It appears we're at the inflection point where even natural gas (in addition to coal) is getting pushed out of the generation mix. Good! About time.
This may require paying natural gas generators for their ability to quickly throttle to back renewables, but only as a temporary measure until utility scale batteries fall in cost.
Natural gas energy can be transported much more easily than solar or wind. As more export capacity comes online in the US I would expect natural gas projects in the US to continue apace even if domestic consumption stays flat or declines.
Gas is easy to transport, but only really by pipeline. LNG is a lot more expensive and capital-intensive. And there is only one place with rising demand where it's easy to transport U.S. natural gas: Mexico. Pipeline gas exports to Mexico did nearly triple between 2011 and 2016 [1]. Exports to Canada over the same period fell, however.
Anywhere besides Canada and Mexico requires liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, which are very expensive and have low capacity compared to a pipeline. You'd need a lot of them to make up for the lost demand from even a relatively small percentage of American natural-gas power plants shutting down. So if production is really going to continue apace, it depends almost entirely on Mexico's demand continuing to increase.
For some reason people have this idea that LNG tankers are a big bomb waiting to go up, but that's not really true. Vapor cloud detonation has never been considered particularly likely, and never documented as far as I know. Mostly it seems the vapors that hit the right mix of oxygen and such would burn pretty rapidly, while the warmer gas began to rise. It would certainly be a large fire for a while, but shouldn't have the lasting impact of an oil spill. Here's a paper[1].
The scary bit for LNG is a BLEVE (Boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion). Even non-flammable liquids undergoing a BLEVE can be incredibly destructive, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgdfgxLApL4
So it's nothing to do with vapor cloud detonation, that's pretty much irrelevant compared to the destruction of the rapid phase transition from liquid to gas.
I think a tanker ship is pretty safe from a BLEVE. Those explosions usually result from a tank being heated continuously by a very hot fire underneath it. I'm not sure where you would find one of those at sea unless the tanker wrecked on top of an erupting volcano.
How about an LNG bunkering facility in Naples, near the Campi Flegrei volcano?
Maybe you start with a minor eruption/earthquake, and the LNG disaster breaches a larger magma chamber to cause a larger eruption? Then you can blanket Europe in ash and start up the typical disaster movie plot, where you follow the Chicken Little and their family as they try to escape the disaster radius.
If you are suggesting that a nuclear power plant can detonate like a nuclear bomb, you are wrong, they are a completely different design. Sure they can melt down in rare cases, but that's hardly anything on the scale of a nuke. I would suggest you look at some of the stats for death rates of different power sources. Nuclear is near the bottom, coal kills thousands every year through air pollution. If you want to find a truly dangerous power source, look at hydroelectric, when a dam collapses it is more damaging than a power plant meltdown in some cases.
I wonder how thoroughly the various failure scenarios have been modeled and reported on. Something merely of the magnitude of the East Ohio Gas Fire [1] in a crowded port or canal would be awful, and I'm pretty sure a supertanker carries a lot more gas.
The industry has every incentive to do a careful job with the safety features of these ships and the terminals they unload into, but the trouble with ships is that things sometimes run into them... sometimes really big things.
It's a pretty awesome way to carry around a lot of portable energy, though.
That was a salt dome holding area, and not a tanker, to be fair.. but yes, it exploded. People in houston (~45m-1h drive away) felt the rumble and thought it was an earthquake..
> Vapor cloud detonation has never been considered particularly likely, and never documented as far as I know
This is an example of a vapor cloud detonation. I'm just pointing out that it's happened, so I'm not sure why you're saying it's never been documented. Unless you just meant in the context of a tanker, but that's not how you phrased it.
As it happened, I lived in the area at the time (about 40 miles away on the back side of Cypress, Texas). I didn't think so much about it being an earthquake, but instead thought a large airplane had crashed nearby. I ran out into the street expecting to see fire and explosions and whatnot within a block or few of my house ... only for there to be _nothing._
x2. Explosives that used ambient oxygen to burn the fuel need to be finely tuned. Blowing up a propane tank (regardless of size) gets you a big fireball.
I find the fear of flammable gasses to be irrationally excessive. Sure there's more stored potential energy than the batteries under the floor of your Prius or the smartphone in your pocket but by nature of being compressed the storage tank is very robust and unlike batteries they do not include their own ignition source.
"Mini-nuke" isn't a very accurate comparison. In the event of a leak, the liquid fuel would need to flow out of the tank and turn into vapor before it could catch fire and burn. As a liquid or highly concentrated vapor it's not flammable. It needs to mix with air first.
The result would be a cloud of gas that burns violently for several minutes, depending upon wind and the speed of the leak. Not the instantaneous, crater-making release of energy that a thermonuclear device produces.
If you suddenly removed the top of a large container of LNG, it wouldn't all instantly vaporise. It would start to boil, rapidly cooling its surroundings due to the latent heat of vaporisation. Large amounts of ice would form on the outside of the container, and pretty soon the boiling rate would drop off substantially as the rate of heat transfer from the now frigid surroundings reduced.
If the vaporising gas was ignited, some of the heat from that combustion would certainly be transmitted to the pool of cold, liquid gas by radiation which would increase the vaporisation rate. The net result would still be a release of energy into the surroundings over probably tens of minutes (as opposed to microseconds in the case of a nuclear bomb).
You can demonstrate this yourself pretty easily using an ordinary 20-lb barbecue tank, a "high pressure" aka 20 psi regulator ($20 on amazon), and a high-pressure burner head (also $20 on amazon). Turn it all the way up - you'll get a great big hot flame at first, but you'll quickly see a shell of ice forming on the outside of the tank, because the process of evaporation drains heat out of the propane very quickly, and it gets cold enough to condense water out of the atmosphere into ice. Within half an hour, that big hot flame will have died down to something very gentle: the tank is still full of propane, but it's now so cold it'll no longer evaporate quickly enough to keep the pressure up. You'll have to turn it off and let it thaw for a few hours before it'll really get going again.
The LHPO runs only on propane, at full bottle pressure (that is, five to ten bars, depending on ambient temperature).
The LHPO may be run from either a bank of propane bottles feeding into a manifold and then proceeding along a main gas pipe to the organ, or from a single propane tank with either liquid or gas feed. If liquid feed, a gasifier must be provided with sufficient peak capacity (see below).
If a single tank, the tank must have at least a three ton filled capacity, to provide enough thermal mass for the required gas delivery rate (see below). The tank connection must be at least 1 1/2 inch inside pipe diameter, to provide for sufficient gas delivery rate.
If a multiple tank installation, at least 28, 33kg capacity bottles are needed. The bottles may not be all close packed into a rectangular array, but must be in one or two rows, with adequate air circulation around the bottle area to provide for heat transfer to the bottles.
If a liquid phase system and a gasifier are to be used, the system must be able to deliver the peak delivery rate (see below) for at least ten minutes continuously."
Well, the double hulls of these ships are inch-thick steel, but I think the dome is less protected. An attack that blew the dome off could open up a large hole and ignite the escaping gas, but it would still take minutes for all of it to boil off, probably freezing as it does.
I guess a big enough rocket could blow the liquid out of the tank, or rupture a large hole in the hull of the ship causing the LNG to dump into the (relatively) warm water and boil off faster. But at some point the real question is: How did the bad guys fire rockets into a secured unloading station?
Inch thick is the same as road plate and means nothing when there's tens of thousands of tons of ship involved. Freight ships are built as light as possible. Steel that you don't have to float leaves room for more cargo weight and increases fuel economy.
This site has been completely revamped, the graphs look a lot clearer.
I guess this is down to the inclusion of solar power which was cursory a few years back. Do they now aggregate all of the roof top solar and add that in?
Snooping around Glastonbury and my great Aunt's old town I've noticed a number of Solar farms in the countryside:
1 megaton? Even the largest LNG tankers can hold only 67 kilotons, so even if you had a perfect stoichiometric mixture somehow and detonated all of it at one you'd get maybe a 130 kiloton explosion.
There are multiple factors that give rise to natural gas's much greater energy density:
- TNT carries its oxidizer internal to the molecule instead of getting it "free" from air
- TNT equivalent energy does not include full combustion of the oxygen-deficient detonation products, only instantaneous energy release during detonation
- TNT has a lower hydrogen:heavy atom ratio than natural gas
> Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt.
