100% clean energy is decades away, I'm not such a pessimist to presume we will have no grid improvements by then. Marketplaces themselves are already straining due to the cheapness of renewables at certain times. Batteries plus renewables will avoid some of this, but overbuilding capacity and demand response with EVs and industry should be another component. I also expect utilities to buy access to appliances and heating and cooling and dynamically control their customers' use.
I really, really don't want the power company to control my thermostat. Big companies are invading my home and violating my agency enough as it is. If past behavior is any indication of future behavior, smart appliances are more likely to be snuck in like the phone-home misfeatures on smart TVs than they are to be a willing contract between the home owner and the power company.
There is another approach that could also alleviate some of the pressure. Instead of keeping the consumer price fixed and allowing the utility to control your load, you can allow the consumer price to float.
Most of these markets have a 24hr-ahead clearing price for energy. I think you aught to be able to expose retail consumers to fluctuations based on the day-ahead market to let people make their own choices for energy usage. Given that exposure, enough consumers will change their behavior to soften the variability in price. It might also make distributed energy storage Just Work (TM) if individual battery owners have a vector to profit from supporting the grid.
Retail consumer prices don't float in most markets. Some markets have time-of-use pricing for some part of the year, but even those have a fixed peak/off-peak rate that is fixed well in advance.
>I think you aught to be able to expose retail consumers to fluctuations based on the day-ahead market to let people make their own choices for energy usage.
What prevents an electric company from significantly raising prices for a day to catch people off guard? I can't exactly switch electric companies to punish them.
People would notice, protest, lobby government for regulation, the usual methods of expressing civil discontent. I'm talking about a situation where people don't notice until after the fact.
There are other futures markets that are bootstrapped off of the day-ahead market. Weeks/months out are used to schedule maintenance operations. Years out are used to schedule construction/decommissioning.
So if the extended market prices are high enough, then this acts as a signal to add generation and/or distribution capacity. Likewise, if the extended market prices are low enough, this acts as a signal to retire capacity that has a higher operating cost/lower profit margins.
You can't switch electric companies, but you can choose to switch off your load (or increase your source), thus denying them revenue or increasing their payments to you.
It also gets harder to game this system as distributed generation gets better penetration. The optimal thing to do as a residential energy provider is also naturally stabilizing for the grid. If a cabal of generators acts to restrict supply and artificially raise the price, then everyone who isn't a member of the cabal makes a killing selling energy into the market.
Its also hard for a cabal to squeeze residential providers out of the market through lower prices. Distributed generation is a small fraction of any individual provider's income. In most cases, a residential provider is paying for their system over several years. So in order to squeeze them out, a cabal would also have to sustain a campaign of artificially low prices for a span of years in order to have an impact.
Distributed generation means that there is a pool of small independent suppliers whose rational choice always acts to counter the actions of any oligopoly that attempts to form.
Nest partners with utilities to support demand shedding/load response [1]; you get a utility bill credit for allowing the utility to send Nest demand shedding signals when local power demand is high (which suspends your AC cooling cycle for 1-3 hours), but you can override the thermostat setting if you must (you just don't get the credit). Cheaper than firing up a single cycle gas peaker (super expensive, comparatively speaking to base load and renewables).
You don't have to allow the utility to control your consumption automatically, but then you'll be exposed to the real time price of power (not a regulated average as occurred in the past because of dumb meters).
So then could I hook up a load to a Nest and have a regular, dumb thermostat control my house and get those credits without actually doing anything? That doesn't seem too hard to pull off.
Until the utility upgrades to the next version of demand response software, which notices that you were sent a control message, but your consumption didn't change, so you're no longer eligible for the credit.
I have this on my nest, and one interesting feature, is it turns down the AC to a lower temp a few hours before the 'energy rush hour' so that your house doesn't get as warm.
IE, I have it at 72 deg, a 'energy rush hour' is declared, the nest automatically turns my thermostat to 70 deg an hour or two before, then to 75 deg during the rush hour.
Then your electricity will probably be more expensive than that of the people who will utilize the night's cheaper rates and will get rebates for installing a device that will turn some devices down on unexpected peaks.
If you still "really don't want the power company to control my thermostat" after seeing your potential savings, that is.
So much legacy technology and machinery, buildings, installations, infrastructure not to mention the fact that neither wind nor solar and not even hydro are anywhere close to being able to provide that it's only a few percentages of world energy usage and have upper limits.
In my view the only real fundamental progress when it comes to energy, within sight (and it's still far away if ever) is Thorium and Fusion.
Furthermore the externalities of things like wind and solar isn't calculated today and would make two things very clear. You can't have wind and solar without the backup of oil/nuclear/coal and they will never be able to provide us with enough energy to meet our needs to not talk about meeting our future needs (which will be many times higher than it is today)
I am all for green energy but i share your pessimism.
