The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change

The push for renewable energy would not be possible at its current scale if it weren't so attractive to the political elite (and subsidized as well), for the shortcomings you mentioned. Fossil fuels and nuclear simply better fulfill the role of consistent, cheap, plentiful energy. Unfortunately, even though nuclear is quite safe, has very few emissions, and emits a ton of energy, it takes a Herculean effort to get federal approval to build a plant.

Losses become less important as things move to renewable. Who cares if your storage batteries lose 20% of your solar power to inefficiencies? That's energy that you were going to just radiate back into space otherwise. If solar becomes really cheap, that just means you slap on some more solar panels and call it a day. And don't forget that solar production matches up well with peak electricity consumption, and transmission losses are small in the common case where production and consumption are co-located.

Re: 2-Again, depending on how you look at it, solar helps with this, at least for homeowner rooftop production. If I'm producing my own electricity on-site, the utility company electricity never has to step-down voltages and move that last mile. I'm not using it (or I'm using less of it) so the energy coming from a central power plant never has to come down the "last mile" to me! Feeding back in is where you've got a bit of a point, but it's not really worse than with central production. In general distributed generation is going to be vastly more efficient (from the perspective of line losses) than central generation. Also, why bring up batteries? You don't need batteries to produce solar. If you have extra power, most people are feeding it into the grid, not batteries.

Re: 3-Agreed. Creating the panels is in general a very energy intensive process (in ways unrelated to the rare earth components), not to be ignored. It takes time for an "energy payback" if you will, but it's there. And the panels are very long-lasting.

1. Nuclear is vulnerable to the weather too. [1] I can't find a link right now, but I'm quite certain a number of plants in the southern US have been off for a long time due to lack of cooling water.

2. Once each house is producing approximate what it's using, there will be very little movement of power over the grid, so it makes no difference that it's low voltage, high current.

3. Agree 100% - we need to invent better solar panels and more wind.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/health/20iht-nuke.1.578848...

As for rare earth mining, the US is way ahead of China in rare earth mining technology. Molycorp's Mountain Pass, CA rare earth mine is now in full production.[1] No more tailings ponds. There's a big back-end process to recover most of the water and solvents. There's a large amount of solid waste, but it's basically what was in the ground, minus the good stuff. Even the Sierra Club is grudgingly satisfied with the project.[2] The China producers have had to cut their prices drastically to compete. Molycorp is now struggling financially, and increasing output.[3] Not clear who will win, but right now there's a glut of rare earths.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id8hDUT5nHQ [2] http://www.desertreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DR_Sp... [3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/03/23/what-60-m...

If this fails, we'll probably still see energy storage taking off in the consumer space as devices are built to simply assume intermittent power...everything will basically have an UPS that will just carry it through to the next time the power is on. We see this already in many places with low development, mobile phones are the preferred access to the internet, personal home generators are common, people keep banks of car batteries around and charged so they can watch the TV or keep the fridge up and running.

If we knew our current base-load systems were going away in 50 years, humanity could engineer solution to keep modernity around.

Thanks to China overplaying their hand, this may be changing. Rare earths were exactly that, rare. And China was quite literally the only country you could get them from (they were the only country that was fine with dealing with all the pollution and waste. Though "dealing with" might be too liberal). They took advantage of their monopoly and used it to bully nations, as well as engage in severe price gouging. They even temporarily banned all rare earth exports to Japan (big electronics producer) back in 2010 because of a minor fishing trawler dispute.

Some countries and business got fed up with China's bullying and began looking at ways to do it cheaper and cleaner. It wasn't that it was "hard" to deal with the waste and pollution, it's that it was expensive to get everything set up and up to IAEA standards. Nobody wanted to invest that much and have China start undercutting the market again.

But China continued to play the bully and demand rose. Finally, it became worth it to open up some new mines (and reopen older ones). Both America and Australia have begun mining operations within the last few years (and meet IAEA environmental standards), and Vietnam signed an agreement to supply Japan with rare earths. Last year, a company in Malaysia was granted a license to refine rare earths with IAEA's seal of approval. They're expected to supply 1/6th the world's rare earths and virtually eliminate China's stranglehold.

I think the general idea is that moving to renewables turns the problem into a more solvable one, or a bunch of more solvable ones. It's an inherently optimistic idea, but I sort of buy it.

Grids that take more advantage of decentralized production, cleaner solar panel manufacturing (or mineral extraction). That sort of thing.

There's another big thing to add to your list: transport. It's almost all hydrocarbons. Planes, ships, cars, trucks. Same answer for this one. We'll a solar, battery, or hydrogen powered vehicles.

The means of dealing with this are to have:

1. Dispatchable load (rather than today's dispatchable supply): high-intensity uses which can be cycled rapidly or on schedule.

