This article doesn't mention some serious problems that affect power grids reliant on renewable energies:
1 - The grids becomes vulnerable to the weather. There's no solar energy at night and it's greatly reduced in cloudy days. Wind power is unpredictable and closely matches the output of hydraulic power, so that the two sources can't complement each other. You can check Brazil in recent history to check the effects of droughts in the power grid.
In the end there is a need of conventional power plants always ready to backup the grid when the renewable energy is not available.
2 - The majority of losses of the power distribution network are on the last mile, when the voltage is lower and the current is higher. If every house and electric car become consumers and providers to the grid, most power movements occur in the low voltage networks. There's also the issue of batteries storing energy for later consumption. Lithium batteries have a 80%-90% efficiency storing energy.
3 - Since we are talking of the environment, rare earth metals have a very pollutant and energy intensive extraction process which in most cases is not accounted in the environmental cost of solar panels.
Replacing the majority of energy production by renewable energies will result in an net efficiency loss. I would rather support a balanced production with nuclear (fusion?) power plants providing the fixed needs of the grid and renewable energies making up the rest.
3 - The rare earth mining operations in China which provide the raw materials for solar panels, batteries, and many other electronics products are reportedly quite filthy and require massive energy (diesel trucks, processing plants, etc.)
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/rare-earth-m...
The push for renewable energy would not be possible at its current scale if it weren't so attractive to the political elite (and subsidized as well), for the shortcomings you mentioned. Fossil fuels and nuclear simply better fulfill the role of consistent, cheap, plentiful energy. Unfortunately, even though nuclear is quite safe, has very few emissions, and emits a ton of energy, it takes a Herculean effort to get federal approval to build a plant.
Fossil fuels are massively subsidized by being allowed to pollute without paying for the consequences. They are not cheap when you account for the externalities they're allowed to impose.
The decision to allow fossil fuel users to poison us all is a political one and it's pretty much the only reason renewables are even still a question instead of being the obvious answer.
I think the decision to allow fossil fuel users to poison us all is motivated, at least in the case of electricity, historically, by the improvement in air quality as people moved away from burning wood for heating and cooking.
The small city I live in, ~100k population, is powered almost entirely by hydro electricity. Some small percentage still burn wood for heating and even that makes the air around town hazy, I'd hate to think what it would be like if everyone was still doing it.
It's interesting to think about this. Those burning wood for heating are polluting the air locally -and globablly- and aren't paying a premium for the privilege, and at the same time all new hydro electricity in Australia was permanently shelved after the Franklin River Dam project was successfully blocked by The Wilderness Society 1983.[1]
So Australian's can thank the 'environmental movement' for pushing us toward being one of the world leaders in CO2 polluters per capita - I think we're the OECD leader, if I remember correctly.
I thought the historical motivation was just that there was not much of a concept of pollution harming people far away, so this sort of activity has traditionally been allowed by default. For thousands of years, you could burn your wood on your land and everybody was fine with that. At most you might have some trouble with your neighbors if they don't like your smoke. But the idea you'd cause diffuse harm to millions is pretty new, and has a lot of inertia to overcome.
This is actually incorrect. When I was digging through old new york times articles from the 1900s and 1930s (using the online search) I stumbled across numerous articles expressing concern about the pollutants being released by factories and combustion-engine automobiles, and how they not only affect the immediate area but surrounding towns. Don't have links to the sources at the moment, or the time right now to pull it up, will check back later, but if you search on nytimes.com you should be able to pull them up.
I'm thinking an order of magnitude or two farther back. Humanity spent thousands of years making fires, but widespread awareness of how the pollution it emits can hurt people is only a century or two old.
Yes, certsinly that also. DI meant in the context of the more recent past as the source of pollution was moved out of the city centre people probably lost interest in pollution as it affected them less directly. Prior to that people were either too sparsely populated to be affected or there was no alternative.
Or something. I guess I speculating given there's other factors I'm not taking into account like automobile emissions and the advent of emissions standards due to air quality concerns.
Let us not forget that the Sierra Club proudly proclaims on their website that, "2014 was a monumental year for dam removal projects. A record-setting 72 dams were removed across 19 states...While the best reasons to do away with old dams are certainly the ecological ones, it doesn’t hurt that the massive detonations involved are pretty dam fun to watch."
These people are not anti-fossil fuels or anti-hydro or anti-nuclear; they are anti-development as such. They reap the rewards of an industrialized energy-rich economy which can provide them lives past 70, decreased child mortality, eradication of most disease, incredible mobility, plentiful food, etc., while they decry the means by which this life is made possible.
Thanks for doing that. I like how the parent comment made some assumptions about motives, which I'm sure we're all guilty of -I know I am, a lot- and then someone provides the balance.
It's interesting how any group of motivated people can and will have their motives questioned and recontextualised to suit whatever agenda some other group are pushing. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that process, just interesting to observe the different camps adding their own spin and observing my changing option as I gain greater understanding - well, so the theory goes.
There are heavy human costs, too, when you consider that mining and oil extraction can leave their laborers handicapped and often dependent on the welfare system, and when it becomes unprofitable to extract from a given area, these companies will disappear and leave the communities they supported to collapse.
The fossil fuel subsidy is even more twisted than direct subsidies and externalities.
Yes, oil and energy are directly related to productive capacity. To the extent that gas and coal can substitute for oil in electricity generation and industrial production means that the near-term prospect of an oil crunch isn't a net energy crisis (ignoring climate impacts), but it does have a massive impact on transport.
But:
⚫ Energy is used to substitute for human labour in production functions. So it hugely increases output capacity.
⚫ We price oil not at its replacement cost, but at its cost of extraction. It's as if you had access to a bank account and were making withdrawals from it, but costed those at the rate of bus fare to the bank, rather than the full value of withdrawn funds.
⚫ Which means that not only does oil hugely accelerate industrial productivity, but it skews all economic prices downward hugely. It's not that oil companies have been greedy, but that oil's been under-priced for the past century and a half.
Biodiesel -- hemp or canola oil -- runs about $1,000/bbl, roughly 25x the longt-erm price of oil (about $40/bbl), and 10x the price of "expensive" oil ($100/bbl).
End of cheap, abundant oil is going to change a hell of a lot.
True, but the scale doesn't come anywhere close. Renewables production isn't changing the climate, poisoning seafood, or giving millions of people lung diseases.
Well it is because it depends on heavy industry to manufacture it. I'm curios, are there stats on the energy that goes into manufacturing a windmill + battery setup vs the expected energy output over the lifetime?
In other words, are they at least self sustaining? Haul trucks and crushers for mining take massive amounts of energy that are currently being driven by fossil fuels. So renewables are subsidized by fossil fuels and the question is how much?
There is a lot of research into this. The terminology is the energy return on energy invested, or ERoEI. And yes, wind power is definitely self sustaining. Wind turbines are pretty simple, cheap, and tend to last a while.
Nuclear quite obviously isn't 'quite safe' and I say that as a general supporter. Chernobyl and Fukushima show it's not entirely safe. There's a risk with nuclear, even in the safest reactor.
Who knows what might happen in the future to force a country to run a reactor dangerously, budget cuts, government changes, national unrest, wars, sabotage.
There's always going to be a % risk of something horrible happening. And of course, there's the waste.
The issue is also compounded by NIMBY people and clueless politicians preventing the construction of newer, safer, reactors and the correct operations of older ones until replacements are complete.
If you look at the IPPC's SRREN report you'll find that most renewables actually do slightly better than nuclear. I've spent a day or so trying to find my previous comments on this without luck, but it's burried somewhere in the thousand-plus pages:
Nuclear, excluding Chernobyl, in fatalities per GWeyr (GW
electricity per year) does worse than EU Hydro, PV, Onshore and offshore wind, or Geothermal EGS. Biomass CHP biogas risks are very slightly higher, but comparable.
Even the worst power-related disaster of all time, a hydro failure in China, has the characteristic that, once it got done being a massive flood, things recovered fairly quickly. Zhumadian City in China is now home to over 7 million people, though 171,000 perished in the 1975 disaster
Nuclear has been safer than fossil fuel generation, but that doesn't make it the safest generating option around.
There's also that pesky little problem that solar's failure modes are pretty self-limiting. A nuclear plant emits, as nuclear advocates are quite fond of noting, less radioactivity than a coal plant, under normal conditions.
It's just that other than normal conditions change that characteristics by many millions of fold, with consequences lasting from centuries to millennia.
I discussed this, at length, a week or two ago on HN. Nuclear power, while useful for military or space applications, can no longer compete on price for commercial electric generation.
"Solar is already cheaper than utility power in 36 states [1], it estimated to reach grid parity in all 50 states next year [2], and US solar generation capacity surging to almost 40GW by the end of 2016 [3]"
"Nuclear power plants take 10+ years to commission (Watts Bar in TN took nearly 36 years to complete), $1 billion USD to start (frequently approaching $2-4 billion), and have no permanent waste storage. Newer reactor designs that can burn up waste products instead of a once-through system haven't been tested in over 60 years (since first tested at Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project in the late 50s; Thorium in a breeder blanket configuration)."
"> Yes, solar is cheaper than the retail with massive subsidies
The numbers I quote are without subsidies. Wind is already cheaper than nuclear without subsidies, even taking into account nuclear power plants receive enormous liability waivers that wind doesn't require (they're only liable for the first $13 billion USD in damages from an accident; the US government picks up the rest).
> So the rest of us are subsidizing solar owners through income taxes (federal) and the rates we pay for electricity.