IIRC US (and other Western ones as well I guess) ICBM warheads are about 300Kt, Russian ones about 1Mt.
The Russian did test a 50Mt device (Tsar Bomba) during the cold war (technically, there's apparently no upper limit how big you can make them), but such large devices are not really militarily useful to the point of justifying their bulk/weight/expense.
I thought Tsar Bomba was designed to have 100Mt yield, but they dialed it back (by using less fissile material I think) because there was no reason to set on of that large and because of safetey. It was my understanding that the nearby towns wouldn't be threatened by a 50Mt bomb and but a 100Mt was expected to break windows and stuff. Also the time for the pilots to get away was improved.
> Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt.
IIRC, the biggest the US ever deployed operationally was 9Mt, and those have since been retired. The common strategic warheads now deployed are, IIRC, 100-350kt range.
About 1/3 of the UK's gas imports are as LNG also (the other 2/3 is via pipelines, mainly from Norway). But the LNG comes exclusively from Qatar [1], which has a huge LNG export terminal (and not much domestic demand).
The US doesn't have all that much export capacity, though it does seem that more is under construction. From what I can find, current US LNG terminal capacity is around 2 billion cubic feet per day (Bcfpd), equal to a bit under 3% of domestic production. But projects under construction will raise that to about 6 Bcfpd in the next few years. That's more than I would've guessed, and at ~8% of domestic production that's starting to get into a serious potential outlet for gas. Although still not enough to absorb a huge downturn in domestic demand, if there were one.
(Side note: The abbreviation Bcfpd sounds like a parody of US customary units, but it does really seem to be in common use.)
They put a telegraph cable under the ocean in 1858. With all the technology (including materials) we have today, I bet it's very feasible from a technological point of view.
An economic point of view is a different question, though.
It's interesting to speculate on how it could be done. Maybe it could be soft, like a fire hose, and kept open by internal pressure. That way it could be unfurled from a ship. Rigid pipe seems pretty difficult.
O&G technology is pretty amazing. I guess you can develop some pretty amazing technology when you can invest many billions of dollars over many decades, because the payoff is huge. Makes you wonder where other technologies would be with that much expenditure.
"Natural gas energy can be transported much more easily than solar or wind." makes me think - is it really cheaper to build and maintain a natural gas pipeline than a large high-voltage line capable of transmitting as much power?
One of the holy grails of solar is syngas: using solar thermal power to convert CO2/water to a mix of hydrogen and methane. If you can do it efficiently enough, the gas is the energy storage and you can either pipe it or use it to fuel a NG turbine/combined-cycle plant which will be more thermodynamically efficient than a simpler solar->steam cycle plant.
The reason it's a holy grail is because there are some major materials science breakthroughs that need to happen before it's feasible. Since the sun's energy cycles rapidly on the minute/second timescale, whatever receiver you're using to convert inputs to syngas needs to not be destroyed by that periodic, rapid temperature (and thus stress) cycling.
> The reason it's a holy grail is because there are some major materials
> science breakthroughs that need to happen before it's feasible. Since
> the sun's energy cycles rapidly on the minute/second timescale, whatever
> receiver you're using to convert inputs to syngas needs to not be
> destroyed by that periodic, rapid temperature (and thus stress) cycling.
What do you mean here? What aspect of the sun's energy cycles on the minute/second timescale? And why would variability at that time scale do anything to a solar thermal system?
I'm pretty sure the reason it is hard is because you need to go above and below phase transitions that change the oxidation state, achieve high rates of oxygen absorption and release, and maintain a high enough surface area to not lose your oxygen diffusion rate.
Haha, yes. The sun doesn't cycle. But sun reaching your receivers does because of clouds :-).
Last time I worked in solar, the processes needed for the conversion typically worked above 600C (or much higher). If you can do conversion at atmospheric pressure, then you don't need pressure vessels (which are susceptible to fatigue because of cycling from 100C to 600C+ when a 5 minute cloud passes overhead, for example), but then your gas is at a lower density and now your process is less efficient.
Also, the higher the temperature, the higher the radiative heat losses become. T1^4 - T2^4 = much much higher. So you want to minimize the view factor of the heat transfer tubes/materials. Which means you want a cavity receiver...yada yada. Google solar air receiver and you'll get some interesting reading material, for example:
Oh, I see. Cyclic thermal stresses from clouds then?
Yeah, the stuff I'm familiar with is solar thermal water splitting using iron oxide at ~1000C, though I can see why the Caltech group preferred ceria (my favorite ceramic).
I think my favorite cute trick with solar thermal is solar thermal reforming of biomass. By piggybacking on the existing chemical reaction you actually end up with solar energy directly added to the chemical energy! First time I saw that I was struck by how clever it was.
I imagine using CO2 as a reactant is a lot more difficult, that's not a simple molecule to break apart so I very much appreciated that the solar thermal reforming process takes advantage of the plants to do the hard part while extracting even more solar energy.
Syngas can be easily converted to DME (dimethyl ether), which is a cleaner diesel replacement. It's stored just like LNG, in pressurized containers at 0.5 MPa - typical roadbike tyre pressure.
> Syngas can be easily converted to DME (dimethyl ether), which is a cleaner diesel replacement. It's stored just like LNG, in pressurized containers at 0.5 MPa - typical roadbike tyre pressure.
Presumably you meant LPG. LNG is another thing entirely..
Adding enough storage capacity to the electrical grid to handle the day/night fluctuations in solar is currently in feasibly expensive. Adding enough storage for minute by minute fluctuations is pretty easy, though.
That question actually has an answer. I suspect they may be right in that an underground pipe is better than high voltage wires being carried over land.
But I've long thought that underground high voltage power transmission built underneath interstates would fare much better than overhead poles.
> Natural gas energy can be transported much more easily than solar or wind.
Yes, but not easier than it is to transport electrons. And solar and wind energy can be converted into electrons and then transported across vast distances using existing infrastructure.
Transporting electrons is extremely difficult. Even with HVDC lines (usually more efficient than AC lines over long distances) you get around 3.5% loss per 1000km. If you tried to run a submarine cable the distance that LNG tankers travel, you'd end up losing a quarter to a half of your power just during transmission. Not to mention the cost of actually building & maintaining that infrastructure.
Transporting any kind of energy across long distances is tied to losses. LNG tankers will lose a few percent per voyage (~3-5 %), which is better than an electrical transmission line on the same distance, however it is still LNG and not yet electricity. You then have to factor in the conversion losses at a gas fired electrical plant.
The plant, the ship, the terminal and the rest of the infrastructure aren't free either.
The good thing about LNG is that it can be converted into electricity, the reverse is rather harder :)
Nobody is trying to run submarine cables across such distances because there is absolutely no reason to do so, all you'd do is hook up nearby power grids using much shorter runs of cable.
So nobody in Romania or Greece is consuming power generated in Norway or Sweden directly but the effect of adding renewable power to the grid in say Norway will usually offset a little bit of fossil fuel generated power elsewhere in the grid.
Electrons are very friendly in that sense. They also don't explode.
In comparison: my recollection is that about 1% of natural gas in the U.S. is lost during extraction and transmission (it's been a couple of years since I researched this). Interestingly, around 5% of our natural gas infrastructure accounts for 80 or 90% of the lost gas: a handful of very leaky wells and compressor stations, plus some regions of the country with legacy cast iron transmission pipelines.
The bottleneck is the grid. The Grid has to match the production and demand, and at times that is why CA gives away electricity to AZ and pay for AZ for consuming its electricity. In turn, AZ turns off some of its production.
A tanker with LNG is much more flexible and denser form of energy than photons to electrons.. Once electrons out they need to be consumed asap!
Sure the grid is a bottle neck, but it is a bottle neck that can be fixed. Aging infrastructure is the problem, not the grid per-se, it just happens to have older and less well maintained segments.
> The Grid has to match the production and demand
No, the grid transports power from places where it is generated to places where it is consumed. Whether the consumer is local or remote is not that important other than that you'll incur some more losses.
Demand matching is the job of powerplants that can change their output power quickly.
> and at times that is why CA gives away electricity to AZ and pay for AZ for consuming its electricity.
That's because there simply is an excess of power in CA and shedding it to AZ is cheaper than shunting it locally.
> A tanker with LNG is much more flexible and denser form of energy than photons to electrons..
