The article contains a number of strawman fallacies that the author then boldly defeats. I do try to read about renewable energy - never encountered the statements that OP claims to be pervasive:
- "Fallacy 1 - Fix It All, Fix it Now or Fix None Of It"
what? who claims this? it is evidently not feasible.
- "Fallacy 2 - 100% Lemon or 100% Lime or Bust"
(only one kind of renewable can be successful) ... again, who would ever claim that?
- "Fallacy 4 - Nothing Less Than Perfection, All the Time"
You must not have the right kind of ‘friends’ on Facebook; the fallacies you listed are straight up on my feed. My favorite one is that wind turbines aren’t recyclable, therefore moar coal!
"A straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy of having the impression of refuting an argument, whereas the real subject of the argument was not addressed or refuted, but instead replaced with a false one. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man"."
> the typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition
It defeats anti-renewable fallacies, by making up some easy to defeat fallacies.
Essentially asking how much X do we need then not minimizing X is not answering the question. 10^100 kWh of storage would work, but so would 10^99 kWh, 10^98 ... we care about the minimum not simply any number that’s sufficient.
A very pervasive argument against renewables is "but storage!!!".
That's one form of this type of argument. There isn't much storage needed for renewables unless you get to very large numbers. Germany is close to 50% renewables, and it barely built any storage at all in the past years. (There's some existing amount of storage, but that largely existed before renewables even started).
Every time you have a "but storage!!" argument, it's an argument primarily relevant for the step from 80% renewables to 100%. But it's very often brought up in situations where the question is rather how to get from 10% renewables to 30%.
He specifically mentions storage in several contexts. “You don't have to make the storage super cheap, you've got cheap power (see Fallacy 3) and you don't have to solve storing the power for weeks or months. All you have to do is suck up enough power at 2pm and sell it at 2am in order to turn power prices positive during the daytime.”
Storage alone isn’t a fallacy. Digging into exactly how much storage is excessive would be another, but that’s a perfectly valid debate and not the root issue with the kind of nonsense people regularly bring up. Here’s one that seems to be about storage but is really a #2 example. It arbitrarily picks 50% solar 50% wind 0% hydro and then does a bunch of meaningless calculations as if that’s ever what people would build in the North East: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20022019/100-percent-rene...
The issue with that article isn’t storage it’s the energy mix used and the lack of excess production. As #1 points out you get to 100% not by building that in a day you build more storage, more wind, more hydro, and or more solar and then figure out what else is cost effective to add. Currently there is seemingly excess solar in California with prices going negative except unlike what’s mentioned people are actually still building solar because it’s cheap enough that even without selling in the middle of sunny days it’s still profitable. It’s really not obvious that that’s going to happen just running some
> Currently there is seemingly excess solar in California with prices going negative except unlike what’s mentioned people are actually still building solar because it’s cheap enough that even without selling in the middle of sunny days it’s still profitable.
Yeah, and at least solar is really easy to turn off so you don't actually have to pay the negative price, you can take zero.
Germany and Austria decided to split their common bidding zone in 2018 since
"Surges of cheap electricity tended to push down prices in the common German-Austrian bidding zone, leading to a rise in demand and exports, something the two countries' grid connections were unable to handle."
If CO2 taxes were high enough, one could make and then burn hydrogen instead, for long term or rare storage needs. And this is still likely cheaper than going with nuclear.
Nuclear could be cheaper; its high cost is probably more regulatory than instrinsic. There is an obvious tradeoff here, but if you look at the renewable/clean energy programs in many first world countries, the primary trend seems to be replacing EOL nuclear with wind/gas. I think we could be doing better.
Hydrogen is promising, but there are technical problems with transportation and storage. I'd like to see carbon taxes push us towards these types of solutions instead of burning 'renewable' carbon.
If we're allowed to diverge from the actual world to hypothetical worlds, then renewables and storage can also be much cheaper.
Hydrogen for load leveling can be stored underground as a pressurized gas, just as natural gas is stored. This is a demonstrated technology. Also, the US already has 1000 miles of hydrogen pipelines, so that too is a demonstrated technology.
There are 50k miles of natural gas pipeline in my state alone. The US as a whole has 2M miles. Somtimes problems become a bigger as you scale.
The main issue is hydrogen embrittlement; where steel spontaneously weakens and fractures in the prescence of hydrogen. The problem is much worse with pure hydrogen than with methane (where even the low concentrations of hydrogen are enough to pose a serious problem). There is a lot of serious enghineering work being done on this front, but I don't think we have reached the ablility to scale by a factor 200k just yet.
The magical hypothetical world where nuclear is much cheaper is called "the 1970s." In this improbable scenario, first world countries like France completely divest from coal in favor of non-carbon-polluting energy techologies.
Yes, that is a magical alternate world, since France now cannot build nuclear power plants on time or budget. Flamanville 3 is an incredible fiasco with a budget ballooning by a factor of 5.
Hydrogen embrittlement is a known issue with known solutions. After all, the world consumes 700 cubic kilometers (at STP) of hydrogen each year. This gas is confined in tanks and pipes, which obviously have to be made of materials for which the problem is solved.
There do exist materials for which hyrdogen embrittlement is 'solved,' but they are far too expensive to build 2M miles of pipe. Transportation at scale is a difficult challenge, and an active goal of a lot of metallurgy research.
You don't need 2M miles of hydrogen pipeline to use hydrogen as a grid backup. It's not clear you need much if any for that purpose: make and use the hydrogen at the storage site.
Most of that 2M miles of natural gas pipeline will be for distribution. To be clear: I'm not talking about replacing consumer natural gas with hydrogen.
Because when you add non dispatchable energy sources to your grid, without storage you have to keep the rest ready to function. Unless you agree to have enough electricity only when the sun shines or the wind blows...
Otherwise at best you can adjust the output of your dispatchable energy sources (mostly coal and nuclear) to make up for the unpredictiveness of the solar and wind. But you still need the same capacity.
This is why Germany and Spain, 2 countries who invested a lot in solar and wind, continued to grow their use of traditional power plant at the same pace as before they started on renewable. For Germany it's even worse because they decided to stop using nuclear, so they burn even more coal than before.
Load following with nuclear is hideously uneconomical though. Even in France they use non-nuclear for much of that, for example by selling or buying power to/from neighboring countries.
In any case, the problem with nuclear is that existing nuclear technology does not decarbonize the world. World primary energy demand is 18 TW. This would require 6000 nuclear power plants (3GW(th) each), if today's reactors are used they'd consume (the 235U in) 1.5 million tonnes of natural uranium per year. Total world uranium resource is a shade over 6 million tonnes, so it would run out in four years.
To power the world with nuclear one either needs seawater uranium extraction (scaled up by 12 orders of magnitude from what's been done so far; 170 km^2 of ocean area for each of those reactors; the power/area is much worse than PV) or breeder reactors (which France has given up on.)
Sure but surely we'll run into the same issues with rare earth metals when building out over 18,000,000 solar farms.
The numbers you use for uranium resources, are the amount that is economically extractable right now at current prices. Given that only 14% of the cost of a nuclear plant is raw fuel we have lots of room to increase to increase the cost of extraction.
And many places abandoned breeder reactors because the cost of uranium is cheap enough right now that fuel efficiency doesn't matter.
Solar farms don't use rare earth metals, so, no, it's not the same at all.
France's abandonment of their breeder program is the tell that they don't think there's any significant chance that nuclear will scale to power the world anytime soon.
This is the same numerical sleight of hand that fossil fuel boosters use.
Roughly half of the primary energy demand isn't actually used, it's just wasted as heat. Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear or renewables would mean that much less primary energy would be needed due to the efficiency gains of electrification.
The real issue with nuclear is that it needs all the same stuff as renewables (better grid connections, pink hydrogen production, demand management, EVs, hydrogen based flight and shipping) in order to keep costs reasonable but still just costs more because solar and wind are much cheaper.
It's a ballpark figure. And it's an argument renewables handily pass, btw. It's not an argument that fossil fuels are essential.
Of course the renewables are cheaper, but in addition to that argument the pro-nuclear argument is deceptive when it tries to portray existing nuclear technology as sufficient.
Or breeder reactors. Use all the uranium, not just the .7% that is U235.
Worried about terrorists? The reprocessing plant needs to leave a few isotopes in the fuel it produces. Things like Co-60. The spent rods have it--the reactors and the shipping systems are built to handle it. The terrorist can't handle it, though--while some are willing to engage in suicide missions they're not going to engage in futile suicide missions. Stealing the material will just get you dead before you can deliver it.
I'd worry more about state level proliferation. The blanket Pu from a fast breeder is super weapon grade, with very low higher isotope concentrations.
In any case, breeders mean the claim that existing nuclear technology, and in particular France's existing nuclear technology, can do it are wrong. France's breeder effort was a spectacular failure that they've now abandoned.
They can, but as most of the cost of nuclear is fixed costs, they're very expensive per unit of energy when used in this way (as you get less energy overall over the lifetime of the plant). As nuclear is already one of the most expensive forms of energy this quickly becomes prohibitive.
They take a day or more to start or stop. When running they're still not exactly nimble (which is why we have peaking plants) but their response time is an hour or two, not a day. Even old plants ramp at 1%+ of maximum power per minute giving one hour as a very achievable 40%-to-100% ramp up. Newer designs are 5-10x as fast.
Not arguing against renewables here but this 1+ day response time figure gets quoted a lot. (eg. my father-in-law uses it and I've always thought it was sketchy, your post just pushed me over the edge to go look it up. ;)
The big trick with natural gas, coal and oil energy is that if it exists but doesn't run, it doesn't produce much emissions.
So, if you have medium amounts of solar and wind, it's fine keeping the gas plants in reserve and maybe having to use them on a particularly cold day once every other year. A gas plant is very cheap from investment perspective. From total emissions point of view it is also fine. (These exceptionally cold windless winter days are waved as examples of the unsuitability of wind and solar.)
Of course if your gas pipes leak like crazy, maybe it's best to turn to decommission the plants and network.
The point simply is, as long as renewables almost never exceed the grid load, there isn't much to store. Yes, as renewables are exceeding the grid load, storage becomes more important and then storage will be pushed harder. It would also help if some regulations limiting the commercial success of storage would be dropped, like paying the EEG fee on stored electricity.
That said, storage is growing, a 1GW DC line to Norway was put into operations recently.
Solar can be switched off at a moments notice. Power from windturbines can also be controlled.
