> Hell, eleven percent of the energy that America currently uses, according to Saul Griffith’s excellent book Electrify, simply goes to finding more energy.
That's a pretty shocking stat too!
The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. It won't be free to transmit that energy, and the intermittent nature of the abundance will play hell with most capital intensive uses (eg crypto mining), but I'm super curious to see what new capabilities that people figure out for humanity.
I feel your last statement is imprecise and overly optimistic. It seems unusually difficult to find proper calculations about what a fully implemented low emissions strategy would look like for a particular country. The only example I have found is this report for the UK [1]. This report makes a number of key points:
1. The UK has to bring in solar power from other countries to meet emissions targets or have more Nuclear capacity.
2. Reduction in energy consumption is just as important as energy sources. This involves use of more efficient technologies, primarly through electrification.
These factors highlight that abundant renewable energy is actually not abundant enough in reality and is unlikely to be for a country like the UK, even with efficiency gains from massive electrification. Without nuclear investment, renewable energy needs to be imported which has infrastructure and geoplitical considerations, as well as being a single point of failure.
While great for its time that book has been thrust hopelessly out of date by technology change. I think some of MacKay's former students are looking to update it, since he is so sadly no longer with us. In particular, wind and solar and storage are dropping exponentially in cost, and it is no longer realistic to think that we could ever build nuclear within 20 years. The nuclear industry is in shambles, a collection of fuckups that can't build, can't ship, can't plan, can't even be honest, and results in jailtime for executives, whether they are from the US (can't build), or South Korea (can build, but faked the safety inspections).
The renewable industry is in contrast an incredible engine of technological advancement. Even enhanced geothermal systems, which have progressed perhaps the least, have advanced since MacKay's time. Ramez Naam has a great concise slide deck on this ongoing transformation:
I would like to refute your assertion that my statement was imprecise. It was extremely precise. And it is not overly optimistic, either. The amount of energy over-production will be determined by how cheap storage in relation to the costs of generation. If storage gets really cheap, then we will have less over-production, because it will be economical to store the production. But if zero-marginal-cost renewable energy continues to get cheaper faster than storage gets cheaper, it will be less expensive to have massive overproduction than to have lots of storage. Napkin math leads to predicitons very similar to RethinkX's prediction, which "traditional" energy wonks discount, but traditional energy wonks also accept ridiculous projections like the IEA's uncritically (sees Naam's slides for just how bad those are)
The UK and Japan are probably the two most difficult geographic locations to power with just solar and wind. But the dramatic drop in cost of off-shore wind is changing that dynamic. As are longer-term grid batteries, like those coming out of Form Energy, that are designed to be profitable from day one on the grid but with only occassional discharge.
To be clear, I am not advocating for nuclear energy. I don't have a preference for one non-fossil fuel energy source over an other. It is good to see that off-shore wind is becoming much more viable.
That slide deck repeats over and over that renewable prices have come down. That's great, but as I said in my original comment, it is hard to find actual calculations about this being implemented in a real country rather than breathless exhortations about the coming revolution.
That MacKay report is valuable for the energy distribution numbers - for example, it talks about the massive amount of panels and windfarms that would be required to meet demand and that this is unlikely to be feasible (notwithstanding the fact that the UK isn't very sunny). Maybe this isn't so true any more, but you seem to be saying that the UK should install an even more than massive amount of renewable capacity, along with various storage solutions to store the excess (presumably to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar). Maybe I don't have that right, but it seems to me to be overly optimistic. The recent energy crisis in Europe would seem to suggest that is the case in the medium term.
The "energy" crisis in Europe is a fossil fuel crisis, not a general energy crisis, the same as so many energy crises in the past, but this time the fossil fuel companies excellent PR engines have been able to cast it as the fault of energy sources that are not dominant on the grid.
The MacKay report was hopelessly and fruitlessly pessimistic on renewable energy, while embracing fraudulent technology like "clean coal" that has proven over and over to be a scam. It's not a fair shake at the world, and much less at the UK. I've been revisiting it since your comment, and though I thought it useful when I first read it, I no longer think it is helpful in understanding the scale of what we can do, and what needs to be done.
The RethinkX report I linked is one sort of model about a future energy grid, using very rough details. Christopher Clack's modeling is far more fine-grained, and his latest models are using historical weather combined with modeling down to the distribution node to run cost optimization strategies. I don't think he's fully published his latest yet (which shows huge cost savings by doing massive storage and solar deployments to homes and businesses within the next five years). But other reports are here:
IMHO, 90%+ renewables by 2040 is a foregone conclusion for 90%+ of the globe, unless governmental corruption requires that people are bilked by the coal and natural gas industries. The key design question for grids is going to be about the amount transmission & storage versus and amount of excess generating capacity from renewables nearby. Transmission is expensive, and not falling much in cost, if at all, so I have a feeling that future and new grids will have much less of it. Looking at those curves from Naam's slide deck should make you think about where we will be in another decade, or in two decades. Our current energy system has costs are split roughly equally fixed capex and fluctuating opex (based on fuel costs). The future grid will have nearly zero opex, and drastically lower capex. For the extreme outliers like the UK, they may lay down a few dozen GW of high-voltage DC to higher resource areas.
The UK just built a high voltage line to Norway. The eventual plan is to sell North Sea wind to Norway while the wind is blowing (which is almost all of the time, they're called trade winds for a reason). Some of that energy will be stored as pumped hydro and sold back to the UK when the wind isn't blowing.
Honestly please stop citing more than a decade old data on renewable energy. It's a highly dynamic sector, and data from the stone age of renewables is completely irrelevant for the discussion.
The book is obsolete on financial costs, but still useful for the physical scale of infrastructure required by various technologies. A lot of people have fairly poor intuition about that.
The bigger foibles are clean coal and nuclear. Clean coal has been impossible to build and CCS of fossil fuels has been a boondoggle whereever it's been tried. Nuclear has also proven to be nearly impossible to build, from France to Finland to the US. The UK has only managed to get one site going, Hinkley, and other planned sites have not had suitable bids, like Wylfa. So more nuclear is not a feasible route.
I think that enhanced geothermal systems (using heat from dry rock, kilometers down), could be a good resource that's just now getting developed in the UK, on the MW scale.
Solar will never be great in the UK, but average capacity factor is at 10%, and currently provides 4% of total UK electricity, which is a remarkable feat given historical costs.
I've said this in other comments, but there's a remarkable amount of hot air that went into the assumptions in this book, and its age is showing terribly. I bet that if MacKay were around still, he'd have massive updates, but the entire world was wrong when it was betting against renewables, and in favor of traditional fossil fuel companies' abilities to innovate.
Nuclear is difficult due to political issues and the poor state of the US industry, but it's not a physical impossibility. China is building quite a lot of nuclear power, including a GenIV plant that just went on the grid.
Political issues are not impeding France, Finland, the UK, or even the US's two sites. This is a misconception.
The underlying Gen3 (or whatever the AP1000 and EPR would be called), is fundamentally incompatible with our construction and logistics capabilities. China probably can't help us fix our processes, and I'm not sure we would trust them. Same goes for Rosatom, who is also building.
Even under the best of economic conditions, however, nuclear is not very favorable. Even China, with its unparalleled construction capability, is only planning a tiny tiny slice of its future energy capacity as nuclear, with much larger generation in wind and solar. And a lot of the planned nuclear will never be built, because renewables and storage are changing the economic case for nuclear.
Biomass is so very inefficient at capturing solar energy (maybe 2%, if that) that even at that small fraction of energy produced it contributes very substantially to the land use of the energy system.
Every right-wing blowhard has heard about Solyndra, but they never mention that the amount wasted of coal carbon capture, which doesn't work or even exist at scale, has spent multiple Solyndras worth of federal money.
Iirc it didn't really assume any arrangement, except maybe as an example. It calculated the physical requirements of different energy sources independently. The reader can start from there to get any particular combination.
I guess I don't find what's so difficult. All you need to do is look to Norway. If you want to make an argument that "the last bit is the toughest" - I guess? But they're already well, well on their way to a low emissions strategy.
As for it being impossible for a country like the UK: you're making some ridiculous assumption that the UK would need all energy to be produced on-shore. Does the UK get all of its coal and oil in-country? No? Then why do they need to get all of their energy in-country? If they need to import and store batteries or hydrogen or insert energy holding vessel so be it.