Of course it isn't. That LNG tanker needs a port and it needs a plant to convert the LNG to electricity. LNG is hamburger, electricity is steak.
> Once electrons out they need to be consumed asap!
There also exist load leveling measures using superconducting loops, these are used for windfarms whose output can change very rapidly especially when they're on the end of anemic grid infrastructure (remote location), these can be used for solar as well.
That's not quite Japan or Europe from the US but it would be intercontinental. The biggest hurdles are political rather than technical. For the really long haul (say, US to EU) I doubt it would be economical, but as a way of leveling the day/night difference it would be an awesome way to make solar power more feasible for base load generation.
Long before that happens though we'll see windfarms in the Atlantic and in the Pacific.
But we do need to ship energy across markets over long distances. There's nothing on the horizon that is going to end that need.
Energy is still largely in the domain of geopolitics. Russia can turn off gas shipments to Europe. Qatar can be blockaded. Entire governments can veer towards collapse threatening supplies (Venezuela). Coalitions may decide to forcibly remove another nation's supplies from the market, as was the case with Iran.
That leaves international energy markets inherently inefficient and susceptible to disruption (not the SV kind). When those disruptions occur, the ability to quickly ship vast quantities of energy becomes absolutely vital.
This has been best demonstrated during periods when OPEC refused to supply certain countries because of their ties to Israel. The ability to quickly shift supplies from non-OPEC sources around the market, due to the fungibility of oil and the ease of shipment, kept the lights on across much of the world.
A fair counterpoint to this argument is the reduced dependency on energy produced by potentially hostile powers that could come about with the advent of renewables like solar and wind. However, as technology improves to allow electricity transmission across greater distances (like, say, the Mediterranean), do we really reduce dependencies on potentially hostile nations? Electricity isn't fungible if it can't be transmitted to the markets where gaps are created by geopolitics.
If, say, Tunisia decided to cut off France from a hypothetical trans-Med grid, would France be able to find enough energy from neighboring grids with excess supply? I don't know.
So long as energy decisions are inherently political, the market needs the ability to ship energy quickly and on-demand to fill gaps created by the whims of politicians and autocrats.
Finally, I'll note that the Allies won World War II in large part because of their superior ability to ship energy wherever it was needed in any theater of operations and moments when those supply chains broke down often led to significant Axis advances and prolonged the war, such as Eisenhower's difficult decision to deprive Patton of gasoline in order to keep other parts of the Allied advance moving across Europe.
> But we do need to ship energy across markets over long distances.
In the case of that LNG tanker, yes. But for electricity the majority of it is consumed relatively close to where it is generated in the case of renewables and waste as the source. There is an obvious economic incentive to transport it across larger distances if and when feasible but for now there does not appear to be a huge need for this. For natural gas and coal fired plants the distance tends to be much larger, but this goes for any fossil fuel production / consumption setup.
To your other points: it is exactly this independence of geopolitical factors that make renewable energy so attractive.
If there ever is another war in Europe (this could easily happen) I suspect that it will be fought with fossil fuels rather than electricity as the dominant power source for prime movers so in that sense not much will change.
It's actually much cheaper to ship the solar / wind production than it is to send the LNG energy equivalent making this all a moot point.
However, we could cheaply ship electrons to Russia, after that it's just a question of displacement. Aka, does energy from powerplant X get sent east or west. Net result you can send elections from US to EU for vastly less than you might think.
Granted, there is no such undersea cable today and US and Russian grids are limited in those areas, but the undersea distance is not actually that far relative to other undersea projects.
> the undersea distance is not actually that far relative to other undersea projects.
Undersea HVDC lines are nothing like the undersea fiber optic cables. The problem isn't whether or not we can create a cable like that, it's the transmission losses that long-distance power lines have. Even for HVDC you're dealing with ~3.5% loss per 1000km.
Shipping electrons over the oceans is only going to be a "question of displacement" when we have superconducting lines, but right now those need to be chilled with liquid hydrogen or nitrogen along the entire length of the cable... Meaning the infrastructure and operational costs are even more than the cost of the lost electricity.
On both sides there are people who use power. Now if 100,000 houses in Russia get power from the US and zero changes Russia could then supply ~100,000 houses with power outside of Russia. Now sure, you need the right substation setup to get this to work out, but a modern grid can quickly route power in response to both changing demand and internment supply.
US already sends and receives power from both Mexico and Canida, and Russia and EU have similar relationships. We don't do this with Russia because there is so little demand in those areas. But, the artic is rapidly warming so that may change fairly soon.
Those areas in Russia/US are sparsely populated and I suspect demand is not that high to justify an undersea cable. Plus there are geopolitical issues like accusing Russia of US election interference and then expecting to sell electricity to the Russians.
Conversion would actually be quite expensive, the United States uses 60 Hz and Russia 50, so you're not just looking at a voltage step-up/down but also a frequency change and that's quite hard.
I like Iceland's solution for this. They import bauxite and export aluminum to use their geothermal electricity as a resource. Perhaps there are other electricity-intensive operations that could be used to consume surpluses?
>The bottleneck is the grid. The Grid has to match the production and demand, and at times that is why CA gives away electricity to AZ and pay for AZ for consuming its electricity. In turn, AZ turns off some of its production.
America will probably lag significantly in this regard because too much of the grid is owned by companies that also own coal/natural gas, etc. and have a strong incentive not to upgrade.
In Europe one big reason for this is that Germany is now a very large producer of electricity from wind energy and several of Germany's neighbors have old and unstable grid infra. This causes all kinds of problem, especially in the former East German part of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.
Those regions still have a large chunk of their power infrastructure dating back to the communist times, power consumption in those regions is up considerably compared to the time when those grids were sized and that combined with the fluctuating supply caused by wind farms has caused some issues that can't be mitigated easily.
The incentive not to upgrade is the incredible cost. Why upgrade when the unit economics make no sense? Of course there are some that would suggest the government should make the unit economics work by imposing heavy taxes – that would work except electricity bills would skyrocket due to a de facto price floor.
I would argue that “immediate” action is unnecessary as the economics gradually improve, so will infrastructure. It isn’t like these changes are needed right now. The data doesn’t support the idea of impending catastrophe, unless your business is profiting from such a catastrophe.
The market will solve this. We are already using more renewables when it makes sense and that percentage will organically grow as renewables become more efficient. Eventually oil and coal will be less profitable than renewables and when that happens, the market and infrastructure will naturally evolve.
Innovation rarely happens because the government wills it. The markets drive innovation.
Out of market deals with the government where wind and solar and even hydro generators get prices way above market rates are what is driving the adoption of renewables in Canada.
For the market to create the incentive for renewables the price of power would have had to go up a lot, or the externalities like pollution applied to gas/coal so that the price would go up, but still generation takes so long to plan approve and build and then so long to pay back that markets with varying prices are a bad mechanism. The price would have to be too high for too long than is politically palatable to encourage construction of new generation, and even then why not just build a gas plant.
> The bottleneck is the grid. The Grid has to match the production and demand, and at times that is why CA gives away electricity to AZ and pay for AZ for consuming its electricity. In turn, AZ turns off some of its production.
This is more likely due to subsidies. The government wants more solar so it pays the producer to make it. They can sell it for any price down to the negative of that subsidy (i.e. pass on 99% of the subsidy to someone else) and still make money. If it displaces fossil fuels then the government has succeeded in achieving their aims with the subsidy and everyone is happy.
I believe solar (and wind) can generally curtail themselves, so if they are exporting power to the grid then it's because it's in their economic interest to do so.
You missed the part where I said solar and wind can simply turn themselves off ("curtailment") in order to balance the grid if demand is too low.
People get a bit excited about negative prices, as if it heralds the end of sanity. But it's usually a very sensible, market-driven response to either subsidies (which to be clear, think are a good thing) or to inflexible coal generation which would rather pay money than throttle down for short periods.
There's also this idea that it'll destroy the grid by overproducing. When really the worst that'll happen is something like the infamous duck curve, where gas plants can't ramp up as far and as fast as needed. The shocking solution? Just turn them on early so they've got time to ramp and curtail the solar being produced at that time.
Since a bit of extra curtailment in Spring is such a boring solution I have to wonder at the motives of the people who report on the Duck Curve as a looming threat to the grid.
Texas is investing billions into new voltage lines---many of which are designed to pull power from west & coastal Texas power to central & near-East Texas. (This leaves East Texas power generation to East Texas.)