So an excess amount of renewables is not a big issue for the grid. Owners of renewable sources may be less happy to switch them off.
(In the EU) storage can take the place of fossil when fossil becomes expensive enough. No need to give more subsidies to storage than renewables would get.
Excess amounts of renewable can also be used for other purposes, such as producing green hydrogen.
Without storage, you want a gas turbine to complement renewables.
Having a large capacity in the form of gas turbines that is only use occasionally costs money, but has to advantage that all extra renewable energy results in less use of gas and therefor less CO2.
So today, we can have a grid that consists of renewables plus gas turbines without any storage.
And even tomorrow, if the natural gas is replaced with hydrogen.
A combined cycle gas turbine power plant might cost 10% of a nuclear plant of equal output. So even if we have to back up the entire fricking grid with CC it's still much cheaper than doing it with nuclear.
The problem with green hydrogen, is that producing hydrogen from electricity and then putting the hydrogen in a gas turbine to produce electricity is extremely inefficient.
So a windfarm backed up by hydrogen may need a significant fraction of the farm to produce hydrogen.
In the end, a nuclear power plant might be cheaper. Might be, because we just don't know. Nuclear power plants are insanely expensive at the moment.
Yes, it's inefficient. But not much of the grid's energy flows through that path, so the inefficiency doesn't cost you much. For long term storage, or rare outage storage, you want storage with low per-kWh-capacity capital cost, even if that means lower efficiency.
And no, nuclear isn't cheaper, even if during the rare times you're burning hydrogen the cost/kWh is high. That's because nuclear needs to be selling at high prices most of the time, including when solar/wind/batteries are able to directly deliver.
It's possible other technologies (transmission, demand dispatching, other storage technologies, even natural gas with atmospheric CO2 capture) will be cheaper than grid hydrogen storage. That doesn't help nuclear.
It's fine as long as you don't do it when you don't need to.
You build more renewables than you need for electricity production and use it to generate hydrogen for agriculture and industry 99% of the time. When you really hit the yearly peak you can a) turn the electrolysers off and if that's not enough b) use some of the hydrogen to generate electricity.
Of course, if you're lucky, then you can get by with just the renewables and sell all your hydrogen for other uses but when that 1 in 10 year event happens you can get away without burning too much fossil gas and paying the carbon fee associated with it.
You have been misinformed, or you didn't do any research. Germany's coal usage was 407 million tons in 1991, and today it's 257 million tons.[1] The last new coal plant was finished last year.
"What is expected to be the last new coal plant to come online in Germany entered commercial operation on May 30, more than a decade after it was first planned... The government last year said it would close all 84 of its coal-fired power plants by 2038 as the country moves toward cleaner sources of electricity."[2]
Spain is also in a similar phase: "Spain has recently made headlines with good climate news. In May, the government announced plans for full decarbonization. At the beginning of July, half of the country’s coal plants were retired. REN21 analyst Duncan Gibb explains why this is the moment for governments to understand that spending taxpayer money to keep fossil fuel infrastructure afloat is a sunk investment."[3]
> There isn't much storage needed for renewables unless you get to very large numbers.
That's categorically false, and the article alludes to this somewhat. The biggest problem with renewables (primarily solar) right now is the "duck curve" [1]. That is, there is plenty of energy available mid-day, but then right when available solar starts to subside is also when you get a sizable demand increase in the early evening (e.g. people getting home from work, cooking, watching TV, doing dishes and laundry, etc.) The slope of that rise means that you not only need as much dispatchable energy sources as before, but you need to ramp them up and down much more frequently, which takes a higher toll on equipment.
Thus, there is a real immediate need for the type of "time shifting" storage the article talks about right now.
It's categorically true. If your energy production is, say, 60% carbon based pretty much every watt generated by wind energy or solar is a watt that doesnt have to be generated by coal or natural gas.
"This is the problem with renewables..." - this amusingly sounds a little like an instance of fallacy #1. It becomes "the" problem only when youve got way more renewables capacity than almost everyone has right now.
Please take a look at the linked Wikipedia article. The problem with solar is that peak energy demand occurs right when solar output is 0. So it means you still need to have the same power capacity from non-solar sources regardless of whether solar can serve 100% of need at midday (without storage).
Peak energy demand for planning is the yearly peak, not the daily peak. Thats why the duck curve mostly shows up in spring when solar production is high and cooling load is low, and total demand is substantially lower than summer.
All grids have a lot of excess production thats only used to meet occaisional peaks. This is not a bad thing in itself and not something new to renewables.
I'm not sure if you're engaging a fallacy, trolling, or you just misread "not much storage needed" as "no need." The argument in the article about storage is literally that there is not much storage needed right now, though that will change in the future that is not a problem to solve right now.
If you read the Wikipedia article I linked, you'll see there is a strong need for storage right now because solar output falls to 0 right as demand peaks.
Again, the source article talks about this, but this is also not just a simple problem that can be wished away, and the only "fallacy" is pretending this problem doesn't exist.
If solar is used instead of nonrenewables, regardless of whether load has peaked, you decrease carbon output for each watt generated. In the chart on wikipedia, it looks like you could double California solar output without adding storage. If you want to provide 100% of your energy with solar, you'd need storage. But we're not at that point yet.
As the article says the need for storage is for storage that can store maybe 1-3 hours worth of grid capacity energy in the afternoon and discharge it late at night. That doesn't seem like a "strong" need for storage. I would say we have a "strong" need for storage if we need the majority of the grid to be operating on storage for at least half the day - "strong need for storage" is not a now problem. If you go out and build that you are likely to lose money. (But if you really think we need that kind of storage, go invest in it and prove me wrong!)
You're saying there's a need for storage right now because without it peak demand can't be met by solar.
They're saying you don't need it right now because if you're ok wasting some of the solar power you can still reduce non-renewable use further without adding storage.
The need in the California "Duck Curve" is between 5pm and 10pm, when the sun is setting and solar output is dropping. Homes are still hot, and empirically speaking, everyone is still using their air conditioning units as the heat of the day is still all around the environment.
No matter how many panels you add, you won't add any electricity at 7pm / 8pm (depending on time of year) because the sun has already set. There's still substantial demand for electricity.
This means to solve the 7pm / 8pm duck curve, you need to build natural gas peaker plants, or figure out a storage methodology.
That's it. Otherwise you get brownouts at 7pm every night and need to manage the lack of electricity. Maybe rolling brownouts is the solution people are proposing?
The other solutions are: figure out storage, or build a gas peaker plant to temporarily provide power in those few hours.
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We focus at the "Duck Curve", because that's clearly where the next brownout will occur without intervention. Secondly: environmentalists are going to block the build of any natural gas plant (even if its necessary), so getting "ahead of the argument" only makes sense.
You're committing fallacy number 2 here. Wind power and hydro is a thing.
Also, the duck curve problem isn't the need for gas peakers after the sun goes down, it's the speed at which you need to ramp them up from being switched off.
If they can't ramp as fast as the solar drops, then you need to start them earlier and end up producing extra electricity (and carbon) that you don't want.
The problem you are talking about is called "nightime" and I'll refer you to the footnote in the article that covers this.
> You're committing fallacy number 2 here. Wind power and hydro is a thing.
Wind is certainly a thing. Its not perfectly reliable, even over large areas (ex: a hurricane on the East Coast would shut down turbines due to too much wind... over a large area). But wind is at least part of the answer to the duck curve.
And Hydro is great, but has a peculiar weakness, especially in the context of California's drought conditions. California has the problem of water-shortages as well, which means that hydro-plants are in "water management mode" rather than energy-management.
That is to say: Hydro serves two masters: energy management AND water management. If you're using the dam as water-management, you're not necessarily getting the electricity you want at the right times.
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I'm not convinced that anything aside from peaker plants really solve the duck curve frankly.
Storage will get there eventually. But not today: there needs to be more research and development into storage technologies before we have something large enough. (Either that, or we need to solve the West's water issues, so that hydro plants can be more into energy-management mode rather than the more pressing water-management issues)
A few hours of storage, every day, at a very predictable time of the day, does not fall into the bucket of "a lot" of storage. That is a very minimal amount of storage. It can barely even be called a buffer.
The storage needs that OP mentioned...the kind that gets us from 80% up to 100% renewables is a lot of storage. We're talking multiple days, possibly weeks of storage.
The supply/demand graphs for the California grid are public for all to discuss. We can look at 9/05/2021, and see that 25GW was demanded at 12-noon, while 36GW was demanded at 7pm at night (hour 19 on the graph).
The energy required between 5pm and 10pm on 9/5/2021 (from 17 to 22) is ~37GW per hour.
That's 185GW-hrs of energy. Exactly what technology can both store-and-output 185GW-hrs each day, and every day? The "Tesla Megabattery pack" in Australia is 0.3 GW-hrs FYI, to give you what a "very very large" battery can do.
California already has 4500 GWh of storage. They don't have those peak power levels (currently, 4.5GW) but that's a matter of capital investment into pumps and generators.
Not that that is even needed. California has a very large coastline with extremely reliable wind power. For example, there isn't a single spot anywhere along the coast of California that is forecast to have <8kts of wind for more than a day this month. Overprovisioning of wind power is a much bigger part of the solution to the duck curve than storage is.
Thankfully thermal batteries work just fine. In your example, using a/c before coming home to reduce the usage when sun is setting would be “wasteful”, but if the energy is roughly free it doesn’t matter.
This scheme would also allow backstop generation by using a fuel to reheat the storage material, potentially useful for "black swan" prolonged outages.
The fluidized bed heat exchangers seem particularly interesting to me, if sufficiently low escape of particulate matter can be achieved.
I used to work at an electric utility and your comment is a common misconception and good learning opportunity for folks on HN. Unsurprisingly, the truth is more complicated.
Firstly, you are correct that on most days, demand peaks around 7pm when solar output is tiny.
However, on most years, demand often peaks around 3pm-5pm, not 7pm (and note that in late summer in California days are longer and solar noon is roughly 1pm, so output is not bad at all). The reason for this is that the days with the most electricity consumption tend to be hot with large AC loads, and those loads tend to be higher during midday.
So when you say solar output is 0 at "peak demand", it's worth mentioning whether you mean the daily peak or the annual peak or a peak measured over another timeframe.
For utility capacity planning, we use the annual peak, not the daily peak, because we want to avoid blackouts most years, not most days. Therefore, adding solar - at today's margin - still does reduce our capex and need for gas peakers.
