It doesn't really matter if renewable generated more energy than coal for 1 day. What matters is annual generation.
Renewables generates 5 times less than coal annually and still peak for a short period of time, so this is not a big progress. Wind turbines can have big energy peaks when it's very windy, but there is no cheap way to store that energy for a long period of time, WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.
And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.
> combined wind and solar generation increased from 12 percent of national power production in 2021 to 14 percent in 2022. Hydropower, biomass, and geothermal added another 7 percent — for a total share of 21 percent renewables last year. The figure narrowly exceeded coal’s 20 percent share of electricity generation, which fell from 23 percent in 2021.
the article is speaking about average power, not peak power. how do you and the article present such different figures?
> but there is no cheap way to store that energy for a long period of time
It's getting close to the point that wind+storage can compete with nuclear, and even gas, on price. With the way cost has been developing on renewables and energy storage sulitons it's more or less inevitable. You're also starting to see off-shore wind, even floating off-shore, come rapidly down in cost, and those have more stable generation and require less energy storage.
The problem of storage is also exaggerated by people who haven't looked at the big picture. We need to replace oil/gas in lots of areas where you need to store and transform energy anyway. Like cars. Think about it.. if you buy an EV you'll generally have enough storage there to power your house for 1-3 days. In a world where all cars are BEVs we'll be well within an order of magnititude of having the manufacturing capacity to have energy storage for all homes. You can even feed electricity from BEVs back into the grid, and I already have my BEV set to only charge in the hours where electricity is cheapest right now. We're also starting to see people use smart controllers to exploit the storage capacity in hot water tanks.
Green metal production will also be a huge source of flexible load. Somewhat related to that, there's even molten metal batteries that can provide extremely cheap grid storage.
> WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.
If you need to shout I'm just led to expect you don't have much meat behind your opinion. Anyway, the problem is just this: what we really need isn't baseload.
You can't solve the worlds energy crisis without lots and lots of renewables. Going all nuclear would be too expensive, too slow, and would probably generate enough heat to slow recovery after climate change. Thermal power plants in general have a whole range of issue that makes it a bad idea to go all-in on it.
Nuclear can certainly supplement with a bit of baseload capacity. But what we need is load following and peaker plants. We need a replacement to gas power plants. Because those are what works well when combining with renewables. And without lots of renewables we have zero hope of combatting climate change.
> And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.
At least copper and steel is easily recycled, with low carbon impact. Nuclear power plants use a lot of concrete and the sustainability of that is far more uncertain.
The extremist right wing parties in Sweden are dead set against wind power. For many reasons, mainly because it's politically good to differentiate yourself like that against the evil greens. Sweden produces a significant amount of steel and has green metal production up and running. I would say that there is a real risk this will not be expanded to commercial deliveries because of populism against wind power, but I am overly pessimistic whenever I see right wing populism.
SSAB and LKAB has experimented with green steel since ~2017. [0]
Too bad the capital requirements upfront are so expensive for nuclear and literally no one wants to fund a project that will cost at least $8 billion, won't be online for a decade, and the power it be will produce is already more expensive than that of smaller renewable projects.
Who knows maybe once renewable market penetration is nearly maxed out and if storage tech somehow hasn't caught up enough despite the great strides being made, the economics won't be so terrible for the GREENEST BASELOAD.
Solar and wind power sources requires an absurd amount of metal (sometimes rare metals) to build the generators (solar panels, wind turbines, etc). This metal is extracted today with an enourmous consumption of fossil fuels, and it will be difficult to have a greener alternative for this extraction (anything running on batteries will require even MORE metal).
The prices per Mwh of renewable energy sources are heavily linked to the prices of fossil fuels, which are quite "low" compared to what will probably happen in the next decades. Moreover, most metals are getting harder and harder to extract (it's likely that we met the peak of copper extraction already), which means that we'll have to dig deeper and deeper to get metal.
I'm not saying we should not invest in renewables, but it will be probably be 10x to 50x more expensive to maintain a renewable parc of solar panels or wind turbines without relying on fossil fuels at all, which will cause the prices per mwh to explode.
Countries that try to go 100% renewable without a healthy dose of nuclear energy will probably end up either burning fossil fuels or buying raw materials from countries that does, at a very heavy price.
basically you are working from wildly incorrect information and consequently coming to completely incorrect conclusions
it's very difficult to predict future technological developments, especially as to pricing, but getting nuclear power down to the price of pv would require dramatic reductions in the cost of heat engines; the nuclear island is only a part of the cost of a nuclear power plant, and the rest of the plant is by itself enough to make the plant economically uncompetitive
solar panels, as i understand it, contain minuscule quantities of metal; they're mostly silicon and glass, with much smaller amounts of boron, phosphorus, aluminum, copper, silver, and eva. but they are commonly mounted in aluminium frames, on the order of a gram of aluminum per peak watt or ten grams per average watt
refining aluminum or iron from ore does cost a significant amount of energy, but there's no real obstacle to doing it with renewable energy and no fossil fuels; aluminum smelting pots won't even notice, and in the case of steelmaking, the technical problems of reduction with hydrogen are interesting but don't pose a risk to the success of the enterprise. the energy payback time on current solar panels is a few months, which is to say they generate all the energy needed to reproduce themselves (metals and all) in that time
aluminum, silicon, and iron are among the most abundant elements in the earth's crust (#3, #2, and #4, respectively), so there's no real risk of having to dig for them. even copper averages 100 ppm. with silver there's a bit of a pinch, as about 10% of world silver production is going to solar panels; copper works as a substitute but significantly impairs efficiency
windmills use the same kind of electrical generator you'd use in a coal or nuclear plant, just at a lower duty cycle, so at worst they have a small disadvantage relative to fossil fuels in terms of metal use. the counterbalancing advantage is that they don't need steam plumbing or a parsons turbine; windmill blades are fiberglass, not metal
(sometimes generators do use rare elements, but that's just a matter of what's cheaper at the moment)
that's why renewable energy from pv and wind is already much cheaper than fossil energy and continuing to get cheaper
if your conclusion were correct, then despite your posited subsidy from cheap fossil fuels, pv and wind energy would already be more expensive than fossil-fuel energy, as it was until about 02014, because their energy payback time would have to be decades. you're two orders of magnitude outdated
Nuclear is economically viable where and when regulations are sane. Nobody wants to fund a project that could get shut down on a whim by government after years of work and billions already invested.
And wind requires immense use of rare metals that are often acquired through slave labour and create massive radioactive pools of waste.
It is interesting to see the responses to Nuclear of 'too much up front/takes too long' while simultaneously patiently waiting out solar/wind 'it's getting there.'
Interesting they also included biomass here as it is certainly not a carbon friendly process nor renewable.
Too much 'we've picked our winners and won't hear a negative word' in this space now, and it's getting worse.
Nuclear is obviously an amazing source of energy, but the stigma is insane.
In high school, my Chem II class had an assignment where pairs of kids had to present on why nuclear was good or bad. Of 16 or so kids, only my friend and I presented on why nuclear energy was good. Even the chemistry teacher was against nuclear energy.
It's wild how bad the reputation of nuclear energy has been, when the alternative has largely been fossil fuels. It's really not that dangerous relative to source for 80% of energy production the world still relies on.
The division of electricity production into baseload, load-following and peaker categories is just a historical anachronism.
Coal and nuclear plants have poor abilities to ramp power production up and down in response to fluctuating demand, so they were called 'baseload'. Various versions of natural gas power plants could respond more rapidly, so they were typically placed in the other other two categories.
This is all irrelevant if you have distributed wind/solar production coupled to efficient storage systems that manage the distribution using technology that doesn't have those limitations. Practically that means short term storage of power in batteries (daily), long-term storage in synthetic fuels (seasonal).
Solar gives lots of electricity in the summer. But you have light and warmth then. In the winter when you need the electricity, you get maybe 1/10 of whatever the solar array is capable of.
Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations.
Biogas (eg anaerobic digestors) seems much more possible - but even these need warmth to run well - so aren't as good in the winter.
And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so), but that the battery will only last a few years - how people think the economics make sense is a mystery to me.
I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps.
PS - the battery thing also applies to cars. Old electric cars are basically not worth keeping after 10 years. Who would replace the old battery that costs as much as the car? Esp when the battery slots are incompatible with the latest advances - ie you can't upgrade to a better battery, but only install yesterday's tech.
Yes, but often too much of it, so lots of people use AC, which uses a LOT of power. Electricity is needed all the year.
"Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations."
And there is wind everywhere, but only if you build high enough.
So yes, there are places where it makes no sense to build them, but there are a lot more other places, where it does.
"I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy"
So a solar + battery powered off grid home is deep controlled by the government?
May you explain how that works?
"And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so),"
Have you looked up any actual numbers? Maybe do so. Also maybe that part, that tracks how the battery prices are changing. They are constantly getting cheaper.
Also maybe you are aware, that the whole industry that was and is fossil based needs to change. Your criticism comes from an angle, that assumes that should be for free?
Burning fossil fuels is cheap. But only if you ignore the external costs of climate change and air pollution.
> Solar gives lots of electricity in the summer. But you have light and warmth then. In the winter when you need the electricity, you get maybe 1/10 of whatever the solar array is capable of.
The third phase of the energy transition will see massive overcapacity in the summer being turned into chemical energy, to be stored until winter. Hydrogen and synthetic methan will be burned, and the dissipating heat used for district heating. Efficiency is north of 70% for this. I don't see a fundamental problem.
Do you have a source for north of 70%? I’m not implying it’s incorrect, but I haven’t seen any papers with this level of efficiency for similar proposals.
The 70% is not for conversion into electricity but for total useable energy if the waste heat is used in district heating networks. It can reach up to 80% of the primary fuel used. While that seems worse then simply burning it at the end user you have to keep in mind that you also gain electricity which can be used to drive a heat pump. This is by far the best way to burn gas if heat is needed as a result.
Yepp. The power plant in my area claims 83% efficiency for that pipeline already (natural gas to electricity & heat), using heat coupling (about 50% electricity). And they're working on powering that with hydrogen in the future.
We're not there yet. Currently, this setup is non-sensical since a lot of other measures should be implemented first, but even currently existing tech is pretty efficient, all things considered. And it only gets better from here.
That paper is awesome, thanks for posting. As well as efficiency, I'm also interested in life cycle analysis of these kind of tech if you know of any good papers.
Lots of southern places where solar is great all year. For more northern locations, cutting down on coal/gas usage for half the year is much better than nothing.
It might be worse. You can’t just dial up and dial down production and processing of fuels. And the regulatory climate is very hostile. So it’s a reasonable business decision to shut down a capital intensive coal mine when demand drops, or to give up on natural gas pipelines (constant hostile regulators, activist lawfare and protests) when demand drops.
It seems you are basing your thoughts just anecdotally. For instance, I'm sure "winter" in USA doesn't mean 6 months of snow and cloud. I'm sure in some areas winter actually is probably better. And sure wind isn't good energy in all locations - but in areas where it is you can probably harness it at quite high density. I'm in Australia and was just looking at this research here looking at cost effectiveness. It seems to both look at the actual generation capability (that is amount of sun and wind) but also cost of distribution and whether it is going to impact wilderness or other uses. Have a look at the heat maps they have created. I'm sure there are similar studies in the USA. https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/heatmaps/#map-links
Ironic about winter, right? In some places in the world, there is more sunshine and less clouds during winter. Nice example: Tokyo (Japan) metropolis. It is typically cloudy and less sunny during summer months and far more sunny during winter months. That said, you will probably needs panels that can adjust tilt by season for maximum energy production.
"I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps."
That sounds like unfounded paranoia. It has literally never been easier to be an energy-independent anarchist living in a hut somewhere than today.
Yup. Large shift in lifestyle to become an energy-independent anarchist living off of the grid without electricity. Not much shift if you want off-grid electricity, but expensive. Seems people deciding electricity is nifty are on to something.
But with multi-kw solar+battery kits selling everywhere for just a few $k, and 1000-lumen LED lights pulling only single-digit watts, it's getting affordable to have both
I guess there is a continuum of “expense” and “lifestyle change,” since you can pick solar installations of various sizes. Choose your own off grid anarchist experience!
Really? What control does the government have over renewables? Fossil fuels bought the government and nuclear is entirely controlled by the government.
Edit: Tesla cars at 200k miles typically retain 80% of their total capacity. The 10 years you quote is the full warranty period. Additionally it costs about $10k to replace the batteries. House hold battery’s last about 20+ years, with 30+ possible without daily draw (quoted based on Tesla power wall specs).
I don’t know where you’re getting your battery facts from, but they’re essentially wrong. I suspect it’s not renewables that’s been captured but your biases.
Sure 100% solar powered homes might be harder to do in the colder hemispheres but in many parts of the world it is already possible.
During spring, summer and autumn you can cover most of your electricity with a 3kW solar panel set up. Shift your dishwasher, washing machine and dryer to mid day, charge devices when the sun shines etc.
Families in poorer countries are likely on a much smaller carbon footprint and it is therefore easier to replace their energy needs with solar or solar thermal.
Small, medium as well as large scale island grids are already possible and in operation. https://reneweconomy.com.au/wa-off-grid-school-runs-100-on-s...
For colder climates the solar alone will not cut it, insulated homes, heat pumps and solar can however.
Ironically most renewables are far more distributed and local than something like gas plants. Instead of maintaining continent-spanning supply chains you can just put your panels up and leave them for a decade or two.
> I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps.
As opposed to government-sanctioned utility companies and petrol companies? Its pretty easy to make your own solar panel (not an efficient one, but something). It is very capital intensive to mine for natural gas and crude these days. Surely the solar panel + battery offers more independence (as evidenced by the fact that nearly every large RV owner is thinking about getting solar now).
> Replacing over a billion ICE cars seems with EV’s is going to be so much more work, for example.
Instead we could replace ICE cars with no cars and get much more bang for our buck. A few changes to how we build so that you can walk/bike within 15 minutes for many daily needs would reduce energy consumption, save families money, still allow for a car, and everyone would be much happier and healthier.
Cars for all transit is a bad solution regardless of ICE or EV.
> How about reporting back once you’ve convinced a billion people to change their habits?
For better or worse they’ll be forced out of their habits against their wishes because the economic physics just doesn’t work. Unless of course they are ready and willing to go to war and to exterminate populations for resources.
Ideally we avoid a lot of that by just building sidewalks and planning now, but to your point - can’t convince people. Who moved my cheese? Boomer central, etc.
We can start with new developments, and we can just allow someone to sell their house in an existing neighborhood to someone who wants to make it a neighborhood grocery store. No deconstruction if “75 years of infrastructure” required.
One thing that's often overlooked in statistics like this is roof top solar because it's just not that easy to account for. In places like Australia, where double digit percentages of homes have solar and where building codes are actually being changed to require solar panels, this is a non trivial amount that is putting a lot of pressure on energy suppliers to adapt. Effectively whole states are running on solar when the sun comes out (which it does a lot over there). Whether they like it or not, demand for grid electricity drops a lot whenever these panels are producing. And of course a lot of people are installing batteries as well. That must be happening in the US as well and it must be having some impact.
https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-research-data This article seems to suggest that the amount of installed solar has doubled in the last four years and that the pace is accelerating. Also it states that the solar market expanded by 40% last year.
Sure, but is that slowing down installations or just setting us up for a correction some time in the future when people install solar anyway? It seems to me that the market for rooftop solar is in any case supply constrained, not demand constrained.
And I can't imagine this being very popular with homeowners or the politicians that represent them, regardless of their political color. So, there might be some backlash against this as well at some point.
Correct. Legislation to disincentive rooftop solar works until battery economics improve sufficiently, at which point the install velocity accelerates because you can sidestep unfavorable net metering or time of day pricing. You’ll then consume your own solar during production, consume it from batteries when not producing, and relying on the grid for shortfall. The next fight will be the legal ability to disconnect from the grid and be self sufficient when they attempt to make connection charges onerous and mandatory.
Tangentially, at scale, this is referred to as a utility death spiral.
The future of some electrity giants is "peaking" (cloudy / windless days and nights) and electricty transfer. They need to adjust for the future, instead of cry like big babies.
I have solar on my roof, but I had to negotiate a net metering agreement with my utility company. I have friends saying the same utility company is now pushing back on new agreements. It seems that stupid issues will need to be resolved before solar hits a critical mass.
Net metering is a bad deal for utilities, though. The “delivery” part of the cost of electricity is more than half; it accounts for the maintenance of the grid etc. People dumping energy into the grid doesn’t lower that cost.
This is an important point that applies more broadly: anything that lowers electricity costs for consumers is a "bad deal" for utilities.
Since in most areas, utilities are monopolies that are not subject to competition, they should not be allowed to deny cost-saving tech advances just because it lowers overall system cost and their overall percentage of revenue and profit goes down.
The thing is, there are issues with handling a grid that go beyond the money aspect.
Balancing a grid that relies on a few production plants is already a non-trivial endeavour.
Changing the network is usually a slow process. Adding a new power line to fix some topologic issues can take years to plan and millions to build.
Having a robust grid means grid operators have to know details of the network, and be able to know how to reroute power when a line becomes too close to its limits or (worse) when a circuit-breaker opens. Studying the current network takes time.
That's why adapting to frequent changes isn't realistic, purely from the carrier's perspective, without even looking into power production aspects.
Thank you for saying this out loud. Let me preface by saying that I am not a shill for big electricity companies. The cost of electricity, including green energy, and "net metering" needs to including the cost of transfer -- basically "big wires". Most people are delusional about the cost of transfer. One idea: Force generation and electricity transfer to be separate companies. Today, they are frequently a single company. This might help to create more realistic "net metering" pricing. Also, it might help to have some gov't rules for "net metering" pricing contracts.
