If a "clean energy" philanthropist really wanted to steer the world away from fossil fuels, they would lobby for the replacement of coal and oil with nuclear.
It is impossible to meet rising global energy needs without either a: nuclear energy as a wedge, b: divine advancements in renewable tech and cost, or c: burning a ton ton ton of fossil fuels.
I dream of a post-energy-scarcity-star-trek future pretty often, but the fact is that barring some revolutionary technological advancement, nuclear is the only long term hope we have to wean ourselves away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energies. "Green" tech it ain't either: refining rare earths is environmentally disastrous and even recycling the waste can be quite hazardous, such as lead battery recycling plants in Africa resulting in lead poisoning in surrounding communities.
If we want to be serious about renewable energy and the long road it will take to get there, we will have to get over our fears of Chernobyl and Homer Simpson running the power plant
Costs are actually the problem of nuclear power, not of renewables - at least in the west. The costs of nuclear power are rising significantly while renewables are dropping in price. The feed in tariff for newly installed photovoltaics in Germany today is lower than the feed in tariff Hinkley Point C will get when it will get when it's finished in 2023 + delay. Additionally the feed in tariff for Hinkley point C will get inflation adjusted.
Make nuclear energy a global resource that all nations MUST buy into based on their % of consumption.
build the appropriate plants, and if the US uses 25% of that power, it pays 25% of the bill. Make it protected by some joint/independent body/military in a de-nationalized territory.
Gates is supporting nuclear initiatives, including backing specific ventures, such as the TerraPower "Nuclear Candle" in situ sealed breeder design that "burns up" current spent nuclear fuel (plus a breeder initiator of uranium).
More generally, though nuclear faces considerable obstacles, among the most serious are designing a high-risk, high-complexity system for a very-long-term deployment. How long do you expect nuclear to be human's primary fuel source, and how do you plan to deal with non-technical challenges.
Modern technical society is about 200-250 years old -- most sources date the start of the Industrial Revolution to about 1800. Virtually all our present institutions, companies, science and understand, etc., have emerged or substantially evolved during this time (though of course many trace back further).
Running nuclear power at global scale from here until Doomsday means planning at the level of centuries, if not millennia or even millions of years. That's timescales exceeding the oldest people, companies, governments, schools, religions, languages, even basic systems of morality and ethics.
Provisioning global-scale nuclear power would require on the order of 15,000 plants operating simultaneously. Unavoidable metal embrittlement limits these to a practical life of about 40 years. That means commissioning and decommissioning plants at the rate of one per day, and both processes are themselves 20-40 year endeavours.
That occurring through political and economic crises, wars, natural disasters, political and moral revolutions, and more. Things which are somewhat difficult to engineer around.
Even trace amounts of some nuclear contaminants are exceptionally poisonous, and at the proposed scale of operation, risks of release are decidedly non-negligible. Present human experience is limited to about 400-500 reactor cores, and there have been at least 4 major core integrity breaches, including Chernobyl and Fukushima. Substantial fault in all accident cases devolves to human and management practices, again, exceptionaly difficult to engineer around. With 30 times that many reactors operating from now until Doomsday, what acceptible accident rate are you targeting? We're at about 1:50 reactor years. Are you going to bump that up 10 - 100 fold?
At 1 per 100 reactor-years, we're looking at 150 core meltdowns pere century. At 1:1000, 15. You'd need to exceed 1:10,000 to limit yourself to 1.5 failures per century, and again, that through political strife, economic crisis, mob and mafia involvement, corruption, war, and natural disaster. Forever.
Renewable energy systems based on solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric sources have far more benign failure rates. And I say that despite the fact that the worst power plant disasters are included in that list. China's Banqiao Dam failed in 1975 (itself a story of engineering, design, management, communications, and meterological factors) killing 171,000. Despite that, the region is now home to over 7 million people. The long term effects of such failures is relatively minimal, compared to the nondiscretionary multi-century wildlife refuges now surrounding the former Chernobyl and Fukushima sites, as well as smaller-factor radiation problems at locations such as Hanford, Washington.
More generally, the problem I see is that which was the real core message of the 1972 book Limits to Growth. There are limts to growth, and at exponential scales, those are reached rapidly even with increasing resources or pollution-absorption capacities by powers of 2, or 10, or 100. Those limits need to be embraced.
Nuclear power is just one of numerous cases of pleading for exceptions from the Gods of Complexity. The real challenge (and one Gates also acknowledges, though generally privately) is of accepting the limits of humans' footprint on this little, and rare, and lonely planet of ours.
It's worth noting that, afaik, none of the reactors that have failed have been built using the "newest generation" of reactors, which are supposed to be much safer. This is a double edged sword, of course, because that also means they haven't been tested nearly as long. But I don't think the math to scaling nuclear power is as simple as we've fucked up 4/500 times, just extrapolate the numerator and denominator and you've got it. As we get more experienced with the technology we'll get better. And any conversation about the safety of nuclear needs to contain the relative risk of not using nuclear.
> More generally, the problem I see is that which was the real core message of the 1972 book Limits to Growth. There are limts to growth, and at exponential scales, those are reached rapidly even with increasing resources or pollution-absorption capacities by powers of 2, or 10, or 100. Those limits need to be embraced.
Embracing those limits requires, as far as I can tell, eugenic-style control over breeding. Personally I'd rather the human race burns itself out than go down that path.
I'm a fan of empirical over theoretical data and arguments. The 4:500 rate is what we've achieved, and, belabouring the point, all accidents have had massive sociological elements. I very strongly recommend reading Charles Perrow (Normal Accidents, but also other works).
