Wind and solar need back up yes - but it doesn't have to be from fossil fuel. Currently that is often the cheapest and quickest - but batteries and other energy storage are fast becoming economical. We are already using less non-renewables each year.

> We are already using less non-renewables each year.

While the UK may be using less non-renewables, they are paying more in total every year for fossil fuels.

Articles like this one (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/09/fossil-f...) shows a rather dark trend.

Some key quotes: From 2020 to 2021 they (fossil fuels) received an extra £1bn support from the government compared with 2020, a 10.7% increase

In 2021, support for fossil fuel extraction rose by 20% to nearly £2bn.

Using fossil fuels as reserve energy is only getting more and more expensive.

Our gov is in the pocket of oil companies, they are perfectly happy for the rest of us to foot the bill for these record profits.

Fast becoming economical? How fast? Current cost for battery storage I've seen quoted (open to correction) is around $600K per MWh. For every MW of wind or solar power that would be $120 million. Wind farms at around $1.5 million per MW ie., around 80 times that. And are there that numbers of batteries available? Currently dependent on availability of cobalt, lithium,manganese and nickel with China as the main supplier of these and world’s largest producer of graphite, the primary anode material for Li-ion batteries.

8minute energy is building solar plants with overnight battery backup for 4 cents/kWh.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200423005264/en/8mi...

Batteries are currently following their own version of Moore's law, though they double in quality (or halve in price) every 48 instead of every 18 months. Of course, that isn't a trend that can continue forever, but it doesn't need too many more iterations to be the only game in town.

Batteries are much cheaper today than they were yesterday, and it’s a clear push downward over time.

China being the “main supplier” has more to do with them undercutting everyone else in refining by not paying attention enough to their environment, it isn’t sustainable. All of these raw materials have ample reserves outside of China. Some of battery economy comes from that, but not most of it.

There are other ways to store energy than batteries. The Pacific Northwest and even California has a lot of pumped storage hydro capacity. Hydro is a renewable that can be used on demand, and can be combined with other renewables to move water back up to reservoirs.

China is world leading on renewable production and installation, EVs and EV busses, Lithium, LFP and Sodium battery production, Hydro, HVDC, nuclear, high speed rail and a bunch of other stuff.

It's not just a case of them being happy to dig nasty stuff out of the ground without care. If anything it's because they lack a specific type of nasty stuff to dig out of the ground and so their government hasn't been totally captured by fossil fuel interests.

The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.

> It's not just a case of them being happy to dig nasty stuff out of the ground without care. If anything it's because they lack a specific type of nasty stuff to dig out of the ground and so their government hasn't been totally captured by fossil fuel interests.

China still produces plenty of coal, so I'm not sure what your point is. I guess you mean oil, and their move into EVs totally makes sense from that context even if they can get it cheaply from Iran and Russia these days.

But the cost is huge. Even the Chinese central government is pragmatic enough to admit that they have a huge unsustainable problem; e.g. https://time.com/6258519/china-lithium-mining-environmental-...

> The crackdown in Yichun, Jiangxi province, follows a local lithium frenzy over the past year as miners raced to feed rampant demand for the battery material — and to benefit from record global prices. Now, they’re grappling with a close-up inspection by environment officials sent from Beijing.

You can tour the Chinese countryside and find tons of places like this.

> The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.

The west could not keep up Chinese refiners because Chinese refiners have little regard for their environment. As the Chinese central government cracks down and the west worries more about their resource security, the Chinese will simply lose that advantage.

pumped storage hydro, while really cool, are absolutely massive and complicated multibillion dollar infrastructure projects (which California lately has not been particularly famous for)

They were built decades ago, so not a big problem now. The west has lots of places to build these things, it doesn't work out east nor probably in the UK outside of maybe Scotland.

Storage will probably use sodium-ion batteries in the future. Those have none of the four elements you mentioned.

Snowy 2 is $6 billion for 350GWh, so $17k per MWh.

At this point somebody usually argues that you can only do that in Australia and the geography for pumped storage is super rare (I call it the "theres a shortage of up" fallacy), and I have to cite the same study proving that it's actually not.

I would go the contrarian way and suggest Snowy 2 is one of several examples that demonstrate that spending the same amount of money on more renewable generation and some battery storage would provide more reliable power for less money.

Which makes the geography question moot. But most people's intuitions on renewables/battery are years out of date so it's confusing to respond to their sarcastic "are we just going to build lots of batteries, LOL" with "actually yes that's going to be sensible for 80% of the world's population".

edit: long article comparing Snowy to more solar plus batteries:

https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-stora...

That's a weird article. It simultaneously argues that between batteries and snowy 2 there is no clear winner, that snowy 2 is a white elephant and that:

>Hornsdale Power Reserve: $690 per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power will be $5,000, which is 5.6 times more than Hornsdale. But its cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity is much lower no matter if you think $20, $29, or $250 is appropriate.

In other words in terms of storing a large volume of energy, cheaply, at high efficiency, pumped storage blows everything else out of the metaphorical water - between 3x and 34.5x cheaper!