2. Storage. Pumped hydro and compressed air energy storage (CAES) are the two most likely options. Synfuels -- hydrogen or synthetic gas or liquid hydrocarbons created from surplus electrical supply, are the most likely options in my book.

3. Standby capacity. Biomass, dispatchable renewable supply (hydro, geothermal), and other fuel-driven capacity (preferably carbon-neutral) seem to be the best bets. I'm pretty bearish on battery solutions in general -- they may work for standby, but the volumes and costs required for long-term supply are enormous. Fuel cell tech might be slightly better.

Rare earths aren't significantly used in solar, and only slightly in wind.

Note that not shifting from fossil fuels isn't an option. Whether due to CO₂ emissions or fuel shortages, that'll have to happen sooner or later.

Nuclear's a possible bridge but faces major long-term obstacles. Most notably that it fails of itself to answer the liquid fuels demand (though, as with renewables, synfuels driven by nuclear generation are possible).

Disclaimer: I'm Brazilian

Sure, you need some conventional powerplants as backup system. However, that's much better than having them run all the time. Don't forget that conventional plants should also have their backups.

The hydroelectric dams do the heavy lifting really. We also have a nationwide energy grid, so we can reallocate resources as necessary. What we actually need is more renewables. The northeast is (almost!) always sunny. If there's not enough sun, it's usually because of rain(increasing reservoir levels) and there's wind (boosting wind power).

The north (near the Amazon forest) has an abundance of rain. The south and southeast are hit and miss, the weather is far less reliable.

With a nationwide power grid, surplus can be reallocated. In case that's insufficient, then the thermoelectric power plants can be started, hopefully running on natural gas or biodiesel. We do have a nuclear power plant, wish we had more.

> The majority of losses of the power distribution network are on the last mile

Which is why microgeneration should be encouraged. Having enough local generation to offset the losses alone would be a win.

> Since we are talking of the environment, rare earth metals have a very pollutant and energy intensive extraction process which in most cases is not accounted in the environmental cost of solar panels.

Sure. But what about the resources to build conventional power plants? It is not like their extraction, transportation, processing and assembly is free.

Thermoelectric power plants also release harmful gases into the atmosphere for as long as they are operating. Solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric dams don't do that (for hydro, I guess they'll release a bunch of methane and other chemicals for quite a while after they are constructed, due to the dead life when the artificial lake is formed).

Fusion is always 10 years away. I wouldn't hold my breath. Nuclear power plants will also require a lot of energy (and pollution!) in order to be constructed. The newest designs are a win in my book, but we can't pretend they don't do environmental damage.

Oh, almost forgot. If you are concerned about rare earth mining, then let us build more solar concentrators. They only require mirrors, no rare earths. The heat exchange medium can also be molten salts, which will retain a lot of thermal energy for the night, without using batteries. They require direct sunlight however, while solar panels will work (at reduced efficiency) even in overcast skies.

Ok, I looked it up myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Waste_management

It does produce nuclear waste, but with a short half life. The waste is more radioactive than fission waste, but will be pretty much gone in 500 years.

Since it does produce radioactive waste, could fusion also make large areas of the earth uninhabitable like fission when there's an accident?

I used to prefer fission and fusion research but seeing what happened in chernobyl and fukushima I had seconds thoughts, and now seeing how well renewables are doing I don't care for fission and fusion any longer.

Funny story, in Switzerland they release water from mountain reservoirs during the day to produce electricity and sell the surplus to France and Germany at a high price, and then at night they buy nuclear-produced electricity from France at a fraction of the cost and pump the water back up into the mountains to repeat the process the next day.

The 2 degrees target seems to be already out of reach and everything beyond that gets closer and closer to being unpredictable. Of course no one knows what exactly will happen anyway. But as an example: If the arctic permafrost starts to melt methane gets released into the atmosphere which further accelerates everything [1].

I would not hope on some not-yet-existing or not-yet-usable technologies to fix everything we're messing up now. The "eventually" when finally everyone stops using fossil fuels because other kinds of energy are cheaper might be just too late.

[1] http://grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-05-the-brutal-logic-...

Solar has become economical at least partly because the subsidies are working, by causing economies of scale in manufacturing, novel process technology, etc.

(However, the single biggest solar development that's a byproduct of the silicon chip industry is the reduced kerf diamond wire saw used for cutting ingots with the minimum of waste)

I don't believe that the market will do that quickly enough on its own, as the costs of climate change are not accounted in the profits of burning fossil fuels. We really shouldn't burn enough coal to make extracting the rest more expensive than renewable energy.

But once the most environmentally friendly choice is the cheapest choice, then, as if by magic, everyone will switch.

