But the news told me that trump destroyed american renewables.... In reality, america has surpassed it's Paris climate goals every year despite not being party to the agreement. That's a better model.
Best news is that cost of these installations is now quite low: less than $1.5 per watt peak.
What about capacity utilisation factor of newly installed turbines? Does it trend downwards? Which means, are we close to exhausting potential of wind?
PS: It's not, it's actually trending a bit up. Which is explainable because average capacity of a turbine trends up -> the turbine is bigger and taller -> wind blows faster and more consistently on higher altitude.
It really depends on the terrain I guess. Having lived all my life either on the shore or in the mountains, I've always seen winds to be pretty stable in a given season.
The short answer scaling heavily favors huge turbines. The taller they are the larger swept area of the blades. More are more wind energy captured. (Good old area = distance squared) And higher up the more consistent the wind, higher the average wind speed, and thus higher capacity factor.
Why do you think there will ever a need for it? Just leave it where it is when it's no longer needed. Someone will eventually sell it for scrap metal making money on it.
The move to offshore is another big factor as wind there is more consistent and its a bit easier to spread them out.
Theres a lot of other small things contributing to the capacity factor increases too: computer modelling of how the wakes of different turbines interact with each other and the labdscape, energy market changes to penalise slow reacting coal plants and or reward flexible demand, better weather prediction, grid and battery integration, HVDC, marginal engineering and business process improvements as you get companies, technicians and tools dedicated to this industry.
Having said all that, I'm not sure how useful a number it is, but nice that it's going up as generally it tracks the price going down as fixed costs get spread further.
But if the price is low enough, then low capacity factors still make sense. Not sure if theres a stat that captures both of those things at the same time though and also considers the full system costs.
There's almost certainly times and places that a low capacity factor producer that hits your system peak is going to be the best option. Demand response, for example, could be modelled as very low capacity factor generators that only supply when you actually need the extra power.
If it’s cloudy and an extended period of calm wind, it’s unacceptable for me to not have electricity, and neither is it for hospitals or nursing homes. We will always need some form of petro backup unless our queasiness with nuclear is solved.
I think you'd have to look at the statistics for consecutive windless days for the given location to rule out battery storage? Also in the US, I think natural gas peakers are more common than petro.
This is some serious biased data selection going on there.
For example he claims that renewables can't replace fossil because of their unreliability. And shows a graph of global energy use that shows that overall percentage of renewables did not grow between 2009 and 2019 despite significant growth in total output. He the compares this to local data which shows that _locally_ turning on and off a nuclear power plant has a significant effect on the _local_ carbon emissions.
You can't really compare conclusions from global and local studies. By his own argument nuclear can't function without fossil either, because over the same time frame as the report he quotes nuclear energy output rose as well [1] (except for a drop due to the GFC).
What the global data really shows is that global energy demand has increased rapidly largely in countries like China and India etc. who build (cheap) coal plants to keep up with tha demand. It will be interesting to see developments now that China is moving away from growing at all costs.
Regarding the baseload myth, it has been debunked many times [2] [3]
Shellenberger is running an Astro-Turf campaign against renewable energy for the nuclear industry. It's good he is flagged where serious discussion is encouraged.
I also hope that efficient scale batteries become possible. But if there is an extended deficit with wind / sun then even a battery might not do it. One undeniable advantage of petrochemicals is they work at any time, consistently, and are a solid backup. Maybe we are OK as a society with backup generators being petrochemicals, rather than going nuclear.
It's always sunny somewhere, but if that is on the opposite side of the earth during the night, good luck building grid transmission.
It's always windy somewhere, but that also might not be on the same continent as you need it.
So if you don't like gas peakers or don't run a nuclear baseload you need to bridge those short non-windy winter days or weeks with batteries. Multiple nation scale terawatt-hour batteries. Which means millions of Tesla li-ion megapacks or millions of pumped hydro plants - which gets expensive and unfeasible real quick as you run out of either the battery raw materials for the former or suitable sites for the latter.
Fossil fuels store energy like batteries too. You could store excess wind energy as synthetic diesel[0] or gasoline, it's just not commercially viable yet.
That's an exceptionally inefficient way to do it, and it comes with the risk of methane leaks (which would then have a climate warming effect).
Hydrogen can be used directly, which skips one conversion step and doesn't need air capture for the CO2. These days no gas plant should be build that can't be converted to 100% hydrogen in the future.
Yes that's true. But Methane is easier to store than Hydrogen. Most countries already have infrastructure in place to store months worth of Methane. And who knows, maybe we figure out some cheap redox-flow batteries or something so that neither option is the cheapest solution. In any case, there is no need for coal or fossil gas as backup, and nuclear is probably out for economical reasons (unless we have some breakthrough in reactor design in the next five years or so)
I'm not convinced. Solar is cheaper than nuclear and making Methane can be done when production exceeds demand. Why do you think that nuclear would be better suited for the task?
Its cheaper, but you are converting it to methane and back to electricity at abyssimal 15% efficiency, and paying for all that extra conversion infrastructure, so your costs are like 10x.
Nuclear is most economical when run 24/7. So I don't think it will be a good backup. Hydrogen and its derivatives (ammonia, methane) will take that role, I guess.
I think you guys need gas as peak power long time but coal is now in borrowed time. At least Germany is started moving towards power to hydrogen but it takes like 10+ years to build truly big industrial scale production for P2H. Same for grid scale batteries eg which are moving right direction but not there yet.
