Wind and solar will be 25% of U.S. generating capacity within three years
electricenergyonline.com
electricenergyonline.com
We should be blanketing every inch of desert with solar. And pair it to use excess energy for carbon fuels synthesis. Reuse all the existing natural gas power plants to run on synthetic carbon fuel. Batteries are not the solution for this. It only fixes the day/night imbalance, but not the seasonal summer/winter imbalance for solar production.
But most importantly, we don't have time. We don't have time to wait for the beautiful, elegant solution of all cars EV, all power storage in batteries, all planes flying on electricity. Perfect is the enemy of good. Look at the arctic and ocean temps, we do not have time. The developing countries will not wait for the perfect nice solar and battery solution. We need to reuse as much of what we have now in a way that will make a difference for carbon output. Again, we do don't have time for the most efficient solution.
What is industry good at? Mass producing a lot of stuff. We can do that now with solar. Stop worrying about matching it to daily power usage. Just pump out those panels and get it installed everywhere. Get the excess into synthetic carbon fuel and we can quickly make a difference in carbon output.
> We should be blanketing every inch of desert with solar.
Please god, no. Solar is so much more useful close to where it's consumed, like rooftops and parking lots. Utility-scale solar power projects like this are just more corporate welfare boondoggles.
And I happen to think that maybe humanity should learn how to leave some things alone. Deserts have fragile, intricate ecosystems. This fucks them up. We need to learn to stop fucking things up to gobble up more energy.
There is no serious reason why solar power plants in the UT, CA, NV, NM and AZ deserts can't transmit power 1000 to 1500 km to far-away loads.
China does a lot of this, because the good power sources are in northwest China, and the big loads are in the Southeast.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-state-grid-in...
So one link at least according to your video, I would be curious about actual numbers about how much they can move already.
For comparison, Hoover Dam is about 2 GW.
According to https://rethinkresearch.biz/articles/chinas-uhv-transmission..., they will be at 105 GW by 2025 (the article is dated 2022). 50% of the power on these lines will be from renewables by 2025 (right now at 43%).
I can't find any .cn estimates of UHV capacity.
Citation strongly needed. Especially in a context where turning sun power into carbon-based fuel wouldn't want to be in a parking lot, but could be near or even colocated with a large solar installation.
..but that'd pay for 100,000 - 200,000 residential solar panel installs that would primarily benefit...residential homeowners. That'd be a ton of jobs, too. And there'd be no power-company profits.
We could crunch numbers on how much more efficient a utility-scale plant is, but look at the reality of who ends up with the money and the profits and who has to keep paying the same damn power bills.
With the benefit of hindsight, Ivanpah should never have been built, but at the time both CSP and PV looked competitive, and so it made sense to invest in both. Now it does not.
Last I checked, solar thermal is not a price competitive utility scale generation technology; photovoltaic is. That facility was probably funded as a large scale experiment to investigate the viability of solar thermal at increasing scales (or corruption).
The gigawatts of new utility scale PV being brought up every year are largely privately funded and cheaper than existing generation sources (in the current context).
If those homes are not grid-tied, good luck with electrically-powered heat pumps as a winter heat source during the winter anywhere that has a winter. Not everyone has (and for the foreseeable, can have) a Passivhaus.
So that means the local grid has to be able to accept the overflow in summer and deliver in winter, which means ... power-company involvement and likely profits.
Saying that "it cost $X to build this, and that would pay for Y other things" is meaningless.
After all, why can’t these industries generate their own power, like in the good ole days?
"One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely.
This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on.
This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity: it is moral ignorance and weakness of character.
We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for.
And we cannot restrain ourselves.
Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy."
An odd timeline to consider, given the speed with which this chapter in existence seems to be unfolding.
I think this is like many new technologies - overestimated in the short term, underestimated in the long term.
I'm reminded of voice recognition systems. we would be able to talk to our computers! well, that didn't happen, but we did get telephone voice response systems, then you could talk to your car, and now it is ubiquitous.
It is freakin' awesome. I imagine the 2nd graders at school around here, growing up with the idea that you can make electricity from sunlight just as second nature to them as the internet is to all of us freaks here on HN.
The electrical industry fears becoming a mere 'backup' or network instead of generation and supply. Or people disconnecting from the grid entirely, destroying economic viability of the infrastructure. They're pushing laws in various states that make a structure uninhabitable if it doesn't have a grid connection.
The only reason most people need to still be connected to the grid are low solar days and peak usage that the panels alone can't supply.
In 10 years you'll probably be able to have an iron flow battery in your basement or backyard that is completely harmless and can meet peak needs, like running an induction stove or a heat pump.
At that point, why do you need a grid connection? You don't.
Because winter happens?