And the rest of us our subsidizing cheap coal by not paying for the damage it does through carbon dioxide and radioactive material release. Your point?"
Wind farm would have to be about 30 times bigger than area taken by nuclear plant. Solar farm -- about 15 times [1]. Renewables definitely take more land. But there's no shortage of land in most places in the world. Shortage of arable land? Sure. But not land in general. E.g. all US energy demand could be met by covering a small fraction of Arizona deserts with solar panels. Solar and wind could also be located offshore.
> why are we using space consumed as a comparison point?
Mostly, I asked out of curiosity. But now that you mention it, I think there is value in comparing space requirements. If you need a vast amount of space, you may have to build further away, perhaps in areas where there isn't already infrastructure to support a major power station (you need roads, utilities, level ground, and so on). That adds to the cost.
edit: Not to mention if you move further out, you have more miles of wire to transport the energy. That's more opportunities for something to damage a line and more time and money spent finding and repairing the issue.
> Should we not be comparing capital costs, cost per kwh, fuel costs, waste costs, and dispatchability? And not "but how much space does it use"?
Let's not get snippy and dismissive, I simply asked a question.
Chernobyl was horrible but Fukushima didn't actually cause any more damage than a typical coal power plant generating the same number of megawatt-years.
And rember that a single bad coal mine accident can kill hundreds at a go - one small village in Wales lost virtualy an entire school (100 plus) at abaervan.
Space flight even gives you numbers for what is acceptable, e.g.:
"It is the policy of SSC that the risk associated with each launch of rockets, balloons, UAV’s and other airspace vehicles at Esrange Space Center is controlled so that the hurt risk or casualty expectation (i.e. personal injury) to the public never exceeds 30x10-6 and that the hurt risk for personnel at Esrange Space Center never exceeds 30x10-5." [1]
which comes down to one or two deaths per a few decades being accepted for the risk. Does the power plant industry have numbers?
[1] www.sscspace.com/file/esrange-safety-manual.pdf (in Sweden)
Please consider not casually grouping those together. They are/were very different situations, but people who don't know any better are naturally going to assume you are referring to two similar events.
Fukushima was designed with passive safety[0], so that even in the event of a tsunami the reactor core would have a good chance to maintain integrity. To date nobody has died from the event (although thousands were killed by the tsunami). I'm sure there are some dubious estimates as there were for decades after Chernobyl but I'll be surprised if there is ever a single provable casualty.
Chernobyl on the other hand was not designed with passive safety, and when the control system failed the reactor core went up in a fireball, killing several people immediately, and then many more from acute radiation exposure. Then there were at least a thousand cases of thyroid cancer, which thankfully is not untreatable.
There are really only two similarities that I'll grant you, and they are not unrelated. One is the association with atomic power. The other is the serious psychological damage caused in part by each event, but greatly amplified by the parasitic media peddling their usual doomsday nonsense.
While I thoroughly agree with you all your points, it is your last paragraph that sets the stage. Nuclear = scary. And we have the 50's and 60's and 70's and their bug-eye green (well, black and white maybe) nuclear monsters to thank for that, along with Friends of the Earth[1] and their ilk. Chernobyl and Fukushima are PR disasters way more than they environmental disasters.
> Chernobyl and Fukushima are PR disasters way more than they environmental disasters.
Absolutely. So providing context and details might help people evaluate these questions from a more informed position. Sadly it's not going to make a huge difference but it's one small thing we can do to help.
The modal emissions from nuclear are low, but the safety worst-case is a circle many square kilometers in diameter rendered uninhabitable (Fukushima) or damage to farming across a continent (Chernobyl).
Fukushima & Chernobyl are very old designs, any analysis of nuclear power needs to be done in a way that is mindful of the greatly reduced risk posed by modern designs. I'd also point out that there is a generation of plant designs on the horizon that have a completely passive safety system, so loss of plant power does not disrupt safety and control systems. If the public can ever be convinced of the inherit safety of these new designs, rolling them out everywhere would be great economically and environmentally.
It is the people who provide the budgets who have drawn up rules that make it nearly impossible to build the safer designs as they haven't been run for as long a time as the unsafe ones, so score worse on the risk assessment.
Well if we're going to talk about worst case, the safety worst-case from coal might end up being a rerun of the Permian mass extinction, so nuclear is still the very clear winner.
How does wind power match the output of hydraulic power? Hydro generation can be turned on and off pretty much at will. The only limitation is that the level of your reservoir can't drop below a certain level. But the reservoirs are huge and typically operate far away from the minimum level. Hydro plants are a perfect complement to anything because of this. Unless the region suffers a years-long drought, you can operate the hydro plant at will, and turn it on whenever your less reliable stuff isn't operating. Add a pump and you can even operate it as a gigantic battery. The only problem with hydro power is that there isn't enough of it to run everything. If there were, we wouldn't even think about running anything else.
Losses become less important as things move to renewable. Who cares if your storage batteries lose 20% of your solar power to inefficiencies? That's energy that you were going to just radiate back into space otherwise. If solar becomes really cheap, that just means you slap on some more solar panels and call it a day. And don't forget that solar production matches up well with peak electricity consumption, and transmission losses are small in the common case where production and consumption are co-located.
I will give you the example of my country, Portugal. We have very rainy winters and the reservoirs usually get full. At some points the entire production of the country is provided by hydraulic power (minus the base coal plants that can't be stopped). With rain usually comes a lot of wind. The eolic energy is sent to the Spanish grid for free, since the energy needs are meet by the hydraulic energy alone.
In summer, we have very dry weather and the reservoirs are used just for top the demand of peak hours. The wind is irregular and more prevalent at night. Now we are retrofitting some dams to allow pumping, so the excess wind power at night is used to pump water back into the dam. This process unfortunately only has 60 % efficiency.
My main point is, for the price of all those eolic towers, pumping dams and gas power plants that backup the renewables, we could build a more reliable nuclear fission power plant at a lower price.
Sounds like they undersized their dams. In some places dams are designed to hold back several years’ worth of water, as in filling it from zero would take more than 1 year while the river stops flowing. This becomes impractical for the largest rivers, but larger rivers often have a network of dams to achieve the same effect.
EX: The hoover dam can hold a little over 1 year worth of Colorado River flow, but the Glen Canyon Dam is also on the Colorado river and its almost as large. (Av flow = 637m3/second ~= 2e10 m3 per year, Lake Powell holds up to 30.001 km3 or 3e10 m3. Though a fair amount of the top and bottom is reserve capacity you don't want to use.
In the end ~50% dam over capacity let's you shift most energy production to any point in the year. Granted, this is much harder to do in wet areas, but it sounds like your already producing most of your energy from renewables so it's probably a non-issue.
The scientific community does seem to be rethinking the environmental impact of wind energy at this point. Supposedly the drag created by windmills is enormous for the amount of energy they provide, so in order to take up a greater portion of our current energy needs, it would drastically harm the environment from essentially slowing down the wind. Local temperatures rise substantially, but there's meteorological effects beyond that that are not fully understood at this time. Here's a primer article on what's been found.
I doubt it'd be more significant that planting trees, which is generally considered a good thing. Regardless of the wind effects. In fact slowing the wind is almost always a plus.
I'm not against nuclear, but also consider that wind power has much, much shorter construction times. Combined with hydroelectric storage, the economics could just turn out great for you.
There are two main issues with hydroelectric power (the power density of the two are not easily comparable as their is too much spatial variability in each):
1) Ecosystem disruption (inundation of land as well as blocking migratory aquatic species and significant changes in the downstream water temperature).
2) Almost all of the potential hydroelectric sites in the US (and much of the developed world) have already been utilized (e.g., [1],[2]). That is, capacity can't really expand much. However, the potential for pumped storage (which is not an energy source) is still high.
Wind power production is still nowhere near at capacity even though it suffers from the deficiencies relative to hydro that you have mentioned.
Re: 1-I support balanced development (yes, including nuclear, but I get why some don't like it), but solar is AWESOME to pair with central electric production. It actually HELPS out with this issue. Very hot, sunny days is when there is peak power consumption. It's also the peak of solar production and can help avoid utilities having to spin up the (very expensive) temporary peaker plants.
Re: 2-Again, depending on how you look at it, solar helps with this, at least for homeowner rooftop production. If I'm producing my own electricity on-site, the utility company electricity never has to step-down voltages and move that last mile. I'm not using it (or I'm using less of it) so the energy coming from a central power plant never has to come down the "last mile" to me! Feeding back in is where you've got a bit of a point, but it's not really worse than with central production. In general distributed generation is going to be vastly more efficient (from the perspective of line losses) than central generation. Also, why bring up batteries? You don't need batteries to produce solar. If you have extra power, most people are feeding it into the grid, not batteries.
Re: 3-Agreed. Creating the panels is in general a very energy intensive process (in ways unrelated to the rare earth components), not to be ignored. It takes time for an "energy payback" if you will, but it's there. And the panels are very long-lasting.
> Also, why bring up batteries? You don't need batteries to produce solar. If you have extra power, most people are feeding it into the grid, not batteries.
Because feeding back to the grid is only a sustainable solution when a minimal number of entities are doing it. What happens when the majority of entities are feeding back to the grid? Where is all that energy supposed to go? The answer, of course, is storage.
And this isn't just some made up problem either; it happens right now with a different solution. There's a huge slack in power demand at night. Sometimes enough that the power providers will offer deep discounts to bulk buyers to get rid of excess supply. So you see some industries that use massive amounts of power, like aluminum refineries, shift to mostly night operations. But shifting demand around will only help so much.