Edit
So typical here: Your comment is being downvoted. It still stands an important point to consider.
by 'transfer' do you mean distribution, transmission, or the kind of grid operation carried out by isos and rtos
with the right pricing incentives, rooftop solar ought to decrease the amount of transmission capacity required rather than increasing it, by generating the required power closer to the point of use
There are various lines at various voltages. Some are 18k+. In commercial manufacturing may be 13.8k, which is further stepped down to 480 and 220 and 110.
The point is that unless a residence can independently provide for their own electricity every hour of the day, then the generation and distribution will be sized for full load.
it still seems that you are unaware of the distinction i was focusing on between transmission systems and distribution systems
a residence that can provide some of its own power during peak hours does not need distribution, transmission, or (utility-scale) generation sized for full load; a neighborhood that can provide some of its own power during peak hours does not need transmission or (utility-scale) generation sized for full load, just distribution. this is a much less onerous requirement than the one you erroneously believe to be necessary
Most of the components don't have a meaningful "maximum load". There's a load with 40-year life, a load with 10-year life, and a load with 160-year life (and obviously this is a continuous curve). It's okay to spend some time at 10-year life load if you can spend more time at the 160-year load than the typical model expects.
things like transformers have a 1-minute load which, if you don't exceed it, they'll last 40 years, but if you exceed it significantly, they'll often catch on fire and explode within a few minutes
it's true that there's probably a load right at the rated load which will gradually cook the transformer over the course of 10 years or so, but that's a pretty narrow window
that's the kind of capacity that needs to be expanded
Doesn't really change the point. Current infrastructures are rarely built to have distribution networks feed back into the HT grid. They are also not as monitored as the HT grid is.
This may change in the future, but until some politician cares enough and passes the cost on to the taxpayer, there's going to be friction for these changes.
> The “delivery” part of the cost of electricity is more than half; it accounts for the maintenance of the grid etc. People dumping energy into the grid doesn’t lower that cost.
This sounds like a pretty good reason for utilities to be a public affair.
The transmission corporation in the state where I live India has had net metering option for a while now. They recently introduced grid maintenance cost chargeable to those exporting solar power to the grid. Despite that it's no brainer for us here to install roof top solar with net metering.
I’m in BC, Canada and just pulled the trigger on 14.56 kw if ground mount for $42k CAD, tax included. Wondering why Solar is so much more expensive (ignoring the batteries) in your area? I’d think it would be a lot cheaper with more competition.
Going with Longi bifacial panels - does the US restrict or add huge duties on Chinese panels?
GP did not mention the mounting option, so I assume they were going for a roof installation. Which has to be a significant markup vs ground mount. I am only partially handy, but even I could throw some poles in the ground and a frame to hold solar panels. Doing the same for a roof would be significantly beyond my abilities.
From the quotes we received ground mount is usually quite a bit more expensive per installed watt. The frames cost more, there’s longer runs of cabling, etc.
Huh, never would have guessed. I assumed cabling was basically free, and the only difference would be the solar mounts were attached to poles vs a roof.
There was a recent experiment[0] where a company is going to start putting panels directly on the ground without any mounting hardware.
Just as a comparison, I did my own 6.7kWh ground mount array, so I can tell you that the materials costs (to a homeowner) for that were about US$13k. That was in 2020 - not sure how those costs have moved since then, but a significant part of the cost you're being quoted is labor.
i'd be interested in a rough breakdown of the costs if you happen to remember
solarserver's photovoltaik preisindex makes it seem like that's about 10 percent pv modules and the rest is either retail markup (or tariffs) or balance of system; is that true?
Alas, I only remember that I paid what was then wholesale solar (OR) almost exactly $10k for the panels, racking, inverter, and the little optimizers that sit under every panel, then about $1k for the iron tubing for the rack, about $600 in concrete, and another $1500 on sundry electrical supplies (conduit, wiring, junction boxes etc.)
Have you calculated the savings each month in your electric bill and compared that to the cost of a loan for the solar? Maybe this is a bad time because of interest rates but my sister has a two story house in NY with solar and is saving between $100 and $150 a month.
I will install solar(not in US) but AFAIK batteries are not yet cost effective, Am I wrong and someone invented some cheap batteries? I expect that a company could be more efficient building giant batteries(chemical, gravity, etc) then a household buying something and maintaining it.
Batteries are not cheap, but they are cost effective based on local conditions.
Time of use billing. The battery is generating ROI if it can arbitrage energy over the day.
Net metering + solar. If net metering is not available, or sufficiently discounted, and your energy usage is not high enough during the day to use all your solar power, then batteries generate ROI.
Grid stability. A battery effectively is insurance against outages of a few hours. With sufficient solar and rationing, that may extend to week long outages (think natural disasters).
Yes indeed, even a small battery that allows you to shift the late afternoon usage of your house away from the grid will generate ROI by saving you electricity cost compared to a lower feed in tariff during the day.
I think a solar system that also gives you independence from the grid is much more expensive, the program that we are using to get some subsidies do not include this extra features , so if power is out even if we have solar we still be out of power. Maybe in 10 years or realistically more a more advanced system would be worth it for my situation.
> ...have solar and where building codes are actually being changed to require solar panels...
Do you have a source for that? It sounds kinda silly. The maintenance + OH&S aspects of solar panels are nontrivial and it doesn't make sense to mandate them on residential homes.
I've always assumed that once the economics make sense it'll be easier to build a massive solar farm and let people use the grid as usual. Much less risk of people falling off roofs,heavy objects falling off roofs, wiring being misconnected, weird maintenance problems, managing the ebb and flow of energy, etc. I don't want to have to look after my own panels.
I don't really understand the advantage of rooftop solar over just putting the same number of solar panels in a field somewhere. Id think it would be a lot cheaper to install the panels in one-place then having to distribute them to a bunch of differently shaped and oriented roof tops, and cheaper to have a few large inverters instead of a bunch of small ones.
Technically, there's also distribution losses (just because we can do HVDC, 5% losses per 1000km, doesn't mean we want to spend the money for it); but I think it's mainly to avoid politicians decrying prime farmland being used for a thing they don't think looks as pretty as sheep grazing on grassy rolling hills.
Depends on the country - some fields are better used for construction, farming or just being left as a natural habitat. And the roofs can't be used for any of those three things. So...
But it depends on the country. Some countries have a whole lot of "low use" fields, like natural or industrial deserts. Others don't.
Electrical transmission and distribution costs dwarf the cost of solar generation, 1x-5x the cost of solar generation, and you have to beef all that up for utility scale solar.
Also, the interconnection queues for attaching your project to the grid are getting astronomically long now, and this is one of the biggest impediments to new renewable generation. One of the most valuable assets of a coal generation sites is its connection to the grid; all the rest of facility might have negative value, but the value of the connection can offset all that.
Utility scale solar is great, until you consider how to connect it up to load.
I'm honestly surprised about transmission and distribution costs dwarfing other costs. In my country, it's about 30% of power cost, and power generation costs here are pretty cheap, considering they've been amortized for a while now.
Are you working in an area with a low consumer density?
> Also, the interconnection queues for attaching your project to the grid are getting astronomically long now, and this is one of the biggest impediments to new renewable generation.
Yeah, that's unsurprising. Power Grids are not something that adapts fast to topological change.
Those costs are paid either way though, aren't they? At least, it seems that close to 100% of houses with roof-top solar are still grid connected, so I don't really see how they'd achieve any savings related to transmission and distribution.
With no behind-the-meter solar, the peak for T&D is during midday.
With behind-the-meter solar, this peak is capped, and if the local solar is allowed to power the rest of the distribution nod with net metering, then that means less transmission too.
T&D must be sized for the peak, so lots of residential solar means a lower peak and lower T&D costs.
Of course, this goes agains the utility narrative, because they can't admit that or else their regulators might have to allow such residential net metering. Instead, utilities try to frame the argument that solar customers are taking away from their neighbors or somehow not paying their fair share.
But when evaluated as a whole system, using massive distributed solar along with utility scale is far cheaper than building it all utility scale due to the T&D savings.
A decent reason to have rooftop solar is that it reduces daytime distribution node demand which reduces wholesale commodity prices and takes pressure of the electricity delivery infrastructure (wires, transformers, etc). These are real costs we all pay in terms of capacity and distribution.
>I don't really understand the advantage of rooftop solar
I see many advantages, among them:
- You don't have to find new land; roofs are ideal for solar.
- No need for a huge project, financing, bureaucracy. Done in weeks.
- Costs are low and spread over tons of landowners instead of requiring fundraising and negotiations
- You can have literally thousands of workers busy creating solar power at the same time.
- You get geographic spread and will be less affected by clouds over your central solar plant.
- No single point of failure
- Less need for large and expensive long-distance powerlines
Rooftop solar puts the power to solve a problem in the hands of the people experiencing the problem and eliminates the need for a megaproject. This has turned out to be really powerful, rooftop solar has grown extremely quickly.
You don't have greedy third parties exploiting monopolies over the electricity you consume.
By all means, it should be much cheaper to make large solar farm on some suitable place and buy the electricity from there. The fact that it isn't can't be explained by technical factors.
rooftop solar has the advantage that it doesn't depend on installing new transmission lines to get a grid connection
this is especially important in backwards countries like the usa with their so-called license raj preventing modernization
since most household energy is used for low-grade heating and cooling (refrigerator, air conditioner, oven, clothes dryer) i think thermal energy storage is likely to be a crucial enabling factor; mit's solar house used phase-change materials, but i suspect thermochemical energy storage is a better option
(why thermal energy storage instead of batteries? in the limit it's about three orders of magnitude higher capacity for a given price)
If the wind stops blowing that means no new weather systems are being formed. In which case the sun must have stopped shining and the entire planet is doomed.
Another way to look at it, renewables are so cheap 100% renewable usage will be dominated by grid-scale battery cost. What is the magnitude of battery price drops that we will see over the next 10-15 years? The cheaper the batteries are the greater the incentive to build renewables.
> The economics of renewables are hard to beat until night falls and the wind stops blowing, at which point the cost jumps to $infinity/MWh
I can understand why you might think that. But there is one place on the planet that's done the renewable transition now. And it proves you wrong.
Let me introduce the state of South Australia. It's an advanced OECD economy, situated at the base end of Australia so far from anywhere it has only 1 transmission line connecting to a neighbouring state, and it's renowned for going down. Unusually for Australia, South Australia also has no coal or gas, and is famous for wild storms taking down kilometres of it's 100kv power lines.
The transition was expensive. SA already had the most expensive electricity in Australia, and during the transition prices did go up for years. But at 80% the transition is almost over (although they need to build more storage), and the price of electricity in SA has been dropping. In fact it's dropped below the pre-transition price, so it's often below the rest of Australia's coal fired generation:
With that example to follow, the rest of the Australian states are gritting their teeth and following South Australia's lead. Teeth gritting is required because we are predicting a 50% jump in electricity prices, during the transition. It's already starting to bite: https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/power-bills-to-rise-by-... . But that price hike only lasted 5 years in SA, and the light at the end of the tunnel is lower prices than we have now.
One thing I have idly considered - what to do with the excess daily solar energy? Presumably the problem is only going to magnify over the coming years. Net-metering agreements are continuing to get worse, so it seems that the surplus electricity will go to waste.
Outside of bitcoin mining, is there any energy sink a residential user could engage to suck up the spare capacity? At the industrial scale - what processes can intermittently engage in production which is still cost effective if the equipment lays idle for a majority of the day?
Electrolyzing excess energy to produce hydrogen is a good option. Sure, it is not that efficient but you can store hydrogen and it's a useful base ingredient for many industrial processes. And if you need electrical energy you just burn it in a gas-fired power plant.
Unfortunately the equipment isn't cheap (though getting cheaper), so it only makes sense if it can run a significant portion (I've heard 25% in the coming decade for germany) of the time.
25% utilization is significantly better than I would have expected. In the middle of Summer, there might already be 6 hours of underutilized solar (averaged with 0% excess in Winter). Given another 10 years of engineering and cost improvements, that does indeed sound a plausible use case.
It's so funny to read discussions of "whether or not renewables are viable for replacement of all or most of electricity needs in the U.S.". Here in Europe, we have it figured many years ago and are replacing fossil-fueled generation at a crazy rate, will probably push it to a niche use (gas peakers to fill void when there's neither sun or wind and before enough electrolyzers are put online), in less than 10 years.
Forget global warming. Of course it will not be stopped. All fossil fuels will be burnt till full exhaustion of reserves, until the remainder is completely uneconomical to extract. But then the nations that were the last to start switching will find their economies too inefficient and expensive to run with the fossil fuels while everyone else is using much cheaper renewables, and will probably no longer have money for the switch, ending up in a major predicament.
As climate risk increases demand for renewables, we may actually see a decline in price for fossil fuels, at least for a time, resulting in prolonged bimodal consumption.
I think we've been in this artificially low fossil fuel price environment since the beginning though: the externalities aren't priced in.
One way or another, it will definitely be stopped. At some point, civilization collapse would end the burning of fossil fuels at scale. The question is at what point it will stop and whether any tipping points are passed which accelerate the process out of control.
It's far from obvious that all efforts to limit carbon emissions will fail and to say otherwise is deeply cynical. Measures are being taken already. They are not enough to reach the claimed goals and the claimed goals will probably not be reached, but that's very different from saying warming will not be stopped at all, let alone "of course". More measures will follow once the adverse effects get worse in industrialized countries (e.g. deaths and economic damage due to changing climate and weather events).
> But then the nations that were the last to start switching will find their economies too inefficient and expensive to run with the fossil fuels while everyone else is using much cheaper renewables, and will probably no longer have money for the switch, ending up in a major predicament.
If all the fossil fuel is burned, we will probably never reach that point ; society breakdown will happen sooner.
Was limiting warning below 2° ever realistic? I can't understand why 1.5° when it was clear to everyone that there was no way in hell that is happening. Why not set a realistic goal and try to figure out the best way to deal with the consequences?
We've known about climate change for at least fifty years now. Every goal we set since then has been "realistic" with considerable effort. Unfortunately we never even attempted to reach them, so we raise the goal by a degree or two every decade or two.
Realistic means it's likely people will put considerable effort into achieving said climate goal, not whether it's possible. Everyone on earth could join hands and achieve world peace or governments could decide to pour trillions into terraforming Mars. But neither is likely to happen.
If you want to lose weight, just setting a goal is insufficient, you have to change your habits too, no matter how unambitious your goal is. It's the same with climate change.
It depends on what you call realistic. If your objection to realism is that it's hard to convince politicians to act on this topic, then 2° is still not very realistic, and the future is likely going to be very bleak.
If it's about having the understanding and technical means to define new targets for our economy in order to reach that goal, even if it means reducing our consumption, then yes, it was a reasonable goal back when we started considering the issue seriously.
I don't see how reducing consumption is a realistic goal considering the economic and political fallout from pursuing such reduction. What political parties would be suicidal enough to put such policies into place? When would a majority of the voting public support such goals in most countries, particularly the biggest polluters? Are governments going to keep such policies going once mass protests break out when unemployment hits record highs? We got to see how much people were willing to put up with during the pandemic, and the answer is not that much reduction for very long, at least not the kind that would seriously curb emissions.
"Utility Steag GmbH will add four hard-coal plants with a capacity of 2.5 gigawatts to the market within the next few weeks, while Uniper SE will prolong operations at its 345-megawatt Scholven-C hard-coal-fired power plant, the companies said on Friday. "
"How did you learn about this and why do you care?"
Because my german colleagues were ranting about this whenever there was a break/issue in "Teams meetings". (which happens often)
Why do I care ? Because people are apparently not looking at reality when they make grandiose claims about renewables and electricity generation in Europe. Replace by renewables by all means - but at-least be honest about the data.
So Germany, a country that is well behind other European countries on renewables, had an over-dependence on Russian gas and was forced to reopen some coal plants when the price spiked. And you came to the conclusion that this was somehow a fault with renewables?
Why did you think its Germany alone ? It's Austria, France and the Netherlands as well. France and Austria both re-opened coal power plants. Even the Netherlands removed their cap on coal power.
What, France? The poster child for the nuclear fans had to re-open coal plants?
Well, I hadn't heard that. That's interesting.
It makes sense to me because they were all clearly dependent on Russian gas, which is what caused the price spike in electricity across Europe. It still doesn't make sense to me that you think it's something to do with renewables.
… they probably had to ramp up to help out their German neighbors when their electricity grid was close to collapose because of a non-sustainable idealogically driven strategy authored by the Green part being completely oblivious of today’s reality.
No, they had to reopen them because their nuclear plants stopped working. Too hot, not enough water in the rivers due to climate change to cool down the nuclear plants - so they shut them off, and France was buying renewable energy from Germany. So you got your facts exactly the wrong way.
Maybe because it’s not a transition but an ideology driven f** up?
I live near the coal plants they are firing up again. I’m all pro PV (have one), I heat my house on geothermal, I spent a ton on energy efficiency for my house.
But this entire “renewable transition”, “getting out of nuclear” and coming up with other random ideas in a industry focused economy is just bogus in execution.
The German government did indeed messed up their transition. As has the French one (their nuclear park is in a dead end, while they are nowhere with new nuclear or new renewable). The French situation is in fact way dyer, but because they are "borrowing to the future" (for example, their electricity cost is low, but they are not building up the budget that will be needed for older power plants dismantlement, so they are heading for a very big crisis), people don't notice.
