc. well it can potentially be "autonomous" IF I'm willing to waste a very big amount of money in a very big battery, much more space for solar panels to have enough energy to recharge the bigger battery AND still depending on a grid or generator for backup because a "reasonably bigger" battery (BEVs alike size) suffice to be comfortable just from a day to the next. Just two day means I need more land to harvest enough energy from the Sun. Oh and that being in France south Alps so in a significantly sunny place. Oh I'm just talking about a home, not a factory.
Sure we can already made let's say a glass production AND recycling factory 100% circular and renewable, we just need mountain hydro nearby. Enough, perhaps, if we are Norway with many mountains, water, little population. Or maybe Iceland with geothermal. Hardly for France.
So far we have seen MANY promises in terms of new battery tech, but essentially nothing really ready. Potentially in 2050 we can even have finally achieved nuclear fusion, witch is renewable formally. But we can't forecast that. It's a hope. It might be even computed in a game-of-if: if we finally discover a battery tech with this and that characteristic we can produce on scale with this and that intensity what time it take to spread it? It's still a study, but just an hypothetical one.
What we see so far is that FOR HOMES we can made single-family homes almost everywhere and power that with electricity only at rate "small enough" to be sustainable even at some arctic latitudes. This on scale means we need abandon dense tall-buildings since YES, we can made them TODAY with similar energy needs BUT we can't really upgrade them in the future, so to be future proof we need homes like cars, with a longer life-cycle but still small enough to be created and re-created after a certain amount of times (like a single human life) to align them with current needs and tech at any point in time. It might be doable if we agree to do so even before 2050 at least in western world, but I see no real push to do so. Just few do so on their own, no plans to design a new society seems to go in that direction, UN New Urban Agenda goes actually in the OPPOSITE direction. The rest are collection of dreams.
The world doesn't need 100% renewable energy, and does not need to build enormous power storage farms to deal with unstable power supply from solar and wind. The correct answer is nuclear power, and the sooner people will stop having NDS (Nuclear Derangement Syndrome), the better for humanity.
Look at the situation in Ukraine with Russia actively threatening the stability of their nuclear power plant as a bargaining chip. Attacks on nuclear facilities during war are quite common, even the US has done it a few times.
Also, unstable countries need energy too - would it really be a good idea to start building nuclear power plants in Syria or Somalia?
Perhaps we need an international UN agency in charge of all nuclear reactors in the world, with every country signing a defence pact? To be clear, I do want nuclear power, I just don't feel like society is stable enough to deliver it.
The thing no one talks about.
A battery that can store energy over 24 hours costs more than an equivalent nuclear power plant, loses half it's capacity within a decade and has never been build.
The closest one in South Australia could match a nuclear plant for all of 10 minutes and still needed the solar panel and wind generation to work.
We're out of time. We don't have another 40 years to wait for renewables to mature.
Seems like small losses for large distances.
Theoretically long distance sounds like fancy idea, but I don't think geopolitics are exactly ready for that yet. At least not on intercontinental scale.
Outside of Russia there are no transcontinental high voltage lines.
The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country.
The European market is probably the most tightly coupled in the world and the inter-border power lines can carry less than 20% of most countries power demand.
>Or convert the excess capacity to green hydrogen which is used as an energy source for things like steel manufacturing?
We don't have 40 years to wait for that technology to mature. We need to be cutting emissions now. Green energy has resulted in increasing use of fossil fuels. The only reason why total CO2 production has dropped is because we've been building gas power plants instead of coal.
Aren't these paid for by the excess electricity that you've sold?
> Outside of Russia there are no transcontinental high voltage lines. The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country. The European market is probably the most tightly coupled in the world and the inter-border power lines can carry less than 20% of most countries power demand.
Isn't this simply describing what the current situation is?
That is because America technically is not or should not be and what definitely not founded as "a single country". The USA was supposed to be and by law, i.e., the constitution should far more be governed like a ~2005 EU. The Federal government is in many ways extremely illegitimate in how it acts in illegal ways in direct violation and contradiction with the Constitution, i.e., the supreme law of the land, i.e., the highest law above which even Federal legislators cannot act without violating the law.
