Look at his other articles - this guy is super disingenuous. Disappointed I didn't look at that first before getting baited into trying to refute his heavily inaccurate and biased position. From his other posts
"Natural gas provides the most cost-effective near-term solution for affordable, reliable, low-emission energy. Shifts from coal to natural gas have produced the biggest emissions reductions over the past 15 years. Natural gas produces only 10% of the air pollutants and 50% of the CO2 that coal does.[10] Natural gas also has many uses beyond providing power; fertilizers, computers, medical equipment, steel, plastic, mobile phones, cars, and most consumer products are currently made from natural gas and oil. In fact, even solar and wind require natural gas as a backup because they don’t operate most of the time.
Energy Capital Ventures (ECV) is one of the few VCs that sees the potential of natural gas. Instead of chasing popular trends, ECV correctly sees the path to achieving low-emission energy will come through investments in scaleable energy technology such as advanced leak detection and methane capture, process automation and controls, renewable natural gas, and synthetic microbes that absorb greenhouse emissions."
Would be happy to read your refutes of his current article since I'm also not seeing how all these (unproven) solutions are going to successfully reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. Wonderful ideas. But I would like to see the code.
For example: The oil refinement process basically boils the oil into various types of fuels and gasses. You get a certain amount of tar, oil, gasoline, diesel, kerosine, gas etc. Refineries are able to prioritize output to certain fuel types somewhat. But not completely and/or efficiently. In the end: If we're producing X amount of diesel we get X amount of the other types as well. The amounts of fuel produced are far too great to store. They need to be burned. It means for every number of cars, trucks and boats burning diesel there will also need to be a number of planes burning kerosine. etc.
It also means that if we're moving from gasoline cars to diesel cars (because diesel has less emissions). If the demand and production for one specific type of fuel increases it will result in an increase of all the fuel types. The excess types which are less in demand would simply be shipped to somewhere else more cheaply. Or used in some other sector.
We're not only having a huge dependency on fossil fuels. But the dependency is also tightly intertwined throughout various facets of society. We'll need to somehow accomplish a mass reduction across the board. I can imagine there's many green initiatives not really contributing as much as they're hoping?
The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas peaker plants during heat waves), but this blog post is a lot of complicating noise in what is a fairly simple economics of implementation problem.
Storage is a big, unsolved problem. As a quantitative resource on that I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" by the great (and unfortunately recently deceased) David MacKay [1], it's available for free.
For a large country like the UK or Germany you need to increase electricity production with a slew rate of 6-8 GW/h in the morning, and decrease it with the same rate in the evening. Currently the only feasible storage form (in terms of quantity and regulation speed) for that is hydro, but most countries simply don't have enough mountain areas to make this work.
If my utility runs a gas generator, wind and solar allow it to run at some fraction of its capacity most of the time. Sure, overnight when there’s little wind, the gas might go full throttle. But that’s still a huge reduction in emissions if most of the time the grid is fully wind/solar.
Yes, storage matters quite a lot because electric grids burn out if supply doesn't equal demand constantly. You need the storage not only for overnight, you need it to store energy when wind and solar are overproducing relative to current demand and you need it to supply that stored energy when wind and solar are underproducing if you expect the grid to get rid of demand resources like coal and especially natural gas.
another unmentioned cost of especially wind, but also to some extent solar is the huge transmission upgrade needed to support wind. It is a huge cost and it is never accounted for in the numbers when people are pushing for wind and solar (because it usually ruins the claim that wind and solar are cheaper over their lifecycle vs natural gas). They are also costs the consumer largely gets stuffed with via billing items outside of energy cost so it's kind of insidiously hidden from the consumer.
The problem is that we don't need to halve our emissions, as would happen if we fully switched from coal to natgas (Presumably sourced from a magical, peaceful land of unicorns, as opposed to, say, the Russian Federation, or some middle eastern despot.)
We need to zero our emissions, if we want to avoid climate catastrophe. And natgas isn't going to do that for us.
I think you’re letting perfect be the enemy of good. How do we get to zero? First cut in half. Then cut the second half. Waiting for a perfect solution today when there’s incremental progress to be made is foolish
That's not going to happen, though. What is going to happen is we'll invest trillions of dollars into natgas infrastructure and then go all whoopsie-daisies-we-can't-afford-to-just-let-it-sit-idle, and we'll be permanently locked into it.
Temporary hacks have an odd way of becoming permanent features, especially when mind-blowing amounts of money are on the line.
It is certainly an unsolved problem but there are nice ideas floating around. I don't know about feasibility or scalability but some suggest to just elevate land with fluid pressure or they suggested air filled tanks that are drawn to the bottom of seas so that energy is generated from buoyancy. That latter approach allegedly can be scaled to multiple GWh.
Sure, you need a deep see and installation is difficult but the latter approach has the advantage of not needing pumps, which are usually maintenance heavy.
>The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close.
So what? Or put another way, if its so cheap, why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come? What do they (and every other country) know that you don't?
The reality is you're not comparing apples to apples. Natural gas can serve as base load and power a modern economy. Solar/wind can't - doesn't matter if they are free. They can't.
By the time any new nuclear reactor is designed, built and turned on, we'll certainly have many new/more ways to store energy for longer time (e.g new battery chemistry, hydrogen…).
The new EPR (Flamanville) continues to be delayed and the one in Finland that just went live has been shut down last week. Also, we may have to reduce the power of many of our plants that are built along rivers because we won't be able to cool them off during droughts.
It's much easier and safer to install renewables now (as we just started with offshore wind) that bet on nuclear. It's also quite difficult to envision relying on Niger and Kazakhstan to supply uranium in the long term…
But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue. And by the time we hit such limits, we'll have many more long term storage options.
I'm not against nuclear (it's fine) but let's not pretend we're still in The Glorious Thirty.
>The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine.
Yet France, with all its nuclear power plants (half of them off due to technical issues), also has revived some coal plants.
>Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc?
>But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue.
Really? 'Easily' and 'cheaply'? So even with massive cultural pressure to move to renewables, somehow we don't want to move to a cheaper energy source? You sure about that?
What if ... we can't actually replace fossil fuels with wind/solar.
You write about "massive cultural pressure to move to renewables" but what about all the money to be lost by the fossil fuel industry? Billions of € coming every year in deep pockets weight definitely more than the "pressure" of a Greta, a few Extinction Rebellion members and some ecologists/socialists.
Looks like we managed to replace 40% of fossil fuels in two decades, without much inflation (almost in line with countries who did not deploy renewables):
We'll see how UK continues its transition, but I see renewables becoming cheaper while nuclear keeps rising. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...: "As of May 2022, the project is two years late and the expected cost is £25–26 billion,[2] 50% more than the original budget from 2016" Oops!
>Looks like we managed to replace 40% of fossil fuels in two decades, without much inflation (almost in line with countries who did not deploy renewables):
Just to get our terms in-line, renewables typically include hydro-electric. Hydro-electric is a great power-source if you have the geography for it. My province of Ontario, between Nuclear and Hydro, pretty much only derives 5% of power from fossil fuels. The problem is, there aren't any more places to dam to generate hydro. So that's done.
And yeah, there is a ceiling on how much wind/solar you can handle as a percentage of your power-mix because you need to rely on base-load to bridge the intermittency of wind and solar. I don't know what that percentage is ... maybe it's 40%, maybe it's 60% - but it's going to be somewhere in that range.
>We'll see how UK continues its transition, but I see renewables becoming cheaper while nuclear keeps rising.