I have a 6.7kW ground mount array. It generates 3x our needs in summer, 0.33 of our winter needs (we heat with air-source heat pumps). We'd need a battery as big as our house to deal with that.
EDIT: ty!
Your use of "only" is doing a lot of work there. It is absolutely essential that something serves electricity during those "only" times, and in many cases a power grid with centralized production is the only thing that can do that.
I live in California, and I could easily meet my year-long needs with a 5kW PV panel install and a couple storage batteries, and live completely off the grid. I don't think I'd do that, as it'd be pretty expensive to set up (with break-even period at ~15 years, after which the batteries would probably need to be replaced), and I'd want the grid as backup. But much of the US just can't do that, especially in the winter when they don't get much sun and their heating needs (even with the most efficient heat pumps, with a backup for the few coldest days during the year when the heat pump just won't cut it) would easily outstrip solar production and battery storage.
The idea that most or even many people could live off the grid economically, with current technology, is just complete fantasy. And I don't think anything is going to change dramatically enough in the next 10 years to change that.
Curious what makes you think that the overhead and inefficiencies inherent to a million small solar installs is somehow better than a single managed facility benefiting from economy of scale both for maintenance and design.
Additionally, curious how you plan to address the problem of adding additional generation to existing way overloaded distribution systems to accomplish this. If this massive hypothetical solar install is all non-grid tied then fine, I guess, but you're losing a substantial amount of the power that's made that way.
Distribution systems don't come for free and have many of the same problems as 'last mile' internet. Not terribly complex but expensive en masse, particularly in areas that are not densely populated (which is a lot of the US).
There is a reason we spend a lot of money on transmission. Spending a lot of money on distribution helps a very small part of your network. Spending a lot of money on transmission helps a huge part of your network.
I'll use some hard to reach parts of WA and BC and OR and ID for example. You might be able to build a nice house/cabin on a piece of rural land and find that setting the poles and running lines to bring basic 100A or 200A service to that house will cost $40,000.
For 40k you can build quite a large off grid PV system that will have a reasonable ROI on it to serve the same loads, vs. spending 40k one time on construction costs for grid and then $50 to $200 monthly electric bills recurring for a long time after that.
As far as grid tied decentralized power systems do I agree with you 100%. It is VERY COSTLY in labor and complications to do something like cover the roof of a Home Depot or similar warehouse-sized structure in grid feeding PV, as compared to doing medium-sized to massive scale ground mount PV on empty land somewhere.
Why would such an off-grid system have any monthly electric bills? Are you just pre-amortizing the cost of replacement batteries?
EDIT: I'm an idiot. The bills are for the grid-tied option.
That’s the biggest issue with this plan, which can be fine for a certain kind of person but not 90%+ of the market of potential people who inevitably have to finance a home.
If you go to the NREL pvwatts calculator and plug in a theoretical 20kW STC rated system at his latitude/longitude you'll find that the Dec. and Jan. production will not be very much at all.
Sometimes it can be more affordable to significantly over-size a system to product enough kwH per month in mid winter vs. spending $4000+ on a generator.
If you can get 360W 72-cell panels at $150 a piece in whole-pallet quantities, 4000 bucks buys a lot of panels... Not counting the mounting and cabling and junction box cost.
As a budgetary figure, can easily spend $4000 on a small Generac propane generator and wiring/transfer switch.
At other times it can totally make sense to have a small generator to run 2-3 hours a day in mid winter, feeding a charger that can add a constant 1500W into a battery system to keep up the battery string voltage.
Location. Deserts are far from people. 80% of people in the US live on the east half of the country (and most of these on the eastern half of that). But even the midpoint is too far from deserts to use energy from it.
So... you've not heard of LA or Arizona or Nevada etc?
Meanwhile urbal solar is many times more expensive, and vastly less efficient per panel.
The total us grid transmission losses are 5%
https://www.nrdc.org/bio/jennifer-chen/lost-transmission-wor....
Actually building one is harder than designing one, so I'm not suggesting breaking ground on a global grid immediately, but if you in the USA can get past the three way split of {east, west, Texas}, that'll do a lot all by itself.
Nor does centralized. The grid needs to be upgraded to handle the significant increase in demand. But more importantly, over-centralization will mean we're putting all our energy production in fewer baskets (than we have now). Decentralized is a form of a redundancy, a form of backup. It's also a form of independence.
There's no single silver bullet. We'd be wise to blend, and blend wisely. And yes, they might have some added financial costs, but not doing it will surely come at other costs (e.g., blackouts).
> There is a reason we spend a lot of money on transmission
This should be in the past tense. Transmission was the only option, because generation needed to be centralized to be anywhere near cost effective. And transmission is suuuuuper expensive, by far the biggest part of my solar bill.