My understanding of the nuclear opposition from the renewable groups is that nuclear effectively has a massive upfront capex cost and delayed capex for decommissioning 3-5 decades later along with extremely low marginal costs to operate.
This means that in order to make "cheap" nuclear, you need to operate the plant at max capacity as long as you can. While this makes great "base load" it can't complement renewables like natural gas can, natural gas peaker plants can simply burn when renewables aren't available "low capex, high opex".
I'm curious how the UK is approaching the economics here, it's quite possible to reduce the capex of nuclear - and it's also possible to simply plan for something along the lines of a 40/60 split between nuclear and renewables where renewables take "peak demand" and high energy use industries.
>If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the cost of photovoltaics
came down enough that we could deploy panels all over the countryside,
what is the maximum conceivable production? Well, if we covered 5% of
the UK with 10%-efficient panels, we’d have
This paragraph is titled "Fantasy time". So before I start the criticism, I would like to thank him for clearly debunking fantasies about hydro and geothermal, where aside from ground-source heat pumps and sparsely populated mountains, they are simply too small. Photovoltaics are the largest source of sustainable energy by far, so the results of an overall analysis will be heavily dependent on the treatment of solar panels.
At the same time, I think it's practical to assume that humans will aggressively innovate the properties and production of PV panels, because the potential value is so large. But I'm going to stick with existing technology. The Agua Caliente farm in Arizona:
As such, describing solar farms as a fantasy, and upper bounding the efficiency at 10%, when there are existing installations built with solar panels at 16% efficiency, seems too pessimistic. Looking ahead to other technologies, perovskites, considered a low-cost option, were recently pushed to 25%:
and Alta Devices demonstrated 29% efficiency with a GaAs thin-film before a buyout by a Chinese firm led to a class-action lawsuit filed by disgruntled employees:
>most countries will be in the same boat as
Britain and will have no renewable energy to spare
A glance at a map will immediately show the viewer that Britain is one of the most poleward and densely populated countries in the world — a worst-case scenario for solar electricity. Even Japan has the benefit of sitting significantly further south.
Yikes, those are some really bad assumptions. It's been a decade since I've read the book, so skimming now I'm seeing an awful lot of hot air in the assumptions that went into it.
For example, the mythical, never built, "clean coal" shows up in most of the potential scenarios for the UK! That was an obvious stinker back when the book was written, but to simultaneously give the benefit of the doubt to charlatans, and then misestimate solar and wind so much is pretty unforgivable.
I think we perhaps give the book too much credit because it converted everything into understandable units, which is the primary utility of the book. But that utility papers over a lot of really bad judgement, so using it as a guide for sustainable energy leads to really bad conclusions.
Yeah consumer panels are routinely 18 - 20% efficiency now. But these are the ideal numbers. To be fair he doesn't derate the efficiency of PV as happens in the real world, so the degree to which 10% is an underestimate is mitigated. I don't think this substantively changes the analysis, it just means less reliance on nuclear in the various models. Additionally, in a gloomy country like the UK the more you rely on solar the more you need advanced storage and grid solutions to deal with the inconsistencies.
And agree that the comment about other countries is not correct. Australia for example will pretty soon be able to meet 100% energy demand with renewables on sunny days and is looking to export power.
Agreed, the 10% seems like a solid estimate, at least for today, but it seems quite likely that new tech could bring that up to 15% or more, which is a 50% in efficacy. Wikipedia says that current panels are getting a 10% capacity factor now, which is only 40% - 50% of what can be had at sites with good solar. That capacity factor seems to be slowly climbing since 2008 as well.
This paragraph has some pretty bad predictions by MacKay though:
>The solar power capacity required to deliver this 50 kWh
per day per person in the UK is more than 100 times all the photovoltaics
in the whole world.
This is a completely irrelevant and pointless thing to state.
> At the start of this book I said I
wanted to explore what the laws of physics say about the limits of sus-
tainable energy, assuming money is no object. On those grounds, I should
certainly go ahead, industrialize the countryside, and push the PV farm
onto the stack. At the same time, I want to help people figure out what
we should be doing between now and 2050. And today, electricity from
solar farms would be four times as expensive as the market rate.
Overlooking that Solar PV had already fallen precipitously in cost in 2008, and assuming that a four-fold fall was not a given, was a huge mistake.
> So I feel
a bit irresponsible as I include this estimate in the sustainable production
stack in figure 6.9 – paving 5% of the UK with solar panels seems beyond
the bounds of plausibility in so many ways. If we seriously contemplated
doing such a thing, it would quite probably be better to put the panels in
a two-fold sunnier country and send some of the energy home by power
lines.
5% of the UK is about the same percentage of the UK that is occupied by houses and gardens. Putting solar panels on all roofs could probably get to 10 kWh/d or more. Converting only a very small amount of arable land, which has already been taken out of nature, to solar panels, could get the UK to 5% easily.
The skepticism of solar and embrace of tech like clean coal and nuclear were big misses here.
People used to say that nuclear would lead to power to cheap to meter. That never happened. I’m not sure it’s going to happen with renewables because of the large land use requirements.
Also is there anywhere in the world where adding wind and solar has led to lower electricity rates for ratepayers? European electricity and nat gas prices should go up about 50% this year.
Lastly, there was a story yesterday on HN about high fertilizer prices. The biggest reason for that is high natural gas prices, in part because of a lack of recent investment in new natural gas sources. There will be an energy transition, but so far the prices for energy and things derived from energy sources are really high.
Electrical grids change slowly, over half of all electrical equipment worldwide is 20+ years old and solar only very recently became cheap. Many places are seeing lower rates due to recent renewable energy investments, others are seeing higher costs due to heavily subsidized early adoption. Some like Germany have both effects at the same time.
So remember, the economics going forward on a 20+ year time horizons look very different from existing infrastructure. We still have extremely overpriced concentrating solar installations that are not even vaguely competitive with sub 2c/kWh PV solar. However when you sign a 20 year contract for all power produced at price X you don’t get to drop it when something else becomes cheaper.
There actually already instances of things being shut down early because the savings from new renewables are so great it is in everyone's interest to buy out the existing contract early.
Obviously that applies more for things with high ongoing fuel costs but I wouldn't be at all surprised if this applied to some early concentrating solar plants, particularly if they can reuse the land and grid connection for new renewables.
Everywhere? Even if you only look at energy prices it's probably fairly clear trend, once you start accounting for pollution, climate change, lower peak loads etc. The savings quickly run into Trillions.
Norway and Iceland come to mind. However, they obviously don’t use much solar power due to location. In terms of recent technology, Iowa is probably the clearest US example.
More generally you need to look at wholesale prices and more specifically inflation adjusted wholesale prices to see large drops from the recent solar price drops.
Of particular note is the graph showing prices in areas heavily reliant on coal, vs those with a high renewable usage.
Conclusion:
> Regions with higher use of natural gas and renewable fuel for electric power generation, in particular hydroelectric power, have seen prices rise more slowly than prices in regions that have predominantly used coal. Although it is not possible to attribute the differences in the retail price development solely to fuel mix, the significant role that capacity investment and fuel costs play in determining distribution rates suggests that at least part of the variation between these regions is explained by capacity shifts in the industry.
That is a massively misleading way to frame it. Hydro is well known as one of the cheapest sources of energy period. The problem being if you happen to have a river of energy. Bundling hydro (and natural gas!) into “renewables” to claim that all renewables lower grid prices (when most people take it to mean solar and wind are impractical) is misleading.
They have graphs for both renewables with hydro and renewables without hydro, the effect is there for both. They also have a separate gas graph too.
But, hydro and gas pairing really well with solar and wind is an actual thing that helps lower energy costs so I don't see why that should be totally ignored.
Providing a set amount of electricity 24/7 of course has a cost as well as setting up renewable sources. But especially solar cells have only fixed/maintenance costs, but no "fuel" cost per amount of electrictiy produced. This leads to a price for the electricity, which mostly has to be reconed up to the point where the grid demands are satisfied. Any excess electricity is literally free and can be repurposed, as long as that purpose can utilize intermittant supply.