Yes, something's got to control human breeding. Either humans or something other than human. Most likely viral or bacteriological, in my book.
I generally agree, but in the case of the environment we're not going to have clear data on what to do. How are you comparing the risk of building nuclear to the risk of not building nuclear? It's a very difficult thing to do.
That gets into some pretty profound discussions of just what "risk" is.
The current benchmark (e.g., used in the IPCC's own assessments of carbon-neutral energy options) is of lives per GW generation. I find this naive on numerous counts, e.g., my citation of the Banqiao disaster -- horrible if you were caught up in it (though also note: the bulk of the deaths werev from disease and starvation in the aftermath, the acute toll from the inundation was ~40-50k).
Virtually all deaths due to conventional processes -- physical, heat, trauma, even chemical -- are fairly ameliorable by direct precautions. Even in the case of a massive dam failure -- Banqiao, Johnstown, Vajont -- advance warning of a few minutes would have reduced fatalities tremendously, and with hours or days, all but entirely. Each of these disasters was precipitated by clear warning signs, though they were unheeded, for various reasons. In the Johnstown and Vajont cases, state of the art in engineering and geology was a major component. Perverse incentives to plant operators existed in all cases.
Looking at instances of explosions also suggests that warning, evacuation, and shelter could save virtually all lives, assuming a proper understanding of circumstances. Halifax, Canada, Galveston, TX, West, TX, Martinez, CA, Tianjin, China, and Lac Megantic, Canada all represented substantial loss of life which could have been avoided through both better advanced risk management and notice in advance of the precipitating disasters. Contrast the Pepcon disaster, among the largest non-nuclear blasts ever. Immediate deaths, though, were only two (another 370 or so injured), in large part due to the facility's isolation from any surrounding structures.
By contrast, long-term chronic exposures can be quite debilitating. Minimata, Japan, Love Canal, Hinkley, CA ("Erin Brokovich"), Bhopol, India, Agent Orange throughout Vietnam and SE Asia, and industrial contamination throughout China, will likely be with us for a long, long time. Flint, MI, can be added to that list.
Chemicals can generally be mitigated through binding and sequestration operations, nucleotides are more difficult. Long-term low-level chronic emissions, or perhaps worse: punctuated equilibria, concern me.
The bigger concern I have though is for systemic failure. Nuclear energy provisioning, particularly based on very sparse fuel sources (uranium from seawater, thorium from rare earths mining) creates a long-term dependence on a large and potentially fragile technological stack. By contrast, wind, solar, and hydroelectric power are rather simpler, and even geothermal is fairly straightforward.
"Complexity is the enemy of reliability" is a phrase first occurring in The Economist newspaper, January 18, 1958. It's been repeated, usually as "complexity is the enemy", many times since, though I suspect those citing it don't know the origins (my first encounter was through Eric S. Raymond's writings).
Creating a civilisation-supporting technological stack that isn't complex seems a strong goal. And quantifying systemic global risk part of the problem.
> By contrast, wind, solar, and hydroelectric power are rather simpler, and even geothermal is fairly straightforward.
My understanding is scaling these technologies is where the complexity may lie, and that it would so extremely difficult to support the growing energy needs of the world's population using these technologies that they aren't really even an option. I'd like to be wrong. Am I?
This gets into a whole mess of considerations, and there's not a lot of agreement.
There's little doubt that there isn't a gross surplus of solar energy incident on Earth's surface. But that surplus is, by orders of magnitude, fairly thin relative to present human energy demands. By the time numerous factors are applied, you end up with infrastructure requirements which are truly prodigious.
I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the real lesson of Limits to Growth has largely been missed -- not what limits are, but that they exist, and even highly generous assumptions of abundance (or effluent absorption capabilities) are rapidly overwhelmed with even modest rates of growth. That is, the lesson is humans must embrace limits. There's considerable more math on how far in advance clear warning signs do or don't exist, though fundamentally the principles are simple.
This turns the typical statement of sustainability on its head. The question isn't "how do we provide energy, food, and other resources for the people we see coming", but "how many people can be supported, at what level of affluence, for what duration?" It's not energy supplies that are insufficient, it's humans which are overabundant.
Answers to "how many" vary, though I've seen published values ranging from 50 million to 50 billion -- three orders of magnitude. Someone's off by a lot.
Going by history, the range of 50 million - 2 billion corresponds to human population from early prehistory to about 1920. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the value stood at about 500 million.
Levels at or above present populations would require a large number of complex problems be solved for a very long time.
The answer to your question may well be not that you're wrong, but that you're asking the wrong questions.
Put another way: there's nothing inherent to the Universe (or even this small speck of it) which gives humans any right to existence or level of affluence. Predicating reality on what we'd prefer is the definition of wishful thinking.
> none of the reactors that have failed have been built using the "newest generation" of reactors, which are supposed to be much safer.
At some point there has to be a compromise made between cost and safety. You could spend an extra $10 billion making a plant even more safe, but in doing so make the scheme unaffordable, and 20 years late. And even then the station could still have complex failure modes that are very difficult to model. Maybe that is exactly what happened to the nuclear industry since Chernobyl? We ended up with ever more complex and monolithic systems that require thousands of expensive physicists to do basic building and maintenance. Perhaps it would have been better to invest in small modular systems.
What population and level of energy consumption is the 15,000 scaled too?
I guess one reactor every 3 days isn't any less daunting, but that 15,000 number seems to be really specific and could use a link or some fleshing out.
