The energy historian who says rapid decarbonization is a fantasy
latimes.com
latimes.com
Perhaps the reliable writing on the wall is in the stock market where the enterprise value of oil and gas companies has been falling since about 2011. That's because investors require a thirty year time frame for financial viability and that window is already closing.
You can still buy buggy whips but that industry is not what it used to be.
Maybe not, but the predictions on this have tended to do linear extrapolation of a clearly exponential trend. Things like this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAXDEAYXgAA7up_.jpg
We won't be exponential forever, an S-curve will show up eventually but the conservative estimates are not even close.
> and to become a large % of the grid will also need to come with gigantic storage projects
This isn't really true. There are already grids with 60%+ renewables without any storage projects to speak of. Large grids already have a lot of diversity and the existing hydro is already a big buffer.
> Lots of pumped back hydro? Trillion dollar projects, and we have water crises all over, so we can't just dam up any river that it is convenient to do it either.
Most of the time those kinds of estimates are predicated on the assumption that we must produce exactly what we consume and thus storage needs grow exponentially. If you have a really really cheap source of power (right now solar) and your problem is that you can't store it, just overproducing it is a better solution. The reality is that we will do a mix of many things but all the simulations I've seen show this to be well within even our current technology and cost. Most claim the total cost of the resulting energy goes down not up.
Texas isn't really a state known for building hydropower.
Well here's a prediction of how they'd do if they could store a small amount of hydrocarbons made from green energy. 3 hours of battery storage.
And if they can't handle the flexible gas, a few more batteries would do it. 12 hours.
I mean they could just run a gas plant and capture the carbon as the oil industry has been claiming they will, but that would be cheating wouldn't it. We need that last watt of power to be pure and green or else the massive amount of money saving renewables that Texas has already installed doesn't count.
The link I gave you goes into extreme detail on this and is based on historical data of exactly how often such windless nights occur and what the Texas grid demands overnight.
It then works out the cheapest combination of solar/wind/battery/etc.
Was what I responded to.
Do you think Texas has anywhere we could store some hydrocarbons?
I don't even think that report is optimistic enough, Green Hydrogen production and EVs as demand response and some grid connections will solve the issue cheaper, but I don't want to blow anyones mind, so you've got to meet them halfway with an in-depth accounting of how the vast majority of Texas energy use could be renewable with ease at a low cost.
Failing that if you can find a way to line some politicians pockets in the process, that could work.
It is apparently hard to sell this to certain political groups, who get their funding from more expensive sources of energy, but the truth has a way of making itself known when money can be earned and/or saved.
The lazard LCOE reports give figures for running costs of existing fully deprecated plants to compare with the cost of new renewables.
See page 7 "Levelized Cost of Energy Comparison—Renewable Energy versus Marginal Cost of Selected Existing Conventional Generation"
https://www.lazard.com/media/451905/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
It sometimes comes to people as a surprise how little solar / wind is actually installed and that the production mostly follows the peaks in daily consumption.
Basically, the idea is that if we go installing new renewables at current speeds, we won't need any real battery storage for years.
https://newatlas.com/energy/sand-battery-polar-night/
https://scitechdaily.com/gridscale-storing-renewable-energy-...
The problem isnt so much the scale or cost, just the amount of time it takes to commission and build them. You can deploy a solar farm in months, but pumped storage is like building a dam. It takes several years.
There also isnt a lot of point to storage unless you turn the gas off sometimes and I think we basically never do even at the sunniest and windiest. Not yet.
We should have been preparing for this for years rather than letting Putin pull the rug out from under our feet.
There's some articles going over the numbers for Snowy 2 and it'll probably be a bad investment overall.
Europe is essentially already using the alps as a battery.
Not to be that guy, but one does have to wonder what European leaders were thinking was going to happen after sanctioning a major source of their oil and natural gas.
Huh? ExxonMobil stock is near all time highs, they've been posting record never-seen-before profits ( much to the chagrin of politicians and general public) .
But it doesn't matter I guess, if renewables are cheaper they will win whatever someone thinks.
They also take up significantly more land than coal, gas, and nuclear. They also don't work in all climates.
Nuclear is the only viable option today if you want rapid decarbonization.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
If land use is the hill to die on a much better target is the beef industry.
More has been done than people think
Doable, but can't happen overnight without everyone dropping everything and working on only this.
from the Wikipedia link above
Said it was just Obama making stuff up.
