Case in point: my local news just published an article saying that global warming is disrupting spider romance. I, for one, am pretty excited about that!
Looking for something to extinct mosquitoes though.
Even today steam turbine plants produce higher cost electricity that natural gas combined cycle plants.
And of course, a room temperature superconductor can have better or worse qualities than existing conductors in other ways. If it were much heavier, or required more expensive raw materials, or had lower critical current, it could in favt be worse than the existing solutions (the extra construction costs could offset the extra energy output).
Perhaps because it's boring. Solar is basically the same tech as it was in the 70s. The only major difference is that it is literally more than a million times cheaper.
It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant.
Sure there are challenges with wind and solar, but that's all they are: challenges, not showstoppers. When something has such a compelling cost advantage, there is lots of margin to throw at the challenges.
It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that? Add short term storage and it'll be 99%.
And this isn't theoretical or anything. We are doing it. We're currently installing solar & wind at about 5% a year, and that 5% is increasing by about 50% annually.
There is way more good news than bad news about solar. But good news is boring and bad news gets clicks, so you only see the bad news.
Look at these graphs: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
You need to either overbuild 10x or you need lots of storage.
Even a 3x overbuild means you need weeks of storage if you want to avoid once a year brownouts.
And electricity storage still costs 100-400$/kWh per 10 years. An extra £60 billion per year while ALSO building 3x more solar and wind than we will use during peak times is a lot of money for the government to spend.
People used to say that you can't make baseline power with solar and wind. Slowly - and often grudgingly - they've come around and now realize that it isn't about 100% availability, that will always be a mix. The question is simply how much of that mix can be offset by renewables and the answer is 'much more than you originally thought'.
And as the price of solar and wind drops further and further that fraction only increases.
Every KWh that is produced by solar and wind does not need to be generated by fossil.
We won't even focus on storing much of it but just build more and more.
The story on that is surprisingly positive, but it's quite easy to FUD because a lot of people will instinctively hear "well, the sun doesn't shine at night. check mate!" or "realistically, there just isn't enough space for all the pumped storage we need" and just believe them because it all sounds plausible enough and they don't see the trail of money spreading the FUD.
Pumped storage and batteries for short term energy storage - hours to weeks. Australia is already building one pumped storage battery which should provide them with roughly 350GWh - roughly half of the short term storage they'd need if they had a 100% solar and wind based grid. With one plant. You can't do this in, e.g. Florida but the geography to build this is more than plentiful enough in most of the world (this topic is pretty well settled: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14555-y but for some reason people keep disputing it).
Hydrogen for seasonal storage - for weeks when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Roughly 2-3% of power will need to be stored this way on a 100% solar/wind grid. It's not efficient and expensive to generate hydrogen from electricity and then turn it back into electricity but still cheaper than generating and using nuclear power at the point of generation. It is cheap to store enormous amounts of power for long periods this way though.
- Ukraine conflict's impact on gas prices
- Cost of renewables from over 10 years ago when Germany jumpstarted the solar industry using subsidies.
- An ill-advised by highly popular switching off of nuclear plants. The Germans preferred higher energy prices now for less hassle and worries due to having Nuclear plants.
None of these points have any impact on the argument that solar is the clear winner of becoming the dominant energy source until 2050.
But it seems hardly replicable say in central Europe.
(I am speaking about central Europe or more specifically Poland)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
Though
> The plant takes advantage of the natural steep sand dune landform of eastern Lake Michigan
In Europe there's some geography known as "the alps" which has been used for years this way by the countries surrounding it.
Poland's environmental record is atrocious on almost every level. I guess the coal lobby must run the government or something because nobody else in Europe that reliant on fuel that dirty. They're a model of how not to do anything right.
Well, that is hardly solution for Poland.
Which part is wrong? Except that we need more than 1-2 weeks worth of storage to rely on solar/wind as anything more than occasional addition.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/much-storage-needed-solar-wind-p...
"Graham says that the CSIRO modelling showed that at very high levels of wind and solar, a maximum of half a day’s average demand was needed for storage. In some areas of the grid, only around three hours might be needed."
Or:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
The amount of short term storage to get a grid between 80-95% running on solar/wind is measured in hours.
Electrolyzing and storing hydrogen in an underground cavern can buffer the rest and be stored easily for years if necessary.