The problem with nuclear is the enormous up-front costs of constructing, even if we could somehow get rid of all the red tape involved. There's some experiments on small-scale fission plants, but there's no market, no buyers, no deployments.
Meanwhile, solar power has a market, has deployments, and is on a path of incremental changes that will take the cost of solar below coal. And once you're below coal, the market will automatically make the switch without any lobbying whatsoever.
I fully agree that we need to keep all existing nuclear as long as possible though, but I'm not so sure it's something it makes sense to invest in.
Sure we're far from commercialization , it's a slow business. But it may be cheaper than solar+storage. And china may be a market - they are throwing serious money at it , and maybe not the only one. And it may be more scalable, maybe.
And let's not forget - solar is tiny. If you wanted to replace the energy infrastructure with solar - it would take decades , it would require a massive share of the world steel supply ,and it would be a huge building project, and the EROI would not be so big.
So it might be too early to say who will win the race.
I think the idea that we have to bet everyone's future on a single tech is extremely shortsighted. In fact, the bet on coal power plants is kind of what got us into this mess in the first place.
And the advancements in renewables look like they are doable, just not as fast as we'd like. More nuclear would be good, but limiting research and development to just fission or only solar is a false choice. As we've learned from applying developments in microchips to cutting wafers for photovoltaics, developments in one area of tech can often be used to improve other areas.
I disagree with your stance on nuclear - in the sense that nuclear is one way to partially replace coal/oil, however a much better combination is solar + nuclear + energy efficiency in transportation + reduction of global footprint of manufactured goods (energy in industry).
How to reduce "consumerism"? Well, you need a revolution. Or, you need to tax sales heavily. Neither are easy.
A carbon tax would work too to reduce "consumerism", and the politcal support for that seems to be snowballing (many jurisdictions already have various behind the scenes mechanisms that do the same thing in a slightly obscure way, because the word "tax" freaks people out)
The only problem with nuclear energy is the Chernobyl / Fukushima risk, which even as a supporter of nuclear energy I find unacceptable. Human nature being what it is, nuclear plants are bound to be run sooner or later by idiot, careless people. Uranium-based nuclear energy is not idiot-proof.
I have great hopes on Thorium. I am by no mean a specialist but I understand it has all the benefits of uranium for civil nuclear energy except that it uses a design of nuclear reactors that can be stopped in seconds, and rely a lot less on high pressure (i.e. subject to blowing up) pipes.
But it will take huge investments to develop the whole supply chain and all the associated technologies. It would make sense for a country or a group of countries who would want to develop a new nuclear park to team up and just bite the bullet. China would be a good candidate. But also the vast majority of the nuclear power plants in Europe and the US are more than 30y old. Might make sense to just do it, go clean, safe and stop writing checks to our "friends" in the middle east...
There is nothing about thorium that makes it able to be stopped immediately or run at much less pressure. There are reactor concepts that run at lower pressure and have passive safety when shutdown, but they could use thorium or uranium just the same.
Thorium reactors have to be part of a closed nuclear fuel cycle meaning you have breeder reactors combined with fuel reprocessing. No nation seriously does this right now because when you reprocess you can easily separate bomb materials (although India is allegedly moving towards a closed thorium cycle). Reprocessing involves nasty chemicals that are super radioactive too which is another step where things can go very wrong.
Also, thorium can't even run a reactor by itself. It has to be used as a feed material to breed Uranium-233 by absorbing neutrons and decaying, so at the end of the day you are still using uranium to produce power. The only advantage of thorium is that it doesn't produce as many actinides which are the really long-lived radioactive waste products. So after thousands of year the radiotoxicity of your waste is less with thorium than uranium.
I'm pro nuclear. I like thorium, but it would realistically require a nation to step up and invest trillions of dollars in the infrastructure and licensing only to have things rolling along decades later. Although, it would provide energy for a few centuries if done well.
I understood that thorium was used in liquid form (molten salt) which you can separate a lot faster than a reactor using fuel in a solid state and that way stop the reaction.
Perfect is the enemy of good. If once every 20 years an accident happens and then 20 years after 20k people get cancer, that is an acceptable loss. And its' not even clear if Fukashima will be that bad. Right now the estimated deaths are going to be zero.
You still have entire regions in ukraine and belarus where you can't grow anything that can be consumed.
I would agree with any other industrial accident. But the reality of nuclear accidents is that you end up polluting at the scale of a country. That's a big Damocles sword to live under.
So they should create a billion dollar lobby? Don't we want cheap, clean, renewable energy? Then there would be no need to lobby for anything. The market will do the rest.
Markets have proven exceptionally unreliable at fully pricing energy.
Much our present problem results from under-pricing of fossil fuels due to:
1. Negative pollution externalities.
2. Far more significant: failing to account for replacement costs of consumed resources. Fossil fuels are accumulated biofuels. We're consuming them at about 5 million times the rate of their initial creation, and at rates exceeding substantively most or all present net primary production.
1. Yes, I am fully aware that the complete cost of fossil fuels is not captured.
2. We have hundreds of years of coal, for example. Many people are willing to use it all then worry about it then. Surely we'll have developed better energy technology long before then. 200 years ago we society didn't even have electricity.
Anyway, my point is to not fight the system but accelerate clean energy development so that it wins in the current market. Solar prices have plummeted in the past 5 years, for example. What will it take to decrease the price further so that more people want it on their roofs, for instance?
Globally, coal reserve-to-consumption ratios are about 110. That is, with zero growth in usage, there's about a century of reserve.
