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.
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.