So what if we roll another Eyjafjallajökull in one part of the world, simultaneously with a war breaking out in another, and some large-scale maintenance ongoing in another part still, while everyone's grid is designed to keep "oh half a day's tops" and not a watt more, because ain't anyone gonna pay for it? With globally reduced capacity for, say, a week, that "half a day's average demand" worth of storage may start running dangerously low, and what then? Will we somehow scramble to fire up long-closed fossil fuel plants in that time?
Which one of reports at linked http://www.energynetworks.com.au/projects/electricity-networ... is one that you refer to here?
For the second one - is "more responsive loads" code for "load shedding" which is code for brownouts and blackouts?
The goal is to reduce Co2 emissions and replace fossil usage.
Well, empirically, we only observe that countries heavily relying on renewable (Denmark and Germany are the poster children) (i) have a much worse average CO2/kWh ratio, (ii) still need to import energy when, well, the wind does not blow and the Sun does not shine.
But feel free to elaborate on where this is wrong.
117 looks ok to me. They're probably one of the most improved countries in the world in the last 10 years, although overall France's is likely still lower thanks to all their 1970s nuclear power plants - decarbonizing decades before anybody gave a damn about global warming.
For reference Poland is at like 650. They use an ungodly amount of coal. Environmentally Poland are an absolute a disaster, but, they didn't shut down a couple of aging nuclear power plants so they're on the good side of the American nuclear power lobby and get relatively little stick.
> they're on the good side of the American nuclear power lobby and get relatively little stick.
I'm French, I don't care about American nuke power lobby – and frankly, given the pitiful state of electricity CO2/kWh in the US and how much coal is burned, it seems that this lobby must not wield that much influence.
Exactly why they haven't enraged the nuclear lobby. The nuclear lobby couldn't give a damn about the environment and neither does their supporters.
Surely california has tons of taxpayer money in excess what is preventing them to do all that?
When you say this you need to also talk about how much it costs to build enough energy storage for solar to become some given percentage of grid power. There is probably some % where it stops being cheaper than coal
> It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that?
Solar, hydro and wind when you have them, nuclear when you don't, gas when you don't have nuclear and coal when you don't have gas. It is really quite simple. And the best bit is that you can have your solar and wind installations up and running before the ink is even dry on the kind of permit and investment required for a nuclear plant and it is much cheaper to boot, as well as decentralized so far more resilient and friendlier to the grid (assuming the grid is well designed in the first place, which isn't always true).
And 'in a country' is the wrong level to be thinking at. You should look at much larger areas than that, and across both longitude and latitude.
It's technically cool, yes, but we need electricity now, and tomorrow, not next century.
I'm excited for fusion as a human accomplishment, as high tech research, maybe as a power source for future spaceships.
But I think it's likely the time may never come when it's used to generate power for the electric grid, and expecting that to come soon is just naive. We don't even have a single fusion plant that produces power yet, let alone the hundreds of them that would be needed for the tech to have a real-world impact.
Fusion energy companies like CFS (tokamak) or Helion (colliding FRCs with direct energy capture) might start producing electricity to the grid in less than 10 years.
No one is ignoring it. We're rapidly deploying both technologies all over the place. It's exciting that real money is flowing into the industry. Fusion has speculator money, and Fusion gets extra attention because it's sold as basically, the cure to all energy problems, forever and ever.
Renewable optimists consistently under-estimate the storage problem by orders of magnitude. We don't have enough batteries on Earth to hold one single day's worth of electricity. And for us to actually rely on solar, we would need to store multiple months of electricity to survive the winter.
Solar is cheap because you're comparing a generation source that works on occasion with a generation source that works 24/7.
I'm not anti-solar at all. But I am realistic about what we can and can't do with it. The thing that will make a solar grid practical _today_ is focusing on variable loads. When the sun is shining, we should be cranking the AC of every home and office, smelting aluminum, filling dams, etc.
Maybe not the national grid, but there are plenty of places in the US where the sun shines a lot more than 40% of the day during the winter. Start there. If Southern CA, AZ, NM, TX, FL, etc.. which all get a ton of sun no matter the season can reduce their reliance on the federal grid, that's a hell of a start, and we should be celebrating that as a great first step and building off of that.
