This sentence seems to be at odds with itself. How does needing a large area concentrate security risks? If anything it seems to disperse them.
Unlike a coal or nuclear plant, you can't just walk up to a critical part of a solar farm and blow it up. Any part that you damage is relatively isolated from the parts you don't damage. Thus, it takes considerably more effort to take the entire plant offline.
a) We create a 200 square mile solar field in the Sahara, from which cables run to Europe to supply electricity. To take this plant out, one just cuts the cables. There, you just plunged Europe into darkness.
b) We create a 20x 10 square mile solar fields in the Sahara, all dispersed over a very large area. Well, this is an engineering and construction project on the scale that dwarfs even the previous project. It is truly vast. Nevermind all the political issues again.
"Just cut the cables" isn't trivial. Have you ever seen a high voltage tower? Not only are they not accessible without professional gear, it's also going to require even more expensive gear to cut multiple inch thick conductors.
In all likelihood he power to Europe will be transmitted via multiple undersea cables, the effort of disrupting which would be unavailable to all but state agents, in which case the security issue is irrelevant, as you are likely already in a state of war.
It's a good thing then that there is a long history of all state agents in northern Africa maintaining friendly and stable relations with European governments.
(Yes, said Europeans also carry a great deal of responsibility for this situation, but that doesn't make the situation any more tractable).
The solution for taking out high voltage powerlines? A pair of Skilsaws hanging under a quadcopter. Drop down onto it and... something bad's going to happen!
edit: I also missed the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA
edit 2: I scrolled around a bit and it's near the 30 minute mark.
Since we're talking about hypotheticals, I could say these things are also true:
1. There are counter-drones deployed and patrolling air space above the towers.
2. There are hundreds of independent power lines with 2N redundancy, so cutting 5-10 high voltage lines would do nothing.
3. The undersea cable points are protected by state agents and have good security for amateurs to compromise.
4. Europe will have 24-48 hours worth of storage even if ALL the lines are cut from the Solar Generation plants.
5. Europe will have backup power generation capacity in the form of locally stored and operated fossil fuel plants.
____
In other words, there's absolutely no evidence that the future hypothetical solar installation is going to be more vulnerable than the infrastructure that already exists today, and surprisingly Europe doesn't plunge into darkness every week.
As to points 4 and 5, although storage and some backup capacity is reasonably feasible, this would mean that Europe could very well be forced to go to war in short order to get their full power supply back if a rogue organization gained power in North Africa.
Well, how many towers do you have to knock down using explosives before the lines fail?
The feet of the towers are simply accessible, so there's nothing stopping people from even just using a metal file. It wouldn't be safe, but you'd get the job done.
Or just plow a truck into their feet. You only really need to bend one of the feet and the wind will do the rest.
The thinking is in fact correct. The parent should have used a better, more serious, and guaranteed inevitable scenario: war. Bomb the concentrated infrastructure and take down all of Europe's power supply. It wouldn't take very high precision and it wouldn't take a vast number of hits: it would require a few, clumsy hits, which would be nearly impossible to stop.
The present system, which tends to be far more distributed than not (to take down all the power in Europe today, you need to hit a lot of spread out targets), is vastly superior to extreme concentration.
I agree with most of what you've said, but cutting a few inch thick conductors doesn't seem all that hard. I think a single stick of dynamite would do it pretty easily. Two for good measure. This would still be an act of war of course.
Further, outside of city's you can generally get solar panels from a roof to provide power for the building under it making the grid a lot more redundant vs cutting cables.
I think that roof top solar is just as viable in more or less the whole Europe - even in the Nordics, at least the southern parts.
The only thing that would make desert-sized solar plants a really good business would be really cheap low efficiency cells.
Isn't this a problem with any centralised electrical power source? In fact I've always thought that terrorists could cause far more disruption by taking out a couple of transmission line towers than blowing people up. And it would only take a decent sized spanner in many cases.
The only solution to this (and to the massive resistive losses over power lines) is localising power production. And that's where solar, wind, small-scale hydro and local battery storage look very effective.
Not that easy. Furthermore, it's the same for any large power plant of any type. This is a very poor argument against solar. It's also a stretch to imagine that Europe would rely on a single power plant for its sustenance.
If you wanted to take a power plant offline, solar included, you would target the grid connection wiring or the high volatage transformers.
The vast, VAST majority of the world's population lives FAR closer to the equator.
Again, you seem to have ignored the part of my post where I mentioned installing enough solar to produce power even during cloudy days. Cost of utility solar is super cheap now. If it continues reducing in cost, it'll be plenty cheap enough to just install 3-5x as many panels as you need to provide power during cloudy days. Yes, solar CAN get cheap enough for that to be a good idea.