If Form Energy (or Ambri or other sub 50$/khw battery system) succeeds, gas and coal are done. Even combined cycle LNG can’t compete with wind/solar + multi day storage on cost. If it looks like one of the major grid scale battery projects will work, gas plant financiers will not risk new projects as their assets will get stranded before they pay off.
Battery storage can, and most likely will, be the solution for day-night fluctuations in energy use. However, for the amounts of energy that seasonal energy storage would require, it's not really a viable solution.
Regarding clean seasonal energy storage - UK, French and German authorities all independently came with studies(1) that arrived to the same conclusion - synthetic methane is the only viable option. Very expensive, but the engineering is doable. Gas plants are here to stay.
I think that natural gas plants will be a significant part of power grids for a long time. Maybe they will not be primary generators, but they certainly will stay as backup. At the very least until the grid-scale storage problem will be properly solved (i.e. you need to store at least several days of consumption, ideally several weeks). I don't think that any kind of chemical batteries is the solution to this problem. Personally, I hope that hydro pumped storage in artificial underground cavities will become mainstream one day.
Have you missed the underground part? Ideally both reservoirs would be kept underground, thus minimizing environmental impact and water loss to an absolute minimum.
I agree that such storage would require huge CapEx, but on the bright side OpEx will be relatively small. And no need to bother with recycling of megatonnes of batteries every decade. Also because stored energy is proportional to volume and height difference you it's possible scale such storage quite flexibly (assuming an affordable technology for creating such cavities will be developed).
> Have you missed the underground part? Ideally both reservoirs would be kept underground, thus minimizing environmental impact and water loss to an absolute minimum.
Nope, but you still need to dig a lot in rocks, and divert water to fill up the reservoir in the first place, which aren't without environmental consequences.
Furthermore, as the video i linked explains, you need very specific conditions for pumped up hydro to be viable (size, height, water, etc.) which IMHO makes it a non-starter in many places.
Am I correct to assume that wind is a more indirect source of power than solar?
In my mind, solar energy creates wind by heating up the surface of the earth, which then heats up the air above it, which then moves around to even out the temperature differences.
Therefore I suspect that in the long run (10 years? 100 years?) solar energy will be more common than wind energy. Similar to how solid state drives are overtaking spinning drives.
Right - I think generally having a variety of energy sources is also good so that we can have a smoother power generation curve during the day rather than the big peaks that wind & solar generate. Eventually, we'll (hopefully) have enough battery or other energy storage capacity to smooth out bumps in energy production so it can be used throughout the day. But even then it'll be useful to have wind power generating some power when, say, it's nighttime.
Depends where you are. In my state in Australia the wind tends to be more negatively correlated with daylight (i.e. it's more likely to be more windy overnight) but down south it tends to be a bit more the other way.
Then there's offshore, where there's a higher likelihood to be more consistently windy just generally.
They are complementary. You tend to have more wind when there's no sun, like during storms and some places are very windy at night.
The problem with wind is dealing with the huge uptick in energy coming down the pipeline during a major wind event. Last I checked, this was still not a solved problem but I haven't been keeping current like I used to.
So in practice they shut down some windmills during major wind events to protect the system. The other issue both wind and solar have is storage. Though we've seen substantial gains in battery storage in recent years, so there is good news but I don't know if we are really "there" yet.
Solar is indeed long term cheaper to install but subject to periodic down-time. Wind blows at night and when it is cloudy. Also the nature of our atmosphere is that there is always some wind somewhere. So, they are complementary.
Right now everybody is focused on getting to 100% carbon neutral. However, the question must be asked: why stop there and not go to something like 500 or even 1000% energy generation.
There will be plenty of things we can do with the excess energy. I think this will play out over the next few decades. Mass produced solar will go on any available surface just because we can. There are already some lower efficiency but potentially very cheap to produce solar systems based on e.g. organic materials that can be printed on flexible surfaces (i.e. not glass). Having that stuff put all over the place is going to make an impact.
Solar is already regularly creating surpluses regularly. It's a huge problem for energy providers because they have to shut down more expensive to manage production when that happens. Any time you see a wind mill not spinning, don't assume it is because it is broken and instead consider that there might be too much wind power temporarily.
A structural surplus will create supply of very cheap (often negatively priced even) energy. There are all sorts of valuable things we can do with that.
Carbon neutrality and excess energy are not a measurement of the same thing. Nevertheless, the energy supply demand balance doesn’t work the way you describe. Most power plants are contracted with a specific energy buyer such as distribution utility or an industrial buyer that is meeting a specific load need or as part of their resource planning. So there is rarely more excess capacity beyond a reserve margin. These plants are very capital intensive and investors demand a minimum rate of return so if you don’t know who will buy the power and at what price for many years, the plant will not be funded or built. Source: i work in the power financing industry
That's only how it works now. It's an obsolete way to operate our energy markets. Carbon neutrality will require electrifying large markets that currently aren't electrified. That overall market is much larger than the current electricity market. By the time even a small portion of that market has been addressed, most electricity generation will long be renewable. That's happening a lot faster than some people seem to think/hope for. Existing gas/coal plant generation will be a tiny portion of that market. And there won't be a whole lot of new capacity going forward. Arguably, new gas plants are already a very dubious investment.
