It is wrong wrt scale, but biomass burning electrical generation is a thing.
As an example, I had a massive old oak tree that needed to come down for safety reasons. I desperately wanted to keep some of the wood from the trunk either to carve a statue or convert to lumber, just so that something from the original tree stayed with us.
None of the professional (i.e. insured) services around could do that; all of them had a contract with a local power company to grind up everything they cut so it could be burned for electricity as part of their "green" commitment (which admittedly also included solar and maybe wind).
Not when you factor in the cost of labor and other market dynamics. Like most markets, supply chains and expertise have become highly specialized and adapted to economies of scale. Wood is either sourced from farms, managed forests, or from people who make a living in niches, such as recovering sunken logs or scrap industrial and commercial framing, which are easier to scale and offer more consistency.
I've dabbled a little in woodworking, and AFAIU while there are still people out there willing to do the work for small, one-off jobs, they're few and far between, especially in regions without significant hardwood stocks. Fewer still willing to actually pay you for the privilege.
It also doesn't help that engineered wood products are displacing quality lumber even at the high end of the market. These days a new, solid hardwood floor would probably appear cheap or antiquated to people accustomed to the look of laminated flooring.
This is spot on. I tried reaching out to some local mills and forestry folk, and dealing with a single tree was simply too small a job for them to bother with.
I guess that would depend on the tree, wouldn't it? How is a tiny little seedling going to clean as much carbon as a tree that took 40 years to become anything substantial?
Well... the process of that seedling growing into the big tree over 40 years is what takes carbon out of the atmosphere. The carbon just goes into the tree's biomass. So - long term, if you have a steady state where the biomass of the trees you're talking about remains roughly constant (or dips but comes back to the same level) - it is carbon neutral. Even if you're cutting down big trees and planting seedlings.
Of course, you're right, there's nuance there. If you start with a mature forest, cut it all down, and replant it with seedlings, that's not a steady state (yet) - particularly when you take ecosystem effects into account, I suspect.
If you take land that doesn't currently have trees on it, and plant a bunch of trees that you periodically cut down and replant then you're at worst carbon neutral. Unless that land would have otherwise be planted and left alone entirely.
No, they are actually burning less trees (although they are still burning trees and waste). Biomass is a shrinking part of the renewables. The increase in renewables is mainly solar and wind:
Please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments. If you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
I think in 10 years there will be so much progress made so fast in renewables that we will look at all large agency forecasts and think how bad these were. I think all the innovations in the storage space are coming together with 10s if not 100s of different options to provide the final nail in the coffin of fossil fuels.
Long term though i guess 30 to 40 years is a reasonable time frame to envision a global economy that becomes net negative.
I have gone from a pessimist to an optimist on this topic. Having said that the incumbents will not give up easily and aggressive goals can only be pursued by fighting their misplaced priorities.
The large agency forecasts have underestimated the growth of renewables for I think about a decade.
But, concerning your optimism — one of the reasons that renewables have gotten better and cheaper faster than predicted is that smart people decided to work on it. There’s a lot of opportunity in clean energy and climate tech, and working on it full time is a great way to manifest your optimism.
China's energy insecurity is also a large part of it.
Their exposure to shipping blockades in the south china sea and reliance on oil and gas imports provided a lot of the early impetus for beating down the price.
If one is not able to work in the industry oneself, there are also clean-energy ETFs that one can invest in, to support companies working on clean energy, which can manifest similar optimism by-proxy.
> I think in 10 years there will be so much progress made so fast in renewables that we will look at all large agency forecasts and think how bad these were.
No need to wait for 10 years, it's already pretty obvious. Look at any solar projection from any major institution 10 years back.
I sure hope so, but at least here in Germany NIMBYs are highly organized and effective at preventing more wind turbines. It doesn't help that many politicians do their best to prevent wind turbines too.
I wouldn't like to have a wind turbine just next to my home (let us say less than 1 km) either, and I would definitely fight against placing wind turbines into protected natural areas like mountains, which are pretty much the only places far from the sea that have almost constant wind.
The proponents of wind turbines seem to forget that wind turbines are huge industrial systems. Placing them all over the map in a populated territory in the name of nature sounds a bit like "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". Future generations may shake their heads on current placement of wind turbines just like we shake our heads on our forefathers placing iron smelting industry in the middle of cities.
I can see their appeal in shallow seas around North Germany, Denmark or England, where they can produce a lot of power from constant sea winds and be a bit out of sight and hearing, but people pushing them into Erzgebirge are damaging valuable places for a few megawatts of power.