The fact of the matter is, as long as we don't have a scalable storage solution, power sources where we can't regulate the power output cannot take up base load and can at best be a small overlay that can pick up load if the beneficial weather happens to coincide with higher load requirements.
But I'm sure we'd eventually find uses for this extra energy. Like producing ammonia for agriculture.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...
(Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.)
Turning on some peaking power plants at night vs the day is not a significant issue. Further, the solution is excess capacity not long term storage.
>"...It’s kind of ironic: Germany, by installing so much rooftop solar, has it that both their coal plants and their rooftop solar are available in the summer, and the price of power during the day actually goes negative—they pay people to take it. Then at night the only source is the coal, and because the energy companies have to recover their capital costs, they either raise the price because they’re not getting any return for the day, or they slowly go bankrupt. There are many people working on storage—batteries are a form of storage, and there’s a few others, like compressed air, hot metals. But it’s not at all clear that we will get grid-scale economic storage. We’re more than a factor of 10 away from the economics to get that."
Having fossil fuel plants that only operate when needed, but get paid more per kWh than they do now when they run all the time (since as well as fuel costs they have up front construction to cover) is not even close to being a problem. It is in fact part of the solution. What is he doing complaining about this?
Negative prices are also not the big drama he makes them out to be. Sad that he's got a reputation as some kind of genius and he's scared of negative numbers as if it's some kind of witchcraft to have too much of something and use pricing and markets to decide which providers should scale back.
Translating for those scared of negative prices: someone wants to keep providing power for some reason (maybe their setup doesn't like rapid changes in output, which would cost them money in repairs), they want to pay you $X to shut down your system instead. Do a calculation and figure out if shutting down your system is cheaper than that, if so, take the money. Market forces at work! The inflexible system don't make as much money, and the flexible systems gain it.
Or, someone with flexibility in when they need electricity says "I'll agree to heat my water tanks at the point that helps the grid most, how much will you pay me for doing that? The amount we'll pay you is the negative price, except not negative anymore".
Gas turbines also have thermal stress, but they are designed for this and they loose vastly less power when you turn them off. With enough of them you can have zero storage and zero problems. Because storage is simply one solution to production / demand mismatch not the only one.
Now yes, peaking power costs more but energy costing more at night is rational behavior and without subsidies you will minimize overall costs.
>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...
As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.
Anyway, I agree it's not without costs. But, if we got to the point where peaking power from gas makes up ~10% of total electricity supply and the rest of that is renewable power then we will have made massive progress. In other words don't let perfection stand in the way of progress.
You are downplaying the impact of methane. As I quoted in the last post, the IPCC estimate is that over 100 years a given amount of methane is 34 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas compared to CO2. Over a 20 year period (which is probably more relevant considering where we are in climate change) methane is 86 times more potent.
>...but the actual long term impact is fairly minimal vs the savings from not using Coal.
That's the problem - there is enough methane being released by our new reliance on natural gas there is concern that we may be having just as much of an impact on climate change as if we went and burned coal.
>...Remember that's ~100,000 tons / ~10,000,000,000 tons = 1/100,000 so yea methane is bad, but in this context it's 0.001% so it's still a rounding error even if it's 100 times that bad.
The problem is that EVERY natural gas well, storage facility and pipeline leaks methane. This was just the largest one. As I quoted in the last post, "...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas."
>... But, if we got to the point where peaking power from gas makes up ~10% of total electricity supply and the rest of that is renewable power then we will have made massive progress.
Yea no kidding - 90% power from intermittent sources would be pretty remarkable. The problem is that 90% power from intermittent sources won't be possible unless there are major advances in grid storage technologies.
In terms of having to use natural gas, nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, so there is no reason this can't be done elsewhere. Minimizing our use of natural gas when when you consider the climate changing negative externalities of natural gas, would be a good thing.
Further, because of this decay increases in release rate don't stack at 86x year over year. You get a magnified increase in the first year and a smaller net increase every year after that until your down to the carbon content of methane.
Under 10% total gen from peaking power is viable with over production of wind and solar and zero grid storage. It's not going to be 10% 24/7 but 0 most of the day, regular generation at part of the day, and rare spikes up to 50%. You can drop that under 5% with moderate grid storage of around 1h average demand, but you start needing vastly more storage the lower you want to take that number.