Most new capacity will either be new players (e.g. Tesla is planning to be a virtual power provider) in the market without a sunk investment legacy or existing players that compete on divesting/isolating their sunk investments the fastest. Either way, this pushes a lot more renewable energy in the market. That in turn accelerates the demise of more expensive things in the market. Including plants that are still under construction which were financed under the assumption that they would operate for a few decades at high price points for energy. I don't think that industry can afford a major drop in cost for renewables. Yet that seems exactly what might be happening.
https://www.rethinkx.com/implications Rethinkx published an interesting perspective on this recently. They point out that the financial incentives of new technology are making this happen much faster than many incumbent players have planned/hoped for. They are calling out a feasible date of decarbonizing 90% by 2035 using existing technology depending on how governments incentivize and stimulate scaling and deploying that. It's a very aggressive and provocative timeline. But the reasoning behind it has some merit. We can haggle about how far they are off but I doubt it will be measured in decades.
Once we've gotten to 100% renewable energy, Excess that isn't sopped up mining bitcoin (I'm probably joking), would best used to reduce the price of things like smelting metals, running heavy industry, and recycling plastics or even better trying to clean the carbon from air.
I think 100% in general is a vague notion. 100% of what? Current demand would be mostly excluding things that in the future would be included. Things like heating houses (mostly gas currently in a lot of countries). Or powering the things you mention. Or creating vast amounts of hydrogen. Or powering most forms of road transport. All of those things are starting to happen.
Carbon neutrality involves most of those things happening on a very large scale. Our current electricity demand is a small portion of that overall future demand.
> Therefore I suspect that in the long run (10 years? 100 years?) solar energy will be more common than wind energy.
This doesn't follow at all.
Even if solar was 100% efficient there would still be many cases where wind power would be preferred. Overcast days, night, and very high latitudes where seasonal effects means there are months where solar isn't very useful are just a few cases.
Most of our energy sources (except nuclear and geothermal) are forms of solar. Wind, hydro, and fossil fuels are all just stored solar energy!
The fact that they’re stored energy is what makes them particularly useful, though. If we were exclusively using solar directly then we’d need to store it ourselves, or build a global distribution grid to move energy from where it’s sunny to where it’s needed.
Taking that energy out of weather systems seems like a good idea too, given the extreme weather we’ve been seeing over the last few years. Perhaps it’s too small amount of energy to make a difference though.
Geothermal is about 50% radio-active decay and 50% left-overs from when earth was formed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget: “Earth's internal heat budget […] comes from two main sources in roughly equal amounts: the radiogenic heat produced by the radioactive decay of isotopes in the mantle and crust, and the primordial heat left over from the formation of Earth.”
I think solar energy will ultimately be cheaper than wind energy and that will make it the leader in total installed capacity. But both resources are freely available so the fact that sun produces wind isn’t relevant to this question.
Wind acts like a battery (or capacitor) that smooths out fluctuations in solar energy. Radiant solar being more "direct" really has nothing to do with which is the better option.
You're technically right that wind is an indirect form of solar energy. You're not right that this would imply that solar is any "better".
The wind will blow whether you use its energy or not. You're not "more efficient" if you use solar instead of wind. You're just making use of energy at another place in the system where it would otherwise go unused.
More generally on the Wind/Solar question: They complement each other quite well. Most of the time when there's a lot of sun there isn't a lot of wind and vice versa. Therefore building up both reduces your needs for flexibility and storage compared to only using one. Also of course there's a bit of location dependance, there are places where wind works better and places where solar works better (sunny). But still in almost all places you can use both, but you probably want a different mixture depending on the location.
For wind you're harvesting the solar energy baked over a vast area while on solar panels you're only harvesting the solar energy directly reaching the small surface area of the panel.
I had the luxury of working on software in support of wind turbines a few years back. I loved it. I was very proud of the work we were doing and the value we added to the space. I would love to continue working in the wind energy space if the opportunity arose again.
I worked for an EU-based arm of Siemens, who I would love to work for again. I worked with lots of EU mechanical and software engineering consultants that were building custom hardware/software to better accommodate turbine maintenance workers. I don't really know if anyone is building turbine-specific software.
What I’m more worry about those Renewables stuff is their ressource footprint , when you look at how much « rare earth » « composite » material is needed to build just one its seems like a nonsense to use wind their are many documentaries on this topic. Today the vast majority of those turbines are not recycled.
On top of that wind being intermittent you need gas power plant to provide.
France power provider RTE estimated that if the country moved to 100% renewable it would need 12 times its gas capacity or 10% of ALL lithium available on earth for battery.
France runs mostly on nuclear, producing less carbon and more energy for less money than Germany which tried (and failed) to move its grid to solar and wind
France does run mostly on nuclear, but the less money claim needs some serious evidence.
The reason why France can export energy more cheaply is because the cost of nuclear is pretty much all capex, so now that they have their plants it makes sense to constantly (nuclear plants can't easily be adjusted to load) run them at a high output and export excess energy. However, the overall cost is very likely much higher (the main reason why nobody wants to build new nuclear plants). France nuclear industry was (and still is?) heavily subsidised because nuclear capability (in particular military) is regarded of strategic importance.
One easy one is charging electric cars. If they can be plugged in both at work and at home, there's a huge opportunity to charge when there's excess production.
I can imagine settings where you can define when to charge e.g. "Charge to 20%, then only at peak excess energy times", like how people set the dryer to go overnight when there's excess energy
Not sure if this is correct. Once power cost is reduced, the cost of investing equipment dominates still further. Industrial processes are designed to operate 24/7 and when they don't, they are uneconomic.