> LET ME BEGIN WITH A DISCLAIMER: I am neither promoting electric vehicles nor denigrating them. I simply observe that the rational case for accepting EVs has been undermined by unrealistic market forecasts and a disregard for the environmental effects involved in producing and operating these vehicles. • Unrealistic forecasts have been the norm. In 2008, Deutsche Bank predicted that EVs would claim 7 percent of the U.S. market by 2016; in 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek put the 2016 share at 6 percent. But actual sales came to 158,614 units, just 0.9 percent of the record 17.55 million vehicles sold that year. • In his 2011 State of the Union address, then–U.S. president Barack Obama called for 1 million EVs on the road by 2015, and a concurrent report by the Department of Energy claimed that the country’s production capacity in that year would reach 1.2 million units. But the 2015 total came to 410,000 units, representing just 0.15 percent of all vehicles on the road, and sales of U.S. brands reached about 100,000 cars. • And this triumph of hope over experience continues. The worldwide total of EVs on the road reached 2 million units in 2016. If you plot the trajectory of the global stock of EVs since the beginning of their sales to the year 2016, you will see that the equation that best fits the data (a fourth-order polynomial) projects about 32 million units in 2025.
There was 4.2 Million EVs sold in the first half of this year. If sales remains entirely flat then between now and 2025 then just the cars sold over the next 4 years will top his prediction for installed base.
Sales won't remain flat.
> The myth that the future belongs to electric vehicles is one of the misconceptions of the modern energy era”. -- Vaclav Smil
> "The notion that any EV is a zero-carbon car is nonsense."
or at length:
> There are no EVs. They are battery vehicles reflecting the electricity’s origins. If I were to buy an EV in Manitoba, it would be a 100% hydroelectricity, truly zero carbon energy, car. In North China it is a 90% coal car, in France it is a 70% nuclear car, in Russia mostly a natural gas car and in Denmark a 50% wind car et cetera.
His message is that we will need to burn a lot fossil fuel and emit a lot of carbon in order to eventually consume less and emit less .. and in the meantime we could stand to insulate more and drive smaller lighter cars, etc.
He's merely saying that all of the solutions to climate change are bad and all the people suggesting them are stupid. Thats just facts, not denial.
https://getjerry.com/questions/what-percentage-of-new-car-sa...
> In the U.S., the numbers for 2021 showed battery EV sales take up 3% of sales, with hybrid cars taking up another 5%.
The climate crisis is only going to keep getting worse.
Hybrids are cool, as are small efficient cars, but EVs are the future.
"It's more efficient" is not good enough. It has to be zero or negative carbon production.
Seems a bit extremist.
Also, ICE and hybrids can run on e-fuels. Not ideal as they still have local pollution and arent very efficient but entirely possible without adding fossil carbon to the system. EVs (and bikes and trains) are better though.
That said the book is a great and useful historical work.
His steadfastness to this hypothesis that “all transitions are like past transitions” is explicitly stated in the end of one of his books:
"A world without fossil fuel combustion is highly desirable, and, to be optimistic, our collective determination, commitment, and persistence could accelerate its arrival. But getting there will be expensive and will require considerable patience. Coming energy transitions will unfold, as the past ones have done, across decades, not years." (Vaclav Smil, Energy Myths and Realities)
I think we are running into a "humans don't comprehend nonlinear/exponential curves". Much like Moore's law, there is enough convergent economies of scale and research development that there has been and probably will be a decade of exponential improvement. I believe some of this is because there was so much large scale suppression of alt energy and EV tech by big oil that so many researches and projects are now being linked together to produce an effective 20-30 year exponential improvement curve.
We're now a solid 5 years into economic supremacy of solar and wind. The 60% efficient gas turbine was the last gasp of big oil, they have nothing else to fire back with. Mazda and some other companies are trying compression-combustion gas engines now, and there's a spate of articles on inside out rotaries and other desperation, but the ICE drivetrain is going the same route: economic obsolesence in the face of an exponential improvement curve by BEVs.
Their projects of adoption of alt energy and EV were head scratchingly conservative given the raw economics, and thankfully real adoption has been much more rapid. I wonder if there was political pressure applied to slow any policy aids/regs/subsidies from coming through congress. Thankfully, the Ukraine war and inflation have turbocharged policy. Thanks Putin!
EVs are rapidly heading that way towards total economic supremacy over the ICE.
Sodium Ion is coming into mass production next year, and that should be at densities that should enable the 200-300 mile EV use cases (SR Model 3s, city cars of the european/chinese design, the cars that at least five billion people would use in the world).
High density LFP (200 wh/kg at pack level allegedly in mass production this year) should do the 300-400 mile range cars.
Solid state, which has some fusion "always five years away" does seem poised for five years away, and will probably handle most of the luxury and ultralongrange applications, probably won't beat LFP or sodium ion in cost for quite a while though.
Lithium apparently just needs development (salton sea, etc). Battery recycling is likely going to take care of itself between grid batteries, resale/reuse markets, etc. The nice thing about a big battery pack is that you can disassemble it and reuse the batteries that still work, and use them in a ton of different ways. Only after several cycles will you get to the issue of actual materials recycling.