At current rate of adoption it may be centuries, but I'm willing to bet that by the end of this century (possibly earlier) there will be a great deal more public pressure to revamp the underlying infrastructure. We could do it in a few decades if we decided to spend the capital on it, its ultimately a question of political willpower.
I do agree that fusion would be the ultimate form of power generation and would have the least impact on the current grid. But regardless, the future of energy generation is in diversity of sources.
There already is pressure today to do that. However, I am unconvinced it will actually get done on any significant scale unless there will be fundamental improvements with regards to energy sources. Otherwise, fossil fuels are simply going to be too valuable in no small part due to its multiple applications which none of the other types of energy provides.
Otherwise, it will come down to economics. So I agree we will diversify but fossil fuels aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Honestly I don't even think it would be as complicated as all that. Its all down to what becomes more valuable. Here is a breakdown of energy generation in the US:
63% of power generation comes from "fossil fuels", but half of that comes from natural gas. If we focus purely on carbon emissions and ignore implications of fracking, natural gas can be considered "clean". Also assuming all renewables are zero-emission, this means roughly 30% of our power generation has the potential for carbon emissions.
By simply instituting a carbon tax, or even requiring coal plants to sequester emissions would make burning coal expensive enough that other forms of power will become cheaper, and thus the market would align appropriately. These are things being talked about right now, so its not unrealistic. The coal lobby won't like this of course and will continue to push us away from that, but I believe in 50 years when Miami and New Orleans have turned into Venice and the new generation of people won't be working in coal, American conservatives, as well as other nations, will stop complaining about the coal industry so much. All that has to happen is a few percentage points in a certain direction and the machinations will start to work.
You are looking at electricity generation, not energy. Electricity production is a subset of energy and that's kind of my point.
We get these rosy images of how far we are with renewables when in reality once you dig into it you realize we are nowhere near anything that can replace our current primarily fossil based system.
We don't appreciate how much fossil fuels are making our lives more livable and how little alternatives add to this livability.
I understand the potential CO2 emission risk etc, but we are safer because we use fossil fuels, not despite of it.
And we are not just talking for energy here, we are talking plastic used in more or less any industry you can think of from healthcare to textiles to toys. We are talking for greasing, we use it for fertilizers which makes it possible for us to produce the amount of food we do etc. Which means that oil will play a very very very significant part of our lives for many centuries unless of course some completely new material shows up with as much versatility and application. And now that we are drilling for the oil anyway....
I understand that this isn't what we want to hear, but that's the reality and there isn't currently much of an alternative.
Yes, my statement was purely scoped to emissions, and using fossil fuels for electricity generation, as well as powering vehicles. If fossil fuels weren't useful we would of course not continue using them. Hydrocarbons will of course continue to be used in various materials.
However, for everything we make in plastic, there is a potential alternative. In many cases that alternative is more expensive than plastic for its specific purpose. Much of the reason plastic is cheaper is (conjecture here) because it is subsidized by fact that we use so much oil for energy. If all (or most) cars were electric, demand and production of crude would go down, and so would the economies of scale, possibly making plastic more expensive than biodegradable alternatives.
People will continue to use the materials that are cheaper. However our economy is not set up to internalize the costs to the world and to its biosphere. In that sense fossil fuels are very expensive, and we are incurring a debt. At some point its going to be time to pay the piper, and the alternatives will become cheaper by comparison.
It's not a question of whether there is an alternative it's a question about what we are using plastics for.
Plastic today is a highly versatile material it can be almost as hard as diamonds, it can be ultra precise like lego and so soft it's weaved into our textiles.
You've seen the sorry substitutes for straws? They can't even make that.
You won't find alternatives for that and again ex. wind and solar are subsidized without providing any of those benefits.
You last comment is speculation and your conclusion even if it was true isn't the only alternative. There are many others. Some of them include us developing methods to deal with CO2 if it turned out to be a problem and you are forgetting the most important thing here.
People who don't have access to cheap and plentiful energy are already incurring a debt to survive and paying the piper. There is a cost to NOT using fossil fuels, one very few are ready to make. I for one am not ready to exchange things like food security for the risk of some speculative consequences we dont even know and to the extent we know isn't something we can't deal with.
Grid power distribution itself is barely more than a century old, and you think it will take several times that to adjust to a mix of different power sources, despite that being already well underway? On what basis?
The more wind/solar you build, the more backup from coal/nuclear/wind you will need.
But the way to make us all better off is to make energy cheaper. There is a 1-1 correlation between energy usage and then rich, advanced, safe, clean and flourishing societies.