Given modest exponential growth, that falls. At 2% global energy consumption increase, rate of use doubles every 35 years. The 10 year average for coal is closer to 3%, though in 2015 it had fallen to 0.4%.
I don't understand why this isn't "the market". It's a fund by private individuals and institutions (granted with enough clout to get gov'ts to fund as well) that will be investing in new technologies. From the website[0]:
>Together we will focus on early stage companies that have the potential of an energy future that produces near zero carbon emissions and provides everyone with affordable, reliable energy. We will invest based on a few core investment principles...
Which then goes on to list what they are looking for when they invest in companies.
Maybe you're thinking that 'the market' should/would/does exist such that when you get electricity to your house, you can either purchase it from the clean energy plant or the dirty energy plant? The problem is that this market doesn't really exist yet, because the technology and infrastructure need more development.
> such as lead battery recycling plants in Africa resulting in lead poisoning in surrounding communities.
This is a social problem, not a tech problem. There's no reason to have any "surrounding communities" -- the lead recycling can be performed in isolated factories.
Gotta love the nuclear supporters in renewable energy discussions. My response is always the same: I'm totally with ya as long as the nuclear reactor is in your backyard.
Thumbnail version: Human sources of CO2 have nothing to do with climate. Instead for at least hundreds of thousands of years to the present and the foreseeable future, essentially the main cause of climate change is just the level of solar activity. As that varies so does the rate of sun spots, the strength of the solar wind, the rate at which the solar wind blocks cosmic rays, cosmic rays hit water molecules in the atmosphere, water droplets are formed, clouds are formed. More clouds have a cooling effect. So, a more active sun blocks more cosmic rays, causes fewer clouds, and warms the earth. A less active sun, ..., more clouds, and a cooler earth.
CO2 levels don't fit the temperature data at all well, e.g., in the Vostok data Gore's movie used, the CO2 levels went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. E.g., the cooling from The Little Ice Age was not from less CO2 but from a very inactive sun. The increase in temperature coming out of The Little Ice Age was from a more active sun. The global cooling from about 1950 to 1980 was from an inactive sun while CO2 levels increased.
Net, CO2 is irrelevant. The cause is the activity level of the sun. Burn all the fossil fuels you want.
Solar? Maybe can find a use for it: E.g., maybe in desert areas, smelt aluminum, desalinate water and use it in greenhouses, convert water and coal to gasoline. A key to such desert applications is don't need to store the electric energy from the solar panels -- instead, just smelt aluminum, the clean water, or gasoline when the sun shines and store that.
Solar for the US electric grid? Nope: Need storage, and it alone is more expensive than the alternatives so that for the grid solar is not wanted even for free.
Thumbnail version: Human sources of CO2 have nothing to do with climate. Instead for at least hundreds of thousands of years to the present and the foreseeable future, essentially the main cause of climate change is just the level of solar activity. As that varies so does the rate of sun spots, the strength of the solar wind, the rate at which the solar wind blocks cosmic rays, cosmic rays hit water molecules in the atmosphere, water droplets are formed, clouds are formed. More clouds have a cooling effect. So, a more active sun blocks more cosmic rays, causes fewer clouds, and warms the earth. A less active sun, ..., more clouds, and a cooler earth.
CO2 levels don't fit the temperature data at all well, e.g., in the Vostok data Gore's movie used, the CO2 levels went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. E.g., the cooling from The Little Ice Age was not from less CO2 but from a very inactive sun. The increase in temperature coming out of The Little Ice Age was from a more active sun. The global cooling from about 1950 to 1980 was from an inactive sun while CO2 levels increased.
Net, CO2 is irrelevant. The cause is the activity level of the sun. Burn all the fossil fuels you want.
Solar? Maybe can find a use for it: E.g., maybe in desert areas, smelt aluminum, desalinate water and use it in greenhouses, convert water and coal to gasoline. A key to such desert applications is don't need to store the electric energy from the solar panels -- instead, just make the clean water or gasoline when the sun shines and store that.
Solar for the US electric grid? Nope: Need storage, and it alone is more expensive than the alternatives so that for the grid solar is not wanted even for free.
I'm pretty sure we don't need billions of dollars of investments in clean energy, we need billions of dollars of investments in energy storage across a variety of scales ranging from household/vehicle level all the way to geographic regions. There are plenty of existing clean technologies that are as low or lower than the existing cost/kWh of dirty energy technologies. They are just intermittent and unreliable for base power distribution. Unfortunately energy storage is not as glamorous as clean energy production and doesn't get anywhere near the investment levels that it deserves.
Pumped hydro / storage sites are largely built out. To meet full needs, or alternatively, the equivalent dispatchable generation capacity of present fossil-fueled generation, would require something on the order of 2,400 Hoover Dam equivalents.
Siting and water flows for such installations are somewhat lacking.
Solar and wind never produce zero energy in a single day. So, at most you may want ~30% of one days worth of storage which less than ~1/20th of what he wants. Extra capacity is actually fairly cheap (winds cost are ~2.5¢/kWh now) and something we already do. In extreme events like a heat wave, traditional hydropower can make up the long term difference as it's designed to store power over long periods already.
There math is also wrong on energy density, you get ~30% efficiency with gas > electricity. So one gallon of gas takes less water on balance. ~4 cubic meters of water dropping one mile ~= 1 gallon. A 10 meter drop in water level over 1 km^2 = ~2,500,000 gallons of gas per day and 0.9 billion gallons of gas per year.
Sure, you would need two ~1 km^2 square body's of water within ~3 miles of each other with one ~1 mile higher than another. But, building two 10-20m deep pools is cheap, so now you just need a large flat hill or an unusually deep valley.