The math gets a bit more multidimensional when you do this for real and consider aspects beyond peak demand (like ramping, fuel, current generation fleet, tradeoffs in characteristics of new gas plants, geographic spread, congestion, etc.), but the main point remains true and important: the daily peak is not the annual peak, and it's a clear mistake to use the daily peak to conclude that solar doesn't help with peak demand.
In fact, at today's margins, solar both helps with peak power and with energy generation. It's fantastic. (And of course it gets less and less fantastic the more you add.)
Anyway, this is a common misconception I've seen a lot, so I've added a new section to the Duck Curve Wikipedia article you cited above to help explain it.
There's a non-storage solution to the duck curve "problem" which is just to waste some solar power.
As long as you come out ahead overall its still a good idea.
It's like saying gas flaring is a problem and we have a desperate need to solve that before getting rid of coal. Well, it would be nice, but overall swapping coal for natural gas is a good thing regardless.
Can't speak for the poster, but I have seen the argument that if solar and wind can both be over-provisioned by a factor of 3, then storage will not be much of an issue.
Fits with a "solar and wind will be too cheap to meter [the amount of cost and materials going into manufacture]" paradigm.
> I have seen the argument that if solar and wind can both be over-provisioned by a factor of 3, then storage will not be much of an issue.
That makes 0 sense. If you have 3x needed capacity at midday but 0x capacity at midnight, you could over-provision by 100x - zero times a hundred is still zero.
So, the duck curve problem although it caught people's imaginations, no-one really read the original source, so most people dont know what the duck curve problem is.
This features some slides from the original use of the term. Note the repeated reference to "Ramp" since that's what the problem was.
> We have to be really careful when we talk about something breaking. The only thing that’s going to break is the economics of solar. The lights are gonna stay on. All it comes down to is more curtailment.
One of the other solutions was asking the gas plants to ramp faster. The specs said the equipment could do it, it was just institutional inertia as they hadn't needed to do it before and so weren't prepared for it.
Ok I see. The problem that the duck curve is really about, is not about the lack of solar at certain times of the day, but really that other sources of power need to ramp up and down efficiently around solar.
Yep, the duck curve was a problem they anticipated they'd hit when trying to get to 15% solar in California, not a general problem for getting to 100% renewable.
Even then it was one of those "good problems to have" as it meant you had an unimaginably high (at that time) level of solar. Some places arent as lucky as California when it comes to solar provision.
The fix for the totally seperate "nighttime" problem is some mix of oversupply of wind, hydro, demand management, transmission lines, batteries etc. but we only need to continue with the next low hanging fruit at the moment as we've not even maxed out solar pv (fallacy #1 in the article is expecting instant perfection and having solutions to all the problems we haven't actually hit yet)
> The only thing that’s going to break is the economics of solar.
Yes, that is the exact point. Unless storage capacity is introduced to the system:
1. It becomes uneconomical to add any more solar plants, because the time when the solar plants can produce already has demand fully met by other, existing solar/wind plants.
2. Since you reach peak daily demand when solar and wind approaches 0 output, it means you need just as much fossil fuel plant generation capacity as before - you can't decommission any of those plants (or, at present, perhaps you just convert them to natural gas).
I'm not sure how this thread went off the rails. All I was originally responding to was the sentiment that "you don't need to worry about storage capacity until you already have the vast majority of your energy met by renewables", and that statement is easily provably false because there are many areas of the world that still have relatively low levels of total power generation from renewables, but until the "time shifting" storage problem is solved it will be uneconomical to add more solar to the system.
You're wrong, and I'll try to explain why you are wrong.
> you don't need to worry about storage capacity until you already have the vast majority of your energy met by renewables
This, on the other hand is true.
There are places where incentives (planned or accidental) make batteries a useful, profitable thing to do right now, but only in very small numbers.
For example, some gas peaker plants installed batteries because it let them respond faster to market changes and so earn more money. Does this mean batteries are required for gas peakers? No obviously not.
We need some kind of storage, at a fairly large scale to meet the final 20% or so of going 100% renewable. My bet is green hydrogen is going to be the winner here. We'll also have a bunch of lithium batteries connected to the grid (EVs etc.) because they're useful for other things and will help out in getting to 100% if they have some grid intelligence.
But, nowhere in the world are we at a place where installing solar and/or wind is anywhere near maxed out. And when we are, the fix will not be batteries but things like grid interconnects, demand response, targeted efficiency improvements and a hundred other boring technologies that we already understand.
It's generally cheaper to build more renewables and just find a use for the excess than it is to build batteries.
This is why people who don't like renewables have consistently, for years now, pretended to think that you need to install exactly enough renewables to get 100% of your needs and then use as much lithium batteries as you need to shift that power from the time it was produced to the time it is needed.
This is stupid, and at least some of them know it is stupid and are just saying it for effect.
It is not true, and the numbers they come up with using this model are meaningless.
It's a good question. The short answer is that although the daily peak in California tends to be around 7pm, the annual peak is more like 3pm-5pm due to air conditioning on hot summer days. So solar, at our current margins, actually does supply peak demand and thereby reduce capex needed for gas peakers.
(And annual peak demand is the correct timeframe to use, since our system targets reliability on the scale of years not days.)
For countries as large as US, there is another solution: transmission.
When evening dusk envelops Boston and New York, there's still plenty of sunlight near Chicago or Saint Louis. Conversely, when it's still morning dusk in Chicago and Saint Louis, sun is already shining over Boston and New York.
We of course already have transmission lines all over the country. They can help, given some coordination between energy companies, and maybe upgraded in the east-west direction to help deliver solar energy when its generation increases.
> A very pervasive argument against renewables is "but storage!!!".
This goes with my issue, emergencies. I expected to see that in the article.
When you absolutely MUST have power absolutely right now, renewables don’t cut it with current storage options. Think disaster or pop-up energy needs.
I’m just really skeptical that the hard pushes for renewables are taking into account we should have excess production options in coal and NG going forward.
Yes, until we have vastly more renewables and sufficient storage, there will be always the requirement for backup in the form of coal and especially gas. The near term aim just needs to be to run them as little as possible. While the end goal has to be to get to 100% renewable, short term the most important impact can be made by going 80-90% renewable this way.
I thought Germany is buying a lot of energy from its neighbors to offset lack of storage, most of it dirty from what I remember. There were some numbers saying that by closing their nuclear plants they're actually doing quite a bit of harm if you see things at a larger scale.
Anyways, things may or may not work if other countries go into renewables. They may have different spike times - but I kinda doubt it. Most Europe wakes up and plugs its kettles at about the same time. And it's small enough that being windy or cloudy will happen in most of it, at least some of the time.
If I put solar panels on my home, say I have an oversized system: produces 10kW on average when I only use 8kW on average. It would appear as I am a net energy exporter to the grid. This alone doesn't tell the story that I use the grid as a big battery which I can use when there is no sun.
Germany buys power occasionally but is a net exporter. Main import country is France which is mainly nuclear, maybe you heard someone quote partial results for this year where most have been from the Netherlands that mainly burn various sorts of fossil fuels?
Like with car traffic, Germany is a transit country for energy. While Germany is importing a lot of French nucler power, most of the time, it is exporting to other countries at the same time. This might exaggerate now much French electricity Germany gets.
And while they might be in the same time zone, there is already about an hour of solar distance between the center of Germany and France and more if you look further eastwards. This smears out the power peaks at least.
Definitely, there is about 1 day of time differential between Germany and France when you look at moving weather systems. If I (in Munich) want to know about the weather development, it is often a good guess just to ask a friend in Paris.
I think Germany proves that if you have neighbors with high base loads and you double electricity costs you can achieve a pretty significant use of renewables without sacrificing grid stability in a normal year.
I don't think the but storage is used to argue we shouldn't build renewable resources.
I see three parties to this argument in the states.
1. Climate change deniers - These people don't ever really ever argue about storage in good faith. Because they don't believe climate change is a problem.
2. Pro-Nuclear climate change believers - People who believe climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed and believe nuclear is probably our best bet. This is the group that brings up "but storage" all the time.
3. Anti-Nuclear climate change believers - These people believe that storage isn't really an issue or will be fixed shortly. They believe solar and wind is the solution to our climate change problem.
Group 2 is believes in replacing fossil fuels with renewables. But when it comes to finite amounts of attention, and funding they believe nuclear is a better option.
1. People who don't or won't believe that renewables work
2. People who believe they do.
So whether you like nuclear is irrelevant. If you like nuclear but hate renewables you're in group 1 with the climate change deniers, if you like nuclear but believe the general reality based consensus on renewables costs and viability you're in group 2 along with the people who don't like nuclear.
If you (correctly) think coal causes lots of pollution and fossil fuels have issues and need replaced then whether you end up in group 1 or 2 still depends on whether you agree with the general consensus that renewables are better/cheaper than nuclear or not.
Germany proves nothing. As you say, "if you have neighbors". Germany pretends to be good but really is just exporting the problem. If your solution requires neighbors doing it different ways it can't be scaled.
Look at his very first "fallacy". He's acting like putting in some storage to move power from 2pm to 2am is not a big deal. Store it how? Storage systems are either very inefficient or cost more per kwh than simply generating the power would. Utilities only build storage systems for dealing with rapidly changing demand--you can draw from a battery or pumped hydro faster than you can spin up another generator.
He read them on discussions about renewable and I have seen them in discussions creeping up as well.
It is also a good primer to relate his experiences to daily work as well. Like fallacies in software engineering. Similar to the encouragement vs. Disencourigment: instead of telling someone 'dont do it's vs. 'sounds interesting. What would be a good easy to do first step to see if it is good'
I routinely encounter all of these fallacies when discussing renewables with family and co-workers. Especially “the sun doesn’t shine at night” types of gotcha.
I encounter “wind mills cause cancer” less often now, but still encounter “kills billions of birds” all the time.
Do you actually converse with people who are against renewables energy? Or even people who claim “it’s not ready”?
Granted #1, #2, #4 were strawmen and not particularly interesting, but #3 (system costs) and #5 (cost trends) were interesting, and really the crux of the matter for renewables.
These arguments are either outright stated or HEAVILY hinted at in the Murdoch Media, and in arguments put together by right wing politics in Australia.
the level of dishonest discourse in green resources and climate change is absurd
Agree, but the snark against nuclear is unwarranted.