I thought the whole point of alternative energy sources is acknowledging that certain locales have potential for different energy sources (solar, hydroelectric, wind, etc..) and we should as a society should take full advantage of that? We know oil isn't going away any time soon, but why aren't we saying "oh City XYZ or State ABC is abundant in (alternative energy source), let's make use of that as best as we can"?
It looks like Los Angeles only averages about 37% for the year as a whole, and Albuquerque averages about 38%, so I'm skeptical that there's anywhere that gets "a lot more than 40%" in winter. You have to take clouds into account as well, remember. Cloudy days exist even in desert areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_sunshine_dur...
Nobody is pretending that solar can provide electricity via night time generation. That's what storage systems and alternative sources are for.
The daylight story in ABQ is this:
> "It is sunny 78.9% of daylight hours. The remaining 21.1% of daylight hours are likely cloudy or with shade, haze or low sun intensity. "
If you can generate solar power 80% of daylight hours, that's a pretty good place to start.
Again, it's not an end-all-be-all solution. But you're talking about some very highly populated areas that could be using solar energy a hell of a lot more than they are now. Phoenix, Tucson, San Antonio, Dallas, LA, San Diego, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Las Vegas....that's a lot of places that could be utilizing solar power in a way that does move the needle. That's some 30-50 million people (if not slightly more) that could reduce their use of the federal grid in a measurable way.
I am optimistic that Santa Fe will soon see a new utility scale PV generation install that ought to generate power (with storage!) corresponding to roughly 1/3 of the city's residental use. The standard NIMBY-but-I'm-all-for-solar-have-some-myself crowd is out in force, however.
The OP appeared to be suggesting exactly that.
It's like the (many) solar advocates who pretend that a solar nameplate capacity of x watts is equivalent to a conventional nameplate capacity of x watts, when in fact you're going to need 2x watts at a minimum, with an expensive storage system on top of that.
Your last paragraph is something different -- that's not an implication that solar can generate at night. Note that levelized cost of energy does take into account that consideration (that why it's "levelized"). And renewables are trouncing new construction nuclear on that metric.
Wind can be very low for days and low for weeks.
Hydro is ecologically devastating and there aren't enough sites for it.
We absolutely are not headed towards extinction as a species. We are like cockroaches and the human species will survive. Using "oh no, the human race is dying out altogether and we must preserve it all costs" is a ridiculous argument.
> [..] it makes sense to cause local ecosystem damage in the form of flooding.
It isn't just the (risk of) flooding. It's hubris to believe we can actually foresee all the second-order ramifications from such large-scale terraforming projects. (Hydroelectric) dams have devastated the local wildlife, transformed the surrounding permaculture for the worse, and set off horrible chain reactions with devastating consequences for the local flora and fauna which have global ramifications down the line, as we are discovering today. Nothing happens in a bubble.
This same argument was once made of fossil fuel emissions (when we thought that smog in the biggest industrial cities was our biggest problem and outsourcing them to developing nations was a great win-win /s). That obviously wasn't true. Why would you wish to repeat the same mistake?
I recommend reading actual IPCC projections and analysis rather than whatever media hype you've been fed.
Where?
Maybe we should try a more global approach to energy.
Almost the entire world? The sun is up for less than 9.5 hours in winter unless you are very close to the equator.[1][2][3][4]
And that's assuming 0% cloud coverage. In reality, places like Germany only get an hour or two of real sunshine a day in the winter[5].
[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/new-york
[2] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco
[3] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/spain/madrid
[4] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/china/beijing
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/982758/average-sunshine-...
Global transmission of electricity isn't a "problem," it's non-existant.
Russia must be confronted with economic, political, and yes, military incentives to behave very differently in the future.
Trying to sell it as "no biggie" will not work well.
See [1] for a very short English description and [2] for the German original.
[1] https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/blueprint-100-... [2] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/studien...
And if you combine the graphs for solar and wind from this: https://aleasoft.com/european-solar-and-wind-energy-producti...
You can nicely see that they are complementary in terms of energy production.
That's the conceptually simple solution, but ofc there's more practical ones. Mix in wind, some nuclear, different storage solutions (Ev2grid, pumped hydro, rocks-in-a-box, etc..), demand-side solutions (VPPs), efficiency improvements (insulation, heatpumps), a few of the hundreds of advanced projects being researched (solar in space, enhanced geothermal, iron air batteries, SMRs, etc..). Combine the 1000s of solutions being proposed, researched and scaled out and you have a very solid plan of attack.