Not that the Germany is better than France. My point is that it s true that people who have a rage boner about Germany are not fair: if they really care about f* up, why they don't care about France?
I don't buy this idea that the German transition was an ideology driven f* up. The project was designed and supported by a lot of experts. They published their results, with their computations and all, and no real flaw was discovered. Sure, there were some pro-nuclear partisans who, like the anti-nuclear ones, would never accept that such studies were scientifically sound just because it did not say what they ideologically wanted to hear.
At the time, the project was scientifically sound. It did not work out because 1) the government did half of the things the project said it should do, 2) as every long-term project, it had some uncertainties, and it turned out some elements did not "aligned".
An alternative project of keeping with nuclear generation was also scientifically sound, but it is not scientifically correct to pretend that this one was "better", or "more rational", or even "less ideological". People who come here and say "it was an ideological f* up" are just people who see it did not worked out and are not smart enough to not think "obviously, if it would have be me, I would have done it way better, the only reason it failed is because they suck and are irrational while I'm wayyyy smarter than everyone and soooo rational".
Ok, you read the studies and are better informed than me. Just lay out how exactly this system would work, if:
1) Nuclear is phased out
2) Coal is phased out
3) We could at any time phase out gas as well because we semi-listened to the US that warned us we gave Putin the switch to our electricity grid
If I look at https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE and see patterns like 50 GW at 3 am and 60 GW at 1 pm I wonder: how can you ensure providing the base output 24/7 entirely with renewables? I have seen facilities within industrial complexes that literally required more electricity than a whole city 24/7. The demand of electricity that needs to be provided 24/7 is enormous.
There is in addition a huge challenge to manage loads in a grid (that was never designed for it) for regional variance and unpredictability in energy production (e.g., sunshine in the north and wind in the north but no need there) and the consumption (e.g., industry in the south).
In classical “German ideology” fashion laws are passed, one-way door decisions are made, “experts testify” that everything works and 10 years later the thing blows up.
So, why does it work out and I have it all wrong? What were the evil forces that sabotaged this very well thought through idea? Because I went all PV and geothermal heat pump and energy efficient housing. What have you done?
If you want to "understand exactly how it works", then you need to build a realistic digital twin of the whole grid, and run tons of scenarios.
Trying to conclude from such "high level" map is as ridiculous as trying to explain car mobility in a city by just looking at one unique number for each country.
When you do that, you realize several things:
- the electricity grid _before the move to go out of the nuclear_ was not sustainable: reducing emission implied electrifying, which implies local flexibility that the grid at the time was simply not able to provide. The "old" nuclear plants had to disappear in the mid-/long-term, and because of that, there were several possibilities. Idiots are assuming that if Germany would not have got out of nuclear, the situation would be perfect today, which is just plain stupid (the situation would be closer to the French one: everything looking fine on the surface, but heading right for the wall).
- the "no wind night" challenge is technically as "easy" as the technical challenge of developing a grid with nuclear plant. It's difficult to understand for the laymen, but the "old" nuclear plants were technically not to the level for a grid without gas and coal, and need to be replaced by new ones which will need to solve a lot of problems that are similar to the "no wind night" challenge. In simulation, it turns out that large distance grid connectivity (which is better for the resilience anyway) and some storage (which was at the time (and still today) way more room to progress than some nuclear technology) are fixing the "no wind night" challenge quite effectively. It may seem surprising, but in science, the conclusions of computations are way more reliable than the gut-feeling of laymen.
I understand it is frustrating to see that your naive understanding is contradicted by conclusions from proper studies, and it is very easy to just conclude "I'm smarter, I know it will not work, the only explanation is that it was ideology".
(not sure I get your point when you bring Nikolas Stihl: isn't this guy as much as an expert on grid simulation than you? Being an industry leader does not magically give them a pass on doing exactly the same mistake as you, which is: drawing naive conclusions from naive understandings and concluding that if experts have a different ones, the only explanation is that they are "ideological")
> What were the evil forces that sabotaged this very well thought through idea?
There are tons of ways to fail. Seeing something not working perfectly and concluding that the project itself was therefore stupid is just incorrect. And we should also keep in mind that the risk of failures was, at the time, according to science, as big if they would have gone in the "nuclear direction". Sometimes you may take the most rational decisions and it still does not work out.
> What have you done?
I really hope this is not one of those stupid argumentation panic "oh yeah? oh yeah? well, you seem to know better than me and have pointed out the stupid things I say, but how many push-ups are you able to do?" (but don't worry, I've done _a lot_).
Well, how should it be done then? You just explain what doesn’t work and explain that “nuclear for sure doesn’t work either”. You offer no viable path how to “go renewable”.
“ In simulation, it turns out that large distance grid connectivity (which is better for the resilience anyway) and some storage (which was at the time (and still today) way more room to progress than some nuclear technology) are fixing the "no wind night" challenge quite effectively.”
Not in reality it seems though. I take a look at April 3, 7 am: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE Solar was zero. Wind dropped to 20% coal was increased to 30%. April 2nd at 3 pm, wind stood at 37% and coal stood at 13%. So, where after two decades of “going renewable” is this even remotely speaking yo your ideological dream world? Let me reiterate: wind dropped by 50% and they had to increase coal by 100%. At night.
I want renewables to work. I put my money where my mouth is. But after two decades or so of “trying” we are only showing data demonstrating they can’t work for Germany the way people like you want us to believe.”
> Well, how should it be done then? You just explain what doesn’t work and explain that “nuclear for sure doesn’t work either”. You offer no viable path how to “go renewable”.
I'm not sure I understand your question. You are saying "the problem is that it did not work because it was ideological". I'm saying "it is incorrect, the plan was not an irrational crazy thing out of ideology, it was a scientific study and the choice was as rational as other possibilities". Then you are now telling me "well, the plan does not work, so it can only be ideological, unless you provide a plan that will work for sure". That does not make any sense. Nobody can come with a plan that works for sure. Saying "you don't have a plan that works for sure, so I can say whatever I want and I'm right" is certainly not a rational way of thinking.
> Not in reality it seems though.
What? You are saying that in a grid that the German government has botched, there is no capacity for compensate for "no wind night". How does that prove that the "no wind night" is an impossible obstacle?
Again, it is MATH! Math proves it is possible. The fact that the German government did not put their money where their mouth was is obviously not proving that not possible.
And don't get me wrong, it works both way: France messed up their nuclear park. It DOES NOT MEAN NUCLEAR CANNOT WORK. Based on our conversation so far, I doubt that if someone bring France summer problems to demonstrate that nuclear does not work, you will not, legitimately, say that it's a stupid argument. That's the same here.
And as long as there are idiots that are unable to discuss the situation by accepting the complexity and by accepting that, maybe, just maybe, decisions that don't fit their naive conclusions are not the result of "bad ideological guys", then, we will never progress.
> ... your ideological dream world ... people like you ...
I see. And you are criticizing the German government for being ideological.
For your information, I was part of a team that helped creating new nuclear project. But you are yet one of those m*rons who are incapable of not seeing the world in black or white. You criticize the German government, and yet, you fall 1000 times faster into the "oh my, this guy is bringing reality that I don't like, so I should convince myself that my church is the great rationality on earth and that he is an heretic". Pathetic.
Not sure how to put it: if you built a model and simulation that has proven something that claims a certain approach might work - but fail to include a realistic plan of execution and “real life” into it: it’s not worth anything and “science” is abused for ideology “look the numbers show it will work”.
Well, today it doesn’t and tomorrow it won’t either.
I’ve seen my fair share of “objective projects/engagements where the wanted outcome was communicated very clearly” by German government bodies.
I love the idea of decentralised and local energy generation; energy efficient housing/living. I spent $$$ on it.
But Germany has an industry that is so hungry for a constant supply of electricity that I see no realistic viable path in renewables for that. People like you have claimed for two decades there is - yet, here we are: running coal full steam at night.
> Not sure how to put it: if you built a model and simulation that has proven something that claims a certain approach might work - but fail to include a realistic plan of execution and “real life” into it
It is not the case. The model say: if you do A, B and C, it will work, but if you do A but not B and C, it will fail. The German government has done A but not B and C. What happened with Germany is CONFIRMING that the model works. Other elements of the models are applied in other countries, such as France or England (not the full deployment, but the elements deployed behave exactly as the model predict).
> People like you have claimed for two decades there is - yet, here we are: running coal full steam at night.
Yep, running coal full steam in France when the nuclear power plants fail. So, according to you, nuclear is not working, renewable is not working, ... What's your plan? Whatever you give me, I can easily find places where it failed, which, according to you, is enough to claim that the whole strategy was "ideological".
The thing you are unable to understand is that failure is part of the reality: there is no obviously winning strategy, and rejecting a whole path based on failures that you are not even understanding is ridiculously obtuse.
> Idealists like you destroy our planet.
You are right: idealists LIKE YOU destroy our planet. I'm a pragmatic, I don't care if the solution is nuclear or renewable (but apparently you are totally unable to realize that, which just reinforce the conclusion that your analysis is disconnected from reality). But you are an ideologist: you have decided what is the "correct" solution without knowing the real situation, and you invented excuses to confirm what you have in your head is "the good thing".
But whatever, it does not change the facts: you may think the move was "ideological", but the facts are still there: it was not. You may insist and cry about it, it is very clear that you have no idea of what was the situation (you've even mentioned it yourself). Honestly, if you really want to help the planet, just stop saying useless things and accusing wrongly people of being "ideological" just because it does not fit with the naive model you have created from your superficial understanding of the situation.
Comparing France to Germany in this respect is totally misleading. France reignited some coal power plants but the impact of this is negligible compared to the consequences of Germany's atrocious anti-nuclear stance.
There is a qualitative difference between an occassional need for some coal in particularly adverse situations, and relying on it for almost a third of your electricity needs.
Because renewables (which I am personally fond of; PV on my roof) cannot cover Germany’s electricity needs/baseload but only supplement it.
Driven by an ideological agenda of Ms Merkel and the green party, they shut down nuclear power plants (needed to cover our base load in chemical/manufacturing/whatnot) and replaced it with gas from Russia (don’t ask me why). Now that Russian gas isn’t exactly on the table anymore and we not only depend on Russian gas for heating but also a great deal for electricity (nuclear was shut down, remember) we have no choice but ramp up to coal thanks to the Green party.
The fact that Germany’s “greenest” (carbon emissions-wise) day was still worst than France’s most polluting day speaks volumes.
Wind power and solar DO NOT suffice to cover Germany’s electricity need unless you go full-scale deindustrialisation (which the Green party certainly would favor). I’m all in for PV on everyone’s roofs, I have geothermal heating for my house, I built everything low energy - but please lets stop the ideological destruction of our economy and our environment by the Green party’s “vision”.
> Driven by an ideological agenda of Ms Merkel and the green party, they shut down nuclear power plants (needed to cover our base load in chemical/manufacturing/whatnot) and replaced it with gas from Russia (don’t ask me why).
You have been misinformed. They shut down nuclear to replace it with renewables. They already used Russian gas at the time.
You cannot replace nuclear with renewables in Germany. You cannot shut down production if the sun doesnt shine or there is no wind. There is a non-trivial amount of electricity that needs to be available 24/7 and there needs to be a source of electricity that can be ramped up quickly when demands spike or renewable isn’t delivering.
1. night currently isn't a significant problem. there's usually lots of wind, businesses aren't open and people don't use a lot of electricity when they're asleep. this may become worse overtime with increasing numbers of EVs charging at night.
2. this is the hard part, but there is good news.
solar and wind over large areas are fairly consistent and with HVDC you can transfer power 1-2 thousand miles with low losses. there's also a small but rapidly growing amount of storage on the grid. right now, we treat hydro as primarily generation with a side benefit of storage, but it's shifting to primary storage with a side benefit of generation. doing so gives most grids a decent ability to scale up and down renewable generation at will. lastly, you can use fossil fuels when everything else isn't giving you enough. a fossil fuel plant that runs a couple times a year for a few hours is a lot better than 40% of the grid being fossil fuel year round.
there's also a decent amount you can do in terms of demand shaping as the grid gets smarter. electric hot water tanks can be used as batteries where you set them up to turn on when there's excess power. you can also do things like make agreements with energy hungry sectors (like ore refining) to throttle output when necessary (compensating them for the lost revenue).
3. this is easy. refill batteries, smelt aluminum, turn off generation.
Do you have any idea how enormous the electricity consumption of our industry is where 24/7 production just is going on and on?
Take a look here:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
If I eyeball the electricity consumption correctly, the lowest consumption was like 50 GW at 3 am in the morning and the highest was 60GW (+20%) at 1pm.
Our freakin grid is NOT capable of managing an additional load for EVs as of today or any time soon. We cannot produce enough electricity to move gasoline driven cars to EV because we right now barely manage to keep or industry alive and geothermal heatpumps and whatnot will strain it further.
So regarding 1) its BULLSH*T its a massive problem.
2) Where do you live that you believe Germany can store electricity in hydro? Why do you believe there is demand shaping when we literally need a constantly high load (see 1)???
3) Yes, I understand. Easy peasy. If i get a battery for my solar panels, the investment costs are effectively above 30cents/kWh which is bogus. Yes, you can just turn off that aluminium smelter or chemical plant running a continuous process.
You clearly have never been close to an industry complex, worked in anything remotely related to “Germany’s industrial backbone”. It’s ideological wishful thinking.
Germany already had Russian gas, by pipeline, the cheapest fossil gas with the cheapest delivery method. Plans were already in place for another pipeline with twice the capacity.
If this choice was actually made to please the greens, as the theory goes, that would have been a first for Germany, a country built on its close ties between industry and government. Not to mention that the greens aren't usually fond of burning fossil fuel.
Occam's razor should suffice to understand the political process that went down here.
Germany was at the forefront of the European push for renewables, though. Sure, they never produced as much electricity from renewable sources as countries with really great hydroelectric resources, but those countries' experience isn't that relevant to everyone else since the countries which could do that generally already did so before renewable energy even became fashionable in the first place. In terms of wind and solar they were way out in front of everyone else (they apparently had the highest installed capacity of solar in the world for a while, and they still have the third-highest wind turbine capacity behind only the much larger USA and China).
its 100% relevant, the belief in return from renewables (which they don't actually offer much) comes at the expense of making the rest of the world poorer, and making europe more vulnerable to energy shocks
putin took advantage of this, europe put their neck in the guillotine for him
You left out the specific reason as to why they re-opened coal plants at the end of 2022:
"Germany is deploying about 3 gigawatts of coal-fired generation to ensure there are enough electricity supplies to make it through the winter amid curtailed natural gas supplies from Russia."
This was done out of necessity to ensure Germany did not run out of natural gas during the winter months as the gas imports from Russia have more or less dried up. I am not German nor am I up to date on their measures to transitioning their grid to renewable energy, but if anything this war is accelerating the transition for many countries in Europe. Even if this means they have to temporarily re-open fossile fuel power plants.
This could possibly have been avoided had the German government not shut its nuclear power plants down in the previous years, but that's another discussion.
Its already DST in Germany and these coal plants are still open. Let's actually wait and see if they are truly shut down this year. My guess is no - and my german colleagues believe they will still be open for the next several years - providing a third to half of Germany's electricity.
(But keep it hush-hush and lets not talk about this dirty fact on HN - it looks bad you know ?)
They will be required to cover the additional load from the nuclear plants we will shut down this year. Germany will produce more carbon emissions than probably almost ever…
You left out the reason why Germany was so dependent on Russian gas for energy: their out of touch with reality, (the conspiratorial amongst us might say fossil fuel company funded) plans to completely rely on fossil fuels until a transition to renewables can be completed in multiple decades.
All of this while they already have a viable green solution: Nuclear, which they planned on completely shutting down by 2022.
Oh please. Cheap Energy is what made Germany the industrial powerhouse of Europe. Getting gas from Russia was one of the best things Merkel did for her country and its citizens.
What????
1) It was Schröder (not Merkelh that started this entire gas thing with Russia (getting paid by Gazprom still)
2) Merkel decided in a completely irrational overnight move to just phase out nuclear. There was no strategy, just a personal preference by her ideological conviction
Energy in Germany has been significantly more expensive than in the rest of Europe for probably a solid decade now… The big challenge from what I see is somehow managing to “balance the ingestion of renewable energy which is very unpredictable and random” and the “actual need” which is rather constantly high and predictable.
> Merkel decided in a completely irrational overnight move to just phase out nuclear.
No, it was an almost unanimous vote where even the opposition agreed with the government[0]. Nothing irrational about it, they decided to go for renewable instead of nuclear.
The opposition agreeing - you mean like the Green party who wanted to end nuclear like forever? Merkel had essentially absolute power in Germany and was leading some major changes that are hard to believe now… 1) shut down nuclear, 2) abolish compulsory military service, 3) open the borders for an uncontrolled influx of male refugees, 4) completely ignore Corona at first and then bulldoze over our Basic Law.
You need a viable military in an advanced and wealthy society. If you disagree you are imho naive.
A military coup is one of the largest risks to any society. The “best” people to serve the military are the young people that stand to lose their country and have a million things that they get excited about - except going to war and fighting.
Coups always happen through a complicit or indifferent army. Having no army (except some small elite corps) seems the best way to prevent coups to me.
Also you don't need weapons and war to resist. It's much more effective to perform civil disobedience on a mass scale. Paralize the country and refuse to obey. Gandhi docet.
It's also what Ukraine should do instead of sacrificing entire generations of their men and women to protect some hundred square miles of land, destroying any value those lands might have in the process.