There are multiple transmission line projects in progress in the US to drag wind energy to major load centers. Solar can be produced anywhere of course.
Natgas exports may increase, but it appears everyone is getting off of fossil asap.
You cannot compete against an energy source with no fuel cost.
> You cannot compete against an energy source with no fuel cost
Of course you can. The technology to turn photons into useful energy is heavy, complex and reliant on rare elements. In any case, one could flip the analogy by branding coal as photons freely stockpiled by dead trees and algae.
When you install solar panels or wind turbines, you've prepaid for whatever power they'll produce for the next 30+ years.
When you generate using a fuel, your margins are dictated by power market spot prices (prices occasionally go negative; do you continue to generate and pay for someone to take your power while you're also paying someone for a fuel? In some scenarios, you must), depreciation, and your fuel costs/contracts.
> you've prepaid for whatever power they'll produce for the next 30+ years
Assuming they don't degrade completely in those 30 years. Also, I still wonder what's their EROI if you count in their manufacturing, transport and installation costs?
Solar panels degrade about 0.7 percent a year based on historical data for the last two decades; after 20 years they're still generating at 80+% of total output.
This doesn't take into account the ridiculous cost decline curve we're seeing in solar, and that'll be a fraction of the cost to replace degraded capacity decades from now.
I like that you mentioned the cost to replace. This is something heavily ignored right now for the fossil fuels. The cost to find and develop new wells is so prohibitive due to either the risk or the technical challenges that securing finance to invest is not as easy as it was the past 50 years. It's becoming a Sisyphean task to replace and grow existing production.
You're completely off the mark. Enough energy from the sun hits the Earth in an hour or two to power humanity for a year. It's simply a matter of scaling up.
Nuclear is already dead at current wind and solar generation costs.
Photovoltaic capacity is expected to be around 4674 GW in 2050 (currently around 150, I think) [1]. Let's be optimistic and say it'll actually be around 20000 GW, just for the fun of it, and let's ignore all of the variability problems that solar poses.
Considering that PV's capacity factor is around 15%, that's around 26 PWh of annual (electric) energy production, around 50% of the electrical energy we use up in a year today, nevermind what we will actually need in 2050 thanks to the neverending growth we're apparently trying to go for.
IIRC, electricity represents 20-25% of our civilization's energy use mix, so solar should solve around 10-15% of our needs in 2050 under extremely optimistic assumptions and ignoring ALL of the variability, energy grid, energy storage, solar panel production issues, none of which are minor limitations.
2050 is around 10 years beyond the date we need to be carbon neutral to stay below 2°C [2], if we were to peak in 2020 and quickly ramp down our emissions. It's 20 years too late in business as usual scenarios.
Emissions are pretty obviously not going to peak by 2020, unless there's some sort of civilization-smashing catastrophe in the next few years. Large scale active carbon dioxide removal measures will be needed later, or natural processes will eventually restore the pre-industrial equilibrium over ~100,000 years. We're not going to stay in the "safe" zone below 2 degrees. Reducing future emissions is necessary but not sufficient. I say this as someone who fully wishes that humans had cut emissions quickly enough to render active CDR measures unnecessary, but recognizes that we did not act in time.
27% is better, though from a quick look it applies only to the US, and in Europe it looks closer to 15%. I need to take time tomorrow to find good sources on this.
I'm not convinced by carbon storage, though I don't know enough about it to be sure. It is my understanding that it is either energy-hungry (so useless because we don't and likely won't have enough carbon-neutral energy surplus) or pretty slow (also useless). And completely unproven at large or even moderate scales, too.
Germany has the most PV installed of any European country. Utility scale PV facilities in Germany may reach only 10% capacity factor. But most of the world's present and future electricity demand centers are significantly closer to the equator than Germany is.
"Carbon storage" would normally refer to physically sequestering purified carbon dioxide or other carbon bearing compounds. I agree that storage of that type is not practical.
Enhanced silicate weathering is IMO the process with the best prospects for large scale atmospheric carbon dioxide removal. It is relatively slow but the thermodynamics are favorable and the kinetics are still orders of magnitude faster than waiting for unaided nature to restore the pre-industrial equilibrium. Enhanced weathering CDR just accelerates the kinetics of the natural chemical reaction that turns alkaline silicate rocks and CO2 into silica and alkaline carbonates. Doing it on a scale large enough to make a difference would be a gargantuan undertaking, of course, because the scale of the problem is also gargantuan.
That's interesting, thanks for the information, I'll probably spend a good portion of tomorrow reading up on this. Geoengineering is scary.
Honestly, I am extremely pessimistic about mankind's ability to work on such a scale. Too many people seem to assume global warming is still a far-off problem, and that for some reason humanity is destined to "progress" forever, even though we know of many civilizations that have collapsed before ours.
I'd just like more people to grasp the dire reality of the situation, and stop assuming that somehow technology and/or progress will save us no matter what.
I don't get it, what's your argument? Yes, at the pace we're building them, PV is not sufficient. Guess what, the exact same fact is true of nuclear. All that establishes is that we must invest more, it doesn't say in what we should invest.
It was an answer to parent's "It's simply a matter of scaling up." comment.
I agree with you that the exact same fact is true of nuclear. And wind too, while we're at it.
I don't think there's a way out of it: our technological civilization lives WAY WAY beyond its means, and that is made possible only by burning through fossil fuels, among many other non-renewable resources. When that dries up (economically speaking) or enough ecosystems have been damaged, our civilization will most likely fall apart. It'll be a slow and ugly process, it'll happen over decades, and it's already under way.
Renewables would have been great in a simpler and slower world. Hopefully, that's how the next global (if any) civilization goes in a few hundred or thousand years.
It seems to me that people don't stop a behavior just because its unsustainable. They only seem to stop a bad behavior entirely when the market provides a less harmful alternative and its costs approximately the same amount or much less.
Whale oil and ambergris where replaced by Fossil fuels.
Ivory for billiard balls was replaced by plastic.
Cigarettes are being replaced by vaping.
Look at the amount of people skipping out on bike helmets and car safety belts. People don't do it even when there is literally no downside and it could literally save their life.
The pace of the world is here to stay, people will just figure out how to sustain it with new stuff. There might a turbine in every backyard, I don't know what the solution will look like. But the extinction of several whale species wasn't enough to put lamplighters out of business coal and transmission lines did and the world got ever faster.
"The pace of the world is here to stay, people will just figure out how to sustain it with new stuff".
I don't know how you can think that. The pace of our world requires incredibly huge amounts of energy, which we get from finite fossil fuels. Either they become economically unavailable or climate change becomes so severe that we can't use what remains in the ground. Oil companies don't go to ultra-deep water wells and shale gas just because they are evil money-eating bastards (which is the prevalent narrative). They exploit these economically mediocre sources for the same reason garbage starts to look appealing when you are starved: you are hungry and the good food has run out.
Too many people assume that technology alone is what has allowed us to reach 7.5 billion people. This misses a significant piece of the puzzle, because in reality it's fossil-fuel powered technology. It's a crucial distinction, as shiny but empty trucks and tractors won't help you feed billions of people. Without fossil fuels we have no realistic idea how to feed that many people. So we'll probably continue burning them as long as we can, because the alternative (mass starvation) is even worse.
If we were a rational species, we could fix all of it. We'd massively slow down our economies, have very few kids for some time to reduce our population to more sustainable levels, rely on local food, stop traveling all the time, and so on. Doing it smart, we could reach a relatively slower but very nice and sustainable way of life, augmented by sparse but useful technology. Something a lot more sustainable that the Rude Goldbergian machine we call "modern life".
Since we're not rational and obviously won't do the smart thing, instead it'll degenerate to resource wars (over food, water, gas, etc.) and massive refugee crises way beyond what we're already seeing. Our civilization will stumble from one crisis to the next, blaming this or that ethnic group for what is happening, each time cobbling a half-solution together that seems to work for a time, but gradually it will sched most of the modern things we currently take for granted.
The myth of humanity going from caves to space is just that, a myth. In the real world, countless civilizations have risen and fallen, gaining and then losing most of their culture and scientific knowledge in the process. We've done it bigger than anyone before due to fossil fuels, which for a limited time have replaced our need for human and animal labor, but it is unsustainable and soon it will go away. Human ingeniosity plays a small part in the real story of our world.