It doesn't matter if they are free! You're not replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar because you still need to run your economy when the sun isn't shinning or the wind isn't blowing. You'll need base-load from somewhere else. Nuclear is actually terrible for that because it can't spin up and spin-down on-demand. Hydro and Natural gas are perfect for that, but like I said, if you don't have the geography for hydro, you're stuck with natural gas.
The 20th century power grid structure - baseload, load-following, and peaker - is decrepit, and this should be more generally understood. It was designed around a few centralized power plants feeding into a large regional grid from which cities and industry would draw power.
Modern electrical grids are powered by a much larger range of primary energy sources, and increasingly have distributed storage and generation as key components. This requires some sophisiticated load-balancing technology, but we're not reliant on engineers throwing switches on a mainboard like it was 1950 and slide rules were in everyone's pockets, are we? For example see:
For example, if solar input to a grid at noon greatly exceeds demand, or there's strong afternoon offshore winds, an advanced grid could instruct all battery storage linked to the grid (in the form of everything from electric cars to home battery systems) to switch to absorbing that output in real-time, while keeping the overall grid energized. The notion that you'd even want a steady state baseload system dumping power into the grid in that situation makes little sense. If the sun goes down and wind dies down, then switch all the battery storage to feed into the grid, on a real-time second-by-second basis. That's how future grids will operate in the absence of either nuclear or fossil fuel inputs.
> if its so cheap, why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come?
Because Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor who approved NS1 in his last days, liked Russia, which earned him nice board seats on Russian energy companies. And because Angela Merkel had her constituency in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the landfall site of the pipelines.
And LNG was always associated with fracking in the US, so for environmental reasons it was not very popular.
>Because Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor who approved NS1 in his last days, liked Russia, which earned him nice board seats on Russian ene
Yeah - it's always corrupt politicians and big oil, big gas, big whatever. Alternatively, maybe it means that wind/solar cannot meet German energy needs.
And by the way, this isn't just Germany. It's every country that doesn't have access to hydro or nuclear.
To be fair Germany isn't especially sunny or even _that_ windy. Somewhere like Colorado or Morocco is far more reliable for renewables. Maybe not to the point of baseload, but enough to plan for. So location is really important here.
> why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come?
German here. Let me tell you that a lot of us have been asking the same question. :)
Your argument seems to be that "they built these pipelines so that must have been a rational decision" but looking at the track record of the conservatives (Merkel's party, "in charge" for 32 out of the last 39 years), their donors, and the just straight-up corruption cases routinely found-and-ignored in this party... I'd say you need to find better arguments.
EDIT: and yes, as siblings point out, their competitor SPD didn't exactly take a rational stance on this either...
The point is, it isn't just Germany. There is no country on Earth that actually replaced fossil fuels with wind/solar. The point with Germany is that you guys invested billions into this, and you still are building pipelines for natural gas and buying coal-derived power from your neighbors.
Are you sure you're not just making excuses for the failure of renewables in Germany to replace fossil fuels?
Again, I mentioned Germany, but it isn't just Germany. No country in the world is running on wind/solar. There are no near-term plans for any country on Earth to replace fossil fuels with wind/solar. It isn't the fact that some conservative leaders put some extra taxes or regulations on solar and wind. It's that solar and wind cannot actually replace fossil fuels. Solar and Wind are diffuse, intermittent power sources, with no grid-scale battery technology available to bridge that intermittence. Therefore, you need natural gas to use a base load when the sun isn't shining, and the wind isn't blowing. This is also why natural gas companies tend to be one of the biggest supporters of solar and wind.
Yes, I'm pretty sure. The conservative govts of the different regions introduced legislation that meant you can't currently build wind energy _at all_ in many of the places where it would make sense. That wasn't a fluke; the stated intent was to keep wind energy from "ruining our beautiful landscape". The new (SPD/green/liberals) coalition is just in the process of slowly unwinding these.
For solar, the ministries are by now steeped in a mentality that's hostile to renewables. Robert Habeck (greens) is now minister of economy and ecology, and even when he told his houses to come up with regulation improvements to solar, the results were... weird. One report stated that the proposals included rules like "if I use any of my own PV generated power in my home, I receive none of the regular public subsidies anymore for the power I send into the national grid." There was no technical or logical grounds for that; it was just that all the ministry mentality by now was "if there's a way to put stones in the way of renewables, the default is to do that."
Frankly, and I'm sorry to sound rude about this, you need to stop using a country as an argument for which you clearly have no idea what the political & societal conditions are. Like I said in my first reply: find better arguments.
>Frankly, and I'm sorry to sound rude about this, you need to stop using a country as an argument for which you clearly have no idea what the political & societal conditions are.
I don't take this as rudeness but rather a result of a different worldview.
The disconnect you and I have is that you believe that wind/solar can replace fossil fuels. In a universe where that fact is true, the fact that wind/solar hasn't been rolled out would most likely be a result of bad government policy.
I don't believe wind/solar can replace fossil fuels. So the fact that wind/solar haven't succeeded in Germany is perfectly inline with expectations. It wouldn't matter what policies Germany put in, because it isn't possible for wind/solar to replace fossil fuels was never going to work. There was no policy that was going to change the reality of this.
No, my point is that regardless of whether you or me are right, your use of Germany as an example is not holding up because you clearly don't bring the background knowledge to argue your point using this example. I'm not saying you're even wrong, just that this particular argument you're making is not informed enough to hold up.
>I'm not saying you're even wrong, just that this particular argument you're making is not informed enough to hold up.
Let's torture this a little longer.
Regardless of the minutia, and internal politics, the big picture reality is that Germany still invested in wind/solar to a greater extent then any advanced economy.
I understand you're saying that mistakes were made and more could have been done, and this political party didn't do a good job, etc., but that's par for course. That's how any complex government program is run in a democratic nation. In fact, maybe you even have to price that in. That is, if a well-managed, rich nation cannot shepherd through this transition, that also says something about the viability of wind/solar.
With respect to why Germany is still building natural gas pipelines. In my mind this was an actual rational decision because I truly believe that when it comes to high-level people in the know, there is an understanding that wind/solar is never going to work. You would not be spending billions of dollars when an alternative is both cheaper (as proponents of wind/solar claim), geopolitically less reliant on an authoritarian state, and also gives you political brownie points (because everyone loves wind/solar).
Look up iron flow batteries and other developing solutions. Assuming no one has been working on this problem and that you know more than them is usually a poor choice.
The other countries know that if they hard stop energy flow their economies will suffer, and these projects take a decade to plan, a decade to sell, and a decade to implement. Anything Germany is building now was probably developed or announced in the 00s.
> Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage
That will work for shifting day & night, but I don't see any feasible energy solutions for summer-winter shifting, or even to bridge weeks with limited sunshine (and/or wind).
There are large populations living relatively far from the equator, which see huge differences in daylight during summer & winter.
We should try to get as much energy from renewables like sun & wind, but I think we'll still need another form of energy generation. Energy storage can help us increase the upper limit of renewables in the total yearly mix though.
There are different types of storage with different trade-offs. In my opinion we'll eventually see lower-efficiency but low cost-per-kWh storage like CO2->hydrocarbon storage used for longer-term seasonal or disaster-preparedness storage, while higher-efficiency higher cost-per-kWh or limited-capacity means like battery and pumped hydro will be primarily used for short term day/night storage.
The cost of inefficiency is a function of energy stored, not storage capacity per se, so effectively its cost scales as (storage capacity) * (# of times charged/discharged). Therefore low efficiency isn't particularly expensive for long-term storage.
So maybe we'll see gas turbines continue to provide power that ultimately is sourced from wind and solar via hydrocarbon conversion, but that's perfectly OK since it would be carbon neutral.