That'll work as long as the attackers are unwilling to simply murder civilians. Did you somehow miss Bucha?
They're not protecting their land, they're protecting themselves. If a significant portion gets shot either way it's better to at least be able to shoot back, no?
Wars tend to allow for this kind of tragedy to happen. Much harder to slaughter people during a civilian disobedience act that is globally covered by media. Brutal repression of demonstrations also causes much more outrage, basically backfiring if your intent is to stop them. Any dictator worth a shot knows this very well.
> If a significant portion gets shot either way it's better to at least be able to shoot back, no?
False dychotomy. People who protest the war in Russia are being arrested, not shot in the streets. So why do you think that would happen in this case? Because "Russians are Orcs"?
Another recent example is Myanmar. Started off as civil disobedience and protests but the military shot them up and it's now a civil war. Certainly the population would be better off had it not initially been a one-sided fight?
People who protest the war in Russia get arrested not shot because that's all it takes to suppress them. This is an argument against your point, not for it. Nor does it mean that Russia wouldn't apply harder measures elsewhere, if they thought it necessary.
Russians aren't referred to as orcs, only their soldiers.
Nobody in the west cares about Myanmar. Most people dont even know which continent it's in. Yes, we are hypocrites, but thats what would make the difference for Ukraine.
> People who protest the war in Russia get arrested not shot because that's all it takes to suppress them
But if as you believe Ukrainians care so much then they would definitely not give up after a few being jailed.
> Nor does it mean that Russia wouldn't apply harder measures elsewhere, if they thought it necessary.
Harder than bombing cities and destroying the infrastructure? Strongly doubt so. Doesnt seem like your way worked well for the Ukrainians so far. Unless all you care about is making Russia weaker, no matter how many Ukrainians it take.
Is this why we were having energy shortages during the winter time and there was a rush to get the nuclear reactors back online in France ? I don't consider that having, "it figured out". If you want to discuss prices.. my place of employment is paying millions more euro this year than last. The increase in energy cost is also leading to increase in water costs.. I could go on, but you get the point.
The point is that Europe does not have energy in general figured out. If I am being told I can be fined for having my thermostat higher than 19C (true for children school also), than we are far from that statement.
I love the idea of clean energy. But the energy "sobriety" we have been experiencing this year in France particularly has been painful. TF1 educated the population on the nightly news on how to block our door jams to not lose energy and warmth. Villages were creating centers for people to go and stay warm. Boulangeries have been shutting down because they cannot afford the still increasing cost of energy. Whatever the plan is, it currently isn't working.
That's some rewriting of history considering it's less than a year old. The scramble to get France's nuclear plants back online was because they completely failed in the first place, and at a critical time. Half of the fleet was offline most of the year, and half of those were completely unplanned and difficult to fix [1]. And it's still happening [2]. This failure was one of the biggest reasons for the electricity crunch and high prices - the expected output of France was missing and they themselves became net importers. [3]
I don't know how anything I said was re-writing history. The fact was over half the reactors were down due to corrosion and need of maintenance, yes. There was indeed a push to get them back online. I am happy the nytimes and reuters gave you such an informed perspective. The fact is we needed the nuclear reactors back online or we wouldn't have had power in sub-freezing tempetatures. So, sure.. thank God for the renewables.
It's the framing that we were having energy shortages because of renewables and that renewables were somehow responsible for the high prices. That is clearly not the case.
1) the shortages stem from the failure of France's nuclear power to deliver
2) the high prices were partly because of shortages, and the wholesale prices were the highest in France all year
I am too lazy to post prices for lst year, but they can be easily verified - besides you are not really interested in facts you don't like. Another thing that can be verified is that those coal plants that were put on emergency stand by had a very very low capacity factor and all the coal that was stockpiled early in the year was basically left unused. Because for all the talk of base load and reliability, when push came to shove, renewables kept the lights on.
The high prices are not so bad overall, there is and was a big incentive to build more capacity fast. Next years will be transformative, and it will all be led by renewables.
this conveniently leaves out how much renewables fluctuate, as well as how much more inefficient it is to transport energy coming from renewables if these fluctuations happen over large distances.
My comment isn't directly related to the OP, but figured it'd be an interesting insight to share as it's very recent for me.
Just finished a motorbike trip in Laos. Fun fact, their largest export is electricity.
Would've never guessed that, right?
90% of the electricity they generate is exported to neighboring countries - mostly Thailand.
80% is renewable - Go Laos!
But wait, it may be renewable... but turns out the government is corrupt and constantly sells rights to the highest bidder wanting to build a dam for hydroelectric wherever they want, and usually without any sort of environmental survey - oops. It's the driest country I've been to in a while, many villages had their water access completely destroyed due to upstream dams.
Just a cautionary tale as "renewable" doesn't necessarily mean better - green-washing is absolutely still a thing out there and we should be sure to thoroughly vet information before assuming it's more viable solution for us.
It's also worth noting that dams aren't just built for electricity. They're also built to control flooding and to control water supply. I'm not saying that's the case in Laos, but it does happen.
People can live without electricity, but it's difficult to live without water.
I cringe each time that I hear a foreigner complain about China's Three Gorges Dam as an "environmental damage". The number of people who have died from floods on those rivers in the last 2000 years in mind-boggling. Yes, it generates a lot of electricity, but it is dual purpose to also control flooding.
People can live without electricity, but it's difficult to live without water.
This part is also interesting. While traveling in developing countries in East/South/Southeast Asia, the driest places and always the poorest. The only way to overcome is irrigation. The wealthiest places find a way to move water from wet lands to dry lands.
If flood control is the main concern, then the size of the dam does not have to be that of Three Gorges -- there are many things that went into three gorges and Vanity of CCP is a significant part of them.
People can live without electricity, but only for very brief periods of time. If we had to go extended periods, I don't think it would be a stretch to say civilisational collapse would be immanent.
You think the energy transition can be achieved without harming people? Yes if you are a river fisherman you do not live in the right century. Nor do people living in mountain villages. There are those who will get cancer from working in a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. Still it's not going to be that bad because the pollution from fossil fuel electricity generation is also causing a lot of disease and killing a lot of people.
There are those who will get cancer from working in a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant.
It doesn't have to be this way, the engineering controls needed are well known. It requires the country in question to be financially committed to doing things right. For nuclear power this is already considered an essential prerequisite, yet coal power plants already release vastly more radioactivity and increase the cancer risk of everone around them. As far as reducing total cancer, nuclear is the way to go.
Mistakes have been made in the past. Just because something can be done safely doesn't mean it always will be. I am also a big fan of nuclear but that doesn't mean it's perfect.
Personally I'd rather see something getting done than endless feasibility studies. That sort of stalling can really prevent countries from making any progress.
I don't think it is helpful to celebrate countries that won the "geography birth lottery" and have huge rivers that are easy to dam. See: Laos, Paraguay, Norway, Austria, etc. Nothing is "amazing" that they are mostly green energy.
Also, for other readers, Laos is a repressive "communist" dictatorship. It is no surprise that the gov't welcomed Belt & Road programme by China (with high interest loans!) to build a giant dam that enriched few at the expense of many. This is green washing at its very best.
The future of green energy is mostly about solar and wind. Yes, there are some places with easy-to-dam rivers remaining (sub-Saharan Africa), but they are few and far between.
It is still crazy to me that North Africa is not covered in solar panels that export to Europe. Same for Australia, South Africa, and many Gulf countries. Sunshine and wind is the "new oil" of the 21st Century. They can export to neighboring countries or produce green hydrogen.
The same exact story can be said about Iceland, which is very far from being a communist dictatorship (and it bears mentioning that Laos government is not repressive compared to many capitalist democratic governments; I don’t know where you would get that from except preconceived biases).
Iceland sells majority of its renewable energy to foreign aluminum companies. Along with fish it is the biggest export. The government is corrupt and constantly sells rights to build factories to bidders while neglecting environmental impacts. Whole towns are often run by a single Canadian aluminum company. And the green origin certificates is then sold to EU countries (just like indulgence was sold by the Catholic church), so “green” energy consumers are buying in Germany, are actually just coal power, where the energy company bought the origin certificates from Iceland.
See, you don’t need to be communist, nor a dictatorship, to do industrial scale greenwashing
I guess you are talking about Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Plant.
Did you read the book <<Draumalandið — Sjálfshjálparbók handa hræddri þjóð>> or watch the documentary <<Draumalandið>>? Me: Neither, but I am interested. I only learned about this project recently.
The most shocking fact about the whole project (from Wiki):
The total affected area according to the environmental impact assessment, outlines that a total of 3,000 km2 or 741,316 acres were affected by the project's construction. That is approximately 3% of Iceland's total land mass.
Yup, I was indeed talking about Kárahnjúkar. I do recommend Draumalandið. I actually got a copy as a graduation present back in 2006. I’ve read it many times over, and even though I’ve moved continents, I still keep the copy prominently on my bookshelf.
It's the driest country I've been to in a while, many villages had their water access completely destroyed due to upstream dams.
Completely destroyed, or just no longer enough to support wasteful methods of irrigation? It's been over a decade since I was in SE Asia, but my impression was that they relied heavily on flooding fields for irrigation.
I live full time in Indonesia, and their irrigation system is much more complex. I saw nothing of the sort in Laos, so perhaps that could be a factor too.
This would have happened a bit earlier if the most efficient and long-lasting solar panels, monocrystalline silicon, had been developed by US manufacturers instead of by Chinese ones. All the tariffs applied by state and federal regulators on the import of these panels have been about slowing the rate of solar PV production in the USA on behalf of the fossil fuel and investor-owned utility sectors.
Claims that these tariffs have some human rights motivations are nonsensical, would the US block imports of Saudi oil over human rights abuses there? Of course not - but silicon solar panels, oh my!
It's no surprise that the pushback by politicians owned by investors in fossil fuels and utilities has been so intense - energy is one of the most lucrative investments, and it's rather difficult to control and meter the flow of sunlight to homes, in comparison to natural gas or crude oil.
Notably, the USA has no R & D programs or subsidy programs like the CHIPS act (for semiconductors for computation, not for power production) aimed at rapidly expanding monocrystalline silicon production.
Why should the US try to lead solar panel technology ? China has many talented engineers and plenty of venture capital. I'd prefer them to invest it in solar panel manufacturing and power electronics rather than social media, ai or Telco technology.
Relying on a non-friendly country for something so crucial as energy is generally not a great position to be in, particularly if that country has rival world power ambitions. Europe and Russia have provided a great recent example of why you don't want to be reliant on potential enemies for your energy needs, and while the situation between the US and China is not the same and solar is different than fossil fuels, it's still a factor worth thinking about. The US would be a lot more secure being able to rely on a domestic solar industry as solar becomes more and more important.
I think your vision is too US centric, US hegemony lead to disruptions to foreign nations like afghanistan, iraq, libya, etc. My pov from latinamerica is that my country could be next, and neither your culture nor your "business class" seems the future(we reflect your cultural hegemony with our version of shitty role models), si why not challenge US hegemony?
The tariffs and policy in questions are being set by the US - of course the discussion is US-centric, the question being discussed is ‘how should the US be approaching this?’
The second biggest geopolitical opponent to the US, Russia, is in major decline. Their primary opponent, China, is slowing down and has enormous domestic problems to deal with that are projected to worsen for a long period of time. The US was supposed to be behind in AI research, but technologically, they're ahead. I believe that once AI is used to exert geopolitical pressure, economically or through counter action, it will be a runaway advantage. If this were Star Wars I think we'd be at the point where we were only starting to see the rise of the Empire.
Hegemony is inevitable, prosperous, and peaceful. Anyone who would challenge US hegemony would either intend to establish themselves their own hegemony or would be patsies creating a situation where another force could do so. Do would we be better off under a global islamic caliphate deriving from afghanistan, iraq, libya, etc… or a Chinese hegemoney, or a German hegemony? I’d put American hegemony up against any civilization that the world has ever seen in terms of equity, prosperity, and peace.
I’d put American hegemony up against any civilization that the world has ever seen in terms of guns, mass shootings, and being okay with children being killed in their classrooms.
For the Americans. In the meanwhile, the rest of the world is so sick of your hegemony, it would rather see anyone else, or better yet, state of a never ending direct fight between the contenders while the rest of the world is left alone.
I'm always baffled by this sort of defensive and childish response that happens whenever someone makes legitimate criticisms of American foreign policy and expresses a desire for a world where their needs are given a higher priority. It hints at a deep-rooted inferiority complex in the American identity.
Are things better than they were under American hegemony? Sure. Could they be even better if we weren't stuck in this local maximum, Absolutely.
Anxiously lashing out at people because they express a desire for improvements in their society, and improvements in American society isn't productive.
"Are things better than they were under American hegemony? Sure. Could they be even better if we weren't stuck in this local maximum, Absolutely."
Yeah! Criticize America so it can be better but taking a stance that world would magically be better off without America, or even that the world doesn't want America while obsessively consuming American products seems rather childish in my opinion.
No offense to you but I think you're really miss reading here and/or looking to interpret something that was meant to illustrate a point rather than be outright deliberately condescending which appears to be how you wish to interpret it.
whenever someone makes legitimate criticisms of American foreign policy and expresses a desire for a world where their needs are given a higher priority.
You think the grandparent comment is what you describe here?
Ironically, GGP's comment was a well thought out comment supporting American 'hegemony'.
I think you have your "lash out" backwards in this case.
Every government has to think about energy independence, of which oil production is part of that story. Our oil economics are also intertwined with US policy, which renewables are helping undo in the US. That's to say, US society is trying to put a cap on how energy independence involves in conflict either directly or indirectly.
> Abstract: In Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, oil-producing countries have civil wars at a significantly higher rate than countries without oil. Is there also a link between oil and armed rebellion in Latin America?
> I argue the answer is “yes,” but with an important qualification. In the rest of the
world, oil heightens the danger of both “governmental” conflicts (over control of the
existing state) and secessionist conflicts (to form new states); but in Latin America, oil is
only linked to governmental conflicts. This is not because Latin American petroleum has
unusual properties, but because the region is uniquely “secession-proof”: there have
been no separatist conflicts in Latin America for over a century. I explore two possible
explanations for this anomaly: the region’s long history of sovereign statehood, which
may have caused national borders to become more widely-accepted; and obstacles to the
mobilization of indigenous groups along ethnic lines.
Tldr; instead of getting involved in foreign wars to save your oil supply, it's cheaper to centralize the oppression back home.
If you think your own country is in bad enough shape that it could be next on a list that includes Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya as they were just prior to US involvement you need to have a good long think about fixing your own problems fast.
Each of those countries might have been "stable" by some definition of the word, but they all had pretty crappy organizations monopolizing power. US interference certainly didn't fix their underlying problems but it did dislodge the badguys on top. (unfortunately, often just leaving the spot open for some other badguys because aforementioned underlying problems)
Realistically, the next country on the US hitlist is probably Iran, not your latam home country. But first the American public needs to get back it's war appetite, and the shooting in Ukraine needs to simmer down (probably within a year, along new borders that are pretty close to what the current battle lines are), and China needs to not distract us by starting with Taiwan.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya were all failed states when the US intervened / invaded (which is also not a good argument for invading those nations; the US betrayed its own self-interest in the second Iraq war).
If your nation is run by a dictatorship, it's a failed state.
If your nation is a theocracy, it's a failed state.
You'll notice the distinct lack of the US invading well-functioning, democratic nations (we share a remarkably unguarded, massive border with Canada).
You generally can't challenge US hegemony, it's far too large, and still expanding. China is the only entity since the 1950s Soviet Union that could even attempt it. For example while the EU's strongest economies have been largely going sideways for ~15 years economically (since the great recession), the US has added nearly $10 trillion to its economy (a further ~65-70% expansion in 15 years). Who is going to keep up with that, at that size (other than China)?
I am not contending Chinese are any shape or form incapable, given the factory floor of the world for a generation they do have best of the best.
The issue is State subsidies and Environmental and Labor regulation that is flimsy.
Any American company operating on US soil will be uncompetitive from Day 1 trying to follow, Federal, State and EPA regulation.
As much as Solar Panels are touted in Environmental community, they are a product of intense chemical process that produces poisonous waste.
EDIT: thanks for all the answers, IIUC it boils down to "nobody cares if a luxury item from a western company is built on slavery, the only thing that matters is that poor people who built it cannot afford it"
Because you’re not just paying for a physical device. You’re also paying for the software that runs on it which is best in class. And before people start saying it’s not, how many people are running 7 year old androids compared to iPhones? In USD, A brand new iPhone, kept for 7 years works out at 32 cents a day - phenomenally cheap for something integral to modern day life. And that’s not even taking into account you can most likely sell it for $50/$100 at the end of that seven years, making it even cheaper.
I changed the battery last year, it costed me 13$ (~12 euros), it is as good as new.
Now it might be that my Android phone is Chinese as well, so it actually costed me less than 10¢ a day. Even if I had to replace my Android smartphone, I could have changed it 3 times in the past 7 years and still spend less than buying an iPhone that lasted me 7 years.
I could still easily sell it for 30-40 euros, making it even cheaper.
So you've edited your comment to bring up slave labour for some reason, so obviously your Android phone and your $13 battery are all ethically sourced right?
Because people are willing to pay the price point. In places I've been, rule of thumb for pricing is usually 3x BoM. I've heard (sorry no reference, just word of mouth) Apple targets at least 5x.
Side-note: if anyone believes the idea that companies pass savings to the consumer... Well I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn they might be interested in
Because Apple sets the price according to what people are willing to pay. The price isn't directly related to the manufacturing cost or the development cost.