If you look at the German electricity prices at the power exchange, high renewable output correlates with very low prices. The amortized costs of renewables by now are distinctly lower than for fossil fuel and of course nuclear power. While large investments have to be taken, a further expansion of renewables should lower the electricity price in Germany (and the rest of Europe via trade)
Current prices are very high, because of gas shortage. I don't have a clear idea how it all started, but it seems there was a too large dependency on the spot markets vs. long term contracts, and now the spot markets have skyrocketed. There are political aspecst too - Russia for sure could extend their deliveries, but barely deliver what was contractually agreed upon.
It didn't help, that several French nuclear plants have been shut down without warning as safety problems were detected and have now to be fixed. Finally, the weather has been not so friendly for renewables in the last year, for the first time in many years, Germany had a small decrease in production year over year.
I can’t speak for other countries but I don’t think you understand just how much land America has. Drive across it sometime. The wind farms are on land that goes on forever.
> The global weighted-average cost of electricity of new onshore wind farms in 2019 was USD 0.053/kWh with country/region values of between USD 0.051 and USD 0.099/kWh depending on the region. Costs for the most competitive projects are now as low USD 0.030/kWh, without financial support.
> is there anywhere in the world where adding wind and solar has led to lower electricity rates for ratepayers?
We do not have a spare universe without such additions to answer that question.
Hornsea Project 1 (1.2GW nameplate electricity generation from wind turbines in the North Sea) is running right now and is paid £140 per MWh under CfD terms. So, on a nice fresh day that's £168 000 per hour.
In 2019 you could say that's a ludicrous subsidy, the market price for electricity in the UK was about £50 per MWh so the government (and thus rate payers ultimately) are paying about 200% extra to subsidise this wind farm.
On the other hand, today (in January 2022) the market price is fluctuating closer to £200 per MWh due to gas prices and so £140 per MWh looks like a bargain.
[ The way Contracts for Difference works is you sell your electricity like everybody else, via some mix of long term and short term contracts, and the government tops up the difference between the market price and your "strike price" so that your income is always determined by your strike price not subject to changes in the market price. This also means if market prices are higher (as they often have been this past year) you pay the government back the difference so you still only get the income your strike price guaranteed. As a result the risk of not generating electricity stays with you, as does the risk of not selling your electricity for market prices but the government eats your risk that market prices are far lower than you expected while also gobbling up any windfall profits if market prices are far higher ]
Now, if Hornsea and similar wind farms don't exist, does the UK magically pay the same price £140 per MWh for that electricity even though gas is expensive and it has no other source of electricity ? Or do the prices go up even further? Maybe with no other choice the UK buys electricity for £300 per MWh or even £500 per MWh. The lights must stay on after all.
Also there are secondary effects. If you propose a new wind farm today, to start construction in 2024 and be online in 2030, you're not going to get a strike price of £140 per MWh because of course prices came down due to investment in the sector. But if there was no investment, why wouldn't you find wind farms in 2030 just as expensive as they were in 2015 ? And not only did prices come down, efficiency went up as suppliers gained experience and competed to offer better products, when Hornsea was proposed a 8MW turbine was best-in-class, Hornsea Project 2 intends up to 15MW turbines. The taller structure offers not only more peak power output, it also delivers higher capacity factor because high altitude winds are more constant.
The problem is that battery costs are so expensive that to get that kW of unreliable power, you need to build a kW of reliable power to back it up. Then rates swing from the very cheap kW when the sun is shining and there are few clouds to the expensive rate on cloudy days or night, and at the end of the day you have to pay for double the capacity. That's why electricity rates go up on average after the introduction of cheap unreliable power.
The production of cheap, long lasting batteries that can be deployed at mass scale and survive large numbers of power cycles is the missing link between cheap unreliable power and actually realized lower costs. So people are declaring victory citing the unreliable rates while electricity consumers are faced with much higher costs. We don't have that victory yet.
Commercial capacity is free. There are no subsidies for building gas turbines. If they want to build more, gambling that they'll be used when the winds are calm and the skies are dark, they're welcome to try to get investment for that.
Looking at the cost of wholesale electricity supply (rather than the price households pay for "units" of electricity) I do not see your "up on average" for introducing "cheap unreliable power".
Ofgem says in June 2010 wholesale electricity cost £42.18 per MWh. By June 2015 that was £41.66 and by June 2020 it was... £28.42
However a year later in June 2021 it was £79.85. Now, what happened between June 2020 and June 2021 ? Did we install a lot more solar panels, build a huge wind farm? No, Vladimir Putin began squeezing Europe's supply of natural gas.
Ofgem even has a gas price chart next to the electricity charts so you can see this obvious correlation.
Gas prices went up, and they're going to stay up unless you think Putin is suddenly going to decide he's happy for Ukraine to join NATO and put American troops on his border.
If you need natural gas for its chemical properties this just sucks, too bad. But many more of us are using it for heating or electricity and those are things we can move away from gas, insulating ourselves from this problem and helping to fight global warming.
The reason why you need to look at what households pay is because the electricity companies are the ones who need to deal with the volatility and what they charge to customers is the price of reliable energy. Wholesale prices are very volatile, but residential prices are much more stable, reflecting an average of wholesale prices. So it is better to sample them than to sample the random noise of wholesale prices.
I also disagree thoroughly with the idea that you can take 3 samples from statistical noise and deduce an average, as you have done.
I also think it's laughable that natural gas prices are controlled by Putin. That's a deep rabbit hole you've fallen into, as it's a global market, and natural gas prices respond to general supply and demand, not the dictates of Putin "squeezing" anyone. In particular, when there is less wind or Europe takes a coal plant offline, for example, then demand for natural gas goes up. Now what do you think happens to the price when demand goes up? The idea that high natural gas prices are dictated by some shadowy enemy, rather than lack of substitutes such as wind, oil, and coal, is not a good analysis of the problem. Frankly it sounds a lot like those who says inflation is caused by "corporate greed" rather than an expansion of the money supply.
In general, please avoid blaming changes to prices on political enemies, as that's pure misinformation. It does not elucidate or explain any actual cause of price changes. It literally makes people less informed, less able to understand the world around them. It's the opposite of what we should be trying to do.
> The reason why you need to look at what households pay is because the electricity companies are the ones who need to deal with the volatility and what they charge to customers is the price of reliable energy.
Nope. The price households pay is "capped" by government policy. Bread and circuses my friend. The result of electricity companies being unable to "deal with the volatility" is that they go bankrupt, if you'd followed that Ogem link it probably highlighted that it has information for UK consumers worried what happens when their supplier goes bankrupt, as huge numbers have (the answer is, in very short term future, nothing important since of course the retail electricity companies don't actually supply any electricity to anybody, they're just an artificial construct).
> I also disagree thoroughly with the idea that you can take 3 samples from statistical noise and deduce an average, as you have done.
I linked Ofgem's site which shows you all this data over an extended period, I just gave you three examples to save on reading, and you... averaged them and then complained this is statistical noise.
> I also think it's laughable that natural gas prices are controlled by Putin.
Laughable or not, Putin in practice controls the Russian company Gazprom which supplies most of Europe's natural gas. That company chose to supply only the bare minimum of what was contracted, even though its buyers would like to buy closer to the upper end of their contract range. Because politically this is in Putin's interest.
Now of course Britain, far from Russia and with its own oil fields and other sources, is not directly depending on Russia for gas, unlike several other important European countries, however, you correctly notice that supply and demand influences pricing. For Britain's neighbour's who can't get Russian gas the British gas is suddenly very attractive, raising its prices, and thus we're back to where we began, Putin is ultimately why you can see that big spike in the Ofgem charts that you are pretending is "just noise"...
Supplying the US with enough solar power for 100% of requirements would require 16,000 square miles, plus one more for batteries.
That's a lot, but in a country with 3.6 million of them, not a big deal. That's about how much we use for cemetaries. We use a lot more for parking lots.
Land use is a problem for some countries, Singapore can't go 100% solar. But most countries are fine.
Singapore us extremely unusual at 51.7 TWh/year on 724 km2 of land. However, they are far from energy independent right now. They currently import the fuel to generate electricity, so they could also just import electricity directly.
Presumably while keeping back up generators for strategic reasons.