As the author said, we don't need 100% today. And he acknowledge that problems exist, and they have to be solved. Wehn reading him, i have the impression that he acknowledge that some issues/blocks can take some time to clear. Why gamble? Just take nuclear as a crutch, plan for 100 year of pilatable nuclear + hydro baseload and 30 year of gaz peakers, to clear the blocks in front of renewables, and if the issues are fixed in the next 30-50 years, great, you can decommission the nuclear plants early!
If you really think GW is the biggest issue of this century, not using all available tools, however dangerous you think they might be, to help you with your issue is plain dumb.
I'm trying to understand from what you got your snark from. Do you refer to:
"I think the renewable industry will end up better and cheaper than the current system but if I'm wrong about the renewables industry being good at optimising that bundle of benefits, problems and"?
As far as I know, nuclear fuel is rare and we don't have a solution to thorium reactors yet.
I would personally not mind more nuclear were it makes sense though. Germany is not very suited though as it's quite populated but there is plenty of empty space in USA.
There is a risk though as current nuclear power station have issues in drought situations.
Nonetheless I haven't read is arguments. Perhaps he wrote about it.
> I'm trying to understand from what you got your snark from. Do you refer to [...]
I think GP might refer to footnote 1 in the article:
> [...] one could technically replace fossil fuels with nuclear power. it would just be more expensive, more dangerous and slower - so probably only a few billion dead.
Personally, I think modern nuclear reactors (that are optimised for safety and efficiency, not for generating nuclear weapons material) and a tad more sensible regulation could make nuclear power safe and cheap, and turn nuclear (together with renewables, of course) into a formidable weapon against global warming.
What do you think nuclear costs? I think you are probably unintentionally operating on a fallacy in this article, which is using decade-old costs. Renewables and storage have fallen in price massively. Nuclear was a great idea a decade ago but when you look at the costs there's no reason anymore. It's just too expensive.
Not really true when you consider systems costs [1]. The way Korea and China and Russia are making nuclear plants right now, nuclear still has a huge role to play. If you look at the current boondoggles only then I could see why you'd think what you say.
Nuclear's cost is substantially less when built at scale. During serial production during the 1960s and 70s nuclear power costs averaged about $1B per GW of capacity[1]. And with a capacity factor of near 100% versus ~30% for renewables other than hydro this is very cost competitive. Furthermore the question of storage to make renewables feasible is typically met with assumptions that batteries will scale by a factor of 100, or that a breakthrough will be made in another form of storage like liquid metal batteries, hydrogen, compressed air, or something else. None of these have been deployed at scale.
You might enjoy Fairphone if you're actually willing to pay that premium for having a more sustainably produced and repairable phone. The company also produces spare parts, e.g. vibration engine + mic + usb port are in the bottom module which costs a grand total of €20 to order new. Screw it in with a regular Philips.
There's also a decent (especially compared to the market share) community so it has good support for various roms if that's your thing. By default it's a normal Android with Google stuff.
They'll introduce a new model with 5G some time this month, in case you're in the market.
There is a lot of haranguing about following the science and picking good sources on hackernews, yet articles from
Non-expert personal blogs get discussed to death.
Has anyone ever considered the effects of wind and solar power on the climate? If wind drives turbines, the energy is not available anymore to circulate air in the atmosphere. And if solar energy is absorbed to a high degree by solar panels, it won't heat up the earth as it used to do before.
So, it seems like a fallacy to think that increasing wind and solar power will have not influence the climate.
Is this line of thinking present in the current discussion, or is it not valid?
Given that both of these situations draw energy from the atmosphere, they should be complementary to the goals of climate change mitigation.
I suppose 'covering the Sahara in solar panels' might need a little thought in regards to how it affects weather patterns across North Africa and Europe, but we're a wee way off from there yet.
Agreed for solar, but I don't see how a reduction of wind energy would contribute to the goal of keeping the temperature increase below a certain level. Kinetic energy is not driving temperature increase, is it?
I suppose not, but reducing wind energy at near sea level would reduce the energy of weather systems, including hurricanes, that whilst products of climate change are the pointy ends of the stick that cause irritation and woe in humans and other creatures.
The total amount of wind and solar in the world is several orders of magnitude higher than the amount that we would harness so this isn’t really a relevant consideration. It’s like asking if a piece of dust on an Olympic sprinter would slow them down due to air resistance.
I hope you're right. Is this true also if we were to replace all current nuclear and fossil energy?
There is also the effect (the name of which I currently can't remember) that consumption increases when people think it does no harm. Like when LED lights were introduced, energy usage allegedly actually increased. Because people were using LED lights for all kinds of things that were NOT using incandescent lights before, as the energy used was thought to be negligible.
> Like when LED lights were introduced, energy usage allegedly actually increased.
This is not true. More lights might be on, but the total energy usage for lights is currently falling with increased LED production. You can find lots of stated fears and speculation on the internet that it could happen - FUD - but not evidence. There is some indirect evidence not specific to LEDs that people sometimes do use more energy when the cost goes down. But LEDs are an order of magnitude more efficient than incandescents, and there has been no such 10x increase in lighting use. Per-capita electricity use in the US is currently falling slowly.
The effect is called Jevons Paradox. That is not a relevant consideration in this particular case, but it is a major concern for things like air conditioning efficiency.
Laterally, the amount of CO2 my existence releases each year is of absolutely no consequence to the global environment. The amount of CO2 that 1Bn others like me - or 8.5Bn if overall living standards increase, however?
The main argument is that we eat all the C02 that we breathe out, and plants re-consume that C02, so it’s in balance, whereas with oil we are releasing CO2 that we can’t replace.
Aside from that, I took the first couple of sources I found googling as roughly accurate, and I see estimates of about 35B-45B tons total C02, where around 3B-3.5B might come from 8B humans breathing. So assuming those numbers are anything close to accurate, we are perhaps slightly less than 10%.
Unfortunately, my existence - and that of the all the other comfortable people in the developed world, yourself too, I imagine - also includes some % responsibility of the oil consumption you refer to.
Sure, of course. I guess I assumed wrong that when you said “existence” you were talking about biology and not lifestyle or consumer choices. I actually thought someone mentioned breathing and now I don’t see it, so my bad for going off on a tangent… ;)
I think I lost a neuron reading your comment. You think that the state of New York lost all its wind when they built all the skyscrapers in a comparable small portion of the state?
On a very local scale, the creation of all those skyscrapers has a significant effect on wind speeds at street level.
As for the energy required to make the concrete, steel and glass that made those same buildings, that has increased the amount of wind that New York has to deal with so indirectly - 'yes', in answer to your question.
I think OP means more 'at the hugely massive scale we appear to need' which I don't think is as neuron-murdering a thought experiment as you so unkindly suggest.
Basically, yes, wind power can have effects on the climate, and we should be aware of them and use them to weigh tradeoffs with other power generation options. This is a reasonable question to ask!
That article is a pretty misleading summary of the situation, IMO. Keith’s paper does demonstrate very localized effects that people living near wind farms might care about, but does not show any significant or even measurable global effects, nor does it actually represent serious negative concerns about wind power in general, especially in relation to coal.
I imagine that the effect is so small that it's negligible. Wouldn't an entire forest block more wind than a field of turbines? And forests aren't known to have that kind of effect.
Solar panels are also on a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface, the rest receives and treats radiation the same way as always.
It’s valid in that everything has an effect, but it’s not really a concern.
One reason is that, as other commenters pointed out, the total volume of wind and solar is currently tiny compared to the energy delivered to the Earth’s surface from the sun. So the size of the effect is not large enough to be noticeable, or probably even measurable.
The other reason involves the mechanics of how wind and solar work.
Solar (photovoltaic) converts electromagnetic energy that would otherwise heat the atmosphere, directly into electricity. But, it converts probably less energy than you think (solar panels still get hot in the sun, i.e. they still radiate in the infrared). And, once the electricity is used by people to do work, the energy is converted back into atmospheric heat. No heat is lost; energy can’t be destroyed.
Wind turbines do absorb energy from the wind, but only from the wind they can reach, which is mostly regional. There is a boundary layer close to the Earth’s surface (below a few thousand feet above mean ground level) where air movement is relatively slow and chaotic. That’s what we experience as “wind” and what wind turbines can reach. But most atmospheric heat transport happens via extremely powerful and persistent air currents higher in the atmosphere. You may have heard of the “jet stream” for example. Wind turbines in high enough concentration could conceivably have a regional effect on wind patterns (just like tall buildings do) but it’s basically adding a small amount of local chaos to a part of the atmosphere that is already small and chaotic, like adding a couple new rocks to the bottom of a river. You might create some new little eddies along the bottom, but you’re not meaningfully affecting the main flow.
People have considered it. There are two reasons that you can summarize this as “it doesn’t matter”:
1- wind and solar (and hydro) are so much better than coal when it comes global warming and other negative environmental impact, the main reason to bring up “concerns” is entrenched economic interests, and not real fears of increased warming. The fact is that renewable sources are net cooling - and not by a little - compared to the warming we’re already causing with coal burning and CO2 emissions.
2- The scale of the earth’s atmosphere and surface area are “very large” compared to our solar and wind farms. So large that it might seem funny at first to think turbines or solar cells would have any effect. One way to think about turbines is that they’re somewhat comparable to trees, and we’ve lost many times more trees in the last 50 years than we’ve added turbines. Another way is to compare the height of a turbine (say, 100 meters) to the height of the wind (maybe 400 km, depending how you measure), so the turbines touch maybe 1/4000 of the vertical air, and across the world cover very little of the total land area, meaning the total volume of air impacted by turbines is ‘tiny’.
According to my internet searches just now, the earth’s land surface (1.5e14 m^2) gets, on average, 2.4e16 watts of solar power. [1] The total solar power production today is just less than 800GW, or 8e11 watts. [2] So solar might be capturing one thirty-thousandth of the surface energy, or 0.003%. (And that actually seems surprisingly large to me, it’s possible I’m missing more orders of magnitude somewhere. I don’t think solar farms are covering anywhere near as much as 0.003% of the surface of the earth.)
Atmospheric energy is about half of the surface energy, and wind is currently capturing roughly the same as solar [3], so maybe we could estimate it about 0.006% of the wind energy.
One thing I hear frequently against wind energy is "but what about the birds?" Usually this is said by someone who politically doesn't care about wildlife.
1. effort is put into abating the issue to some degree.
2. billions of birds are killed due to human activity. Number one is house cats, but impacts with windows and cars is orders of magnitude more than due to wind turbines.