No, those numbers are from the IPCC which represents the mainstream consensus. Take it up with them if you think you are right and they are wrong. Using the 20 years number is reasonable considering how far along we are in climate change. As the IPCC report states: "There is no scientific argument for selecting 100 years compared with other choices (Fuglestvedt et al., 2003; Shine, 2009). The choice of time horizon is a value judgement since it depends on the relative weight assigned to effects at different times."
>...Under 10% total gen from peaking power is viable with over production of wind and solar and zero grid storage.
Yea I hear advocates make such claims all the time. Unfortunately I never hear the same thing from people who actually run a major utility. We might get there someday, but for now I have to agree with Gates: "...What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."
This won't solve the baseload problem, but it will reduce it.
So yea, residential customers get a fixed rate but that's because there is no point in demand based pricing. They simply charge you enough that it makes little difference what time of day you use slightly more power. In the future the same is likely to be true.
Scenario 2: Your solar power is used elsewhere. In this case, there must be a means to transmit power to the people who will use it. Those people are likely to live near seawater. The closest such people are also likely to have a limited supply of freshwater.
You are already either transporting water to the solar site, or transporting power away from it to somewhere else. So the idle capacity of the solar plant will be usable for desalination and/or wastewater reclamation. And I think aqueducts, particularly seawater aqueducts, are cheaper than you realize. The majority of energy required is in increasing the elevation of the water, and that can be done with surplus power, too.
Do you mean ice or steam? ;-)
Dynamic remote cut-off of heaters, chargers, and other non-critical consumers is one suggestion, but the equipment cost is probably at least 100 Eur per consumer.
Imagine building a huge water desalination plant and only running it when there is excess power available on the grid.
I can't see anyone wanting to invest in that, except maybe a financially myopic government, and they tend not to last very long.
How you do it depends on whether you prioritize capital costs or operating costs.
Not without huge tax breaks to incentivise load following, because intermittent production of large scale industrial processes is hard and not cheap.
Some processes are better fits than others. If you have 2-5x extra capacity that is sold cheap on sunny days, someone will figure out how to use it.
Does that mean they can operate in 4hr windows? Or do they run have to run the furnace for a minimum period? A large quantity of steel takes a large amount of energy to melt.
http://www.steel.org/making-steel/how-its-made/processes/pro...
It could also be a plant for shredding scrap, where I guess it wouldn't be a time issue so much (and if it doesn't have the material inflows to run full time, timing cheap power would make sense).
Heat up some molten salts or any phase change material, then run the steam through a generator. Or pump water uphill. Not very efficient but doable.
You don't. No one said it has to be all solar everywhere.
> there are many difficult issues that remain to be solved before they can become a core part of the energy production.
Wind and solar are already core sources in some places.
In many places, a decent solution to the night-time solar problem is natural gas power stations. We built them already.
Finland will use Finland-appropriate solutions. That has very little to do with the appropriateness of solar in Mumbai or Phoenix.
Solar in the Sahara is an example, but countries already spend a few percent of GDP on safety, being less efficient but more independent is generally an excepted trade-off. Further, Sahara solar > desalination > farming is probably a better use of that space vs transmitting it.
High voltage DC transmission works fine for this problem. All of the engineering challenges have been credibly worked out and priced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec). The main problems with this approach are political, in that it requires massive cooperation between many countries over very long time scales (decades).
Why is there a security risk with putting solar in the desert? It seems like a relatively easy to secure location, and solar cells are hardly high value-density targets for theft or vandalism.
Letting the northern African nations provide the security is just plain folly, and also makes Europe completely dependent on these economically backwards and frequently hostile nations.
[1] In the sense that nobody is willing to buy it so it has no price.
You really think that's a viable way to maintain the electric power supply for all of Europe? "What could possibly go wrong?!"
Forget the solar farm, easiest is to cut power lines. (explosives?)
Given how stable that has been it seems unlikely that a small African country, who will be getting a big chunk of cash from Europe, would do anything stupid.
(Better still to generate locally, but not every country has the land available to do so).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_...
The economist had a reasonable article, though light on technical detail: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2171432...
I mean, most of the same security risks appear in oil pipelines and extraction.
(Solar is also one of the few truly distributed power sources, but I expect most power in the future will come from vast solar farms due to the ease of automation.)
Edit: put differently, why should we adopt a new solution that is even more exposed to the already known risks?
And I don't think our current electrical grid has a major problem that even a slight attention to infrastructure couldn't fix.
In any case, you cannot compare this to oil pipelines directly because we can stockpile oil. Even if all the pipelines are taken out, many countries stockpile oil that can bridge them over until an alternative solution is found. If a considerable part of the electricity comes from some remote site in a desert and the connection is taken out, that'll immediately plunge the country into darkness.