Now, while distributed generation is fine, I don't think distributed storage is going to work. Storage cost (both economic and ecologic) and efficiencies are simply much better scaled up.
>Because feeding back to the grid is only a sustainable solution when a minimal number of entities are doing it. What happens when the majority of entities are feeding back to the grid? Where is all that energy supposed to go? The answer, of course, is storage.
I was talking about solar and it's benefits at shaving peak demand. I'm not talking about moving all of our power generation to solar and storing it in batteries. That would be silly. However, that you mention the huge slack in power demand at night helps illustrate my point. Solar matches up quite well with our needs for when electricity is consumed. No, the sun doesn't always shine, but yes, it can be a great tool in managing our power needs.
See the post you replied to--I'm not one that thinks all of our power should be coming from renewables at this point--but we could use a lot more solar (and also other renewables in different scales) than we already do. Is Germany's grid in shambles because they use so much solar? Are they doing widescale battery storage of extra energy? Of course not.
If there does end up being some sort of HUGE central energy storage happening, I doubt it would be in batteries. Talk about being difficult/expensive to scale...
>If there does end up being some sort of HUGE central energy storage happening, I doubt it would be in batteries. Talk about being difficult/expensive to scale...
Why would it be difficult/expensive to scale? As long as battery costs go down, there's absolutely no issue scaling. You just put as many of them as you want together.
I think there will be "grid scale storage" using various battery technologies (in the loosest sense, including things like pumped hydro, electric storage heaters in people's houses, as well as just standard lithium cells) but I also think that the rise in electric cars will also create a distributed storage and demand management solution.
Your car can receive a signal from the grid and either stop charging or actively feed power back in to the grid. This can be beneficial on even a very short timescale, e.g. lots of UK soccer fans put their kettles on during half-time of the FA cup, and all the electric cars currently plugged in stop charging for 30 seconds or so to counteract the demand spike.
I'm sure I saw an analysis that claimed you needed surprisingly few electric cars before that has a dramatic impact on the optimal way to design an electric grid.
Yes, but storage at scale can use more efficient and environmentally friendly solutions like pumped water which are not viable on a per home basis. This option is already in use at nuclear plants for absorbing peaks in demand.
Apparently distribution of storage to the extremities of a grid helps massively with reducing the peak power you have to force over a long distance interconnect, and it actually works out cheaper now in many situations to put in lithium at the far end, than upgrade the cable.
At least one US utility claims that residential solar has a similar win/win impact if the solar generation coincides with the transmission peak. Presumably the two technologies would work together well in this regard too.
I don't disagree with your points, though here are a few counter-points:
1. Nuclear is vulnerable to the weather too. [1] I can't find a link right now, but I'm quite certain a number of plants in the southern US have been off for a long time due to lack of cooling water.
2. Once each house is producing approximate what it's using, there will be very little movement of power over the grid, so it makes no difference that it's low voltage, high current.
3. Agree 100% - we need to invent better solar panels and more wind.
Technically true. Practically, not as much. Solar/Wind power is several magnitutdes more vulnerable to weather than nuclear.
There is a huge difference that you're out of power because a heatwave is hitting your country, and that you're out of power because it's been raining all day or there wasn't enough wind.
How long does a rainy day last? How long is climate change such that California is seeing going to last?
It is insane to consider nuclear a safer choice than solar and wind. I will concede solar and wind aren't firm resources, but that is quickly changing with utility scale battery storage and distributed rooftop generation.
It remains to be seen if distributed rooftop generation will be a viable long term strategy. What is proven and viable, as an investment we can make today to combat climate change is nuclear power. It is truly insane that we continue to use fossil fuels decades after knowing what they are doing to humans and the planet.
>It is insane to consider nuclear a safer choice than solar and wind.
It isn't.
Nuclear is by far the safest choice, of the given, It account for 17% of electricity output and when you look at deaths per Kwh it's the safest source of energy, bar none.
Nuclear energy is the airplane of transportation. Safest form we invented yet, but when things go wrong, which rarely happens it makes for a better news.
I should've constrained my statement; nuclear is safe when properly managed, and a sensible choice when it can be completed on time and under budget. Rarely, if ever, is a nuclear generation facility completed on time and under budget.
No, the problem is that nuclear is overall safest it contributes a large portion of electricity and small percent of all deaths. Because it's both a powerful source and its nature makes people very careful, so they generally are good at avoiding stupid mistakes.
The nature of other power sources is that have a slow trickle of uninspiring deaths - worker falls into turbine (OH NO THE TURBINES ARE EVIL!), person falls off a roof installing solar panels, workers killed in a mine, workers killed on the oil rig. They are so small and numerous it becomes background noise.
When nuclear powerplant goes bad, it goes with a bang. International press coverage, rescue operations, etc. Look at Fukushima. It took a friggin' tsunami to mess up that old plant and even then, they managed to avoid Chernobyl scenario.
France had to shut down several reactors in the 2003 heatwave due to the river water getting too hot and had to try and cool some of them by spraying water on them from the outside.
Unless you're making gallium arsenide cells, solar panels don't need rare earths. They're used mostly for motors.
As for rare earth mining, the US is way ahead of China in rare earth mining technology. Molycorp's Mountain Pass, CA rare earth mine is now in full production.[1] No more tailings ponds. There's a big back-end process to recover most of the water and solvents. There's a large amount of solid waste, but it's basically what was in the ground, minus the good stuff. Even the Sierra Club is grudgingly satisfied with the project.[2] The China producers have had to cut their prices drastically to compete. Molycorp is now struggling financially, and increasing output.[3] Not clear who will win, but right now there's a glut of rare earths.
I think we'll see a companion industry for base-load energy storage following pretty fast. Musk's companies are already in on some of this, but I think it will take more forms than just electro-chemical batteries: for example, kinetic or thermal systems can be scaled up quite large and can provide fairly steady base-load ready power.
If this fails, we'll probably still see energy storage taking off in the consumer space as devices are built to simply assume intermittent power...everything will basically have an UPS that will just carry it through to the next time the power is on. We see this already in many places with low development, mobile phones are the preferred access to the internet, personal home generators are common, people keep banks of car batteries around and charged so they can watch the TV or keep the fridge up and running.
If we knew our current base-load systems were going away in 50 years, humanity could engineer solution to keep modernity around.
Seriously though, I don't understand how our entire grid has made it this far with no storage. All the electricity used in the US is produced at basically the same instant.
Flywheel storage systems would be a great idea to supplement renewable energy, or even to supplement our current electricity generation technologies. Peaking plants are crazy expensive and most of the time base load pretty greatly exceeds actual usage; it would be great to be able to store some of that energy and use it instead of a peaker.
There are three ways to handle the difference between relatively fixed base load power generation and highly variable grid usage.
First, you can add variable load power generation facilities, that are less efficient overall, but can change output levels more quickly.
Second, you can add an energy storage and return capacity to the grid. For this, you need a reversible process and good efficiency.
Third, you can add variable usage. "Smart grid" appliances, particularly air conditioners, are good for this. But an energy-intensive industrial process co-located with the power plant, that could be scaled up or down automatically, would be better.
The fact that most solutions to the problem of handling variable load when it is most efficient to have near-constant production are of the first variety is easily explained by the economic factors. A power generating company understands power generation better than any other industry, therefore has a bias towards solving its power generation problems with different kinds of power generation.
It is only relatively recently that computing made it possible for automated usage negotiations could take place between producer and consumer on a scale that would be significant. And we still don't quite have batteries good enough to make peak-leveling storage practical or cost-effective. Pumped hydro is about the only game in town, and that depends heavily on appropriate terrain.
every spinning generator has stored energy in the rotor's inertia. Some turbine-generators have flywheels on the shaft to increase the inertia and decrease changes in speed that happen when there is a mismatch in load (power out) and generation (power in). When there is a mismatch in load and generation on the grid every single generator slows down or speeds up. you can monitor this by measuring the frequency of the voltage anywhere on the grid, it will be the identical measurement at all times (except where DC interconnects are involved).
Every generator should have a 5% speed-droop characteristic where a 5% change in speed results in a 100% change in output. So if you were running your hydro plant at 80% output with 60 Hz speed setpoint, and some other generator tripped resulting in more load than generation, and the frequency on the grid dips to 59.9 Hz (a 0.1% change), your hydro plant would increase the output by 1/5% * 0.1% = 2%, to 82%, as would every other generation source that can control its throttle, and once again generation and load are matched, but the frequency is now 59.9. A couple of special power plants (running in Automatic Generation Control (AGC) mode, have control systems with a big picture view of large portions of the grid) will increase their output to restore the lost generation, raising the frequency back to 60.0, and re-balancing whatever power flows were scheduled across the various transmission interties for that hour.
Any source where you can control the throttle should have this 5% droop characteristic. wind turbines and solar distributed generation without batteries can't provide it, so not only do we need more dispatchable resources like gas, hydro, etc to be able to quickly make up the variations in wind and solar output, but the conventional plants either can't run as close to 100% output or have to have increased droop to make up for the sources that have zero droop.
The fact that peakers are more cost efficient than flywheels or other storage tells you how expensive storage is. Plus it tells you that our electricity grids have been very robust to not need storage.
Alternatively it tells you how heavily subsidized fossil fuel based peaker plants are. See the recent IMF report (not a group known for being idealistic hippies) for some numbers on that.