It is one of those fundamental things that the vast majority of people even in the USA simply do not comprehend on an even basic level, not even to mention anyone outside of the US. It's one of those obvious and blatant lies that humans somehow have the capacity to simply live with as if it is not a lie.
It is an odd phenomenon when one is able to recognize the mass delusion for what it is. Imagine being somewhere in a group and all the sudden everyone in that group but you insists that grass is in fact not green at all, but rather purple. You would be astonished and confused at first and incredulous as to what is going on, before you went through some phases to rest on a kind of bargained acceptance of "ok, well I guess we are doing that now", regardless of how insane and stupid it is.
We can and should do more high voltage DC interconnects, but that isn't the same as making the grid larger.
We just need 10 of those and we'd have covered the base load of NSW as long as there isn't a drought in the worlds driest continent.
Now all we need to do is build a few mountains to put the dams in and we're golden.
On the other we have 20 years of missed deadlines and broken promises. Watching Germany head to a winter where people will freeze to death if Putin cuts the gas is hilarious. Here's hoping that it finally cures them of their delusions.
Unless you count pumped storage, in which case it has.
In Central Europe, where I live, there aren't that many opportunities left to build new ones on a large enough scale. Also, if a drought comes, you suddenly have a double whammy on your hands: not enough water and not enough electricity.
The nuclear/carbon lobbies opine pretty loudly that there isnt enough suitable geography for it around the world. They are not correct though: https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...
That's a whole lot of important things that they didn't even bother to check before pushing out a nice impressive press release for the media to latch on to. Also, from what I can tell even finding that many potential candidates required changing the very definition of a suitable site away from the type actually used by existing real-world pumped hydro projects.
Nonetheless nuclear power really doesnt stack up well against pumped storage on any of those other dimensions either. Certainly not cost or NIMBY potential.
> Fifth, many scenarios suffer from incomplete power-to-X routes, a lack of comprehensive sector coupling, and excessively high costs assumed for key flexibility-providing technologies: batteries and electrolyzers. These are the two most important VRE supporting technologies that strongly increase the VRE supply share in scenarios by overcoming the day-night limitation of solar PV, supporting strong electrification of practically all on-road transportation, squeezing out biofuels for road vehicles, and enabling highly cost-attractive power-to-hydrogen-to-X routes for almost all remaining energy segments that cannot be directly electrified, including long-distance transportation, high temperature industrial energy demand that may remain despite comprehensive direct electrification, and hydrogen-based chemicals demand in industry. Thus, low-cost batteries, low-cost electrolyzers, and established power-to-X routes strongly increase the VRE share in covering the total primary energy demand. Solar PV benefits more from low-cost electrolyzers than wind power, since low-cost electricity is most efficiently matched with relatively inflexible energy demand categories through the intermediaries of hydrogen storage and electrolyzer-based power-to-X routes
Since you mention Australia, they seemed to be one of the first movers on green hydrogen, though everyone else seems to have caught up recently.
The amount of hydrogen used just for fertilizer globally dwarfs the amount of pumped hydro storage by multiple orders of magnitude.
There aren't any because they don't exist.
Renewables without grid scale storage are a pipe dream. We don't have grid scale energy storage and we won't have it for decades yet.
https://www.energy-storage.news/western-australia-putting-10...
> The initial rollout seeks to replace reliance on about 762km of overhead power lines, in the process freeing up land for agricultural use and crucially reducing the risk of bushfires caused by problems with power infrastructure going to remote areas.
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
Suggests you'd need enough batteries to run Western Australia for 1 hour and enough green hydrogen produced to power the region for 11 days. But mostly it would be wind and solar.
If for whatever reason you think Australia isn't about to start making Green Hydrogen at scale, they also provide numbers if you want to go hard on batteries.
You'd use 150% more solar and 10x more batteries, but 6% less wind (and no power-to-x turbines) this would cost a whopping 50% more overall and be 10 hours of battery storage.
