... solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, yet somehow that's not good enough for the people who claim to be realists. Odd.
New demand every year is at parity or maybe outpacing the new production of wind & solar.
Not to mention the huge amounts of glass, plastic, concrete (which by the way, we are apporoaching a shortage of suitable sand for making it), and rare earth metals required to build wind & solar infrastructure.
Dont get me wrong, I'm with you. I want to beat climate change as much as the next guy, but this article is saying what we need to hear. The situation is dire & it might be too late to avoid the worst.
Man, I hope not. I'm very hopeful. But I often get worried, & pessimistic like the author. If you really look at it objectively, everything is still trending in the wrong direction. Even at the rate renewable energy is coming online.
Electricity is only part of the problem. Only 20% according to this guys numbers. And it's still predominantly created by coal. What about all the gasoline/ diesel for cars? Oil heating homes & buildings?
There's too many people. Crap it's hard to not be pessimistic :(
But social change for energy efficiency is slow. Especially if you cannot convince the majority that it matters. Not easy to fix air travel either.
Metals, glass and concrete are easy enough to make (the shortages of sand are mostly driven by economics of mining and not availability), the rare earths and batteries are the hard part.
Hydropower is a nice solution, but highly geography-dependent. China is attacking this problem by investing heavily in ultra-long-range HVDC power transmission from dams in the west to cities on the east.
Removing CO2 is important, and urgent in the medium term, but it isn't urgent in the "must happen this second" sense. Intermitten removal would be fine if the removal tech could be power intermittently.
It may be possible to do atmospheric CO2 removal with intermittent power, I haven't attempted any kind of chemical engineering deep dive into what that process entails, but that is likely to incur a significant loss of productivity. Given that it is already an extremely expensive proposition, we will probably need to maximize process efficiency, which means reliable continuous power.
That changes economics a lot.
The issue is that scaling is about relative growth, and to solve climate change we need absolute growth. Despite all the optimistic growth, the truth is that our world runs on fossil fuels and is likely to do so in the future as more and more parts become developed and use more energy.
On the other hand, nuclear fission and fusion plants are spatially compact and can be located in secured areas near the industrial and residential users connected by short transmission lines. Nuclear plant heat and power can also be harnessed to generate synthetic fuels for transportation and chemical feedstocks as required for military and civilian purposes.
All indications are that renewable power is more practical at this time than nuclear.
Pennsylvania is a fossil fuel economy now, through fracking, and we are idiosyncratically beholden to it in our federal election. Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Ukraine, Venezuela, Mexico, Norway, Denmark, Sudan, the Middle East and Iran... these are all volatile fossil fuel and mineral extraction economies, they do not export much else to us besides a declining pool of cheap labor or in Denmark’s case, cheese.
Many countries aspire to be mineral economies, not the other way around, life is much simpler that way. That some places extract minerals from the earth, and others “extract minerals” by converting their control of the worldwide supply of attention into ads, and that the Earth extractors are in Pennsylvania and other parts of the world while the Attention extractors are in San Francisco and Los Angeles, is also a big part of the issue.
It is indeed more complicated than “who’s to blame, consumers or producers?” This forum is constantly full of people whose opinions boil down to, “I should get paid for my thing, and everyone’s else’s thing can go suck it.” It isn’t workable. This guy isn’t advancing a workable politic for global action against global warming.
And yet neither is solar power, despite obviously fixing the carbon problem. They do not make solar panels in Indonesia or Iran or Saudi Arabia or Mexico or Brazil or Sudan, that’s a billion people right there who depend on fossil fuel economics. What do you think their opinion is about solar panels? Making solar panels is hard, squeezing oil out of the ground is easy.
And if there’s anything history has taught us, people will fight violently to protect not their profitable means of making money, but their easy means of making money. That’s the problem dude.
Natural gas. The year-over-year growth in natural gas deployment is greater than the entire historic deployment of solar power. Let that sink in.
I'll be optimistic when the total fossil fuel footprint stops growing. Hell, I'll be optimistic when it stops growing exponentially. We aren't there. We aren't anywhere near there. We don't have the foggiest plan of how we will get there. Germany killed its coal power industry, and transitioned right into burning Russian natural gas.
And this is just in electrical generation. Electrical generation is only 20% of our overall energy usage. In order to transition the rest of our society to green energy, we'd have to triple our overall electricity production.
Solar and wind deployments aren't even able to keep up with increased demand in electricity growth. How you expect them to triple our overall electricity generation capacity anytime soon is beyond me.
Resources are ultimately more limited than oil, and have grown only through extremely expensive, and environmentally damaging (groundwater contamination, earthquakes) hydrofracking. Simply on a financial basis that appears unsustainable.
Natgas has and will help smooth the transition. It's not a stable goal, however. Lifeboat, not safe land.
EDIT: I'd appreciate knowing where I'm wrong.