> rare earth metals have a very pollutant and energy intensive extraction process which in most cases is not accounted in the environmental cost of solar panels.
Thanks to China overplaying their hand, this may be changing. Rare earths were exactly that, rare. And China was quite literally the only country you could get them from (they were the only country that was fine with dealing with all the pollution and waste. Though "dealing with" might be too liberal). They took advantage of their monopoly and used it to bully nations, as well as engage in severe price gouging. They even temporarily banned all rare earth exports to Japan (big electronics producer) back in 2010 because of a minor fishing trawler dispute.
Some countries and business got fed up with China's bullying and began looking at ways to do it cheaper and cleaner. It wasn't that it was "hard" to deal with the waste and pollution, it's that it was expensive to get everything set up and up to IAEA standards. Nobody wanted to invest that much and have China start undercutting the market again.
But China continued to play the bully and demand rose. Finally, it became worth it to open up some new mines (and reopen older ones). Both America and Australia have begun mining operations within the last few years (and meet IAEA environmental standards), and Vietnam signed an agreement to supply Japan with rare earths. Last year, a company in Malaysia was granted a license to refine rare earths with IAEA's seal of approval. They're expected to supply 1/6th the world's rare earths and virtually eliminate China's stranglehold.
I think the general idea is that moving to renewables turns the problem into a more solvable one, or a bunch of more solvable ones. It's an inherently optimistic idea, but I sort of buy it.
Grids that take more advantage of decentralized production, cleaner solar panel manufacturing (or mineral extraction). That sort of thing.
There's another big thing to add to your list: transport. It's almost all hydrocarbons. Planes, ships, cars, trucks. Same answer for this one. We'll a solar, battery, or hydrogen powered vehicles.
Much of the variability in solar and wind is predictable, both long term (solar generation at night or during a given season is highly preditable) or near-term (weather forecasts give very good 72-hour estimates of both load and supply). Germany's experience, documented by the Fraunhoffer Institute, are an excellent example of this. There are occasions where per-MWh prices have spiked or fallen drastically, but those are both rare (2-3X annually, for a few hours), and are almost always instances where the forecasts were in error.
The means of dealing with this are to have:
1. Dispatchable load (rather than today's dispatchable supply): high-intensity uses which can be cycled rapidly or on schedule.
2. Storage. Pumped hydro and compressed air energy storage (CAES) are the two most likely options. Synfuels -- hydrogen or synthetic gas or liquid hydrocarbons created from surplus electrical supply, are the most likely options in my book.
3. Standby capacity. Biomass, dispatchable renewable supply (hydro, geothermal), and other fuel-driven capacity (preferably carbon-neutral) seem to be the best bets. I'm pretty bearish on battery solutions in general -- they may work for standby, but the volumes and costs required for long-term supply are enormous. Fuel cell tech might be slightly better.
Rare earths aren't significantly used in solar, and only slightly in wind.
Note that not shifting from fossil fuels isn't an option. Whether due to CO₂ emissions or fuel shortages, that'll have to happen sooner or later.
Nuclear's a possible bridge but faces major long-term obstacles. Most notably that it fails of itself to answer the liquid fuels demand (though, as with renewables, synfuels driven by nuclear generation are possible).
I think you are forgetting about the fact that we can store energy. This will act as a buffer and not run into the problems you are describing. Of course the buffer size needs to be reasonable and we need to collect and store energy at a rate greater than or equal to the rate of consumption, but I think we can achieve now with current technology.
Energy storage solutions are getting better, but energy storage research didn't really pickup till the 1990s.
Pumped Hydro (~80% efficiency) is still the best large-scale energy storage mechanism in the USA. Maybe in a few years Redox-Flow Batteries (Or flywheels, or Lithium, or Compressed Air, or...) will catch up to technologies from the 1960s and we can have advanced energy storage.
But for now, the vast vast majority of energy storage is basically pumping water up a hill and letting it back down at a later time. Something like 95% of the entire USA's energy storage is pumped hydro.
I am curious about your third point. From my understanding solar panels are 99% sand. I searched around a little and all I could find is that the thin film type need Tellurium. The rarity of Tellurium is comparable to that of platinum. The standard crystalline type do not. Maybe someone else can expand on this.
"Rare earth" supply concerns usually means neodymium for magnets. In any case, most of them could be extracted from aluminium mine tailings ("red mud") at moderate expense.
That is part of why I prefer tidal power. It is predictable, and because water is so much thicker than air you can get more energy than from wind turbines. They can even be integrated into hurricane protection measures (I forget The specific term).
I think we'll hit the turning point when renewable infrastructure can be built with energy and supplies that are also renewable, sort of like writing the compiler for a programming language in that language.
>I would rather support a balanced production with nuclear (fusion?) power plants providing the fixed needs of the grid and renewable energies making up the rest.
I agree on the fusion part. The NIF has been strangely silent about their project for the last year or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
NIF is always strangely silent, because they don't exist to drive progress towards fusion based electrical power generation, they exist to validate and test miniaturized nuclear weapon designs.
I don't know about that, but I was watching their ignition tests succeed one after another, and then they stopped. If they did succeed they would want to run it for awhile before announcing it. <tinfoil hat off>
Bad math. If it takes 10kwh to build a 1kwh storage system that seems like an issue. However, if you use that storage system to store 1kwh every day for 20 years that's 10kwh to store 7,300 kwh which is clearly a non issue.
PS: From a cost of energy standpoint you can quickly see that at 10c/kwh all forms of energy storage are way in the black on this issue. Just by looking at their cost vs how much they store over their lifetime. But, more importantly storage is supplemental as during some of the day you’re just directly using the energy without storage.
> You can check Brazil in recent history to check the effects of droughts in the power grid. In the end there is a need of conventional power plants always ready to backup the grid when the renewable energy is not available.
Disclaimer: I'm Brazilian
Sure, you need some conventional powerplants as backup system. However, that's much better than having them run all the time. Don't forget that conventional plants should also have their backups.
The hydroelectric dams do the heavy lifting really. We also have a nationwide energy grid, so we can reallocate resources as necessary. What we actually need is more renewables. The northeast is (almost!) always sunny. If there's not enough sun, it's usually because of rain(increasing reservoir levels) and there's wind (boosting wind power).
The north (near the Amazon forest) has an abundance of rain. The south and southeast are hit and miss, the weather is far less reliable.
With a nationwide power grid, surplus can be reallocated. In case that's insufficient, then the thermoelectric power plants can be started, hopefully running on natural gas or biodiesel. We do have a nuclear power plant, wish we had more.
> The majority of losses of the power distribution network are on the last mile
Which is why microgeneration should be encouraged. Having enough local generation to offset the losses alone would be a win.
> Since we are talking of the environment, rare earth metals have a very pollutant and energy intensive extraction process which in most cases is not accounted in the environmental cost of solar panels.
Sure. But what about the resources to build conventional power plants? It is not like their extraction, transportation, processing and assembly is free.
Thermoelectric power plants also release harmful gases into the atmosphere for as long as they are operating. Solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric dams don't do that (for hydro, I guess they'll release a bunch of methane and other chemicals for quite a while after they are constructed, due to the dead life when the artificial lake is formed).
Fusion is always 10 years away. I wouldn't hold my breath. Nuclear power plants will also require a lot of energy (and pollution!) in order to be constructed. The newest designs are a win in my book, but we can't pretend they don't do environmental damage.
Oh, almost forgot. If you are concerned about rare earth mining, then let us build more solar concentrators. They only require mirrors, no rare earths. The heat exchange medium can also be molten salts, which will retain a lot of thermal energy for the night, without using batteries. They require direct sunlight however, while solar panels will work (at reduced efficiency) even in overcast skies.
Fusion is basic science research. In a few decades it may become engineering.
Making solar and storage cheaper is already engineering.
I do expect fusion to out-compete solar and storage eventually, but probably not in the next 50 years unless one of the fringe groups does something amazing.
The basic science research has already been conducted.
What is being done now could be viewed as engineering, as the goal is to scale the process to a large size, such that the system may deliver a 10x return on the power going into it.
When we have an experimental reactor that produces electricity reliably, then the engineering can start. Up till that point it is still science research. There is engineering involved, but the engineering is being used to construct an experiment.
edit - and ITER has not been inspiring confidence. They seem to be massively bogged down at the moment, though we shall see if anything picks up now that they have swapped management and are trying to rebuild the organization.
I'd argue that making solar and storage cheaper is not engineering. Currently, their efficiency and capacity do not warrant widespread use. More research should be done before money is wasted deploying half-baked technology.
You can try to engineer cost savings and efficiency out of the current solutions, but using all that brain power on something that might yield single digit percent gains is a massive waste of talent IMO.
The minds that are working on those problems would be much better utilized working on solar and storage research as well as more long term solutions like nuclear fusion (NIF, ITEF).
Without subsidies, civilian nuclear would not exist and we'd have a lot less oil and gas supplies. Exploration subsidies for oil and gas have doubled in the last five years in the US.
edit - energy production is always subsidised in wealthy countries, as energy security is key to national security, so it would be stupid not to.
Something I don't understand about fusion, doesn't it also produce radioactive waste? Does the containment system get irradiated with high-energy neutrons?
It does produce nuclear waste, but with a short half life. The waste is more radioactive than fission waste, but will be pretty much gone in 500 years.
Since it does produce radioactive waste, could fusion also make large areas of the earth uninhabitable like fission when there's an accident?