PS: People talk about how variable wind is, but if you ignore the peak and compare median power to minimal power it's actually surprisingly steady. Yes, we will waste a few days at peak power, but that's not actually a lot of wasted energy.
Solar produces, to a reasonable approximation, zero energy every night.
If you want to see seasonal trends, the Fraunhoffer Institute in Germany has excellent actual production plots for Germany. Solar does well in summer, not so much in winter. Some of the slack is made up for with wind.
There's additional other sources, including wastestream processing, though that itself is just derivative of biofuels. Germany has surprisingly little geothermal potential.
And though Germany is a high-latitude country, it's fairly representative of about 450 million people living in modern high-energy lifestyles, throughout Europe.
People use vastly more energy in the day time. Peak solar and usage don't line up 1:1, but they are fairly close. Further, Summer cooling uses a lot of energy and you get more solar energy in the Summer.
Solar hot water heating is much more efficient ~90% and easy to store locally. Payback is ~3-5 years in most of the US even if you only need heat for a few months out of the year. Granted, it does not work in Alaska, but it does work in Mane.
Thus, Wind for base load 24/7/365. Solar for peak power usage. Toss in a 30% buffer + ~20% extra generating capacity get's you to 5 9's.
This isn't guaranteed to be true. Before electrical household appliances were common, we used far more energy at night because indoor lighting was the primary use case for energy. And we are likely to revert to this pattern again if we ever have a mass move toward electric cars which will be charging at night.
Electric cars need less energy than you might think.
Using Tesla numbers, 230 miles on 60kwh. Average person drives 13,000 miles per year which averages out to 9.3kwh per day. Split that over 12 hours and your looking at ~780watts.
Further, if it cost less we would charge cars during the day.
PS: Average household uses 31kwh per day. But, offices are really daytime biased.
It is only solved if you are lucky enough to have suitable geography and a stable and wealthy enough government to support it, and are willing to irrevocably damage large ecological areas to build it. That solution isn't good enough to convert the entire world.
This things can actually be fairly compact and self contained. Traditional hydro is designed to store ~1 year of energy generally from seasonal rain, and needs a deep lake to build a useful head of water, which takes a lot of space. Pumped hydro is designed to store ~12 hours of energy and recharged every day. So, you can just have a small lake on top of a hill and another at the base within ~1-2 miles.
As to geography you can also move electricity ~1,000 miles with minimal losses, So there is some dependence on geography but outside of some islands you can use pumped storage just about anywhere in the world as all you really need is a large hill to start with.
> A single location is storing 4,200 gigawatt-hours per year
That seems like a lot, but for comparison purposes, China uses 5,400,000 GWh/yr. I don't know how many sites China has available to build storage plants of this capacity; the terrain there looks kinda special --- Wikipedia claims the lower dam is over 400m high...
The scale of solar and wind build-out required, and of energy storage, are both absolutely staggering.
Largest built infrastructure, possibly short of highway and road systems (which are significantly lower tech, and have far fewer moving parts).
Though highway maintenance costs might give you pause as well. Lifetime for solar and wind plant is roughly 20 years, due to various degredation factors.
There is also huge potential for adjusting demand. There are numerous devices that don't need to be powered all the time which could be switched depending on availability.
We do do geothermal, just not much of it. There are two main categories, power generation and heating/cooling using a heat pump. Power generation requires a power plant, while heat pumps can work extremely efficiently on a building-by-building basis. Heat pumps are great, but can't power a city. For that you need geothermal, which generally means 'hydrothermal' because they all use steam to turn turbines (or to heat other fluids that turn turbines).
Basically, you're right about the limiting factor being that it's expensive to drill deep holes. The heat distribution in the earth's crust is highly variable, so geothermal is more favorable where the crust is hot, because you don't have to drill as deeply (and install and operate equipment at great pressures). In a favorable area, such as near active volcanoes or large hot springs, geothermal may be a viable choice if the area is available for drilling (i.e. not in a national park) and close to a metro area or other high-capacity electrical grid.
When all of these factors work out, geothermal is great. The Geysers north of San Francisco has a capacity of about 725 MW[0], and basically powers SF. It loses ~1% production annually, though, because the hot water powering the plant becomes extracted, and cold water pumped in cools the rocks slightly. Note that the rocks will re-heat themselves, but it takes time.
However, it doesn't always work out. Much of the hot crust in the US is in Nevada and Idaho, where there are very few people, and not a lot of groundwater. Colder crust has the hot water too, but it's at great depths (e.g. 3-4 km) which would cost maybe 50-100 million USD to drill to. (A recent temperature test well--not production--well near me cost $3MM to drill ~1000 feet, and it gets exponentially more expensive with depth. The well, located by a small hot spring not far from Seattle, had a temperature inversion and turned colder with depth, so the money went down the drain).
I do some consulting work for a company[1] that is experimenting with a technique called 'Enhanced Geothermal' or EGS that tries to exploit hot, dry rock by pumping cold water in through an injection well and pumping now-hot water back out at a nearby production well. This opens up a lot more exploitable ground[2] but is still very expensive and not yet proven for production. A test is in progress at Newberry volcano in Oregon[3].
However, I have high hopes for geothermal longer-term. I think that the drilling costs may get a bit lower, especially as a lot of the technology is developed by oil and gas companies (and associated drilling companies that are now or soon to be out of work, with current low oil prices). Additionally, once EGS is more proven and therefore less risky, investors will be willing to put money in. I don't know if it will ever as profitable as fossil fuels, but once the geological and technological uncertainties are lowered, then it should start to become a great, fairly safe investment (i.e. the demand for electricity is unlikely to drop down much).