Wind and solar will only go as far as the political goodwill will take them. They are IMO unfairly promoted and that will incur a cost on their fundamental ability to be a solid enough energy form IMO. They are great as plugins to the existing system but the idea that we should build a smart grid because of their inabilities to provide on demand is not sustainable at the end of the day.
So my basis is based on part speculation, part knowing the limits and true cost of wind and solar and other alternatives.
Only Fusion or Thorium or maybe if we are lucky, fuel cells, will be actual progress which will also be economically viable. But this idea of a giant mix all handles by a smart grid is the not how it's going to play out as the upside of the usual alternatives simply aren't enough to outweigh the downside of cost and complexity they will incur on society.
But it's just my personal opinion of course. Each to their own.
Maybe more the opposite: in the long enough term radioactive materials are just ugly rocks. It's more the short term storage in the here and now that is the concern for most people, because they are understandably afraid of DNA damage and cancer.
Disposing of nuclear waste is actually a big deal in the US. Last I heard, nuclear waste is kept on-site or close by since the Yucca mountain storage facility was never built[1]. These storage facilities weren't built or meant for long-term storage and could potentially (likely?) have radiation leaks.
It's 100% sustainable not 100% green. It should be the solution humanity picks, if we want to be serious about emission reduction but I wouldn't put my money on it.
That's a large part of the reason that it likely won't be a part of the future mix. Because no investor groups want to "put their money on it". Nuclear is expensive to build out, it needs investment. The problem is that everyone sees the shit show that Vogtie has become. Also, energy investors can see what's happened to nuclear in places like Iowa where it almost seems as though every guy able to even get a USD100,000 loan has gotten a group of his buddies together and slapped up some windmills. (Seriously, have you ever driven through Iowa lately?) Anyway, what investor group wants to put up the USD4 Billion to compete against all that? Harsh reality is that, assuming all they care about is generating more money, there are better places for their money to go. That's why we need government investment.
I've been saying for a while, we've reached the point where if we want nuclear to be a part of the future mix, government is going to have to step up in a big way. You could argue that the problem with Vogtie was that the government was unrealistic in expecting private industry to be able to pull that off with the provided level of assistance. (And yes, that also implies that private industry was just as unrealistic in believing they could pull that off without additional assistance.)
Let's remove all regulations for everyone. Wind, solar, nuclear, everyone. A nuclear plant is still going to run you north of USD1 Billion. Not only that, but you won't start seeing any return for 5 to 10 years. And that's doing everything in a headlong rush, on the cheap, with no regard for safety. Now someone would need to come up with that money.
Contrast this with throwing up windmills. You need, (again, no more regulations here), around 500 g's. You start generating income on that outlay inside of a year. Worse, because the prices are so low, enterprising people who would never have been able to compete in the energy markets before, all of a sudden are able to slap up windmills too. It can just snowball into a free for all. What happened in Iowa was a bit more controlled than that, but you still ended up with runaway growth in wind generation capacity. And now their nuclear plant is literally closing down. It can't even compete. One nuclear plant can out generate one windmill. But if everyone and his mother is gonna try to get a piece of the wind generation pie on their family's farm, well, that's an awful lot of windmills.
We've got to get serious and look at the energy markets in a realistic fashion. Iowans are not anti-nuclear hippies, they just don't want to get a bill for 15 cents a kWh instead of the bill for 2 cents a kWh. I don't blame them. Yeah, go wind, and fill in the gaps with whatever fossil fuel generation you have. It's cheaper for you. But we've got to get realistic about that fact and have government either pay for nuclear outright, or put it's finger on the scale like it ended up doing with Vogtie. Basically, telling consumers that you have to use the energy from the nuclear plant, you have to pay the higher price, and you're not allowed to switch away from it.
Like you said, that was not popular, but it is what it is. Those are the choices, we can't soft pedal this stuff anymore if we're serious about a carbon free future.
It is cheaper by all measures. Which is what you're not understanding.
Even if there is a a few years until actually being fully operational. It is still a better use of capital, providing the situation you described (no regulations for everyone). Which, to me, would remove the substitutes to solar.
A nuclear power plant has lower upkeep than the 20-30 year lifespan of wind and solar. This is a large cost you aren't including.
Small nuclear is uneconomical the last time I ran the numbers but mid to large scale is.
1 GW Nuclear power plant uses less land, less resources in materials and labor, and is more durable considering the maintenance/upkeep. If you compared that to solar or wind, using the most economical price point, it wouldn't even come close.
But Nuclear has major problems, since your situation isn't realized, an investor could lose 100% of their investment just to be used as a political scapegoat. You don't see that often with Wind and Solar.
So, given the current environment, yes, Wind/Solar are more economical but give no regulations and no substities, Nuclear would be the most economical.