We need to put them everywhere the wind blows if we want to become carbon neutral. Just putting up a couple of offshore turbines in northern Germany won't be enough by a large margin.
In Germany we always had very strict laws that regulate how long a house can be shaded by a wind turbine per year (8h/year, 30min/day iirc), only recently politicians started imposing arbitrary distance rules based on wrong information about noise immissions. I'd rather have a wind turbine close to my house than a road, provided I'm not in the flicker-shadow region of the blades.
"We need to put them everywhere the wind blows if we want to become carbon neutral."
That sounds far from optimal to me. If sea turbines are, say, five times more efficient and legally/socially non-problematic, why not just cover the sea with them as far as possible?
Because "as far as possible" is not enough. Even if you ignore that off shore power is a good bit more expensive to build, there is just not enough room there with current technology. And, by the way, the ocean deserves just as much protection as the mountains. Building offshore wind parks is not exactly good for the local wildlife there either.
I think you have an overly optimistic view of sea turbines.
They're more expensive, require more infrastructure (pylons and electricity lines aren't conflict free either) and there are a lot of conflicts around use of seawaters. And for a country like Germany there simply isn't enough space within the north sea and baltic sea for all the wind power we'll need.
(And to be clear: I'm 100% supportive of offshore wind energy, I just think it's entirely unrealistic to assume that could be a replacement for onshore wind. We need both.)
Yes, I am not totally indifferent to where I live. In other contexts, this attitude might be called "activism" and viewed positively.
As to your question: sound and sight. I definitely believe in smarter urban planning that just does not mash power plants and residential building together.
Urban planning that mashes together residential, retail, light industry and clean power sounds a lot smarter than American style urban planning that forces you to drive everywhere.
As a normal citizen, you do not really need to drive to your power station, though. Wind turbines operate without personnel and transmission losses from one extra km of cable are negligible. Only maintenance needs to visit them from time to time.
Wind turbines have almost zero footprint, a few square meters per square kilometer. They can either be installed where people are or where people aren't. Far better for the environment if they are installed in populated regions.
It is absolutely activism. Not all activism is good. Activism is also the reason we have too many single-homes and not enough low-income housing or transportation—because we tend to give too much weight to the few individuals who are vehemently opposed to these changes, and not to the much broader good they can generate for the general public.
NIMBYISM is activism. Your comments are classic NIMBY - you want these things but in someone elses back yard.
There are 'activists' everywhere, there are even 'activists' who campaign for the age of consent to be lowered because they want to have sex with 12 year olds. Being an activist is only as positive as the cause and the motives.
"Your comments are classic NIMBY - you want these things but in someone elses back yard."
No, I want them in reasonable distance from villages and cities. Say, 1 and more km. I do not want to push them into anyone's backyard.
And that is actually entirely possible, unlike with, say, highways or railways that fundamentally connect human habitation with another human habitation. Even Europe has a lot of empty corners.
People have a very simplistic view of nature vs industrial. That could make sense in some untouched part of the Nevada desert. But a lot of the world it is just more complicated than that. We act like the landscape is untouched, unblemished and static when it is not!
People don't like their view to change and equate that emotional impact with more substantive impact to nature. Landscape does matter, but not very much in comparison to more pressing matters. I think future generations will shake their heads at our willingness to pander to emotion.
You have not refuted the OPs point. We become so used to the impacts that we've grown up with that they tend to become invisible. Cue the pearl clutching and hysterics when something new comes along.
Your "we" does not include "me". I specifically avoid noisy locations all my life. For me, lack of noise is even more important than clean air, though they tend to come together.
The planet is on fire, and we're arguing about whether firefighters create too much traffic congestion. Future generations are far more likely to shake their heads at how we destroyed the climate with CO2 emissions.
I'm sympathetic, I really am, but these small harms need to be weighed against the effects of unchecked climate change!
The EU wants to be carbon neutral by 2050. Europe's forests absorb around 10% of today's CO2 emissions and they are expanding. Given over 50% of CO2 emissions comes from transport and energy (natural gas is the real elephant in the EU), just pushing hard with today's renewable technology could quite easily go a long way towards meeting that goal.
Renewables seem to be growing quite fast, the fear I have is that electrification may take longer. Car transport seems to be 'solved' (just needs roll-out over decades). But many other industries may take more time.