Domestic power consumption is never 24/7 on any major device and there is some discretion over scheduling. Even fridge/freezer has some flexibility
> Today the vast majority of those turbines are not recycled.
I really doubt this is true in any meaningful sense. First of all, I'd expect the majority of all turbines ever produced to still be in their useful service life. Second, many of the materials are valuable as scrap. It would be blatantly idiotic to just destroy and bury these materials, even if your goal is to spite environmentalists. Third, even the unsubsidized cost of wind turbines is not that high. These materials don't just appear out of thin air, they're accounted for in the costs.
In Sweden we are making wind power company owners very rich with heavily subsidies, wind power is far from cost effective and at least here it’s not even close to covering its own.
The materials are indeed worth recycling but the process is just too expensive and complicated.
Best examples would be devices like phones/microwave/tv they contain lots of those rare materials.
Industrial simply prefer to sell junks for cheap in bulk to the African continent where very poor people burn those junks to extract the rare minerals.
It’s not as simple as « 100% recyclable = Always Recycled »
Except people do care and are looking for solutions. Just Google turbine blade recycling to see. Also, storing some inert waste seems pretty mild as an environmental issue.
The industry needs political incentives to even exist and now they want incentives to fix the problem the incentives created. Why don’t we just agree on state financed and owned wind power and be done with it instead of feeding the middlemen.
And it begs the question, the waste was a known factor before even starting building turbines, why start asking for this now instead of twenty years ago. To me it feels very much like a problem once wanted to be swept under the rug now becoming too much to handle.
I feel like your argument is the kind that sounds sort of intuitive in isolation, but is nonsensical in context.
How much of the inputs into fossil fuel generators are recycled? Massively more coal, gas, oil etc. is consumed than the amount of wind turbine blades that will go to landfill. Then there’s the byproducts - in Australia, coal ash is literally 22% of all waste generated across the whole country per year. It just goes to landfill!
That is the typical “two wrongs make a right” argument, fossil fuels being bad makes it ok for wind turbines to generate land fill too.l
And I answered a statement about recycling of turbines, nothing more.
No it's a typical "this alternative is better even though it is not a panacea" argument. Nobody argues that it's good that wind turbines produce waste. It's just that the problems caused by wind turbine waste are absolutely trivial compared to climate change.
My point is that the people who suddenly seem very worried that wind turbines and other renewables produce a small amount of waste don't seem to care about the fact that fossil fuels produce a huge amount of waste (in addition to the GHG emissions). Same issue as being very worried about renewables using resources (some steel, etc.) when not caring about the huge amounts of resources (especially including the fuel itself!) consumed by fossil fuels.
Today most of wind turbine blades get literally buried in specialized landfills [0]. Companies which produce them promise to boost recycling rate in a decade or so, but right now it's just yet another externality. Proper recycling simply costs more and it's not given that there is enough capacity for materials produced from recycled blades (you can find a similar story with plastic recycling).
That being said, yes, the recycling (and presumably also the environmental impact while they are running and constantly weathered) of these composites remains problematic. But they don't end up in land fills in Germany, at least:
The post I replied to implied metals and rare earth materials were being thrown away. That is the part I doubt.
For materials like the blades, we need to compare this to alternatives. The lack of recycling may be insignificant compared to the amount of materials consumed by non-renewable power sources (e.g. coal, oil), purely in terms of environmental impact from mining the materials, let alone GHG emissions.
OP is referring to pollution in the form of toxic metals and things like that, your link only refers to the co2. Lithium ion batteries don’t grow on trees…
The great majority of installed wind turbines are already built using electromagnets. Only a minority of turbines use rare earth permanent magnets. Permanent magnet designs cost more but are lower maintenance, so they are mostly used offshore where maintenance is more costly.
Wind turbines take less than a year to become CO2 neutral - generating enough electricity to offset the embodied CO2 used to produce, transport and construct the turbine.
This will likely go down over time though, as steel and concrete (which are both very much recyclable today) are big parts of wind turbines so as those become "greener" so will the wind turbines.
Yes the blades are not currently recycled, but like most things, this is because it's cheaper to produce new than to recycle. If it became economically viable or government's mandated it, then it would happen. There are already some processes to recycle glass fibre composites:
That's a great thing. A singular advantage of wind over solar is that solar has a strong time dependence over the day and seasons. And the time for high solar presence is not that correlated with the consumption time. While seasonality is present over wind as well, wind can blow all through the day reducing dependence on energy storage.
This is good news. As wind increases on the grid we really need to move towards shiftable-load specific submetering so that an EV, water heater, etc can exploit their ability to shift demand to take advantage of times of excess renewable supply and lower prices. In CA there was a pilot of this for EVs but it seems to have fizzled out.
With today's rate structures in CA you have to choose between a plan that is optimal either for your EV or for your house but the load profile of these are very different from each other. Without 2 separate utility meters, you can't have separate rate plans.
In the US, there was more coal power generation in 2021 than 2020 because 2020 was an abormally low year of power consumption. If we skip over the pandemic, there was less electricty generated from coal in 2021 than 2019.
Coal in the US has been in long-term decline since around 2008. Natural gas seems to be holding fairly stable at the moment.