The upshot is this is all a reason to be sanguine about solar and wind.
If we could reduce our energy dependence on burning things to use cases where it actually makes sense to burn things (such as heating in extreme regions), we could basically consider the problem solved.
Solar and wind will always suffer from a storage problem. The key to modern power is not potential but throughput and consistency. Modern infrastructure needs x Watts delivered 24/7, shifting to y Watts during on-peak hours and z Watts during off-peak hours.
Because of inconsistency, solar and wind will remain non-viable as a primary source of power.
Making solar and wind consistent with various kinds of storage is likely going to be more economical than producing said energy with nuclear power plants.
As for comparison to natural gas and such, CO2 taxes will be increased until those are phased out. Still economical? Taxes will be raised until they aren't. We have to leave most of the carbon in the ground.
The waste produced by a renewable energy system will be small (and of the same kind) compared to the waste produced by industrial society as a whole. If the renewable energy system isn't sustainable because of waste, then neither will be that industrial society, even if it were nuclear powered.
To be fair, waste isn't really the issue with nuclear power either.
I'm not buying that all the solar panels, batteries, and grid infrastructure will produce little waste. Do you have any references to studies this or are you just going by gut feeling?
What specific waste is causing your trepidation? Solar and wind have most of their impact from mundane things like glass, aluminum, and steel. But enormous amounts of these are produced for the rest of the economy (annual world production of steel is nearly 2 gigatonnes). None of them present an insuperable obstacle to a global economy that could function indefinitely.
Last year we had the first ever permanent storage open. If it really opened, perhaps it was delayed again. Because storing nuclear waste long term is not a solved problem aside from the fact that uranium isn't endless either. Deconstructed nuclear plants also need to be cleaned up.
Wind and solar will provide cheap power at times, extremely cheap at times when the production outstrips demand. It’s a simple and easy business model to buy this cheap power and sell it back to the grid at times of high demand. Buy some batteries, then buy low and sell high electricity. Bam, grid evened out by the invisible hand.
I keep hearing its so much cheaper, but renewables keep requiring dark patterns, more money, more subsidies. If it was so much cheaper it would just win automatically because of the market.
Boston doesn’t have a huge amount of renewable energy in our mix, sadly. Most of New England is fossil fuels. More renewables would make it easier to keep prices low.
But how does the narrative of “this is so impossibly cheaper and better” square with “we can’t build enough here so it’s 30% more expensive”. Either the region simply isn’t cost effective for solar / wind in which case we need nuclear to have any hope of clean energy, or renewables aren’t actually cheaper. If it was actually cheaper then it would just happen automatically.
Did you know that electricity prices have exploded in France because EDF (French power company) have lowered their production from 360 to ~300 TWh year over year? That's due to technical problems with the nuclear plants (half of the fleet is still offline).
So given that it's so cheap you've converted your home to be 100% solar with battery storage and went off grid, right?
Probably not. As you'd like to have power for those dark winter days where you don't see the sun for weeks on end and any viable battery storage will only last a day or two.
Dont get me wrong, I love solar, I'm building a house with it. But outside of select niches there's no viable storage for solar or wind that deals with seasonal intermittency.
I think you're missing the fact that solar and wind, being quite mature and otherwise unencumbered, have been pretty well optimized to what physics and chemistry will allow. Further gains will be slow and incremental.
Nuclear has been around quite a while as well, but is heavily encumbered by public sentiment, sub-optimal regulations, and knowledge atrophy. There is much more room for optimization before running into physical laws.
The price of renewable energy is often very low, frequently even negative. This does not reflect renewables advantages, but their disadvantages: being available in abundance when the energy is not needed or wanted.
Even the Energy Return on Investment is barely sufficient for solar, for example, so I have a hard time believing that the cost is actually competitive.
I would agree he has some valid points but on the whole he misses a fair bit and sounds very jaded. Like lets just do Natural Gas and Nuclear Power - which isn't a great solution in the long run.
1. Wind + Solar are insured for 20 years but last much longer. They are still in their early phase of adoption and costs are still falling.
2. Of course energy isn't a one size fits all - so you need to be aware of all the different product attributes and comparative offerings. Just like you wouldn't deploy
facebook on heroku.
3. Regulatory and political willpower take long periods of time to build/change.
4. Capital deployments in climate tech are very different than VC and returns are lower
5. Manufacturing infrastructure and business models take long periods of time to build out and get traction
6. EVs are going to change a lot of the emissions space
7. There are a lot of very entrenched companies who have been actively working to stop progress on this problem since the 90s and they remain in power. Tough inertia to break through.
8. I could go on forever.
I hear that he is no longer just deploying solar, wind and ESS and is feeling disappointed that he has devoted so much time. All of that work helps move the needle and build the infrastructure, talent and capital to start deploying and cleaning up the grid. When he deployed EE capital in 2008 there wasn't the political will power (ACES regulations collapsed) and technology (most utilities didn't have smart meters). While he may not have made money he certainly helped the industry along and that is an important part of trying to solve this multifaceted complex problem.
Agree with the sentiment let's not let "Perfect is the enemy of good". However let's not let these hard fought gains be for naught.
edit: The OP's argument is disingenuous he's a natural gas booster, annoyed I responded in depth here.
Agreed. It seems the author is falling into another shortsighted position after getting out of the previous one.
> it’s time to be honest about all the costs and benefits of every energy source
is a good advice, but then you can't just say
> Solar farms need 75 times more land to produce the same amount of energy.
based on a study that compares the footprint of only the facility. To be honest about the costs, you have to compare the lifetime operating costs: the area lost to mining, the infrastructure to service the facilities, and to distribute the power (wind farms are farther out, pylons and roads are non-negligible land use).
Another interesting observation is:
> Trillionsof dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
which suggests that either solar and wind didn't take off, or they did take off but increased our hunger for energy. The author fails to consider the latter by later advocating that energy must be affordable. In fact, making energy affordable is likely to exacerbate the problem, as it drives demand high.
The 87% -> 84% is disingenuous at best and probably not accurate in the first place.
It represents a massive uptick in China’s carbon energy consumption while places like the USA have been flat to down and transitioned nearly 25% of energy consumption to renewables
> Nuclear plants can operate for over 80 years and run for 100 years if they are well-maintained. By contrast, solar panels and wind turbines last only about 20 years.
This is theorized. There doesn't exist a nuclear power plant that is even nearly that old.
The oldest still functioning reactor is the Benzau nuclear power plant in Switzerland. It started operating 53 years ago.
Meanwhile the oldest operating(IIRC), grid-connected array is the TISO-10 (also in Switzerland), which started operations in 1982.
Solar panels usually don't just fail catastrophically, but lose efficiency gradually. In the 35-year assessment of the mentioned plant it was noted that the rate of degradation was around 0.38%/year.
20 years is just the warranty period for a certain performance level.
I recently heard (on HN, maybe you did too) about a form of energy that sounds pretty utopian to me. Ultra deep bore geothermal.
Geothermal has been around for a long time and has problems like causing earthquakes and needing very specific geological formations that only exist in certain places. But these limitations are mostly due to the fact that we can't bore that deep.
Geothermal energy exists under every point on Earth, in quantities far greater than we could ever use, in the form of heat which can be used to run steam turbines that existing power plants already have.
The problem is that this energy lies deeper than we have ever dug. If we could dig deeper, we might be able to replace the fuel burning part of most existing fossil fuel power plants with geothermal steam. Deep boring is a hard problem to be sure, but is it harder than fusion? Seems unlikely!
