All I want for Christmas is 1TW of solar deployed annually
pv-magazine-usa.com
pv-magazine-usa.com
Relocate populations? We won't even handle a few hundred thousand refugees of wars we've started, and you're talking about global migration.
I’m not so sure we need to be that alarmed. First of all, I’m all about renewable energy I don’t like burning fossil fuels. I think planes and gas cars and cargo ships are awful emitters of nasty gases.
However, we can’t even accurately model the global weather system. We keep changing the scientific definitions every decade. Off topic but first the universe was 13b years now it’s way more. Or this kind of fat is bad but flip flop some time later that it is good. The ozone hole was huge, then it turns out it’s patched. Sometimes arctic ice is melting so fast we will all be underwater in 2040. Other times it is somehow way more than expected.
I’m in California and the wildfires probably release a shit ton of bad juju into the air. Some volcano erupts and just spews black smoke into the air.
Our planet has literally been killed by asteroids. And life bounced back. There were no humans then sure, but what I’m trying to say is that nothing is really that certain. I’m a software engineer I literally hack systems to make them work together. We have insane test coverage and shit still goes wack sometimes. It gets patched and we move on, and our tech is definitely far better and powerful than a month, a year, or a decade ago.
Humans will figure it out. We aren’t going to die out. We shouldn’t kill progress because of doomerism fueled by paranoia.
The species will most likely survive. Whether is on the same advanced level and whether we will be able to make progress still, that is another matter altogether.
The 13b year estimate for the age of the universe is about right. A better estimate is 13.8b, which is not way more.
The ozone hole didn’t “turn out” to be patched. We identified a problem, took specific actions to address it (migrate off CFCs), and that repair project is still ongoing.
The occasional cold winter doesn’t negate the overall trend of polar ice melting. Only Hollywood is predicting that we’ll all be underwater by 2040.
Volcanic CO2 emissions are 1/60 that of human activities: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits...
Anthropogenic CO2 will also be reabsorbed over millions of years. But the rate of emission is so high that our challenge is to survive the next few hundred years.
You make it sound like the ozon layer problem was not a big deal, and went away on its own.
It was actually fixed with the Montreal protocol[1]. So this is an example of a problem that urgently needed international cooperation to solve, and was indeed solved that way.
(The ozon layer is still slowly recovering btw. The hole is still there. But the problem peaked in the year 2000.)
Why should this make us less alarmed? Uncertainty of prediction doesn't mean that the outcome is going to be better than predicted, it might just as well be worse.
However the same scientific approach don't support that much that humans are immune to extinction and even less that a similar species would ever appear again through evolution. Mass extinction is here, there is no scientifically compliant way to deny it. Human species are not independent of the rest of biological ecosystems. If they collapse, we fall with them. We don't have technologies to resurrect these complexe systems, even through magic hacks we could use without a sound theory to reason about how it works. We only have the poor technology that allow to destroy it.
To make a IT technology analogy, it's like we master the stone technology and a fleet of advanced computer are all around, artifacts of disappeared civilisation. That is, we can easily employ our technological stack to destroy any computer we encounter, and we will have little to no resistance from them. We can interact with computers, though we have no idea of how they really work internally or together as a networked system.
A good place to start is how it is we cannot predict the tumbling of a tennis racket or wingnut from moment to moment despite being able to very accurately model and predict the arc of motion of their respective centres of gravity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_racket_theorem
https://www.wolfram.com/system-modeler/examples/more/mechani...
What do Lorenz (Butterfly effect) and Smale (Horsehoe maps) tell us about weather uncertainty Vs climate trajectory prediction?
Lots of people are gonna suffer worse climate each year, lose their home and eventually their life all because we didn't put our shit together. Try telling them it's fine because the human race will prevail at the end.
Science keep changing predictions and recomendations. That's part of the scientific method and the expected result. It can be disencouraging some times but the solution is not to give up on science and just wing it. Having said that, the climate change models have been pretty accurate, more so taking into account the difficulty of modelling such a complex system.
The ozone hole was huge and we changed the products we used and it got fixed, it wasnt a miracle or a bad prediction just cause and effect. This worked well because the economies were favorable but if the replacement were a lot more expensive the issue would have lasted a lot longer.
There are some more points I would like to tackle but I'm writing on my phone and this is already getting too long.
It can't be great to cover so much of nature.
Reality is that solar is being built at a much faster pace than predicted for much cheaper than predicted.
Nuclear. Crickets.
Also you are overplaying the amount of panels covering land and sea.
Oh, what's the amount of land & sea needed to rely on solar then?
I also wonder (not asking) about the resources to make and replace each panel every 30 years vs the equivalent of making and maintaining nuclear plants.
> Reality is that solar is being built at a much faster pace than predicted
I see, so the Christmas wish is coming true!
Ideally, I'd like to see the NRC dial back it's strict regulations.
That's the main reason nuclear development is slow here.