> It's not expensive, financially, compared to Solar and Wind.
Per-megawatt, it might not cost more but:
1. The upfront investment is high. I can build a 1MW solar installation, or 10MW, or 100MW. Our smallest nuclear plant is around 500MW.
2. It will take many years to build.
3. It will take even longer to fully pay itself off.
Nuclear is fine if you have a massive amount of capital and know the market won't change in the next 50 year. But no rational actor in the energy market is about to bet on that stability when solar is a much more nimble investment that's cost-competitive.
It's not expensive to build or operate as long as everything goes right. If and when things go wrong it may be so expensive that dealing with it requires major resources. IIRC, nuclear plants are all basically government insured because there's no insurance company or set of companies that could underwrite the potential losses from a catastrophic failure.
Living only expecting things to go right means that cities don't need to worry about backups and hardened networks.
It's when things go wrong that you end up with an HBO series a few decades later.
> It's not expensive to build or operate as long as everything goes right. If and when things go wrong it may be so expensive that dealing with it requires major resources.
Say that to France. Stop buying the propaganda. HBO series has warning signs. Chernobyl and Fukushima were grossly mismanagement and ignored the glaring issues. France has never had the problem.
"Gross mismanagement" is an easy diagnosis after the fact. During the time in which the decisions were being made they probably made perfect sense, at least given the knowledge and constraints the decision makers were working with.
With some notable high profile exceptions people don't go into things with the intention of completely screwing them up.
If the issue is brought up to management more than 3 times then yes, it's gross mismanagement and could be solved.
Which is why I provide France as a counter-example. They aren't mismanaging the potential issues. It's a solvable problem and France is continually demonstrating it.
Wind, in particular, has a great deal of bureaucracy around it. Environmental issues. Construction codes. Land use issues. Land ownership issues. Air rights. And more. Today, investors have to work through all these in order to put up a wind farm. The reason they still do it is because as an entry into the energy markets it is an incredibly cheap vehicle. (Comparatively speaking.) The technology is just not that complicated. Even compared to fossil fuels, wind is just a dead simple tech. The costs when you don't count regulation reflect that.
I've recently stumbled upon some videos where Kirk Sorensen describes LFTR reactors (Liquid fluoride thorium reactor) that his startup is working on, and he is claiming that their reactor can cover its costs simply by selling fission products like xenon, helium, and rare radioactive elements used in medicine.
If you're smart, and careful and plan well and don't try to cut corners, you'll be safe.
Chernobyl was hampered by design flaws [1] that can be pretty well avoided these days, and it's not like light water reactors are the only / best option, either.
Right or wrong, people aren't worried about design flaws that are known about, it's the design flaws that aren't anticipated. There's plenty of safely operated nuclear energy facilities, but the prospect of one contaminating either a large urban area or a large agricultural area is pretty horrific. I suspect most people aren't worried that the theory and design of new plants is safe, but that the practice wouldn't result in at least one plant with corners cut.
I'm personally comfortable with the idea of nuclear power, but I don't really begrudge people who aren't too much. It's all moot anyway; for providing base load, natural gas is going to be the hands down winner for awhile. I could be mistaken on this point, but I'm under the impression that they're both cheaper and faster to get going, and easier to decommission.
Isn't hindsight great? I suspect the people who designed Chernobyl thought they were being smart and careful at the time.
You can be as smart and careful as you like, and still get bitten by something you had no idea was a possibility. If you're building a wind turbine, there's likely to be a reasonable limit to how catastrophic that totally unanticipated problem might be. If you're building a nuclear plant, the stakes are a lot higher.
I think it's just sloppy terminology on the authors part, using "clean energy" to refer to wind/solar/whatever new method that has much different pricing characteristics to stuff that was making up a large percentage of the grid 20 years ago (like nuclear). Like how in programming code written yesterday can be called "legacy code".
The mention of demand side IoT power load as a service has me wondering about the theoretical abuse potential for insider trading or Enron style shenanigans. Ideally such attempts would result in losing money.
It does bring to mind an oddly positive twist on the "you don't own it" of IoT. By signing up as part of a service cooperative of some sort getting a share of the generated income as compensation.
Probably not a winning move and if done by could rightfully get FTC involved by mixing in investing - especially if it id being run by the manufacturer who has potentially clashing incentives.
I’m not sure why we pay for electricity in the first place. Reliable electricity, clean water. These things are fundamental to modern human existence. Why do we have to pay for them at all other than greed?
You should bear the cost of whether you keep your A/C at 68° or 72°, whether you heat your house with baseboard heaters or central air, whether you insulate your house so it's easy to keep it at whatever temperature you care to, whether you live in a 4000sq detached house or a 500sq apartment, whether you run a modern refrigerator or something that fell off a truck in the 50s.