The real story is that nature has kindly stored millions years worth of solar energy as fossil fuels and we've gotten so drunk on it for 200 years that we've started to think that we've mastered the universe, with soon to come galactic civilization, godlike AI and the end of death itself. The hangover is not going to be fun for a lot of people, and these delusions will not survive it.
People thought that the pace of the world couldn't get faster when everyone had horses. They had no distinct concept of energy and now we know nuclear energy is possible.
You see what exists and presume it is all that can exist. You are limited and whether or not it is rational human ingenuity is not limited. Only those civilizations that slowed down as you advocate "failed", and even then they still innovated just in different ways.
You are wrong because you make the same argument as people of yesteryear and they were wrong for reasons unknowable to them but obvious to us now. The future is unknowable to us but it should be obvious that some group of people will do better with some technology or process that seems obvious to them.
Past civilizations did not fail because they slowed down. They slowed down while they were failing. I mean, this is what failing is. They failed at getting enough food and energy to feed their growing population, they failed at managing their growing social and technological complexity. The "people of yesteryear" you reference may have been wrong, until now, for our civilization. But it turns out these people also existed in failed civilizations and guess what, then they were right. Read "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter, it's a great book and it makes much more compelling arguments than I ever could about this subject.
Human ingenuity is definitely limited. There are levels of complexity we probably won't manage to get past. More importantly, physical laws have limits, and these are not negotiable. For example, we very probably won't ever get beyond the speed of light. We won't produce energy from nothing. We won't cancel gravity. We won't stop heat death. We won't travel in time. We won't teleport, or beam up as they say. We know that with a relatively high degree of certainty because science has progressed a lot, so we know a lot more about what this universe can do for us, but also about what it cannot do. This is not comparable to a few centuries (or even decades) ago, because then we knew a lot less about both.
We've got 20 years to address climate change and fossil fuel shortage, probably less, before they become catastrophic. There are reasons to think it may already be too late without active measures (carbon capture and so on). 20 years is less than the time it takes to go from brand new technology (let alone lab experiments) to widespread commercial use, which means that technologies that don't yet exist are of no use to address this problem, and that rules out fusion (which hasn't even proven it can produce more power than it consumes, let alone at economically viable scales), among others. I'd say thorium-based fission plants are the only semi-viable bet if we want to continue BAU, because uranium is probably a dead end (there's just not that much that can be exploited with an EROEI > 1).
Note that this is only the energy problem. We also need to deal with over-population, climate change, sea level rise, resource depletion, soil loss, aquifer depletion, species extinction, collapsed fisheries, ocean acidification and so on. At the same time, and at a time when our political institutions are reaching unparalleled levels of passivity and incompetence. If we solve all these problems, remember that our economists and leaders still insist on the need of exponential growth on a finite planet, which means it would soon prove not enough and the new problems we'd face would be even worse.
If you are part of the people who think we're destined to a Star Trek future, I can imagine that the thought of collapse can be painful to you. It used to pain me a lot, but now I'm okay with it. I'd prefer for our civilization to survive, but like with terminal illness, there comes a time when acceptance becomes the only good option.
Our civilization will fail, but eventually the biosphere will recover (though with the amount of damage we do, it'll take more time than with past collapses). Then life will go on for about 500M-1B years, after that it'll be toast and it will most likely be over for life in this corner of the galaxy.
I am a big fan of wind and solar! Appreciate you recognizing that!
My reaching arguments aren't what is bringing about change, of course. It's a ruthless market for low cost energy. And renewables are delivering (as evidenced by this Bloomberg piece). That's what's driving coal, natural gas, and even nuclear out of business.
It takes a very small piece of the Earth to power all of humanity with solar alone. We must continue to deploy wind and solar as quickly as possible though.
Energy intensity (watts per dollar of economic activity) is leveling off and decreasing in developed economies such as the US, China, and Europe, and I think also South America. I don't know about India and Africa. But the days of exponential increases in power needs have passed, I'm pretty sure.
And carbon intensity -- tons of CO2 per economic activity -- should show an even steeper decline, as energy generation becomes less CO2-intensive. We're going in the right direction, and it would be great to go there faster!
"Exponential growth" of energy would start to directly cook the earth through rejected heat. I'm not too thrilled about the exponentially growing pile of radioactive waste either. (No, not the spent fuel, everything else)
The main driver right now in the US is that electricity produced from wind receives a federal production tax credit for each megawatt-hour delivered during the first 10 years of a wind farm's life. During low-demand times a wind farm can pay e.g. $10/MWh for customers to take the surplus power and still earn $14/MWh net from the tax credit (presently $24/MWh). Some states also offer per-MWh credits that can drive negative prices similarly to the federal PTC.
Solar PV power does not directly drive negative prices via the federal PTC in the same way as wind. Solar presently gets a 30% federal investment tax credit up front on the costs of constructing a solar farm. This tax incentive structure doesn't encourage generation during unprofitable times like the PTC. But a solar farm can curtail its output nearly instantaneously and at no risk to plant equipment. The same is not true of e.g. coal and nuclear generators; those facilities ramp output up and down significantly slower, and cannot generate at arbitrarily low fractions of nominal power. A cold start can take 15 hours for a legacy coal plant, longer for nuclear. Full shutdowns also impose extra costs due to equipment thermal stresses during restart. Slowly-ramping coal and nuclear plants may continue to generate negative-profitability electricity at some times of day because they can't adjust fast enough to be back at full output during profitable hours otherwise and because cycling reduces equipment lifetime.
"Impact of Load Following on Power Plant Cost and Performance: Literature Review and Industry Interviews" has a lot of good details on the impact on fossil plants from making additional adjustments:
One thing that really stands out, reading this 5 years later, is that measures to make coal more efficient (like integrated gasification combined cycle plants, IGCC, or going from subcritical to supercritical steam) also make it even less flexible. Plant operators will continue to extract what value they can from coal plants that are already constructed. But there's no plausible combination of factors on the horizon to encourage the building of advanced/new coal plants, even if Trump remains president for 8 years.
For modules based on crystalline silicon cells, which have ~95% market share, the only rare element they presently use is silver. Silver is a component of screen-printed pastes used to form electrical contacts on cells. Silver can be replaced by base metals such as aluminum, copper, nickel, tin, and combinations thereof. So far most manufacturers find that the simplicity of processes using screen printed silver pastes outweighs the high material cost of silver. But that's an economic trade-off rather than a hard technical limit.
Beware of silver bulls proclaiming that silver consumption will "inevitably" grow alongside PV manufacturing volume. I think that the transition away from silver will be more like a ratchet than a floating level. If silver prices rise enough to spur high volume PV manufacturers to implement more complex metallization schemes using base metals, they're not going to switch back to silver pastes even after silver prices fall again.
>...There are multiple transmission line projects in progress in the US to drag wind energy to major load centers.
If so, this cost should be considered to be part of the cost of wind energy.
>...Solar can be produced anywhere of course.
Well sunlight does fall everywhere, but in lots of places it wouldn't make sense to depend on solar for much power.
>...Natgas exports may increase, but it appears everyone is getting off of fossil asap.
asap? From the article:
>...By 2040, renewable resources such as wind and solar power will supply just as much of America’s electricity demand as gas, according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance outlook.
The reality is that without some major advance in grid storage, we will, unfortunately, be very dependent on natural gas for a very long time.
>...You cannot compete against an energy source with no fuel cost.
That is kind of a silly thing to say - there is more to the expense of a power source than that of course.
On the other hand, apparently [1] natural gas exports can be shifted to different markets faster than new solar power can come online? Not a bad thing if it replaces coal.
It typically takes months and years to retrofit a coal plant for gas. That said, it's wildly more economic because you have to rebuild coal power plants every 12 years or so due to ware and tear
Elon Musk has said that to fight climate change, we need to implement emissions cap and trade globally. But it seems that solar and wind is an unstoppable force now even without internalizing the external costs of fossil fuels.
So is Elon Musk saying this just because it's convenient for him and Tesla? Or do we really need emissions penalties?
The issue isn't that transition to renewables isn't going to win out economically, it's that the transition may not happen quickly enough to avoid the 2C warming threshold that triggers alot of negative effects.
Leveraging to the hilt and operating at a loss is par for the course in the oil industry. It's very common, especially when new plays open up, either from technological or political advances.