Electricity is just 20% of energy use. [0] And forecasts for 2040 are set around 28%. Even if electric goes all-renewable, you're still not there if you use non-electric for heating, industrial, air, sea etc.
Second, renewable growth is quite strong now yet there's large increases in energy use and decreases of nuclear. All in all, it appears the share of no/low-carbon energy sources in 1995 (i.e. renewables incl nuclear and hydro) was roughly large as it is today [1], but unfortunately on a much larger total energy consumption. [1] That's absolutely depressing. It seems the trend has finally set in the last few years, but we're a long way from home.
If we're talking 1950, I'd be an optimist. But it seems we're very much on a tipping point. The fact we'll be able to innovate ourselves to low-carbon is something I'm very optimistic about, but in the necessary timeframe... I'm very concerned.
Heating for one doesn’t just depend on switching energy sources. You also have options like better insulation, building codes, more efficient heat pumps or even moving south.
Yep. I'm proud of what I'm doing with my house. Installed heat pumps, put in $5000 of new insulation, replacing propane stoves/fireplaces with electric. Next car will be electric.
I'm oddly optimistic about it as well - I think we get bombarded with bad news regarding renewables so often that it can be easy to forget that there's plenty of good news too.
Unfortunately, after basically monotonically reducing over the last decade, coal has started creeping up slightly, from 19.5% last year to 21% last 12 months (May2021 and previous 11 months). But it was at the expense of natural gas.
We need to crush coal. The entire coal logistics train, from mines, to coal trains, to power plants, to coal export terminals (and replace blast furnaces with DRI/etc). The US has a quarter of the world’s coal, but we’ve got to lock that stuff underground.
We had some odd figures like that in the UK. It turned out two coal stations that were shutting down rushed to use up their coal reserves. Perhaps that is the case here?
As AC units are basically heat pumps why aren't people running them in reverse in the winter? Except in very cold climates, it should still be cheaper/more efficient than gaz. What am I missing?
This. Bear in mind also that even with the efficiency gain of the heat pump in warmer places (much of the US lives in places that are not warm), there are efficiency losses from generation and transmission of electricity to the end user.
A key point to understand about a heat pump is that it can move a lot more (heat) energy than the equivalent it consumes. One joule of pumping could get up to six joules of heat moved[0] - so it could be represented as being 600% efficient. Burning gas can only generate a maximum of one joule of heat for every joule consumed (i.e. 100% efficient).
Getting six joules requires favourable conditions and a good setup, but the normal expected efficiency is considerably above 100%.
Gas is (normally - I'm on a variable tariff and being paid to consume electricity at the moment) cheaper than electricity per joule, but not so much that it works out cheaper than a heat pump to achieve the same effect.
Much depends on where exactly you are and who you pay for electricity and when. For me, under PG&E pricing, the running cost for heat pump heating ends up higher than with gas. And the equipment cost is much higher.
I'll end up getting it anyway when I get an AC system someday, but it'll have to run off solar to be worthwhile.
There is actually a tip-over point. For a given price for gas, and a given price for electricity, each will be more economical at different points because the efficiency of heat pumps (for heating) is a function of the external temperature.
There are calculations that can be done to determine this point:
Heat pumps change the equation a bit. Yes, 1 kWh of resistive heating is a lot more expensive than 1 kWh of natural gas. But with high-efficiency heat pumps you can produce a few kWh of heat in your house with 1 input kWh, so it comes down to just how much cheaper natural gas is per kWh.
In Florida I think they wanted to charge me $1000 extra for a heat pump instead of just an AC. for the five cold days a year it didn’t seem worth it. The air handler just has resistive coils for heat.
The graph is of annual electricity generation, so it almost certainly is not included. Natural gas used for residential heating doesn't get converted to electricity, it just gets burned by the home's furnace. Only around a third of homes in the US use electricity for heating.
I don't like the title. Sorry for nitpicking but "renewables" are packed together in opposition to what? To non-renewables? If so being second is actually the worst position to be in.
Only after looking at the picture you see the categories are "natural gas", "coal", "renewables", "nuclear", "other".
And the decline of coal vs natural gas is more significant than the rise in renewables.
And if you look at the second graph already in 2019 "renewables" were for some time the "second" source.
I would like to see a more insightful analysis and a better title
Beyond this title, most titles and the prevailing culture focuses on adding non-fossil fuel sources. But adding more alternatives doesn't mean decreasing carbon emissions and pollution. History shows that finding a new energy source leads to using the old ones and the new one.
