Apple and global suppliers expand renewable energy to 13.7 gigawatts
apple.com
apple.com
It's much more important these days to measure progress is integral terms like low-carbon energy generated/year rather than max low-carbon power when in ideal conditions.
It's even better to measure with things like lifecycle mass CO2-equiv/kWh avoided, which avoids traps of crediting things like forest combustion as "green" like drax does in the UK.
For reference, non-FF capacity factors here: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
So you’re probably looking at a 2-3x difference between renewable nameplate capacity and the equivalent replaced fossil fuels.
I did some research to see if it would make sense as a homeowner and found it to be mostly not worth it. You shouldn't attach it directly to the building because wind speed near surfaces slows down significantly. So you need a large pole which will make maintenance very expensive. You usually can't attach the pole directly to the building either because it isn't rated for such high forces. Wind mills are also quite noisy so you probably want to have a huge amount of land to put it far away from the house.
The power produced rises to the power of two with the diameter of the rotor and to the power of three with wind speed. This means that you want an installation which is both large and high.
Are coal plants better because they have higher capacity factors?
Are they cheaper to run?
I mean obviously if you compare two coal plants that are otherwise identical, you'd assume the higher capacity leads to cheaper power and is therefore better. But once you are comparing coal to solar, its utterly meaningless out of context. Even in the near identical coal case, why not say "this one is cheaper" or some other measurement people actually care about?
So building 13.7 GW of nuclear capacity in a northern region could generate ~5x more clean energy per year than 13.7 GW of solar capacity.
Not sure if Apple is investing in nuclear or not. (:
In Nevada you nuclear is means paying 10x as much to get a 90% capacity factor vs 30% for solar. So you build 3x as much solar and a ton of batteries and still cost less than nuclear while being able to follow the demand curve.
Individual nuclear power plants are single points of failure and go offline randomly. Nuclear needs redundancy to ensure a stable grid which further increases its costs.
Transmission is again worse for nuclear because it’s so centralized. With solar you can locate it much closer to end users which cuts down on annual transmission losses.
The single point of failure argunent doesn't make any sense when you're attached to a regional electricity grid with hundreds of generators on it.
So installing 1GW of wind power onshore basically produces about half the actual power as 1GW offshore, off the bat.
Similarly yields of other renewables vary considerably (unsurprisingly, 1MW of solar panels produces twice as much power in Spain as in Germany).
You can have your electricity share coming from renewable that is increasing, if in the end you have 30-40 of gaz/coal as a backup to handle the time when renewable is not producing you'll no go way further. Example: Germany.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/53504.pdf
My favorite fun fact on this is that regular old nuclear plants can ramp up at down quickly, at 5% full per per minute! Most people don't know this. They often choose to not due it because fuel is a small fraction of their operating costs, but in a low-carbon capacity markets they could really shine. French and (previous) German reactor do it all the time.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp...
> however, these impacts are modest compared with the overall benefits of replacing fossil-fueled generation with variable renewable generation
Being backup generation implies that you will optimize for the minimum possible capacity factor. Nuclear can't deal at all with low capacity factors.
Germany made a huge sacrifice by subsidizing early and very expensive Solar to in a northern country to really kick things off. But they’re stilly paying subsides on those early installations.
Most areas in California, maybe.
> This is why the percentage of solar is exploding world wide while nuclear has stagnated.
No, solar is exploding because it's heavily subsidized, either monetarily or by other schemes like net metering. Nuclear has stagnated because it requires huge upfront cost, and stability in building new capacity.
Look at a globe some time, most of the world is much closer to the equator than Germany yet battery backed solar still beats gas/coal/nuclear in parts of southern Germany.
PS: Nuclear, coal, and natural gas also receive plenty of subsidies. It turns out removing all subsidies from electricity production actually pushes wind/grid solar even harder. What it discourages is rooftop solar which isn’t a good fit for many locations.
As to PA, this time of year demand is very low as you need minimal heating or cooling. Similarly while solar output is low in stormy weather wind isn’t. Similarly the region has plenty of hydroelectric which can offset production from days with high wind/solar production to days with low wind/solar production.
Weather tends to be a tradeoff where hydro and wind improve just as solar and demand decline. In extreme cases like Washington state batteries are pointless and the ideal mix changes.
This is the real problem with renewables. You need to 20-30x them to get to real usage. Or have 100% redundant gas coverage, with giant political problems coming with it.
It also has 12.5GW of PV because it’s still a cost effective location for solar power.
You don’t get anything in seconds, but over years you just pay people to build them and they build factories just like you pay people to build equipment for other types of power plants.