Car pollution too high? Make electric cars cheaper to buy and own,and everyone will switch.

Coal power plant pollution too high? Make solar power plants cheaper, and everyone will switch.

Meat industry pollutes too much/uses too much water/is unethical? Make synthetic meat cheaper, and everyone will switch.

If you're going to use that metaphor, then really, all power is nuclear power, since that's how all that solar energy is generated.

The Earth's molten core is not solar power.

Uwot. Geothermal? Fission?

You're right in that the Saudis will likely never stop extracting. But there are much larger deposits in the Americas that we quite likely will never develop if solar brings down the price of energy.

Of course a carbon tax does the same thing, as does removing the tax breaks were still paying to corporations to prospect for yet more oil.

One nice feedback loop is that as countries shift to renewables they have more selfish reasons to introduce carbon taxes to try to stick it to other countries while looking progressive.

Not to mention the continued development of Canadian tar sands, which falls outside the electricity generation equation but is still part of the global emissions picture.

Quite a few countries have substantial natural gas reserves.

http://euanmearns.com/el-hierro-another-model-for-a-sustaina...

(pump water up with cheap wind energy, use the hydro when needed)

Here's one (built in 1977.. uses power from the grid), and can produce 3000MW (stores 24000MWH): http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/27/2524501/hydro-pu...

Many of them were built to make nuclear plants more efficient.. nuclear plants turbines are most efficient at full power.. so they would store the water during the night (when demand is low) and then use it the next day to handle peak demand.

So they were also made to start generating electricity quickly.. the one above takes 5-10minutes.. but there are others that respond within a minute. Much faster than starting a oil-fired generator.

These account for the vast majority (90%+) of stored capacity worldwide.

There's no reason they couldn't be used to store solar/wind energy.

You asked for research, so here's a link from UCS. While they don't address that particular point, they do point out various potential problems. http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewa...

The two changes are that the electricity is sometimes stored (so we have some small amount of energy cooped up in batteries instead of out in the world as heat) and that we often move the electricity before turning it into heat. The latter probably exacerbates the heat island effect, although I wouldn't expect it to be worse than pushing electricity from other sources into major cities. The former hardly seems like a problem given that global warming is a concern.

When scaled up to the hoped-for levels, we face the prospect of "solar strip-mining" whereby vast areas of land where sunlight used to reach ground is now blocked. How bad would it be?

Just to bracket the subject with a SWAG (corrections welcome): total USA electricity consumption is 534,938,184,000 watts. Practical maximum for solar is about 1,000 watts per square meter (a very optimistic collection & conversion rate). That works out to a minimum of 200 square miles (534 km^2) devoted entirely to solar collection, or 2,000 mi^2 for a more realistic solar efficiency. The upside is the latter is just 0.05% of total USA land area, hopefully with most of that being used on already-erected roofs.

What the climactic effect of 534,938,184,000 solar watts being converted into electricity instead of heat or photosynthesis is, I'll hope someone else figures out whilst I do lunch.

I was also under the impression that most peaker plants are likely to be natural gas fired and not nuclear -- as in, easier to build, and less of an investment to recoup if something better/cheaper comes along for peak loads.

It just has to be cheaper than pure coal/natural gas/etc. plants.

2. If we switch 3/4 of energy production away from fossil fuels, that will make a huge dent and make renewables even cheaper.

3. Once renewables get cheap enough, it may be cheaper to use a few kWh of solar to produce one kWh of ethanol than it will be to dig 1 kWh of oil out of the ground.

EDIT: I hope the OP wasn't getting downvotes. It was a reasonable thing to worry about.

There is a lot of research going into ways to turn CO2 into various precursors to fuel or directly into things that are liquid fuels. And the last generation of concentrating solar plants have shown that you can gather the heat very effectively if you need that. Photovoltaics are cheap and getting cheaper if your process requires electrons instead of heat. This is likely the way things will go for airplanes.

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q=making+liquid+fue...

There are also a number of companies working on harnessing the wind for ships. There's the SkySail system which I believe is being deployed commercially already that's a huge, automated kite-sail. There are also people working on rigid, self-adjusting wingsails (Saildrone). Finally the folks at Makani could probably put many, many kite plane generator systems on a boat and produce a substantial amount -- perhaps even all -- of the power needed to make a large boat go.

These might require that boats get redesigned to be slipperier but as fuel prices climb inefficient ships look less like assets and more like liabilities. Given the choice between holding less expensive assets with high operating costs and more expensive assets with low operating costs plenty of businesses can find the capital to upgrade if the economics are there. And as fuel prices climb, the economics are increasingly there.

So while I agree that in the short, short term none of this helps, in the long term things can get a lot better incrementally.