In the case of fracking, everyone was scrambling to get extraction rights on any piece of land that looked promising. Often that involved massive speculation and debt.
Inevitably the downturn comes and shakes out the players who don't have the capital or discipline to survive. The industry consolidates and production continues. The cost of fracking has continued to decline as frackers learn how to be more efficient in order to be profitable with crude prices at their current low levels. Even if the current players went bankrupt, others will pop up once prices rise again.
American frackers have effectively replaced Saudi Arabia as the world's swing producer. Unfortunately for them that means learning how to withstand wild boom-and-bust cycles.
That’s not a very realistic view of the globe. There are plenty of populous places with only 8-9 hours of total sunlight during winter months, assuming a clear day. Growing up in Vancouver, it wasn’t uncommon to go a week without seeing sunlight...
I take issue with "of course". It will be always be wildly more economic to produce solar power in places with a lot of sun. And without checking, my ballpark guess would be that you get at least 10 times more solar energy out of a panel in Texas than a panel in, say, Canada. Our eyes are just so good at adapting to different light levels that we don't notice the different energy densities that much.
>And without checking, my ballpark guess would be that you get at least 10 times more solar energy out of a panel in Texas than a panel in, say, Canada. Our eyes are just so good at adapting to different light levels that we don't notice the different energy densities that much.
Should have checked. "Canada" is pretty vague, but if you mean the southern part where people live you're waaay off. It's only a factor of 2.
According to the Solar Energy Potential site [1], the difference between the best and worst areas in the US is a factor of 2 or 3. I assume they average over the whole year and take cloud cover into account.
It would also be pretty difficult to use solar in Murmansk, Russia, for about a quarter of the year (it's within the arctic circle, so the sun is below the horizon for most (or all near the solstice) of the day during the winter.
And it can actually be less efficient if there's too much sun, solar panel efficiency decreases with temperature. Solar thermal also depends on temperature differential, so if the environment around the plant is too hot the efficiency drops.
True, but I'm being pedantic about the use of "anywhere". Also it's a pretty important port for Russia, though of course the population is small at only 300k people.
The UK is also one sea blockade away from losing a huge chunk of the food its population eats. The merits of renewable energy don't include permitting the UK to endure another World War-style blockade attempt, because either the blockaders are swiftly destroyed at sea or have their land based supply and command chains destroyed, by nuclear means if necessary.
I believe the UK would nuke a blockading fleet in its water starving it of food. I do not believe it would do so to a fleet starving it of oil from the waters of Qatar.
Put some solar panels on your roof, run wire to home. There, you have transported your power.
Bigger issue is winter time energy, aka heating. That one will be hard with current tech (storing energy for once per year use), though solar is getting cheap enough you may be able to use use solar generated electricity to heat -- you would need overcapacity of panels in northern climates -- but that's probably cheaper than moving the world's coastal cities.
Spot on. In Canada I visited a building that was being constructed as an experimental home using very thick walls (12", R35 or thereabouts) using several vertical chambers and reflective mylar for insulation and a solar trap. Mid winter, -20 outside, the house had not been heated at all and a bucket of water was left in one of the rooms, it had not frozen. Body heat would be enough to get it to 10 Celsius or so, solar would easily do the rest.
Coal is a third of the US energy mix. It'll take decades to bring that to zero at present energy consumption using both NG and renewables. NG will continue to expand by necessity. We're about to switch over to electric vehicles, which will add a huge amount of new electricity demand to the grid. There's no scenario where we support that shift in the next ~30 years on renewables alone. More likely, circa 2050, we're going to see 30-40% NG with 50-60% renewables (maybe 10% nuclear).
It will take a lot less if the fuel cost differential between NG and coal looks permanent. Coal turbines will be converted to NG or shut down entirely.
In Texas there would most likely be no such subsidy.
ERCOT runs markets for multiple aspects of energy generation, transmission, and management. Standby or peaking can be just another of those. As long as it is cheaper to provide that service via gas turbines they will win. If batteries become cheaper, they will start taking market share.
My hope is that renewables push the cost per kWh higher for natural gas (due to its run time dwindling) beyond the point where utility scale battery storage is feasible, at which point it's game over for natural gas for demand response/light peaking.
Wouldn't that subsidy delay the cost drop in batteries? Instead those expenditures can go towards batteries, which will be costly, but will hasten the price drops and technological development of batteries.
Not if the subsidy targets the function of capacity availability, instead of targeting a specific generation type. In that case, batteries and natural gas would compete for the subsidy, with batteries eventually winning.
I wonder what the economics would be without the federal tax incentives for wind and solar. Does anyone know?
EDIT: Someone above provided a link that provides the figure I was looking for:
"Between 2010 and 2016, subsidies for solar were between 10¢ and 88¢ per kWh and subsidies for wind were between 1.3¢ and 5.7¢ per kWh. Subsidies for coal, natural gas and nuclear are all between 0.05¢ and 0.2¢ per kWh over all years." [1]
I wonder how much of a subsidy there is for LED lighting. A lot of energy goes for incandescent lighting.
Also, there should be a lot of subsidies to replace heaters in building burning #6 and #4 fuel oil which is very, very dirty and pollution (NYC where I live banned #6 a few years ago but #4 is allowed to persist until 2030 I think).
It's a complex question. In trying to answer it, one should keep in mind that the tax incentives for fossil fuel production dwarf the $15 billion per year or so that supports renewable energy. In addition, fossil fuels impose an estimated $200 billion/yr in social costs (external costs), in the form of pollution, etc. And it would be hard to estimate how much of our defense spending should be attributed to the need to secure the middle Eastern oil supply.
The Harvard study estimated the negative externalities of coal at 200-500 billion annually. The study estimates the effective subsidy from not including these costs at 9-27 cents per kilowatt hours.
Say the government decided to let Wal-Mart park delivery trucks on your property for free (i.e. decline to enforce your property right in favor of a business). Economically, it'd be indistinguishable from a subsidy. Shareholders don't care whether the government policy increases Wal-Mart's revenue or decreases its expenses. The same is true for power generation.
But with the level of compensation people think energy producers should pay to offset their "negative externalities" -- if governments forced them to pay it, the price of energy would rise by a huge amount, disrupting the economy, and making the previous calculation of the externalities meaningless.
Even the renewables would then need more subsidies, to pay for increased manufacturing costs and the fuel for the trucks that repair their transmission lines.
Point is its obviously misleading to say that fossil fuels are more heavily subsidied than renewables. People who hear that will assume that fossil fuel companies are being given taxpaper money, as the renewable companies are, when that is not the case. I don't think lumping together "companies that receive free money" and "companies we think should be fined" is an honest way to frame the situation.
When the true costs of coal are not being paid by those that use coal based electricity the economy is already being disrupted. More coal than would be economically efficient gets consumed because coal based electricity is artificially cheap. Implementing pigovian taxes repairs the existing disruption.
"People who hear that will assume that fossil fuel companies are being given taxpaper [sic] money, as the renewable companies are, when that is not the case."
That is in fact the case. Here is just one component of those direct subsidies, as reported by the U.S. Treasury Department:
But then every negative externality not taxed is subsidized. It dilutes the meaning of subsidy because with this new definition government accounting doesn't make sense - the government is 'paying' trillions to subsidize all kinds of negative externalities (but it never actually does).
Also, if the government actually subsidizes a negative externality, you're in a thicket, since some of it is a real subsidy and some of it is the estimated negative externality subsidy.
> Added to which the cheapest solar panels in China are often subjected a tariffs of up to 60%.
Because they were both substandard and being dumped. And they drove a lot of reliable US manufacturers under.
In addition, a LOT of installers went under because the warranty they offered assumed that they wouldn't have to show up again for 10 years. 3 years on they're getting warranty calls because the solar cells were failing. Of course, the Chinese manufacturer was nowhere to be found.
There is a big difference between disposable electronics being too cheap and a capital expense being too cheap.
Until US businesses can sue Chinese businesses for bad practices and win "the market" won't sort itself out. In the meantime, tariffs are a good working solution.
The market figures this kind of stuff out. Reputable installers won't use the cheap cells and will warn their customers off the cheaper selling stuff that won't break in a few years. If the market couldn't things like double and triple pane windows wouldn't be able to out-compete single pane windows.