I used to prefer fission and fusion research but seeing what happened in chernobyl and fukushima I had seconds thoughts, and now seeing how well renewables are doing I don't care for fission and fusion any longer.
Funny story, in Switzerland they release water from mountain reservoirs during the day to produce electricity and sell the surplus to France and Germany at a high price, and then at night they buy nuclear-produced electricity from France at a fraction of the cost and pump the water back up into the mountains to repeat the process the next day.
Fusion accidents are much less likely - they need to be constantly supplied with new fuel for the reaction to continue. If they get hit by an earthquake / terrorist attack / other emergency, the natural tendency of the system is to stop moving things, including the fuel, which means that the source of energy is immediately removed, and the danger with it. At worst the reactor itself may get destroyed, but containment techniques should guarantee minimal radiation escaping to the environment.
Fission on the other hand requires a large quantity of fuel just to get the chain reaction started, so if things go wrong, you'd better have a robust cooling system, because nothing is going to stop that fuel from producing lots of waste heat. The fuel melts and escapes containment, radiating surrounding groundwater and the general environment. Even without catastrophes, fission results in lots of irradiated coolants and 'spent' fuel that is still hot enough that it needs to be stored in water for years after it leaves the reactor.
There are some experimental IV generation Fission Reactors, which burn the entirety of the nuclear fuel leaving just lighter radioactive elements with shorter half-life.
Regarding safety, the Molten-salt Reactor also of IV generation, allows for non catastrophic failures since if the reaction goes out of control, the salt solidifies and stops the reaction instead of exploding by the increased pressure. The downside is that reactor becomes a radioactive rock.
what I don't get is, isn't "highly radioactive" waste dangerous because it puts out so much energy? So..... maybe we should just plop that waste back into a fission reactor, then?
Lots of stuff can burn and produce heat, but you don't just put any old flammable thing into your car, you use a specific type of refined petroleum that has well known properties that you can design an engine around.
Likewise, while lots of radioactive material can put off heat that can be used to drive a turbine, by using a specific blend of U235 and U238 the whole system operates in a controlled and well understood way.
There is a program to blend in plutonium from decommissioned nuclear bombs as a fuel for reactors, but it is fairly complex and probably wouldn't be done except for security / political reasons.
There are also designs on the drawing board for something akin to a garbage incinerator, the primary purpose would be to eliminate waste, but much or all of the energy to do so would come from the waste products themselves.
If that's how you feel, give examples why. Personally I don't think what is in that post is too far off from reality; "renewable" energy is a net loss still. Nuclear is the cleanest source per measure of energy produced option we have.
1 - Storage. Ignoring developments in storage as part of the build out for renewable power will always make it seem as though you need loads of baseload. And storage is far better developed than fusion. It exists for one thing.
2 - Is ignoring the research done by the grids themselves that indicate they can save money on link upgrades by building out lithium storage systems.
3 - solar panels are nearly all silicon, the storage is mostly lithium and nickel and copper. Some polluting compounds get used, but come on, we are comparing to oil, gas, coal and nuclear. To crap as much in the capital production of devices that last decades as is produced by a chemical fuel economy requiring constant replenishment over the same timescale, would be pretty impressive.
This article does a pretty good job of synthesizing why I'm fairly optimistic about climate change despite believing the scientific models. I think that there is an austerity/flagellant meme within environmental circles that states that we have sinned against the environment, and unless the solution involves a heroic self-sacrifice (a la Kyoto protocol) then we cannot be saved.
In reality, all power is solar power, and innovation and market forces will eventually make it more efficient to skip the fossil-fuel middleman. The process could be accelerated by a carbon tax, but it will happen either way.
Responding to the 'Climate is still screwed' point, once we're on track to stabilizing emissions, geo-engineering methods that were dismissed as stopgaps can always be used to hold the climate over for the next century.
The problem with this is that once we've reached a "perilous level of global warming", it is quite possible that there is no way back.
The 2 degrees target seems to be already out of reach and everything beyond that gets closer and closer to being unpredictable. Of course no one knows what exactly will happen anyway. But as an example: If the arctic permafrost starts to melt methane gets released into the atmosphere which further accelerates everything [1].
I would not hope on some not-yet-existing or not-yet-usable technologies to fix everything we're messing up now. The "eventually" when finally everyone stops using fossil fuels because other kinds of energy are cheaper might be just too late.
This is where geo-engineering can come in. I think climate scientist will be much more comfortable discussing it if it seems we are on track for fixing the underlying causes.
There are bunch of different ideas, most of them involve directly interacting with global temperature by reflecting energy back to space. Injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere for example, mimics how some volcanic eruptions cause temporary cooling. Another is massive scale cloud seeding over the oceans.
One of the scariest things about these ideas is how cheap could be are. What happens if Canada decides it would really prefer a milder winter and sprays the hydro dioxide up there like a bunch of unruly mounties? Then they cut it out and Uzbekistan do the same.
Purely my (possibly terribly misinformed) opinion, but geo engineering (used here to mean the bundle of blue-sky proposals to manipulate the climate intentionally after we've completely screwed it up unintentionally) is a red herring and, at best, a high-risk hail-mary.
It is a red herring: in discussing climate change, it is brought up primarily as a reason not to worry about doing anything now, we'll fix it in post. The sheer number of otherwise smart, educated people who blithely assume that attempting to modulate a huge chaotic system we don't fully understand and can't model is a tribute to optimism and not much else. Add to that the fact that we only have one atmosphere on which to practice, and, well, I'm not optimistic.
And that is before we get in to the (alluded to by the parent post) public choice questions on an global scale, something that history demonstrates is, politely, extremely difficult, extremely slow, mostly toothless and prone to cheating. To pick one example, we, as a species, cannot agree that leaving explosive objects scattered around to randomly maim and kill is, on balance, a bad idea.
If, in 100 or whatever years, the options are go extinct slowly or pump tons of reflective gas into the upper atmosphere and see what happens, well, I'd vote to go for broke, too. But that is all the "geo-engineering" approach is at this point.
> And that is before we get in to the (alluded to by the parent post) public choice questions on an global scale, something that history demonstrates is, politely, extremely difficult, extremely slow,
If we could agree on global-scale engineering projects to manipulate the climate, we'd probably be able to agree on reducing dependence on fossil fuels...
Many types of geo-engineering could in theory work to cool the planet. But none of the proposals I'm aware of will decrease the CO2 in the atmosphere. Without fixing that, we'll still have ocean acidification, which will dramatically change how the oceans support life. It's possible that most forms of seafood we know today will become extinct.
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidificati...
So on which climate sensitivity estimate are you basing your comment, and why are you choosing it in preference to others?
A compilation of at least 30 published studies based upon satellite and ocean observations demonstrate climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 levels after all feedbacks is only about 0.5 C, which is ~7 times less than the 3.2C claimed by the IPCC AR5 modelled mean estimate.
> The problem with this is that once we've reached a "perilous level of global warming", it is quite possible that there is no way back.
IIRC, there have been significant periods in prehistory where there were no ice caps, and technically we're currently in the middle of an ice age [1]. That's not to say that the effects of global warming won't cause severe stresses on our current ecosystems and civilization, but it's an overstatement to say "there's no way back."
This is a bit like saying that the people causing panic over Y2K were unwarranted because everyone checked their systems and sorted it out in advance. If nobody had panicked about it, then nothing would have been done.
Solar has become economical at least partly because the subsidies are working, by causing economies of scale in manufacturing, novel process technology, etc.
(However, the single biggest solar development that's a byproduct of the silicon chip industry is the reduced kerf diamond wire saw used for cutting ingots with the minimum of waste)
I would be very wary of Geo Engineering approaches. Our models of the global climate are really not complete enough to risk setting of some weird feedback loop by trying to undo the damage we already did. The safest bet is stopping carbon dioxide emissions as soon as possible to avoid catastrophic warming.
I don't believe that the market will do that quickly enough on its own, as the costs of climate change are not accounted in the profits of burning fossil fuels. We really shouldn't burn enough coal to make extracting the rest more expensive than renewable energy.
Agreed, appealing to people's conscience to buy the more expensive, but more environmentally friendly option doesn't work at scale, because only the upper-middle class can make that choice consistently. Most people cannot afford it, and won't make the choice.
But once the most environmentally friendly choice is the cheapest choice, then, as if by magic, everyone will switch.
Car pollution too high? Make electric cars cheaper to buy and own,and everyone will switch.
Coal power plant pollution too high? Make solar power plants cheaper, and everyone will switch.
Meat industry pollutes too much/uses too much water/is unethical? Make synthetic meat cheaper, and everyone will switch.
I would agree with and extend your remarks that humans tend to be slightly more adaptable than they are usually given credit.
A century ago it was utterly unthinkable that people would drink milk in any format other than quart glass jars delivered daily to a little airlock on the side of the house. My neighbors ancient brick house still has their milk delivery door! Now a days people get their gallon of antibiotics and growth hormones in plastic gallon jugs that last a week or so. Turned out to not be a big deal. Humans adapt, its just what we do.
Can't run a grid at night? Well, then don't. Or more likely a KWh at noon will be a 100th the cost of a KWh at midnight, maybe less. Not being able to run my clothes dryer at 3am sounds a lot like the astroturfers who claim the universe will end if they can't drive their SUV 800 miles daily so no one should be permitted to buy electric cars.
And in the other direction, technology is getting to the point where the required adaptation is a lot smaller.
The idea of conservation used to be combined with the idea of sacrifice. Save the planet by living in the dark, bundling up in sweaters, and exhausting yourself on a bicycle to get anywhere.