Wonderful, they spend $37 million on 1,000. Now they just need to use the savings from the $37 million to offset the next 130 trillion dollars needed for the next 299,000 installations.
So, they don't need to buy and burn fuel, they don't need to build or maintain transmission, they don't need to fight as many bushfires, they get to sell the land that was previously occupied by pylons etc. etc.
The claim was that batteries didn't exist and/or were too expensive.
And yet here, as in EVs, there is a situation were cold hard cash dictates that rolling out batteries is a good idea. And that's what's driving the massive global expansion of battery production.
[1] https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/batteries-and-energy-storage/n...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-24/community-battery-yac...
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-05/community-battery-in-...
'Community' local area batteries are $1 million (AU) and service ~ 200 homes (at $5,000 per home across a decade) with some 280 kilowatt-hours of storage, soaking up power during the day from rooftop solar | wind and feeding it back at night | during lulls.
These complement hybrid smart grids and greatly reduce fossil fuel usage at approx $500 per home per year.
Early days, time will tell.
Renewables don't technically need storage, as long as you overbuild them and expand the grid to average over regional variability. Storage just obviates the need for expanding the grid. This was all known decades ago when I was studying engineering. The technology is not the problem, the political will has always been the problem.
Yeah, "lack of political will" is exactly the problem, because the incentives to continue spending in the current manner are considerable.
[1] https://energystorage.org/why-energy-storage/technologies/co...
[2] https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/sepm/article/view/1574/131...
and, of course, there are other approaches.
What a bargain.
Oh sorry, we could have the storage facilities of a single hydrogen storage plant with none of the equipment needed to turn the stored hydrogen to electricity.
You mean six reactors that produce about the storage capacity of the hydrogen storage facility over a year, I'm guessing.
The problem is the nuclear power plants just dribble out their power at a constant rate, while hydrogen storage can deliver its output just when it's needed (and is most valuable). In other words, the hydrogen output is dispatchable, nuclear is not. The output part of the hydrogen storage would be either simple cycle turbines or combined cycle, which are 20x (10x for CC) cheaper than NPPs per unit power output.
Total yearly energy consumption here (of all forms of energy) is 1,271.9 PJ aka 3.533056e+11 kilowatt hours aka 353.3 TWh or approx 1 TWh / day.
Given the dispersed area we're more interested in distributed buffering storage to smooth solar, wind, and wave generated energy over the top of natural gas baseload generation.
Thanks for the ridiculous non applicable straw question though, that was a chuckle.
Multiple have been built, for cheaper than a nuclear reactor, losing zero capacity within a decade.
I present you Nant de Drance [0]:
- 20 GWh of storage capacity
- 900 MW of power
- 2.1 * 10^9 USD cost
This kind of project cannot be replicated just anywhere. Other fairly cheap large scale scalable electricity storage solutions do exist.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nant_de_Drance_Hydropower_Plan...
The best sites for this have been taken already, but there is still some potential in new sites and optimisation of existing ones.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldisthal_Pumped_Storage_Stat...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markersbach_Pumped_Storage_Pow...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BBarnowiec_Pumped_Storage_...
[3] https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/01/18/poland-set-to-resume-...
> The thing no one talks about.
Given how many people talk about energy storage every time renewables come up (including in this very thread), would you agree to stop pretending they don't? You're not smarter than the rest of us for "finding" the storage issue or better for "revealing" it to us. Just stop telling lies, that's all I ask here.
He even quoted it for you.
And it isn't going to happen at all if at least some citizens don't take a cut to their quality of life (compared to what they could have had with no action)
So it's a trade-off....
What you suggest would push many Energy companies and the entire Oil&Gas complex into insolvency. So I can guarantee that politically there will be no "trade-off".
Of course emissions per capita matter but this constant spin that consumers drive demand and depiction of industry as a passive agent victim of consumer desire is naive at best and malicious at worse.
It's product of thousands more variables and the most important ones are urban planning and social issues.
