I feel your last statement is imprecise and overly optimistic. It seems unusually difficult to find proper calculations about what a fully implemented low emissions strategy would look like for a particular country. The only example I have found is this report for the UK [1]. This report makes a number of key points:
1. The UK has to bring in solar power from other countries to meet emissions targets or have more Nuclear capacity.
2. Reduction in energy consumption is just as important as energy sources. This involves use of more efficient technologies, primarly through electrification.
These factors highlight that abundant renewable energy is actually not abundant enough in reality and is unlikely to be for a country like the UK, even with efficiency gains from massive electrification. Without nuclear investment, renewable energy needs to be imported which has infrastructure and geoplitical considerations, as well as being a single point of failure.
While great for its time that book has been thrust hopelessly out of date by technology change. I think some of MacKay's former students are looking to update it, since he is so sadly no longer with us. In particular, wind and solar and storage are dropping exponentially in cost, and it is no longer realistic to think that we could ever build nuclear within 20 years. The nuclear industry is in shambles, a collection of fuckups that can't build, can't ship, can't plan, can't even be honest, and results in jailtime for executives, whether they are from the US (can't build), or South Korea (can build, but faked the safety inspections).
The renewable industry is in contrast an incredible engine of technological advancement. Even enhanced geothermal systems, which have progressed perhaps the least, have advanced since MacKay's time. Ramez Naam has a great concise slide deck on this ongoing transformation:
I would like to refute your assertion that my statement was imprecise. It was extremely precise. And it is not overly optimistic, either. The amount of energy over-production will be determined by how cheap storage in relation to the costs of generation. If storage gets really cheap, then we will have less over-production, because it will be economical to store the production. But if zero-marginal-cost renewable energy continues to get cheaper faster than storage gets cheaper, it will be less expensive to have massive overproduction than to have lots of storage. Napkin math leads to predicitons very similar to RethinkX's prediction, which "traditional" energy wonks discount, but traditional energy wonks also accept ridiculous projections like the IEA's uncritically (sees Naam's slides for just how bad those are)
The UK and Japan are probably the two most difficult geographic locations to power with just solar and wind. But the dramatic drop in cost of off-shore wind is changing that dynamic. As are longer-term grid batteries, like those coming out of Form Energy, that are designed to be profitable from day one on the grid but with only occassional discharge.
To be clear, I am not advocating for nuclear energy. I don't have a preference for one non-fossil fuel energy source over an other. It is good to see that off-shore wind is becoming much more viable.
That slide deck repeats over and over that renewable prices have come down. That's great, but as I said in my original comment, it is hard to find actual calculations about this being implemented in a real country rather than breathless exhortations about the coming revolution.
That MacKay report is valuable for the energy distribution numbers - for example, it talks about the massive amount of panels and windfarms that would be required to meet demand and that this is unlikely to be feasible (notwithstanding the fact that the UK isn't very sunny). Maybe this isn't so true any more, but you seem to be saying that the UK should install an even more than massive amount of renewable capacity, along with various storage solutions to store the excess (presumably to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar). Maybe I don't have that right, but it seems to me to be overly optimistic. The recent energy crisis in Europe would seem to suggest that is the case in the medium term.
The "energy" crisis in Europe is a fossil fuel crisis, not a general energy crisis, the same as so many energy crises in the past, but this time the fossil fuel companies excellent PR engines have been able to cast it as the fault of energy sources that are not dominant on the grid.
The MacKay report was hopelessly and fruitlessly pessimistic on renewable energy, while embracing fraudulent technology like "clean coal" that has proven over and over to be a scam. It's not a fair shake at the world, and much less at the UK. I've been revisiting it since your comment, and though I thought it useful when I first read it, I no longer think it is helpful in understanding the scale of what we can do, and what needs to be done.
The RethinkX report I linked is one sort of model about a future energy grid, using very rough details. Christopher Clack's modeling is far more fine-grained, and his latest models are using historical weather combined with modeling down to the distribution node to run cost optimization strategies. I don't think he's fully published his latest yet (which shows huge cost savings by doing massive storage and solar deployments to homes and businesses within the next five years). But other reports are here:
IMHO, 90%+ renewables by 2040 is a foregone conclusion for 90%+ of the globe, unless governmental corruption requires that people are bilked by the coal and natural gas industries. The key design question for grids is going to be about the amount transmission & storage versus and amount of excess generating capacity from renewables nearby. Transmission is expensive, and not falling much in cost, if at all, so I have a feeling that future and new grids will have much less of it. Looking at those curves from Naam's slide deck should make you think about where we will be in another decade, or in two decades. Our current energy system has costs are split roughly equally fixed capex and fluctuating opex (based on fuel costs). The future grid will have nearly zero opex, and drastically lower capex. For the extreme outliers like the UK, they may lay down a few dozen GW of high-voltage DC to higher resource areas.