Thinking that nuclear fission stations would lead to super cheap power is somewhat naive. Nuclear power stations are incredibly expensive to build. There is the cost of fuel, decomissioning and ongoing costs for waste disposal - note that most of this is not spent fuel rods, but things like PPE which can only be used for a certain amount of time.
Wind and solar have at times pushed wholesale prices negative in Germany in the past - that doesn't necessarily translate to a cost for users (ie homeowners). I'm not super familiar withWe really need much better local storage so that people can soak up excess power, or fabled smart appliances that communicate properly to use electricty at an appropriate time.
One issue is if you run a power plant which is difficult to shut off quickly, or the time to start up is also prohibitive. You might choose to take the hit and pay for the grid to take your power, rather than shutdown and lose out when demand increases in the future. If I understand correctly, this cost is sometimes passed to consumers (e.g. if your supplier owns the plant). So consumers actually lose when prices go negative - indeed if you have your own generators, in theory you should also be paying to supply the grid when demand is negative if you don't disconnect your feed. What should happen in an ideal world is you'd store/use it locally (say charge your car up).
> Wind and solar have at times pushed wholesale prices negative in Germany in the past
Germany has extremely high electricity prices for the consumer. It doesn't matter if it's occasionally negative if the average is extremely costly, because you need electricity all the time.
It's also everything else, especially the monopoly on transmission.
Energy is a supply and demand game like everything else.
'Hydro One' in Ontario has a CEO, workers, and a quasi monopoly.
On what planet would they, in all self-interest ever decide to lower rates for something?
If energy prices went down a little bit, they could actually increase their transmission prices, lower end prices to users by a tiny fraction, and that's that. That's how a value chain monopoly works.
Getting rid of the transmission problem, at lest for 'last mile' would be a giant leap.
> On what planet would they, in all self-interest ever decide to lower rates for something?
In Ontario electricity rates are one of the biggest political footballs. Every election there's a stupid electricity rate promise from every party. That's how rates will go down in Ontario.
"People" who were "Greatest generation" and "Silent generation" adults who lied to us, lied to my face, when they knew it wasn't the truth. Civilian nuclear power (at least terrestrial nuclear power) is, and always was a grift. Initially as a way to keep military nuclear programs going, but later as a grift unto itself by elements of the MIC like GE and Westinghouse who couldn't contain their greed any better than they could radioactive waste.
> Lastly, there was a story yesterday on HN about high fertilizer prices.
Keep in mind that you can't make urea without carbon dioxide.
Currently, you just can not electrify its production. It would take many years of research before you can do it in any sizeable amount. This is different from ammonia, that is just an equipment renovation away (so, a few years of investiment), but ammonia isn't useful as fertilizer.
> Ammonia (NH₃) is the foundation for the nitrogen (N) fertilizer industry. It can be directly applied to soil as a plant nutrient or converted into a variety of common N fertilizers
> Ammonia has the highest N content of any commercial fertilizer, making it a popular source of N despite the potential hazard it poses and the safety practices required to use it. For example, when NH₃ fertilizer is applied directly to soil, it’s in a pressurized liquid that will immediately become vapor if exposed to air after leaving the tank. To prevent such releases into the atmosphere, growers use various tractor-drawn knives and shanks to place it at least 10 to 20 cm (4 to 8 inches) below the soil surface. Ammonia will then rapidly react with soil water to form ammonium (NH₄⁺), which is retained on the soil cation exchange sites.
Yeah, ok, ammonia is not completely useless as a fertilizer. You can't do that process in any soil, and can't repeat it many times on the same place either. But it is used a few times in a few places.
(Interestingly, I live in a place that would gain a lot from it, yet people overwhelmingly prefer to use magnesium and calcium during the PH correction of the soil. Now I'm curious about the reason.)
There is also ammonium nitrate, that is a much safer and easier to handle carbon-free alternative to ammonium and much more widely applicable. It is still more dangerous and harder to handle than urea, and also requires equipment renovation (so, don't expect people to change any fast). But if the carbon becomes a hard constraint, people will very likely migrate to it or something similar. The problem we are seeing right now is that any migration takes time and money.
Yeah, it's one of the top 5. Notice there are no numbers there.
It's hard to find numbers, most places basically ignore the usage as a direct fertilizer. It seems to be much more popular on the US than anywhere else, for the US I was able to find this (it's old, but it's what I have):
> Urea is the most popular source of dry N fertilizer, accounting for 79% of the
total dry N used. Ammonium sulfate has risen in popularity. In 1988 it constituted 14% of the dry N market. (https://www.canr.msu.edu/field_crops/uploads/archive/E0896.p...)
Most countries just equate nitrogen fertilizer with urea.
Also most of roofs yet uncovered by panels. And you can do dual use: solarpanels that provide shade for agriculture use, etc.
Land or technology is not the problem - competing with cheap fossil energy in the ground is, as well as the massive investment required to make the complete transition to renewables.
Is it, though? It sounds like plain old production costs.
I mean, unless you build a coal plant right into a coal mine, a natural gas generator at each gas well, you don't store any surplus wind power... Energy is needed in parts of the energy production chain to keep it working.
That puts it at an energy return on energy invested of around 9, which is pretty damn bad.
Wind is at 18 right now, solar at something like 15. These will only go up as they become cheaper and cheaper. Given how frequently renewables are critiqued for low energy return on energy investment, 11% is a pretty pathetic stat. I think it's pretty clear that these industries are the walking dead. I should have switched my total market index funds to exclude the fossil fuel companies a few years ago, before they lost so much of their value recently.
> That puts it at an energy return on energy invested of around 9, which is pretty damn bad.
Is it, though? That sounds pretty awesome, specially as renewables lower/eliminate energy imports thus improve a country's balance of trade.
Also, one aspect of renewables that results in energy dissipation/loss is energy storage. Wind and solar farms generate energy that don't coincide with peaks in demand, thus that production is stored and reintroduced in the grid resulting in a drop of efficiency. However, it would be stupid to argue that losses from, say, restocking the reservoir of a pumped storage hydroelectric plant, specially one which has been retrofitted as an energy reservoir, makes the technology worse than only generating power during periods where demand surpasses supply.
> For example, suppose we had single 1KW solar panel, and the panel had a very low ERoEI of 4 (which is certainly an underestimate [1]). Even if you increased the ERoEI from the very low value of 4, all the way up to to infinity, so that no energy was required to replace that solar panel, it would make little difference--it would increase the amount of NET energy obtained by only 25%. On the other hand, if you could build 3 such solar panels, instead of 1, then you would triple the net energy obtained. In this case, building two more solar panels had 12x greater effect than increasing the ERoEI to infinity.
I get what you are saying, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to say it is "BS". Here is a different pov:
You are about to build 1 solar panel. Where should you put it it? Somewhere with a lot of sun (EROEI of 1:10) or somewhere with a little sun (ERORI of 1:4). All else being equal, you would put it where you get more sun. Of course, as you build more and more panels, you ask yourself "when should I stop", and the answer is "when it costs just as much to install as I get back" (ERORI 1:1)
A separate calculation is "I have invented a more efficient solar panel! Should I replace existing solar panels?"
Thats not a real problem, nor a real solution. If you have a panel already built, the energy input is a sunk cost. It has no relevance to where you put the panel to maximise its output, you only care about the E part, not the ROEI part which is the hard bit to calculate. And no-one used it that way anyway.
Zooming way out, you also don't stop building panels on a global scale when EROEI reaches 1.0000001. You stop when there's an opportunity cost. Can that same input be used for something more valuable? Then stop building panels, even if their EROEI is massive. We're not phasing out fossil fuels because their EROEI is below one, for example.
Similarly, We have plenty of different solar panel designs, with different EROEI's. We're not building the ones with the highest score on this metric, and we shouldn't, it's not as important as other things like mass scale manufacturing capability. Especially because what we are building generates electrical energy. If energy is the deciding factor we can make some, by building solar panels.
I used BS specifically because it is a real thing that you can actually measure. Its just that it was only ever found to be useful to people who were making most of their facts up anyway. Its not a lie if the person saying it doesn't care if its true or false, its just BS.
I feel that demand shifting is something that is talked about least but will automatically happen at a larger scale than we envision when marginal cost of electricity is low. Hopefully that leads to cheaper versions of many expensive items with high embedded energy costs.