+ A smart grid allows demand and load to be managed, home and industrial storage and devices to be controlled to vary the load. This is a direction Europe is moving in. Your industrial heavy user might willingly sign up to a service that can be cut to stop grid crash in exchange for discount on the vast amount of electric used - this has quietly existed for decades. Getting smarter, homes and other premises can have charging and in building devices controlled to move demand, and in home spare solar battery added to grid storage for the overnight. Again for discounts. There are examples of this working already.
+ Pumped hydro can add TWh of storage if built at scale. It needs suitable geography, but we don't lack potential sites. Sites that would attract a NIMBY reaction can take the "hollowed out mountain" approach, invisible when finished. Again, plenty of examples exist. Unlike battery will last hundreds of years needing only turbine replacement periodically. The higher build cost can amortise beyond a lifetime.
+ It is very unlikely the whole of the US will completely lack wind at the same time, especially offshore. It's just about unheard of for tiny UK to be becalmed, though admittedly we're more "blessed" with wind than many regions. Over specify to allow the regions with wind to assist any region currently becalmed.
+ Last, use neighbours as storage - sell and buy electric from surrounding countries to smooth each other's demand. Once again this is already coming into being across Europe with the super-grid.
In short, we have ample ways to store and move electricity, along with managing demand today. It's already being done in many places. We just need the political will do more of it to support a fully renewable grid.
FWIW, I also tend to agree 10 of his 11 closing points. I'm not at all convinced by his argument renewables can't scale up to cover all global electric generation.
> A smart grid allows demand and load to be managed
Which we don't have on a national (let alone international) scale, and won't have in any reasonable period of time.
> Pumped hydro can add TWh of storage if built at scale.
It's not, and it's not being built or even planned.
> sell and buy electric from surrounding countries
We can't. There's not enough transmission capacity, and there's no sign that capacity between countries is being built. We can't even ship power from the east coast to the mid-west interior.
> It is very unlikely the whole of the US will completely lack wind at the same time, especially offshore.
Which doesn't help the interior of the US - see comment about a complete lack of transmission capacity. We also have effectively-zero offshore wind capacity, and none in the works to be built.
It's a dirty secret but the US simply doesn't have the capacity to ship power any major distance. The country is broken into individual sub-groups that are maybe a thousand miles on a side that are physically incapable of linking up due to a lack of infrastructure for lots of power.
Theoretical technology won't solve our problems; Pumped Hydro is a great example. It effectively doesn't exist outside of a few demos; per Wikipedia the total installed pumped hydro storage in under 200 GWh. That wouldn't even cover the electricity imported into CA.
The sticking point is political, not technical or logistical. If there are ever politicians convinced climate heating, and sustainability is important, it's fixable with no more difficulty than building a highway network. Undoubtedly you'll say citizens won't tolerate the taxes that would be needed -- still a political issue. Those can change.
As the International Energy Agency noted today whilst criticising the completely inadequate efforts the globe is making: “We will need to see great political will around the world. This is why I believe that the world needs to build a grand coalition encompassing governments, investors, companies and everyone else who is genuinely committed to tackling climate change.”
> That wouldn't even cover the electricity imported into CA
In a year. CA doesn't need a year's storage backup capacity, just enough to cover cyclic shortfalls. A few hours to cover winter nights, that's under a day's worth at most.
Why is every nation not committing an investment on the scale of the Apollo/Manhattan Projects? Politically it should be sell-able as a near-term investment (jobs) and future prosperity (cheaper renewable energy).
Governments should be putting billions into fusion, wave/tidal generation (nothing should be too expensive), upgrading all hydro to pumped hydro as well as developing more.
Ideas like this: https://www.arup.com/projects/bendigo-underground-pumped-hyd...
should be fully supported and funded. As each of the dozens of 400m+ deep underground coal mines around the world are wound down and replaced with wind or solar generation, convert them to pumped hydro, providing jobs for displaced coal miners and saving their communities in the process.
The US currently subsidies renewables at about $7 billion annually.
Though the renewables subsidy doesn't look as generous if you compare things in % of GDP terms.
The current US Government investment seems pretty small.
There is promising work coming out of Lockheed's Skunk Works, using a completely different design and MIT has SPARC. Given ITER is pretty well locked in on the Tokamak design they've chosen and it a matter of building it, why not fund as many ideas as possible as while most may not work, you just don't know whether one results in a discovery and pivot that changes everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Compact_Fusion...
Manhattan needed to build a vialbe, air-transportable, nuclear bomb. It arrived at two independent designs, both effective to task, and succeeded in assimilating materials for at least several more weapons (on the order of 6 IIRC), over the course of WWII. The rationalisation was both defeating, and not losing military supremacy over, an enemy. (Germany was also working on a nuclear weapon.)