3. wind power displaces gas and coal power. the effects of pollution (particulates, mercury, etc) is far worse than wind turbines for birds. not only that but it is better for anything that breathes oxygen, including humans.
So if the "what about the birds" crowd actually cared about birds, they'd push for wind power over coal. But it isn't about the birds; it is a pretext for keeping the status quo.
That paper is comparing what happened to what would have happened without the nuclear phase out. That is, coal would have gone down MORE if nuclear had not been phased out. It does not support your claim that nuclear was replaced by coal. As the graph I gave you shows, coal use there declined over this decade, even as nuclear has also declined.
He made a universal statement. You presenting an example where it might be true doesn't save his statement, when I can present an example where it is wrong.
The kind of bird is important. Many more songbirds are taken by cats it’s true but their numbers aren’t in danger. Wind turbines impact mainly larger birds such as raptors that don’t reproduce as quickly. The problem is such that a wind farm might be allowed a single kill before fines or being shut down and some places are trying to develop early warning systems to shut down a turbine if a bird is detected. Seems a long way around to go just for a single type of renewable when you could most likely solve most problems with nuclear.
Wild life would totally benefit from nuclear power. This is often overlooked by environmentalists. Look at Tschernobyl. It's like hitting the reset button and removing humans (a bug, not a feature) from the equation.
Nuclear has two problems: high cost due to lack of scale, and bad publicity. The crazy people which produced the Chernobyl disaster not only directly killed hundreds of people and displaced hundreds of thousands, they turned the whole idea of nuclear power generation into a hobgoblin.
The "nuclear waste" is still mostly fuel, it can be processed and burned further. But this involves, among other things, producing and extracting plutonium (which itself is a fine nuclear fuel), and thus some suspicion of producing more nuclear weapons.
Another thing I heard about wind energy recently was that the friction of the blades significantly warms the air, so if deployed at scale, the total effect on atmospheric warming would not be as beneficial as hoped.
Not sure how valid it is, but I thought it was interesting and hadn't heard it before.
I'm by no means an expert here, but wouldn't the energy that is expressed as heat in that friction just be the energy that's already in the air? Wouldn't it just be expressed as heat and friction anyway as air moves past other objects and other air? It doesn't make sense that turbines would be putting more energy into the system than they're taking out.
In an ideal frictionless encounter between air particle and turbine blade, the particle loses some kinetic energy and the blade gains the same kinetic energy.
In a real encounter with friction, some of the KE is lost to heat.
The initial source of the particle's KE was heat from the Sun causing weather. So the net energy is constant, the local temperature is higher because the blade has heated up at the cost of the air particle's motion, but overall temperature is the same because more heat from the sun will be needed to restore the air particle's motion that was lost to friction. It all balances out in the end.
The fact that the total energy is the same doesn't necessarily mean it's okay. Hypothetically if wind turbines set up a gradient so that the first few meters of atmosphere become hotter and the rest of the atmosphere becomes colder, total energy is conserved, but it's not a desirable outcome. But I don't know if humans can build enough wind turbines to make that possible; the Earth is very big and the atmosphere has a lot of mass.
That is not even remotely valid, the easiest way to think about it is through energy conservation: the atmosphere would have to be significantly heating itself from energy it already had.
Does all the energy to run a wind turbine come from the energy produced by that turbine's blades?
I'd expect several components of a wind turbine to require power. Its electronic components may need power for cooling or heating depending on the season. The motors that change the blade pitch need power.
Some of these things need to work when the blades are stopped. One way to do that would be to power them from the grid instead of from the turbine.
If those things are grid powered, then a wind turbine might actually very very very slightly raise local atmospheric temperature.
Anyone here happen to know if they actually do power anything in the turbine from the grid, or if they do something else like power such things from batteries that get recharged by the turbine when it is generating power?
That's bullshit. They can plausibly cause some surprising changes by disturbing the local air circulation patterns (which can either increase or decrease temperatures at a very local level), but increasing the temperature because of friction is a fantasy.
If this were happening at a significant scale, it would decrease atmospheric temperatures, because the energy that ends up heating the blades would have to come from somewhere, and the air would lose some of its kinetic energy.
This is sadly a general trend. Take some numbers out of context. The numbers appear large because they are a small fraction of really really large population. Publish on social media and induce outrage. Clicks and clout follow. For example: covid deaths, which are 1-3% of total deaths from all causes for young people and up to 10-15% for older generations.
Why do these fossil fuels billionaires seem like such morons? They have so much money they could invest in renewables and then "own" the next couple of hundred years of energy at least. Instead, they use money to fight against inevitable change.
Because fossil fuels are much more convenient, reliable and efficient. If there is no wind and or no sun you have no power, so now you have to invest in expensive batteries to bridge meteorologic conditions.
Compare an EV and a petrol one. If you want to go from Lisbon to Vladivostok, this will be a breeze with a petrol car and a headache with an EV (I'm not sure it's even possible, good luck charging it fast in the deepest parts of Russia).
I'm not saying to end all fossil fuels, we obviously need them, but you can use your profits to fund the next sources of energy rather than fight change.
Fusion and nuclear count too imo. Those work rain or shine.
You should not conflate someone arguing in bad faith with someone is arguing in good faith. Their whole agenda is to distract you from the problem you are trying to solve.
Mostly correct. But the problem is that these are literally the points of Green proponents/Anti-climate-change people. They have a religious, purist, orthodox attitude - ZERO fossil fuels ASAP!
Only a portfolio of all sources can enable a transition and time required to debug all the problems with the new technology. But Green Absolutism has no room for that. The fact is: We Will be using fossil fuels in the next 50-100 years still. It may become smaller or more limited but it will NOT be zero. If you try to force the issue to absolutely, we will end up with NOTHING - either from Green or from Fossil because the system will break. Just like supply chains have broken recently, fossil fuels are just as deeply intertwined into the supply chain network FOR EVERYTHING that is post-1800 technology. It's like a jenga pile or pick-up-stix situation.
Zero fossil fuels needed to happen 20 years ago. ASAP won't be good enough. One argument can be made to keep around existing gas-powered plants to absorb demand peaks, but building coal or gas plants right now is lunacy. Nuclear might or might not be in the future, but fossil fuels certainly need to die much quicker than they do.
One thing people seem to misunderstand is where renewable skepticism is coming from. Sure there are some lingering climate deniers that don't like renewables out of principle, but a growing amount of criticism comes from people (I put myself in this camp) that see renewables as distracting us from the real and immediate need for decarbonization.
I'm very skeptical about renewables ability to address any of our climate problems, but that stems more deeply from the clear observation that globally, we are not replacing fossil fuels with renewables, but rather supplementing fossil fuel energy. Globally all sources of energy production have continued to rise. And to preempt any "but Germany/Sweden/etc!?", the planet does not care about some local success if globally emissions rise.
The problem is that most renewable advocates argue that renewables will solve our energy and carbon problems so we don't need to consider any other method of decarbonization that will necessarily result in economic contraction.
Our way of life is absolutely unsustainable. I would certainly hope that renewables would allow us to have a less severe economic contraction then without, but the idea that we can just keep on with current economic growth and that renewables will magically allow this to happen without permanent and catastrophic impacts on our climate is dangerously naive.
The original argument for renewables was that they would help us with decarbonization. They objectively do not. We do objectively know that reduced economic activity does reduce emissions. If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change we need immediate and aggressive decarbonization. Maybe renewables will have a major part to play in our less industrial future, but alone they have proven incapable of even mitigating this problem.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadThe article contains a number of strawman fallacies that the author then boldly defeats. I do try to read about renewable energy - never encountered the statements that OP claims to be pervasive:
- "Fallacy 1 - Fix It All, Fix it Now or Fix None Of It"
what? who claims this? it is evidently not feasible.
- "Fallacy 2 - 100% Lemon or 100% Lime or Bust"
(only one kind of renewable can be successful) ... again, who would ever claim that?
- "Fallacy 4 - Nothing Less Than Perfection, All the Time"
...
and so on, one strawman after the other...
"A straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy of having the impression of refuting an argument, whereas the real subject of the argument was not addressed or refuted, but instead replaced with a false one. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man"."
> the typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition
It defeats anti-renewable fallacies, by making up some easy to defeat fallacies.
I can show you examples of every single one of these if you want. This #2 example is interesting as it specifically excludes hydroelectric which is a common refrain in 100% calculations: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20022019/100-percent-rene...
Now having given an example can I mention how modeling the grid without hydroelectric power is a fallacy?
Essentially asking how much X do we need then not minimizing X is not answering the question. 10^100 kWh of storage would work, but so would 10^99 kWh, 10^98 ... we care about the minimum not simply any number that’s sufficient.
A very pervasive argument against renewables is "but storage!!!".
That's one form of this type of argument. There isn't much storage needed for renewables unless you get to very large numbers. Germany is close to 50% renewables, and it barely built any storage at all in the past years. (There's some existing amount of storage, but that largely existed before renewables even started).
Every time you have a "but storage!!" argument, it's an argument primarily relevant for the step from 80% renewables to 100%. But it's very often brought up in situations where the question is rather how to get from 10% renewables to 30%.
but the OP does address that at all.
instead you get:"Fallacy 2 - 100% Lemon or 100% Lime or Bust"
I am not saying that the author does not make valid points,
I am saying that the valid points get lost when titled with evident nonsense
The issue with that article isn’t storage it’s the energy mix used and the lack of excess production. As #1 points out you get to 100% not by building that in a day you build more storage, more wind, more hydro, and or more solar and then figure out what else is cost effective to add. Currently there is seemingly excess solar in California with prices going negative except unlike what’s mentioned people are actually still building solar because it’s cheap enough that even without selling in the middle of sunny days it’s still profitable. It’s really not obvious that that’s going to happen just running some
Yeah, and at least solar is really easy to turn off so you don't actually have to pay the negative price, you can take zero.
"Surges of cheap electricity tended to push down prices in the common German-Austrian bidding zone, leading to a rise in demand and exports, something the two countries' grid connections were unable to handle."
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-austria-energy-europ...
https://model.energy/
Hydrogen is promising, but there are technical problems with transportation and storage. I'd like to see carbon taxes push us towards these types of solutions instead of burning 'renewable' carbon.
Hydrogen for load leveling can be stored underground as a pressurized gas, just as natural gas is stored. This is a demonstrated technology. Also, the US already has 1000 miles of hydrogen pipelines, so that too is a demonstrated technology.