Only decreasing burning fossil fuels decreases burning fossil fuels. Focusing the important measure: carbon and toxic pollution emitted will get results.
Whether politically feasible or not, the fastest, most effective way to reduce carbon and pollution emissions is first to close fossil fuel extraction and production, then to solve what problems arise. We'll need less peaker plants and nuclear. People will adjust faster than anyone expects, I'd estimate in weeks to months, not years.
Since the people polluting the most (U.S., Europe, rich people everywhere) aren't using most of their energy for life necessities or even things they'd miss, most Americans can decrease our use 70 percent or more just with low-hanging fruit (source: I've reduced mine over 90 percent and each step improved my life, mostly getting rid of waste and frivolities). We'd have to make sure hospitals, public transit, and some infrastructure keeps powered during the transition, and protect people on the margins, but most people will quickly adjust to flying less, not leaving the a/c on 24/7 six months of the year, eating less meat, etc.
Tldr: 1. Focusing on lowering emissions will result in lowering emissions more than focusing on increasing alternatives.
2. Lowering supply of fossil fuels would create the changes we seek faster than trying to prepare for the changes first, mainly because we waste so much.
73 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadAs an example, I had a massive old oak tree that needed to come down for safety reasons. I desperately wanted to keep some of the wood from the trunk either to carve a statue or convert to lumber, just so that something from the original tree stayed with us.
None of the professional (i.e. insured) services around could do that; all of them had a contract with a local power company to grind up everything they cut so it could be burned for electricity as part of their "green" commitment (which admittedly also included solar and maybe wind).
I've dabbled a little in woodworking, and AFAIU while there are still people out there willing to do the work for small, one-off jobs, they're few and far between, especially in regions without significant hardwood stocks. Fewer still willing to actually pay you for the privilege.
It also doesn't help that engineered wood products are displacing quality lumber even at the high end of the market. These days a new, solid hardwood floor would probably appear cheap or antiquated to people accustomed to the look of laminated flooring.
Of course, you're right, there's nuance there. If you start with a mature forest, cut it all down, and replant it with seedlings, that's not a steady state (yet) - particularly when you take ecosystem effects into account, I suspect.
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Long term though i guess 30 to 40 years is a reasonable time frame to envision a global economy that becomes net negative.
I have gone from a pessimist to an optimist on this topic. Having said that the incumbents will not give up easily and aggressive goals can only be pursued by fighting their misplaced priorities.
But, concerning your optimism — one of the reasons that renewables have gotten better and cheaper faster than predicted is that smart people decided to work on it. There’s a lot of opportunity in clean energy and climate tech, and working on it full time is a great way to manifest your optimism.
Their exposure to shipping blockades in the south china sea and reliance on oil and gas imports provided a lot of the early impetus for beating down the price.
I wouldn't say I am 100pc invested in clean energy ETFs, but do hold them for ideological reasons.
No need to wait for 10 years, it's already pretty obvious. Look at any solar projection from any major institution 10 years back.
The proponents of wind turbines seem to forget that wind turbines are huge industrial systems. Placing them all over the map in a populated territory in the name of nature sounds a bit like "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". Future generations may shake their heads on current placement of wind turbines just like we shake our heads on our forefathers placing iron smelting industry in the middle of cities.
I can see their appeal in shallow seas around North Germany, Denmark or England, where they can produce a lot of power from constant sea winds and be a bit out of sight and hearing, but people pushing them into Erzgebirge are damaging valuable places for a few megawatts of power.
In Germany we always had very strict laws that regulate how long a house can be shaded by a wind turbine per year (8h/year, 30min/day iirc), only recently politicians started imposing arbitrary distance rules based on wrong information about noise immissions. I'd rather have a wind turbine close to my house than a road, provided I'm not in the flicker-shadow region of the blades.
That sounds far from optimal to me. If sea turbines are, say, five times more efficient and legally/socially non-problematic, why not just cover the sea with them as far as possible?
They're more expensive, require more infrastructure (pylons and electricity lines aren't conflict free either) and there are a lot of conflicts around use of seawaters. And for a country like Germany there simply isn't enough space within the north sea and baltic sea for all the wind power we'll need.
(And to be clear: I'm 100% supportive of offshore wind energy, I just think it's entirely unrealistic to assume that could be a replacement for onshore wind. We need both.)
What exactly is it about a wind turbine within 1000m of your home that bothers you?
As to your question: sound and sight. I definitely believe in smarter urban planning that just does not mash power plants and residential building together.