Anyway, this startup https://www.quaise.energy/ was on HN a while ago, and while I have no idea if their specific technology works, it seems like we ought to be allocating at least a medium size fraction of the fusion research budget to deep bore geothermal research instead.
Sounds too good to be true! Is geothermal truly renewable? Or is it just abundant enough that it would last us for thousands of years? I wonder if there are other long term side effects of releasing heat from the core.
Most geothermal heat is produced by nuclear decay in subsurface radioisotopes vs gravitational/frictional source or residual heat of planetary formation, so it's effectively renewable at any kind of level of extraction that we might feasibly be able to make use of.
"About 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) below the Earth’s crust, or surface, is the hottest part of our planet: the core. A small portion of the core’s heat comes from the friction and gravitational pull formed when Earth was created more than 4 billion years ago. However, the vast majority of Earth’s heat is constantly generated by the decay of radioactive isotopes, such as potassium-40 and thorium-232."[0]
Obviously that's not true, but it is a data point you have to explain. For all the lip-service paid to wind and solar, nobody is actually acting like wind/solar are the future.
Look, all that the lack of domination of solar/wind shows at this time is that solar and wind are not yet cheap enough to displace already installed, capital-cost-sunk fossil-fuel-using plants which are not being charged CO2 fees. Be able to achieve that would be remarkable.
However, in most of the world, most new generating capacity is renewable, even without CO2 charges. Renewables have crashed in cost so quickly that there's still a large installed base of fossil fuel capacity that just hasn't reached end of life yet. The persistence of this zombie technology doesn't mean renewables can't power the world, it just means zombies are hard to kill.
>Look, all that the lack of domination of solar/wind shows at this time is that solar and wind are not yet cheap enough to displace already installed, capital-cost-sunk fossil-fuel-using plants which are not being charged CO2 fees.
Even if solar/wind were free, they still can't displace fossil-fuels(i.e. they need coal or natural gas to serve as base load). That's the problem.
Of course it could, in any number of ways. No, you don't need coal or natural gas to serve as baseload. One could, for example, make hydrogen, store that underground, then burn that when renewables are not directly available. If renewables are very cheap, one could simply heat some large thermal mass (rocks, sand) by resistive heating, then use that later to drive a thermal cycle.
Babcock and Wilcox is commercializing a system like that second right now, using sand heated to 1200 C to store energy for 100 hours or more, with a round trip efficiency > 50% and a storage cost of maybe $0.05/kWh.
This is what I was talking about when I dissed you for saying anything that wasn't existing yet couldn't exist. You need to censor your prejudices about renewable energy, your irrational dislike for it is leading you astray.
These are engineering projects, not science projects. They are becoming practical not because of huge advances in science fictional novelties, but because the economic context (where fossil fuels are going to be gone, one way or the other) is making approaches using largely off-the-shelf things competitive. Thermal storage, for example, is almost steampunk.
The big question with renewables is not whether it can do the job -- it clearly can -- it's which of the many subsidiary technologies will win.
>These are engineering projects, not science projects. They are becoming practical not because of huge advances in science fictional novelties,
You equivocate between things that are ready and proven NOW versus things that may be ready in the future. This is a common method of argument with proponents of wind and solar.
How about this: There are around a thousand cities in the world with a population of 750,000 or more. When you show me one of those cities powered by wind/solar/choose-favorite-storage (not even to 100%, but maybe to 90%), then maybe we can say that wind/solar can do the job.
Right now that number is 0 (and there are no near to mid-term plans to change that) so I think you have to have a little bit of humility with respect to wind/solar viability.
What's happening is that the environment in which these technologies have to work is changing. When fossil fuels were cheap and CO2 untaxed, it's really hard for renewables and storage to win.
But that's not going to be the world going forward. Fossil fuels have to be phased out, which means raising CO2 taxes as high as needed to make that happen. In that environment, it's suddenly highly profitable to push these technologies, and they will go from nothing to dominant in very little time.
The supposed advantage of nuclear, that it has already been demonstrated, means very little. Nuclear had its change to get better, and it got worse. It's already demonstrated it's a loser.
The market is already making the judgment on how this will turn out, whether you like it or not. Money is flowing into renewables and storage; very little is going into nuclear. Nuclear is old, tired, and slowly dying.
This reads more to me as: “I thought I was going to be a hero, turns out I was early in the technology cycle, haven’t yet had the impact that I wanted and now I’ve finally realized I made a ton of assumptions.”
Instead of increasing his scope of understanding though, He decided to retreat into the thing that won during the time period that he was trying to win.
That strategy rarely works.
That's how I read it too. Also as someone who has been in the industry since early 200s it's been a long rollercoaster ride and it isn't stopping. Easy to get disenchanted and jaded especially if you live in the bay area where you watch people make money for stuff that sometimes has little to no real value.
> I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
> I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safest and most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.
These two points taken together make me wonder how many trillions of dollars would have to be invested in nuclear to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels from 84% to zero? Also, I wonder how nuclear holds up in the "Security: Does an energy source enable a country to maintain its autonomy" department. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p..., over 40% of Uranium is coming from Kazakhstan, which is itself not a democratic country and a close ally of Russia. And the countries with the most nuclear plants have next to no Uranium production of their own. So much for autonomy...
I clicked the "next" button and found a similarly structured story about how ESG guidelines are also not the answer and how oil and gas companies can improve their image.
I am concerned that this article isn't expressing genuinely held beliefs and is instead part of a marketing effort (and not just for the author).
Reading that is a sad reminder of why people make such poor decisions. He’s still arguing about things in the abstract without a basis in the underlying mechanics of these systems. And the sad thing is he’s effective at convincing people.
Sounds like anybody who goes to work for the fossil fuel industry.
"Trillions spent on solar and wind" but apparently what we spent annually on Fossil Fuels is not significant enough to mention and Nuclear power can't cost too much because government money pays to build the plants.
“Trillionsof dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.”
Core issue is he’s at best justifying his points with sloppy thinking, we didn’t just transition to solar for fun we got actual energy from those investments. The world also spent around 100 trillion on just oil over 20 years excluding natural gas and coal yet tomorrow we are going to still need to spend more. So, on that basis it looks like a great investment and huge progress.
Except look at where exactly that 87% number is from, it includes fuel oil to heat homes while excluding passive solar gain. So it’s a number that does represent something just not “dependence on fossil fuels.” After all the primary use of energy by humanity is either plants converting sunlight to chemical energy or even more holistically the energy needed to keep the earth from freezing. In the end he picked those numbers because saying saying humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels dropped from something like 0.00087% to 0.00084% just doesn’t have the same impact.
I don't really understand his conclusion. If I understand it correctly, it boils down to: Fossil fuels are cheaper (better ROI) than renewables, therefore changes/improvements to fossil fuels did more to reduce CO2 than renewables. My work on "utopian energy" didn't have the effect I wished it had.
Climate change is a problem. Just because gas, oil, and coal are cheaper and made improvements doesn't change a thing about that.
He's a self-promotionist who seems to have built quite the profile marketing himself as providing energy "truth".
It's inevitably going to turn out he represents oil and gas in some way because boy does he just gloss over the subsidies those industries receive while uncritically spruiking the benefits.
EDIT: oh look, the very next story he has on this site is how fossil fuel companies can improve their image "to protect our prosperity" [1]
> I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. > But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions during the past 15 years (over 60%)
> has come from switching from coal to natural gas.
But once you transition to natural gas, you can't go any lower with fossil fuels, while to stop warming we need to get to zero human-caused CO2 emissions, so clearly natural gas is not a viable solution.
> I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and
> batteries. This, too, was false. Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and
> solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil
> fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
Sorry, that does not make it false. During those 20 years, energy production rose, mostly in emerging markets, while the transition to cleaner sources happened mostly in developed markets.