The main issue is hydrogen embrittlement; where steel spontaneously weakens and fractures in the prescence of hydrogen. The problem is much worse with pure hydrogen than with methane (where even the low concentrations of hydrogen are enough to pose a serious problem). There is a lot of serious enghineering work being done on this front, but I don't think we have reached the ablility to scale by a factor 200k just yet.
The magical hypothetical world where nuclear is much cheaper is called "the 1970s." In this improbable scenario, first world countries like France completely divest from coal in favor of non-carbon-polluting energy techologies.
Hydrogen embrittlement is a known issue with known solutions. After all, the world consumes 700 cubic kilometers (at STP) of hydrogen each year. This gas is confined in tanks and pipes, which obviously have to be made of materials for which the problem is solved.
Otherwise at best you can adjust the output of your dispatchable energy sources (mostly coal and nuclear) to make up for the unpredictiveness of the solar and wind. But you still need the same capacity.
This is why Germany and Spain, 2 countries who invested a lot in solar and wind, continued to grow their use of traditional power plant at the same pace as before they started on renewable. For Germany it's even worse because they decided to stop using nuclear, so they burn even more coal than before.
This is the reason why electricity was traditionally cheaper at night.
Germany also doesnt burn more coal than before. The amount of coal they burn has been falling steadily since about 2010.
(I am curious about more details since the figure lack context. It is not clear whether the 80% applies to nominal power.)
Edit: the English wikipedia article on load following is actually much clearer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#N...
> Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope.
In any case, the problem with nuclear is that existing nuclear technology does not decarbonize the world. World primary energy demand is 18 TW. This would require 6000 nuclear power plants (3GW(th) each), if today's reactors are used they'd consume (the 235U in) 1.5 million tonnes of natural uranium per year. Total world uranium resource is a shade over 6 million tonnes, so it would run out in four years.
To power the world with nuclear one either needs seawater uranium extraction (scaled up by 12 orders of magnitude from what's been done so far; 170 km^2 of ocean area for each of those reactors; the power/area is much worse than PV) or breeder reactors (which France has given up on.)
The numbers you use for uranium resources, are the amount that is economically extractable right now at current prices. Given that only 14% of the cost of a nuclear plant is raw fuel we have lots of room to increase to increase the cost of extraction.
And many places abandoned breeder reactors because the cost of uranium is cheap enough right now that fuel efficiency doesn't matter.
France's abandonment of their breeder program is the tell that they don't think there's any significant chance that nuclear will scale to power the world anytime soon.
Roughly half of the primary energy demand isn't actually used, it's just wasted as heat. Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear or renewables would mean that much less primary energy would be needed due to the efficiency gains of electrification.
The real issue with nuclear is that it needs all the same stuff as renewables (better grid connections, pink hydrogen production, demand management, EVs, hydrogen based flight and shipping) in order to keep costs reasonable but still just costs more because solar and wind are much cheaper.
Of course the renewables are cheaper, but in addition to that argument the pro-nuclear argument is deceptive when it tries to portray existing nuclear technology as sufficient.
Worried about terrorists? The reprocessing plant needs to leave a few isotopes in the fuel it produces. Things like Co-60. The spent rods have it--the reactors and the shipping systems are built to handle it. The terrorist can't handle it, though--while some are willing to engage in suicide missions they're not going to engage in futile suicide missions. Stealing the material will just get you dead before you can deliver it.
In any case, breeders mean the claim that existing nuclear technology, and in particular France's existing nuclear technology, can do it are wrong. France's breeder effort was a spectacular failure that they've now abandoned.
Not arguing against renewables here but this 1+ day response time figure gets quoted a lot. (eg. my father-in-law uses it and I've always thought it was sketchy, your post just pushed me over the edge to go look it up. ;)
Source: Graph on page 10 of https://usea.org/sites/default/files/092014_Increasing%20the...
So, if you have medium amounts of solar and wind, it's fine keeping the gas plants in reserve and maybe having to use them on a particularly cold day once every other year. A gas plant is very cheap from investment perspective. From total emissions point of view it is also fine. (These exceptionally cold windless winter days are waved as examples of the unsuitability of wind and solar.)
Of course if your gas pipes leak like crazy, maybe it's best to turn to decommission the plants and network.
That said, storage is growing, a 1GW DC line to Norway was put into operations recently.
So an excess amount of renewables is not a big issue for the grid. Owners of renewable sources may be less happy to switch them off.
(In the EU) storage can take the place of fossil when fossil becomes expensive enough. No need to give more subsidies to storage than renewables would get.
Excess amounts of renewable can also be used for other purposes, such as producing green hydrogen.
Having a large capacity in the form of gas turbines that is only use occasionally costs money, but has to advantage that all extra renewable energy results in less use of gas and therefor less CO2.
So today, we can have a grid that consists of renewables plus gas turbines without any storage.
A combined cycle gas turbine power plant might cost 10% of a nuclear plant of equal output. So even if we have to back up the entire fricking grid with CC it's still much cheaper than doing it with nuclear.
So a windfarm backed up by hydrogen may need a significant fraction of the farm to produce hydrogen.
In the end, a nuclear power plant might be cheaper. Might be, because we just don't know. Nuclear power plants are insanely expensive at the moment.
And no, nuclear isn't cheaper, even if during the rare times you're burning hydrogen the cost/kWh is high. That's because nuclear needs to be selling at high prices most of the time, including when solar/wind/batteries are able to directly deliver.
It's possible other technologies (transmission, demand dispatching, other storage technologies, even natural gas with atmospheric CO2 capture) will be cheaper than grid hydrogen storage. That doesn't help nuclear.
You build more renewables than you need for electricity production and use it to generate hydrogen for agriculture and industry 99% of the time. When you really hit the yearly peak you can a) turn the electrolysers off and if that's not enough b) use some of the hydrogen to generate electricity.
Of course, if you're lucky, then you can get by with just the renewables and sell all your hydrogen for other uses but when that 1 in 10 year event happens you can get away without burning too much fossil gas and paying the carbon fee associated with it.
"What is expected to be the last new coal plant to come online in Germany entered commercial operation on May 30, more than a decade after it was first planned... The government last year said it would close all 84 of its coal-fired power plants by 2038 as the country moves toward cleaner sources of electricity."[2]
Spain is also in a similar phase: "Spain has recently made headlines with good climate news. In May, the government announced plans for full decarbonization. At the beginning of July, half of the country’s coal plants were retired. REN21 analyst Duncan Gibb explains why this is the moment for governments to understand that spending taxpayer money to keep fossil fuel infrastructure afloat is a sunk investment."[3]
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coal/germany-coal/
[2] https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-...
[3] https://www.ren21.net/decarbonise-energy-spain/
That's categorically false, and the article alludes to this somewhat. The biggest problem with renewables (primarily solar) right now is the "duck curve" [1]. That is, there is plenty of energy available mid-day, but then right when available solar starts to subside is also when you get a sizable demand increase in the early evening (e.g. people getting home from work, cooking, watching TV, doing dishes and laundry, etc.) The slope of that rise means that you not only need as much dispatchable energy sources as before, but you need to ramp them up and down much more frequently, which takes a higher toll on equipment.
Thus, there is a real immediate need for the type of "time shifting" storage the article talks about right now.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
"This is the problem with renewables..." - this amusingly sounds a little like an instance of fallacy #1. It becomes "the" problem only when youve got way more renewables capacity than almost everyone has right now.
It doesnt exactly render the solar panels pointless.
All grids have a lot of excess production thats only used to meet occaisional peaks. This is not a bad thing in itself and not something new to renewables.
Other locations have more flexibility, either due to natural gas peakers or the prevalence of water (pumped hydro is the best battery)
Again, the source article talks about this, but this is also not just a simple problem that can be wished away, and the only "fallacy" is pretending this problem doesn't exist.
You're saying there's a need for storage right now because without it peak demand can't be met by solar.
They're saying you don't need it right now because if you're ok wasting some of the solar power you can still reduce non-renewable use further without adding storage.
It's just two different ways of looking at it.
No matter how many panels you add, you won't add any electricity at 7pm / 8pm (depending on time of year) because the sun has already set. There's still substantial demand for electricity.
This means to solve the 7pm / 8pm duck curve, you need to build natural gas peaker plants, or figure out a storage methodology.
That's it. Otherwise you get brownouts at 7pm every night and need to manage the lack of electricity. Maybe rolling brownouts is the solution people are proposing?
The other solutions are: figure out storage, or build a gas peaker plant to temporarily provide power in those few hours.
-----------
We focus at the "Duck Curve", because that's clearly where the next brownout will occur without intervention. Secondly: environmentalists are going to block the build of any natural gas plant (even if its necessary), so getting "ahead of the argument" only makes sense.
Also, the duck curve problem isn't the need for gas peakers after the sun goes down, it's the speed at which you need to ramp them up from being switched off.
If they can't ramp as fast as the solar drops, then you need to start them earlier and end up producing extra electricity (and carbon) that you don't want.
The problem you are talking about is called "nightime" and I'll refer you to the footnote in the article that covers this.
Wind is certainly a thing. Its not perfectly reliable, even over large areas (ex: a hurricane on the East Coast would shut down turbines due to too much wind... over a large area). But wind is at least part of the answer to the duck curve.
And Hydro is great, but has a peculiar weakness, especially in the context of California's drought conditions. California has the problem of water-shortages as well, which means that hydro-plants are in "water management mode" rather than energy-management.
That is to say: Hydro serves two masters: energy management AND water management. If you're using the dam as water-management, you're not necessarily getting the electricity you want at the right times.
----------
I'm not convinced that anything aside from peaker plants really solve the duck curve frankly.
Storage will get there eventually. But not today: there needs to be more research and development into storage technologies before we have something large enough. (Either that, or we need to solve the West's water issues, so that hydro plants can be more into energy-management mode rather than the more pressing water-management issues)
The storage needs that OP mentioned...the kind that gets us from 80% up to 100% renewables is a lot of storage. We're talking multiple days, possibly weeks of storage.
The supply/demand graphs for the California grid are public for all to discuss. We can look at 9/05/2021, and see that 25GW was demanded at 12-noon, while 36GW was demanded at 7pm at night (hour 19 on the graph).
The energy required between 5pm and 10pm on 9/5/2021 (from 17 to 22) is ~37GW per hour.
That's 185GW-hrs of energy. Exactly what technology can both store-and-output 185GW-hrs each day, and every day? The "Tesla Megabattery pack" in Australia is 0.3 GW-hrs FYI, to give you what a "very very large" battery can do.