Other countries build nuclear much cheaper and quicker, just as safe.
That's my Christmas wish.
We need a reactor going online each week to make a dent.
Not disagreeing that the regulations in the US are way too onerous for nuclear.
What happens if in 30 years we have to discuss nano PV particulates in blood and great PV patch in some ocean?
("Externalities of wind power"? Oh.... is this bird strikes?)
Noise is problematic for wildlife, and in some areas we tend to build wind power in previously quiet areas.
Completely forgets the impact of climate change to the ecosystems.
Adding to that, by acknowledging the harms of wind power we can locate it where it’s less harmful. Near cities or at sea, instead of destroying the few quiet places.
Not being a scaremonger, these are just real costs that come along for the ride into a brave new future.
Spodumene processing in Malaysia from Australian concentrates (Mt. Weld, etc) to produce litium for batteries creates massive acid dams of wate and tonnes of radioactive waste.
Copper mining has always been problematic (albeit out of sight for many) and much more of that is called for.
Without being pro or anti any of the possible solutions for power generation we need moving forward, they all have toxic waste issues that bear looking into.
2021 produced 50 thousand tons of pure lithium.
Coal gets used ONCE, lithium stores energy thousands of times before recycling to do it again.
This kind of context is important before whatabouting.
Lithium, Copper, Nickel, and a slew of other minerals and elements are on the increase and have some serious waste products.
The comparison here is to
> Good thing nothing like that ever happens with nuclear.
(with implied /s)
with the rational response that all resources come with a downside.
This kind of context is important before whatabouting.
You've whatabout'd by dragging in coal.
Mixed, obviously, and different mixes in different parts of the world, but what should be our first-choice energy source? Assume fusion's off the table for now, lets stick with things that already exist.
My gut feeling is that wind, with its primarily local ecological impacts that are able to be minimised with careful placement and design, is a strong candidate for least-worst solution. The catastrophic failure mode of a wind farm does a lot less damage than the catastrohopic failure mode of a nuclear reactor, for a start. I do realise a lot of that wind power is probably going to end up in batteries (I'm hopeful for StEnSEA, but like fusion it's a bit Real Soon Now).
In a very real sense to date the actual catastrophic failure modes of nuclear haven't been that bad on a realistic industrial scale.
Chernobyl persists as a bad place to dig into the soil if you're a Russian soldier commanded to do dumb things, as a large area nature reserve the case could be made that it has been a positive for non human animals.
The events at the Fukishima nuclear plant had few actual direct deaths, as an incident embedded within the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that directly caused 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, and 2,553 people missing it would fade from sight were it not for the evacuations and containment costs.
The areas evacuated are already allowing returns to much of the region, the containment costs are the kinds of things that can be mitigated with engineering on future projects.
I'm no great fan of nuclear but pragmatically designs and safety have improved over the decades and actual deaths and casualties look small compared to deaths in conventional resource mining and industrial accidents such as the Bhopal disaster (500,000 people exposed to the highly toxic gas methyl isocyanate).
Sure, let's go with as much wind and solar as we can, let's have battery farms, green gas production, overnight thermal energy storage in sodium salts, etc.
But let us also pay attention to the costs of "green energy" - the ramp up to meet the current fossil fuel power creation levels will drastically ramp up toxic waste byproducts from nickel|copper mining, litium for batteries, rare eath processing, etc.
We are in a looming CO2 crisis that is worse for being kicked down the road since the 1970s when eraly action could have been taken.
Let's not blindly walk into another e-waste crisis by greenwashing away the real issues that come with new energy sources.
Coal might have peaked but it has an insanely long way down.
Mining waste problems need to be dealt with but they are localized and can be cleaned up afterwards.
Climate change is neither.
Right .. like recycling in the USofA - greenwashing.
Just be self aware about advocating to continuing to kick a can down the road and admit to yourself at least that you have no intention of being bothered by mining waste.
I'm glad to see the back of coal, but were it not for the associated C02 emmissions I would much prefer to live within 20 km of (say) the Muja coal | power site than (say) Lynas Malaysia, Kuantan.
Nickel | Copper mining in Sudbury and nearby generates more than 650 million tonnes of tailings every year from 200 operations along with about 10,000 abandoned mines that are "managed" by the Canadian government. "Managed" is essentially a euphermism for "not actively dealt with". Mine remediation has a long way to go in countries such as Canda and Australia and the majority of sites with problems are elsewhere and out of sight out of mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muja_Power_Station
https://aidwatch.org.au/stop-lynas/
"Can be cleaned up afterwards" is very different from "Will be cleaned up".
> Also from IAE https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpLhuguXsA8YE8V
Seriously? Not sure what point you're attempting to make with an graphic that lacks context and in any case supports my point that solar related waste will be rising seemingly "expontentially" along with solar.
If you're serious about understanding global energy and mineral resources I advise you to look at presentations that put total usage and transitions in the same picture - coal has a long way to fall to zero and solar has a long way to go to replace.