You're roughly claiming that "Decoupling" (economic growth without resource consumption) is not only possible but has already occurred? Seriously? Global GDP is very highly correlated with energy use, fossil fuel use specifically.
You probably heard that some countries (the US, EU) are in the process of decoupling. Bullshit. Looking at this on a per-country basis is a deeply flawed analysis at best, a deceptive account trick. We have a global trade network and you can't outsource your fuel consumption to China, import their products, and call yourself green. If you extend the analysis globally, you will not find decoupling at all - energy is the economy.
I encourage you to read this paper by the European Environmental Bureau: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
So it is GDP. Also environmental impact, happiness an much more.
Yet you can find plenty of lists of countries by per capita income, QoL and so on and make comparisons.
> But if we take economic output as a proxy, it's your view that is demonstrably false.
Wrong.
> You're roughly claiming that ... is not only possible but has already occurred?
It's clearly shown if you compare QoL vs environmental impact across nothern european countries, japan and US for example.
US being pretty terrible at that, to no surprise.
> Bullshit.
You can do better.
> I encourage you to read this paper by the European Environmental Bureau: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
From the landing page: "Is it possible to enjoy both economic growth and environmental sustainability?"
...which is nowhere close to my initial point.
And for the record I'm actually going to finish reading the pdf instead of just calling things "Bullshit"
Sorry for the language but the argument that you can have economic growth without energy/resource consumption is just plain false. I'm deeply frustrated that people continue parroting that view without any credible evidence.
To be fair to you, your initial point only hinted at Decoupling and didn't claim it directly. My bad.
> "Is it possible to enjoy both economic growth and environmental sustainability?" ...which is nowhere close to my initial point
So in your view, quality of life and happiness are separate concerns from "the economy"? I truly hope you're right! We may never be able to decouple resource extraction from economic production - but we might have a shot at decoupling economic production from QoL if we can learn to collectively reduce our consumption and find more fulfilling ways to live on less. There's no historical precedent for a civilization ever willingly de-growing themselves and surviving (see the work of Joseph Tainter) let alone thriving, but one can hope.
If a renewable energy source is for example twice cheaper overall including the need to reinvest 25% then it is twice cheaper overall.
Sadly regarding renewables, there is no twice cheaper available right now. Maybe through innovation somewhere in the future. Right now only hydro power is close to fossil fuel energy density. But it is only available in a few places around the world.
It's about everyone's best option for energy production and consumption. Rather than the "greens" and their iPhones — let's have the discussion and make informed choices, rather than accepting the status quo as the choice.
Energy density is at best a contributor to cost, but if we have the actual cost there's no reason to use this dubious substitute. No reason, that is, unless you know the actual cost figures do not support your argument and are trying to dissemble.
Money is quasi-energy. The petrodollar is not a joke. It literally binds the US dollar to barrels of oil. As everybody needs energy / oil, everybody needs US dollars.
Except it isn't. Energy is only one of the resources that goes into making things. Other costs, like materials, labor and cost of capital, are also important. Nuclear has the problem that these other costs are significantly higher than for renewables.
There is an insane amount of commodity input into so called renewable energy sources.
And what happens once you have two or more dry, becalmed winters, going to be hellishly cold when there is no juice in the battery and you've killed all meaningful hydrocarbon energy sources. On a long enough time line you will eventually not have enough storage to cover these scenarios. The idiocy of the narrative "climate change makes the climate unpredicable, solution become dependent on the climate", fucking moronic.
The EU could be a revelation of what's to come. The current drought has brought hydro to it's limits, the progressive liberal foreign policy has starved it of hydrocarbons. If this winter is cold and becalmed europe will collapse and all of you bleeding heart liberal bear responsibility for the millions who will die.
And if we do get through this winter we'll have the massive global shortfall in food due to the war on fertilizer both the Netherlands and Canada are waging.
You know what, fuck the animals and fuck the climate I want to be able to eat and not freeze to death.
No credit no control. No vote no power.