Paying for your electricity helps align incentives so that you can make the trade-off of investing to lower usage vs. just buying the power you want at market rate... and bearing that cost means you have the freedom to make that trade-off rather than it being made for you.
1) I lived in Iraq for a while, and they have free electricity. What happens there is that they have to implement rolling blackouts because when people do have electricity they turn on every appliance, light, tv, ... Having some kind of cost involved helps to limit this type of silly behavior.
2) At some point, someone is paying for electricity even if they don't send me a bill every month. Let's say the government funds free electricity for everyone. As someone who tries to conserve energy, my costs will go up while the guy next door keeps his 3k sq-ft house at 65 degrees all summer pays less than he does now. That does not seem like a good system.
Because it is morally reprehensible to have people work on the grid and maintain it without paying them due compensation for their work. That is called slavery. Without their labor, there would be no grid.
Things that have no price cannot be fairly allocated by a market system, and production cannot be reliably planned.
Also, paying $0.10 per kWh makes us choose between using an air conditioner to cool the interior of an occupied building to 20 degC, or wasting power on mining proof-of-work cryptocoins.
There may be a case for having the first N kWh of residential household use in a month be free, and metering the excess at a higher rate. If I got unlimited electricity at no cost, I, for one, would have an aluminum smelter in my back yard--right next to the Moon-etching laser, programmed to write "CHAIRFACE".
Let's forget about "fair" then, and focus on the allocation. Whether fair or not by someone's definition of "fair", the market system can allocate resources among uncountable federated actors, without spending a significant fraction of those resources on centralized calculations. A zero-price system cannot do that.
There may exist theoretical alternate systems that can allocate more fairly than a market system. If one can do that with unmetered, no-additional-cost-to-the-consumer electricity, I'd be happy to hear about it, as I am not currently aware of any.
To convey information. Getting rid of price is like putting a blindfold on because you think there's a tiger nearby. I'm pretty much in the classical liberal / conservative mold and I would say that if you're worried people are suffering from the greed of others it's better to give the people who can't afford the thing in question money then to just make it free for everyone - or even make it free for the people who can't afford it.
I watched an interesting "Interesting Engineering" video on why utility scale batteries are a game changer.
Right now, in my area, we have a Nuclear plant that handles the base load, but we tend to keep it at "not full capacity" most of the time, because nuclear is harder to ramp up/down in response to load.
In the video, he shows how renewables can pick up the slack in many ways... but I was thinking, why not run our nuclear plants at something like 90% capacity all the time and store the excess energy in utility scale batteries?
It seems like these devices could have a far greater impact than renewables could, and they can harness existing investments in nuclear. It's too bad we can't just pump water uphill into reservoirs from nuclear plants and dump that through turbines when needed. Such a setup is obviously a huge investment and you can't really build a reservoir next to every nuclear facility.
We have one in Western Massachusetts (Northfield Mountain) built nearly 50 years ago to pair with the Yankee nuclear power plant in Vermont. Peak run-rate is 1140 megawatts and the hilltop reservoir is ~12k acre feet. Peak spin up takes ~10mins and can run for ~8hrs if the upper lake is full. So capacity is just short of 10 gigawatt hours.
My high school electronics class took a field trip there and I found the scale and design simplicity truly awe inspiring.
Wait, the markets? Don’t you mean the infrastructure? The financialized language in the article is very jarring. It’s like their readers can’t relate to base reality anymore and the only way to connect with them is these financial terms, the “demand side and supply side”, “smart energy resources”, “multi period optimization”, and so on. Almost like you’re trying to describe a Ford Focus to them and you have to describe it as a “on demand relocation capital unit as a service” or something.
People say that nuclear is superior to wind and solar, and the main reason it isn't booming in the US is governmental regulations. But since 2016 we have had a federal government that is anti-renewable and pro-nuclear, and still nuclear plants are being closed, not built.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadMost of these markets have a 24hr-ahead clearing price for energy. I think you aught to be able to expose retail consumers to fluctuations based on the day-ahead market to let people make their own choices for energy usage. Given that exposure, enough consumers will change their behavior to soften the variability in price. It might also make distributed energy storage Just Work (TM) if individual battery owners have a vector to profit from supporting the grid.
Yes, absolutely this is the way to go. It works well for gasoline, for instance.
What prevents an electric company from significantly raising prices for a day to catch people off guard? I can't exactly switch electric companies to punish them.
So if the extended market prices are high enough, then this acts as a signal to add generation and/or distribution capacity. Likewise, if the extended market prices are low enough, this acts as a signal to retire capacity that has a higher operating cost/lower profit margins.