California already has 4500 GWh of storage. They don't have those peak power levels (currently, 4.5GW) but that's a matter of capital investment into pumps and generators.
Not that that is even needed. California has a very large coastline with extremely reliable wind power. For example, there isn't a single spot anywhere along the coast of California that is forecast to have <8kts of wind for more than a day this month. Overprovisioning of wind power is a much bigger part of the solution to the duck curve than storage is.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2020/12/f81/SETO%20P...
This scheme would also allow backstop generation by using a fuel to reheat the storage material, potentially useful for "black swan" prolonged outages.
The fluidized bed heat exchangers seem particularly interesting to me, if sufficiently low escape of particulate matter can be achieved.
Firstly, you are correct that on most days, demand peaks around 7pm when solar output is tiny.
Source: http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html
However, on most years, demand often peaks around 3pm-5pm, not 7pm (and note that in late summer in California days are longer and solar noon is roughly 1pm, so output is not bad at all). The reason for this is that the days with the most electricity consumption tend to be hot with large AC loads, and those loads tend to be higher during midday.
Source: https://www.caiso.com/documents/californiaisopeakloadhistory...
So when you say solar output is 0 at "peak demand", it's worth mentioning whether you mean the daily peak or the annual peak or a peak measured over another timeframe.
For utility capacity planning, we use the annual peak, not the daily peak, because we want to avoid blackouts most years, not most days. Therefore, adding solar - at today's margin - still does reduce our capex and need for gas peakers.
The math gets a bit more multidimensional when you do this for real and consider aspects beyond peak demand (like ramping, fuel, current generation fleet, tradeoffs in characteristics of new gas plants, geographic spread, congestion, etc.), but the main point remains true and important: the daily peak is not the annual peak, and it's a clear mistake to use the daily peak to conclude that solar doesn't help with peak demand.
In fact, at today's margins, solar both helps with peak power and with energy generation. It's fantastic. (And of course it gets less and less fantastic the more you add.)
Anyway, this is a common misconception I've seen a lot, so I've added a new section to the Duck Curve Wikipedia article you cited above to help explain it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
As long as you come out ahead overall its still a good idea.
It's like saying gas flaring is a problem and we have a desperate need to solve that before getting rid of coal. Well, it would be nice, but overall swapping coal for natural gas is a good thing regardless.
Can you explain this? How does “wasting some solar” solve the problem when your max solar output is 0 at peak demand?
Fits with a "solar and wind will be too cheap to meter [the amount of cost and materials going into manufacture]" paradigm.
That makes 0 sense. If you have 3x needed capacity at midday but 0x capacity at midnight, you could over-provision by 100x - zero times a hundred is still zero.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/3/20/1712847...
This features some slides from the original use of the term. Note the repeated reference to "Ramp" since that's what the problem was.
> We have to be really careful when we talk about something breaking. The only thing that’s going to break is the economics of solar. The lights are gonna stay on. All it comes down to is more curtailment.
One of the other solutions was asking the gas plants to ramp faster. The specs said the equipment could do it, it was just institutional inertia as they hadn't needed to do it before and so weren't prepared for it.
Even then it was one of those "good problems to have" as it meant you had an unimaginably high (at that time) level of solar. Some places arent as lucky as California when it comes to solar provision.
The fix for the totally seperate "nighttime" problem is some mix of oversupply of wind, hydro, demand management, transmission lines, batteries etc. but we only need to continue with the next low hanging fruit at the moment as we've not even maxed out solar pv (fallacy #1 in the article is expecting instant perfection and having solutions to all the problems we haven't actually hit yet)
Yes, that is the exact point. Unless storage capacity is introduced to the system:
1. It becomes uneconomical to add any more solar plants, because the time when the solar plants can produce already has demand fully met by other, existing solar/wind plants.
2. Since you reach peak daily demand when solar and wind approaches 0 output, it means you need just as much fossil fuel plant generation capacity as before - you can't decommission any of those plants (or, at present, perhaps you just convert them to natural gas).
I'm not sure how this thread went off the rails. All I was originally responding to was the sentiment that "you don't need to worry about storage capacity until you already have the vast majority of your energy met by renewables", and that statement is easily provably false because there are many areas of the world that still have relatively low levels of total power generation from renewables, but until the "time shifting" storage problem is solved it will be uneconomical to add more solar to the system.
> you don't need to worry about storage capacity until you already have the vast majority of your energy met by renewables
This, on the other hand is true.
There are places where incentives (planned or accidental) make batteries a useful, profitable thing to do right now, but only in very small numbers.
For example, some gas peaker plants installed batteries because it let them respond faster to market changes and so earn more money. Does this mean batteries are required for gas peakers? No obviously not.
We need some kind of storage, at a fairly large scale to meet the final 20% or so of going 100% renewable. My bet is green hydrogen is going to be the winner here. We'll also have a bunch of lithium batteries connected to the grid (EVs etc.) because they're useful for other things and will help out in getting to 100% if they have some grid intelligence.
But, nowhere in the world are we at a place where installing solar and/or wind is anywhere near maxed out. And when we are, the fix will not be batteries but things like grid interconnects, demand response, targeted efficiency improvements and a hundred other boring technologies that we already understand.
It's generally cheaper to build more renewables and just find a use for the excess than it is to build batteries.
This is why people who don't like renewables have consistently, for years now, pretended to think that you need to install exactly enough renewables to get 100% of your needs and then use as much lithium batteries as you need to shift that power from the time it was produced to the time it is needed.
This is stupid, and at least some of them know it is stupid and are just saying it for effect.
It is not true, and the numbers they come up with using this model are meaningless.
(And annual peak demand is the correct timeframe to use, since our system targets reliability on the scale of years not days.)
Today's peak: http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html?fbclid=I...
Annual peaks: https://www.caiso.com/documents/californiaisopeakloadhistory...
I wrote a detailed version of this comment later in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436432
When evening dusk envelops Boston and New York, there's still plenty of sunlight near Chicago or Saint Louis. Conversely, when it's still morning dusk in Chicago and Saint Louis, sun is already shining over Boston and New York.
We of course already have transmission lines all over the country. They can help, given some coordination between energy companies, and maybe upgraded in the east-west direction to help deliver solar energy when its generation increases.
This goes with my issue, emergencies. I expected to see that in the article.
When you absolutely MUST have power absolutely right now, renewables don’t cut it with current storage options. Think disaster or pop-up energy needs.
I’m just really skeptical that the hard pushes for renewables are taking into account we should have excess production options in coal and NG going forward.
Anyways, things may or may not work if other countries go into renewables. They may have different spike times - but I kinda doubt it. Most Europe wakes up and plugs its kettles at about the same time. And it's small enough that being windy or cloudy will happen in most of it, at least some of the time.
https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/20180302.h...
https://knoema.com/atlas/Germany/topics/Energy/Electricity/E...
In any case it seems like an unreliable source.
Example of German power imports:
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_trading/chart.htm?l=...
I don't think the but storage is used to argue we shouldn't build renewable resources.
I see three parties to this argument in the states.
1. Climate change deniers - These people don't ever really ever argue about storage in good faith. Because they don't believe climate change is a problem.
2. Pro-Nuclear climate change believers - People who believe climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed and believe nuclear is probably our best bet. This is the group that brings up "but storage" all the time.
3. Anti-Nuclear climate change believers - These people believe that storage isn't really an issue or will be fixed shortly. They believe solar and wind is the solution to our climate change problem.
Group 2 is believes in replacing fossil fuels with renewables. But when it comes to finite amounts of attention, and funding they believe nuclear is a better option.
1. People who don't or won't believe that renewables work
2. People who believe they do.
So whether you like nuclear is irrelevant. If you like nuclear but hate renewables you're in group 1 with the climate change deniers, if you like nuclear but believe the general reality based consensus on renewables costs and viability you're in group 2 along with the people who don't like nuclear.
- air quality, radiation from burning stuff
- noise, pollution
- accidents(mines, oil rigs etc.)
- with every gallon/liter of oil you buy, you send at least 50% of those money to a foreign despot.
Being a climate change "denier" is mostly irrelevant for this discussion.
If you (correctly) think coal causes lots of pollution and fossil fuels have issues and need replaced then whether you end up in group 1 or 2 still depends on whether you agree with the general consensus that renewables are better/cheaper than nuclear or not.
Because they have French nuclear power to back them up. And fucking German coal.
It is also a good primer to relate his experiences to daily work as well. Like fallacies in software engineering. Similar to the encouragement vs. Disencourigment: instead of telling someone 'dont do it's vs. 'sounds interesting. What would be a good easy to do first step to see if it is good'
I encounter “wind mills cause cancer” less often now, but still encounter “kills billions of birds” all the time.
Do you actually converse with people who are against renewables energy? Or even people who claim “it’s not ready”?
The article starts with:
" I was reading this post https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/09/fossil-... on Charles Stross' blog, and the comments, and ... "
So I assumed that some comments there are at least similar to what the author is discussing.
> it is evidently not feasible
No one who has ever incurred in fallacious arguments starts them like that, by naming the fallacy they are about to incur in. But it would be nice.
no, you are wrong, at least in my country.
These arguments are either outright stated or HEAVILY hinted at in the Murdoch Media, and in arguments put together by right wing politics in Australia.
the level of dishonest discourse in green resources and climate change is absurd
As the author said, we don't need 100% today. And he acknowledge that problems exist, and they have to be solved. Wehn reading him, i have the impression that he acknowledge that some issues/blocks can take some time to clear. Why gamble? Just take nuclear as a crutch, plan for 100 year of pilatable nuclear + hydro baseload and 30 year of gaz peakers, to clear the blocks in front of renewables, and if the issues are fixed in the next 30-50 years, great, you can decommission the nuclear plants early!
If you really think GW is the biggest issue of this century, not using all available tools, however dangerous you think they might be, to help you with your issue is plain dumb.
"I think the renewable industry will end up better and cheaper than the current system but if I'm wrong about the renewables industry being good at optimising that bundle of benefits, problems and"?
As far as I know, nuclear fuel is rare and we don't have a solution to thorium reactors yet.
I would personally not mind more nuclear were it makes sense though. Germany is not very suited though as it's quite populated but there is plenty of empty space in USA.
There is a risk though as current nuclear power station have issues in drought situations.
Nonetheless I haven't read is arguments. Perhaps he wrote about it.
I think GP might refer to footnote 1 in the article:
> [...] one could technically replace fossil fuels with nuclear power. it would just be more expensive, more dangerous and slower - so probably only a few billion dead.