The UK just built a high voltage line to Norway. The eventual plan is to sell North Sea wind to Norway while the wind is blowing (which is almost all of the time, they're called trade winds for a reason). Some of that energy will be stored as pumped hydro and sold back to the UK when the wind isn't blowing.
Honestly please stop citing more than a decade old data on renewable energy. It's a highly dynamic sector, and data from the stone age of renewables is completely irrelevant for the discussion.
The book is obsolete on financial costs, but still useful for the physical scale of infrastructure required by various technologies. A lot of people have fairly poor intuition about that.
The bigger foibles are clean coal and nuclear. Clean coal has been impossible to build and CCS of fossil fuels has been a boondoggle whereever it's been tried. Nuclear has also proven to be nearly impossible to build, from France to Finland to the US. The UK has only managed to get one site going, Hinkley, and other planned sites have not had suitable bids, like Wylfa. So more nuclear is not a feasible route.
I think that enhanced geothermal systems (using heat from dry rock, kilometers down), could be a good resource that's just now getting developed in the UK, on the MW scale.
Solar will never be great in the UK, but average capacity factor is at 10%, and currently provides 4% of total UK electricity, which is a remarkable feat given historical costs.
I've said this in other comments, but there's a remarkable amount of hot air that went into the assumptions in this book, and its age is showing terribly. I bet that if MacKay were around still, he'd have massive updates, but the entire world was wrong when it was betting against renewables, and in favor of traditional fossil fuel companies' abilities to innovate.
Nuclear is difficult due to political issues and the poor state of the US industry, but it's not a physical impossibility. China is building quite a lot of nuclear power, including a GenIV plant that just went on the grid.
Political issues are not impeding France, Finland, the UK, or even the US's two sites. This is a misconception.
The underlying Gen3 (or whatever the AP1000 and EPR would be called), is fundamentally incompatible with our construction and logistics capabilities. China probably can't help us fix our processes, and I'm not sure we would trust them. Same goes for Rosatom, who is also building.
Even under the best of economic conditions, however, nuclear is not very favorable. Even China, with its unparalleled construction capability, is only planning a tiny tiny slice of its future energy capacity as nuclear, with much larger generation in wind and solar. And a lot of the planned nuclear will never be built, because renewables and storage are changing the economic case for nuclear.
Biomass is so very inefficient at capturing solar energy (maybe 2%, if that) that even at that small fraction of energy produced it contributes very substantially to the land use of the energy system.
Every right-wing blowhard has heard about Solyndra, but they never mention that the amount wasted of coal carbon capture, which doesn't work or even exist at scale, has spent multiple Solyndras worth of federal money.
Iirc it didn't really assume any arrangement, except maybe as an example. It calculated the physical requirements of different energy sources independently. The reader can start from there to get any particular combination.
I guess I don't find what's so difficult. All you need to do is look to Norway. If you want to make an argument that "the last bit is the toughest" - I guess? But they're already well, well on their way to a low emissions strategy.
As for it being impossible for a country like the UK: you're making some ridiculous assumption that the UK would need all energy to be produced on-shore. Does the UK get all of its coal and oil in-country? No? Then why do they need to get all of their energy in-country? If they need to import and store batteries or hydrogen or insert energy holding vessel so be it.
My understanding of the nuclear opposition from the renewable groups is that nuclear effectively has a massive upfront capex cost and delayed capex for decommissioning 3-5 decades later along with extremely low marginal costs to operate.
This means that in order to make "cheap" nuclear, you need to operate the plant at max capacity as long as you can. While this makes great "base load" it can't complement renewables like natural gas can, natural gas peaker plants can simply burn when renewables aren't available "low capex, high opex".
I'm curious how the UK is approaching the economics here, it's quite possible to reduce the capex of nuclear - and it's also possible to simply plan for something along the lines of a 40/60 split between nuclear and renewables where renewables take "peak demand" and high energy use industries.
>If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the cost of photovoltaics
came down enough that we could deploy panels all over the countryside,
what is the maximum conceivable production? Well, if we covered 5% of
the UK with 10%-efficient panels, we’d have
This paragraph is titled "Fantasy time". So before I start the criticism, I would like to thank him for clearly debunking fantasies about hydro and geothermal, where aside from ground-source heat pumps and sparsely populated mountains, they are simply too small. Photovoltaics are the largest source of sustainable energy by far, so the results of an overall analysis will be heavily dependent on the treatment of solar panels.