> you don't have to pay for the negative externalities of carbon.
We aren't yet seeing much indication that there will be a global tax/fee on the externalities of carbon. That means even if local policies are implemented for certain cases (eg. no gas cars in the city, no coal power in one state), there will always be somewhere on earth willing to burn dirty coal to make helicopter fuel for export.
>The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation.
Well, by now, it seems like completely the opposite: thanks to nuclear plants shutting down and CO taxes, we are starved of energy.
I still remember the outcry when the EU banned incandescent bulbs in 2009.
CFLs were crappy and full of heavy metals, Halogen was half-assed, LEDs were expensive, too blue and too weak.
People were defending their radiant heaters in full force, but everybody underestimated exponential development in a market suddenly put into full force solving this.
By the last stage where 40W bulbs were being phased out, nobody was interested in them anymore, because LEDs were simply better with cheaper TCO.
Solar and battery are still on exponential track down the cost curve (with wind saturating, but still going strong).
Nuclear and fossils are not.
The energy world will look very different 10 years from now.
I used to be anti nuclear, then I was pro, but by now I‘m back to anti. Main reason being that it‘s too slow to move the needle by now. Any new nuclear project by now - even if we’d change public sentiment and regulations today - is so time, planning and capital intensive that by the decade it goes online, it‘ll be outcompeted by overprovisioned solar roofs + battery storage even in the worst locations except maybe the arctic circle.
Without proliferation risks and however you get rid of the radiated mess.
I believed the same things in the same order (anti, pro, too slow), but I'm not anti nuclear now. Let it try and compete. We'll get a better electricity supply either way. Yeah, letting it persist wastes time and money, but so what? Every other system we have in life has a lot of waste too.
I would be strongly antinuclear if the nuclear industry somehow manages to persuade politicians to shut down wind, solar, and battery technologies, though. But that's very unlikely.
I’ll take contaminated mushrooms and wild boar to climate change and the large scale disease brought on by fossil fuels. Nuclear is much safer, even accounting for these absolute outliers.
If you look over the last 10 year, renewables have reduced the CO2 emissions considerably in Germany, reaching 50% in 2020. However, while 2020 was a record year with a huge increase vs. 2019, 2021 was back on the 2019 level, as the weather was very average.
> thanks to nuclear plants shutting down and CO taxes, we are starved of energy.
There are countries which already started transitioning to renewable energies which not only endured long periods of energy independence from renewable sources alone but also already reported energy production surpluses which even led to null and negative energy prices.
Therefore your baseless assertion regarding shutting down nuclear and coal plants seems to be totally made up and completely unfounded.
Can you provide any basis for your assertion, and point out any rational basis for that so-called "energy starvation" scenario?
The abundance of cheap energy is based on renewable sources. They need to be built in the form of wind power and photovoltaics and others first. Blocking this of course raises the energy costs.
In Germany, the previous government has done a lot to stall further builtup of renewable energies. The builtup was only a fraction in recent years compared to the top years. If the builtup had continued (or even accellerated), Germany would be an even larger exporter of electricity than it is.
> In Germany, the previous government has done a lot to stall further builtup of renewable energies.
I find this assertion hard to believe. Merkel has been in charge of Germany's federal government for the past two decades, and throughout this period Germany's energy production from renewable sources has skyrocketed from virtually none to the leading energy source, with a share of over 60% of the nation's energy production.
In fact, if anything, Germany's production from renewables has been accelerating.
Well, for one, I don't understand it either, why Merkel didn't see the change through. It was, however, started by the red-green government before Merkel. They set up the system which guaranteed a price for any renewable energy producted (initiall very high, decreasing for later installations).
The production did indeed skyrocket, with the peak of over 50% renewable power in 2020. But in the last 3 years the built-up of new wind generators has stalled. Hitting a peak of 5GW/year in 2017, it went down to below 1 in 2019. This was due to several changes by the government. On the one side they replaced the flat fee which was paid for electricity produced to a complex auction schema, on the other side there were more and more restrictions about where one could build wind generators. Also the amound of solar power was even capped. It seems that the situation has improved somewhat, the build-up of renewables was a bit higher in 2020 than in 2019, but hasn't reached the past peaks again yet.
> On the one side they replaced the flat fee which was paid for electricity produced to a complex auction schema (...)
Aren't you referring to the initial subsidized program where private companies were enticed to invest their own cash in renewable energy sources in exchange for assured profitability during the initial period?
Well, the new distance requirements for wind parks are stricter, than for a garbage burning plant, for example. And there are still villages being removed, because of coal - so it is far from 100% support, but overall I would not agree, that the previous government was stalling renewables. But there was and is lots of general movement into renewables, so maybe there would have been a wind and solar boom, despite governments efforts.
Won’t the intermittent nature hurt crypto less than other industries? We currently have a crypto mining company setting up in Texas where energy is cheap with the understanding that they might have to shut down and start up at a moments notice due to demand from the rest of the grid.
As long as these sources are available at all times in aggregate across the globe, crypto mining should be one of the most resilient industries.
I don't know how the situation is now but when I looked into it a few years ago the rapidly increasing hash rate of the mining hardware meant that running them only half the time didn't meant that it just takes twice the time to recoup your investment but that you might not make back at all.
> The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. It won't be free to transmit that energy [...]
It won't be free to transmit that energy, but that transmission will also be zero-marginal cost. The cost to operate power lines and transformers doesn't depend on how much power it's going through them.
Transmission is not a near zero marginal cost, and the cost to operate absolutely does depend on the design capacity, including the operating voltages and number of sources and taps.
Additionally, wider geographic distribution of power sources greatly increases the number of transmission lines and overall amount of right-of-way and materials needed per generated kwh.
And because you can't assume a usage of near 100% of transmission capacity due to intermittent solar and wind, having to over-build transmission capacity reduces overall efficiency even greater, meaning even higher transmission costs for equivalent grid capacity.
Right now in certain seasons there's huge amounts of curtailed renewable power. For example in 2020 California threw away 1.5TWh of solar power that was in excess of what the grid needed.
As renewables go to higher and higher percentages of generation, this amount of curtailment will increase dramatically. Battery farms won't solve this entirely, because regardless of the mix of batteries, we are going to be building a system that serves a seasonal minimum of energy production.
During the seasonal maximum of energy production, probably in California alone, we will have dozens of TWh per year that can not be consumed on the grid, and may not even be able to be transmitted on the grid.
There's even a good amount of slack in most current solar farm designs. Due to the cost balance between inverters and panels, it's quite common to have more DC power from panels than the inverters can convert to AC for the grid. As batteries get cheaper, batteries are taking some of that DC power right now. But there's still the seasonal effects of generation.
From what I have heard from my energy business acquaintances, the only alternative source that has a hope of surpassing fossil is nuclear. Solar panels and wind have their own issues: rare earth minerals, difficult upkeep, and in the case of the non-mirror solar- toxic pollution as they breakdown. I hope some combination of nuclear, geothermal, hydro, mirror-solar, and wind can combine to satisfy energy needs, but I am not optimistic.
"is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. "
We're nowhere near that. I don't believe that energy will be truly available in abundance until fusion or later.
The 'new capabilities' we need are in storage, smarter regulation about transmission because the monopolies are ugly etc..
Any new technical game changers are in the works. Disruptive technologies don't come out of nowhere. There's someone in a lab, working away on something, already publishing papers for what will one day be fairly transformative.
I don't think that fusion will ever provide terrestrial energy abundance. The current fusion schemes under consideration all resort back to being a heat source to boil water and drive a turbine. Renewable energy + storage is within striking distance of undercutting the just the steam turbine side of fusion. Since the only benefit of fusion I've ever heard is a huge amount of energy from a small amount of space, which presumably allows lower costs for that heat energy, let's assume best case of zero cost for fusion. In that scenario, fusion-driven electricity is more expensive than renewables, so it will be renewables providing abundance, not fusion.
If somebody figures out direct conversion of fusion to electricity, that would change my projections. Also it's possible that for non-terrestrial applications, fusion might be the best applications. But I think it's far too early in the development of space travel to predict what sort of energy mechanisms we may use.
Renewables are nowhere near what you indicate, that's the problem.