I like your optimism about all the problems being trivial, but with your mindset every problem we currently face is trivial.
At this point, why don't you just propose that we go and harvest Helium-3 from Jupiter? I mean, we already sent some probes that far, it's just some engineering issues, right?
There are a whole host of political, engineering and social issues that need to be sorted before something like you propose can be done. It can work for individual countries in certain regions, but it is not in a state where it can fix the energy problems of the world or liberate us of the carbon dependence.
Yes. You're blowing up the security argument when really it isn't the security of it that is the problem -- our current infrastructure isn't more secure, and we have had only minimal problems with it thus far. The problem is the imminent and looming destruction of various thousands of ecosystems, and the continuing habitability of the planet.
It could be done. We got to the moon in about twenty years, which was much more of a technological leap than this will be. With the concentrated effort and enough propaganda, we could make the switch from coal/gas/oil. We are very rapidly running out of runway.
It concluded that there is literally not enough renewable energy potential in Great Britain (e.g., cover every square millimeter of space with solar panels) to do so at then-current energy consumption rates. It also pointed out problems with approaches like "giant solar fields in the Sahara" (the requisite solar fields are, well, roughly the size of Germany in terms of required area). Nuclear is technically not a renewable energy resource, but it does have requisite power generation capabilities--and very staunch anti-nuclear activism that makes expanding nuclear difficult.
All in all, quite an eye-opening read.
That is false, though. Just a little math shows why.
The UK is 242,500 km². Nameplate solar capacity on that would be on the order of 150MW/km², so 36 Terawatts. UK average electrical consumption is 32 /Giga/watts. Assume solar produces 1/4 of that 36TW on average when it's sunny during equinox, so 9TW. Even on a pretty cloudy day on the winter solstace in London, you're still going to produce at least 1/10th to 1/20th of that much, so worst case of worst cases (cloudy day on solstice) you're looking at 450GW average if you cover the entire UK in solar panels. That's still over ten times the UK's average electrical consumption.
(I used UK instead of Great Britain, but that doesn't make much difference.)
I mean, the overall point that you wouldn't want to power the UK on solar alone is totally and completely valid (and I fully support the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant, by the way), but the idea that it's literally not possible is BS.
It's an absurd claim to say it's impossible, and there's almost nothing more annoying than a source claiming to be "without the hot air" actually being full of plenty of hot air on absolutist claims like this. You don't correct BS by using equal and opposite BS.
(Most energy advocates I know do this... both renewable advocates and nuclear advocates, exchanging BS about the opposite technology. It's a clean energy circular firing squad, with the climate in the middle.)
The total chart at the end came out to <https://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml>, with solar making up about 68 kWh/d per person.
Highly distributed rotating masses would handle a large part of the storage, turning it into more of a power smoothing problem.
Secondly, I presume that at some point we'll be covering every building (rooftop and window) with some sort of solar film that converts electricity.
Why don't we have those today in large scale production? Probably for the same reason that the US builds more roads instead of mass transit - it's a bias to build what we've alway built, not a real technological limitation.
Microwaves
The summers are sunny all day and night. The problem becomes how to store the energy until the dark winter months.
(There are solar panels that doesnt need heat just light)
Edit: http://www.nordicenergy.org/article/solar-power-at-the-arcti...
So yeah, if you want to run on natural gas for half the year, then solar in the nordics isn't bad.
But luckily the nordics have lots of hydro and don't need any gas or even solar.
But on the equator, the seasonal variation is small. The Global South will have a big energy cost advantage as solar costs keep dropping.
Furthermore, you need to plaster a vast area in the desert with solar plants, which brings along all sorts of concentrated security risks. The alternative is to have many smaller plants dispersed, which results in a big loss of efficiency.
I'm all for clean energy, but you seem to be handwaving away pretty huge issues as "thought exercise". Our inability to store energy is not just some side concern that will go away any time now. There is a reason carbon fuels are so prevalent - their energy density is far above what we can store in batteries. Without scalable and high density energy storage, unpredictable energy sources like solar or wind are much less useful because often there is no sun or wind at high demand and on the contrary there can be an overproduction during low demand. Germany already causes serious headaches for the European grid when it floods the network with electricity on sunny/windy days. They actually have to pay other countries to take over the extra capacity.
Solar, wind, tidal etc... energy are all awesome and clean (if we disregard the land that they take up), but there are many difficult issues that remain to be solved before they can become a core part of the energy production.