There isn't a strong consensus among the worlds people that global warming is 1) real 2) bad, and 3) preventable.
I myself doubt whether there will be strong action until major changes already start.
And unless the whole world agrees to act in unison, it doesn't make sense for America to act unilaterally. China and India will just eat our lunches and do the polluting for us.
I agree about the former, but not with the last two sentences. China and to a lesser extent India have massive incentives to get clean energy ASAP. The pollution in China is out of control, and is a major toll on public health, tourism, and agriculture (especially fishing). In the US, with its low population density, we worry more about climate change, which is more abstract than the local environmental pollution that is so visible and problematic in Asia.
While unilateral US action through regulation and taxation might not directly do anything to ameliorate the global problem, US investment in technology might. The US can absolutely sell technology to China and India, whether it's intellectual property sales/licensing, product sales/licensing, or simply by charging huge amounts of tuition for Asian engineering students to learn at US universities (this is currently a very large subsidy to US education).
The politics for this entire issue are very tricky. Putting your money where your mouth is and dropping hundreds of millions to fund clean energy is a good way to get the denialists to stop stonewalling. They can't claim that "it's all a conspiracy to grab some gov't money" if the person is actually putting even more of their own money towards this issue.
You say that as if the consequence is that we should not invest into alternative energy production.
Prokon used unregulated financial instruments to take investments, and they obscured their financial situation by spreading their balance sheet over dozens of companies. It took the bankruptcy administrators a year to even figure out what the financial situation really was.
I think what we should take from that is that oversight over companies that take financial investments, especially from consumers, should be tighter. That really has nothing to do with alternative energy.
Tell the people who down voted me about 15 points just in this thread. They look like attackers paid by the Greenies to down vote anyone who casts doubt on their quasi-religion and their carbon-taxes and big subsidies, e.g., about $100,000 of US Federal money for each Tesla car.
I gave a reference to the excellent BBC video with details of the total solution to the whole climate change subject and got attacked for doing that. Attacked for giving a reference to the solution. Tell the attackers, or the Mods, or PG, or Sam. Let the Mods find the attackers and kick them off HN.
These attacks are not the first: Once before I lost about 50 points from the Greenie attackers.
There is no debate, no refutation, no dispute, no discussion, no references, no facts, and no thanks -- just attacks. The attackers are the ones who shouldn't do that here.
I want to push this, see what HN is really about -- rational, scientific and technical communications or or paid off, propagandist, gangland, dirty politics.
I'm a moderator. The problem is that by adding so much noise, like this, to your comments, you're lowering the signal/noise ratio of the site. Please don't do that. If you would condense your comments down to just their core information, they'd be good contributions.
One of my posts here was very short and got attacked.
The length of my posts is not the reason I am being attacked: I've posted some very long posts at HN, right to the limit of 10,000 characters and sometimes longer broken into two posts without any attacks.
No, I'm being attacked because I am giving a reference to a BBC video clip and explaining that clip that conflicts with the climate change paid propagandists.
Surely you can see that.
This is a war at HN about the climate change movement. I'm giving rational arguments against the movement and being attacked.
Look, guys, some of you are all wound up, concerned, alarmed about the effect on the climate of CO2 from human activities and, thus, are eager to reduce burning of fossil fuels.
Well, since you are concerned, I have some really good news for you. For your concerns, the news is much better than anything from research on solar cells, energy storage, wind farms, geothermal energy, nuke energy, carbon-taxes, etc.
The news is really, really simple and says how to address your concerns in the best way, absolutely, positively the best way possible.
In three posts in this thread, I've given a reference to a quite well done BBC video available at YouTube.
The secret solution, best possible for your concerns? Sure: Do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Do zip, zilch, and zero. Totally f'get about it.
Why? Because as in the video, CO2 has nothing at all to do with the climate -- in any meaningful sense at all. None. All details are in the video. It's like you had some doctors tell you you had a very sick child and then a week later told you that it was all a mistake, that some lab tests got mixed up, and, in fact, your child is fully healthy.
And from CO2, the earth is fully healthy.
Again, why? Because in fact, CO2 has no effect at all meaningful. It didn't in the past several hundred thousand years, isn't now, and won't for the foreseeable future.
Best news you can get. Why? Because to save the planet from the dangers of CO2, you don't need to work on solar, wind, nukes, carbon-taxes, home insulation, subsidies, EPA shutdowns of coal plants, have cold houses in the winter and hot houses in the summer, etc. All those things you were doing to save the earth from CO2, you get to stop all of them.
Now, is this a happy day for you?
I'm not joking.
Watch the movie. If you have any questions, then post them here and I will respond.
People will say: don't look a gift horse in the mouth. But that's exactly the trap we have fallen into: A very few obtain most of the wealth, many of them fund an anti-tax and anti-government agenda; as government shrinks, the power of these people relatively increases; and so the public has to depend on oligarchs rather than on a democratic government including for national issues like energy and climate change. Then the oligarchs say: Look how generous we are; how you depend on us; who dares complain? And governments and people have to focus their efforts on pleasing them on all matters so as not to lose precious funding they control (instead of the legislature).
It's anti-democratic and, to use a provacative but applicable term, un-American. National issues should be decided democratically, not by a few oligarchs. We were founded on the rejection of an aristocracy.
It may be unfair to Gates and to this fund but unfortunately, even with the best of intentions, he is part of the problem.