There is no future in which a Canadian throws up a panel and gets vast amounts of cheap energy.
Fission would by far and away be the cheapest form of energy: it's literally hot rocks that boil water. What makes it expensive is dealing with the radiation ans safety.
Fusion, without those artifacts might yield vast amounts of free energy. But we don't really know.
Wind and Sun are never going to provide vast surpluses of electricity, they're just going to help us come down a bit off of fossil fuels.
The scoop: by tonnage, 40% of what is transported by sea is oil, coal, and LNG.
By switching to local sources of energy (renewables mostly), humanity can seriously lower the impact of ships on the oceans, and stop burning as much fuel to move them, too.
I'd like to add that all these fuels are very energy-dense. Producing as much energy locally would not be an easy or inexpensive enterprise.
Taking overcapacity for wind free periods and energy storage into account, the numbers are less favorable, but transitioning to green energy doesn't really need to affect our wealth or lifestyle all that much.
Batteries need to shape up, though. Huge battery installations should become cheap and ubiquitous; so far they are neither.
A number of interesting chemistries exist that would suit well the needs of stationary batteries, which can be heavy and bulky, but need to be cheap and safe. As usual, more time and money are needed :)
The quickest way to force/ assist adaptation of new tech is to stop complaining about it, start buying it when/if possible, watch how demand drives innovation for the years to come - yet be happy to have gotten in at a certain point which helps both yourselves and everyone.
Solar panels for one have come a very long way in the last decade. The same will apply to batteries. How retired EV packs can be reused for home storage is but one field of opportunity I feel is exciting.
In the uk I’m currently not allowed to buy a cheap old nissan leaf car with a worn old 22kwh battery pack (that’s basically useless for transport now, something like 30 mile range in perfect conditions) and connect it to supply my house.
I can buy electricity from the grid at 5p/kwh between 12pm and 5am and if i was allowed to charge that car and then draw my daily 10kwh of house usage from it instead of paying 20p/kwh during the day. I’d be happy to give some percentage to the grid but it’s just not allowed by most DNO’s here right now.
Wallbox.com has a £10k bi durectional wallbox (quantum) that can be deployed in a few very select areas in the UK currently.
My best option right now is a couple of £2.5k battery packs from givenergy but my supplier won’t switch me to the ev tarrif without proof i own an EV. Also the givenergy route is the same price as the old leaf but for half the capacity.
What kind of inverter could you use to connect an old traction battery to supply your house? (I have a Leaf and solar backed by a 4.5kWh battery so... for the future I suppose)
How cool, I didn't know that was possible. So CHAdeMO lets EVs discharge as well as charge? I assumed you were talking about a hack. So why can't that particular inverter be connected to your home? I have _two_ separate solar inverters connected to mine already!
It’s in use in Japan as i understand it but in the UK the DNOs currently don’t have appropriate controls in place for when the power goes out as i understand it. I believe people with solar and batteries on their property have no power when there’s a power cut - their inverter turns off for safety of the DNO operatives if mains power goes out.
Im not that clued up on this. Tent with a big pinch of salt…!
Oh I see! Right, yes, that applies to my two inverters, which have an "off grid" mode which I don't use for this reason.
The electrician who wired in the system offered to add in an isolator to cut the house off from the mains. That way I could use the "off grid" mode, but it'd have to be something pretty bad for me to want to use it & reconfigure the inverters too.
Note that if batteries stayed at their current level of development forever, wind and solar would still be the best choice to build out at large scales today.
It is unlikely that they wont progress dramatically, but even in that extreme case there's no need or reason to wait.
This is sadly wishful thinking. The unreliability of solar and wind plus the state of modern batteries means that nuclear and coal are still better choices for large scale baseload generation.
One factor people don't consider is reliability of power. Since solar and wind are unreliable (example, German wind power saw -25% generation last year due to weather, and ended up increasing coal by as much as 40 to 50% to make up for it plus meet new demand) you end up needing to produce significantly more to have a guarantee of baseload.
For every bit of ultra-reliable, ultra-safe, tiny-footprint nuclear you build out, you need ~4X the amount of less reliable and giant foot print solar or wind.
Ultra-reliable nuclear power, like in France where a couple of reactors had to be shut down due to safety issues detected?
Yes, wind and solar are limited in their available capacity by the weather. The trick to get reliable power generation nonetheless are wide range networks (mitigates weather influences), storage solutions and storable renewables like bio-gas.
For the gap, gas powered plans are the key. Even in the worst case, they are way more environment friendly than coal, only emit a fraction of the CO2 at the same output. But beyond that, they can be quickly switched in output, they are the ideal counterpart to wind and solar. That is the weakness of coal and especially nuclear power plants.
Also, one can afford a lot of overproduction capacity for the cost of a new nuclear power plant.
Gas is not for baseload generation, it's for peaker power. The idea of using gas for baseload is extremely cost prohibitive, you'll be paying double price for your power.
You have it totally backwards: the reliability of coal and especially nuclear to produce a constant output is the strength! That's called baseload generation, the ability to produce large amounts of power reliably, rain or shine, night or day, windy or still for a set low cost.
This is why nuclear is the best to pair with unreliable solar/wind technologies. Not only is nuclear DRAMATICALLY more friendly than literally burning oil like you suggest, it also provides a completely stable baseload for your industry. The idea that someone would suggest using oil over nuclear is insane. Are we trying to save the planet or not? There is nothing environmental about gas! It's a non-renewable resource that is likely already "post-peak" and will experience increasing scarcity and dramatic price increases over the next century.
Needing peaker power ontop of baseload, such as gas plants, is a different aspect of power generation. You wouldn't want to use gas as base, and you can't rely on solar/wind as base. As Germany in the real world evidenced: coal is the backstop for base there.
And when you consider how many batteries one needs for all the extra generation one is using because of their weird dislike of the greatest and greenest power generation technology there is, one should consider the ecological and environmental impact. Nuclear build outs are tiny and use a fuel whose energy density is several orders of magnitude above everything else. Solar takes up a huge amount of space and takes a lot of materials that are messy to mine for that nuclear doesn't. Consistent generation > battery storage every time.
No, an unreliable old plant with severe safety concerns was shut down not very recently. Currently 16 French nuclear plants are not operating due to maintenance. About 4 of those went offline very recently (as in November or December) because severe issues were detected which needed to be addressed at once.
How are the people who want to build modern energy plants the luddites? If anything it's the people who insist to keep ancient technology on life support that had failed all its promises by the late 1970s who are luddites.
There's always an ideal solution that would be best in an ideal world. Unfortunately, this is the world where two nuked cities and a handful of nuclear accidents was enough to turn people against nuclear power. It doesn't matter that this position is based on ignorance. Turning people back in favor is a generational project. We don't have a generation left to do that. We need solutions that can be implemented at scale now.
> The unreliability of solar and wind plus the state of modern batteries means that nuclear and coal are still better choices for large scale baseload generation.
I'm not convinced that's true. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are pretty good, and as far as I can tell they're expensive outside of China for artificial reasons. (Chinese manufacturers have a deal with the owners of the LFP patents something like: if you don't enforce your patents in China, we won't export our batteries outside of China. The last major patent expires in April I believe, so maybe the situation will change then.) If you could reliably buy LFP batteries in the U.S. for under $100 a kwh, I would expect that to change the economics of grid storage quite a bit. Maybe coal would still be cheaper, but coal has some pretty significant externalities.
It might be possible to do nuclear more cheaply than we've done it in the past, and if so that would be great, but so far it's fairly expensive and we still don't have a good political solution for the problem of what to do with the waste. I'm generally in favor of more nuclear being built, but renewables are a viable alternative if grid storage is cheap enough and/or our power grid is capable of moving power around over long distances efficiently. (There was a story a couple months ago[1] that Chile is planning to export solar power to China via an undersea cable. If they pull it off it would mean China wouldn't need to buffer 12 hours of energy to get through the night because they literally have solar installations on opposite sides of the Earth.)
Few appreciate the “brick wall” facing variability in green energy: if the battery depletes, power flow stops.
Batteries cost the same to cover whatever multiple of standard deviation prepared for. “Hundred year calm/clouds” need be prepared for - there’s no discount on installing that battery backup, very costly for a rare event (still often enough to need coverage).