Yeah I see a big push for nuclear in the last few weeks/months... only the proponents always fail to mention the huge delays and cost overruns associated with those projects. Like the nuclear power plants currently being finished in European Union (Finlad, France, Slovakia) cost between 3-5 times of the original budget while taking about 15-17 years to build. And China is building nuclear power stations too and also seems to always be too optimistic about the costs and the time, while also building loads of renewables.
Actually the nuclear push seems to be too intensive this time to be random, so maybe it is coordinated - or is it just me?
> while to stop warming we need to get to zero human-caused CO2 emissions, so clearly natural gas is not a viable solution.
Currently an immense source of greenhouse gases is offgassing by landfills. Burning that is a great way to turn those short hydrocarbons into carbon dioxide, which is comparatively benign.
Ah yes, I've heard that one. Which is why I mentioned China.
But also, it's not the technology that is building and running those projects, it's people, and in the foreseeable future, it will continue to be ran by people, so even if it is somehow a people problem that only happens for nuclear energy and not (or much less) for renewable energy, it is something that needs to be taken into account when planning for new energy sources.
Not only is the blog post black and white, the comments here are similar.
We have not leveraged yet the potential solar and wind have. They are easy to build easy to understand, make you self sufficient and are now the cheapest option from all.
In parallel there are plenty of countries who have lots of space and uran and could do more nuclear (ignoring the storage issue).
And geothermal is a good option in plenty of countries as well.
But funny enough people still think that nuclear IS THE solution while ignoring that the thorium reactor is still not viable, that we don't have enough uran and that they are highly dependent on water for cooling which becomes a big problem in the summer for plenty of countries.
Let's finally stop talking about our future energy mix and trying to do the best option for were you are.
We need to get a ton of energy changed from high co2 production to the lowest possible very fast.
And btw. Whoever this dude is he is probably not someone who would be able or allowed to build a nuclear reactor so his best option is probably to still be in the solar business.
Nonsense. Uranium is plentiful in Earth's crust. There's enough to last for the foreseeable future. Obviously it's not infinite, but that's not the same as "there's not enough of it".
Germany's nuclear waste disposal will end up costing over 100 billion, the companies themselves shelled out a mere fraction of it, and the public is now officially on the hook for the rest.
I really don't get the nuclear argument. We are in a crisis, and yet it's being argued for a very expensive solution that will come online ... in a decade or two. If all goes according to plan, which currently is not really the case. We do not have the funds to go 100% nuclear now, so why not do the cheap and fast version that reduces the carbon footprint almost immediately? If it turns out 100% renewable is not possible, then build nuclear. Like I said, they won't all built in one go anyway.
>Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
A lot of that money was spent on R&D. Tens of billions of [inflation-adjusted] dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project, but the net effect on fossil fuel usage was zero (outside of two cities in Japan).
If this is the author's key argument, he's just wrong, plain and simple. For context, I support investment in nuclear energy, precisely because it offers the fastest replacement for fossil fuels. But that doesn't mean I think you couldn't do it with solar and batteries — you absolutely could — but the technology needs time to mature.
>1. Security: Does an energy source enable a country to maintain its autonomy? Controlling access to critical minerals and natural resources to make affordable, reliable energy is a precondition for liberty and self-determination. Relying on energy imports or minerals from other countries puts a nation at risk.
It's painfully ironic to read a paean to nuclear power that leads with this as its highest priority! Sure, this is perfectly valid for nuclear energy in the United States, or in India, China, Russia, the UK, France, Pakistan -- you know the list. But the modal nation cannot produce fissile material and maintain its autonomy. It will be sanctioned or worse. Just ask Iran, South Africa or Libya.
>7. Land use: What are the energy source’s effects on wildlife, habitat, farmland, viewsheds, and coastlines? For example, a typical 1,000-megawatt US nuclear power plant needs little more than 1 square mile to operate. Solar farms need 75 times more land to produce the same amount of energy. Wind farms need 360 times more.
This is largely a red herring. Actual land use is driven by the regulation of land use, and any energy-related uses are a small fraction. If solar farms displace agricultural usage in the Southwest, that could actually be good for the environment by reducing irrigation! Also, wind can be trivially co-located with agriculture, while for solar this is difficult, so a simple area comparison is not apples-to-apples.
Thanks for the correction. I will add that the equivalent cost basis (i.e. the expected cost of carrying out a similar project today) is probably higher than inflation due to Baumol's cost disease and increased regulation.
Clever writing can let you argue for any viewpoint. That doesn’t make it true.
>I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissionsduring the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas.
Upgrading coal to gas is a great intermediate step. However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited. Plus, many countries have already done it.
>I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillionsof dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
We increased global generating capacity from 15,000 to 26,000 TWh. So green energy has supported economic and social development through electrification without adding new pollution sources.
>I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safestand most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.
Nuclear is the safest way to generate electricity, but that safety comes at a financial cost. Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper.
But solar and wind are no where near sustainable, or efficient. They are extremely fragile and have serious detrimental effects on their local environment. Nuclear is the best option and gas is a massive improvement. The whole point of this article is that we are chasing a utopian ideal instead of actually fixing the problems. Once again, perfect is being the enemy of improvement.
Sure, some days they'll be covered by snow. But in industrial systems that can easily be melted / brushed off. Obviously they don't generate as much in winter as in summer. But cool bright winter days are surprisingly plentiful.
Alaskan here; it doesn’t work so hot in the winter months. Even if they are kept clear by maintenance workers (not that hard or expensive to hire someone to clear snow from a panel) the sun’s azimuth is so low in the winter that there is hardly any energy produced.
Small correction: you mean altitude, not azimuth. Altitude is how far you need to tilt your head vertically to look at an object. Azimuth is the compass direction.
Very well. Rooftop solar in Seattle pays for itself in 7-9 years, and we have the least sunlight and cheapest grid power of almost any place in the continental US.
> Rooftop solar in Seattle pays for itself in 7-9 years
Can you show me the arithmetic for that? I understand rooftop solar to cost $20,000 - $25,000. Is your non-solar electric bill over 7-9 years really more expensive than that? Seems impossible.
Victoria BC area here (practically next door), it wouldn't work for us.
My annual hydro bill was $2400 in 2018 with baseboard heating, and $2050 for 16,500kWh in 2021 after we put in a heat pump. 3 bedroom detached.
A recent article suggested a typical 4 kW system around here would cost $10k for 3261 kWh a year, or about $405 in credit at a blended rate. Another suggests an 11 kW system at $27,500, which could maybe hit 9000 kWh - about $1100 in credit. We do have net metering with BC Hydro so it'll just wash through, but that's still a 25 year payback horizon.
Meanwhile a relatives system failed before 2 and is now a pile of panels leaning on the side of their house. No way these things are actually lasting 20 years. Or if they are, it's by dint of enough repair & maint to destroy the math even more.
What does seem to be true though is that it's getting better/closer. As the panels get both more efficient and cheaper, it becomes less of a waste of motion.
Like anything else you can buy quality components and install them correctly or you can buy poor quality components and install them poorly. If a solar system fails after 2 years there were defects in materials or worksmanship. A solar setup is a pretty robust thing when done right.
I'm afraid I don't have the exact numbers anymore, but I determined that the 2700W solar panel array installed on my Seattle house for about $14k in 2013 (including a new breaker panel) had paid for itself before the end of 2019. The system worked really well.
People often think that solar won't work well in Seattle because it's cloudy so often, but light still comes in through the overcast, and solar panels don't care which angle the photons hit them from. Meanwhile, lower ambient temperatures mean the panels work more efficiently.