Today I light my house with LEDs that are nearly 10x more efficient than incandescents and should last just about forever. High efficiency HVAC and good insulation mean that the energy I expend on climate control is very small. I drive an electric car which is a fantastic way to get around. Some of these (like the electric car) are not good economic choices yet. Others are. But the ones that aren't are becoming so pretty quickly. That is the face of conservation now: great stuff that just happens to be efficient.
You mean, to be more specific, that all power is nuclear fusion power. Actually, yes. When fusion reactors are available they'll cut out the middleman again -- and this middleman will be solar.
But to be fair, the sun will remain the largest fusion reactor humans can access for quite some time so solar may continue to be relevant while we are close to it.
I was being facetious :) These generalizations aren't terribly useful. It doesn't matter if all power comes from the sun/wherever if you can't put that thing in your car and drive somewhere, or use it to make your light bulbs work.
As others have already pointed out, the article contains a lot of handwaving arguments and seemingly inaccurate claims.
So, for anyone interested in a more thorough and quantitative discussion of the problem I highly recommend David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air", which is available for free online:
It contains detailed discussions of many of the problems that we would face when shifting our energy production to renewable sources and decentralizing it, and he provides a lot of data and calculations to give you a feeling of how to overcome them.
This is an excellent book, very well reason, quantitative, and clearheaded. I do wish it was a little less UK focused (I have the same problem with many books that are US focused; it's a world problem and leaving out the BRICs is missing a lot of the story).
How to lie with graphs: use a log/log plot. In this article the GDP/capita vs the energy consumed/GDP. I know they did this to cram a lot of data onto one compact space, but it's very misleading. Overall the trend is to the lower right, which sounds great, and it's mostly straight lines. But on a log/log plot, all polynomials are straight lines.
Second, the energy consumed per capita is not _going down_, it's actually still going up--it's just going up slower than GDP. The fact that GDP keeps going up would also seem to be a good thing, but it isn't always, e.g. if the economy is producing superfluous goods that don't actually improve the quality of life, and if life demands ever more services for basic necessities, this is also not a win.
The simple fact remains that the total resource consumption per person is still rising. And the population is still rising, too.
My problem with all of this is that, as renewables get cheaper, people use less fossil fuels. But this drives the price of fossil fuels down. Eventually all you're extracting is the low-hanging fruit that can be pulled out of the ground very cheaply and running tight margins on it. So you have kind of a vicious cycle. Meanwhile most people just assume that fossil fuel prices will increase inexorably. I doubt it.
In other words, absent regulation keeping fossil fuel costs high (carbon tax!), I think the shift to renewables will take longer than the optimists think.
Only for some types of fossil fuels. Saudi light crude costs very little to extract -- a few dollars a barrel -- whereas shale oil has an extraction cost of around $70-$90.
You're right in that the Saudis will likely never stop extracting. But there are much larger deposits in the Americas that we quite likely will never develop if solar brings down the price of energy.
This is a good thing, in fact lower prices/profits for oil is the only way to keep most of it in the ground.
Of course a carbon tax does the same thing, as does removing the tax breaks were still paying to corporations to prospect for yet more oil.
One nice feedback loop is that as countries shift to renewables they have more selfish reasons to introduce carbon taxes to try to stick it to other countries while looking progressive.
The part that shocked me (and prefaced section 6) is the chart in section 2: these are all _additions_ to the current energy grid. We're still adding so much coal when we should stop building these plants right now.
Not to mention the continued development of Canadian tar sands, which falls outside the electricity generation equation but is still part of the global emissions picture.
19 years and 6 months with a statistically insignificant temperature trend. UAH 6.0 brings the UAH data inline with the RSS data. As the years go on, catastrophic warming seems less and less likely - or at least so the hard satellite data says.
You mistake my argument. I don't doubt ocean acidification, rise in ocean levels, or global warming. My point is that the best data we have conflicts with the IPCC consensus of 4 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. And there wasn't a single model that showed 2 decades of flat temperatures until the latest IPCC assessment, when it became obvious there were definitely 2 decades of flat temperatures.
Any few decades would be a great time to say that. You just have to pick the right predictions of yours to say "I told you so" about, and be silent about the incorrect ones.
I work at ShaleApps http://shaleapps.com/ a Oil and Gas focused start up in West Virginia. Investment in the industry is plummeting because of low oil prices. The price of oil is around $60 a barrel right now, but the oil sands in North Dakota and Canada are only profitable at >$100. Coal is getting killed in the US for regulator reasons, but I don't see why other countries would make the massive investment to switch to natural gas. I think coal will like be seen as the "bridge fuel" by later generations.
Right now the efficiency over oil is enormous. At current market price youre getting over 3x the energy per dollar for natural gas, IIRC. Methane is also by definition the cleanest burning hydrocarbon, with the fewest CO2 molecules per energy provided. In the US alone, it's estimated that nat gas has the average household pocketing $800 yearly since the fracking boom. In addition, a geoscientist recently told me it's estimated that we're only extracting about 10% of the natural gas available per well, meaning there's tons more down there. It has serious potential, and at least the US's electric infrastructure is rapidly changing to accommodate it. Anyway, what I'm getting at is maybe we shouldn't count out natural gas.
My main issue is that electricity prices are not going to reflect the reduction in costs to the consumer, and instead, between stagnant companies fighting decentralization via corruption of local politics and big monopolies taking over, electricity will be high as ever.
A good example is my local town, where the city council are all bought out, don't even rely on the single electricity provider because they live in a different part of the city, but still keep voting on jacking up prices more and more all while the electrical company that was originally a publicly owned company, (pushed private by our congresscritter), is probably the most hated entity in town for it's shady business practices and constant rate hikes.
(For example, last summer they said they underbilled in May, but didn't catch it till June, and then added the new "back-owed" charges at the new rates in July, one of the hottest times of the year, handily raking in tons more money than they would have. No one did a thing because all our politicians are corrupt. Of course this is in one of the most conservative towns in America, where everyone pays jingoistic lip-service to "family values" like "honesty", but when it really comes down to it we're just as bad as the beltway.)
Public isn't much better, here in Canada the corrupt kleptocrats running my province clean out the profits of the public hydro corp which disappear into general revenue, so the corp has to increase rates every year as they have no way to save any income, and are increasing filled with more crony management positions with sky high salaries.
For large scale energy storage, what's wrong with pumping water up high and then making electricity on the way down. IE, make a dam. Make electricity at night. Refill the top part during the day.
The system has three basic components – an 11.5 MW wind farm, a 380,000- cubic-meter upper pumped hydro reservoir in a conveniently-located inactive volcanic crater at 709.5 meters elevation and a lower 150,000-cubic-meter reservoir at 56 meters elevation.
I especially like the inactive volcano part. Technology that tempts the gods.
Many of them were built to make nuclear plants more efficient.. nuclear plants turbines are most efficient at full power.. so they would store the water during the night (when demand is low) and then use it the next day to handle peak demand.
So they were also made to start generating electricity quickly.. the one above takes 5-10minutes.. but there are others that respond within a minute. Much faster than starting a oil-fired generator.
These account for the vast majority (90%+) of stored capacity worldwide.
There's no reason they couldn't be used to store solar/wind energy.
There's a couple in Scotland, where I grew up. My school did a tour once. (The tour was uninspired and rather dull. The nuclear reactor tour was way more interesting.)
They're strictly limited as to how much they can store. Ben Cruachan (the one I visited) can generate 440MW for up to 22 hours before the reservoir empties. It's used for emergencies and buffer usage spikes; Ben Cruachan can spin up in two minutes from standby, or thirty seconds if they have some warning, and is used to provide power while the much slower reacting gas or coal plants rev up. I don't know how quickly it can pump water uphill, but it's probably a lot slower than it consumes it. Round-trip efficiency looks to be ~70%.
According to Wikipedia the UK uses about 40GW of electricity at peak, so you'd need a hundred Ben Cruachans to store enough to run the country for under a day.
See the grey border around the water? Hydro power reservoirs are ecologically pretty bad --- freshwater life isn't equipped to deal with what are basically irregular tides, and so the shorelines are always completely barren.
This might be one of the most trivial questions, but I always tried to find the answer, failing always.
How is it that Solar energy is 'clean' and 'renewable', (or for that matter, any natural source of energy that plays a significant role on earth ecology), for if we make use of solar energy, will it not break the environmental equilibrium (temperatures, weather patterns etc) thereby making it 'unclean'? I see that using solar energy doesn't create any direct poisonous residue, but what about the unintended indirect effects? Did researchers already prove that there won'e be any effects or that the effects are far less significant than existing energy sources? (I would like to read actual research, apart from opinions/thoughts)
Why would you think there's a possible break in environmental equilibrium due to solar energy. They amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere won't change. The only thing that changes is instead of the energy being wasted, it will be used to generate electricity. Conservation of energy guarantees this.
> They amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere won't change
True
> The only thing that changes is instead of the energy being wasted
The solar energy that is falling on earth and that is not yet captured by the solar panels is doing a good number of direct things, such as Photosynthesis (not that Photosynthesis is stopped by putting solar panels, but one example of direct things Sun is doing), and an unknown number of indirect things such as Heating the atmosphere by scattering back from earthly-surface (causing many ecological reactions). Would you consider all these effects waste?
If we do know all these effects and also know that redirecting this solar energy into our energy needs won't significantly annihilate the effects, then it's good. I am curious to know about studies in this regard. If there are no studies and my question itself is pointless, I want to be enlightened, because I haven't had a satisfactory explanation yet.