Depending on source, it looks like the US retired some 9 to 11 GW of coal power plants in 2020. However, China is attempting an energy-intensive recovery from the pandemic and put 38 GW of coal plants into operation in 2020.
I wonder where all of these raw materials for all the solar panels and wind turbines is going to come from. Do you think we can replace all of our energy with renewable energy without destroying the remaining natural habitats?
I feel like the drive to green energy is only to allow us to continue growth and consumption instead of saving the natural world. It seems short sighted.
> Do you think we can replace all of our energy with renewable energy without destroying the remaining natural habitats?
Yes. In fact it's pretty much the only way to not destroy those remaining natural habitats so it's good were pursuing it if that's what your worried about.
How much mountain top removal and mining will we need to do in order to build out all of this green energy? Steel, copper, concrete, rare earths, etc. all require fossil fuels. The green energy systems all require those components. Just take copper for example. How many tonnes of copper are going to be required to outfit all of the wind turbines? Copper isn't renewable. It will require endless mining and extraction to get anything close to the amount of copper we need. I feel like people are ignoring the elephant in the room.
How is copper turned into wire? I guess they have litle men to rub the copper with their little hands until the copper is warm enough to spin ibto threads. Little copper Rumplestiltskins.
Almost as much probably. Basically wind and solar deployments currently take up the market growth and things like coal and oil plants as they are being retired. Of course gas plant share is also still growing, although at an increasingly lower pace. Proportionally, coal has already been pretty much wiped out relative to say five years ago in a lot of places. Most remaining plants have closure dates looming over them in the not so distant future.
Energy consumption is increasing everywhere. Renewables are just adding to the overall available energy needed for the new consumption demand and not negating fossil fuel consumption.
If you're saying we should be rolling them out faster and banning and/or restricting fossil fuel usage further when its too carbon intense and easily replacable then I agree.
Luckily the projections are for faster growth in the future as the fossil fuel groups political stranglehold gets loosened.
I am surprised. I thought the solar capacity being installed was far greater. At least that is certainly true of India. With extensive 'open' coastlines in the US, this might prove to be better.
It's great......when the wind blows. In the UK we have about 15GW of installed wind generating capacity, but it's very rarely fully utilized. The variability means it's balanced out by other sources mostly gas powered Combined cycle turbines. During summer there have been weeks where wind and solar were negligible and gas was providing nearly 60% of the electricity generated. Nuclear is reliable, but we only have about 5GW of capacity, we can import another 6GW from Europe and other sources such as biomass and hydro are about 3GW. There's higher wind capacity utilisation in Winter but there are still days when it's very still and we have to rely on fossil fuels. French nuclear and British gas turbines help to balance out demand across Europe when the winds are still, but it's variability is a real issue. Would more installed capacity help?
First, it only refers to the US, while the headline makes no such qualification.
Second, this refers only to electricity generation, which is roughly 25% of US energy use, or 20% if you include energy embedded in imports, mostly fueled by fossil fuels in China.
Third, this refers only to gros capacity. For those who have been asleep, the effective energy capacity is far lower for renewables than for stable power sources due to intermittency.
inb4 By referring to facts you have shown you are clearly on the wrong team.
> First, it only refers to the US, while the headline makes no such qualification.
Yes the title should be "Land-Based Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition Released" but it still won't say US cause it's not in the title.
> Second, this refers only to electricity generation, which is roughly 25% of US energy use, or 20% if you include energy embedded in imports, mostly fueled by fossil fuels in China.
Of course it's only about electricity generation?
> Third, this refers only to gros capacity. For those who have been asleep, the effective energy capacity is far lower for renewables than for stable power sources due to intermittency.
That's what you usually mention when you build something that generates energy. Nothing unusual here either.
> inb4 By referring to facts you have shown you are clearly on the wrong team.
What's with this unhealthy polarization? What teams are you talking about?
Worth noting that one of the standard anti-renewable talking points is to compare electrical energy production with the energy output by burning fossil fuels.
This latter number is about 3x higher than the useful output since if you need something other than heat, say a car to move, or grid electricity then 2/3rds of the energy will be lost as heat while converting the energy to motion (and then to electricity).
And if you do need heat, then an electric heat pump will provide 2-5 times the heat if you feed it one unit of energy.
This is why electrification of everything that can be electrified will reduce total energy requirements substantially (while increasing the amount of electrical energy we need slightly).
I assumed (generously) that they were talking about capacity factor. Most wind power plants have a capacity factor between 0.25 and 0.5, which has been increasing over time. We are now able to build taller towers with longer blades, and that makes a difference. From the PDF:
> The average 2020 capacity factor among projects built from 2014 to 2019 was 41.4%, compared to an average of 29.0% among projects built from 2004 to 2011, and 25.2%
among projects built from 1998 to 2001. This improvement among more-recently built projects has pushed the cumulative fleet-wide capacity factor higher over time, reaching 36% in 2020.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadWhat about capacity utilisation factor of newly installed turbines? Does it trend downwards? Which means, are we close to exhausting potential of wind?
PS: It's not, it's actually trending a bit up. Which is explainable because average capacity of a turbine trends up -> the turbine is bigger and taller -> wind blows faster and more consistently on higher altitude.
Scaling is extremely lucrative. And break even for these turbines is aroun 5 to 8 years, with active life of around 30.