Further, it's used ineffectively, often with capacity factors far below 30% because it's sized for peak, not for average use.
As the cost of generation gets lower and lower, the cost of transmission and distribution becomes an ever higher fraction of power costs, and the next thing to minimize.
Big transmission across the continent makes the most sense. But it's also the hardest to build. We are likely stuck repowering existing transmission to higher capactities.
Sure, we will need a lot more transmission capacity, but the less we can get away with will probably lower costs.
(And transmission is only geographic arbitrage, we will soon have time arbitrage with batteries that will rival nearly all transmission costs. Transition is not getting cheaper, but storage solar and wind are.)
Rooftop residential is 2x+ times as expensive as utility scale. Lazard's well regarded annual Levelized Cost of Energy survey puts the range for utility scale at $24 - $96 MWH vs $117 - $282 for residential rooftop.
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost...
For exactly the same reason we should subsidize the cost of nuclear energy to ensure a sustained ~25-40% nuclear base, we should subsidize solar locally (rooftop et al.) and utility scale.
The answer isn't either or, it's all of the above.
We should be doing both!
This may be true, but a residential install does eventually pay for itself in 5-10 years, and after that, effectively free power. So it's cheaper and better for consumers.
How does that work? Oh yeah, it's because they don't have to pay for the maintenance of the entire distribution network plus the profits of utility companies.
How is that going to be paid for?
So you are admitting its not a corporate boondoggle?
> but a residential install does eventually pay for itself in 5-10 years, and after that, effectively free power.
LCOE amortizes over the life of the system so that its an apples to apples comparison.
> So it's cheaper and better for consumers.
Its cheaper for the homeowner. Its likely more expensive for the other ratepayers, especially if there is net metering or RPS. They have to spend more on storage or flexible generation to combat the duck curve and have to make up for the fixed costs that net metering is not covering plus buy solar generation at the retail rate instead of wholesale. And its not a good deal for the taxpayer who is paying for a third of the system price since they are getting less carbon reduction per dollar than they would with utility scale.
That last one combined with RPS has really gotten on my nerves lately. My city I've seen several panel installations done on the north side of a gabled roof. That's such a horrible deal for tax payers.
Much like growing my own vegetables is "gaming" the marking by letting me "avoid paying the full retail price."
This presumes that grid operators are preemptively entitled to dollars out of the pockets of anyone within range of the grid regardless of whether they need it, which is utility propaganda that they use to fight the development of residential power in state legislatures across the country.
If enough people get solar, rate structures will change to be less based on kWh consumed and more based on what you have the right to call on, even if you don't consume it. This is similar to large industrial rates.
Well, I don't get how only poor people would be targeted, but to inject data into the picture:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/the-u-s-elec...
That suggests that all of the distribution, maintenance, and administrative costs are on the order of 2-3 centers per kWh, which is about 1/8th of the cost of a kWh. So I'm going to soft disagree on that point. Besides, we could further decentralize with small modular nuclear reactors (think neighborhood to small town to even small city scale) and cut out a ton of grid cost.
Yes, we could. But you know and I know we're not so let's stop kidding ourselves. Nuclear is off the table in the US for the foreseeable future.
If you want "free" power at night (and on cloudy days), you also need battery storage, which can double your initial cost. And the batteries don't last 25+ years like the solar panels do; you may even have to replace them before your break-even point.
If you don't have battery storage, you're still relying on the grid at night, and relying on selling excess power back to the grid during the day in order to zero out your power bill. So you're still making use of the distribution network that someone has to pay to be maintained.
Adding in transmission costs would make non-rooftop solar 2x+ more expensive...
What is more efficient, a utility with dedicated engineers and technicians who spend their days managing an install or clueless homeowners who can’t even be bothered to clear the leaves off their panels?
Installation and management for large scale commercial companies is _much_ cheaper. Bespoke rooftop installs require way more permit, engineer, contractor overhead. Oh year and don’t forget to upgrade your roof framing and hope your installer doesn’t ruin your waterproof membrane of your roof. Have a clay tile roof? There’s another 5k in broken roof tiles.
Transmission losses are in the noise by comparison.
And when your components go out… a small potato install can basically go pound sand. A friend of mine has been out 18 months b/c LG Chem recalled his battery and hasn’t replaced it! They remotely disabled it, so it can’t be used.
Contrast that with a utility. LG chem would probably have a dedicated field agent to manage bad batteries for a utility scale buyer.
>Deserts have fragile, intricate ecosystems. This fucks them up. We need to learn to stop fucking things up to gobble up more energy.
You know what’s worse for desert eco systems than solar installs? Climate change. Gobbling up 25% of the deserts to prevent the other 75% from becoming totally uninhabitable sounds like a bargain to me.