When the batteries deplete, system halts until nature decides to provide enough again. FF reserves can tide over, nuclear will glow on; green varies by hour where outages can last weeks.
I run my office on solar every summer. Battery depletion is a very real, common, and costly issue.
Once you're preparing for events that rare, you have to first prepare for more common events, like failures in the power transmission infrastructure (the latest widespread one in my country, for instance, was only 11 years ago). And a lot of the preparation for these more common events (for instance, backup generators) would also help with these more rare events.
Batteries have shaped up, actually! Retail costs are about $300/kWh for at least 7000 cycles, which is only $4.2/kWh (plus inverter/BMS, plus electrician costs, plus sales markup, etc.).
There has been a 10x decline in lithium ion battery costs in just 10 years, which is shocking. Check out this slide from Ramez Naam, of which batteries are only one component of the massive ongoing transition:
Lithium ion batteries are getting deployed in large GW and GWh sizes all over, and in smaller sizes too. Worldwide production capacity is expected to grow by 10x every five years.
I think other stationary battery chemistries will catch up for "longer-term" storage, where the charge rate is lower and the capital cost is lower, and they can't cycle as fast. My favorite are the iron air batteries, which are rumored to be as low as $20/kWh, but with a power/energy ratio of only 1%.
Did you intentionally say "not be an easy or inexpensive" enterprise?
That feels carefully crafted to suggest it would be harder or more expensive than getting the same energy with fossil fuels (which isn't true) while carefully avoiding actually saying that untrue thing.
The statement is not sufficiently defined to be true or untrue in all cases. Energy is not just energy. It has to have certain characteristics and parameters in which it can be utilized. In some instances, fossil fuels will be able to be displaced by local sources easily. In others, it will not.
Oil tankers, LNG carriers, and coal transporters are specialized to their cargoes. I doubt that there are alternative types of cargo for any of them. Certainly not in the same quantities. Transporting water, for instance, is not economic beyond a few thousand km.
For all the breathless talk (above) about how the cost of renewable energy and batteries are plummeting, it is still not clear how cargo ships will be powered sans fossil fuels, or what that will cost. Time and the market will tell, I suppose.
My nitpicking brain immediately stumbled over these two consecutive sentences:
> something very close to forty percent of all the shipping on earth is just devoted to getting oil and coal and gas (and now some wood pellets) back and forth across the ocean.
Wood pellets are not fossil fuels though...
> That’s a remarkable snapshot: almost half of what we move around the seas is not finished products (cars) nor even the raw materials to make them (steel), but simply the stuff that we burn to power those transformations, and to keep ourselves warmed, cooled, and lit.
Oil is also a raw material, e.g. to make plastic. Not sure about what percentage is used as raw material vs. how much is used for fuel...
Wood pellets are shipped across the ocean in large quantities because of a loophole in carbon accounting, allowing coal power stations to burn wood pellets across the EU, 'carbon free', as long as the wood came from outside the EU.
I would say wood pellets are a grey area, similar to nuclear power. On one side, if the pellets are produced from wood that can't be used for other purposes and from responsibly managed forests, they're better than burning fossil fuels. On the other side, if they are produced from cutting down virgin rainforests and are then shipped halfway around the world, that's definitely not good.
Wood pellets are counted as renewable. Creating something of loophole. Not sure what difference non-EU would make other than making tracking of regrowing trees more difficult.
You are clearly not familiar with the Bio-mass 'green' lobby in the UK and US.
The UK does not have enough woodland for all these tax payer subsidized 'green' energy plants so they are physically shipping wood pellets from US and Canada to these bio-mass plants. Trees are cut, shredded, put on a truck, put on a boat, then burned in furnaces, to generate steam, to produce 'green' energy.
You make it sound like all of it is from North America. There's import from the european continent and scandinavia as well.
Sweden exports a lot of wood pellets. Plenty of woodlands there. Plenty more to grow, if the Union will let them.
Wood pellets are "green" because the source material is replantable, albeit not that much locally for you. Seems like nothing is ever "green enough" though, besides a complete stop in consumption..
The distance from Sweden/Scandinavia/Continental europe is a lot less than from North America.
The whole argument around Bio-mass is that it becomes carbon neutral because it emits carbon that itself has been captured.
The concept of burning bunker fuel on ships to keep these plants at break even is ludacrious. The fact that the pellets come from Finland or Malaysia is irrelevant.
I have nothing against Bio mass energy generation from gasing garbage or agriculture waste. But these wood furnace burner plants are a borderline racket.
I am familiar with that, but given its environmental damage it seems quite likely that in the future this energy source will be somewhat reduced. Especially as renewable energy gains greater penetration in the UK.
Also of note is the fact that transportation of gas is a major part of its final price even when the mode is pipeline. There is a sweet spot of distance for which natural gas is competitive IIRC.
That site is pretty sketchy. No sources and no numbers.
I also have a hard time believing that “Artwork and Sculptures” is #3. Maybe I live in a bubble, but do people really buy physical art more than once a year? Like I’ve commissioned digital art on several occasions, but I can’t imagine art being a significant chunk of anyone’s spending.
I bet by count of items jewelery and other Etsy artwork list pretty high, but no way in total volume since they are all very small.
Sounds more like a cover category people use to avoid duty taxes. Or the site is completely making up statistic on the spot, looks quite sketchy indeed.
There is also concerts and trade fairs shipping a lot of what could be considered artwork around the world.
Hehe yes this site aint trustworthy at all… just wanted to make a joke :). But bananas are rly in the top 3 cargo shipped goods on most lists
Art is used to lounder money … I dont know how much of that makes it via cargo but it has to be something. And sometimes cars and other big things are art. One artwork could easy fit one container … oh and 3d printed stuff. Company have to ship that too …. But arts ranking seems way to high….but searched for us imports and found this … https://www.titlemax.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/the-most...
The history of it is very interesting. They were unknown to the world until the United Fruit company marketed them globally. Of course they also ruled very harshly in central america, hence term banana republic.
They are paid for in blood. For example, when workers in Collumbia went on a strike, US government got involved, decladed the strike 'communist' and 2000 people were massacred.
They're shipped in oxygen free containers to prevent ripening and bruises while in transit, and then are over oxygenated to quickly ripen once unloaded to dockside facilities.
Before that, shipping distances were limited and the majority of what was unloaded had to be trashed before making it to market.
Only one interesting aspect of an extremely interesting historical topic.
Highly recommend starting with the story of Samuel Zemurray for those interested in the topic, who sold his company to united fruit then promptly turned around and took charge of it for the next twenty years in a hostile takeover.
I don't understand why nuts are so expensive. They sell for almost 10x their wholesale price.
They wholesale for ~$1.70 per pound. Peanuts wholesale for ~$0.25 per pound.
Yet walnuts sell for like ~$12 per pound and peanuts sell for ~$3 per pound.
Most foods that have sell for 10x wholesale price are delicate AND perishable, so a ton of that food goes to waste. Also, grocers reject a lot because of looks.
None of this is true with nuts.
So why do they retail for 10x wholesale price? I know technically, it's closer to 5x - since they usually retail blanched and the shell is half the weight. Still...
I've got around 10kg of them from a couple of trees in my garden. I've done zero maintenance, they're just there to keep other shit from growing (walnut trees poison the soil, most weeds stop growing, also because of the shade). All "high quality", the same stuff you get in stores.
Walnut trees are used on roadsides, they're perfect for it, zero maintenance, keeps the soil from moving/sliding and kills weeds. Random people just harvest them if they want to.
The store prices on them make no sense. Just like bananas :D
Shipping is primiarily about volume, not tonnage. The density of a container full of tennis rackets is much smaller than brent. If we were comparing volume percentage, the fossil fuel might not be so high.
Using the below url as a guide the fuel consumption per amount of fuel transported is actually very economical.
Deadweight: 442,470dwt, Lightweight: 67,000t = 375,470t of cargo. Fuel usage 141t per day. With a 15 day trip that would mean using 2,115t of fuel to get 375,470t of crude to its destination.
* engine https://www.man-es.com/company/press-releases/press-details/... "This is a massive milestone as these engines will be the largest methanol-burning engines ever constructed. They will be based on their well-proven 50-bore counterpart, which has already been in our engine portfolio for some time gathering more than 100,000 running hours on methanol alone."