They are around 0.5 on offshore installations.
https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet
Theres a lot of other small things contributing to the capacity factor increases too: computer modelling of how the wakes of different turbines interact with each other and the labdscape, energy market changes to penalise slow reacting coal plants and or reward flexible demand, better weather prediction, grid and battery integration, HVDC, marginal engineering and business process improvements as you get companies, technicians and tools dedicated to this industry.
Having said all that, I'm not sure how useful a number it is, but nice that it's going up as generally it tracks the price going down as fixed costs get spread further.
But if the price is low enough, then low capacity factors still make sense. Not sure if theres a stat that captures both of those things at the same time though and also considers the full system costs.
There's almost certainly times and places that a low capacity factor producer that hits your system peak is going to be the best option. Demand response, for example, could be modelled as very low capacity factor generators that only supply when you actually need the extra power.
For example he claims that renewables can't replace fossil because of their unreliability. And shows a graph of global energy use that shows that overall percentage of renewables did not grow between 2009 and 2019 despite significant growth in total output. He the compares this to local data which shows that _locally_ turning on and off a nuclear power plant has a significant effect on the _local_ carbon emissions.
You can't really compare conclusions from global and local studies. By his own argument nuclear can't function without fossil either, because over the same time frame as the report he quotes nuclear energy output rose as well [1] (except for a drop due to the GFC).
What the global data really shows is that global energy demand has increased rapidly largely in countries like China and India etc. who build (cheap) coal plants to keep up with tha demand. It will be interesting to see developments now that China is moving away from growing at all costs.
Regarding the baseload myth, it has been debunked many times [2] [3]
[1] https://nwenergy.org/featured/debunking-the-myth-of-baseload... [2] https://nwenergy.org/featured/debunking-the-myth-of-baseload... [3] https://reneweconomy.com.au/dispelling-the-nuclear-baseload-...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-stories-michael-shel...
https://nuclear.foe.org.au/michael-shellenbergers-pro-nuclea...
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/07/review-bad-scienc...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/18/worlds-b...
https://highviewpower.com/
It’s always windy (and sunny) somewhere. The combination of energy storage and grid transmission alleviates intermittency.
Chemical batteries are very useful, but far from the only way to store energy.
It's always windy somewhere, but that also might not be on the same continent as you need it.
So if you don't like gas peakers or don't run a nuclear baseload you need to bridge those short non-windy winter days or weeks with batteries. Multiple nation scale terawatt-hour batteries. Which means millions of Tesla li-ion megapacks or millions of pumped hydro plants - which gets expensive and unfeasible real quick as you run out of either the battery raw materials for the former or suitable sites for the latter.
[0] like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-diesel - the input is water, CO2 and electricity, and as such it's carbon neutral.
Hydrogen can be used directly, which skips one conversion step and doesn't need air capture for the CO2. These days no gas plant should be build that can't be converted to 100% hydrogen in the future.
We are discussing artificial fossil fuel production with terrible efficiency, in that context nuclear is very viable.
Nuclear is the good solution, not renewables.
Of course, this is assuming that the power to produce Hydrogen is from renewable sources.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/new-study-a-zero-emi...
Regarding clean seasonal energy storage - UK, French and German authorities all independently came with studies(1) that arrived to the same conclusion - synthetic methane is the only viable option. Very expensive, but the engineering is doable. Gas plants are here to stay.
(1) https://english.bdi.eu/media/presse/presse/downloads/2018030...
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1...
That would have massive (environmental and financial) costs.
https://youtu.be/JSgd-QhLHRI
Is a great video discussing the practicality and finances involved in hydro pumped storage.
I agree that such storage would require huge CapEx, but on the bright side OpEx will be relatively small. And no need to bother with recycling of megatonnes of batteries every decade. Also because stored energy is proportional to volume and height difference you it's possible scale such storage quite flexibly (assuming an affordable technology for creating such cavities will be developed).
Nope, but you still need to dig a lot in rocks, and divert water to fill up the reservoir in the first place, which aren't without environmental consequences.
Furthermore, as the video i linked explains, you need very specific conditions for pumped up hydro to be viable (size, height, water, etc.) which IMHO makes it a non-starter in many places.
In my mind, solar energy creates wind by heating up the surface of the earth, which then heats up the air above it, which then moves around to even out the temperature differences.
Therefore I suspect that in the long run (10 years? 100 years?) solar energy will be more common than wind energy. Similar to how solid state drives are overtaking spinning drives.
What do you guys think?
Then there's offshore, where there's a higher likelihood to be more consistently windy just generally.
The problem with wind is dealing with the huge uptick in energy coming down the pipeline during a major wind event. Last I checked, this was still not a solved problem but I haven't been keeping current like I used to.
So in practice they shut down some windmills during major wind events to protect the system. The other issue both wind and solar have is storage. Though we've seen substantial gains in battery storage in recent years, so there is good news but I don't know if we are really "there" yet.
They have a max amount of power they can generate per turbine anyway, and I would imagine that's designed around.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/how-do-wind-turbines-su...
Right now everybody is focused on getting to 100% carbon neutral. However, the question must be asked: why stop there and not go to something like 500 or even 1000% energy generation.
There will be plenty of things we can do with the excess energy. I think this will play out over the next few decades. Mass produced solar will go on any available surface just because we can. There are already some lower efficiency but potentially very cheap to produce solar systems based on e.g. organic materials that can be printed on flexible surfaces (i.e. not glass). Having that stuff put all over the place is going to make an impact.