At the same time, I think it's practical to assume that humans will aggressively innovate the properties and production of PV panels, because the potential value is so large. But I'm going to stick with existing technology. The Agua Caliente farm in Arizona:
As such, describing solar farms as a fantasy, and upper bounding the efficiency at 10%, when there are existing installations built with solar panels at 16% efficiency, seems too pessimistic. Looking ahead to other technologies, perovskites, considered a low-cost option, were recently pushed to 25%:
and Alta Devices demonstrated 29% efficiency with a GaAs thin-film before a buyout by a Chinese firm led to a class-action lawsuit filed by disgruntled employees:
>most countries will be in the same boat as
Britain and will have no renewable energy to spare
A glance at a map will immediately show the viewer that Britain is one of the most poleward and densely populated countries in the world — a worst-case scenario for solar electricity. Even Japan has the benefit of sitting significantly further south.
Yikes, those are some really bad assumptions. It's been a decade since I've read the book, so skimming now I'm seeing an awful lot of hot air in the assumptions that went into it.
For example, the mythical, never built, "clean coal" shows up in most of the potential scenarios for the UK! That was an obvious stinker back when the book was written, but to simultaneously give the benefit of the doubt to charlatans, and then misestimate solar and wind so much is pretty unforgivable.
I think we perhaps give the book too much credit because it converted everything into understandable units, which is the primary utility of the book. But that utility papers over a lot of really bad judgement, so using it as a guide for sustainable energy leads to really bad conclusions.
Yeah consumer panels are routinely 18 - 20% efficiency now. But these are the ideal numbers. To be fair he doesn't derate the efficiency of PV as happens in the real world, so the degree to which 10% is an underestimate is mitigated. I don't think this substantively changes the analysis, it just means less reliance on nuclear in the various models. Additionally, in a gloomy country like the UK the more you rely on solar the more you need advanced storage and grid solutions to deal with the inconsistencies.
And agree that the comment about other countries is not correct. Australia for example will pretty soon be able to meet 100% energy demand with renewables on sunny days and is looking to export power.
Agreed, the 10% seems like a solid estimate, at least for today, but it seems quite likely that new tech could bring that up to 15% or more, which is a 50% in efficacy. Wikipedia says that current panels are getting a 10% capacity factor now, which is only 40% - 50% of what can be had at sites with good solar. That capacity factor seems to be slowly climbing since 2008 as well.
This paragraph has some pretty bad predictions by MacKay though:
>The solar power capacity required to deliver this 50 kWh
per day per person in the UK is more than 100 times all the photovoltaics
in the whole world.
This is a completely irrelevant and pointless thing to state.
> At the start of this book I said I
wanted to explore what the laws of physics say about the limits of sus-
tainable energy, assuming money is no object. On those grounds, I should
certainly go ahead, industrialize the countryside, and push the PV farm
onto the stack. At the same time, I want to help people figure out what
we should be doing between now and 2050. And today, electricity from
solar farms would be four times as expensive as the market rate.
Overlooking that Solar PV had already fallen precipitously in cost in 2008, and assuming that a four-fold fall was not a given, was a huge mistake.
> So I feel
a bit irresponsible as I include this estimate in the sustainable production
stack in figure 6.9 – paving 5% of the UK with solar panels seems beyond
the bounds of plausibility in so many ways. If we seriously contemplated
doing such a thing, it would quite probably be better to put the panels in
a two-fold sunnier country and send some of the energy home by power
lines.
5% of the UK is about the same percentage of the UK that is occupied by houses and gardens. Putting solar panels on all roofs could probably get to 10 kWh/d or more. Converting only a very small amount of arable land, which has already been taken out of nature, to solar panels, could get the UK to 5% easily.
The skepticism of solar and embrace of tech like clean coal and nuclear were big misses here.
1. The UK has to bring in solar power from other countries to meet emissions targets or have more Nuclear capacity. 2. Reduction in energy consumption is just as important as energy sources. This involves use of more efficient technologies, primarly through electrification.
These factors highlight that abundant renewable energy is actually not abundant enough in reality and is unlikely to be for a country like the UK, even with efficiency gains from massive electrification. Without nuclear investment, renewable energy needs to be imported which has infrastructure and geoplitical considerations, as well as being a single point of failure.
[1] http://www.withouthotair.com/ (synopsis at http://www.withouthotair.com/synopsis10.pdf)