Solar panels will probably get an LFP-style "good enough and ultracheap" design with some perovskite derivative in the short term.
Yes there are scale issues, but grid storage may be solved by the move of transportation to batteries and reusing car batteries as distributed grid storage. Home solar will reduce grid load of cars moving to EV drivetrains, and make civilization more resilient.
There is so much investment and research in this, with lots of headroom, that the old guard doesn't seem to wrap their heads around it.
It's the closest thing to a real technological miracle/magic in my lifetime, with the transistor/semiconductor scaling being the other contender.
What kills me about batteries and solar is I wonder how much earlier we could have moved to this without oil/gas companies actively blocking it. But I'm not super familiar on what materials technologies and imaging/analysis would have been necessary to get to usable 200 mile EVs back in the 1970s or 1980s.
The author is right though, when we look back when we MOST NEEDED to get efficient on gas vehicles for global warming, in the 1990s, the big SUV trend went exactly the opposite direction. I shook my head back then at people that bought those, and I still do.
The interesting question is do we have to be carbon-neutral to avert the largest calamities due to anthropogenic climate change? Can we continue using natural gas to produce fertilizer? Are some crops more fertilizer-intensive than others?
https://thefern.org/ag_insider/report-fertilizer-responsible...
Now, sure, we've generally got that hydrogen from natural gas, but that's just because it was the cheapest way...
Think its likely that the recent IRA makes Green Hydrogen cost competitive with Gray so we should see some movements on this soon. Lots of incoming projects in Australia and I'm assuming the EU will be accelerating this due to recent invasions too.
1. No building nuclear, the only base load that is carbon free. 2. No building the water storage option because of the environmental impact 3. Not allowing for the scale of up of mining necessary to supply the materials for batteries
These three things are why the people who speak about solutions and know are Subject matter experts say: here is what needs to happen, but it will never happen because of environmentalists and how they have corrupted the layperson’s mind to these ideas.
We can look to Europe to see how the environmentalists will doom society.
> What are the chances that after going from 86% to 83% during the first two decades of the 21st century the world will go from 83% to zero during the next two decades?
This is a hard dose of reality for renewable maximalists. What is the counter point to these facts?
fossil fuels -> heat -> usage
renewable source -> electricity -> usage
And then, we of course need an exponential growth of the deployment of renewables, which absolutely should be doable, especially in solar, which is mostly about manufacturing capacity, it is relatively easy to deploy it in the needed numbers.
Also the idea of "renewable source -> electricity" is conveniently omitting an important step for lots of renewables. That is "heat". Solar panels don't need this, but for example thermal solar (using a working material like molten salt) does.
Electric engines have efficiencies of about 95%. There are some charging losses and network transmission, but the 60% efficiency needed to be 3x efficient as ICE cars are easy to hit.
Or to calculate the other way around: a Tesla Model 3 uses less than 20kWh/100km. That roughly equivalents to 2l of fuel per 100km. Most cars use 6 to 8l for comparable performance, so the 3x factor checks out well.
When an EV is being charged by a natural gas turbine hooked into the electric grid, the efficiency is about the same.
Basically imagine if instead of having an transmission in my regular truck I just coupled my engine to an enormous alternator. Then used the electrical energy to run electric motors driving the wheels. It is in no way more efficient.
And of course it enables power generation that is not bound to inefficient combustion - be it hydro, solar PV, wind etc.
Unless you convince society to build zero-carbon electrical generation it's the equivalent of the British calling the American Revolutionary War a victory on their part. The difference is purely political, societal, and cultural. None of which can change the laws of physics.
My observation is United States society simply doesn't want or care about zero carbon electrical generation. Nuclear fission was figured out a long time ago & we basically never built any significant capacity in that regard. Fossil fuels are cheap, which means cheap energy.
Basically, even if you assume that the grid will not decarbonise, the least efficient EV beats the most efficient ICE everywhere in the US.
The average is 4x better. With today's grid.
Once you accept the reality that the grid is getting greener, it's no contest.
Imagine a 1 trillion dollar investment into renewables in 2003 instead of the Iraq war. Imagine a carbon cap tax in 2008.
Additionally, technology has increased in that time. Its quite reasonable that the first few decades of development won't see very commercially viable products -- they are new and in development. Renewables becoming better than fossil fuels for many tasks will happen eventually and would be like flipping a switch. At that point, it just takes the government printing money and spending it on something that matters for a change.
The adoption curve is probably going to look like that of initial electricity ultility uptake, or of moving from coal to patroleum, but maybe accelerated a bit more because of additional pressures.