Solar is already regularly creating surpluses regularly. It's a huge problem for energy providers because they have to shut down more expensive to manage production when that happens. Any time you see a wind mill not spinning, don't assume it is because it is broken and instead consider that there might be too much wind power temporarily.
A structural surplus will create supply of very cheap (often negatively priced even) energy. There are all sorts of valuable things we can do with that.
Most new capacity will either be new players (e.g. Tesla is planning to be a virtual power provider) in the market without a sunk investment legacy or existing players that compete on divesting/isolating their sunk investments the fastest. Either way, this pushes a lot more renewable energy in the market. That in turn accelerates the demise of more expensive things in the market. Including plants that are still under construction which were financed under the assumption that they would operate for a few decades at high price points for energy. I don't think that industry can afford a major drop in cost for renewables. Yet that seems exactly what might be happening.
https://www.rethinkx.com/implications Rethinkx published an interesting perspective on this recently. They point out that the financial incentives of new technology are making this happen much faster than many incumbent players have planned/hoped for. They are calling out a feasible date of decarbonizing 90% by 2035 using existing technology depending on how governments incentivize and stimulate scaling and deploying that. It's a very aggressive and provocative timeline. But the reasoning behind it has some merit. We can haggle about how far they are off but I doubt it will be measured in decades.
Carbon neutrality involves most of those things happening on a very large scale. Our current electricity demand is a small portion of that overall future demand.
This doesn't follow at all.
Even if solar was 100% efficient there would still be many cases where wind power would be preferred. Overcast days, night, and very high latitudes where seasonal effects means there are months where solar isn't very useful are just a few cases.
The fact that they’re stored energy is what makes them particularly useful, though. If we were exclusively using solar directly then we’d need to store it ourselves, or build a global distribution grid to move energy from where it’s sunny to where it’s needed.
(extracting kinetic energy from the orbiting moon)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Formation: “Although coal is known from most geologic periods, 90% of all coal beds were deposited in the Carboniferous and Permian periods”
That was 300 million years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Origin: “uranium is only naturally formed by the r-process (rapid neutron capture) in supernovae and neutron star mergers”
That happened 6,5 billion years ago.
Geothermal is about 50% radio-active decay and 50% left-overs from when earth was formed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget: “Earth's internal heat budget […] comes from two main sources in roughly equal amounts: the radiogenic heat produced by the radioactive decay of isotopes in the mantle and crust, and the primordial heat left over from the formation of Earth.”
The wind will blow whether you use its energy or not. You're not "more efficient" if you use solar instead of wind. You're just making use of energy at another place in the system where it would otherwise go unused.
More generally on the Wind/Solar question: They complement each other quite well. Most of the time when there's a lot of sun there isn't a lot of wind and vice versa. Therefore building up both reduces your needs for flexibility and storage compared to only using one. Also of course there's a bit of location dependance, there are places where wind works better and places where solar works better (sunny). But still in almost all places you can use both, but you probably want a different mixture depending on the location.
So wind is number one and solar is the next one? That's great news!
On top of that wind being intermittent you need gas power plant to provide.
France power provider RTE estimated that if the country moved to 100% renewable it would need 12 times its gas capacity or 10% of ALL lithium available on earth for battery.
1st gen renewable are far from a panacea.
/s
https://www.lazard.com/media/451446/grphx_lcoe-07-07.jpg
From:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Some industrial processess, such as smelting, crushing, etc can be incentivized to do that.
At domestic levels, its more difficult
Not sure if this is correct. Once power cost is reduced, the cost of investing equipment dominates still further. Industrial processes are designed to operate 24/7 and when they don't, they are uneconomic.
Domestic power consumption is never 24/7 on any major device and there is some discretion over scheduling. Even fridge/freezer has some flexibility
I really doubt this is true in any meaningful sense. First of all, I'd expect the majority of all turbines ever produced to still be in their useful service life. Second, many of the materials are valuable as scrap. It would be blatantly idiotic to just destroy and bury these materials, even if your goal is to spite environmentalists. Third, even the unsubsidized cost of wind turbines is not that high. These materials don't just appear out of thin air, they're accounted for in the costs.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... “Companies are searching for ways to deal with the tens of thousands of blades that have reached the end of their lives.”
In Sweden we are making wind power company owners very rich with heavily subsidies, wind power is far from cost effective and at least here it’s not even close to covering its own.
That’s a far cry from “no way”.
Those 85% are actually 15% in effective.
Best examples would be devices like phones/microwave/tv they contain lots of those rare materials.
Industrial simply prefer to sell junks for cheap in bulk to the African continent where very poor people burn those junks to extract the rare minerals.
It’s not as simple as « 100% recyclable = Always Recycled »
The wind power industry cares and is actively asking for political incentives to change this: https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/wind-industry...
And it begs the question, the waste was a known factor before even starting building turbines, why start asking for this now instead of twenty years ago. To me it feels very much like a problem once wanted to be swept under the rug now becoming too much to handle.
How much of the inputs into fossil fuel generators are recycled? Massively more coal, gas, oil etc. is consumed than the amount of wind turbine blades that will go to landfill. Then there’s the byproducts - in Australia, coal ash is literally 22% of all waste generated across the whole country per year. It just goes to landfill!
This is certainly not universally true...for example: https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2019/07/10/vattenfall-...
[0]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8294057/Hundreds-no...