It also gets harder to game this system as distributed generation gets better penetration. The optimal thing to do as a residential energy provider is also naturally stabilizing for the grid. If a cabal of generators acts to restrict supply and artificially raise the price, then everyone who isn't a member of the cabal makes a killing selling energy into the market.
Its also hard for a cabal to squeeze residential providers out of the market through lower prices. Distributed generation is a small fraction of any individual provider's income. In most cases, a residential provider is paying for their system over several years. So in order to squeeze them out, a cabal would also have to sustain a campaign of artificially low prices for a span of years in order to have an impact.
Distributed generation means that there is a pool of small independent suppliers whose rational choice always acts to counter the actions of any oligopoly that attempts to form.
You don't have to allow the utility to control your consumption automatically, but then you'll be exposed to the real time price of power (not a regulated average as occurred in the past because of dumb meters).
[1] https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9244031?hl=en (Google Nest: Learn about Rush Hour Rewards)
IE, I have it at 72 deg, a 'energy rush hour' is declared, the nest automatically turns my thermostat to 70 deg an hour or two before, then to 75 deg during the rush hour.
If you still "really don't want the power company to control my thermostat" after seeing your potential savings, that is.
So much legacy technology and machinery, buildings, installations, infrastructure not to mention the fact that neither wind nor solar and not even hydro are anywhere close to being able to provide that it's only a few percentages of world energy usage and have upper limits.
In my view the only real fundamental progress when it comes to energy, within sight (and it's still far away if ever) is Thorium and Fusion.
Furthermore the externalities of things like wind and solar isn't calculated today and would make two things very clear. You can't have wind and solar without the backup of oil/nuclear/coal and they will never be able to provide us with enough energy to meet our needs to not talk about meeting our future needs (which will be many times higher than it is today)
I am all for green energy but i share your pessimism.
I do agree that fusion would be the ultimate form of power generation and would have the least impact on the current grid. But regardless, the future of energy generation is in diversity of sources.
Otherwise, it will come down to economics. So I agree we will diversify but fossil fuels aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
63% of power generation comes from "fossil fuels", but half of that comes from natural gas. If we focus purely on carbon emissions and ignore implications of fracking, natural gas can be considered "clean". Also assuming all renewables are zero-emission, this means roughly 30% of our power generation has the potential for carbon emissions.
By simply instituting a carbon tax, or even requiring coal plants to sequester emissions would make burning coal expensive enough that other forms of power will become cheaper, and thus the market would align appropriately. These are things being talked about right now, so its not unrealistic. The coal lobby won't like this of course and will continue to push us away from that, but I believe in 50 years when Miami and New Orleans have turned into Venice and the new generation of people won't be working in coal, American conservatives, as well as other nations, will stop complaining about the coal industry so much. All that has to happen is a few percentage points in a certain direction and the machinations will start to work.
We get these rosy images of how far we are with renewables when in reality once you dig into it you realize we are nowhere near anything that can replace our current primarily fossil based system.
We don't appreciate how much fossil fuels are making our lives more livable and how little alternatives add to this livability.
I understand the potential CO2 emission risk etc, but we are safer because we use fossil fuels, not despite of it.
And we are not just talking for energy here, we are talking plastic used in more or less any industry you can think of from healthcare to textiles to toys. We are talking for greasing, we use it for fertilizers which makes it possible for us to produce the amount of food we do etc. Which means that oil will play a very very very significant part of our lives for many centuries unless of course some completely new material shows up with as much versatility and application. And now that we are drilling for the oil anyway....
I understand that this isn't what we want to hear, but that's the reality and there isn't currently much of an alternative.
However, for everything we make in plastic, there is a potential alternative. In many cases that alternative is more expensive than plastic for its specific purpose. Much of the reason plastic is cheaper is (conjecture here) because it is subsidized by fact that we use so much oil for energy. If all (or most) cars were electric, demand and production of crude would go down, and so would the economies of scale, possibly making plastic more expensive than biodegradable alternatives.
People will continue to use the materials that are cheaper. However our economy is not set up to internalize the costs to the world and to its biosphere. In that sense fossil fuels are very expensive, and we are incurring a debt. At some point its going to be time to pay the piper, and the alternatives will become cheaper by comparison.
Plastic today is a highly versatile material it can be almost as hard as diamonds, it can be ultra precise like lego and so soft it's weaved into our textiles.
You've seen the sorry substitutes for straws? They can't even make that.
You won't find alternatives for that and again ex. wind and solar are subsidized without providing any of those benefits.
You last comment is speculation and your conclusion even if it was true isn't the only alternative. There are many others. Some of them include us developing methods to deal with CO2 if it turned out to be a problem and you are forgetting the most important thing here.