We need more solar as soon as possible. Messing up the desert to save the artic and permafrost is a winning bet every time.
Even when you need to transport it thousands of miles? Thats where most people are in relation to the deserts in the US.
1. we already have a grid
2. the US southwest is where the sun is. insolation per unit of area is crazy high compared to elsewhere, meaning you need less panels per unit of generating capacity.
1.45$/w for commercial install
2.95$/w for residential install.
That doesn’t include management economies of scale.
Big chunks of the US can’t do solar in the winter, so you need long range transmission anyway.
Solar panels might be decreasing in cost 10% annually, so over-building to accommodate that seems entirely feasible.
I'm not really worried about this. Humanity has already invented the greatest utility-scale battery. Pump water uphill when it's sunny. Let it flow back down, through a turbine, when it's dark out. No lithium needed!
People often talk about the space required for pumped hydro, but it's probably a lot less than all the shopping mall parking lots in America.
It's not viable where water is a valuable resource.
The *dirt battery I have in mind would be a vertical pulley system with small dirt scoops spaced at regular intervals. The scoops would pull dirt from the bottom of the pulley system and bring the material to the top were it is dumped into a mechanically locked, very large container. Over time the container would fill up, and when that stored energy is needed the container could be unlocked, at which point it would power a clockwork of turbines on its way down.
Thoughts, critiques?
Gravitational storage only works in the very particular case of water, where moving it is downhill nearly perfectly efficient and free, and where you can also get free energy from things like rivers feeding in.
ARES Nevada is developing a 50MW GravityLine merchant energy storage facility on approximately 20 acres at Gamebird Pit, a working gravel mine in Pahrump, Nevada. This project will employ a fleet of 210 mass cars, weighing a combined 75,000 tons, operating on a closed set of 10 multi-rail tracks.
It uses at least an order of magnitude less water than nuclear does, per unit of electrical energy flowing through the system.
Here's an example of a system going into Nevada. 8000 MWH of capacity. Notice how tiny it is on the scale of the state.
https://www.cityofelynv.gov/pdf/CityCouncil2021/cc1-28-21/Wh...
Water use is just 500 acre-feet/year, which is tiny (Nevada's consumptive water use is 6000x this.)
Solar and wind while intermittent have so much redundancy they never have week long interruptions. You can look at CAISO's charts of solar output in California. You get a couple of days in the winter where production is off due to weather. But not a week.
The argument that you can't afford 7 days of renewable storage is just restating that the marginal cost of fossil fuel storage is lower than the cost of electric storage. While ignoring the ability to curtail demand.
There was a NY Times article on this (http://web.archive.org/web/20230226032242/https://www.nytime...) that mentioned that the PJM Interconnection, the biggest US grid, is not even accepting new applications for large projects until 2026.
Yes and no.
Yes. In places like Southern California, rooftops and parking lot solar would do a great job of providing power for mid-day consumption.
No. This is far less effective in, say, Seattle or Pittsburgh.
However, HVDC links are really good at moving power over long distances. The US has lots of places that are effectively completely uninhabited and would make really good spots for solar farms if they had an HVDC link.
That said, the bottle neck is now expanding and upgrading the grid. u/bit_logic is advocating we continue to build new generators, do not wait for the grid, and use that excess capacity to create green hydrogen. ASAP.
aka known as The Correct Answer™.
Here's an interview with Andrew Wang of ETFuels, who is executing this strategy, with paying customers, today.
"Making shipping fuel with off-grid renewables" [2023/06/28]
That said, 100 sq miles of desert is 10 miles by 10 miles.
also, distribution systems are pretty efficient, and power can be sent from sunny areas to areas with dimmer sun or clouds.
We already have a ton of experience transporting electricity over large distances. Losses are not zero, but are not significant enough to matter (2-3%, usually).
Damage to desert ecosystems is a very important concern. I'm not sure how to solve that. But if an alternative is we fall further behind on saving our planet, the desert ecosystems will suffer there, as well.
Overall, I think we should be doing and encouraging both. Local generation is great, but we still need centralized generation.
We should have a national program to create zero-interest loans to incite homeowners and businesses to invest in on-site solar when possible. Make the loan payments managed by the power companies so they get a cut of the action and are incentivized to play along.
That way, you still are paying the power company monthly bills but most of that is paying down a debt that will eventually go away.
A lot of people are responding to your other point about proximity, but I think this is the much more salient one.
Deserts are not dead. They are ecosystems too, and just paving over deserts with solar and wind is going to harm those ecosystems. We spend so much time and effort to elucidate the ecological harm that fossil fuel power generation does but we seem to be content to ignore how much damage solar and wind can do too.
No, this is not an argument against using solar and wind. We absolutely should be. Just...we need to stop ignoring the costs of these methods. There's no free lunch in this world.