That being said, yes, the recycling (and presumably also the environmental impact while they are running and constantly weathered) of these composites remains problematic. But they don't end up in land fills in Germany, at least:
https://www.energieagentur.nrw/blogs/erneuerbare/beitraege/r...
For materials like the blades, we need to compare this to alternatives. The lack of recycling may be insignificant compared to the amount of materials consumed by non-renewable power sources (e.g. coal, oil), purely in terms of environmental impact from mining the materials, let alone GHG emissions.
[citation needed], careful you're not falling for a disinformation campaign.
The counter argument is clearly made here: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/06/whats-the-carbon-...
Also, what about wind turbines that use less/almost no rare-earth materials? Could these be produced at sub-optimal efficiency but still be viable?
https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg24332461-400-what-is...
This will likely go down over time though, as steel and concrete (which are both very much recyclable today) are big parts of wind turbines so as those become "greener" so will the wind turbines.
Yes the blades are not currently recycled, but like most things, this is because it's cheaper to produce new than to recycle. If it became economically viable or government's mandated it, then it would happen. There are already some processes to recycle glass fibre composites:
https://www.materialstoday.com/carbon-fiber/features/recycli...
Nuclear is much greener that renewables, nuclear emits less CO2 per watt.
Building a wind turbine on a large floor of concrete, building batteries and solar panels all the material that comes with it...
Fossil fuel benefits from renewables.
Also it might be a cloudy area.
Inert wind turbines in the ground? bad
The demand peak tends to be later in the afternoon than the noon-time peak of solar, but 4-hour batteries would cover that.
With today's rate structures in CA you have to choose between a plan that is optimal either for your EV or for your house but the load profile of these are very different from each other. Without 2 separate utility meters, you can't have separate rate plans.
(Kind of a bummer that only U.S. agencies of government can use .gov)
Coal in the US has been in long-term decline since around 2008. Natural gas seems to be holding fairly stable at the moment.
Depending on source, it looks like the US retired some 9 to 11 GW of coal power plants in 2020. However, China is attempting an energy-intensive recovery from the pandemic and put 38 GW of coal plants into operation in 2020.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal/chinas-new-coa...
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
Presumably China uses coal because it is most economical for them in the short term (not so good for the world!)
I feel like the drive to green energy is only to allow us to continue growth and consumption instead of saving the natural world. It seems short sighted.
Yes. In fact it's pretty much the only way to not destroy those remaining natural habitats so it's good were pursuing it if that's what your worried about.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but in most ways it could be interpreted, that's not true.
Copper doesn't require fossil fuels, and if it did then we'd come up with an alternative.
What about, how have recent changes affected the carbon intensity of the US electricity grid?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/the-u-s-electric-power-s...
Luckily the projections are for faster growth in the future as the fossil fuel groups political stranglehold gets loosened.
Yes, as well as country interconnects so that excess wind generation in one region can be distributed elsewhere.
First, it only refers to the US, while the headline makes no such qualification.
Second, this refers only to electricity generation, which is roughly 25% of US energy use, or 20% if you include energy embedded in imports, mostly fueled by fossil fuels in China.
Third, this refers only to gros capacity. For those who have been asleep, the effective energy capacity is far lower for renewables than for stable power sources due to intermittency.
inb4 By referring to facts you have shown you are clearly on the wrong team.
The url gives you a good hint.
Even if you know that only US agencies use .gov, it's not like an American agency wouldn't publish a report on a worldwide trend, is it?
This isn't a rule by any means but seeing .gov usually translates to "pertains to the US"
True, but it is easily overlooked. A qualification in the title would be nice.
> The Land-Based Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition provides an overview of developments and trends in the U.S. wind power market.
> A record 16,836 megawatts (MW) of U.S. wind capacity was installed in 2020, bringing the cumulative total to 121,955 MW.
Asking a US government to put in the headline that the report is about US stuff is a bit surprising.
PS: I am sorry, I was sure that HN policy is not to editorialize/change the title. I did not suspect this was done here.
It is. I'm sure 'dang will fix it when he sees it :).
Yes the title should be "Land-Based Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition Released" but it still won't say US cause it's not in the title.
> Second, this refers only to electricity generation, which is roughly 25% of US energy use, or 20% if you include energy embedded in imports, mostly fueled by fossil fuels in China.
Of course it's only about electricity generation?
> Third, this refers only to gros capacity. For those who have been asleep, the effective energy capacity is far lower for renewables than for stable power sources due to intermittency.
That's what you usually mention when you build something that generates energy. Nothing unusual here either.
> inb4 By referring to facts you have shown you are clearly on the wrong team.
What's with this unhealthy polarization? What teams are you talking about?
This latter number is about 3x higher than the useful output since if you need something other than heat, say a car to move, or grid electricity then 2/3rds of the energy will be lost as heat while converting the energy to motion (and then to electricity).
And if you do need heat, then an electric heat pump will provide 2-5 times the heat if you feed it one unit of energy.
This is why electrification of everything that can be electrified will reduce total energy requirements substantially (while increasing the amount of electrical energy we need slightly).
> The average 2020 capacity factor among projects built from 2014 to 2019 was 41.4%, compared to an average of 29.0% among projects built from 2004 to 2011, and 25.2% among projects built from 1998 to 2001. This improvement among more-recently built projects has pushed the cumulative fleet-wide capacity factor higher over time, reaching 36% in 2020.
Fortunately nuclear has no similar issue, right?