Yes, I think this is really unfair. In no way is Gates a part of the problem, the country would be in much better shape if there were more like him. He innovated, created tens (hundreds?) of thousands of jobs, and one of the biggest companies on the planet. To top it all off, he puts the majority of his personal wealth in a foundation that he and his wife run to the benefit of humanity in general. It has been my dream since I was a kid to do the same (on a much smaller scale, likely). I wish there were thousands more like Gates and Buffet.
But he is, by amassing and using power that should be democratic, whether or not that was his intent. Doing good things with that power only makes one an "enlightened oligarch". Though to be fair to him, I don't know what he should do - at least lobby for higher taxes for the super-wealthy, and economic policies that don't result in such conncentration of power - Bill Gates of all people can't claim to be a helpess, innocent bystander.
I'll add that his power, even well-intentioned, can distort things for the worse. For example, there was (maybe is) a problem in some African nations where foreign AIDS (and/or malaria or TB) funding was so much greater than local health care funding that they hired away all the talent and net more people were dying from a lack of basic health services.
In fairness, there is a middle ground. Realistically money always will provide some power, some people will have more than others they have a right to use their money as they choose, and it's great if they use it to help others. However, when that concentration of money becomes so great that it undermines democracy, then it's gone too far.
> He innovated, created tens (hundreds?) of thousands of jobs, and one of the biggest companies on the planet. ...
A side point but let's not whitewash Microsoft's history, which wasn't all bad, but wasn't unicorns and rainbows either.
Just characterizing someone's statement and then disagreeing with your characterization is an internal debate for you. If you have a respose to something I specifically said, that's valuable.
Also, it's sad that democracy is now seen as such a liberal idea that people call it socialism (though it's not that at all).
Democracy is not some magic solution. It's often described as the best of a lot of bad options. It can only be as intelligent and effective as a mob of of its average citizenry - which if you look at democracies in the third-world and developing world where your average person is uneducated - doesn't lead to good results.
The best form of government has often been described as a benevolent dictatorship. This is closer to the form of governance of corporations and open-source projects. The problem is, there's no easy way to guarantee the benevolent part.
I see no problem with people like Bill Gates having amassed power, money, and influence, because he can use it far more effectively than a mob of your average citizens would - the average citizen being a lot less educated and less intelligent than Bill Gates. Now, among the wealthy and powerful you also get types like the Koch brothers, who use their power for dubious ends - that's inevitable in a capitalist system. There's no way to prevent that aside from very strict socialism - which has the same economic problems seen in any communist country past or present. So for better or worse, I think we have to accept the influence of the wealthy.
> Now, among the wealthy and powerful you also get types like the Koch brothers, who use their power for dubious ends - that's inevitable in a capitalist system.
It's not. Don't accept the status quo as inevitable. Money wasn't always so enormously concentrated in a few hands, and the disparity wasn't always so great. It's worse now in the U.S. than in modern history, and worse than on other Western nations. It's now in an extreme state.
The current rules of the economy, the tax rates, etc. that yield this situation are not inevitable or somehow natural. They aren't the result of capitalism or the free market. They are simply the product of politics that favor one group (a group that now has enormous power over government) over others.
> There's no way to prevent that aside from very strict socialism
I disagree. They can have their money, and we can separate money from politics. If we take money out of elections then money loses a great amount of influence. If we decide and fund public issues democratically, as our nation fundementally believes, everyone gets a vote in deciding things for their community. For example, I was reading that because government is so under-funded a park in a New York was being funded by someone wealthy. Now who decides where that park should go and what it should look like? Instead of being decided democratically by everyone in the community, it's dictated by the oligarch. That's not democracy.
> Democracy is not some magic solution. It's often described as the best of a lot of bad options.
I agree, but it's clearly the most effective; almost all the nations that lead in their citizen's welfare, from health to education to safety to civil rights to economic issues, are democracies. Also, there is very importat moral component - nobody has a right to tell me what to do, and if we have to come to an agreemet, we should vote on it with everyone getting an equal say.
> if you look at democracies in the third-world and developing world where your average person is uneducated - doesn't lead to good results.
I disagree that the results are necessarily worse than they would be under other forms of government. Also, we're talking about the United States and not a developing country.
> The best form of government has often been described as a benevolent dictatorship.
Hmmm ... I haven't heard that from anyone but the dictators who want people to think they are benevolent. If they are so effective and benevolent, why not hold an election? No doubt everyone will vote for them.
> I see no problem with people like Bill Gates having amassed power, money, and influence, because he can use it far more effectively than a mob of your average citizens would - the average citizen being a lot less educated and less intelligent than Bill Gates.
Let's assume Gates is more intelligent than the average (almost certainly true) and is purely benevolent (certainly not true, and remember the corrupting influence of power). He still can't do better because he can't possibly understand the interests and needs of millions of people; nobody has that capacity. That, along with the lack of true benevolence, is one place where central planning fails and where free markets and democracy succeed. The people who don't have a seat at the table are the ones who get their interests trampled on because either nobody cares, or people think of course, the other person's priorities really aren't as important as their own.
Now you're making some reasonable points, higher taxes on the rich and on corporations might help. It has to be weighed against the cost in lost innovation and investment. For example US corporate taxes are so high that companies don't repatriate their international profits - they invest the abroad when in many cases they would rather bring the money back to the US. The international "market" of countries and tax system also functions as a free market, and the money has a tendency to flow to where it will be taxed least. It's the the free market and competition (between countries) at work. Where the optimal point is for reducing the wealth gap while still maintaining optimal levels of innovation and investment is something nobody knows - the issue is very complex.