The latter is crucial. The cost of providing "synthetic baseload" in Germany doubles if you don't include it.
See https://model.energy/ for optimization of an energy system using these to provide synthetic baseload, using various tweakable cost assumptions and historical weather data. The cost is not outrageous, likely well below new construction nuclear.
In a place like India, you don't even need wind and hydrogen. PV and batteries will do just fine.
Solar and wind cannot be used in this role and at this scale due to their massive variability
IMO, the right move is for the government to subsidize power generation to the point of absurd excess, like we do for agriculture. It's a matter of national security, and it ends up acting as a subsidy for industry of all kind.
This of course has a lot of political implications, but if we wanted to do it we could.
Wind power requires an enormous amount of epoxy and the windmills wear out and then you have to throw an enormous amount of epoxy away and it is not green.
Storing energy using batteries from the above sources requires an enormous amount of nickel and cobalt mind out of the Earth by third world countries and is not green.
Fusion power requires mining lithium and is not green.
Nuclear power requires changing people's minds and when it does fail it causes two-headed fish. While perhaps green, it is not politically feasible at this time.
Here's an idea. Take public transit instead of using that Tesla that required a bunch of imported rare earth minerals from sweatshops in China and microchips from Taiwan -- which may or may not be available to us in the future in this geopolitical climate -- and lithium and cobalt from death trap mines down in Peru and Africa.
Burn natural gas in your stove instead of electricity which is generally coal-fired, or if it isn't coal fired, it comes from so solar and wind and is therefore not green.
My point is that the original paragraph stands. It's going to get worse before it gets better and no one wants to believe this.
Yeah, having mine next to your house sucks, we need to get better at managing that kind of thing. But it's a local suck. It's in a totally different category than having the climate shift into a mode that no longer supports our food crops, for instance.
Where can I buy this machine?
Wow, you've concatenated a string of lies into a single sentence. What a density of mendacity!
Solar requires none of those things, and is quite "green". Solar doesn't even need concrete for footings -- steel earth anchors, or even laying modules flat on the ground, are both practical and cheaper.
Sadly incorrect. You can see the variation of wind and solar we get here in the UK at: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
As you can see, fossil fuels are about a 1/3rd of power and we expand renewables by maybe another 30% before we start getting excess power. After that point, you start to have excess power while no longer reducing CO2 by much as you still need the Nat gas for the cloudy and still days.
In practice you might be able to get to 75% non-fossil fuels before you're firmly into the realm of diminishing returns without a big storage breakthrough or a doubling/tripling of electricity costs (its triple to go pure wind and current tech energy storage because you need up to weeks of storage to not have blackouts, but with a nuclear power expansion youd only need a doubling).
But even if you can't easily get to 90% why not celebrate the fact that 75% is easy. Sure the last 25% is hard, but 75% good news and 25% bad news is not what I see in the news articles.
Breeders are from an obsolete vision of the future where we'd have an order of magnitude more nuclear power plants than we do now. In that future, uranium would start to be in short supply. But that didn't happen, uranium remains cheap, and breeders have no business case.
New offshore wind projects in the UK contract to produce power at about 40% the cost of new nuclear, about the same as gas before the Ukraine war interruptions. And that’s before the 45% construction cost overrun on Hinkley Point C that EDF is responsible for.
Onshore wind would be half the price of offshore but we’ve stopped building it because Tories.
Over provisioning a mix of renewables is likely the most cost effective route to greening the electricity supply.
Modelling for Denmark shows over 90% of its electricity consumption could be provided through modestly over provisioning renewables 1.5-2x along with 4-12h of storage and 99% with 3-4x over provisioning renewables and 48h of storage.
Most of the public can't grasp the mathematics of compounding change.
In the 1940s - cities smelled like sh!t, were so polluted you almost never wanted to go outside, healthcare was still largely snake oil, the average person was still working 10 hours a day 6 days week, human rights outside of straight white christian men were questionable, AND we were in our second world war in 20 years - at the advent of the nuclear bomb.
Look at where we are now.
If you don't see progress, and if you can't see how people back then thought the world was surely coming to an end, and you think it's worse now, I'm honestly amazed.
At no point in time, was progress a up and to the right with no impediments. Every advance we've had, people have worked HARD for. So thank your lucky stars so many people get up every day and keep working for it.