People who don't have access to cheap and plentiful energy are already incurring a debt to survive and paying the piper. There is a cost to NOT using fossil fuels, one very few are ready to make. I for one am not ready to exchange things like food security for the risk of some speculative consequences we dont even know and to the extent we know isn't something we can't deal with.
The more wind/solar you build, the more backup from coal/nuclear/wind you will need.
But the way to make us all better off is to make energy cheaper. There is a 1-1 correlation between energy usage and then rich, advanced, safe, clean and flourishing societies.
Wind and solar will only go as far as the political goodwill will take them. They are IMO unfairly promoted and that will incur a cost on their fundamental ability to be a solid enough energy form IMO. They are great as plugins to the existing system but the idea that we should build a smart grid because of their inabilities to provide on demand is not sustainable at the end of the day.
So my basis is based on part speculation, part knowing the limits and true cost of wind and solar and other alternatives.
Only Fusion or Thorium or maybe if we are lucky, fuel cells, will be actual progress which will also be economically viable. But this idea of a giant mix all handles by a smart grid is the not how it's going to play out as the upside of the usual alternatives simply aren't enough to outweigh the downside of cost and complexity they will incur on society.
But it's just my personal opinion of course. Each to their own.
The more road you build, the more rail you will need.
also known as 'who cares, we won't be here'
edited to add links
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-the-us-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/05/31/new-map-...
That's a large part of the reason that it likely won't be a part of the future mix. Because no investor groups want to "put their money on it". Nuclear is expensive to build out, it needs investment. The problem is that everyone sees the shit show that Vogtie has become. Also, energy investors can see what's happened to nuclear in places like Iowa where it almost seems as though every guy able to even get a USD100,000 loan has gotten a group of his buddies together and slapped up some windmills. (Seriously, have you ever driven through Iowa lately?) Anyway, what investor group wants to put up the USD4 Billion to compete against all that? Harsh reality is that, assuming all they care about is generating more money, there are better places for their money to go. That's why we need government investment.
I've been saying for a while, we've reached the point where if we want nuclear to be a part of the future mix, government is going to have to step up in a big way. You could argue that the problem with Vogtie was that the government was unrealistic in expecting private industry to be able to pull that off with the provided level of assistance. (And yes, that also implies that private industry was just as unrealistic in believing they could pull that off without additional assistance.)
It's not expensive, financially, compared to Solar and Wind.
But it is expensive politically. For whatever reason, Nuclear is toxic in the public's eye. To shift public opinion is not going to be cheap.
Some Nuclear plants were stopped before starting their energy generation due to the public opinion shifting against them.
> government is going to have to step up in a big way.
We have agreement on that but how that's done is difficult.
Let's remove all regulations for everyone. Wind, solar, nuclear, everyone. A nuclear plant is still going to run you north of USD1 Billion. Not only that, but you won't start seeing any return for 5 to 10 years. And that's doing everything in a headlong rush, on the cheap, with no regard for safety. Now someone would need to come up with that money.
Contrast this with throwing up windmills. You need, (again, no more regulations here), around 500 g's. You start generating income on that outlay inside of a year. Worse, because the prices are so low, enterprising people who would never have been able to compete in the energy markets before, all of a sudden are able to slap up windmills too. It can just snowball into a free for all. What happened in Iowa was a bit more controlled than that, but you still ended up with runaway growth in wind generation capacity. And now their nuclear plant is literally closing down. It can't even compete. One nuclear plant can out generate one windmill. But if everyone and his mother is gonna try to get a piece of the wind generation pie on their family's farm, well, that's an awful lot of windmills.
We've got to get serious and look at the energy markets in a realistic fashion. Iowans are not anti-nuclear hippies, they just don't want to get a bill for 15 cents a kWh instead of the bill for 2 cents a kWh. I don't blame them. Yeah, go wind, and fill in the gaps with whatever fossil fuel generation you have. It's cheaper for you. But we've got to get realistic about that fact and have government either pay for nuclear outright, or put it's finger on the scale like it ended up doing with Vogtie. Basically, telling consumers that you have to use the energy from the nuclear plant, you have to pay the higher price, and you're not allowed to switch away from it.
Like you said, that was not popular, but it is what it is. Those are the choices, we can't soft pedal this stuff anymore if we're serious about a carbon free future.
Even if there is a a few years until actually being fully operational. It is still a better use of capital, providing the situation you described (no regulations for everyone). Which, to me, would remove the substitutes to solar.
A nuclear power plant has lower upkeep than the 20-30 year lifespan of wind and solar. This is a large cost you aren't including.
Small nuclear is uneconomical the last time I ran the numbers but mid to large scale is.