Removing (reducing to be more realistic) the influence of money on politics is a great idea. I'd love to see a system that leverages technology to provide a finer-grained representational democracy. One where you can vote for a representative on any given issue, or group of issues, or type of issues, etc and you can change that vote whenever you want. Google experimented with such a system internally at one point. Pure direct democracy is too dangerous, it's mob rule and would stomp all over minority rights and issues. Representational democracy is too far removed from the people. Something in between is likely the sweet spot. But it may never happen. Politicians have no incentive to dismantle the system that supports them.
I too disagree that alternative systems would work better in Africa, but it's clear that democracy doesn't work very well either compared to developed countries.
Well Gates might not be investing in things that people in the US would vote for, he's doing a great job in service of humanity. One could say that maybe the people he's actually trying to help, e.g. in Africa should vote on what to do, rather than him making the decisions - but would they make smart decision? These are uneducated people who don't know anything about economics, or science, or anything outside of their day to day struggle for survival. Well they might be better aware of the issues that they face, they almost certainly are not well equipped to solve them - democracy is of no help here.
Anyway it's all moot, the money is his, and it's his right to decide what to do with it. Good on him for using it to help humanity.
Gates seems to have bought into the propaganda FUD that renewable energy isn't today cheaper than fossil fuels. But it is, so why not invest in it. Yes, some money should go on longshot and forward looking R&D, but there's absolutely no need for Bill Gates to be talking down the existing solutions that are clearly better than coal in order to promote his own speculative investments.
Luckily, the free market, despite the excessive subsidies that are granted to coal and other fossil fuels, has caught on to the trend and more and more money is pouring in. 97% of economists that publish in this field agree that doing nothing will cost us more than action right now. But still the "common sense" hasn't caught up with reality and relentless propaganda has convinced large numbers of people that solar, wind, efficiency and demand manangement are the domain of idealistic tree huggers and/or parasitic boondoggles rather than a pragmatic and cost effective solution.
Raw renewables capacity (nameplate IIRC, possibly w/ capacity factor applied) is on the order of fossil costs (though those are grossly understated by the market), but storable and dispatchable renewables / sustainable solutions aren't. The cost of stored energy is far higher than of nondispatchable wind and solar.
This matters not only for grid power but for off-grid energy needs, ranging from chainsaws to backup generators to marine and aviation fuel.
> propaganda has convinced large numbers of people that solar, wind, efficiency and demand manangement are the domain of idealistic tree huggers and/or parasitic boondoggles rather than a pragmatic and cost effective solution.
The problem is that renewable energy is very capital intensive. Without some kind of price fixing (thank you tree huggers) it is excessively risky. When you have price fixing it is very attractive to speculators who make unpopular profits from electricity bills.
The best way to make money is to already own a big power station and not bother reinvesting or maintaining existing capacity (coal). You reach a situation where no one has any incentive to build anything unless they are heavily subsidised. The public are stuck renting ever more expensive energy whilst funding massive building projects that they will never own.
Electrical grids are capital intensive anyway, one of solar and winds big advantages is how non-capital intensive it is compared with the competition, that's why it's making up such a large share of newly built generation capacity across the globe.
As you say in places where demand isn't growing quickly, it's more about shutting down and replacing existing plants, and that's where it can get political, see the "war on coal" in the US. But even there, it's an economic no-brainer to shut the coal plants that are killing people and replace them with gas and renewable, the only thing stopping it from happening is politics, not anything inherent in renewable tech.
>but there's absolutely no need for Bill Gates to be talking down the existing solutions that are clearly better than coal in order to promote his own speculative investments.
I'm lost, where is he talking down existing solutions and what are his speculative investments you're talking about?
I don't think Bill Gates has much of a clue about what the world needs, he's very hypocritical. He lives a very consumptive 1% lifestyle (nothing wrong with that in my eyes - he earned it) but yet he turns around and preaches that everyone needs to change. Start with the man in the mirror bub.
Elon Musk is a bit better than him since he doesn't preach - but I would agree with Gates that he's a little gung ho on space travel. I honestly don't think it is humanity's place to leave earth, we are fish in water. Whatever comes after us (speaking in terms of evolution) will be the alpha in terms of space travel.
I'd give Gates a bit more credit (and that's from someone highly, highly critical of his business practices and even much of his erstwhile philanthropic activities). His public persona is relatively glib, but there are signs of deeper awareness generally expressed only privately.
We are the only form of life we know of that can get into space using ingenuity. The alpha could be our descendants or created by tying our ingenuity in with the genetic background of other creatures.
We are the best chance known of getting life off of one small planet - I think it is our place to expand life through the universe.
> I think it is our place to expand life through the universe.
Not sure if it's our "place" but for damn sure it's a good goal, getting life off the Earth and becoming sustainable in space massively reduces the risk of humans going extinct.
The solar system is rich in resources we are going to need at some point.
It is impossible to meet rising global energy needs without either a: nuclear energy as a wedge, b: divine advancements in renewable tech and cost, or c: burning a ton ton ton of fossil fuels.
I dream of a post-energy-scarcity-star-trek future pretty often, but the fact is that barring some revolutionary technological advancement, nuclear is the only long term hope we have to wean ourselves away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energies. "Green" tech it ain't either: refining rare earths is environmentally disastrous and even recycling the waste can be quite hazardous, such as lead battery recycling plants in Africa resulting in lead poisoning in surrounding communities.
If we want to be serious about renewable energy and the long road it will take to get there, we will have to get over our fears of Chernobyl and Homer Simpson running the power plant