I'd also reiterate that I care about the issues here that come along with energy transitions - I'm not advocating for any one over another.
PV aren't just sand, if they were my windows would be PV. Small impurities matter over long times and large quantities.
Also wrong on long term plan for nuclear. Long term plan is wait. Radioactivity reduces itself with time.
Yes, we need to recycle the materials. Landfill is not a viable solution for any waste, none of that is unique to solar power.
> Long term plan is wait
Waiting a lifetime is easy. Waiting hundreds of generations after we’re dead is not. Is that an argument against nuclear power? Not in my opinion. There’s still no finalized plan describing how waiting will work in practice though.
90% of nuclear waste is harmless within a year or two. The rest is so dense, that it fits a couple of trucks, and can be stored indefinitely long in a very small storage
Voila what? If you're concerned about people degrading so far down that whatever we leave behind is "tombs of the third millenium", then storing a truckload of nuclear waste isn't really an issue.
I’m talking about the massive externality of climate change that is certain.
Waiting for nuclear to maybe get its shit together is not a gamble that we can take.
That said, I have nothing against nuclear. It’s just not happening unfortunately.
My point is even plastic packaging was invented to deal with problems of previous packing techniques namely glass, tin, paper, etc. Now we have a huge plastic environment issues.
Seems doable to be honest, even if you assume real-world inefficiencies and double or triple the area required. Especially when you fold it into existing infrastructure (eg solar panels on buildings).
These are 0.02% of the earth landmass.
Values are like this, when calculating conservative: 1 KWp needs an area around 10m². For enough maintenance distance multiply by 3 = 30m².
=> 1 Megawatt = 3 * 10m² * 1000 = 30.000m².
=> 1 Gigawatt = 3 * 10m² * 1000 * 1000 = 30.000.000m².
=> 1 Terawatt = 3 * 10m² * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 30.000.000.000m².
7.6% of Nevada
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28US%20power%20consump...
Because there is absolutely no reason not to assume that those new nuclear power plants will once again take least 20 years to build (and will be 3 times over budget). That's quite a long time span that you need to fill with fossil fuels.
The only reason countries want to maintain an industrial nuclear supply chain and skills base is because they are a nuclear power already (France, Russia, US, etc.) or because they are purchasing the option to become one in a hurry (Iran, Sweden, South Korea, etc.).
Governments don't firehose subsidies at a form of power that has an LCOE 5x the cost of its competitors and give it free catastrophe insurance on top for the hell of it.
People will post stuff like this and then act surprised when others are put off.
Political will requires a median IQ high enough to understand the tradeoffs and lack fear from decades pass, which I don't think is possible this century.
For 24x7 grid supply at .9999 reliability? I’m not nearly so sure; it might be, and if that were the case, it’s great news, because it makes that almost an inevitability.
Only billionaires could afford the cheap smartphone you have in your pocket if it wasn't manufactured at scale.
You'd be surprised! Solar panels provide shade for local wildlife and improve crop/grazing yields due to the cover moderating the hot sun and providing spots for dew to form. As much as I love nuclear, we really should have started deploying it 10 years ago to make a difference. Solar is cheaper now and easier to deploy.
This dual-use of land for solar panels and agriculture is called "agrivoltaics".
where X and Y could be integers depending on location for 12 + hr demand.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/electricity/nuclear-power# “ Nuclear energy, with around 413 gigawatts (GW) of capacity operating in 32 countries”
So the total global nuclear capacity ever built is now producing 413GW. Eerily the same as the solar capacity installed just last year.
Whoever is pushing for nuclear instead of solar in 2023 either doesn’t have the slightest idea about the current energy market or simply wants to help the fossil fuels to survive given how long would it take to build a nuclear power plant and at what cost.
Peak power isn’t the right measure of comparison here, I don’t think. Average power and guaranteed power on a 24- hour basis seems a more logical comparison.
“Can it run my heat pump at 5 in the morning on a cold winter day?” matters a lot to people.
The capacity factor of solar at night is exactly 0%.
You don't have to cover nature if you cover buildings.
Los Angeles, for example, could provide a very significant amount of it's electricity needs if it got a 5 mile radius of commercial buildings to all cover their roofs with solar panels.
Now, we can argue whether those buildings, themselves, are a good thing. But, given that they exist, we should cover them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...
Jevon’s paradox will presumably generate (or scale up) massive energy-consuming use cases. Solar (and other renewables) would retain whatever cost advantage they have, but huge demand might keep non-renewable sources around for longer than we’d otherwise think.
Meanwhile ultra-cheap energy might reduce the cost of current activities, but debottlenecking always just reveals the next bottleneck.
Use absurd amount of energy to capture the carbon out of the atmosphere. Obviously this cannot be powered by fossil fuels. If this becomes a global priority, energy for everything else would just be taxed enough to ensure enough of the seemingly abundant cheap energy is left for this project to keep earth habitable.