We have done it with other goods too. American car companies got away with selling substandard stuff for a long time but revenues kept shrinking as Americans bought more foreign brands. It a major market disruption and a bailout for the car companies to right themselves. Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes a touch of government regulation makes it happen faster but when a business do shady stuff they punish themselves in the long run if there are legitimate options competing with them in the market.
> The market figures this kind of stuff out. Reputable installers won't use the cheap cells and will warn their customers off the cheaper selling stuff that won't break in a few years.
How many years does your reputable solar cell manufacturer need to survive to allow the market to "figure it out"? And where does he get the money to do that? "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" applies to more than just shorting stocks.
That was the issue. The domestic manufacturers were going bankrupt waiting for the market to figure out that the Chinese cells would die prematurely. Of course, once all the domestic manufacturers are bankrupt, "the market" no longer matters because all you can get are the crappy Chinese cells.
My utility sent some LED bulbs in the mail. I expect it was attached to some government incentive (they probably get green credits for the difference in consumption).
Lighting isn't that big though, ~10% of US electrical consumption, when you include commercial and street lighting.
(It's a big chunk, just not a huge one. If you figure on a fair amount of it already being florescent or other relatively efficient lighting, the savings aren't going to be dramatic)
LED can produce just about any kind of light you want. Don't confuse them with the terrible CFL bulbs that were forced upon us. LED is likely the end game for lighting in our lifetime.
You've just got to pick the right bulbs. I tested out a Feit LED bulb in one of my kitchen can fixtures and it was totally indistinguishable from the other incandescents so I replaced all of them. 13 watts each instead of 65, and they are the same brightness and color temperature.
Used to think the same. Got good quality LED lights with "warm yellow" color (same as an incandescent bulb). Even at 5W, they are far superior to a 60W regular bulb.
First, you need a quality DC power supply for the light. Most bulbs use small capacitive droppers that let a bit of current squeak through with each change in polarity from the AC mains. These need to be well designed with plenty of filtering to provide stable light without lots of flicker. The power supplies are also generally the failure point, rather than the LEDs themselves.
Color temperature and quality are addressed with phosphor coatings over the LEDs. With an appropriate coating, they can be perfectly suitable for many lighting applications.
The issue for all of this is mostly cost; quality LED bulbs are still rather expensive. Passable-quality LEDs are becoming much more affordable, though.
Passable quality LEDs have been around for a few years, and the price has dropped substantially. I got a few 75W-equivalent LED bulbs with a warmer color temperature for $35USD each in 2013, and they color match almost identically with some incandescent bulbs that I can't replace (built-in lighting units in an apartment).
It's a hard to say, but in your case every dollar of solar subsidy probably reduces ratepayer cost by $1.50 or more.
Adding marginal capacity to the NYC grid costs a fortune to ratepayers, as siting a plant will take a decade and cost billions, and transmission capacity is already constrained -- nearly limitless hydropower is available from Quebec, but it requires massive infrastructure investment to move!
That's why New York subsidizes solar and heavily subsidizes peak load reduction.
Our brilliant governor Cuomo has decided to remove Indian Point power plant from the grid. It generates electric with no greenhouse gas for 1/4 of NYC and Westchester County which in total is a population of about 10 million (8.5 + 1) meaning that the equivalent of a city of 2.5 million will go from no greenhouse gas back to carbon-based fuels. The power company that runs Indian Point wants to shut it down because it costs more to run than natural gas.
Are you certain that there is limitless hydropower in Quebec? I think we are using capacity and that more damns would have to be built? We already get a lot of power from Hydro Quebec, some of which runs our subway system.
Some fraction of the US military expense should be attributed to obtaining energy, both explicitly (eg, patrolling shipping lanes) and implicitly (as a superpower, we can get considerations other countries don't). I don't know enough about it to hazard a guess, but I'm hoping someone, somewhere, has done an analysis.
I'm sure this is also non-zero for, say, elements required to construct solar panels, however it's almost certainly (currently) dwarfed by those for fossil fuels. That may change in the future, though.
I dislike this line of thought because it seems to imply that oil producers in the United States need to be taxed to pay for the military defense of all the overseas producers trying to put them out of business.
It is reasonable to have arguments about whether or not certain wars were fought of fossil fuels. This is not the case for any other industry I am aware of. When pressed I could not categorically refute those claims and there is at least some shady evidence pinning some of our responsibility for violence in Iraq on oil companies.
This is not a stance I personally hold or reject, but there are many with strong convictions about at least some evidence with regards to this. These people cannot easily be dismissed as tinfoil hatter.
If true the most certainly they should be accountable for the cost of military action and life lost. If false then I don't know how to prove it, proving negatives and all that.
“It’s pretty slim pickings right now,”
Ferguson said. “God is not manufacturing
more coastal property.”
Part of the concern for renewable energy folks is that you could argue that God is arranging for more coastal property, though not perhaps in ways useful to wind farmers on the Texas coast.
No. More extreme = less consistent, and likely too violent, these are not things you want for wind power.
You want consistent wind within the efficiency band of your turbines. Wind spikes are not a good thing, best case your turbines go into protection (they brake and the blades are feathered), worst case they're on fire. Significant gusts also increase wear of the blades, aging them prematurely and increasing the risk of catastrophic failure.
what about offshore wind farms? More water wouldn't be "so bad". haha. Plus, there was a cool idea about how they could be use in mass to mitigate hurricanes' strength to some degree but I'm not sure how feasible that is
I was joking of course, but 88 meters is not that far above the sea level if all the Earth's ice caps melted. I think if that happens, it would add up to about 70 meters. So Oklahoma is safe, but it would get a lot closer to the coast.
Hopefully we can prevent all ice caps melting, and even if they do melt, the process would probably take 1000 years (+/- an unknown number of centuries based on how this plays out, how much we manage to mitigate or accellerate it, etc.).
After driving through Texas last year, I really can't overstate just how many wind turbines there are, and how windy it is. I stopped at a little rest stop right in the middle of the state - in the middle of the day - and I was nearly blown over getting out of the car. And the number of turbines... Just amazing. Miles and miles and miles. It really looked like an endless landscape of turbines.
The last lines of the article elicited a bit of cynicism:
"That’s because the market is so oversupplied that it’s even difficult for the wind guys to make money at these electricity rates. And besides, it’s hard to acquire land by the water at reasonable prices."
“It’s pretty slim pickings right now,” Ferguson said. “God is not manufacturing more coastal property".
In 70 years it will be nice and cheap at this rate, which is ironically and sadly just the sort of problem cheap wind power would help alleviate.
> It blows the most in the dead of night, precisely when there’s the least demand for electricity. That’s true for just about every wind-blown spot across the U.S., from the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains in California to the coastal plains of North Carolina.
I live in Northern California (SF). Winds don't start until about 1pm or so. And it's almost never windy after 8pm.
I think this pattern holds for most coastal places, because as the sun reaches the peak, it heats up land, forcing the air over the land to rise; but the water doesn't heat up as much, and hence winds come in from offshore, to replace the air rising above the land.
In the absence of a fair pollution tax, I don't think subsidies for less-harmful technologies are necessarily bad. Unless you are actively in favor of the tragedy of the commons, these negative externalities have to be addressed somehow.
Also in Dallas, my cost for nonrenewable was about $0.075/KwH, my new contract which is 100% renewable is $0.08/KwH. The added money goes to further renewable energy in the state. Easy decision. Only costs be about $5.00 more per month, I won't miss the money.
No it is not. As a consumer in Dallas we get to choose which power company we want to buy from. Basically, we have to buy our share of electricity that is used from the grid.
Having moved to Texas recently, I was really impressed by the electricity set up.
There's one company which, I assume, is granted a local monopoly on power distribution (Oncor for my area, IIRC), and they handle the actual lines to the buildings/meters etc. I've never had to deal with them directly.
I can choose from probably 40+ companies and different plans offering different rates, expected usage, contract terms, etc. and whatever other criteria I care about, all listed in one place and compared side-by-side on one website.
It was really depressing having just gotten my head around that wealth of choice to then be told "for internet, you will have Spectrum."
Right now, we generally treat "the internet as the grid", but there's no inherent reason we can't separate "the internet"/IP address and network peering from "the grid"/physical last-mile cables.
But in this case, you are simply throwing your money away since the green producers aren't going to produce more energy because you and other consumers are paying them to. They will produce the same amount regardless.