There are 'activists' everywhere, there are even 'activists' who campaign for the age of consent to be lowered because they want to have sex with 12 year olds. Being an activist is only as positive as the cause and the motives.
No, I want them in reasonable distance from villages and cities. Say, 1 and more km. I do not want to push them into anyone's backyard.
And that is actually entirely possible, unlike with, say, highways or railways that fundamentally connect human habitation with another human habitation. Even Europe has a lot of empty corners.
People don't like their view to change and equate that emotional impact with more substantive impact to nature. Landscape does matter, but not very much in comparison to more pressing matters. I think future generations will shake their heads at our willingness to pander to emotion.
Visit a place than mixes industry and residential sensibly, like Japan before condemning it. Heavy industry is segregated, but light industry isn't.
Also, if electric cars become a thing, you can at least hope that within 10-15 years, environmental damage from major roads will diminish.
I'm sympathetic, I really am, but these small harms need to be weighed against the effects of unchecked climate change!
Electricity is just 20% of energy use. [0] And forecasts for 2040 are set around 28%. Even if electric goes all-renewable, you're still not there if you use non-electric for heating, industrial, air, sea etc.
Second, renewable growth is quite strong now yet there's large increases in energy use and decreases of nuclear. All in all, it appears the share of no/low-carbon energy sources in 1995 (i.e. renewables incl nuclear and hydro) was roughly large as it is today [1], but unfortunately on a much larger total energy consumption. [1] That's absolutely depressing. It seems the trend has finally set in the last few years, but we're a long way from home.
If we're talking 1950, I'd be an optimist. But it seems we're very much on a tipping point. The fact we'll be able to innovate ourselves to low-carbon is something I'm very optimistic about, but in the necessary timeframe... I'm very concerned.
[0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-elec...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
We need to crush coal. The entire coal logistics train, from mines, to coal trains, to power plants, to coal export terminals (and replace blast furnaces with DRI/etc). The US has a quarter of the world’s coal, but we’ve got to lock that stuff underground.
The US is now exporting significant amounts of coal to China, whose demand is increasing.
This isn't true at all. Gas is much cheaper per joule than electricity.
Getting six joules requires favourable conditions and a good setup, but the normal expected efficiency is considerably above 100%.
Gas is (normally - I'm on a variable tariff and being paid to consume electricity at the moment) cheaper than electricity per joule, but not so much that it works out cheaper than a heat pump to achieve the same effect.
[0] https://www.eec.org.au/for-energy-users/technologies-2/heat-...
I'll end up getting it anyway when I get an AC system someday, but it'll have to run off solar to be worthwhile.
There is actually a tip-over point. For a given price for gas, and a given price for electricity, each will be more economical at different points because the efficiency of heat pumps (for heating) is a function of the external temperature.
There are calculations that can be done to determine this point:
* https://c03.apogee.net/mvc/home/hes/land/el?utilityname=ever...
* https://masslandlords.net/heat-pump-vs-furnace/
It's not as clear-cut as you make it sound:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
We heat with gas. We cool with grid-powered A/C.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=18131
Only after looking at the picture you see the categories are "natural gas", "coal", "renewables", "nuclear", "other".
And the decline of coal vs natural gas is more significant than the rise in renewables.
And if you look at the second graph already in 2019 "renewables" were for some time the "second" source.
I would like to see a more insightful analysis and a better title
Only decreasing burning fossil fuels decreases burning fossil fuels. Focusing the important measure: carbon and toxic pollution emitted will get results.
Whether politically feasible or not, the fastest, most effective way to reduce carbon and pollution emissions is first to close fossil fuel extraction and production, then to solve what problems arise. We'll need less peaker plants and nuclear. People will adjust faster than anyone expects, I'd estimate in weeks to months, not years.
Since the people polluting the most (U.S., Europe, rich people everywhere) aren't using most of their energy for life necessities or even things they'd miss, most Americans can decrease our use 70 percent or more just with low-hanging fruit (source: I've reduced mine over 90 percent and each step improved my life, mostly getting rid of waste and frivolities). We'd have to make sure hospitals, public transit, and some infrastructure keeps powered during the transition, and protect people on the margins, but most people will quickly adjust to flying less, not leaving the a/c on 24/7 six months of the year, eating less meat, etc.
Tldr: 1. Focusing on lowering emissions will result in lowering emissions more than focusing on increasing alternatives.
2. Lowering supply of fossil fuels would create the changes we seek faster than trying to prepare for the changes first, mainly because we waste so much.