I find it weird that there's not more emphasis on the startup opportunities on HN created by this. Someone out there is going to profit from innovative demand shifting tech. Im pretty sure there is a vast and mostly untapped potential in this space beyond just the obvious stuff - e.g. storage heating, wall batteries and intelligent car charging.
Instead it seems we're all still somehow assuming the power consumption economy will continue as if the grid were still fed by a slightly greener form of coal.
(But it might still be a lot cheaper than current fossil and nuclear sources).
Also:
> massive energy-consuming use cases
One such use case is the synthesis of hydrocarbons for plastic/chemical production. We’re going to need a lot of solar to power that.
https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
It looks like utility solar is currently ~33% the LCOE price per kwh of nuclear or 85% of the price of gas (CCGT).
This is an increase relative to 2021 (20% of nuclear / 60% of gas)
(As I understand it, the cost increase between 2021 and 2023 is from cost of capital and shipping)
Naively projecting out the LCOE trajectory, it indeed does not look like it's going to get to be 'dirt cheap' soon - eyeballing, the LCOE curve over time appears to be flattening towards a 5% or smaller cost reduction year over year.
Why? There are plenty of hydrocarbons left. All climate science and renewable energy policy indicates that we have to stop burning it before we exhaust supplies.
If (electric) energy were near free, we'd probably get dishwashers that dry properly again, and more HVAC. IIUC, electric cars tend to be much heavier than ICE cars as storing energy in batteries is heavier than storing it in liquid fuel. That means you need more energy to move that weight; I think economics point towards moving heavy cars with electricity more than synthesizing liquid fuels if electricity is near free, but I could be wrong. Near free electricity could enable on-road charging as inductive losses would be palletable; and this could enable viable cars with smaller batteries, but this is pipe dream planning.
Eg, when batteries are heavier than petrol, carrying enough fuel for a 200 mile journey every time you go to the shops doesn't make any sense. We need smaller, lighter vehicles for the vast majority of journeys. Scooters, electric bikes and trikes but also much smaller trucks for deliveries and tiny cars for people who can't use transit or bike-type vehicles (older people, infants, disabled people). Self-driving makes some of this more doable.
As vehicles get lighter, there is a virtuous circle where they need less fuel just to transport their engine and their fuel around. EV motors and drive trains should usually be lighter than ICE vehicle ones so this all helps.
A vehicle which can transport a whole family plus suitcases, camping equipment or Christmas presents several hundred miles in a few hours is a great thing to have, but we just shouldn't be using them routinely for urban and suburban journeys of a few miles, transporting 1-2 people and/or a few bags of shopping. Same with a truck that can fit half an apartment's worth of furniture.
Moving away from cars means moving away from framing our transport needs in terms of problems that only cars can solve.
Worse than that, grid scale storage capacity isn't even being built in the countries deploying wind at scale. It looks like a strategy for a country like the UK if the intention is to keep relying on carbon (LNG) in the long term. But if the intention is to switch off carbon, there is a massive cost in the pipeline to deal with intermittency.
In many places in Australia, we have so many solar panels installed that's enough to power everything in the day time, but when the sun sets, coal still has to be burnt regardless.
I'm quite skeptical to grid-scale battery projects. Every such project has a total capacity of like 2hrs, making them only useful at some short peak time in the day, rather than overnight or over a cloudy rainy week. The only power storage that makes a difference to me is pumped hydro like our Snowy 2.0. But it's constrained by its location, and it's taking a decade to build.
I'm not sure what's the way forward. Maybe more wind farms can complement solar, but I guess that probably means we should really be deploying more wind farms rather than solar at this point.
Like inventing a car without brakes.
However, you always need conventional power plants on the grid as otherwise you won't be able to do load-following.
Most 100%-renewable-energy plans suffer from a deficit of knowledge how large electricity grids actually work.
There is a reason why there is no 100%-renewable-energy grid anywhere in the world which does not heavily rely on hydro power or geothermal power.
Energy storage is a big part of that, but really boring, non headline grabbing things like better/more transmission lines and slightly more sane usage patterns make up the low hanging fruit.
I know in Texas, we are largely making more wind/solar power than we can even transmit. There are projects to address this, but they are slow.
Any other market would have dropped a production machine already that does not produce on-demand.
It's like having a worker that only works when they feel working and be it 3 AM in the morning. No company boss would accept such a behavior in the long term.
For wind and solar, it's just widely accepted and rather than accepting that you can't build an electricity grid on top of unreliable generation, people try to come up with all kind of weird solutions to force a solution based on solar and wind.
So to put it in your words, yes, companies are absolutely accepting that kind of behaviour from their electricity suppliers. Companies are even benefiting greatly from it.
Hydro does provide power without wind or sun so, as does bio gas, geothermal, pumped hydro.
Nowadays, base load is nowhere near as important anymore so as it was decades ago, industry quitely adapted without any body noticing, unless they wanted to know.