So yes deserts are fragile, but what isn't? Something is going to suffer no matter what.
Potentially. Just as likely to destroy the ecosystem though. Barring a few human-caused ones, most deserts have been around for a long time, and the plants and animals that live in them are adapted to them as they are. Maybe additional shade will provide a new niche for some organisms, but it will also disrupt the existing ones.
> I don’t think solar means “paving the desert”
If we take any solar installation of notable size as disrupting the existing system, then the difference between literally and figuratively paving the desert becomes moot.
Is de novo gasoline or diesel synthesis profitable at proximate prices?
Profitability approximates economic sustainability.
If this fuel costs $100/gallon, it's cheaper and thus more sustainable to aggressively subsidize EVs before synthesising fuel. If, on the other hand, it costs $6/gallon, funding its production with a tax on fossil fuels makes sense.
Rejecting reality "to save humanity" is a false economy.
Where I live, the fossil gas industry has been running ads promoting green hydrogen, and of course fossil gas as a clean "bridge technology" to H2. So just keep running that gas heating system, cuz it'll switchover to H2, for sure, at some decade in the future.
As for profitable, it's perfectly profitable for meeting its goals of predatory delay. The longer fossil fuel companies can string along useful idiots, the longer they can continue being profitable.
Everything that can be electrified, will be electrified, because it's more efficient. It seems like shipping & aviation are probably the hold-outs.
I used to think this was the way, especially for balancing the grid, but the more I read [4-7], the more it looks like batteries will be used for fluctuations <1 day, and demand adaptation for longer periods. Some of that adaptive demand may wind up being used for hydrocarbon synthesis, but I don't expect it to compete with fossil fuels for a long time, if ever.
[0] https://prometheusfuels.com/
[3] https://www.terraformindustries.com/
[4] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adapen.2021.100051
[5] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2020.07.007
[6] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2019.11.009
[7] https://www.liebreich.com/the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-upda...
No, we can't. Because the U.S gets the majority of its goods from China [1]. So we have to get China to install all those panels.
[1] https://ustr.gov/countries-regions
We need to consume less. Please start consuming less, ok?
Is there any EROEI analysis for this approach? Direct air capture of carbon is rather energy intensive, because CO2 concentration in the air is really rather low, whereas making solar panel is very energy expensive. If we can’t get enough useful energy from the panels during their expected lifetime, we shouldn’t be blanketing deserts with those.
Also, blanketing the deserts with panels is difficult due to environmental regulations, read eg. about desert tortoises at Ivanpah, and the cost of their relocation. If we want to use deserts to generate energy, first we need to solve the problem of environmental regulations blocking it.
Or, like, come up with solutions to the environmental externalities posed by blanketing anything with solar panels.
For example, if farming didn’t already exist, it would probably be illegal to start it, because of how turning big patches of earth into monoculture completely destroys preexisting ecosystems. There is no known effective way to mitigate this damage, efficient farming at scale requires this, and inefficient methods will require more land and likely cause more damage.
Similarly, blanketing deserts with solar panels will very much significantly damage existing fragile desert ecosystems. You can maybe avoid some of the negative aspects by carefully chosen procedures, but in general, there is no way around it.
The question is whether the specter of environmental destruction will hold us hostage, and allow other, grandfathered environmental destruction to proceed.
In theory we could produce more food and fuel while preserving diverse ecosystems, but it would require refactoring our entire conception of what we eat, how it is produced & preserved, distributed, etc...
> The problem is that permaculture outputs don't fit neatly into the existing industrialized food supply chain.
No, that’s not a problem, “food supply chain” will buy produce from you with not a lot of concern of how you have grown it, as long as it meats the specs. The problem with “permaculture” kind of stuff is that it simply doesn’t produce adequate amounts of food, relative to required investment of labor. That’s the problem with it, not “industrial supply chain”.
> In theory we could produce more food and fuel while preserving diverse ecosystems, but it would require refactoring our entire conception of what we eat, how it is produced & preserved, distributed, etc...
I hear this kind of vague stuff often, but rarely any concrete proposals. Whenever I do, these almost always involve reducing the human population to a fraction of existing population, and have the remaining ones consume only a fraction of what people consume today, with higher labor investment required from each. This is, obviously, a non-starter, which is why actual, concrete proposals are not forthcoming.
How does it compare to letting plants do the capture?
Idk if you burn it. Digest it, maybe, into a fuel or whatnot. My point is biomass is a more-familiar industrial input than whatever comes out of direct-air capture .
The density of ethanol is the issue, no?
Solar panels are profitable and are one of the cheapest marginal sources of power in many places. Therefore, solar panels are almost certainly net positive.