Solar won’t work on new townhomes in Seattle with rooftop decks (since we don’t have to worry about snow so much?). There is simply no place to put them unless you give up your deck.
Alas, indeed. I'd have installed solar panels on the townhouse I bought in 2020 if there were anywhere to put them, but there would only be room for 800 watts, at most - not really worth it.
It depends on the house, the occupants, and lifestyle. 25k is the cost of a 9kWh PV array today, which will produce maybe 11GWh/year in Seattle.
$230/month is about 1700kWh/month at Seattle electricity price of .13/kWh.
That usage could easily be the amount of electricity used for an average efficiency 3000sqft house with 4 occupants and a couple EVs driving the median American commute. Add an electric hot tub, and $230/month isnt so crazy.
Yes, it's very high, but not crazy high considering the typical upper middle class American home and lifestyle.
In contrast, my home and lifestyle transplanted to Seattle would be 1/4 the usage and cost, but different preferences and all.
In the example above the PV array would provide about 50% of usage, so about $115/month in bill reduction. The 25k is 18,500 after the Federal tax credit, which puts the payback at 13 years.
Always shocked by the labor component of PV arrays. I did my own 6.6kW array (split into two physical arrays, thus increasing the parts costs a bit), and it came out to around $13k. I don't mean I don't want to pay people a living wage, just always hard to remember (when you're used to doing stuff yourself) what fraction of the total cost that will be when you do pay them.
Most of the planet, most of the people are not in the Arctic. Brief search indicates 4 million, globally. You could have people in the Arctic powering their homes with peat or lignite and it wouldn't be a huge problem. Happily NG is better for this, and the rest of the world has fewer problems with solar seasonality.
They're not efficient at turning sunlight into power - somewhere around 20% depending on the technology, which continues to improve albeit slowly. This efficiency goes down about 2.5% in the first year and another [edit](0.5%-1%) in each subsequent year [1]. These numbers are all at 25C, which is significantly lower than a black solar panel is going to be out in the sun - which reduces its efficiency a further 10-25%. [2]
So typical 20% efficiency solar panel at 45C in year 2 is already starting at 17.5% efficiency, and by year 10 is down to just [edit](15%) efficiency.
And then while lower temperatures do improve efficiency, they tend to happen in higher latitudes which get less sunlight to begin with.
60% of Ontario's power (about half of Canada by population) comes from just 3 nuclear plants (Bruce, Darlington and Pickering). Replacing them with solar panels would cover an area the size of the entire greater Toronto area in silicon and plastic, give or take. [3] And it would need to be replaced every 20 years.
This is some bad reasoning. Solar efficiency is very different from say engine efficiency. A very efficient combustion engine is 35% efficient meaning it wastes 65% of the energy in the input fuel. Solar panels don’t waste sunlight and have no input costs. Rooftop solar turns 20% of something that would have been 100% wasted into high grade energy. A very efficient coal power plant is 45% efficient before transmission losses. That means more than half the energy in the coal is wasted. Solar wastes nothing.
Your numbers on solar panel degradation are also incorrect based on my experience in the industry. They do degrade but not at that at 7+% per year for ten years.
> Solar panels don’t waste sunlight and have no input costs.
Not exactly, the point is that building and installing solar panels consumes resources and physical space. A solar plant with 100% efficient panels is 1/10th the size of today's solar plant, and as I mentioned, to generate comparable amounts of power to conventional sources requires huge amounts of landmass. Plus input materials. And it has to be replaced every 20 years.
> Rooftop solar turns 20% of something that would have been 100% wasted into high grade energy.
Not 20%, right, closer to 15%. Rooftop solar also kills about 10X as many people per generated TWh (0.44-0.83 people per TWh) as compared to nuclear power (0.04 people per TWh) - due to installation. [1]
I'm not advocating for coal of course, but it's wrong to say solar wastes nothing. There's input materials, plastics, silicon - all sorts of toxic chemicals - and generates tons and tons of e-waste that we don't really have a plan for right now. [2]
> Your numbers on solar panel degradation are also incorrect based on my experience in the industry. They do degrade but not at that at 2% per year for ten years.
As I mentioned, the degradation rate is highest in the first year, I said 2.5%, but then it drops off to about 0.5% in subsequent years. The data comes from an NREL analytical review. [3]
NOTE: I edited the number to more generously assume the 0.5%-1% degradation was not in percent efficiency but rather in percent capacity - which is 1/5th as much, to your point.
Not sure why I am responding since you moved the goal posts from operating efficiency to lifecycle efficiency but even there you are wrong.
To your point re: land use, this is why I said rooftop solar. The roof is already there, the structure is already there, there is zero additional land use and very little opportunity cost for the space. Further, the land use for coal is much broader than the plant area because of mining, transit, and waste heat management. There was a recent post on HN comparing total land usage by prime mover.
Solar is only deadlier per unit than coal if you ignore substantial local health effects that aren’t priced in.[0]
Your implied rate of degradation to go from 20-10 is more than 7%. Even 15-10 is more than 2.5% and again that is an absurd number that contradicts observed performance. You misunderstand what degradation means in this context, to your point.
I never said anything about coal, and I updated the degradation numbers per your suggestion, but the degradation numbers themselves come from NREL. I think you're confusing the derating due to temperature with degradation. They are additive.
Panel temps go up and down depending on time, date, location, and weather. On cool, sunny spring days you can see panels produce more than they are rated. You can’t simply apply a fixed worst-case derate for all time to all panels regardless of installation details.
Further, the derates are not additive, they are multiplicative. (A a 20% panel which has degraded in lab efficiency by 10% operating at 90% thermal efficiency is running at 16.2% efficient compared to 18% for a non-degraded panel).
Nothing you have said, however, addresses my first and principal point which is that operational efficiency has a different meaning for solar when compared to anything that has non-free inputs. Efficiency is outputs/inputs. One way to look at it is [energy out]/[energy hitting panel]. That is 20% for a solar plant, 45% for an nuclear analogue. Another, financial way is [value of output]/[cost of inputs]. This is infinity for solar setting aside fixed/financing costs and quite finite for nuclear using the same assumptions.
A device that's 15% efficient is inherently more wasteful than a device that's 100% efficient, right? Therefore we're wasting something. That thing isn't input fuel, it's the materials used to build the device, and manage its lifecycle. That doesn't mean it's free - it just means we're considering different inputs.
Total efficiency here is the sum of all inputs over outputs. For solar panels that's land use, that's glass, silicon, plastic, PCBs, etc - in addition to the sun.
Otherwise, in your model, a panel that's 100% efficient is inherently the same as one 15% efficient.
In your model, a battery is infinitely efficient - after all it has no inputs, only outputs! Once you get to that point your model needs to be adjusted.
A nuclear plant that is 100% efficient would be better than the current ~40% units but it is thermodynamically impossible. Thanks Carnot.
You are confusing operating/marginal efficiency with lifetime efficiency. Think about a power plant as a series of payments. You have one big up front payment to build the thing and a series of smaller payments to buy fuel and run it.
For solar, those smaller payments are zero. There is still the fixed upfront payment and that is why you would prefer 40% efficient panels to 20% efficient panels everything else being equal.