How much graphite are we producing compared to, well, almost literally everything else?
> Hydro does provide power without wind or sun so, as does bio gas, geothermal, pumped hydro.
Hydro, geothermal and pumped hydro have the downsides of: you can't build them everywhere. "Bio gas" is a euphemism for, well, burning hydrocarbons (though burning gas is cleaner than burning coal)
> Nowadays, base load is nowhere near as important anymore so as it was decades ago,
This is a patently false statement. If anything, base load is much more important now than decades ago because almost everything we have and depend on requires electricity 24/7.
> industry quitely adapted without any body noticing, unless they wanted to know.
Well, if your only example of such industry is "graphite production", then it sure has. I sampled a few countries here: https://app.electricitymaps.com (note: the time is European, so you have the reversed numbers for "the other side of the world")
02:00 14:00
Germany 43.7 GW 61.9 GW
France 58.6 GW 59.2 GW
UK 25.3 GW 31.4 GW
Central Brazil 47.4 GW 48.2 GW
US
PMJ Interconn 94.2 GW 88.0 GW
SW Power Pool 33.6 GW 34.6 GW
California 21.9 GW 16.2 GW
So no, baseload needs are not as important as they used to be. Something people fail to accept, it seems... And those base load needs can be met, among other things, larger grids covering a bigger area. Also something tgat has been found as completely feasible in multiple studies. Feel free to ignore all of that so, I don't want to harm your strongly hold opinion.
No, they aren't. You said, and I quote, "base load is nowhere near as important anymore so as it was decades ago".
Decades ago we didn't have everything requiring electricity 24/7. These days even your stove continuously drives power from the grid. And where "decades ago" your production stopped or slowed down because workers would go home, now you have 24/7 automated production and logistics chains.
Moreover, a lot of industries have shifted to production at night precisely because of the "civilian" electricity requirements during the day.
And energy consumption has only been growing https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...
> Now imagine what can be done with modern production technology.
I don't deal in fantasies.
> So no, baseload needs are not as important as they used to be.
Again, this is patently and provably false.
> Something people fail to accept, it seems...
Some people pretend that their fantasies are fact and that their baseless statements have to be taken at face value.
Meanwhile electricity consumption has grown almost 5-fold since 1980 https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-power-consu... and ~7.5-fold since the 1950s: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
And I never said we don't need baseload anymore, I said, and that is confirmed by grid operators, studies and first habd knowldge, that demand, and there only big consumers matter, is getting more and more flexible. Hence, baseload is less important today than it was before.
Know why industrial consumers do that? Money, they are paid for that flexibility: either by getting free electricity or getting paid (negative prices) at certain periods. Or by getting paid to not consume electricity in certain periods, same way peaker plants are paid to generate electrivity in these periods to maintain grid balance. The large cobsumers do this, as I said, since at least a decade (first time I was directly involved with it, so propably longer), and they do this on production equipment and processes almost a century old.
We do need baseload, because while solar and wind are predictable, they depend on the weather to produce, and might not produce enough sometimes (almost a guarantee, your claim of zero is local so, large grids mitigate that).
Not sure what's so hard to understand about any of that...
So far we only have your word for it
> and first habd knowldge
And this is your word. That's it.
The rest I really don't care about because I'm just as capable of writing plausible-sounding walls of text without a single link to a study or a statistic. I try not to do that.
> that demand, and there only big consumers matter
Ah yes. Only big consumers. We've increased our electricity requirements 5-fold, but that doesn't matter. The "big consumers" will halt their production when there isn't enough electricity.
> We do need baseload, because while solar and wind are unpredictable, they depend on the weather to produce, and might not produce enough sometimes
I'd say often
> almost a guarantee, your claim of zero is local so, large grids mitigate that
The grid can mitigate it if there's a stable baseload generation available. A month ago there was a day when all of Europe's wind and solar combined was producing something like 10% of installed capacity. Saved by copious amounts of coal burning (and also by nuclear and some hydro).
So, riddle me this: when there isn't enough renewable energy, do "big consumers" halt their production, or the electricity consumption remains the same? And what does this tell you about "we don't require as much baseload anymore", given that our electricity requirements have grown 500% in the past 40 years?
If there isn't enough solar and wind (hydro and other green / renewable electricity sources are perfectly base load capable), yes, large consumers reduce their consumption for that period. So, in percentage and not absolute values (no surprise you don't get that difference, you don't get neither the electricity has to he consumed when produced and production / consumption lives on a time scale...), we need less base load generation then previously. Heck, even Germany, among other countries, had days with > 80% renewable electricity on the grid, so we know it is technically absolutely possible.
Coal is bad, agree. Nuclear is a great stop gap until everything is ready, grid, capacity, industry and the like, to function with a renewable epectricity grid. Building new NPPs is a dead end so: too expensive, takes too much time and gets nowhere near the additional capacity we need, since most new NPPs replace old ones the net nuclear capacity gain is negligible.