* https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2021/08/24/maersk-accel... "" In the first quarter of 2024, A.P. Moller - Maersk will introduce the first in a groundbreaking series of 8 large ocean-going container vessels capable of being operated on carbon neutral methanol. The vessels will be built by Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) and have a nominal capacity of approx. 16,000 containers TEU""
* https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2021/08/18/maersk-secur... ""The methanol facility will use renewable energy and biogenic CO2 to produce the e-methanol. The fuel production is expected to start in 2023. The energy needed for the power-to-methanol production will be provided by a solar farm in Kassø, Southern Denmark. "
* process https://info.topsoe.com/emethanol "The required electrical input will depend on how the hydrogen is sourced, and whether the methanol process is integrated into an existing plant or a stand-alone plant. If the hydrogen is sourced from an electrolysis unit, the power consumption (for hydrogen generation only) will be approximately 10.5 MWh per ton methanol."
* process https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/methanol-sy... "Transport Fuel, Arno de Klerk, in Future Energy (Third Edition), 2020 "Methanol synthesis, Eq. (10.9), is a very exothermic reaction" "With water-cooled reactor designs, higher once-through conversion is possible,"
If methanol is generated from electrolysis, then ok.
If it's from "biofuel", then more deforestation in tropical countries to use land to make methanol from crops. I recall news like this back 5-10 years ago.
I can easily imagine huge floating batteries being very valuable in one place or another.
But we will probably move in the direction of more local production. When the energy is already there, transporting it there, as cheap as it may be is pure cost, for no gain.
Given this, what are the ecological oppositions to things like keystone XL?
I've also wondered if it is feasible for renewable sources like offshore windfarms and very remote nuke powerplants to charge continually flowing battery trains to populated areas.
Keystone XL is totally irrelevant wrt shipping (as in, ships on the water).
Keystone XL goes from Alberta to Kansas, and is just a shorter route than an existing pipeline connecting those two points. Rail is another common transport for oil between these points.
Regardless, the article comes to a better conclusion, IMO:
> Because it means that if and when we make the transition to solar power and windpower, we will not just stop pouring carbon into the atmosphere, and not just save money—we will also reduce the number of ships sailing back and forth by almost half.
I feel the author is forgetting that anything made out of plastic comes from oil derivatives. Another reason oil is an incredible resource. Can anyone comment on this?
Not only is it making some very bad actors very wealthy for centuries to come, think of all the political power in play to ensure it continues forever.
I mean they still allow/use LEADED fuel in aircraft everywhere in 2022 despite everything horrifying we know about that now. It's not just a lack of care for health of a population, there has to be some serious profit/politics in that decision.
Electrons can have so many flexible sources and all can be relatively local.
Stop subsidizing burning things, make it cost what it really costs.
Making things first what they really cost would solve a lot of problems, but no one actually wants that. Certainly not enough people to matter.
Civilization is built on loans from future citizens. I think the only reason most people who clamor about "balancing the budget" don't push for environmental improvements is that they know they will be dead before it really matters.
...they still allow/use LEADED fuel in aircraft everywhere in 2022 despite everything horrifying we know about that now. It's not just a lack of care for health of a population, there has to be some serious profit/politics in that decision.
This specific complaint is kind of silly, since there is no "population" at risk in the aviation context. The use of tetraethyl lead for a single day by automobiles in urban areas where children live was worse for human health than its use for decades at aviation elevations over wilderness where most aircraft spend most of their operating time.
There could be concentrations around airports I guess, but those would be better dealt with by local regulations than by a blanket ban. It is good for humanity that aircraft built in the 1940s are still in use today. Obsoleting all those engines would be harmful.
Forty percent by what? Mass, volume, or dollar value? Most likely (gosh, the article is so long form, I can't find out) it's dollar value, other types of comparison are nonsensical.
But then this is dependent on the oil price. Right now it's about $80/barrel, but the median price for the last 5 years was about $50/barrel. For liquefied natural gas (LNG) the current price is about $10/thousand cubic feet, but the median over the last 5 years was about $5.
the more intermittent energy generation is in a grid, the more balancing mechanisms, either storage or flexible generation, will be required. As both generation and consumption have to be balanced in real-time (at close to 100% reliability no less!), we have quite a challenge on our hands. There are hard limits in physics, geology and in regards to cost for grid-scale lithium-ion batteries (for detailed reasoning and the role hydrogen might play, please refer to this excellent talk from UC Davis: [3]), especially as the global roll-out of EVs is simultaneously under way. Long story short: more solar & wind is bad news for coal but great news for natural gas (especially in regions like the coastal US and Germany where a phase out of nuclear is ongoing).
In the western world, we can eventually shift away from burning fossil fuels (low population growth and off shoring of energy intense manufacturing helps), but globally the demand for fossil fuels is still growing quickly. It's hard to overstate just how much of a revolution LNG (liquefied natural gas) has been and is - for the longest time you could only use natural gas directly if you were connected to a source via pipeline. Western Europe was almost entirely dependent on Russia for example. Now, a global market has evolved. Nigerian gas can be shipped to Brazil when a drought limits Hydropower capacity, gas from Trinidad-Tobago is burned in Massachusetts to compensate for limitations imposed by the Jones Act and lacking pipeline connections to the nearby Marcellus shale [0], Australian gas powers industry in South Korea and Japan - countries that don't have substantial energy resources. It has gotten harder to strong-arm consumers, as they now have many suppliers to choose from and countries like India are making gigantic bets on natural gas for the coming decades [1] longer term, we should expect a changing power balance and better energy availability around the world. Replacing coal-fired capacity with cleaner burning natural gas is the biggest, fastest gain we can aim for when trying to combat local pollution and global co2 emissions (though methane leaks have to be brought under control!). Nuclear is a tough sell politically (even though that seems to be changing in some areas and the solar/wind capacity roll-out is already moving quickly.
Given that the global population is expected to be north of 10 billion in 2060 - 38 years from now - and that the average disposable income should get a very substantial boost, the energy demand of humanity is still on an aggressive upward trajectory.
I would not count Exxon out just yet, if you read their 10K (annual report) [2], you get the sense that they have a deep awareness of renewable energy deployments around the world. Given the cost advantages of oil (think of it as liquid batteries) and the centrality of natural gas in our economic system, I don't think ships, pipelines and trucks moving fossil fuels will disappear anytime soon.
There's lots of viable technologies that are currently displaced by the cost-performance of lithium ion batteries.
For instance, sodium-ion appears to be viable for grid storage and much less material limited than lithium-ion. Maybe it's addressed in the hour long video you link, I don't know.
It’s a valid point and yet given it’s pge we’d have to mention they blew up people in San Bruno due to their shoddy natural gas pipeline so we might need examples from outside pge to check that it’s not just an awful safety culture and poor maintenance makes anything unsafe.
But yes in principe lines can start fires or electrocute people, squirrels, and Mylar balloons
> it’s not just an awful safety culture and poor maintenance makes anything unsafe.
I agree, I just felt that the original article was being disingenuous by stating that power lines are somehow safer than fossil fuel infrastructure just because it’s not fossil fuel. Whereas it is more about your point on safety culture, where both can be equally as safe or dangerous if managed incorrectly.
> if and when we make the transition to solar power and windpower
I love people who write about transitioning to full renewables as if it's something that's inevitably going to happen. Meanwhile, we still don't have the tech to make it even close to economically viable. Maybe we'll get there at some point, maybe we won't - but there's a whole subgenre of pundits who are already speculating about second-order consequences of such full-renewable world (in the same manner as in around 2017 or so everyone was speculating about the world in which self-driving cars are a reality, how many jobs it will cost etc.).
Also, the author is evidently counting wood towards fossil fuels, which shows that his understanding of what a fossil is is lacking.
They might be viable on cost per kWh basis, but you also need storage if you want to rely on renewable during off-peaks. Right now, there's no economically viable solution for it.
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That's a pretty shocking stat too!
The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. It won't be free to transmit that energy, and the intermittent nature of the abundance will play hell with most capital intensive uses (eg crypto mining), but I'm super curious to see what new capabilities that people figure out for humanity.