Apollo needed to land a man on the Moon and return him, alive, to Earth. Rationales varied, but one compelling argument was as a proof-of-capability of US technological capacity as regards missile design, reliability, control, targeting, with the additional constraints of solving life-support systems challenges capable of keeping meat-puppets alive for a week in space. Drag-racing and Lunar golf were bonus stretch targets.
Each project was relatively independent of other complex technological systems, and wasn't concerned with a tightly-coupled, long-term, widespread integration. Manhattan's gadgets needed to fit in Bock's Car's bomb bay. Apollo's designs, once the fundamental mission was completed, were largely abandoned. Several technologies survived, but the project as a whole did not.
Both projects saw numerous exceedingly close approaches with disaster. Manhattan's tail-tickling proved unwise, the US are still cleaning up Hanford (and as yet have no final management plan), and there were several near-catastrophic handling mishaps at Oak Ridge. (Though in total the project was remarkably smooth.)
Apollo's record was, to my knowledge, far worse. An entire crew were lost in ground testing, one very nearly in space (13), and missions 8, 11, 12, and probably others, saw one or more potentially fatal / mission-loss incidents and events. Margins for safety were extraordinarily slim.
(Subsequent history with the Space Shuttle and two total vehicle losses shows that risks persisted decades later.)
The Global Energy Sustainability Project is far more complex.
It is building not a simple tool or one-shot mission, but a total system. That system needs to be tighly integrated, as an integral component, of the worldwide technical economic system. It needs to function from now until doomsday, or at least until some replacement regime is established. It challenges what's arguably been the most lucrative and critical as well as geopolitically salient sector of the global economy, which is to say it upsets a vast set of economic, financial, political, military, and national interests. Pains are localised, benefits are diffuse.
Success depends on global coordination and cooperation, or barring that, sacrifice and effectiveness on local scales which counters the actions of any defectors.
This is almost certainly the Biggest of the Big Problems.
As in India, which is nearly finished building from ~ 40GW to 170GW of renewable energy. And you skip past the powers of conservation. We don't need more power, we need less CO2.
> capable of scaling ... nuclear fission
The CO2 problem needs to be addressed promptly, and efficiently. Renewables build -much- more quickly, and the immediate cost of hundreds of nukes would finance thousands of green installs. (Waste aside.) Sunlight and wind are the result of the Sun's NF ... it eats the waste problem.
> I don't see any possibility.
Oh it's possible. What you 'see' as irrational politics I see as just as rational as the CO2 evidence. And the rational response is to vote out all of those who stand in the way of prompt and efficient.
Consider if we had acted and done in the same short period what India has done, we'd now have the equivalent of 130 nuclear plants online ... ready for a mandate to move to electric transportation.
The future cost of continued reliance on fossils completes the calculation.
In that time, other forms of energy generation (with no major lasting effects following catastrophic failure) and storage are getting cheaper, and if that happens at a sufficiently fast (e.g. half-life (heh) of price of a few years) than fission reactors will be priced out before they even start running.
Fusion is safe! D: Fusion when?
Nuclear is safe compared to the alternatives.
Hydro power, for much the same organisational, political, and disaster response reasons as nuclear, which is to say, non-technical reasons, can be exceedingly risky.
But once the immediate hazard is resolved, over the course of months to years, the region returns to normal.
The immediate innundation from Banqiao was responsible for ~25k deaths. The additional 100k or so came from starvation and disease due to widespread disruption of the region, and a grossly inadequate disaster response plan and capability.
Organisational / institutional failures at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and for that matter, Hanford and Sellafield, were and are massive contributing factors. You cannot engineer around those.
Something I say as no particular fan (though also not a doctrinaire opponent) of nuclear power.
The fact that scaling nuclear beyond its present contribution would require vast numbers of plants, many in politically (and otherwise) unstable regions, is a much larger concern in my book. We're committing to decades to millennia of addressing consequences in regions where stability is often measured in years, sometimes months.
This sounds like a tautology, but we solved hard problems by solving them, not by believing we'd solve them.
You sounds like the typical advocator of oil pipelines over protected land and I'm sure you know how that ended up. Can we build safe pipelines? Yes. Do we? No. Why? Because of the human factor, which comes down to greed, stupidity, and laxation of regulation.
This is the same exact case for nuclear. Already we see that a majority of nuclear power plants in the US are operating at almost 2x the design life and will likely get additional extensions. This is done by continued laxation of regulation.
And this is in the US where I would expect the strictest of regulation. When the rest of the world sees the US doing this, it sets a precedence for them to follow and I'm sure other countries will have even less strict regulations and inspections. It's really only a matter of time until we have another disaster.
I don't see any possibility of the required power generation capability being built. Even if the economic resources were made available, which is at least plausible in the abstract, the irrational politics around nuclear power in the developed world would guarantee that there would be little actual progress.
Constructively addressing climate change means massively increasing power generation capacity as a primary input. Given the ample evidence that this is not politically achievable, I think it is fair to call pessimism "realism".