The grid can mitigate if somwhere on the grid sufficient electricity is produced, base load, nuclear, renewables or somethibg else doesn't matter. Throw in demand flexibility and you are almostv here already. Storage is lacking, but even that is built out, e.g. most new residential PV has some storage component.
And since you insist: Yes, big consumers absolutely do stop production if needed and financially interesting. Know what? They even schedule production accordingly in close alignmwnt with electricity markets and grid operators. Hard to believe, I know.
Edit: I know big consumers do stop or scale down production, because my wife does so in production planning every week. And I scheduled production runs the same way during my time in production planning in the chemical industry. Oh, and one of the green belt projects I coached looked for ways to optimize production runs to enable more and more short notice shut downs for limited periods. The last one happened over ten years ago.
Proof beyond "I said so"?
> So, in percentage and not absolute values (no surprise you don't get that difference, you don't get neither the electricity has to he consumed when produced and production / consumption lives on a time scale...), we need less base load generation then previously
So, again, empty words with ad hominem attacks.
"Oh we still produce shitloads of electricity not because we need to, but because you're stupid enough to understand we don't need to produce it".
Strangely enough, instead of "not needing as much baseload" everyone is busy running coal plants to sustain that baseload they don't need or something.
> Edit: I know big consumers do stop or scale down production, because my wife does so
Ah yes, it must be true then. I'll ask my wife, she knows something, too.
---
Anyway. I'm not interested in this discussion any further. Because nothing trumps "you're too stupid to understand" and "my wife said so".
Adieu.
Yeah, couldn't agree more. Hard to discuss with someone who refuses to take other view points into account if they don't fit the narrative, regardless how well founded those other view points are.
Currently there's more than 100 concentrated solar thermal plants, generating 7GWh of power, deployed around the world with a another 30 under construction right now in China and a third generation plant being designed here in Australia while the second gen is currently being built and tested after the success of first gen pilot.
https://theconversation.com/batteries-wont-cut-it-we-need-so...
It's happening, it just hasn't yet arrived at scale.
In parallel we're also seeing the rise of solar -> green hydrogen | ammonia | methanol for use in heavy primary industry (mining and transport) which is a decent chunk of fossil fuel use to be displaced.
Making it at scale is a MAJOR challenge.
Germany alone consumes up to 1.6 billion kWh on a single day. That's the capacity of 16 million Tesla-S batteries with 100 kWh.
Solving the storage problem is simply infeasible and is never going to happen in the foreseeable future!
Batteries aren't the only way in which energy can be offset by 10 hours to meet lower night time demand.
That said sure, we need to build storage, and I think the first and most important step is to remove the political obstacles currently in place to prevent people and companies from generating and storing their own electricity.
This HN thread might interest you [1] "A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage"
From one of the comments:
>That's what is different about this new study. It uses real time supply/demand figures instead of annualized averages. It meets 98.8% of demand with renewables and fills in with fossil power the rest of the time.
The linked article is interesting, and it kinda confirms what I was wondering that it is probably wind farms that we need way more, not solar.
> "in Australia" is an important qualification here. Australia has a very high ratio of available solar and wind energy to population.
"Don't let perfect be the enemy of good." doesn't mean not to think it through. Show me the math.
What's been happening now in Europe - the electricity prices go negative during the day and in the evenings the gas plants are turned on and start burning fossil fuels again to make up for the demand.
Luckily in some places it's supplanted by wind (when available - e.g. Germany), but a lot of EU countries just burn gas in those examples.
After an initial "WTF I have to go to sleep now, because there's no electricity?!", people would get crazy innovative and find new solutions, and -to some extent- adapt.
Unfortunately law makers are not keen on making people suffer a little now, in order to avoid a whole more of suffering later, once climate change effects hit irreversibly and tangibly.
You cannot enforce innovations. That's not how it works, really!
We're burning coal or gas. At least that's what happening in Germany which had to reactive 19 coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of 7.3 GW after shutting down 8.4 GW of nuclear capacity.
See: https://www.smard.de/home/rueckkehr-von-kohlekraftwerken-an-...
Don't be like Germany, support nuclear!
How long batteries last is controlled entirely by how long you want them to last. A 2 hour installation is made to last 2 hours, if you attach it to half as many consumers it will last 4 hours, if you double the size as well it will last 8 hours. Some modern EV's can power a single home for several days.
Another interesting option is to synthesize gas. Australia could for example power Sydney from solar+batteries+synthesized gas by the end of this decade if they wanted to, construction could start tomorrow.
It seems that worldwide, the main obstacle really is "Wanting to". Everybody says they want to but there are so many economic structures closely tied to the status quo that actual change is quite slow.
Seems like we might get there in a few years instead of a few decades.
EDIT: If you’re downvoting this, please explain to me why a solar or wind power plant owner won’t immediately shut off his plant once prices go negative. A PV curtailment takes 30 seconds or less.