Is that true? In India I thought I read how people have fake iPhones because of what a luxury symbol it is. That purchasing one for the vast majority of people is out of the question.
There must be some limit to how low it can be sold for.
I have experienced a culture shock after moving to the US and looking at prices for some items. The best summary I have is "in USA, the thing is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it", unlike the previous mindset I had, roughly "take the cost of producing something and add X% markup" where X is not too high.
What you’ve described is specific to humanity, not the US — “the thing is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it” is a near universal truth.
Poland. I think folks there are more price-sensitive and it helps keep the prices at a more reasonable level. Coming from Poland, my price-setting approach would not take into account how much something is worth to the customer, just how much it cost me to produce + low double-digit percent markup.
And significantly less burdensome manufacturing pollution rules. The West exported manufacturing pollution to developing countries and named it 'free trade'.
German speaking here. This position brought a lot of harm and made the German economy very fragile. The German business model in the last decades was based on cheap security (NATO), cheap gas (Russia) and a huge market to sell cars (China).
And here we are in 2023, paying 100s of billions of tax money for (maybe) having a working army in a couple of years, a near collapsing economy bc of zeroed gas imports and a tightening market in China.
Still relying on boundless global trade in 2023 is just.. a funny position.
Not to get off topic but that's why BMW has changed their grill and car design so much even though Western journalists hate it. They are targeting the Asian market.
Well I'm calling bullshit on neoliberal free-trade ideology based on voodoo economics which just looks at simple measurable factors like "cost of labor" completely ignoring social cost (local unemployment, mass migration, social tensions, etc.) and ecological cost (pollution, climate crisis, etc.) which were commonly socialized (tax money) in case of a concrete crisis. Not a personal attack, sorry if it sounded like that.
That's not necessarily true. Shipping (via ocean) of finished expensive small products is cheap and quite low carbon on a per device basis as long as you don't mind the delay. One of the reasons china is the place to manufacture is that the electronics manufacturing _inputs_ are now concentrated there, as is the know-how.
You're forgetting labor costs in the US are much higher and environmental regulations are much more strict. So US made panels will unlikely to ever be price competitive with the Chinese made ones.
Dumping is when a producer sells their product at a lower price abroad than they do domestically [1]. For example, if Chinese solar panels sell for the Renminbi equivalent of 35 cents per watt domestically, but are sold for 30 cents per watt in the United States, that would be dumping.
As far as I can tell, Chinese solar manufacturers do not engage in this sort of straightforward and easy to define dumping. They sell their products at comparable low prices both domestically and abroad. The United States claims that advantages given to Chinese solar manufacturers (like low cost land and industrial partnerships with local governments) are unfair and counters them with measures termed "anti dumping" tariffs. Given how many perks American states and municipalities roll out to attract manufacturing jobs, including solar jobs [2], I don't see how the Chinese incentives for solar manufacturing go too far. I rather think it's something like the situation with Canadian softwood exports to the US [3]: the US government's position is dubious, but it's too powerful in practice to be held to account.
Come on, you can make silicon monocrystalline products without pollution with appropriate controls, it's no different from the computer chip production process. See CHIPS act?
China doesn't have a big natural gas / crude oil sector trying to block development of alternatives to their products, that's the difference.
Including hydro in the renewables column made the math work. Makes it seem like we've made more progress than perhaps we have. Hydro and wind are the biggest chunks in their pie chart. And much of hydro is decades, if not centuries old infrastructure.
This would be better news if coal wasn't also being replaced by new fossil gas plants like crazy. If you look at coal vs fossil gas in the US it's a lot more depressing.
On paper that is sometimes true, and gas companies try to lean in hard on that. Gas can do 480 gCO2/kWh vs. coal's 800+. But when you include wellhead and pipeline losses of methane they end up looking almost exactly equal, according to many studies. So it's not really progress. Also, half the CO2 of coal is nowhere even close to acceptable. We need things that do about 1/20th the carbon of coal or less, so wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, tidal only. Gas is out.
Grams CO₂-equiv emitted per kWh of electricity generated are the units used by everyone, e.g. the IPCC to quantify the carbon intensity of energy sources. E.g. for a graph of data from IPCC, see [1].
Again, 480 is not all-inclusive. If you look at the whole system, gas is no better than coal, due to wellhead and pipeline leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
i wish they'd use si units like kilograms per joule, or joules per kilogram, which works out to s²/m² and permits direct comparison with the energy density of fuels
a kilowatt hour per 800 g works out to 4.5 megajoules per kilogram, which makes it easy to see that we're in the right ballpark (the energy density of coal itself is less than an order of magnitude higher) and that we're talking about delivered work rather than just thermal power
I disagree. Sometimes when you're trying to quantify something specific, it's best to use units that are topical. If you want to talk about how much CO₂ the production of a kWh of electricity (not heat) that different sources of electricity use, mass CO₂ per kWh electric generated is the most useful and intuitive unit. Differences in thermal efficiency, etc. do not matter if you're focused on getting a kWh-electric for the smallest amount of lifecycle CO₂. This is especially important when comparing non-thermal sources (hydro, wind, solar) alongside thermal sources.
the difference between kilowatt hours per gram and joules per kilogram also does not matter if you're focused on getting a kilowatt hour electric for the smallest amount of lifecycle carbon dioxide; a kilowatt hour per gram is precisely 3.6 gigajoules per kilogram, nothing more, nothing less. the only benefit of using the 'topical' units is an unnecessary risk of calculation errors and other kinds of confusion
this nonsense about topical units is the reason that medieval merchants would measure certain kinds of cloth in flemish ells of 27 inches and other kinds of cloth in english ells of 45 inches; silver was weighed in troy ounces of 480 grains, drugs were weighed in apothecaries' drams of 60 grains (or apothecaries' ounces, which were the same as troy ounces), and foods were weighed in drams of about 27.3 drams, or avoirdupois ounces of 437½ grains
kilowatt hours and grams per kilowatt hour are the modern equivalent of apothecaries' drams
reducing the carbon dioxide emitted by 40 percent at the same load does in fact meaningfully ensmallen the global warming problem, unless there's some compensating extra emissions somewhere else in the system, like methane leaking from pipelines
That's just for electricity production. A 40% reduction in the sector where we could do 90-95% leaves no room for sectors where there are fewer opportunities.
40% for electricity means a much lower reduction overall, especially if it informs the efforts we're willing to make.
Long-term trends clearly demonstrate the energy grid’s transition to renewable energy sources.
However, renewables like solar and wind come with unique challenges due to their intermittent nature. They are more variable, harder to forecast, have location constraints, and can benefit from battery storage. These factors lead to a more dynamic grid than before.
For instance, several regions in the country provide five-minute updates on their energy generation mix, enabling near real-time observations of renewable energy effects throughout the day
For example, numerous regions across the country provide updates on their energy generation mix at five-minute intervals, allowing for close to real time observations of these effect of renewables throughout the day.
To help those involved in the energy transition, I created an open-source project called Grid Status (https://github.com/kmax12/gridstatus) that provides fuel mix, wholesale pricing, load, load forecasts, and more.
Additionally, I've developed real-time visualizations to make this data more accessible and easier to comprehend: https://www.gridstatus.io
I hope making this data more accessible and understandable will accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.
It demonstrates, quite clearly, that energy cost is not a concern. We can just barrel through to the electric revolution without a single care to cost, availability, or reliability.
>> And even when projects are approved, developers often discover they need to pay for new transmission lines to deliver power to residents and businesses. Those transmission lines often face further permitting delays.
Just discovering this? Yeah, this has not been well planned.
This article is a mess. Energy is NOT power. Reporting on energy (which is what the original publication does; and even they confuse it) is almost pointless.
We need power. Not energy.
Let me explain. There is no such thing as a useful measure of energy reliability. Energy is the accumulation of power over time. Here's a super simplistic example to illustrate the point:
You spend all day walking through the desert. Your water bottle is empty. You drank it all. You really need water, yet there's none to be found. You nearly die a few times, yet manage to make it out to a settlement by nightfall.
Someone there fills your bottle with water.
A reporter says your bottle, over that 24 hour period, was full.
That's the way you compute energy. You can have zero power for 12 hours and then have some for another 12. Energy just adds-up all the bits of power you had over 24 hours and reports it as one number.
Energy comparisons are useless.
Here's reality:
Solar is, nominally, about 50% reliable (if this term isn't comfortable, think "available").
No?
It turns off at night.
Roughly 50% of the time...it does not work.
Wind, on the other hand, does not suffer from this issue. It is much more reliable.
With the addition of a nominal amount of storage wind can easily get up to 95% reliability. Solar, with the same amount of storage, runs about 70% reliability.
This is about power delivery. Consistent. Water bottle in the desert, to use when you need water.
Ignoring all other factors (environmental, wildlife, NIMBY, noise, etc.), wind is a far better technology than solar.
Yet, again, to pull this back into the realm of what we should discussing: We need to talk about power, not energy. When you go to charge your electric car at the same time a million other people want to do the same thing, you need power.
Both are great, since while the daily cycle is a problem with solar, the seasonal variations are a far larger issue (since much mobe energy storage is needed). But both complement each other.
Wind is stronger in the winter and solar is strong in the summer. The best consistency is achieved when both are used, not one or the other.
No, not really. That's the impression most people have. For example, solar, in the northern hemisphere, is --to use your term-- stronger in March/April, not the summer. This is due to the panel negative temperature coefficient.
> The best consistency is achieved when both are used, not one or the other.
No. Wind with approximately three hours of storage is about 95% reliable.
> No. Wind with approximately three hours of storage is about 95% reliable
That isn't enough, unless you are happy with 18 days of no power per year. Of course you could maintain traditional power plans to provide power for those 18 days, but then you've doubled or tripled your power costs because you have purchased two systems for providing power. An intermittent system and a second system with the same capacity that is unused 95% of the time but must be available at a moments notice. And of course you have to maintain a viable supply chain for fuel, repairs, maintenance, labor, etc.
> you have purchased two systems for providing power.
Precisely! Correct!
Therein lies the problem of renewables few people seem to understand, talk about and want to talk about. Solar and wind require 100% backup for the period of time during which they are not locally available.
BTW, a good deal of what I have been saying is supported with data from this paper [0]. It analyzes 39 years of data from 42 different countries. It does a good job of displaying the difficult relationships between various mixes and solar, wind and storage. Figure 2 is excellent. It takes a bit of study to internalize. After studying these charts almost everyone should have serious questions about solar. This is where the 95% figure for wind comes from.
And, BTW, figure 2 also shows that without overbuilding capacity both technologies are challenging.
There are ways to look at using distant solar and wind to provide for power holes. For example, have wind power brought in from 500 to 1000 miles away. The idea is you know there's a seriously good probability for the weather being different enough that you cover the power holes at location A using power from location B.
That's great. The question then becomes: How do residents of location B deal with their issues when you are sucking-up their power from location A.
No simple answers to this other than to say that both solar and wind have to be overbuilt and require 100% backup --of some form, I don't care what type-- for when they cannot deliver.
And so your question is perfectly valid and one that really needs to be on the table, front and center. I have asked it before. It is usually met with attacks and insults. It can take many forms, the most basic being:
If you need full 100% reliable backup available at a moments' notice, 24/7/365, are these truly the best technologies for the job?
I have argued that nuclear is a solid solution with 100% availability and the power density to deliver our needs. That is met with even more violent attacks and insults. Apparently I am somewhere between a really stupid person and a criminal for suggesting any of this.
Having devoted a significant effort towards understanding the many intricacies surrounding these issues, my thinking has morphed over time. I used to think we had to consider deploying a massive amount of nuclear power (somewhere beyond 1000 new power plants) for a full transition to electric vehicles and homes. That, of course, is as close to impossible as one can get.
I think a sensible path might be to focus on the 95% reliability of wind (which is far better than anything solar can achieve) and provide that 5% backup with regionally shared nuclear power and other power sources. We would still need hundreds of nuclear power plants built over the next, say, 30 to 50 years. Difficult, yes.
Here's the shocking reality of a transition to full electrification (homes and transportation):
We have to, at a minimum, TRIPLE our power generation and transport capacity.
Why triple?
Well, if we are going to go clean, you have to replace all of our existing power generation with 100% reliable clean alternatives.
That means we need to build 1200 GW of new clean power generation.
As we do this, we shut down what we don't want (if we can).
Next, we need another 1200 GW --at a minimum-- to power a full fleet of electric ground vehicles.
If we start talking cargo ships and aircraft, we are likely at another 1000 GW or far more.
The task, then, is to build somewhere around 3000 to 4000 GW of new clean power generation sources. They have to be 100% reliable, or you need to grossly overbuild to compensate for that.
The, question, then: Can we do this? In 25 years? No way. How about 50 years? Maybe? Tough to say. It sure a hell isn't happening in ten or fifteen, which makes the dramatic claims being made by politicians and their supporters nothing less than ridiculous.
EVs just charge whenever. Very few people use them like ICEs with regard to fuelling. The only thing needed to make them fit easily in the existing max output envelope is L1 chargers where they spend the day and TOU aware charging (and tarriffs). Most of the energy for charging them will never even hit the grid. And what little does will be mostly during the times of minimum usage. Fast chargers will have battery buffers anyway because no sane operator will want to pay the peak capacity rates for drawing 30MW during peak demand when their competitor next door can outcompete them by 50c/kWh by using a buffer.
You have the right order of magnitude of 3TW nameplate (you're quoting nameplate for the existing capacity which is absolutely not the same thing as CF weighted power, but you know this and you're trying to intentionally conflate the two) for solar + wind and about 3TW peak including storage and energy-limited dispatch lime hydro and w2e, but you really went off the rails with the rest. You also know that a mix of wind and solar has a higher uptime than either alone.
Maybe you should consider for half a second that the real engineers who actually think about this might have come to a different conclusion to your half-assed fermi estimate for good reasons?
You continue to chase me around HN to insult me any time I participate in a discussion about energy.
In the past I have asked @dang to let you carry on with these insults so you could show the world exactly who you are. My reasoning included such things as letting you "get it out of your system".
Yet another article and discussion that mostly ignores the fact that intermittent energy sources are not viable mechanisms for base-load generation. This is a basic physics problem that no amount of legislation or green-virtue signaling is going to make the problem go away.
Until we find a reasonable way to store energy at grid scale, a continued shift to intermittent energy generation will result in dramatically higher prices and dramatically lower reliability.
OECD ecomony, averaging 80% renewables (wind, solar primarily). The other 20% is gas. They have enough generation now. To rid of that 20% (I'm not sure the economics makes sense) they need to build pumped storage.
Oh, and now they've made the transition, electricity prices are cheaper than non-renewable generation of 5 years ago.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadRenewables generates 5 times less than coal annually and still peak for a short period of time, so this is not a big progress. Wind turbines can have big energy peaks when it's very windy, but there is no cheap way to store that energy for a long period of time, WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.
And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.
the article is speaking about average power, not peak power. how do you and the article present such different figures?
My friend, let me introduce you to the wonderful world of "not reading the article".
It's getting close to the point that wind+storage can compete with nuclear, and even gas, on price. With the way cost has been developing on renewables and energy storage sulitons it's more or less inevitable. You're also starting to see off-shore wind, even floating off-shore, come rapidly down in cost, and those have more stable generation and require less energy storage.
The problem of storage is also exaggerated by people who haven't looked at the big picture. We need to replace oil/gas in lots of areas where you need to store and transform energy anyway. Like cars. Think about it.. if you buy an EV you'll generally have enough storage there to power your house for 1-3 days. In a world where all cars are BEVs we'll be well within an order of magnititude of having the manufacturing capacity to have energy storage for all homes. You can even feed electricity from BEVs back into the grid, and I already have my BEV set to only charge in the hours where electricity is cheapest right now. We're also starting to see people use smart controllers to exploit the storage capacity in hot water tanks.
Green metal production will also be a huge source of flexible load. Somewhat related to that, there's even molten metal batteries that can provide extremely cheap grid storage.
> WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.
If you need to shout I'm just led to expect you don't have much meat behind your opinion. Anyway, the problem is just this: what we really need isn't baseload.
You can't solve the worlds energy crisis without lots and lots of renewables. Going all nuclear would be too expensive, too slow, and would probably generate enough heat to slow recovery after climate change. Thermal power plants in general have a whole range of issue that makes it a bad idea to go all-in on it.
Nuclear can certainly supplement with a bit of baseload capacity. But what we need is load following and peaker plants. We need a replacement to gas power plants. Because those are what works well when combining with renewables. And without lots of renewables we have zero hope of combatting climate change.
> And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.
At least copper and steel is easily recycled, with low carbon impact. Nuclear power plants use a lot of concrete and the sustainability of that is far more uncertain.
SSAB and LKAB has experimented with green steel since ~2017. [0]
[0] https://www.ssab.com/sv-se/ssab-koncern/hallbarhet/fossilfri...
Who knows maybe once renewable market penetration is nearly maxed out and if storage tech somehow hasn't caught up enough despite the great strides being made, the economics won't be so terrible for the GREENEST BASELOAD.
Who
Solar and wind power sources requires an absurd amount of metal (sometimes rare metals) to build the generators (solar panels, wind turbines, etc). This metal is extracted today with an enourmous consumption of fossil fuels, and it will be difficult to have a greener alternative for this extraction (anything running on batteries will require even MORE metal).