Synthetic fuel generation is probably not in the current environment. Storage is not a major problem yet at the current power generation mix. It may become competitive if storage becomes a problem, or if solar drops in price by 66% or more.
Direct air capture is about $300-$600/ton of CO2. The numbers for this are terrible as everyone is posting estimates of what it'll cost by 2030. So let's pick $300/ton of CO2.
If we could convert captured CO2 directly into gasoline, it would have a market price of $170. This is already pretty problematic because I'm ignoring the cost of getting the hydrogen for gasoline, or the fast that 75% of CO2 is useless oxygen.
More realistically, there is $60 worth of gasoline in that ton of CO2. And you still need to pay to get those hydrogen molecules.
Of course that won't be the priority for the government though, because there aren't any special interests that can benefit from that. Politicians don't really care about the environment. Don't trust them to spend money fixing the environment.
This is a generational project. We don't have time for it. That doesn't mean we can't do both. But we can't only make the long-term massive-upheaval play. While suggested with good intentions, it's the sort of thing a fossil-fuel lobbyist will latch onto as a stalling tactic.
In an utopian world I would agree with you. I find consumerism ugly as well. However, without consumerism there is no economic growth. Without growth no capitalism. Without capitalism no democracy and peace. It would completely upend our civilization.
I mean consider how crazy everything goes when we have a small dip in economic markets.
Even if it's not ideal, we have urgent big problems to solve, and comfort of lizards and thumbleweed is low on the list.
Climate change prevention should distance itself from the environmental movement in my opinion. Make it clear that we're focused on stopping global warming for the benefit of humanity. Yes, blanketing deserts in solar panels will destroy habitats. Yes, mining lithium is ecologically destructive. And we should cut environmental regulation for both, because the survival of humanity is more important than desert tortises.
The main issue with fossil fuel is that we are burning embodied carbon from millions of years ago, throwing the present system out of whack.
Batteries are too heavy for cargo ships to float, and too heavy for planes to fly. The only other real credible alternative is hydrogen, which has been trying to get off the ground for about three decades now. And of course we have all the extant hydrocarbon infrastructure that would need to be duplicated.
E-bikes and electric scooters have tons of daily range. For cases where you need more range quick swap stations like gogoro make it fast, cheap, and simple. Unlike cars where the battery is huge personal mobility batteries are pretty small and don’t need special tools or lifting capabilities.
Has anyone solved the water problem? You know, cleaning all those dusty panels.
Is that a thing? I know you can turn water and electricity into hydrogen, but that's not a carbon fuel.
“Look at the arctic and ocean temps, we do not have time.”
“Again, we do don't have time for the most efficient solution.”
Yes, we squandered 45 years not doing obvious things and waiting for the batteries to improve, etc.
However, I sort of take issue with the “it’s too late to do things the right way”
We can stop burning coal. We are all time highs globally.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/12/16/world/coal-use-record-hig...
This illustrates that a big part of the problem is political, not economic or technological.
We have the technology and money to get to nearly 100% renewables (we'd likely keep some non-renewable fallbacks in place) in a fairly short time... hell, we could be there already.
But the coal industry is a powerful political lobby -- both the executives and workers who don't want to lose their jobs -- and so coal sticks around.
https://oaklandside.org/2022/02/03/6-year-battle-over-propos...
The well known Castner Process can be used to split molten salt NaOH and get sodium, hydrogen and oxygen in the process. That does work under lower temperatures than the electrolysis of NaCl which is more efficient if you only look at this part of the cycle to get sodium. If you use sodium as fuel, the cycle as a whole is important for recycling. Sodium has much higher density than e.g. liquid hydrogen and does not require any cooling or pressure for storage. Also, it melts at about 100°C so you can pump it if you can keep it at about the temperature of boiling water. Yes, NaOH is caustic but neutralizes quickly in the nature which cannot be said for oil spills. You can keep NaOH in normal steel containers. For instance, it is common to use NaOH when cleaning clogged toilets. However you wouldn't pour gasoline down the drain.
You can read more about the sodium fuel cell and the context here: https://orgpad.com/s/5BfLP-cxj-7
Solar in the US is easy. Most of the US is south of most of Europe. If people in Germany at 52.5 (Berlin) degrees latitude can economically use solar, it should be no issue whatsoever for people at 40.7 degrees latitude (New York). Not to mention those lucky people blessed with long, warm sunny winter days at 25 degrees latitude (Miami), 29.7 (Houston) or 37 degrees latitude (San Francisco). Plenty of light there all year round. Most of the US actually matches Northern Africa in terms of latitude. Marakesh for example would be at 31 degrees latitude. That means a relatively stable and longish amount of time between sunrise and sun set. About 9 hours of daylight in New York around Christmas. More for anything south of there. Texas should be more than fine. There's a reason temperatures are so toasty there in the summer. It's at the same latitude as the Sahara desert. Plenty of light in other words.