It can take more than 12h for some thermal plants to pick up steam after they have shut down. So it sometimes makes sense to produce and pay in order to regain profits at the following non-negative hours.
Negative prices happen because plants are still subsidised during negative price periods. The 4 and 6 hour rules in Germany only apply to newer plants, and many phases of negative prices are shorter than that.
France has the 1 hour rule apply to all renewable plants, but there are still subsidies available in the form of time-shiftable origination certificates.
But all of this is improving and we are going to see prices go less negative in future.
But most of the time, prices will be positive since batteries will smooth out demand.
This may be approximately true for new plants coming online.
But existing plants get to keep their old subsidy schemes for a period of N years, at least here in Germany.
Well in Europe you can sell guarantee of origins. This drives down opex for a solar plant, at least the plants i manage in my job on the day-ahead market.
(This is an educated guess, not knowledge, so take with a grain of salt.)
The owner can still buy back the power in the spot market and turn off his plant. He can then deliver the power he bought on the spot market to the PPA. If prices are negative, this means the owner gets paid for turning off the plant buying back the power. So the plant still gets curtailed.
All this is assuming no subsidies and that the PPAs don’t contain any weird origination provisions.
If that theory is correct, paying someone to take your electricity is worthwhile.
Of course, it could operate its own shunt load on-site but not worth it if it runs a few hours a year.
And I’ve no idea if a panel has a longer or shorter lifespan if it just runs hotter but unloaded. But definitely going to take a hit to production if prices go positive in 5 minutes but your panel is baking.
And like I said, hot panels reduce production so in 5 or 50 minutes when rates are positive, losing 5-10% of your production is no Bueno. Panels usually have passive cooling, so if there’s little wind…
It really sounds like nobody has modelled. There is some negative value worth selling for but nobody seems to know what it is (or keeps it a secret)
I’m pretty sure that the arbitrage possibility is made use of by building batteries to even out the duck curve.
You are absolutely correct, which is why these assumptions that building out lots of solar will result in free or even negatively priced energy make no sense.
Currently these arbitrage possibilities are infrequent enough that they can't be exploited profitably. There just aren't enough super sunny days where an absolute excess of power is generated that would make it possible for, say, a battery farm to get built out to capture that storage. But everyone knows storage will be essential as renewable energy makes up more of overall power generation, and at that point it will make sense for power producers to save up their excess "sunny day" energy to sell it at other times.
But I imagine it becomes more of an engineering problem at grid scale, where you might need to dump hundreds of megawatts to make a difference. Cooling starts to require more significant infrastructure and/or environmental impact. E.g. the gigawatts of thermal waste of a nuclear power plants either heats a local river or needs to be dumped in the atmosphere with those big hyperboloid cooling towers.
I feel that this basically has to happen sooner or later when the political obstacles to producing your own energy are removed. Electricity in several regions fluctuates between negative to 30-40 cents per kwh, having a storage mechanism like this to extract the differences as profit has to be a money-fountain, and it's not even expensive or difficult to build.
The reason electricity is "free" on very sunny days currently is because there is little/no storage for it, and systems aren't built to be able to capture the value of that excess energy. However, in a future where nearly all energy is from renewable sources, storage will be essential. So it's highly likely at that point that that excess energy will just be used for pumped storage, or hydrogen generation, or whatever other storage systems will exist.
The wholesale electricity price on the Australian NEM, which covers 9 million dwellings goes negative basically every day, there's 11 million dwellings in the entire country.
You can see the price in the bottom graph here: https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&interval=30m&vie...
> That's not how it would work, and folks are extrapolating the current situation, with very limited energy storage, to a future where storage will be essential.
Again, right now in Australia, grid-scale storage is extremely limited (which is excellently highlighted in your link in one of the tables under "loads", at only .9%). Power prices go negative because on the grid generation always needs to be matched with demand, and there basically isn't a place to "put" excess generation. I'm addition, while I'm not familiar with the specifics in Australia, many places have government subsidies that can make renewable generation profitable even when prices go negative.
Here are 2 articles, on Texas and Germany, explaining how and why prices go negative, and it's basically always due to a lack of storage and government subsidies:
https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/understanding-negative-pr...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-...
Also electric cars are storage, which means they can cut the net price of electricity even lower than the minimum raw price.
One stunning fact, originating in the incredible energy density of e=mc^2, is:
"If we take that a step further, U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."
Now ponder how much coal ash and CO2 has been released into the atmosphere since the 1950s (!!!) And more than that: how many heavy metals with an infinite half-life have been sent into the atmosphere by such burning and settled into the ground including agricultural soil.
Nuclear waste is a gigantic straw-man. It's a manufactured issue by environmentalists who've wanted to kill nuclear for decades.