The prices per Mwh of renewable energy sources are heavily linked to the prices of fossil fuels, which are quite "low" compared to what will probably happen in the next decades. Moreover, most metals are getting harder and harder to extract (it's likely that we met the peak of copper extraction already), which means that we'll have to dig deeper and deeper to get metal.
I'm not saying we should not invest in renewables, but it will be probably be 10x to 50x more expensive to maintain a renewable parc of solar panels or wind turbines without relying on fossil fuels at all, which will cause the prices per mwh to explode.
Countries that try to go 100% renewable without a healthy dose of nuclear energy will probably end up either burning fossil fuels or buying raw materials from countries that does, at a very heavy price.
please look at this, I'm tired of having to remind people that nuclear is the best on ALL fronts except cost
https://i.imgur.com/qKzwxuj.jpeg
it's very difficult to predict future technological developments, especially as to pricing, but getting nuclear power down to the price of pv would require dramatic reductions in the cost of heat engines; the nuclear island is only a part of the cost of a nuclear power plant, and the rest of the plant is by itself enough to make the plant economically uncompetitive
solar panels, as i understand it, contain minuscule quantities of metal; they're mostly silicon and glass, with much smaller amounts of boron, phosphorus, aluminum, copper, silver, and eva. but they are commonly mounted in aluminium frames, on the order of a gram of aluminum per peak watt or ten grams per average watt
refining aluminum or iron from ore does cost a significant amount of energy, but there's no real obstacle to doing it with renewable energy and no fossil fuels; aluminum smelting pots won't even notice, and in the case of steelmaking, the technical problems of reduction with hydrogen are interesting but don't pose a risk to the success of the enterprise. the energy payback time on current solar panels is a few months, which is to say they generate all the energy needed to reproduce themselves (metals and all) in that time
aluminum, silicon, and iron are among the most abundant elements in the earth's crust (#3, #2, and #4, respectively), so there's no real risk of having to dig for them. even copper averages 100 ppm. with silver there's a bit of a pinch, as about 10% of world silver production is going to solar panels; copper works as a substitute but significantly impairs efficiency
windmills use the same kind of electrical generator you'd use in a coal or nuclear plant, just at a lower duty cycle, so at worst they have a small disadvantage relative to fossil fuels in terms of metal use. the counterbalancing advantage is that they don't need steam plumbing or a parsons turbine; windmill blades are fiberglass, not metal
(sometimes generators do use rare elements, but that's just a matter of what's cheaper at the moment)
that's why renewable energy from pv and wind is already much cheaper than fossil energy and continuing to get cheaper
if your conclusion were correct, then despite your posited subsidy from cheap fossil fuels, pv and wind energy would already be more expensive than fossil-fuel energy, as it was until about 02014, because their energy payback time would have to be decades. you're two orders of magnitude outdated
It's trivial to fund renewables with a chinese, coal-powered industry, so it will look cheap, but it's putting coal under the rug.
It is interesting to see the responses to Nuclear of 'too much up front/takes too long' while simultaneously patiently waiting out solar/wind 'it's getting there.'
Interesting they also included biomass here as it is certainly not a carbon friendly process nor renewable.
Too much 'we've picked our winners and won't hear a negative word' in this space now, and it's getting worse.
That's not including the ongoing gearbox maintenance requirements.
In high school, my Chem II class had an assignment where pairs of kids had to present on why nuclear was good or bad. Of 16 or so kids, only my friend and I presented on why nuclear energy was good. Even the chemistry teacher was against nuclear energy.
Edit: This was in rural USA.
Coal and nuclear plants have poor abilities to ramp power production up and down in response to fluctuating demand, so they were called 'baseload'. Various versions of natural gas power plants could respond more rapidly, so they were typically placed in the other other two categories.
This is all irrelevant if you have distributed wind/solar production coupled to efficient storage systems that manage the distribution using technology that doesn't have those limitations. Practically that means short term storage of power in batteries (daily), long-term storage in synthetic fuels (seasonal).
Since you're obviously some time traveler, would you mind sharing winning lottery numbers with us?
Solar gives lots of electricity in the summer. But you have light and warmth then. In the winter when you need the electricity, you get maybe 1/10 of whatever the solar array is capable of.
Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations.
Biogas (eg anaerobic digestors) seems much more possible - but even these need warmth to run well - so aren't as good in the winter.
And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so), but that the battery will only last a few years - how people think the economics make sense is a mystery to me.
I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps.
PS - the battery thing also applies to cars. Old electric cars are basically not worth keeping after 10 years. Who would replace the old battery that costs as much as the car? Esp when the battery slots are incompatible with the latest advances - ie you can't upgrade to a better battery, but only install yesterday's tech.
Yes, but often too much of it, so lots of people use AC, which uses a LOT of power. Electricity is needed all the year.
"Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations."
And there is wind everywhere, but only if you build high enough. So yes, there are places where it makes no sense to build them, but there are a lot more other places, where it does.
"I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy"
So a solar + battery powered off grid home is deep controlled by the government? May you explain how that works?
"And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so),"
Have you looked up any actual numbers? Maybe do so. Also maybe that part, that tracks how the battery prices are changing. They are constantly getting cheaper.
Also maybe you are aware, that the whole industry that was and is fossil based needs to change. Your criticism comes from an angle, that assumes that should be for free?
Burning fossil fuels is cheap. But only if you ignore the external costs of climate change and air pollution.
The third phase of the energy transition will see massive overcapacity in the summer being turned into chemical energy, to be stored until winter. Hydrogen and synthetic methan will be burned, and the dissipating heat used for district heating. Efficiency is north of 70% for this. I don't see a fundamental problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
We're not there yet. Currently, this setup is non-sensical since a lot of other measures should be implemented first, but even currently existing tech is pretty efficient, all things considered. And it only gets better from here.
That sounds like unfounded paranoia. It has literally never been easier to be an energy-independent anarchist living in a hut somewhere than today.
It's quite expensive to do now if you don't want a reasonably large shift in lifestyle in doing so.
But with multi-kw solar+battery kits selling everywhere for just a few $k, and 1000-lumen LED lights pulling only single-digit watts, it's getting affordable to have both
Edit: Tesla cars at 200k miles typically retain 80% of their total capacity. The 10 years you quote is the full warranty period. Additionally it costs about $10k to replace the batteries. House hold battery’s last about 20+ years, with 30+ possible without daily draw (quoted based on Tesla power wall specs).
I don’t know where you’re getting your battery facts from, but they’re essentially wrong. I suspect it’s not renewables that’s been captured but your biases.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
Sure 100% solar powered homes might be harder to do in the colder hemispheres but in many parts of the world it is already possible. During spring, summer and autumn you can cover most of your electricity with a 3kW solar panel set up. Shift your dishwasher, washing machine and dryer to mid day, charge devices when the sun shines etc. Families in poorer countries are likely on a much smaller carbon footprint and it is therefore easier to replace their energy needs with solar or solar thermal. Small, medium as well as large scale island grids are already possible and in operation. https://reneweconomy.com.au/wa-off-grid-school-runs-100-on-s...
For colder climates the solar alone will not cut it, insulated homes, heat pumps and solar can however.
As opposed to government-sanctioned utility companies and petrol companies? Its pretty easy to make your own solar panel (not an efficient one, but something). It is very capital intensive to mine for natural gas and crude these days. Surely the solar panel + battery offers more independence (as evidenced by the fact that nearly every large RV owner is thinking about getting solar now).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/859266/number-of-coal-po...
They generate something like 25% of greenhouse gases. When should be expect these to be replaced, and get the 25% drop in emissions?
Replacing over a billion ICE cars seems with EV’s is going to be so much more work, for example.
An immediate 25% drop in emissions might even buy us a few more years before we need to get to net zero emissions.
Instead we could replace ICE cars with no cars and get much more bang for our buck. A few changes to how we build so that you can walk/bike within 15 minutes for many daily needs would reduce energy consumption, save families money, still allow for a car, and everyone would be much happier and healthier.
Cars for all transit is a bad solution regardless of ICE or EV.
If we can’t replace a few thousand coal plants, we are unlikely to…
People wouldn’t even notice the difference if we replaced coal power plants.
For better or worse they’ll be forced out of their habits against their wishes because the economic physics just doesn’t work. Unless of course they are ready and willing to go to war and to exterminate populations for resources.
Ideally we avoid a lot of that by just building sidewalks and planning now, but to your point - can’t convince people. Who moved my cheese? Boomer central, etc.
It’s not a bad idea but let’s be realistic about the amount of work it would take
https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-research-data This article seems to suggest that the amount of installed solar has doubled in the last four years and that the pace is accelerating. Also it states that the solar market expanded by 40% last year.
Not disagreeing with your statement, just pointing out that there's many headwinds to a greener energy future.
And I can't imagine this being very popular with homeowners or the politicians that represent them, regardless of their political color. So, there might be some backlash against this as well at some point.
Tangentially, at scale, this is referred to as a utility death spiral.
https://eepower.com/news/71-of-u-s-utilities-see-the-utility...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spain-politics-electricit...
That said, batteries help.
Since in most areas, utilities are monopolies that are not subject to competition, they should not be allowed to deny cost-saving tech advances just because it lowers overall system cost and their overall percentage of revenue and profit goes down.
Balancing a grid that relies on a few production plants is already a non-trivial endeavour. Changing the network is usually a slow process. Adding a new power line to fix some topologic issues can take years to plan and millions to build. Having a robust grid means grid operators have to know details of the network, and be able to know how to reroute power when a line becomes too close to its limits or (worse) when a circuit-breaker opens. Studying the current network takes time.
That's why adapting to frequent changes isn't realistic, purely from the carrier's perspective, without even looking into power production aspects.
Edit
So typical here: Your comment is being downvoted. It still stands an important point to consider.
with the right pricing incentives, rooftop solar ought to decrease the amount of transmission capacity required rather than increasing it, by generating the required power closer to the point of use
The point is that unless a residence can independently provide for their own electricity every hour of the day, then the generation and distribution will be sized for full load.
a residence that can provide some of its own power during peak hours does not need distribution, transmission, or (utility-scale) generation sized for full load; a neighborhood that can provide some of its own power during peak hours does not need transmission or (utility-scale) generation sized for full load, just distribution. this is a much less onerous requirement than the one you erroneously believe to be necessary
it's true that there's probably a load right at the rated load which will gradually cook the transformer over the course of 10 years or so, but that's a pretty narrow window
that's the kind of capacity that needs to be expanded
This may change in the future, but until some politician cares enough and passes the cost on to the taxpayer, there's going to be friction for these changes.
This sounds like a pretty good reason for utilities to be a public affair.
Going with Longi bifacial panels - does the US restrict or add huge duties on Chinese panels?
There was a recent experiment[0] where a company is going to start putting panels directly on the ground without any mounting hardware.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33926683
solarserver's photovoltaik preisindex makes it seem like that's about 10 percent pv modules and the rest is either retail markup (or tariffs) or balance of system; is that true?
Time of use billing. The battery is generating ROI if it can arbitrage energy over the day.
Net metering + solar. If net metering is not available, or sufficiently discounted, and your energy usage is not high enough during the day to use all your solar power, then batteries generate ROI.
Grid stability. A battery effectively is insurance against outages of a few hours. With sufficient solar and rationing, that may extend to week long outages (think natural disasters).
Do you have a source for that? It sounds kinda silly. The maintenance + OH&S aspects of solar panels are nontrivial and it doesn't make sense to mandate them on residential homes.
I've always assumed that once the economics make sense it'll be easier to build a massive solar farm and let people use the grid as usual. Much less risk of people falling off roofs,heavy objects falling off roofs, wiring being misconnected, weird maintenance problems, managing the ebb and flow of energy, etc. I don't want to have to look after my own panels.
Technically, there's also distribution losses (just because we can do HVDC, 5% losses per 1000km, doesn't mean we want to spend the money for it); but I think it's mainly to avoid politicians decrying prime farmland being used for a thing they don't think looks as pretty as sheep grazing on grassy rolling hills.
But it depends on the country. Some countries have a whole lot of "low use" fields, like natural or industrial deserts. Others don't.
Also, the interconnection queues for attaching your project to the grid are getting astronomically long now, and this is one of the biggest impediments to new renewable generation. One of the most valuable assets of a coal generation sites is its connection to the grid; all the rest of facility might have negative value, but the value of the connection can offset all that.
Utility scale solar is great, until you consider how to connect it up to load.
Are you working in an area with a low consumer density?
> Also, the interconnection queues for attaching your project to the grid are getting astronomically long now, and this is one of the biggest impediments to new renewable generation.
Yeah, that's unsurprising. Power Grids are not something that adapts fast to topological change.
With behind-the-meter solar, this peak is capped, and if the local solar is allowed to power the rest of the distribution nod with net metering, then that means less transmission too.
T&D must be sized for the peak, so lots of residential solar means a lower peak and lower T&D costs.
Of course, this goes agains the utility narrative, because they can't admit that or else their regulators might have to allow such residential net metering. Instead, utilities try to frame the argument that solar customers are taking away from their neighbors or somehow not paying their fair share.
But when evaluated as a whole system, using massive distributed solar along with utility scale is far cheaper than building it all utility scale due to the T&D savings.
I see many advantages, among them:
- You don't have to find new land; roofs are ideal for solar.
- No need for a huge project, financing, bureaucracy. Done in weeks.
- Costs are low and spread over tons of landowners instead of requiring fundraising and negotiations
- You can have literally thousands of workers busy creating solar power at the same time.
- You get geographic spread and will be less affected by clouds over your central solar plant.
- No single point of failure
- Less need for large and expensive long-distance powerlines
Rooftop solar puts the power to solve a problem in the hands of the people experiencing the problem and eliminates the need for a megaproject. This has turned out to be really powerful, rooftop solar has grown extremely quickly.
If the panels are in a field somewhere, an energy company gets the money.
If the panels are on my roof, I get the money.
By all means, it should be much cheaper to make large solar farm on some suitable place and buy the electricity from there. The fact that it isn't can't be explained by technical factors.
this is especially important in backwards countries like the usa with their so-called license raj preventing modernization
since most household energy is used for low-grade heating and cooling (refrigerator, air conditioner, oven, clothes dryer) i think thermal energy storage is likely to be a crucial enabling factor; mit's solar house used phase-change materials, but i suspect thermochemical energy storage is a better option
(why thermal energy storage instead of batteries? in the limit it's about three orders of magnitude higher capacity for a given price)
Too late to worry about electricity in that case!
I can understand why you might think that. But there is one place on the planet that's done the renewable transition now. And it proves you wrong.
Let me introduce the state of South Australia. It's an advanced OECD economy, situated at the base end of Australia so far from anywhere it has only 1 transmission line connecting to a neighbouring state, and it's renowned for going down. Unusually for Australia, South Australia also has no coal or gas, and is famous for wild storms taking down kilometres of it's 100kv power lines.
It's currently running at 80% renewables:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-hits-stunning-ne...
No, the power does no go off at night.
The transition was expensive. SA already had the most expensive electricity in Australia, and during the transition prices did go up for years. But at 80% the transition is almost over (although they need to build more storage), and the price of electricity in SA has been dropping. In fact it's dropped below the pre-transition price, so it's often below the rest of Australia's coal fired generation:
https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/sa_fact_...
With that example to follow, the rest of the Australian states are gritting their teeth and following South Australia's lead. Teeth gritting is required because we are predicting a 50% jump in electricity prices, during the transition. It's already starting to bite: https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/power-bills-to-rise-by-... . But that price hike only lasted 5 years in SA, and the light at the end of the tunnel is lower prices than we have now.
Outside of bitcoin mining, is there any energy sink a residential user could engage to suck up the spare capacity? At the industrial scale - what processes can intermittently engage in production which is still cost effective if the equipment lays idle for a majority of the day?
Fuel synthesis? Desalination? SETI-like computations?
I think we've been in this artificially low fossil fuel price environment since the beginning though: the externalities aren't priced in.
The thing is, abundant cheap energy will make it less and less worth doing.
One way or another, it will definitely be stopped. At some point, civilization collapse would end the burning of fossil fuels at scale. The question is at what point it will stop and whether any tipping points are passed which accelerate the process out of control.
It's far from obvious that all efforts to limit carbon emissions will fail and to say otherwise is deeply cynical. Measures are being taken already. They are not enough to reach the claimed goals and the claimed goals will probably not be reached, but that's very different from saying warming will not be stopped at all, let alone "of course". More measures will follow once the adverse effects get worse in industrialized countries (e.g. deaths and economic damage due to changing climate and weather events).
I won't happen by magic. Even with their ever increasing scarcity, as long as no alternative exists, they will be economical.
If all the fossil fuel is burned, we will probably never reach that point ; society breakdown will happen sooner.
If it's about having the understanding and technical means to define new targets for our economy in order to reach that goal, even if it means reducing our consumption, then yes, it was a reasonable goal back when we started considering the issue seriously.
See, that's the difference between an organized society planning this change and just letting it happen.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-21/germany-b...
"Utility Steag GmbH will add four hard-coal plants with a capacity of 2.5 gigawatts to the market within the next few weeks, while Uniper SE will prolong operations at its 345-megawatt Scholven-C hard-coal-fired power plant, the companies said on Friday. "
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/1124448463/germany-coal-energ...
https://www.ft.com/content/9d3c8af8-ae00-4dc5-9e85-579681450...
"Germany turns to coal for a third of its electricity"
Because my german colleagues were ranting about this whenever there was a break/issue in "Teams meetings". (which happens often)
Why do I care ? Because people are apparently not looking at reality when they make grandiose claims about renewables and electricity generation in Europe. Replace by renewables by all means - but at-least be honest about the data.
How does that make sense to you?