One argument might be that, all the solar energy that's captured and used by us will also generate heat back into atmosphere and thereby not changing the ecological reactions in earth atmosphere - but I just made it up
All renewable energy sources that I can think of are processes that used to be (Energy -> Heat) and we turn them into (Energy -> Electricity -> Heat), where Energy is gravitational potential, EM radiation, etc.
The two changes are that the electricity is sometimes stored (so we have some small amount of energy cooped up in batteries instead of out in the world as heat) and that we often move the electricity before turning it into heat. The latter probably exacerbates the heat island effect, although I wouldn't expect it to be worse than pushing electricity from other sources into major cities. The former hardly seems like a problem given that global warming is a concern.
As long as a solar panel is lower albedo than the object it's installed on, the effects you're mentioning will be an improvement over the baseline effects of human development. If you start replacing fields with solar farms you may have to worry, but for a rooftop installation a solar panel will absorb more energy than the average tar or asphalt shingle roof surface.
Even on fields its not an issue (especially if you replace fields where sheep graze), as the sun still wanders around, and the animals can stand below the panels comfortably.
I've been waiting for that point to emerge, eventually used to denounce "clean renewables" by the same people now promoting them.
When scaled up to the hoped-for levels, we face the prospect of "solar strip-mining" whereby vast areas of land where sunlight used to reach ground is now blocked. How bad would it be?
Just to bracket the subject with a SWAG (corrections welcome): total USA electricity consumption is 534,938,184,000 watts. Practical maximum for solar is about 1,000 watts per square meter (a very optimistic collection & conversion rate). That works out to a minimum of 200 square miles (534 km^2) devoted entirely to solar collection, or 2,000 mi^2 for a more realistic solar efficiency. The upside is the latter is just 0.05% of total USA land area, hopefully with most of that being used on already-erected roofs.
What the climactic effect of 534,938,184,000 solar watts being converted into electricity instead of heat or photosynthesis is, I'll hope someone else figures out whilst I do lunch.
_Where_ is relevant. Point is every kilowatt of solar electricity you use is 1-10 m^2 of ground denied that energy. If the collector is on top of your house, fine - probably will help with your home cooling (gettin' hot here in GA), but over other space you've just deprived a nano-ecosystem its energy supply (no big deal for home use, but significant when it's upwards of a couple thousand square miles).
Oil is constantly underestimated. Underestimated hopefully in most cases but underestimated nonetheless.
A - Demand for oil is notoriously inelastic.
If demand drops a little, a big shift in price will "compensate." If solar starts genuinely digging into oil's market share the oil prices will drop by a lot, fast until almost the same amount of oil gets bought as before. Whatever you are assuming is the "cheaper than oil" flip point, is very likely to be too optimistic. It is likely to just be cheaper than the most expensive marginal 5%.
This is inherently speculative because economics and because real marginal costs of oil production are closely guarded secrets, but over the last 50+ years this has usually been correct. This isn't disruptive tech land where the cheaper-worser becomes the cheaper-better and wins total victory. This is substitutable commodity land where prices drop like rocks but total volume produced barely moves.
^Much cheaper power for slightly less carbon is still a good thing, but more on the prosperity front than the climate change front.
B - There is a lot of oil down there. Even "dry" wells are usually only slightly drier than they were when we started drilling them. We just got the easy oil out and then stopped. FInding oil really means finding "accessible" oil. Our methods of finding and our methods of accessing are technology too. It's advancing, like solar tech is.
This is what "fraking" is. It's a new way of accessing.
C - Speaking of fraking… It's only just begun, probably. It's happening in the states because that's where it happens to have been invented. There is no reason to think that it is not equally applicable in Russia, S. America, the Persian Gulf or anywhere else with oil.
I like the elegance of solar though, and I hope it succeeds. Decentralization seems like it can take a big part of the residential market. In rich countries, a lot of people can afford it and with between incentives, people's general interest and the real estate value (people like investing in their home), it seems like it will have a good run.
In poor and/or dysfunctional places, going off grid is always a favored option. Solar power can do what mobile phone did. Anything that relies on less infrastructure is more suitable for these places. This is an especially attractive idea. Mobile phones/modems mean that phone infrastructure is much easier to come by. Solar + battery could mean the same for electricity. Add in rainwater + home purification systems (progress here too) and all we'll need is hover cars to deal with potholes.
I need a Terry Pratchett philosopher to help here, but they're all in the bath.
First, the inelasticity means that a tax is a great way to raise taxes, but a terrible way to reduce use. Oil has gotten more expensive lots of times, when has it ever made people take the bus? We've seen oil price fluctuations. A tax will work just like a natural price hike. A nasty painful tax (with street protests just short of revolution) might get you a 10% reduction in emissions, maybe 30% over a really long time if your tolerance for civil unrest is above average. Probably less. Also, flat taxes hit poor people hard.
Second, a carbon tax is an almost hopeless mission. We're having enough trouble with money taxes. I mean we might be able to make carbon tax or cap-and-trade or something in that family of thing work in a country. We might even be able to get it partially functional in the EU, NAFTA or some group level. We are absolutely not ready to pull off this level of cooperation at international scale yet.
We will have cheating and defecting. Carbon tax evasion and carbon tax loopholes and carbon tax havens, or whatever the gasey equivalents of monetary tax mess are.
A great book (though slightly dated now) on climate change is "Climate Wars" by Gwynne Dyer. He's a shining beacon journalist and an ex soldier-scholar tip. He made the argument (I'm paraphrasing) that we're lucky we hit this problem now, when we have a chance of cooperating at this scale. Imagine if you had to get China, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Canada and everyone else to cooperate in the 1700s. I like the thinking, but I think he's overestimating our chances. It's straddling the border region between optimisms and lunacy.
We have spent the last 20 years trying to come up with a light weight agreement for minimal reductions in rates of expansion. The idea was, put in a framework, make it easy and painless at first. Then turn the crank. We failed! We failed at ground level, well before the point where it even starts to sting. Even though the targets were way under what we need to be targeting in order to avert disaster based on the median models (or the most lenient ones), we failed to agree on them. And, when we did agree them, we failed to meet them.
Decentralized solar might work in some places, but we have a long, long way to go before our existing grid can start to make use of it. We still need old school generating capacity (read: nuclear) to serve peak demand.
The other reason solar has become so attractive is because the spinup time is so much lower than for other traditional sources.
Except that nuclear plants do not serve peak demand in any way, unless by "peak" you mean something other than the electrical supply industry means by that term; nukes are by nature very much baseload generation, taking days and weeks to spin up and synchronise. Pumped storage, gas turbine, large-scale hydro,... those are peak supply generation that can be brought onstream in minutes to hours to meet peak demand.
As we currently experience to great cost here in South Africa currently, where, due to a decade of neglected maintenance and capacity building brought about by a short-sighted government, rolling blackouts (euphemistically called "load shedding") are the norm, and diesel generation is brought to bear as a poor substitute for baseload capacity, at - as you may imagine - ruinous financial cost. Something in the region of USD400million a month for diesel fuel. Boy, are we in for some price hikes coming up!
Batteries (like Tesla's PowerWall) are an increasingly-relevant option for peak loads.
I was also under the impression that most peaker plants are likely to be natural gas fired and not nuclear -- as in, easier to build, and less of an investment to recoup if something better/cheaper comes along for peak loads.
How can you make projections like "between now and 2040" with a straight face? It makes me instantly lose respect for an article attempting to be serious.
With a combination of solar and energy storage overall consumption and demand can drop dramatically. Intelligent storage systems can curb demand and drastically reduce carbon footprint. I'm surprised that wasn't mentioned in the rift about cheap rooftop solar.
> So even as people rise from poverty to middle class faster than ever, BNEF predicts that global electricity consumption will remain relatively flat. In the next 25 years, global demand will grow about 1.8 percent a year, compared with 3 percent a year from 1990 to 2012. In wealthy OECD countries, power demand will actually decline.
The doubling time at 1.8% per year is 39 years.
This must be some alternate definition of the term 'flat' I was previously unaware of.
I'm confused as to whether that means "if you build a plant today, your de-amortized annual running costs will fall" or "in 25 years time, the projected lifetime cost of a solar plant will be half of what it is today". The latter is .. not useful today.
Re: the essentially unavoidable coming climate change - Perhaps it will be the impetus to learn how to control the climate, knowledge which in turn could be applied to making Mars more habitable? Just fanciful pondering, but cool to think about nonetheless (while also recognizing that for that impetus to exist, we're going to go through some rough times climate-wise for a while).
1. 3/4 of energy usage is outside the transportation sector.
2. If we switch 3/4 of energy production away from fossil fuels, that will make a huge dent and make renewables even cheaper.
3. Once renewables get cheap enough, it may be cheaper to use a few kWh of solar to produce one kWh of ethanol than it will be to dig 1 kWh of oil out of the ground.
Hydrogen goes boom, and ethanol is already straining the corn market to the limits. I can't see us turning every square section of arable land into ethanol production.
Energy is fungible at an efficiency loss. If solar gets cheap enough we'll use it, water, and atmospheric CO2 to synthesize hydrocarbons. At that point your boats and planes are net carbon neutral. It's getting carbon-free energy that cheap that's the challenge.
EDIT: I hope the OP wasn't getting downvotes. It was a reasonable thing to worry about.