For most of the US, solar should be usable throughout the year. It being cold doesn't mean it's dark. Also, solar panels actually work better when they are cool. So cold temperatures and sunny days are a good combination. Clouds are more of an issue, of course. But they are more of a local thing and they you don't have those every day. And even they let through some light. If you have to wear sun glasses to protect your eyes when you go skiing, it's an excellent day to be generating solar power as well.
Such as Vanadium Redox flow batteries;
There was a big push for local salt reactors for cities or neighborhoods, but Vanadium Redox flow batteries could be a local solution to level demand from Solar/Wind -- or more simply, to balance load during the day; ie run ACs off of liquid batteries that charged last night.
It would help if Texas buildings had better insulation. The more insulated, the less quickly they heat up when the A/C is turned off/down, and the less storage needed.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
Note that Storage contributes for about four hours and at its peak comprises less than 7% of the total load serving capacity in the state.
I'm not saying batteries don't exist and aren't useful, but the scale is very small at the moment. Too small to be a comprehensive way to balance out the low load factors of Wind and solar. (Which are also a useful but incomplete component of the overall electrical portfolio.)
I've always wondered, if we had a huge solar farm in a nevada or arizona desert, could we have a satellite with a mirror lens to redirect sun from above the horizon down to the panels so they can generate power throughout the night as well?
https://www.space.com/space-solar-power-satellite-beams-ener...
And if we are concerned about the damage to desert ecosystems that covering them with solar panels would cause, consider what the damage would be to an area that is now suddenly perpetually bathed in daylight, even at night.
Solar is growing at about 25% year on year, and the "Inflation Reduction Act" should help sustain this. So after around 3 years, solar will be about 10%. Wind is growing slower, but 15% of electricity from wind in 3 years is feasible.
Did you actually check first?
[0] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... [1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Please double check the reported solar capacity (the article) vs the reported power generation (your links).
The report shows 84GW of current solar capacity which, multiplied by the hours in a year gets you 735,840 GWhr if running at peak all year.
Your links shows a total of 204,110 GWhrs solar generated in the year of 2022. So the very information you shared confirms a solar capacity factor of roughly 28%. The sun doesn't always shine and solar panels don't always run at peak. This is common sense, but the article makes no reference to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_electri...
California and North Carolina both generate nearly 50% of their energy from renewables for example.
https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=WA
Overall, Washington's electricity net generation exceeds electricity demand in the state, and the excess power generated is sent to the Western Interconnection, a regional grid that stretches from British Columbia and Alberta in Canada, to the northern part of Baja California, Mexico, and across all or parts of 14 western states.
Washington is a net exporter of electricity. It produces more electricity than it consumes.
Texas has a lot of oil fields and windmills.
> I’m seeing 12,000 bills filed this past regular session.
That's for two years though - the Texas Legislature meets every other year. Also remember that Texas has an economy roughly the size of Canada's, so in some senses that's like the output of a national legislature.
https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-politics/texas-lege-update-w...
Sorry, but no.
Florida (Method 1) 1,350 mi (Method 2) 8,436 mi
Texas (Method 1) 367 mi (Method 2) 3,359 mi
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Oil is Texas "T", but money is always the real motivator.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
Right now (4:30pm) about 41% is coming from renewables (according to the full-day graph, that number is only slightly higher earlier in the day when the sun is strongest). Since 75% of renewables generation in CA comes from solar power, that 41% will drop like a rock once the sun goes down (eyeballing the stacked graph, it's around 15% or so in the morning before the sun comes up). No way does CA's renewables generation average out to the 49.4% shown on that Wikipedia page.
For reference, here's the full day graph: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#sectio... (unfortunately I can't encode options in the URL, so you'll need to pick yesterday to see a full day, and select the stacked graph from the options to better see the breakdown). Natural gas alone seems well over 50% of the usage. Even at 1pm, when solar generation should be around its peak, natgas+hydro+nuclear is above 50% of generation.
People can try to convince others of the importance all they want, but once renewables are cost competitive with fossil fuels, the majority will switch of their own volition... no convincing needed. EVs are already on the cusp of this
Of course everything is a bit reflexive... less dependency on Oil will drive lower oil prices and vice versa.
As comparison, Germany installed one of the largest solar and wind systems in the world - however being not particularly sunny nor windy, it's only generating about 54% of its rated capacity: https://spectrum.ieee.org/germanys-energiewende-20-years-lat...
Germany, one of the largest national investors in green power in the world, is only keeping up with the US on decarbonization.
Maryland 7.8 California 7.7 Massachusetts 7.4 New York 7.1
The Americans casting aspersions on Germany on this topic are shockingly out of touch with reality, humility and their humanity.