Because it isn't easy. But it's what we do. Always have. Always will.
Eventually, we will reach the physical limits of how good technology can get. But we are laughably far away from that point in so many major aspects of life, that we've got a long way to go before the 10 & 20 year future might not be better.
> But it's what we do. Always have. Always will.
You can’t extrapolate from the past because never before in history we had the capacity to have impacts at that scale (e.g. atomic bomb). We are in uncharted territories.
I'm always amused by the doomsaying Malthusians. They're always so confidently wrong.
If you cut down a few trees to build a house then 50 years later the forest will reclaim the land. If you instead cut down the entire forest then that can't happen.
>We have been using nonrenewable resources for hundreds (tens of thousands?) of years, and yet we keep finding more.
Multiple civilisations in the past have collapsed at least in part due to resource shortages. Again though, because none of these civilisations were _global_ the collapse was local and could be recovered from using outside resources.
Seriously, we can't even consistently land on the moon but everyone is convinced we're going to have space mines operating by the end of the century. Keep dreaming.
The rate of technological progress has if anything _slowed down_ in the last 50 years. Compare the difference if you look at the 40s vs the 60s, then the 2000s vs the 2020s.
But i do not see how thats relevant
More and more technological solution I see nowadays are the solution to problems technology created in first place.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/06/01/towards-the-end...
In the middle of an environmental crisis? Are we not going to factor that outcome into our measure of progress?
You have to prove the analogy, not just state it.
"Plumbing Facilities
In 1990, only 1 percent of our homes lacked complete plumbing facilities. But, things were much different in 1940, when nearly half lacked complete plumbing. Then, about ten States had rates approaching or exceeding 70 percent. In succeeding decades, the proportion of homes lacking complete plumbing dropped dramatically, falling to about one-third in 1950 and one- sixth in 1960. It is interesting to note the States with the lowest percent- age of such homes in 1940 were higher than Alaska, which topped the 1990 list."
Some can't be reasoned with.
Also population growth has declined more rapidly than predicted and in places where it wasn't expected. Which brings it's own issues most of which have to do with finance and sustainability of rentier capitalism, but not being able to feed and house people.
Partly due to policy makers fuckups around the 2008 financial crisis birth rates in US dropped. Which means today's 14 years olds are going to enter the best job market in three generations.
Physicists are no exception.
~there's a lot of a bad news around, so people are excited about potential good news~
as if before climate change there'd never been media hype over scientific breakthroughs
this whole article makes exactly one interesting point: the media hype around fusion fails to properly illustrate the actual energy being put in to the experiment. it explains this well once, then wraps it up in snark and verbosity and repeats and re-explains it 5 or 6 times
the useful information in this article could be imparted in one, maybe two paragraphs
In the case of these laser fusion stories, the effect described is at least real, but the press is happy to spin it in wildly optimistic ways.
The LM99 room temperature semiconductor circus was a very different phenomenon, mostly driven by internet people rather than journalists. And very short-lived. If mainstream journalists were as skeptical of fusion as a net power source as they were of LM99, people would be better informed.
"fast-charging, high-range" EVs are already here, so I'm not sure what you're on about. "non-degrading," no, but nobody is actually claiming that. machine learning also exists and does useful work. We can argue that it's overhyped. That's a different conversation than the one about whether fusion power can ever work.
"In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to believe, full of hope, because their life situations (poverty, housing crisis, hot weather) are so dire ... I should say that even if it doesn't affect them personally, it creates their worldview when it is 90% of their news. Homeless crisis, war in Ukraine. Why wouldn't you want and allow some positive, apolitical, hopeful story about noble science to consume your attention instead?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895665
It was downvoted and flagged. Mainstream press like NYTimes got it right by ignoring this until replication. HNers fall for hype as much as the rest of the world, it's just different hype.
"In any case, the public reaction to the fusion story tells me a lot about our collective psychology. To me, it speaks to a sense of desperation. I think people sense that the “bad news” side of the ledger is overcrowded of late, and it’s starting to dawn on people that the future could possibly be worse than the present. This causes a cognitive dissonance in that our cultural narrative is one of progress, growth, and innovation. How can these competing visions be squared? News of fusion has the effect of temporarily permitting people to shed the anxiety and embrace the dream all the more strongly."