I would respectfully disagree. As liquid fuel prices climb higher alternative methods of producing liquid fuels become more and more attractive.
There is a lot of research going into ways to turn CO2 into various precursors to fuel or directly into things that are liquid fuels. And the last generation of concentrating solar plants have shown that you can gather the heat very effectively if you need that. Photovoltaics are cheap and getting cheaper if your process requires electrons instead of heat. This is likely the way things will go for airplanes.
There are also a number of companies working on harnessing the wind for ships. There's the SkySail system which I believe is being deployed commercially already that's a huge, automated kite-sail. There are also people working on rigid, self-adjusting wingsails (Saildrone). Finally the folks at Makani could probably put many, many kite plane generator systems on a boat and produce a substantial amount -- perhaps even all -- of the power needed to make a large boat go.
These might require that boats get redesigned to be slipperier but as fuel prices climb inefficient ships look less like assets and more like liabilities. Given the choice between holding less expensive assets with high operating costs and more expensive assets with low operating costs plenty of businesses can find the capital to upgrade if the economics are there. And as fuel prices climb, the economics are increasingly there.
So while I agree that in the short, short term none of this helps, in the long term things can get a lot better incrementally.
The Germans have done a lot of work on straight vegetable oil running current model COTS diesel engines.
Imagine hydroponic greenhouses in some wasteland growing canola, for example.
This is a little different than waste vegetable oil aka biodiesel mostly made from old fryer oil and needing lots of processing and filtration, but roughly the same concept.
Obviously all the oil underground came from plants initially, you can skip a lot of trouble and harvest your sunflower seeds and rapeseed seeds right on the surface and skip all that "bury it for a few million years then tunnel down and dig it up"
does anyone else have HUGE issues with their chart? it makes it seem like solar provides something like 20% of the world electricity and hydro electric is not even a mention. meanwhile, as far as I know (wikipedia) solar is only 1% of the worlds total electricity and hydro around 16%
Additions are what's called a leading indicator. They are predictive about the direction of change in a system. If there is much more solar added than coal, then the overall make-up of the system will shift towards more solar, less coal overall... It is future-looking.
The governments of the world will allow decentralization only to the point where it starts to cut into the tax proceeds of centralized energy. In the U.S., solar isn't going to move to rooftops, it's going to move to panel arrays on large swaths of government-owned land out west where it can still be metered and taxed.
This is reminiscent of the argument that marijuana could never be legalized because no one could figure out how to tax it. Different angle of attack, I suppose, but just as inapplicable to reality.
First, sure, for the usual renewables,
need either storage or transmission lines
across continents and/or oceans. So,
assume renewables need storage.
=== Home Batteries?
For residential electric power,
why have home batteries instead of
grid batteries? Likely grid batteries
will be cheaper due to economy of
scale and also, due to parallelism
and better engineering and maintenance,
better reliability.
=== Wholesale Electric Prices
We need to keep in mind, for someone in
the US paying their local electric utility
12 cents per KWh, that the wholesale price
on the grid is surprisingly low. E.g., at
can see that the wholesale price is often,
depending on geographic location and time,
ballpark 1-2 cents per KWh.
That's a current reference, but as I
recall not so many years ago the wholesale
price was commonly 0.5 cents per KWh.
Lesson: In the US, electric power, the
actual power itself, as generated, at the
plant, and ready to put on the grid, is
surprisingly cheap. So, talking about
something cheaper has some challenges.
So where does the rest of the 12 cents go?
Sure, to running the grid.
=== Charging for a Grid Connection
So, basically, assuming the wholesale
price of 2 cents per KWh, for an electric
bill of $100 at 12 cents per KWh,
(10/12) * 100 = 83.33
dollars are for basically just the grid
connection alone.
So, if you tell your electric company that
you want to use their power only when
there is two feet of snow on your roof,
then they will have their public utility
commission let them tell you that, fine,
and now, the good news, your cost of
electricity is reduced from 12 cents per
KWh to 2 cents per KWh but, the bad news,
there is now a flat fee of $83.33 per
month for just the grid connection itself.
Else, ballpark, the electric company loses
money, and the public utility commission
doesn't much like that.
=== Rugged Rooftop Solar
Roof-top solar will need to be more
reliable than asphalt shingles or will
need to be replaced, say, each 10 years
due just to wind and weather.
Just the labor cost for the replacement
will be significant even if the panels are
just dirt cheap. If they are cheaper than
asphalt shingles -- terrific! Somehow I
doubt that rooftop solar panels will be
cheaper per square foot than shingles; ask
the shingle guys -- I doubt that they are
worried!
Gotta keep those solar panels in good
shape. So, ballpark need a new roof each,
maybe, 10 years.
=== Off the Grid!
Suppose want to have no grid connection at
all. Four issues:
(1) If want electric cars, then need one
heck of a slug of electric power and the
grid again. Else get to drive for
groceries maybe once a month. Look up the
arithmetic -- e.g., for charging stations,
we're talking megawatts.
(2) I'm skeptical that rooftop solar can
drive whole house A/C in warm climates.
Then, what about the standard summer
afternoon thunder storms -- the A/C will
be pulling one heck of a load out of the
batteries.
Uh, a lot of the load on A/C is not to
cool the air but just to condense the
humidity as the air cools and keep the
humidity nicely below 100%. So, even if
the thunder storms cool the air, the A/C
still has to remove humidity.
Sure, a totally sealed up house, no air
leaks at all, an air to air heat
exchanger, special windows, fantastic
insulation, etc. can work wonders (if you
are not over a radon source), but only a
tiny fraction of houses were built that
way.
(3) How to heat the house in the winter,
say, the snow last winter in Boston? No
sunlight to the solar panels for days.
So, no electric power even to drive the
pump for burning fuel oil.
(4) If want electric heat in the winter
(and I believe we should hope for that),
then will need the grid again, at least
when have two feet of snow on the solar
panels. Then for the grid, will be back
to that $83.33 a month fixed charge for
the grid connection.
=== Cover the US SW
So. sure, cover the US SW with solar
panels. Also put wind turbines on the
Rockies, all over Kansas, etc.
Assume all this is for free, both capex
and opex.
Now, what will the batteries cost?
And the conversions between DC and AC?
Net, we need to hear about not just cheap
solar panels but about a lot of really
cheap batteries.
Also we're talking paying for those
batteries -- capex plus opex -- with
ballpark 1 cent per KWh, maybe less, in
wholesale electric prices.
=== Tests
To me, the OP fails both the sniff test
and the giggle test.
=== The Hidden Agenda
So, what's really going on?
I smell carbon taxes and, net, higher
electric bills. No thanks.
=== High Speed Trains
Japan has high speed trains. So do the
Chinese. So does France. Just get on
board and zip to your destination --
clean, modern, quiet, smooth, comfortable,
fast, safe. Right?
Wouldn't you really like to see lots of
high speed trains, a nice grid, connecting
all the important US cities? Pride of the
US! Great for the US infrastructure!
Benefits beyond ability to count! Changes
everything! Why have we waited so long?
If China can build high speed trains, then
surely US engineering can also. Is there
something wrong with US engineering; does
it need to catch up with China? Do we
need to wake up US engineering? Why does
the US want to fall behind China?
What to do with the carbon taxes? Sure,
high speed trains, general revenues, etc.
=== Cost/Benefit Analysis
Of course, there are problems with the US
Federal Government building high speed
trains: About 100 years ago a lot of
people saw that could build big water
resource projects and make the desert
bloom.
So, smart real estate entrepreneurs, buy
up some cheap desert land, have the Feds
build a big water resource project, make
the desert bloom and that land valuable,
sell the land, and retire rich, all from
the generosity of the US taxpayers.
Well, that situation, I didn't actually
call it a scam, was the case a few times
too often, and then a law was passed about
"cost/benefit analysis". Before such a
project, had to add up all the costs and
all the benefits "to whomsoever they may
accrue" and have the benefits bigger than
the costs.
Presto. Bingo. Right away that little
ratio killed off nearly all the Fed funded
water resource projects.
For high speed trains? In the US, nearly
all projects for public transportation of
people lose buckets of money and would get
a grade of flat F on any reasonable
cost/benefit analysis. Indeed, in a
course I took, the optimal decision for
the Baltimore subway, already built and
ready to roll, was just to brick up the
entrances and f'get about it because, even
counting the capex as $0.00, the project
failed cost/benefit just from the opex.
States and cities can fund high speed
trains, but the Feds can't.
=== Summary
The OP is not about solar panels. Instead
it's about something it never mentions --
carbon taxes.
1 - The grids becomes vulnerable to the weather. There's no solar energy at night and it's greatly reduced in cloudy days. Wind power is unpredictable and closely matches the output of hydraulic power, so that the two sources can't complement each other. You can check Brazil in recent history to check the effects of droughts in the power grid. In the end there is a need of conventional power plants always ready to backup the grid when the renewable energy is not available.
2 - The majority of losses of the power distribution network are on the last mile, when the voltage is lower and the current is higher. If every house and electric car become consumers and providers to the grid, most power movements occur in the low voltage networks. There's also the issue of batteries storing energy for later consumption. Lithium batteries have a 80%-90% efficiency storing energy.
3 - Since we are talking of the environment, rare earth metals have a very pollutant and energy intensive extraction process which in most cases is not accounted in the environmental cost of solar panels.
Replacing the majority of energy production by renewable energies will result in an net efficiency loss. I would rather support a balanced production with nuclear (fusion?) power plants providing the fixed needs of the grid and renewable energies making up the rest.