How does that make sense to you ?
Well, I hadn't heard that. That's interesting.
It makes sense to me because they were all clearly dependent on Russian gas, which is what caused the price spike in electricity across Europe. It still doesn't make sense to me that you think it's something to do with renewables.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-...
Turns out, nuclear is not the end all, be all solution. Who knew?
I don’t know why HN has such a rage boner for Germany’s energy transition, it doesn’t seem that triggered by any other country.
Not that the Germany is better than France. My point is that it s true that people who have a rage boner about Germany are not fair: if they really care about f* up, why they don't care about France?
I don't buy this idea that the German transition was an ideology driven f* up. The project was designed and supported by a lot of experts. They published their results, with their computations and all, and no real flaw was discovered. Sure, there were some pro-nuclear partisans who, like the anti-nuclear ones, would never accept that such studies were scientifically sound just because it did not say what they ideologically wanted to hear.
At the time, the project was scientifically sound. It did not work out because 1) the government did half of the things the project said it should do, 2) as every long-term project, it had some uncertainties, and it turned out some elements did not "aligned". An alternative project of keeping with nuclear generation was also scientifically sound, but it is not scientifically correct to pretend that this one was "better", or "more rational", or even "less ideological". People who come here and say "it was an ideological f* up" are just people who see it did not worked out and are not smart enough to not think "obviously, if it would have be me, I would have done it way better, the only reason it failed is because they suck and are irrational while I'm wayyyy smarter than everyone and soooo rational".
If I look at https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE and see patterns like 50 GW at 3 am and 60 GW at 1 pm I wonder: how can you ensure providing the base output 24/7 entirely with renewables? I have seen facilities within industrial complexes that literally required more electricity than a whole city 24/7. The demand of electricity that needs to be provided 24/7 is enormous.
There is in addition a huge challenge to manage loads in a grid (that was never designed for it) for regional variance and unpredictability in energy production (e.g., sunshine in the north and wind in the north but no need there) and the consumption (e.g., industry in the south).
In classical “German ideology” fashion laws are passed, one-way door decisions are made, “experts testify” that everything works and 10 years later the thing blows up.
And it’s not just me who “brilliantly came up with this assessment” - but I borrowed it from publicly shared opinions of industry leaders: https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/industrie/nikolas...
So, why does it work out and I have it all wrong? What were the evil forces that sabotaged this very well thought through idea? Because I went all PV and geothermal heat pump and energy efficient housing. What have you done?
- the electricity grid _before the move to go out of the nuclear_ was not sustainable: reducing emission implied electrifying, which implies local flexibility that the grid at the time was simply not able to provide. The "old" nuclear plants had to disappear in the mid-/long-term, and because of that, there were several possibilities. Idiots are assuming that if Germany would not have got out of nuclear, the situation would be perfect today, which is just plain stupid (the situation would be closer to the French one: everything looking fine on the surface, but heading right for the wall).
- the "no wind night" challenge is technically as "easy" as the technical challenge of developing a grid with nuclear plant. It's difficult to understand for the laymen, but the "old" nuclear plants were technically not to the level for a grid without gas and coal, and need to be replaced by new ones which will need to solve a lot of problems that are similar to the "no wind night" challenge. In simulation, it turns out that large distance grid connectivity (which is better for the resilience anyway) and some storage (which was at the time (and still today) way more room to progress than some nuclear technology) are fixing the "no wind night" challenge quite effectively. It may seem surprising, but in science, the conclusions of computations are way more reliable than the gut-feeling of laymen.
I understand it is frustrating to see that your naive understanding is contradicted by conclusions from proper studies, and it is very easy to just conclude "I'm smarter, I know it will not work, the only explanation is that it was ideology".
(not sure I get your point when you bring Nikolas Stihl: isn't this guy as much as an expert on grid simulation than you? Being an industry leader does not magically give them a pass on doing exactly the same mistake as you, which is: drawing naive conclusions from naive understandings and concluding that if experts have a different ones, the only explanation is that they are "ideological")
> What were the evil forces that sabotaged this very well thought through idea?
There are tons of ways to fail. Seeing something not working perfectly and concluding that the project itself was therefore stupid is just incorrect. And we should also keep in mind that the risk of failures was, at the time, according to science, as big if they would have gone in the "nuclear direction". Sometimes you may take the most rational decisions and it still does not work out.
> What have you done?
I really hope this is not one of those stupid argumentation panic "oh yeah? oh yeah? well, you seem to know better than me and have pointed out the stupid things I say, but how many push-ups are you able to do?" (but don't worry, I've done _a lot_).
“ In simulation, it turns out that large distance grid connectivity (which is better for the resilience anyway) and some storage (which was at the time (and still today) way more room to progress than some nuclear technology) are fixing the "no wind night" challenge quite effectively.”
Not in reality it seems though. I take a look at April 3, 7 am: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE Solar was zero. Wind dropped to 20% coal was increased to 30%. April 2nd at 3 pm, wind stood at 37% and coal stood at 13%. So, where after two decades of “going renewable” is this even remotely speaking yo your ideological dream world? Let me reiterate: wind dropped by 50% and they had to increase coal by 100%. At night.
I want renewables to work. I put my money where my mouth is. But after two decades or so of “trying” we are only showing data demonstrating they can’t work for Germany the way people like you want us to believe.”
I'm not sure I understand your question. You are saying "the problem is that it did not work because it was ideological". I'm saying "it is incorrect, the plan was not an irrational crazy thing out of ideology, it was a scientific study and the choice was as rational as other possibilities". Then you are now telling me "well, the plan does not work, so it can only be ideological, unless you provide a plan that will work for sure". That does not make any sense. Nobody can come with a plan that works for sure. Saying "you don't have a plan that works for sure, so I can say whatever I want and I'm right" is certainly not a rational way of thinking.
> Not in reality it seems though.
What? You are saying that in a grid that the German government has botched, there is no capacity for compensate for "no wind night". How does that prove that the "no wind night" is an impossible obstacle?
Again, it is MATH! Math proves it is possible. The fact that the German government did not put their money where their mouth was is obviously not proving that not possible.
And don't get me wrong, it works both way: France messed up their nuclear park. It DOES NOT MEAN NUCLEAR CANNOT WORK. Based on our conversation so far, I doubt that if someone bring France summer problems to demonstrate that nuclear does not work, you will not, legitimately, say that it's a stupid argument. That's the same here.
And as long as there are idiots that are unable to discuss the situation by accepting the complexity and by accepting that, maybe, just maybe, decisions that don't fit their naive conclusions are not the result of "bad ideological guys", then, we will never progress.
> ... your ideological dream world ... people like you ...
I see. And you are criticizing the German government for being ideological. For your information, I was part of a team that helped creating new nuclear project. But you are yet one of those m*rons who are incapable of not seeing the world in black or white. You criticize the German government, and yet, you fall 1000 times faster into the "oh my, this guy is bringing reality that I don't like, so I should convince myself that my church is the great rationality on earth and that he is an heretic". Pathetic.
Well, today it doesn’t and tomorrow it won’t either.
I’ve seen my fair share of “objective projects/engagements where the wanted outcome was communicated very clearly” by German government bodies.
I love the idea of decentralised and local energy generation; energy efficient housing/living. I spent $$$ on it.
But Germany has an industry that is so hungry for a constant supply of electricity that I see no realistic viable path in renewables for that. People like you have claimed for two decades there is - yet, here we are: running coal full steam at night.
Idealists like you destroy our planet.
It is not the case. The model say: if you do A, B and C, it will work, but if you do A but not B and C, it will fail. The German government has done A but not B and C. What happened with Germany is CONFIRMING that the model works. Other elements of the models are applied in other countries, such as France or England (not the full deployment, but the elements deployed behave exactly as the model predict).
> People like you have claimed for two decades there is - yet, here we are: running coal full steam at night.
Yep, running coal full steam in France when the nuclear power plants fail. So, according to you, nuclear is not working, renewable is not working, ... What's your plan? Whatever you give me, I can easily find places where it failed, which, according to you, is enough to claim that the whole strategy was "ideological".
The thing you are unable to understand is that failure is part of the reality: there is no obviously winning strategy, and rejecting a whole path based on failures that you are not even understanding is ridiculously obtuse.
> Idealists like you destroy our planet.
You are right: idealists LIKE YOU destroy our planet. I'm a pragmatic, I don't care if the solution is nuclear or renewable (but apparently you are totally unable to realize that, which just reinforce the conclusion that your analysis is disconnected from reality). But you are an ideologist: you have decided what is the "correct" solution without knowing the real situation, and you invented excuses to confirm what you have in your head is "the good thing".
But whatever, it does not change the facts: you may think the move was "ideological", but the facts are still there: it was not. You may insist and cry about it, it is very clear that you have no idea of what was the situation (you've even mentioned it yourself). Honestly, if you really want to help the planet, just stop saying useless things and accusing wrongly people of being "ideological" just because it does not fit with the naive model you have created from your superficial understanding of the situation.
France generated less than 1% of electricity with coal in 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263322/electrical-produ...
While in Germany it was over 30%: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
There is a qualitative difference between an occassional need for some coal in particularly adverse situations, and relying on it for almost a third of your electricity needs.
Driven by an ideological agenda of Ms Merkel and the green party, they shut down nuclear power plants (needed to cover our base load in chemical/manufacturing/whatnot) and replaced it with gas from Russia (don’t ask me why). Now that Russian gas isn’t exactly on the table anymore and we not only depend on Russian gas for heating but also a great deal for electricity (nuclear was shut down, remember) we have no choice but ramp up to coal thanks to the Green party.
The fact that Germany’s “greenest” (carbon emissions-wise) day was still worst than France’s most polluting day speaks volumes.
Wind power and solar DO NOT suffice to cover Germany’s electricity need unless you go full-scale deindustrialisation (which the Green party certainly would favor). I’m all in for PV on everyone’s roofs, I have geothermal heating for my house, I built everything low energy - but please lets stop the ideological destruction of our economy and our environment by the Green party’s “vision”.
You have been misinformed. They shut down nuclear to replace it with renewables. They already used Russian gas at the time.
2. this is the hard part, but there is good news.
solar and wind over large areas are fairly consistent and with HVDC you can transfer power 1-2 thousand miles with low losses. there's also a small but rapidly growing amount of storage on the grid. right now, we treat hydro as primarily generation with a side benefit of storage, but it's shifting to primary storage with a side benefit of generation. doing so gives most grids a decent ability to scale up and down renewable generation at will. lastly, you can use fossil fuels when everything else isn't giving you enough. a fossil fuel plant that runs a couple times a year for a few hours is a lot better than 40% of the grid being fossil fuel year round.
there's also a decent amount you can do in terms of demand shaping as the grid gets smarter. electric hot water tanks can be used as batteries where you set them up to turn on when there's excess power. you can also do things like make agreements with energy hungry sectors (like ore refining) to throttle output when necessary (compensating them for the lost revenue).
3. this is easy. refill batteries, smelt aluminum, turn off generation.
If I eyeball the electricity consumption correctly, the lowest consumption was like 50 GW at 3 am in the morning and the highest was 60GW (+20%) at 1pm.
Our freakin grid is NOT capable of managing an additional load for EVs as of today or any time soon. We cannot produce enough electricity to move gasoline driven cars to EV because we right now barely manage to keep or industry alive and geothermal heatpumps and whatnot will strain it further. So regarding 1) its BULLSH*T its a massive problem.
2) Where do you live that you believe Germany can store electricity in hydro? Why do you believe there is demand shaping when we literally need a constantly high load (see 1)???
3) Yes, I understand. Easy peasy. If i get a battery for my solar panels, the investment costs are effectively above 30cents/kWh which is bogus. Yes, you can just turn off that aluminium smelter or chemical plant running a continuous process.
You clearly have never been close to an industry complex, worked in anything remotely related to “Germany’s industrial backbone”. It’s ideological wishful thinking.
If this choice was actually made to please the greens, as the theory goes, that would have been a first for Germany, a country built on its close ties between industry and government. Not to mention that the greens aren't usually fond of burning fossil fuel.
Occam's razor should suffice to understand the political process that went down here.
putin took advantage of this, europe put their neck in the guillotine for him
"Germany is deploying about 3 gigawatts of coal-fired generation to ensure there are enough electricity supplies to make it through the winter amid curtailed natural gas supplies from Russia."
This was done out of necessity to ensure Germany did not run out of natural gas during the winter months as the gas imports from Russia have more or less dried up. I am not German nor am I up to date on their measures to transitioning their grid to renewable energy, but if anything this war is accelerating the transition for many countries in Europe. Even if this means they have to temporarily re-open fossile fuel power plants.
This could possibly have been avoided had the German government not shut its nuclear power plants down in the previous years, but that's another discussion.
(But keep it hush-hush and lets not talk about this dirty fact on HN - it looks bad you know ?)
All of this while they already have a viable green solution: Nuclear, which they planned on completely shutting down by 2022.
Northstream 2 was planned under Merkel.
> Merkel decided in a completely irrational overnight move to just phase out nuclear.
No, it was an almost unanimous vote where even the opposition agreed with the government[0]. Nothing irrational about it, they decided to go for renewable instead of nuclear.
- 0: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/30/germany-end-nu...
The opposition agreeing - you mean like the Green party who wanted to end nuclear like forever? Merkel had essentially absolute power in Germany and was leading some major changes that are hard to believe now… 1) shut down nuclear, 2) abolish compulsory military service, 3) open the borders for an uncontrolled influx of male refugees, 4) completely ignore Corona at first and then bulldoze over our Basic Law.
No, I mean pretty much everyone: 513 yes to 79 no.
> abolish compulsory military service
hard to believe? I guess we agree to disagree.
A military coup is one of the largest risks to any society. The “best” people to serve the military are the young people that stand to lose their country and have a million things that they get excited about - except going to war and fighting.
A society itself needs to protect itself.
Also you don't need weapons and war to resist. It's much more effective to perform civil disobedience on a mass scale. Paralize the country and refuse to obey. Gandhi docet.
It's also what Ukraine should do instead of sacrificing entire generations of their men and women to protect some hundred square miles of land, destroying any value those lands might have in the process.
They're not protecting their land, they're protecting themselves. If a significant portion gets shot either way it's better to at least be able to shoot back, no?
Wars tend to allow for this kind of tragedy to happen. Much harder to slaughter people during a civilian disobedience act that is globally covered by media. Brutal repression of demonstrations also causes much more outrage, basically backfiring if your intent is to stop them. Any dictator worth a shot knows this very well.
> If a significant portion gets shot either way it's better to at least be able to shoot back, no?
False dychotomy. People who protest the war in Russia are being arrested, not shot in the streets. So why do you think that would happen in this case? Because "Russians are Orcs"?
People who protest the war in Russia get arrested not shot because that's all it takes to suppress them. This is an argument against your point, not for it. Nor does it mean that Russia wouldn't apply harder measures elsewhere, if they thought it necessary.
Russians aren't referred to as orcs, only their soldiers.
> People who protest the war in Russia get arrested not shot because that's all it takes to suppress them
But if as you believe Ukrainians care so much then they would definitely not give up after a few being jailed.
> Nor does it mean that Russia wouldn't apply harder measures elsewhere, if they thought it necessary.
Harder than bombing cities and destroying the infrastructure? Strongly doubt so. Doesnt seem like your way worked well for the Ukrainians so far. Unless all you care about is making Russia weaker, no matter how many Ukrainians it take.
Russian gas to Germany is being replaced by gas from USA. And liquefying gas for boat shipping is not a cheap/green process.
https://apnews.com/article/germany-government-olaf-scholz-bu...
I still shudder at the perspective of a looming croissant shortage.
Thank God the reliable renewables delivered.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr... [2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-nuclear-watc... [3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...
1) the shortages stem from the failure of France's nuclear power to deliver
2) the high prices were partly because of shortages, and the wholesale prices were the highest in France all year
I am too lazy to post prices for lst year, but they can be easily verified - besides you are not really interested in facts you don't like. Another thing that can be verified is that those coal plants that were put on emergency stand by had a very very low capacity factor and all the coal that was stockpiled early in the year was basically left unused. Because for all the talk of base load and reliability, when push came to shove, renewables kept the lights on.
The high prices are not so bad overall, there is and was a big incentive to build more capacity fast. Next years will be transformative, and it will all be led by renewables.
renewables do not have this kind of obvious benefit, fossil fuels and fission are the best options until we can get fusion
either way it ends up getting offset by coal
Just finished a motorbike trip in Laos. Fun fact, their largest export is electricity.
Would've never guessed that, right?
90% of the electricity they generate is exported to neighboring countries - mostly Thailand.
80% is renewable - Go Laos!
But wait, it may be renewable... but turns out the government is corrupt and constantly sells rights to the highest bidder wanting to build a dam for hydroelectric wherever they want, and usually without any sort of environmental survey - oops. It's the driest country I've been to in a while, many villages had their water access completely destroyed due to upstream dams.
Just a cautionary tale as "renewable" doesn't necessarily mean better - green-washing is absolutely still a thing out there and we should be sure to thoroughly vet information before assuming it's more viable solution for us.
People can live without electricity, but it's difficult to live without water.
s:East/South/Southeast Asia:the United States:
It doesn't have to be this way, the engineering controls needed are well known. It requires the country in question to be financially committed to doing things right. For nuclear power this is already considered an essential prerequisite, yet coal power plants already release vastly more radioactivity and increase the cancer risk of everone around them. As far as reducing total cancer, nuclear is the way to go.
That doesn't imply we can't compare alternatives and say "This one will result in less harm than that one."