In that case, better to give the money to some charity that say, replaces incandescent bulbs with the newest LED lamps starting with your own house and office if you haven't already converted. Also, better to take mass transit than use the car.
BTW, our brilliant NY Govenor Cuomo is putting a lot more carbon-based fuel back on-line. Because nuclear is more expensive than gas powered generation, he is removing the Indian Point nuclear power plant from the grid. This plant generates 1/4 the electricity for NYC and adjacent Westchester County.
The population of NYC is 8.5 million, Westchester County is about 1 million. So removing the carbon-free power for about 2.5 million people.
All will be replaced with carbon-based fuel generation. So much for people like you trying to be responsible and green.
It is not throwing the money away - electricity distributors are required to buy additional portions of renewables for delivery. This increases demand and available investment funds for new renewable projects. Here's a section of the Terms of Service of my provider:
"If you elect to purchase a renewable energy product, we will ensure that the appropriate amount of renewable energy credits (RECs) is retired to authenticate the renewable energy contained in the product."
So here in TX we can actually individually vote with our wallets to make a difference in the makeup of renewable energy demands in the state. Maybe tiny steps at a time, but at least it is possible.
> But in this case, you are simply throwing your money away since the green producers aren't going to produce more energy because you and other consumers are paying them to. They will produce the same amount regardless.
Yes they will. They get more money, so they can afford to invest in more green energy, and there's clearly more demand for clean energy, so it would be prudent to produce more of it. This is how markets work. You vote with your dollars.
You can actually incentivized green energy production in this way. It's also possible for cunning utilities to have a government set target for renewable power which they turn round and sell to consumers as a green tariff.
Google has lots of documents online about how they go about ensuring that their efforts to buy renewable energy actually help the grid get cleaner. "Additionality" is one buzzword that might help you locate them.
Are you suggesting the transmission company would refuse the electricity from the wind mills if enough people aren't paying for the clean option?
I'm curious how this works. What happens if you pay for clean and the wind isn't blowing at night? What happens if everyone paying for clean turns on their appliances and the demand outstrips the clean supply?
I highly doubt there are blackouts in these occasions so it seems like someone is getting screwed.
There is a secondary marketplace of "green energy futures".
edit: Going from memory... The fine print on your electric bill in Texas says something like: "If we, the electricity provider, don't have enough renewable energy to meet your current need, we promise to offset the amount of non-renewable energy we provide to you now with a future purchase of the same amount of renewable energy from an electricity generator." In other words, you get the electricity today, they get the money today, but they have to buy more renewable energy in the future.
If people aren't paying the generators, they don't maintain their windmills and can't send electricity into distribution. In Texas you pay the retail company that's selling you the power. The distribution is a wholesale company that just sells the generator distribution capacity and maintains the lines.
So yes, if people stopped buying from companies selling wind and solar only the companies selling gas and coal would be putting energy into the grid.
To incentivize renewable energy production, "Renewable Energy Credits" are used for the bookkeeping of what kinds of energy is being generated, and are created when energy is produced by a renewable provider (handwaving a bit here...)
Consumers and businesses can have their electric plan provider purchase these credits per their usage to make sure they are getting the correct portion that actually comes from a renewable source.
So the demand and pricing is adjustable determined by the pricing of the credits.
> "Are you trying to tell me that they won't build more windmills..."
The tilting at windmills joke comes to mind :-)
Honestly, first off the article says that it seems that gas is less competitive than renewable, so there are already market incentives in Texas to build windmills.
A lot of the money for windmill power simply ends up in General Electric's (the major US vendor for windmills) pockets.
Also, I think ones energy is best put in doing what one can do to minimize energy consumption using LED lights in place of incandescents, using mass transit instead of one's automobile and working with city council in Dallas and other major Texas cities to encourage more production of mass transit.
Also, doing what one can to turn up air conditioning from 72 to 76 or 78 in Dallas will save substantial amount of carbon-based power generation.
There is also the use of microturbine technology that can be used for trigeneration meaning that water chillers for air-conditioning as well as electric power from natural gas. This is very efficient and if it received the same financial incentives and wind and solar probably much more cost effective.
> A lot of the money for windmill power simply ends up in General Electric's (the major US vendor for windmills) pockets.
I actively prefer it if GE (etc.) makes money building windmills.
To switch to renewables, you have to build new infrastructure. That means the people who manufacture the equipment are going to make money. And they should make money! That's their reward for being part of the solution.
Not to mention, it encourages them do more R&D because of the potential for better profits. And it encourages competitors to join in, which is even better.
But the energy is fungible. So that if it is purchasing the green energy from elsewhere, it is simply depriving others from that benefit meaning that ultimately is is carbon-based fuels that are used.
I think they also purchase it from elsewhen. At the moment, the fluctuation in demand is probably mostly handled by gas powered plants (because they're the quickest and most efficient to adapt). I suspect that green energy providers just need to meet the total demand over time for green energy, and end up paying gas plants for taking care of the fluctuations (because they need to buy energy when its expensive and sell it back when it's cheap).
If the green power providers produce exactly as much over time as the demand from their customers, that would mean some of the customers'money would still go to the gas plants, so I suspect the green energy companies produce a bit more, so they have some extra to sell to make up the difference.
It's absolutely true that until large scale efficient energy storage is real, green electricity will continue to depend on gas plants. Of all the fossil fuels, those will be the last to go, but that's okay, because it's both the cleanest and apparently the cheapest of the fossil fuels. But as long as there are still coal plants, there's still every reason to move forward with more green energy production.
They didn't really go into the wind surfing enough to point out why Texas is actually damn good for water sailing sports.
One of the non obvious reasons is the inner gulf coast has very little chop. Chop (which is basically little waves of water turbulence at the surface as well as constant little swells) massively decreases boat/board speed even for planing boats/boards.
Of course large swells are generally worse (with some exceptions... like wanting to do tricks and if your going downwind).
I assume the natural gas people are fighting against shallow-water coastal wind generation. That would add a lot of surface area to build and could probably supply more than 50% of the energy mix.
Yep. I've seen some documentary where they said that in a very sunny region of Spain it was too expensive to put solar panels on your own roof due to taxes. The large companies made sure it was not feasible for home owners to do so.
A quick search on Google reveals that GOP legislators in at least Indiana and Wyoming are working to actively legislate against wind farms. So, it certainly has precedent.
There's a distinct possibility your world view is incorrect then if this surprises you.
The big misunderstanding the blue has about the red is who pays for things. It's not the GOP hates renewables, they just want the private industry to pay for them, not the taxpayer. Let the cheapest energy source win! Wind and solar absolutely have a great chance at doing that.
That doesn't make a good story though... It just stinks that people won't look for common ground :/
I wouldn't call it a misunderstanding; at most, it's an over-generalization:
"The bill would require all utilities serving Wyoming by 2019 to obtain their electricity from sources other than commercial-scale wind or solar operations. Utilities would be fined $10 per renewable energy megawatt hour used in a year, the amount of energy it takes to power 82 Wyoming homes."
There's an awkward unit to use--dollar per megawatt-hour per year?
Perhaps it would be clearer to say $0.01 per kilowatt-hour, though it is unclear whether the fine is levied annually, or only for energy used over a duration of one specific year.
That bit about powering 82 homes just does not compute. Homes are powered with watts. American homes average 1.25 kW. One MW powers 800 homes. One MW-h spread out over the span of one year (8760 h) is 114 W, which is enough to power about 9% of one home. So if your Wyoming home uses 9% grid-tied renewables for its power, you would probably pay $10 extra per year for this fine.
I think the GOP hates renewables is a good enough starting point. The reality is they like policies that reward making money more than they hate renewables, so if your state makes money off of renewables, the state Republican party will like them. If your state makes money from fossil fuels, then the state Republican party will like those most.
Wind power is built and operated by massive multinationals too and their money is just as good as anyone elses. If politicians are interested in getting donations, I'm not sure why they would strangle a new industry rather than profiting from it themselves.
The deregulation has been pretty beneficial to consumers.
As long as you are willing to put up with the slight hassle of changing retail providers [1] every 3 to 6 months you can get service in the range of .05 - .07 per kwh.
This may require paying natural gas generators for their ability to quickly throttle to back renewables, but only as a temporary measure until utility scale batteries fall in cost.