The marginal cost of rooftop solar is zero. Nothing is wasted. Really! No fuel is bought, the roof underneath is cooler and lasts longer, there are systemic benefits, etc. There is virtually no maintenance. No land is used (Solar land use is complicated but most places you can put solar wouldn’t support a nuclear plant). Light which would have bounced back into space or turned into infrared is instead made into usable, high grade energy. Land/build area that would otherwise do nothing is made useful. It is literally close to economic and physical magic. It is true that panels break, inverters die, upgrading is compelling, etc. However, most components are silicon, glass, copper, and aluminum. These are some of the most recyclable materials on earth. There are plenty of analyses of lifecycle energy and material costs and it is generally pretty favorable (1-2 year operating recovery time). The panels are warrantied in many cases for 25 years so idk where your 20 year then scrap lifespan comes from. Inverters tend to be the weaker link.
Finally batteries have marginal round trip efficiency because what you put in doesn’t come back out 1-1 so I am not sure I follow your point.
> The marginal cost of rooftop solar is zero. Nothing is wasted. Really!
No, it isn't. There's literally materials consumed to build the solar panels, and a 0.4-0.8 deaths per TWh generated. To your own point a 1-2 year recovery period on panels that last 20 is 5-10% loss in energy off the mark. We don't really have a recycling plan, but we better get one, because solar generates a ton of waste materials. To power the entire United States, we'd need 20,000 square miles of solar panel - the entire landmass of West Virginia. Replaced every 20 years, we'd need almost 100,000 square miles of solar panel in my lifetime. That's the entire surface area of Colorado.
But that's ok because I'm not arguing against rooftop solar lol. I never was. That doesn't change the fact they're not particularly efficient, and there's a lot of room to improve. I was arguing in favor of nuclear, which, with seawater extraction, can be completely renewable.
MARGINAL. I will try one more time because a stranger is wrong on the internet. It is the difference between how much a car costs and how many miles per gallon it gets. Once you have paid for the car, the only thing that matters with respect to fuel efficiency is MPG. The MPG of solar is infinity because there are no gallons to buy/use once you have bought the car. You are confusing purchase price with MPG for some reason. There is no additional material used once the panels are installed and nothing wasted. For a car, 65% or more of every gallon you buy is wasted.
There isn’t a lot of demand for panel recycling because most panels have been installed in the last 10-15 years are not end of life. When there is demand there will be recyclers, you don’t need to centrally plan it.
There actually is NOT a lot of room to improve with monocrystalline silicon and other single band panels. The theoretical max efficiency on them is 40% so they are currently more than 50% of their max, room but not a lot. The technical efficiency (how much of the energy hitting the panel is turned in to electricity) is subsumed by the economics. For ROOFTOP, small systems can offset residential load 100%. I am not sure what is inefficient about that on any definition.
> to generate comparable amounts of power to conventional sources requires huge amounts of landmass.
It would take about 0.01% of the US land area to generate all the electricity we need. Meanwhile we use 30% (over 1000x) to grow food. And if we prioritize solar on rooftops and deserts, we really are not using any useful land.
>Solar efficiency is very different from say engine efficiency. A very efficient combustion engine is 35% efficient meaning it wastes 65% of the energy in the input fuel. Solar panels don’t waste sunlight and have no input costs.
They're exactly the same kinds of waste. A 35% efficient IC engine wastes 65% of the energy in the fuel heating itself up. A 20% efficient photovoltaic cell wastes 80% of the energy in the light heating itself up.
This argument only stood if the fuel for the IC engine were raining from heaven for free and would go 100% to waste if not burned, and if the combustion process itself produced no other waste than heat, both of which are obviously not true.
You have to consider /all/ inputs and outputs for any honest assessment of efficiency.
Yes, I am aware solar cells need to be manufactured, producing waste in the process. Still, the same applies for all alternatives, neither fossil nor nuclear plants grow on trees.
That's not what "efficiency" means, though. The efficiency of a power source is the ratio between the actually generated work and the work that could theoretically be generated. I don't know if the metric you're referencing has a name but let's call it "greenness". arcticbull's argument was that solar panels are inefficient at converting light into electricity, not that they're ungreen. dpierce9 tried to reframe the discussion from efficiency into greenness for no apparent reason.
My argument has nothing to do with ‘greenness’. What I am talking about already has a name: marginal productivity or marginal efficiency.
My point is if you have to dig and burn 2.5 rocks to get 1 rocks worth of energy you are really concerned with that ratio for a whole host of reasons and affects everything you do (it is one reason why coal plants are huge for instance).
Now say you can get a rocks worth of energy with no rocks to dig and burn. Of course you still want to get the most amount of energy and there is an upper limit to how much you can collect but you no longer think about it in terms of the number of rocks you have to dig out and burn. That is a huge difference.
That's fine, and that's a metric that's worth considering, but you're not talking about the same kind of efficiency arcticbull was talking about. When someone says that "a solar panel is 20% efficient" what they mean is that, of the energy contained in the light that hits it, 20% of it is converted into electricity and the rest is converted into waste heat stored in the panel. Yes, if the panel hadn't been there 100% of that energy would have gone unused, but that's a different discussion. It doesn't make what arcticbull said false. Optimistically a new solar panel is 20% efficient, and that efficiency becomes worse with age.
Articbull is saying nuclear is better than solar for the energy system. He bases this on a claim that solar panels are inefficient along a number of dimensions. Look at his actual comments, they aren’t narrowly related to lab or theoretical efficiency (he is making points about land use, death, etc). There is no real concept of physical inefficiency there is only relative efficiency. And relative efficiency of Rankine cycle prime movers vs semiconductors is not a strictly easy comparison. 20% of something free that would have been entirely wasted is different than 40% of something you have to find, dig out, transport, crush, then filter. I also didn’t say what he said about theoretical panel efficiency is wrong (except all his actual numbers were wrong until he edited them). I am broadly saying this point doesn’t support his conclusion.
Edit: you are also wrong about what happens to the energy that hits the panel. Some light is reflected, a lot of light passes right through the panel. Further, panels are designed for particular wavelengths which is why multi gap panels have theoretical efficiencies higher than any thermal plant. And some is turned into heat. All of this would have happened had the panel not been there too except no usable electricity would be created.
> Look at his actual comments, they aren’t narrowly related to lab or theoretical efficiency (he is making points about land use, death, etc).
I don't know about deaths, but the point about land use is related to theoretical efficiency. If an existing solar plant that is 20% was 100% efficient it could generate five times as much power in the same space, or generate the same power in a fifth of the land it currently uses. The land used by solar power plants is very relevant when considering its practical utility.
> 20% of something free that would have been entirely wasted is different than 40% of something you have to find, dig out, transport, crush, then filter.
It's not free, though, because those rooftop panels will lose efficiency over time. Eventually they will need to be replaced or they will generate so little power that they may as well not be there. Since they need to be replaced over time then harvesting that 20% of sunlight is no longer free, but carries an ongoing resource cost. Is that more or less than the cost of getting the same total energy from a nuclear power plant?
> I am broadly saying this point doesn’t support his conclusion.
The conclusion is that solar and wind can at best only complement nuclear, and this is supported by various points about the inefficiency of solar panels. Setting wind aside for the moment, why do you think the fact that solar panels are inefficient and degrade over time doesn't affect their viability as an alternative to nuclear power?
Response to edit: I don't know whether the 20% figure counts in the theoretical 100% light that is reflected or unabsorbed. It seems to me that it shouldn't be counted, since if you're going to count light that couldn't have interacted with the cells anyway, then you may as well count light that hits the ground next to the panel, which would mean the panel is 0% efficient.
If nuclear plants were twice as efficient that would be great too. They aren’t.
Land use isn’t relevant for rooftop solar. There is basically no opportunity cost.
Everything becomes less efficient over time. Sunpower warranties their panels for a 20% decline in performance over 25 years. That means a 20% efficient panel is warrantied to be 16% efficient after 25 years in the field. To put that in perspective, panels made 15 years ago were around 16% efficient. There isn’t a cliff and they are still useful.