Moreover, it's likely that Helion will create the first commercially viable fusion reactor in a small number of years. Once that happens, it becomes even better than fission.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
Lets see what we have left when we have reached 95%, it will not be the issues we think are most critical today.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
I’m asking this not to get into the usual discussion on baseload and the sun not always shining, but to point out the simple economics of renewables: they might not be ideal, but that won’t matter as they’ll be cheap.
And of course solar is “cheap” in SoCal or Morocco. North of latitude 50, in France or the UK or Canada or northern China it is more expensive than mass-produced nuclear power plants even without accounting for batteries and nighttime.
Distributed solar is also a regulation nightmare. If there is a fault in a powerplant you have experienced staff on site to deal with the issue. If there is a bug in the firmware of a cheap inverter that is installed thousand of times the owners probably won't even notice until the grid maintainer rings.
(I am pro-nuclear, but definitely not against solar. Still looking at a cheap balcony system once I find some time.)
We are in a situation where we simply can’t buy hopes, dreams, promises and marketing.
Build or shut up. Nuclear is just not delivering. I wish it did tho.
Not to say that the whole industry does not benefit from learning curves. Solar and wind have had massive cost reductions that come from learning curves and standardization.
Current planetary electric generating capacity is about 11 TW.
There are a few things worth noting.
- Like this article does, rather than talking about installed solar, we need to look at production rates for panels. It's much simpler to estimate and from there to installed capacity is just a matter of the market figuring out the right price levels and the panels being sold and installed.
- Why is the growth exponential? The demand for cheap energy far outstrips the supply. Our economies are bottle necked on energy cost and they've always been historically. And energy prices have come down by a lot recently. Every time somebody starts producing solar panels, they pretty much have no trouble selling them. That's not going to be true infinitely but we're nowhere close to having saturated demand for cheap energy.
- As production volumes go up, the learning effect drives prices down. People keep on finding new efficiencies and improvements as volumes go up. Everything from production, distribution, installation, operation, etc. is affected by this. New entrepreneurs in this space don't just do what others are doing but they try to do it a little faster. And looking at big markets like the EU and the US, there are plenty of easily observed inefficiencies still resulting from regulations, bureaucracy, and other hurdles. Most of the cost at this point is installation. And most of that is because it requires specialist skills and because there are lots of rules mandating the use of people with those skills. It could be plug and play but isn't just yet. Buy some panels, plug them in, job done. Works like that for your boat. But not your house somehow. Can that be solved? (rhetorical question).
- Lower prices grow the market because there are plenty of consumers of expensive energy that would love to pay less. We've long crossed the line where there is any doubt about solar panels earning themselves back under most circumstances. The lower the price, the faster they earn themselves back. The subsidies have helped but they aren't strictly needed for this anymore. And there are plenty of people and companies still paying way too much for their energy.
Based on the above, the market is much simpler to predict. Just follow the money: where are countries investing in new production capacity? Express it in GW/year. Add it up. That's the market growth. China is obviously leading and expanding enthusiastically but it's making other countries nervous that are now also investing in their own production capacity. So, we can expect some surge in growth to result from that.
And yes, solar panels don't work 24/7 and are affected by weather and seasonal changes. All well known and mostly easy to predict and model. Luckily, we're seeing the same exponential effects in battery and energy storage production. For grid storage, domestic usage, cars, planes, toothbrushes, etc. That number is soon going to be expressed in twh/year produced. 1 twh of battery can translate into hundreds of twh stored and released per year if utilized to the max. But most batteries actually aren't. Most batteries just sit there holding most of their charge for most of the time. It's potential capacity we're barely utilizing. We'll have lots of that soon. Tens/hundreds of thw.
The world's annual electricity production is only about 25 pwh (2500 twh). That will grow. But the numbers are starting to add up. We'll need some amounts of other, more expensive sources of energy (wind, nuclear, fusion, etc). But battery plus solar actually go a long way and we're going to have insane amounts of both. Also, existing fossil production capacity won't disappear overnight. Technically that's still growing and might only start shrinking towards the end of this decade. Driven by renewables replacing them and out competing them. The more interesting trend is going to be the nature of that decline. It's going to be another exponential. I.e. much faster than people currently expect/anticipate.
In short, people keep under estimating the numbers. Both conservatives and progressives keep getting surprised by this. Even people that should know better (politicians, executives of companies affected by these trends, etc.). It's because people look at the numbers and then assume they won't change much or at least ignore the clearly observable exponentials or assume some linear trend.
We're not seeing that
5M vehicles per year (nowish), 10M vehicles per year (a few years from now), 20M vehicles per year, etc. That's just cars. Deployed grid battery capacity is doubling the same way every few years. Those industries are constrained on how quickly new battery factories can be built. Which is happening at the pace manufacturers can finance it.
Toothbrushes not so much, obviously.
And you are off by an order of magnitide: The largest NPP has all of 8.2 GW...
You would need to build again the total global nuclear capacity ever built only to balance the 413GW of solar deployed just this year.
Nuclear is dead, whoever says otherwise doesn’t know anything about the current energy market or is in denial.