We're going to blow right past 1.5C, 2C, 2.5C...
Globally electricity production has gotten significantly more green, though offset by increased demand. But, new coal power plants for example were down 66% globally in 2020 vs 2016 and existing infrastructure only lasts so long. Project things forward to 2040 and emissions should be noticeably below current levels even with increasing demand simple because of economic forces.
In 2022 10% of all new cars globally were EV’s and that number keeps rising. Combined with an even cleaner grid and things could look quite different in 2040 again even with increasing demand for cars.
Now I don’t want to project those trends over the following 60 years, but lower emissions give even more time to lower them further. 2.5C could easily hit in 2200 rather than 2100, or even be avoided entirely.
Thus we might be able to shift 1.5C by a few years, 2C by decades, and 2.5C by literal centuries.
Electric cars are an expensive distraction from the problem. The sustainable future of transportation is the electric train, the electric trolley, the electric scooter, and the electric bicycle. Personal automobiles, electric or otherwise, were, are, and will continue to be an environmental catastrophe.
And while we can electrify some fraction of personal automobiles by 20whenever, we aren't lifting two fingers on the task of rebuilding our societies to be less car-manic. A few underused bike lanes, a few rental scooters scattered around town, and a light rail extension 10 years from now aren't it.
Spending enormous amounts of energy to move around 4,000+ lbs of metal, just to go to the restaurant down the street, is insane.
Gas has significantly lower emissions than coal. Progress is progress.
Absolutism gets us nowhere, unless your goal is to drive humanity back to the stone age by "switching" to energy production systems that do not currently exist (with the exception of nuclear, which is the only currently practical solution for "green" base load that we stubbornly refuse to consider).
All of those electric transportation doo-dads add significant load to a system that can barely keep up as it is (in the US, anyway).
Just to emphasize the point, in NYC environmental extremists shut down Indian Point, thus converting about a quarter of NYC's power demands from clean energy (nuclear) to fossil fuel. Meanwhile, each of the past few summers the city has come close to rolling blackouts. Good job, folks.
And building out natgas will get us into a situation where we are locked into decades of guaranteed emissions, as all the vested interests in the production and consumption space fight tooth and nail to protect their line of business, and the capex they've dumped into it.
There's no plausible net-carbon zero path this century that's compatible with our current buildout of natgas. Perfect is the enemy of the good, but this isn't even good!
Quite literally you’re better off building solar where 1/2 it’s output is wasted over a year than burning natural gas. When you’re building that much solar things are very close to net zero.
Eventually batteries will replace natural gas, but until that happens we need technologies that can fill the gaps in demand and nuclear can’t do it economically.
It can, we're just stupid (in the US).
Auto corrupt…
However, large steam turbines simply take a lot of energy to warm up to operating temperature. This means simply turning coal power plants on and off releases lots of CO2.
This makes a huge difference as we add wind and solar because you can turn natural gas off and on multiple times a day with minimal cost. Which enables you to dramatically scale just how much wind and solar is connected to the grid.
Nobody wants to turn off a wind farm in favor of a coal power plant but it happens. Eventually we want to swap to energy storage, but for now getting off of coal is a huge deal in both directly and because it allows the grid to be more flexible.
> Electric cars are an expensive distraction from the problem.
As long as people live outside of cities they need personal transportation. Electrifying roads is a viable option, but it’s much easier when cars carry a big battery so you get similar results with 1% of the infrastructure.
*Actual efficiency varies somewhat, but it’s still big gap.
Boilers, not turbines. The boilers at a coal plant are gigantic -- 5+ story hunks of metal the size of city buildings. They don't turn on/off on demand. The whole system is complex, of course, but the boilers are giant boxes of fireball that flash-vaporize water using pulverized coal at ~500C and 200+ bar of pressure [1].
My father was a control systems engineer for coal plants (and later, gas) for a major utility. When I was a child, he'd be away for weeks at a time when plants were spun up or down for maintenance.
One of the more memorable events in my life was when I was allowed to take a tour of a big coal plant when it was down for maintenance. Those boilers were terrifying, even when "off". The gates of hell.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/pulverized-...
Cold pipes and turbine blades steal energy from the steam. Similarly the boiler is less efficient when fed cold water vs hot water from the condenser. Thus the startup process is more involved than just how long it takes to start generating power.
The most efficient coal power plants are actually double-reheat which takes even long to get up to optimal conditions. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
The broader point that we can't just turn these things on and off is 100% correct, and one of the (many) things that people don't understand when talking about the power system and emissions.
I don't know the details of wind and solar, but any system that deals with hundreds-to-thousands of megawatts can't just be spun up on a dime. Make a mistake, and things blow up.
It kind of is, in that before it was being used all over the place, natural gas would just be vented or flared when it was extracted as bycatch for oil. Burning it instead of venting it is climate positive, and burning it in a power plant instead of onsite is energy with no impact to the climate.
Of course, when you extract it specifically, that's no longer the case.
Natural gas also makes for decent peaker plants which can complement solar and wind until/unless storage fills that need better.
False. Total electricity produced from fossil fuels (coal + natural gas + Oil) is down even ignoring efficiency gains which reduced the amounts needed per kWh.
US per person total Fossil Fuel based electricity production production: 2020: 7,322 kWh, 2019: 7,861 kWh, 2015: 8,499 kWh, 2010: 9,321 kWh, 2005: 9,838 kWh. It’s offset somewhat by increased population but the overall trend is still really clear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...