I would say that batteries and large scale pumped storage complement each other. I don't agree that Australia will regret building it.

That article is completely mad. But it does admit the following:

  The main drawbacks [of battery storage] are: At the moment, it has a much higher cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. Much shorter lifespan.

  If we consider Snowy Hydro 2’s maximum possible energy storage capacity, it comes to only $20 to $29 per kilowatt-hour

  $5,000 [buys] 5.16 kilowatt-hours of Hornsdale storage

That is, Snowy Hydro is an order of magnitude cheaper for storage.

The article continuously harps on about kW comparisons, and ignores comparing kWh storage: foolish for an article supposedly about electricity storage. For example the article makes the inane point: “If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power output comes to… $5,000 per kilowatt. That’s not cheap. Gas generation normally comes to under $1,000 per kilowatt.”, and again “Snowy 2 Vs. Hornsdale: Assuming Snowy Hydro 2 costs $5,000 per kilowatt of power output, for that cost, we could instead buy . . .”.

Utter rubbish.

> around $600K per MWh

So if enough solar gets built that the electricity price falls to near zero every day, batteries are now cheaper than natural gas?

That's a very impactful change that I honestly didn't see coming.

Even at a domestic scale you can install solar and batteries for your household/heating/car usage -- assuming you have the roof space -- be self sufficent 10 months a year, and have a payack time of about 12 years last time I looked.

The other 2 months a year sure, you've got either grid power or an off grid oil/gas generator.

"$600K per MWh" sounds like the cost per peak (initial) storage capacity; as the batteries can be recharged something like six thousand times before wearing down to half capacity, that's more like adding $100 per MWh ($0.1/kWh) if you throw them out at that point or $50 per MWh (5¢/kWh) if they keep wearing down at the same rate until they're negligible.

> And are there that numbers of batteries available

Not yet — but there are enough people investing in each stage of mining, processing, and making battery factories, that this is probably not going to be an issue.

> Currently dependent on availability of cobalt, lithium,manganese and nickel with China as the main supplier of these and world’s largest producer of graphite, the primary anode material for Li-ion batteries.

Technically, I think, yes; but that's just where we are today rather than a fundamental property of world geography.

I think you are assuming that turbines would be paired with a certain number of batteries and taken together that would provide continuous power. But that is just not how a grid works or how the economics work. Battery storage is economical because you can buy cheap and sell high. And a system with high renewables penetration will see some very high prices for a few hours or days per month and cheap prices the rest of the time. That is ideal for battery storage, particularly as renewables gets cheaper.

Exactly - and any parts that are from fossil fuel can be replaced over time.

That fossil fuel generation is centralised so easier to mitigate and not where the usage is happening (ie in our towns and cities).

Batteries will make it extremely expensive and we don't even have the technology to do it at scale.

It's not really a problem, even just moving all fossil fuels from heating and transport and using it in electrical generation gets you a 4x gain, from which you lose about 50-60% when turning it to electricity, so still ahead by about 2x even before you start adding in the wind and solar.

Plus we already built all that storage for gas and oil, might as well use it as part of the transition.

> from which you lose about 50-60% when turning it to electricity

Does this include transmission losses? I think they average 10% for UK electricity.

Figure to back this up for anyone wondering: 9% last year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/550583/electricity-losse...

Quote: Every year, the United Kingdom loses a share of generated electricity through transmission. In 2021, transmission losses amounted to around 25 terawatt-hours, or approximately nine percent of the electricity supplied in the UK that year. Transmission losses stood above 30 terawatt-hours in the early 2000's.

Yes it does. A big gas plant is say about 44% efficient (i.e. 56% lost as heat) so 10% of that electricity getting lost in wires takes you down to 40% of the original input energy.

Heat pumps don't qualify for EU Renewable heat incentives if they get less than 2.5 SFP (COP averaged over the year's seasons).

You're possibly thinking of an Open Cycle gas turbine, where we burn gas, it spins the turbine, and the hot exhaust is lost energy. The UK has a negligible amount of this in electricity production and obviously with higher fuel prices there's ever less reason to use that small capacity. The 30GW or so gas turbine electricity in the UK is Combined Cycle, so the exhaust heat runs a secondary steam turbine bringing them up past 50% efficiency.

Additionally with an ever improving grid in Europe local variables such as weather or seasons be can also partially balanced.

Yeah, another story covering this had interconnects as just below gas in rank order of usage. Also, despite that large import, UK was a net exporter for the first time in a while last year since France was having issues with its nuclear fleet.

We need to get more interconnects between Scotland and England.

They are building them, but in the sea which could be interesting with an annoyed Russia.

Wind farms were built at sea, on the surface because of nimbyism on land, but being ever cynical I think the real reason was to push the cost and difficulty up giving oil companies more time.

Later, during Liz Truss's short and disasterous tenure, just as solar panels were getting very cheap, even very low quality farm land was reclassified as a strategic asset for food to be grown on and no solar.

In what was possibly a distraction wind was now to be allowed on land (of course it's much less convenient to put up a wind turbine than to get some very cheap solar panels and that's before all the nimby groups, some of which get dark money funding).