Tell me you're in a privileged western country without telling me.
Also, for other readers, Laos is a repressive "communist" dictatorship. It is no surprise that the gov't welcomed Belt & Road programme by China (with high interest loans!) to build a giant dam that enriched few at the expense of many. This is green washing at its very best.
The future of green energy is mostly about solar and wind. Yes, there are some places with easy-to-dam rivers remaining (sub-Saharan Africa), but they are few and far between.
It is still crazy to me that North Africa is not covered in solar panels that export to Europe. Same for Australia, South Africa, and many Gulf countries. Sunshine and wind is the "new oil" of the 21st Century. They can export to neighboring countries or produce green hydrogen.
The same exact story can be said about Iceland, which is very far from being a communist dictatorship (and it bears mentioning that Laos government is not repressive compared to many capitalist democratic governments; I don’t know where you would get that from except preconceived biases).
Iceland sells majority of its renewable energy to foreign aluminum companies. Along with fish it is the biggest export. The government is corrupt and constantly sells rights to build factories to bidders while neglecting environmental impacts. Whole towns are often run by a single Canadian aluminum company. And the green origin certificates is then sold to EU countries (just like indulgence was sold by the Catholic church), so “green” energy consumers are buying in Germany, are actually just coal power, where the energy company bought the origin certificates from Iceland.
See, you don’t need to be communist, nor a dictatorship, to do industrial scale greenwashing
Did you read the book <<Draumalandið — Sjálfshjálparbók handa hræddri þjóð>> or watch the documentary <<Draumalandið>>? Me: Neither, but I am interested. I only learned about this project recently.
The most shocking fact about the whole project (from Wiki):
Completely destroyed, or just no longer enough to support wasteful methods of irrigation? It's been over a decade since I was in SE Asia, but my impression was that they relied heavily on flooding fields for irrigation.
I live full time in Indonesia, and their irrigation system is much more complex. I saw nothing of the sort in Laos, so perhaps that could be a factor too.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/04/14/the-weekend-read-chin...
Claims that these tariffs have some human rights motivations are nonsensical, would the US block imports of Saudi oil over human rights abuses there? Of course not - but silicon solar panels, oh my!
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/exclusive-us-blocks-more...
It's no surprise that the pushback by politicians owned by investors in fossil fuels and utilities has been so intense - energy is one of the most lucrative investments, and it's rather difficult to control and meter the flow of sunlight to homes, in comparison to natural gas or crude oil.
Notably, the USA has no R & D programs or subsidy programs like the CHIPS act (for semiconductors for computation, not for power production) aimed at rapidly expanding monocrystalline silicon production.
Something like Star Trek no involvement rule.
I'm really really sorry that our Navy is used to protect trade. Terrible of the U.S.
I'm sorry that the U.S. likes to have allies with democracies and a thriving, consuming, middle-class.
Are things better than they were under American hegemony? Sure. Could they be even better if we weren't stuck in this local maximum, Absolutely.
Anxiously lashing out at people because they express a desire for improvements in their society, and improvements in American society isn't productive.
"Are things better than they were under American hegemony? Sure. Could they be even better if we weren't stuck in this local maximum, Absolutely."
Yeah! Criticize America so it can be better but taking a stance that world would magically be better off without America, or even that the world doesn't want America while obsessively consuming American products seems rather childish in my opinion.
You think the grandparent comment is what you describe here?
Ironically, GGP's comment was a well thought out comment supporting American 'hegemony'.
I think you have your "lash out" backwards in this case.
Latin America: https://www.statista.com/statistics/961585/latin-america-cru...
US: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...
Every government has to think about energy independence, of which oil production is part of that story. Our oil economics are also intertwined with US policy, which renewables are helping undo in the US. That's to say, US society is trying to put a cap on how energy independence involves in conflict either directly or indirectly.
Latin Americas story is different: https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/ross/papers/work...
> Abstract: In Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, oil-producing countries have civil wars at a significantly higher rate than countries without oil. Is there also a link between oil and armed rebellion in Latin America?
> I argue the answer is “yes,” but with an important qualification. In the rest of the world, oil heightens the danger of both “governmental” conflicts (over control of the existing state) and secessionist conflicts (to form new states); but in Latin America, oil is only linked to governmental conflicts. This is not because Latin American petroleum has unusual properties, but because the region is uniquely “secession-proof”: there have been no separatist conflicts in Latin America for over a century. I explore two possible explanations for this anomaly: the region’s long history of sovereign statehood, which may have caused national borders to become more widely-accepted; and obstacles to the mobilization of indigenous groups along ethnic lines.
Tldr; instead of getting involved in foreign wars to save your oil supply, it's cheaper to centralize the oppression back home.
Realistically, the next country on the US hitlist is probably Iran, not your latam home country. But first the American public needs to get back it's war appetite, and the shooting in Ukraine needs to simmer down (probably within a year, along new borders that are pretty close to what the current battle lines are), and China needs to not distract us by starting with Taiwan.
If your nation is run by a dictatorship, it's a failed state.
If your nation is a theocracy, it's a failed state.
You'll notice the distinct lack of the US invading well-functioning, democratic nations (we share a remarkably unguarded, massive border with Canada).
You generally can't challenge US hegemony, it's far too large, and still expanding. China is the only entity since the 1950s Soviet Union that could even attempt it. For example while the EU's strongest economies have been largely going sideways for ~15 years economically (since the great recession), the US has added nearly $10 trillion to its economy (a further ~65-70% expansion in 15 years). Who is going to keep up with that, at that size (other than China)?
The issue is State subsidies and Environmental and Labor regulation that is flimsy. Any American company operating on US soil will be uncompetitive from Day 1 trying to follow, Federal, State and EPA regulation.
As much as Solar Panels are touted in Environmental community, they are a product of intense chemical process that produces poisonous waste.
EDIT: thanks for all the answers, IIUC it boils down to "nobody cares if a luxury item from a western company is built on slavery, the only thing that matters is that poor people who built it cannot afford it"
Ironically, me.
I changed the battery last year, it costed me 13$ (~12 euros), it is as good as new.
Now it might be that my Android phone is Chinese as well, so it actually costed me less than 10¢ a day. Even if I had to replace my Android smartphone, I could have changed it 3 times in the past 7 years and still spend less than buying an iPhone that lasted me 7 years.
I could still easily sell it for 30-40 euros, making it even cheaper.
Side-note: if anyone believes the idea that companies pass savings to the consumer... Well I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn they might be interested in
There must be some limit to how low it can be sold for.
What you’ve described is specific to humanity, not the US — “the thing is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it” is a near universal truth.
Let me guess — you’ve sat at a desk for your entire career?
Still relying on boundless global trade in 2023 is just.. a funny position.
It is utterly inefficient to produce stuff far, far from where it will be used.
Spreading things out like this is balls.
Lets start building again. If we're to get off this dust-ball, we have to learn to do things ourselves, again.
That's why I'm saying: just, stop!
It has to become consumer-preferred to have something cool be built locally.
This won't happen until someone builds something cool this way.
As far as I can tell, Chinese solar manufacturers do not engage in this sort of straightforward and easy to define dumping. They sell their products at comparable low prices both domestically and abroad. The United States claims that advantages given to Chinese solar manufacturers (like low cost land and industrial partnerships with local governments) are unfair and counters them with measures termed "anti dumping" tariffs. Given how many perks American states and municipalities roll out to attract manufacturing jobs, including solar jobs [2], I don't see how the Chinese incentives for solar manufacturing go too far. I rather think it's something like the situation with Canadian softwood exports to the US [3]: the US government's position is dubious, but it's too powerful in practice to be held to account.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dumping.asp
[2] https://bgindependentmedia.org/first-solar-site-promising-50...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...
China doesn't have a big natural gas / crude oil sector trying to block development of alternatives to their products, that's the difference.
The tariffs boosted domestic production of solar panels.
The tariffs also increased the cost of solar panels, so they slowed adoption of solar.
You can have Made in America, or you can have cheap, but you cannot have both.
Including hydro in the renewables column made the math work. Makes it seem like we've made more progress than perhaps we have. Hydro and wind are the biggest chunks in their pie chart. And much of hydro is decades, if not centuries old infrastructure.
But still! Lots of progress.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896
The fraction of energy that comes from low carbon sources is what matters.
in some sense that's 'low carbon'
√(kilowatt hour / 480 g) = 2700 m/s
√(kilowatt hour / 800 g) = 2100 m/s
480 g is 60% of 800 g so i guess my vaguely remembered percentage was about right
wrt co₂ reduction i think carbon capture is probably going to be necessary
Again, 480 is not all-inclusive. If you look at the whole system, gas is no better than coal, due to wellhead and pipeline leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/img/lifecycle-carbon-emissions-nol...
a kilowatt hour per 800 g works out to 4.5 megajoules per kilogram, which makes it easy to see that we're in the right ballpark (the energy density of coal itself is less than an order of magnitude higher) and that we're talking about delivered work rather than just thermal power
this nonsense about topical units is the reason that medieval merchants would measure certain kinds of cloth in flemish ells of 27 inches and other kinds of cloth in english ells of 45 inches; silver was weighed in troy ounces of 480 grains, drugs were weighed in apothecaries' drams of 60 grains (or apothecaries' ounces, which were the same as troy ounces), and foods were weighed in drams of about 27.3 drams, or avoirdupois ounces of 437½ grains
kilowatt hours and grams per kilowatt hour are the modern equivalent of apothecaries' drams
It doesn't in a sense that meaningfully addresses the challenges we're facing, though.
40% for electricity means a much lower reduction overall, especially if it informs the efforts we're willing to make.
however, methane does work as a transport fuel as well, at least for land transport
not sure what you mean by 'leaves no room for sectors where there are fewer opportunities'
However, renewables like solar and wind come with unique challenges due to their intermittent nature. They are more variable, harder to forecast, have location constraints, and can benefit from battery storage. These factors lead to a more dynamic grid than before.
For instance, several regions in the country provide five-minute updates on their energy generation mix, enabling near real-time observations of renewable energy effects throughout the day
For example, numerous regions across the country provide updates on their energy generation mix at five-minute intervals, allowing for close to real time observations of these effect of renewables throughout the day.
To help those involved in the energy transition, I created an open-source project called Grid Status (https://github.com/kmax12/gridstatus) that provides fuel mix, wholesale pricing, load, load forecasts, and more.
Additionally, I've developed real-time visualizations to make this data more accessible and easier to comprehend: https://www.gridstatus.io
I hope making this data more accessible and understandable will accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.
Just discovering this? Yeah, this has not been well planned.
We need power. Not energy.
Let me explain. There is no such thing as a useful measure of energy reliability. Energy is the accumulation of power over time. Here's a super simplistic example to illustrate the point:
You spend all day walking through the desert. Your water bottle is empty. You drank it all. You really need water, yet there's none to be found. You nearly die a few times, yet manage to make it out to a settlement by nightfall.
Someone there fills your bottle with water.
A reporter says your bottle, over that 24 hour period, was full.
That's the way you compute energy. You can have zero power for 12 hours and then have some for another 12. Energy just adds-up all the bits of power you had over 24 hours and reports it as one number.
Energy comparisons are useless.
Here's reality:
Solar is, nominally, about 50% reliable (if this term isn't comfortable, think "available").
No?
It turns off at night.
Roughly 50% of the time...it does not work.
Wind, on the other hand, does not suffer from this issue. It is much more reliable.
With the addition of a nominal amount of storage wind can easily get up to 95% reliability. Solar, with the same amount of storage, runs about 70% reliability.
This is about power delivery. Consistent. Water bottle in the desert, to use when you need water.
Ignoring all other factors (environmental, wildlife, NIMBY, noise, etc.), wind is a far better technology than solar.
Yet, again, to pull this back into the realm of what we should discussing: We need to talk about power, not energy. When you go to charge your electric car at the same time a million other people want to do the same thing, you need power.
Wind is stronger in the winter and solar is strong in the summer. The best consistency is achieved when both are used, not one or the other.
> The best consistency is achieved when both are used, not one or the other.
No. Wind with approximately three hours of storage is about 95% reliable.
Once again, it's about power, not energy.
That isn't enough, unless you are happy with 18 days of no power per year. Of course you could maintain traditional power plans to provide power for those 18 days, but then you've doubled or tripled your power costs because you have purchased two systems for providing power. An intermittent system and a second system with the same capacity that is unused 95% of the time but must be available at a moments notice. And of course you have to maintain a viable supply chain for fuel, repairs, maintenance, labor, etc.
> you have purchased two systems for providing power.
Precisely! Correct!
Therein lies the problem of renewables few people seem to understand, talk about and want to talk about. Solar and wind require 100% backup for the period of time during which they are not locally available.
BTW, a good deal of what I have been saying is supported with data from this paper [0]. It analyzes 39 years of data from 42 different countries. It does a good job of displaying the difficult relationships between various mixes and solar, wind and storage. Figure 2 is excellent. It takes a bit of study to internalize. After studying these charts almost everyone should have serious questions about solar. This is where the 95% figure for wind comes from.
And, BTW, figure 2 also shows that without overbuilding capacity both technologies are challenging.
There are ways to look at using distant solar and wind to provide for power holes. For example, have wind power brought in from 500 to 1000 miles away. The idea is you know there's a seriously good probability for the weather being different enough that you cover the power holes at location A using power from location B.
That's great. The question then becomes: How do residents of location B deal with their issues when you are sucking-up their power from location A.
No simple answers to this other than to say that both solar and wind have to be overbuilt and require 100% backup --of some form, I don't care what type-- for when they cannot deliver.
And so your question is perfectly valid and one that really needs to be on the table, front and center. I have asked it before. It is usually met with attacks and insults. It can take many forms, the most basic being:
If you need full 100% reliable backup available at a moments' notice, 24/7/365, are these truly the best technologies for the job?
I have argued that nuclear is a solid solution with 100% availability and the power density to deliver our needs. That is met with even more violent attacks and insults. Apparently I am somewhere between a really stupid person and a criminal for suggesting any of this.
Having devoted a significant effort towards understanding the many intricacies surrounding these issues, my thinking has morphed over time. I used to think we had to consider deploying a massive amount of nuclear power (somewhere beyond 1000 new power plants) for a full transition to electric vehicles and homes. That, of course, is as close to impossible as one can get.
I think a sensible path might be to focus on the 95% reliability of wind (which is far better than anything solar can achieve) and provide that 5% backup with regionally shared nuclear power and other power sources. We would still need hundreds of nuclear power plants built over the next, say, 30 to 50 years. Difficult, yes.
Here's the shocking reality of a transition to full electrification (homes and transportation):
We have to, at a minimum, TRIPLE our power generation and transport capacity.
Why triple?
Well, if we are going to go clean, you have to replace all of our existing power generation with 100% reliable clean alternatives.
That means we need to build 1200 GW of new clean power generation.
As we do this, we shut down what we don't want (if we can).
Next, we need another 1200 GW --at a minimum-- to power a full fleet of electric ground vehicles.
If we start talking cargo ships and aircraft, we are likely at another 1000 GW or far more.
The task, then, is to build somewhere around 3000 to 4000 GW of new clean power generation sources. They have to be 100% reliable, or you need to grossly overbuild to compensate for that.
The, question, then: Can we do this? In 25 years? No way. How about 50 years? Maybe? Tough to say. It sure a hell isn't happening in ten or fifteen, which makes the dramatic claims being made by politicians and their supporters nothing less than ridiculous.
[0] Schroedingersat ↗ https://www.autoblog.com/amp/2023/03/22/home-charging-challe... robomartin ↗ > your half-assed fermi estimate
EVs just charge whenever. Very few people use them like ICEs with regard to fuelling. The only thing needed to make them fit easily in the existing max output envelope is L1 chargers where they spend the day and TOU aware charging (and tarriffs). Most of the energy for charging them will never even hit the grid. And what little does will be mostly during the times of minimum usage. Fast chargers will have battery buffers anyway because no sane operator will want to pay the peak capacity rates for drawing 30MW during peak demand when their competitor next door can outcompete them by 50c/kWh by using a buffer.
You have the right order of magnitude of 3TW nameplate (you're quoting nameplate for the existing capacity which is absolutely not the same thing as CF weighted power, but you know this and you're trying to intentionally conflate the two) for solar + wind and about 3TW peak including storage and energy-limited dispatch lime hydro and w2e, but you really went off the rails with the rest. You also know that a mix of wind and solar has a higher uptime than either alone.
Maybe you should consider for half a second that the real engineers who actually think about this might have come to a different conclusion to your half-assed fermi estimate for good reasons?
You continue to chase me around HN to insult me any time I participate in a discussion about energy.
In the past I have asked @dang to let you carry on with these insults so you could show the world exactly who you are. My reasoning included such things as letting you "get it out of your system".
You have done enough of that.
This is now abusive.
Please.
Stop.
and for how it compares to coal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stati...
you have like 60-65% coal fired in the States.
40% of the corn produced in US is used for ethanol which is a energy intensive process which uses fossil fuels.
Until we find a reasonable way to store energy at grid scale, a continued shift to intermittent energy generation will result in dramatically higher prices and dramatically lower reliability.
Now, make it a 24/7 steady supply of renewable energy.
We’ll wait.
You can stop waiting now. https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-hits-stunning-ne...
OECD ecomony, averaging 80% renewables (wind, solar primarily). The other 20% is gas. They have enough generation now. To rid of that 20% (I'm not sure the economics makes sense) they need to build pumped storage.
Oh, and now they've made the transition, electricity prices are cheaper than non-renewable generation of 5 years ago.