Personally, I think modern nuclear reactors (that are optimised for safety and efficiency, not for generating nuclear weapons material) and a tad more sensible regulation could make nuclear power safe and cheap, and turn nuclear (together with renewables, of course) into a formidable weapon against global warming.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006
1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C...
It would be nice if manufacturers had to make them easily replaceable too.
EDIT: Posted to wrong story by mistake.
There's also a decent (especially compared to the market share) community so it has good support for various roms if that's your thing. By default it's a normal Android with Google stuff.
They'll introduce a new model with 5G some time this month, in case you're in the market.
(I'm not affiliated by the way, just a fan)
So, it seems like a fallacy to think that increasing wind and solar power will have not influence the climate.
Is this line of thinking present in the current discussion, or is it not valid?
I suppose 'covering the Sahara in solar panels' might need a little thought in regards to how it affects weather patterns across North Africa and Europe, but we're a wee way off from there yet.
Again, probably not much, mind!
There is also the effect (the name of which I currently can't remember) that consumption increases when people think it does no harm. Like when LED lights were introduced, energy usage allegedly actually increased. Because people were using LED lights for all kinds of things that were NOT using incandescent lights before, as the energy used was thought to be negligible.
This is not true. More lights might be on, but the total energy usage for lights is currently falling with increased LED production. You can find lots of stated fears and speculation on the internet that it could happen - FUD - but not evidence. There is some indirect evidence not specific to LEDs that people sometimes do use more energy when the cost goes down. But LEDs are an order of magnitude more efficient than incandescents, and there has been no such 10x increase in lighting use. Per-capita electricity use in the US is currently falling slowly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Aside from that, I took the first couple of sources I found googling as roughly accurate, and I see estimates of about 35B-45B tons total C02, where around 3B-3.5B might come from 8B humans breathing. So assuming those numbers are anything close to accurate, we are perhaps slightly less than 10%.
As for the energy required to make the concrete, steel and glass that made those same buildings, that has increased the amount of wind that New York has to deal with so indirectly - 'yes', in answer to your question.
I think OP means more 'at the hugely massive scale we appear to need' which I don't think is as neuron-murdering a thought experiment as you so unkindly suggest.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/10/large-scale-w...
Basically, yes, wind power can have effects on the climate, and we should be aware of them and use them to weigh tradeoffs with other power generation options. This is a reasonable question to ask!
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-resear...
Solar panels are also on a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface, the rest receives and treats radiation the same way as always.
And of course a thermal source like nuclear pumps out 3x as much heat pollution (2x at the plant, 1x at the place the power is used).
Direct thermal pollution is still very minor globally, compared to heating from increased greenhouse gases.
One reason is that, as other commenters pointed out, the total volume of wind and solar is currently tiny compared to the energy delivered to the Earth’s surface from the sun. So the size of the effect is not large enough to be noticeable, or probably even measurable.
The other reason involves the mechanics of how wind and solar work.
Solar (photovoltaic) converts electromagnetic energy that would otherwise heat the atmosphere, directly into electricity. But, it converts probably less energy than you think (solar panels still get hot in the sun, i.e. they still radiate in the infrared). And, once the electricity is used by people to do work, the energy is converted back into atmospheric heat. No heat is lost; energy can’t be destroyed.
Wind turbines do absorb energy from the wind, but only from the wind they can reach, which is mostly regional. There is a boundary layer close to the Earth’s surface (below a few thousand feet above mean ground level) where air movement is relatively slow and chaotic. That’s what we experience as “wind” and what wind turbines can reach. But most atmospheric heat transport happens via extremely powerful and persistent air currents higher in the atmosphere. You may have heard of the “jet stream” for example. Wind turbines in high enough concentration could conceivably have a regional effect on wind patterns (just like tall buildings do) but it’s basically adding a small amount of local chaos to a part of the atmosphere that is already small and chaotic, like adding a couple new rocks to the bottom of a river. You might create some new little eddies along the bottom, but you’re not meaningfully affecting the main flow.
1- wind and solar (and hydro) are so much better than coal when it comes global warming and other negative environmental impact, the main reason to bring up “concerns” is entrenched economic interests, and not real fears of increased warming. The fact is that renewable sources are net cooling - and not by a little - compared to the warming we’re already causing with coal burning and CO2 emissions.
2- The scale of the earth’s atmosphere and surface area are “very large” compared to our solar and wind farms. So large that it might seem funny at first to think turbines or solar cells would have any effect. One way to think about turbines is that they’re somewhat comparable to trees, and we’ve lost many times more trees in the last 50 years than we’ve added turbines. Another way is to compare the height of a turbine (say, 100 meters) to the height of the wind (maybe 400 km, depending how you measure), so the turbines touch maybe 1/4000 of the vertical air, and across the world cover very little of the total land area, meaning the total volume of air impacted by turbines is ‘tiny’.
According to my internet searches just now, the earth’s land surface (1.5e14 m^2) gets, on average, 2.4e16 watts of solar power. [1] The total solar power production today is just less than 800GW, or 8e11 watts. [2] So solar might be capturing one thirty-thousandth of the surface energy, or 0.003%. (And that actually seems surprisingly large to me, it’s possible I’m missing more orders of magnitude somewhere. I don’t think solar farms are covering anywhere near as much as 0.003% of the surface of the earth.)
Atmospheric energy is about half of the surface energy, and wind is currently capturing roughly the same as solar [3], so maybe we could estimate it about 0.006% of the wind energy.
[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/EnergyBalance
[2] https://iea-pvps.org/snapshot-reports/snapshot-2021/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country
1. effort is put into abating the issue to some degree.
2. billions of birds are killed due to human activity. Number one is house cats, but impacts with windows and cars is orders of magnitude more than due to wind turbines.
3. wind power displaces gas and coal power. the effects of pollution (particulates, mercury, etc) is far worse than wind turbines for birds. not only that but it is better for anything that breathes oxygen, including humans.
So if the "what about the birds" crowd actually cared about birds, they'd push for wind power over coal. But it isn't about the birds; it is a pretext for keeping the status quo.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encina_Power_Station#Retiremen...
I lived there. I believed the 'environmentalists' when they said that SONGS would be replaced by renewables. I am not falling for it again.
Not to mention, the comment is practically a truism aside from the locations mentioned:
"Wind only displaces gas and coal when governments aren't shutting down nuclear to persue [sic] it..."
If a nuclear plant were shut down and replaced entirely with wind, then that necessarily means that coal and gas are not displaced.
"Wind only displaces gas and coal when governments aren't shutting down nuclear to persue it like in Germany, California, New York, etc."
Notice that word "Germany"?
The "nuclear waste" is still mostly fuel, it can be processed and burned further. But this involves, among other things, producing and extracting plutonium (which itself is a fine nuclear fuel), and thus some suspicion of producing more nuclear weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
Not sure how valid it is, but I thought it was interesting and hadn't heard it before.
In a real encounter with friction, some of the KE is lost to heat.
The initial source of the particle's KE was heat from the Sun causing weather. So the net energy is constant, the local temperature is higher because the blade has heated up at the cost of the air particle's motion, but overall temperature is the same because more heat from the sun will be needed to restore the air particle's motion that was lost to friction. It all balances out in the end.
The fact that the total energy is the same doesn't necessarily mean it's okay. Hypothetically if wind turbines set up a gradient so that the first few meters of atmosphere become hotter and the rest of the atmosphere becomes colder, total energy is conserved, but it's not a desirable outcome. But I don't know if humans can build enough wind turbines to make that possible; the Earth is very big and the atmosphere has a lot of mass.
I'd expect several components of a wind turbine to require power. Its electronic components may need power for cooling or heating depending on the season. The motors that change the blade pitch need power.
Some of these things need to work when the blades are stopped. One way to do that would be to power them from the grid instead of from the turbine.
If those things are grid powered, then a wind turbine might actually very very very slightly raise local atmospheric temperature.
Anyone here happen to know if they actually do power anything in the turbine from the grid, or if they do something else like power such things from batteries that get recharged by the turbine when it is generating power?
If this were happening at a significant scale, it would decrease atmospheric temperatures, because the energy that ends up heating the blades would have to come from somewhere, and the air would lose some of its kinetic energy.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Am I missing something?
Compare an EV and a petrol one. If you want to go from Lisbon to Vladivostok, this will be a breeze with a petrol car and a headache with an EV (I'm not sure it's even possible, good luck charging it fast in the deepest parts of Russia).
Fusion and nuclear count too imo. Those work rain or shine.
Whether someone cares about wildlife does not affect whether a logical argument is true or not.
That's a logical fallacy. You already lost me.
Only a portfolio of all sources can enable a transition and time required to debug all the problems with the new technology. But Green Absolutism has no room for that. The fact is: We Will be using fossil fuels in the next 50-100 years still. It may become smaller or more limited but it will NOT be zero. If you try to force the issue to absolutely, we will end up with NOTHING - either from Green or from Fossil because the system will break. Just like supply chains have broken recently, fossil fuels are just as deeply intertwined into the supply chain network FOR EVERYTHING that is post-1800 technology. It's like a jenga pile or pick-up-stix situation.
There are far more important barriers in the way of 100% renewable energy than these strawman arguments.
I'm very skeptical about renewables ability to address any of our climate problems, but that stems more deeply from the clear observation that globally, we are not replacing fossil fuels with renewables, but rather supplementing fossil fuel energy. Globally all sources of energy production have continued to rise. And to preempt any "but Germany/Sweden/etc!?", the planet does not care about some local success if globally emissions rise.
The problem is that most renewable advocates argue that renewables will solve our energy and carbon problems so we don't need to consider any other method of decarbonization that will necessarily result in economic contraction.
Our way of life is absolutely unsustainable. I would certainly hope that renewables would allow us to have a less severe economic contraction then without, but the idea that we can just keep on with current economic growth and that renewables will magically allow this to happen without permanent and catastrophic impacts on our climate is dangerously naive.
The original argument for renewables was that they would help us with decarbonization. They objectively do not. We do objectively know that reduced economic activity does reduce emissions. If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change we need immediate and aggressive decarbonization. Maybe renewables will have a major part to play in our less industrial future, but alone they have proven incapable of even mitigating this problem.
nuclear in the only viable green energy, and the EU is on its way to recognize nuclear as green energy.
renewables at a large scale is not worth it because there is just not enough copper on earth for it, and same goes for batteries.