Well, the storage bit we are a bit bad at, the Tories didn't renew one of the biggest facilities after it closed down which was inconvenient during the Russia thing.

That gas storage facility got closed down because it didn't make economic sense to operate any more - the big summer-winter price swings that made it viable had ceased to exist (possibly because more widespread use of gas for electricity generation caused more gas usage in summer, I'm not sure) and it had physical limitations on how fast gas could be injected and extracted that meant smoothing over those seasonal changes was all it was really useful for. It still didn't even make sense during the whole Russia thing.

Over in mainland Europe, gas storage was vital to dealing with Russia cutting off supplies because their gas infrastructure was physically incapable of importing gas from non-Russian sources fast enough to keep up with winter demand (if I remember rightly, even if they cut back massively on non-essential gas usage). So they basically needed full gas storage just to survive the winter, and of course Russia had made sure it was emptied out the winter before. The UK didn't have this limitation. This need to fill gas storage caused huge problems - global gas demand was already quite high and it takes a long time for supplies to be redirected and high-energy industries to reduce usage, so prices spiked sky-high at first.

As a result, mainland Europe ended up filling its gas storage at close to the all-time-high price and emptying it out when prices were much lower, effectively buying high and selling low funded by people's gas bills with the high prices being more or less a direct consequence of the fact that they couldn't just put off buying their gas until winter. If the UK government had done the same, the press here would never have shut up about how much money they "wasted" on it.

Also our sources of gas are relatively diverse and secure compared to some main land countries. The UK maintained supply just fine, the problem was price. And arguably that had more to do with lack of nuclear capacity in France.

There’s always wood… those stoves have gotten surprisingly efficient, and no new carbon in the carbon cycle, it’s basically a solar battery.

Except they produce horrendous small particle pollution, which even the most efficient stoves haven't solved.

https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/14/wood-bur...

Looking at the report that that was based on (page xiv on https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... ), it looks like the efficient stoves are at about 1/15-1/10 the open fire amount. Those “450x” numbers are compared to methane, which is close to zero particulate, so it’s a little misleading. But burning methane means you’re adding prehistoric carbon to the atmosphere.

I’m guessing that if all the open fires were instead “low particulate” stoves, then it wouldn’t be a concern compared to PM2.5 generation from vehicles.

I don’t see a perfect here until we all have heat pumps driven by nuclear.

This is kind of interesting: https://www.bts.gov/content/estimated-national-average-vehic...

Exhaust particulate per mile has plummeted over the past couple of decades! By comparison, EPA stoves put out a couple grams of particulate per hour.

But, it seems like it's not apples to apples, because brake dust is metal dust, whereas wood smoke tends to be mostly organic compounds. Maybe the body is better at dealing with organic wood smoke compounds? We've certainly been heavily exposed over many generations.

I am curious if wood-burning technology would be a suitable solution for rural settings where lower population density means particulates and smog are a lesser concern. Pellet stoves for heating, wood-gas for long-ranged vehicles. But while trees are a renewable fuel, they still mean converting carbon from a sequestered place (a tree) into being released into the air.

In a densely populated country like the UK, nobody lives in a remote enough setting for their particulate emissions to not be a concern.

Unfortunately, it seems like middle-class Brits are completely obsessed with log fires, judging by British home renovation shows.

Probably because of British home renovation shows.

Trees are net neutral.

Tree starts as a seed. Grows up and sequesters X tons of carbon. Tree is burned, releases X tons of carbon. Tree is re-planted, grows up, sequesters X tons of carbon. Tree is burned, releases X tons of carbon.

If everything in the world right now was wood powered, we would not have a global warming problem. We would have massive tree farms sequestering the same amount of carbon we are releasing. (We might have a soot and particle problem, but that's another story).

The problem with oil and coal, is we have no way to make more. We burn oil and release carbon.. how are we making more oil and pumping back underground to sequester that carbon?

Very true, but we likely couldn't have that amount of farmland for what we currently just pull out of earth with millions of years of sequestring.. not sure if getting rid of most of the livestock needs would free enough ("Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world's supply of calories").. are there any calculations how many tree farms we'd need besides a huge solar/wind/geothermal mix?

I don't know the math to globally power the world with wood. I don't think it's even a good idea.

But I don't feel bad when I burn firewood pulled from a local forest. As that burning is not adding carbon to the world overall.

Discounting all the power consumed planting, growing, cutting down and delivery of the logs to the power generator.

We don't have a way to make trees quickly enough. In the timespans relevant to climate change it is far from neutral.

I make no claims it's a global clean energy. Just pointing out it's not actually carbon increasing.

It might be useful to keep in mind that culling trees means that a forest that was in steady state and pulling very little net carbon can go back into more active growth. But I suppose that the total carbon sequestered would be less with a decrease in the average age of the trees.

With what argument? Parent post was talking about measuring energy needs and how efficiency of consumption works, not wind and solar. Did you mean to reply to a different post?

Or a buffer system with batteries - there are a few options that are being researched!