New limits always show up with new scales. People will advocate dramatically scaling nuclear as if tens of thousands of people with the skills to operate them are sitting around with nothing to do. Lack of skilled workers is actually a larger limiting factor for nuclear than the few years it takes to build a single reactor and one of the reasons they can’t make a significant difference without at least a decade of lead time and more likely several. Current programs can teach people reasonably quickly, but you need not just students but more people trained to teach the material.
Sounds like a win/win.
In reality renewable contribution might be even higher, unless there is correction for this.
However, at 5AM it was bad - wind was only on 5%, zero solar.
By the way, I'm not arguing that all is well and everything is solved, I just hate this juvenile argument of "but what if it's cloudy and there is no wind for weeks", because that does not happen often, especially not on a continent-wide grid with lots of offshore wind power in one of the windiest seas in the world.
This isn't a once in a while issue that can be solved with a few batteries. We need revolutionary grid-scale storage tech to make renewables work. Current batteries are orders-of-magnitude too expensive and we have orders-of-magnitude too little manufacturing capacity.
Let's ask Mark Jacobson from Stanford what his modelling shows: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/21-U...
I find this very hard to believe. There was never a windless night all year? Not for an instant?
This[1] seems to disagree. There were plenty of times when wind + solar generation was 3GW or lower, where total usage was over 50GW.
If you look at all the electricity generated over the whole of 2022, about half came from renewables. But the grid doesn't operate on averages. Every load needs an instantaneous generation to match. And Germany regularly had times were wind + solar couldn't even meet 10% of demand.
[1] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...
A watt is a unit of instantaneous power. A joule is a unit of energy. A Tesla supercharger that delivers 100,000 watts can fully charge a 100 kilo-watt-hour capacity battery in one hour storing about 3.6 million joules.
At solar noon in the mid-latitudes, charging your average Tesla like this would take about 400 250-watt solar panels, (a 100 kilowatt system) running for one hour under full sun, which requires about a 25 * 25 meter surface area, or about 1/8th of a football field.
However, the total energy produced by a rated 100 kilowatt solar array over a 24-hour period is not 24 * 100, because earth spins. Hence, comparing a 100 kilowatt coal plant (running 24-7) to a 100 kW solar array (at noon)...
How many 100 kW solar arrays do you need to completely replace the output of a single 100 kW coal plant? Well, we need to integrate the solar power curve over time to get the energy under the curve which is the energy produced by the solar array, and we just have to multiply 100 * 24 to get it for the coal plant...
And that's why when you see companies reporting their green credentials in terms of 'rated renewable power' instead of actual energy produced you should be somewhat skeptical.
https://www.sec.gov/securities-topic/enforcement-task-force-...
Right, so can I repair my iPhone without proprietary screws and glue yet? Can I install any OS on legacy hardware yet to extend its life without intentional roadblocks? Do your cables still have embedded chips in them making them needlessly complicated, wasteful, and energy intensive to manufacture?
This term is becoming overinclusive to the point of uselessness. Greenwashing implies deception. If Apple were buying nonsense carbon credits and claiming that was renewable energy, that would be greenwashing. If actually deploying renewable energy is greenwashing, then everything is greenwashing.
However, Apple presents itself as a sustainable company and suggests to the consumer that it's sustainable to buy Apple products. That's not true. Many of Apple's products are environmentally hostile (the most extreme example being the AirPods that are impossible to repair and have a limited lifespan), and Apple actively lobbies against the right to repair. That's the opposite of sustainable, and they know it.
So, Apple's marketing is deceptive, and that's why I call it greenwashing.
X GWh/year means that they produced x actual clean GWh of energy over a period of 1 year.
X GW can mean they produced X GW of clean power for some arbitrary amount of time, like 1 hour or 1 week or 1 second.
> some arbitrary amount of time, like 1 hour or 1 week or 1 second
I think anyone would understand a vehicle going 200km/h to mean "at most, when you put in fuel". Not "for the next 1 hour right now specifically". Specifying how many km you're promising to drive the customer is a bit weird, one can assume Apple's commitment for the capacity figure is in perpetuity.
It's a rare moment where I don't fully agree with a comment from acidburnNSA, and I really hate to be defending Apple and won't buy a device that isn't mine no matter how green the energy is (if they would do fair material sourcing, like Fairphone, that would honestly make me doubt my stance, but not the relatively easy decision to use green energy as one the richest companies on earth), but this skepticism that they might stop it before the year is out is also kind of weird.
That's one definition you can also use GW to specify average power over a year.
1 GWh/year is 1 GWh/8760h is ~114KW, the time element cancels out
...or they also have gaz/coal and other backups ? ...or they also invest in nuclear energy ?