My guess is this will end up being slower than many would like, but slightly faster than he suggests, and more diversified. That is, you're not going to see moving to all EVs, but a proportion of EVs, a proportion hydrogen, city restructuring to support mass transit, some hybrid engines, and some ICEs that never go away completely. Probably also some things we're not even discussing now because they haven't been invented yet.
Any analysis of “what we’re doing to fight to global warming” that does not start with the physical reality of it is pointless. And yet a tremendous amount of the conversation does just that.
The alternative to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not that everything just keeps going as it was. Our choice is pay to decarbonize, or pay to deal with everything in my first paragraph. We can pick either one but there is no secret 3rd option where we shout down the “renewable maximalists” and then everything is fine.
So the practical answer is that we’ll do things much faster when we feel we must. So predicting the pace has more to do with predicting public/government sentiment than it does with linearly extrapolating what we’ve done up to this point. You could not have predicted the nuclear bomb in 1930 by extrapolating weapons development since 1910.
For example, a heatpump can produce 5MW of heating from 1MW of electricity by concentrating the heat from the environment. An electric car is 90% efficient while a combustion vehicle is about 30% efficient, roughly speaking.
Don't those struggle in cold climates (e.g. winters consistently below freezing)?
> An electric car is 90% efficient while a combustion vehicle is about 30% efficient
On the other hand, even the best batteries have far less energy density than a gallon of gasoline, and some of that "waste" heat can be put to good use (e.g. heating in cold climates).
I keep my EBBs set to come on a few degrees below where I keep the house so they will kick in when the heat pump shuts off and they kick out when the heat pump comes back on. This tends to happen at night when I don't mind the house getting a bit cooler anyway. Where I live in Canada, the heat pump typically only shuts off half a dozen nights in the second half of January. It's not like my heat pump is useless 6 or 8 months of the year.
There are also geothermal heat pumps that push/pull heat to/from water from underground (eg. a well, a pond, or a buried coil of pipe) where, even in the winter, the ground remains warm. These don't suffer a loss in efficiency in the winter.
Regarding EVs, most EVs get between 3 and 4 miles/kWh. The Porsche Taycan gets only 2 miles/kWh. The Tesla Model 3 gets 5 miles/kWh. The Aptera gets 10 miles/kWh, which with the 100 kWh battery, gives you 1,000 miles of range.
Fully Charged Show - Aptera (time-indexed to efficiency discussion): https://youtu.be/mpiH-Y-HOvE?t=135
This does not sound right. Can you elaborate that further?
Trick (to understand maybe?) is to not convert the energy from chemical to heat, but to take existing heat energy and pump that around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
Coefficient of power of 3 to 6.
This won't work in permanently frozen areas like Antarctica.
Have you seen a graph of wind generation?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-generation?tab=chart...
For solar it's 2015 that it curved upward: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption?...
If you look at oil production from 1900 to 1973, for example, it grows by ~7% every year but after that it has only grown linearly by ~326TWh/year since -73.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country...
Meanwhile, renewable energy generation has grown at a decent rate the last 20 years, so if it goes exponential (if it hasn't already) the chances are... okay? Hopefully?
I'd be ecstatic if we hit 50%
I don’t understand the author’s need to score rhetorical points against an imagined second party here, it’s completely unnecessary.
> There are no EVs. They are battery vehicles reflecting the electricity’s origins.
Why is it necessary to split hairs in definitions like this? Electricity is used to propel the car. Yes, that electricity often comes from carbon today. But EV’s take us from cars that must use fossil fuels, to cars that may use other sources of energy. Isn’t that a positive? Yes, carbon is used to make the materials out of which the car is built, but that’s true of all vehicles, and it’s possible in principle to decarbonize that process as well. We’re trying to tackle the problem from both ends at once here, and that’s the only way to make progress, because otherwise you have chicken-and-egg problems (“it’s not worth it to make EV’s if we don’t have clean energy” vs “it’s not worth it to have clean energy because cars still use oil”, etc.)
“Rapid decarbonization is a fantasy”… yeah, if you define “rapid decarbonization” as being some impossible goal of zero carbon in 20 years, sure. No duh.
EV’s run on electricity. The phrase “Electric Vehicle” has no implication one way or the other how you get said electricity. Adding the word “battery” changes exactly nothing, except maybe winning arbitrary strawman internet points.
> Until society actually builds net-zero carbon electrical generation we haven't done much for carbon footprint.
Ok so if my electricity is provided by a nuclear plant, I still can’t call my car an EV because there exists other sources of electricity out there? Please.
"Nearly half of freight-rail transportation is used to move coal—most of the other half is wheat and food. A not-so-surprising revelation from a close study of the Sankey diagram: our fossil-fuel supply chain is itself a major consumer of fossil fuels." (Saul Griffith, Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future)
Does this world famous energy historian not know the difference?
Or is he hoping to fool people who don't?