A fascinating way to see solar cover ~50% of the grid during the middle of the day, also see batteries connected to the grid charging to prepare for the evening.
Just like healthcare and higher education, the reason it costs so much in the US is because they're all for profit, and maximizing profit is the goal.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-el...
EIA.gov reports coal capacity is 198 million kilowatts, so, unless my math is wrong, that's ~10.0% of total coal capacity. (19,966 MW = 2.00e7 kilowatts vs 1.98e8)
I do wonder if recent political trends were considered. Lots of "coal country" states are doing everything they can to curb adoption of renewables and I believe WV is looking to subsidize coal.
Edit: corrected billion to million - OG calcs were off by a factor of 3.
Are you perhaps misremembering units? A billion kilowatts is a terawatt. 198 terawatts is more electrical generating capacity than exists in the whole world. As of November 2022 the EIA says the US had 200,568 megawatts of coal capacity:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=54559
That would mean that about 10 percent of US coal capacity is going to retire over the next 3 years.
However, I don't guarantee that I didn't misplace a decimal point. Honestly, the point of my comment was to get someone to double-check my work because it didn't feel right.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
Edit: doh - I used billion when it said million.
Article: "ASSUMING THAT MATERIALIZES, in three years, wind WOULD account for 12.43% of installed capacity while utility-scale solar WOULD provide another 12.41%."
The headline seems certain but the article not so much. Capitalization mine.
Wind generated electricity was 35.6% of total installed wind generating capacity in the U.S. in 2022 (439,203.67 GWh from 141 GW of generating capacity) [0].
Solar generated electricity was 21.8% of total installed solar generating capacity in the U.S. in 2022 (206,171.72 GWh from 113 GW of generating capacity) [1].
(My percentages above were calculated by multiplying the GW of capacity by 24x365 hours in a year and comparing that to the GWh of generated electricity.)
Using the above numbers it would mean that solar and wind may provide only 7% of generated electricity in 2024, even though they will make up 25% of generation capacity.
To convert completely to wind and solar using these numbers we would need 300% to 500% of our required electricity output in generating capacity, and these yearly numbers don't account for regional, seasonal and daily variations.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-energy-consumption-v...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-energy-consumpti...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/18/fervo-energy-hits-milestone-...
For extra fun, do this in rocks that contain subeconomic levels of some interesting mineral resource and use the hot fluids to transport that mineral out of the formation for recovery.
In the short term, wind and solar provide power when they can and make up the difference with natural gas. That is much better than the current system of coal and natural gas. This extends to wind and solar providing all of the normal power. Then can have storage to cover the daily needs. There is no problem turning off wind and solar when not needed, but we will find ways to use the free power.
In the long term, we can have so much wind and solar capacity, I have seen 3 times load, to cover nearly all the time. The excess power will be needed for carbon capture and fuel production. For the rare times when renewables aren't enough, can use hydrogen or other generated fuels as backup.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/18/fervo-energy-hits-milestone-...
There's a company that managed to make it work I believe on Guam but otherwise... its tricky. The power company wants to maintain a stable power network, keep linemen safe, and generally know whats going on everywhere with controls all the time.
Ad-hoc solar installs start with enough density on a branch can overwhelm the grid signal on the power line as I understand it. This is problematic.
great job, Scotland!
And the answer is all three, but mainly the third. Some coal plants are getting shut down, but many coal plants are still online but are being idled more often.
Now we need to swap out the baseload from oil and coal to nuclear, and drastically increase our overall capacity so we can run as much of everything on electric.
We'll probably use dead dino's for decades to come though, especially natural gas.
Not now. SMRs seem to be making real headway. No need to Deutschland ourselves by prematurely optimizing for a legacy design.
https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-r...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#/m...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
While coal has considerably less capacity (~60%) than renewables, but coal generates nearly as many kilowatt hours as renewables do.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
Annoyingly the charts are misleading as generating capacity separates hydro from other renewables, yet actual generation figures combine the two.
We can then ask, how much storage is needed? This is an optimization problem. We need to specify how much solar, wind, batteries, and long term storage (hydrogen) to use so that cost is minimized. The latter is important especially at high latitudes and is often ignored by those trying to argue renewables can't do it.
This optimization problem is solved (for the problem of providing "synthetic baseload") at this web site: https://model.energy The web site uses historical weather data combined with various adjustable assumptions about various costs. The optimal solution varies greatly depending on location, and often includes some curtailment of renewable sources. Even so, the costs are not bad, usually considerably less than providing the same power with new construction nuclear.
Also, "on track to provide a quarter of the nation's installed electrical generating capacity within three years." is a way to make something sound much bigger than it is.
If you look at this chart you get a better idea of the real picture: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56980