1 GW Nuclear power plant uses less land, less resources in materials and labor, and is more durable considering the maintenance/upkeep. If you compared that to solar or wind, using the most economical price point, it wouldn't even come close.
But Nuclear has major problems, since your situation isn't realized, an investor could lose 100% of their investment just to be used as a political scapegoat. You don't see that often with Wind and Solar.
So, given the current environment, yes, Wind/Solar are more economical but give no regulations and no substities, Nuclear would be the most economical.
Per-megawatt, it might not cost more but:
1. The upfront investment is high. I can build a 1MW solar installation, or 10MW, or 100MW. Our smallest nuclear plant is around 500MW.
2. It will take many years to build.
3. It will take even longer to fully pay itself off.
Nuclear is fine if you have a massive amount of capital and know the market won't change in the next 50 year. But no rational actor in the energy market is about to bet on that stability when solar is a much more nimble investment that's cost-competitive.
Living only expecting things to go right means that cities don't need to worry about backups and hardened networks.
It's when things go wrong that you end up with an HBO series a few decades later.
Say that to France. Stop buying the propaganda. HBO series has warning signs. Chernobyl and Fukushima were grossly mismanagement and ignored the glaring issues. France has never had the problem.
With some notable high profile exceptions people don't go into things with the intention of completely screwing them up.
Which is why I provide France as a counter-example. They aren't mismanaging the potential issues. It's a solvable problem and France is continually demonstrating it.
If we started actually calculating wind and solars true cost (ex. backup power by coal, oil, nuclear) then it too would be extremely expensive.
If we added the cost of decommissioning which isn't added to solar and wind but to nuclear then that would increase the price even more.
Chernobyl was hampered by design flaws [1] that can be pretty well avoided these days, and it's not like light water reactors are the only / best option, either.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-23-mn-15781-...
I'm personally comfortable with the idea of nuclear power, but I don't really begrudge people who aren't too much. It's all moot anyway; for providing base load, natural gas is going to be the hands down winner for awhile. I could be mistaken on this point, but I'm under the impression that they're both cheaper and faster to get going, and easier to decommission.
You can be as smart and careful as you like, and still get bitten by something you had no idea was a possibility. If you're building a wind turbine, there's likely to be a reasonable limit to how catastrophic that totally unanticipated problem might be. If you're building a nuclear plant, the stakes are a lot higher.
It does bring to mind an oddly positive twist on the "you don't own it" of IoT. By signing up as part of a service cooperative of some sort getting a share of the generated income as compensation.
Probably not a winning move and if done by could rightfully get FTC involved by mixing in investing - especially if it id being run by the manufacturer who has potentially clashing incentives.
Paying for your electricity helps align incentives so that you can make the trade-off of investing to lower usage vs. just buying the power you want at market rate... and bearing that cost means you have the freedom to make that trade-off rather than it being made for you.
1) I lived in Iraq for a while, and they have free electricity. What happens there is that they have to implement rolling blackouts because when people do have electricity they turn on every appliance, light, tv, ... Having some kind of cost involved helps to limit this type of silly behavior.
2) At some point, someone is paying for electricity even if they don't send me a bill every month. Let's say the government funds free electricity for everyone. As someone who tries to conserve energy, my costs will go up while the guy next door keeps his 3k sq-ft house at 65 degrees all summer pays less than he does now. That does not seem like a good system.
Also, paying $0.10 per kWh makes us choose between using an air conditioner to cool the interior of an occupied building to 20 degC, or wasting power on mining proof-of-work cryptocoins.
There may be a case for having the first N kWh of residential household use in a month be free, and metering the excess at a higher rate. If I got unlimited electricity at no cost, I, for one, would have an aluminum smelter in my back yard--right next to the Moon-etching laser, programmed to write "CHAIRFACE".
There may exist theoretical alternate systems that can allocate more fairly than a market system. If one can do that with unmetered, no-additional-cost-to-the-consumer electricity, I'd be happy to hear about it, as I am not currently aware of any.
Right now, in my area, we have a Nuclear plant that handles the base load, but we tend to keep it at "not full capacity" most of the time, because nuclear is harder to ramp up/down in response to load.
In the video, he shows how renewables can pick up the slack in many ways... but I was thinking, why not run our nuclear plants at something like 90% capacity all the time and store the excess energy in utility scale batteries?
It seems like these devices could have a far greater impact than renewables could, and they can harness existing investments in nuclear. It's too bad we can't just pump water uphill into reservoirs from nuclear plants and dump that through turbines when needed. Such a setup is obviously a huge investment and you can't really build a reservoir next to every nuclear facility.
My high school electronics class took a field trip there and I found the scale and design simplicity truly awe inspiring.
https://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2016/12/02/northfield-mounta...