Suppose you abandon the system for whatever reason. You go back to the steady state of not producing power on that site. There is again no cost.
I am not saying nuclear is bad. I am outright rejecting the claim that solar panels are inefficient on any dimension that counts. I think this argument about degradation is beyond silly. I also think you are an astroturfing troll.
>Eventually they will need to be replaced or they will generate so little power that they may as well not be there. Since they need to be replaced over time then harvesting that 20% of sunlight is no longer free, but carries an ongoing resource cost. Is that more or less than the cost of getting the same total energy from a nuclear power plant?
Yeah, is it more or less? I don't know either. But finally we're getting to the core of the question instead of debating about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
So at the end of its lifetime, be that 50 or 100 years in, a nuclear plant will have to be replaced, too. Basically a sudden 100% degradation. What is the resource cost for that, why are we not talking about that in this context? Because it's not "ongoing"? What's the resource cost for cooling with increasingly sparse water bodies that due to climate change will be less and less suited for it over the lifespan of the plant, BTW degrading its efficiency? What's the resource cost of plant dismantling and disposal, which goes on for decades after a plant has ceased to produce power? Would you like to include nuclear waste disposal as an ongoing resource cost in the consideration? Where do you draw the line? Are there any reliable estimates about these externalities that don't range wildly depending on which faction informed them? Do we want go down that rabbit hole?
If not, then what's the point of fixating on this single aspect with regards to solar and solar only? Just because this one is a figure that's easy to quote out of context and sounds kinda bad? Can I make you realize that in this light it's hard to not think of this as deliberately cherry-picking an argument for argument's sake?
These are all retorical questions, of course. FWIW, I don't claim to have any definite answers on the topic, and actually I do think that nuclear and renewables will have to complement each other to varying degrees around the globe, depending on many factors. I'm just trying to get across why the specific point your're clinging to seems so extremely moot to me.
>Setting wind aside for the moment, why do you think the fact that solar panels are inefficient and degrade over time doesn't affect their viability as an alternative to nuclear power?
Because it's already correctly priced into the running costs, just as - I suppose its proponents will claim - the corresponding facts above are for nuclear. Also, as has been pointed out, the ever repeated claim of solar inefficiency is baseless in the most literal sense, due to the lack of a comparable reference point for nuclear. 20% is an entirely meaningless number as long as the system boundaries are drawn so arbitrarily that it's impossible to benchmark. To put it bluntly, what would be sufficiently efficient for your taste? 30%? 60? 90? Can you explain why? It's just apples and pears on this level, the only reasonable comparison could come from a much broader view that you're explicitly not interested in.
Anyway this discussion is going in circles. I'm not assuming bad faith on your side, but I don't think we'll come to an agreement either.
>What is the resource cost for that, why are we not talking about that in this context?
Presumably because nobody knows it. Personally, I'm not aware of any nuclear power plant that has been replaced. I also don't know why one would need to replace the entire plant and not just the core and possibly surrounding structures.
>Would you like to include nuclear waste disposal as an ongoing resource cost in the consideration? Where do you draw the line?
I don't think a line should be drawn anywhere. If we're talking about sustainability and total impact, we should look at all the facts, otherwise we're drawing conclusions off incomplete data. It should be possible to reduce the entire situation down to a single "impact per Joule" value that's comparable between any two power production systems, and every impact that's caused in order to produce that Joule (mining, land use, pollution, etc.).
>If not, then what's the point of fixating on this single aspect with regards to solar and solar only? Just because this one is a figure that's easy to quote out of context and sounds kinda bad? Can I make you realize that in this light it's hard to not think of this as deliberately cherry-picking an argument for argument's sake?
The point is that treating rooftop solar as "free" because it's supposedly a one-time cost is at best naive, at worst disingenuous. I have no interest in making nuclear look good or solar look bad, but let's call a spade a spade. Neither of them has zero impact on the environment. Pretending that they do means we're not making rational decisions.
>Also, as has been pointed out, the ever repeated claim of solar inefficiency is baseless in the most literal sense, due to the lack of a comparable reference point for nuclear.
I wouldn't say it's baseless. The figures on efficiency by themselves are measurable and true. It is true, though, that nothing can be said to be (in)efficient in an absolute sense, for the reasons you say. That's why I never said "solar panels are inefficient". All I said on the matter was that efficiency in this sense is exactly the same kind of efficiency that an IC engine has, because, as I said, dpierce9 was trying to reframe the discussion for no reason. Well, I don't think it was for no reason.
>Because it's already correctly priced into the running costs, just as - I suppose its proponents will claim - the corresponding facts above are for nuclear.
I'm not sure either are. Is the pollution caused by semiconductor production, or as you mentioned the warming of natural waters used as coolant, priced into the corresponding products?
>the only reasonable comparison could come from a much broader view that you're explicitly not interested in.
Yes, I agree, that's the only reasonable comparison. I would be interested in that if anyone came forward with an actual analysis from which we could derive a figure like the one I mentioned above.
Nuclear is an option but it's not a fast option. The newest reactor designs from Westinghouse and EPR have taken 9 years at the fastest to complete in China and much longer everywhere else. You can say the regulations or NIMBYs are slowing down construction, but those aren't an issue in China.
I know that China has a rampant corruption problem, and very poor safety track records, but Westinghouse's reputation is very much on the line here, and not even China can afford to invoke the stigma of a nuclear accident. You can't deny a meltdown the way that you can deny, say, a virus leaked from a lab.
Solar + wind are actually fixing problems. They are not perfect, but as you said, perfect is the enemy of improvement. Solar + wind are cheaper than almost anything else, specially nuclear. They have much less detrimental effects to the local environment than fossile fuels (specially coal). Yes, they are not guaranteed, so you need a grid (which you have), and some batteries (for short-term storage; like batteries of electric cars) + pumped storage (for medium term storage) + maybe some other storage like hydrogen / ammonia.
Nuclear is way too expensive, specially if you account for risks of disasters (no insurance company will insure them, so the risk is on the population).
>Nuclear is way too expensive, specially if you account for risks of disasters (no insurance company will insure them, so the risk is on the population).
This is CATO propaganda. All power generation is subsidized by our incredibly relaxed attitude towards externalities in general. Of the reliable sources of energy, nuclear is safest and the least subsidized.
> Of the reliable sources of energy, nuclear is safest and the least subsidized.
How do you evaluate this? Do you have a summary of estimated subsidies per MWh for different generators?
My understanding is the same as the comment you are responding to, that nuclear subsidies are significant, ~6-10USD/MWh on insurance alone. I would be happy to be wrong on this. On a good day we pay ~EUR25/MWh for nuke electricity in EU day-ahead markets, as a scale point; 8EUR/MWh is a significant subsidy.
First, I want to make it clear that my claims are about relative subsidy, rather than absolute subsidy.
Second, the nuclear insurance subsidy is not really a subsidy, since the taxpayer is only on the hook in the case of an accident, which is not only extraordinarily unlikely, but also mitigated many times over. The calculation of the implicit subsidy to nuclear power comes from highly motivated speculative accounting by CATO, whom you should generally think of as playing the role of a law firm working for oil and gas and against alternative forms of energy production. There are a range of values which could be assigned to the "implicit subsidy of nuclear insurance", and the opposition lawyer has obviously chosen the absolute highest end of that range.
It is difficult enough to calculate the probability of a nuclear reactor meltdown, but we have observational evidence that it is at least many dozens of times less likely than say, a hurricane, and each of those is generally more costly than even the worst nuclear disaster in history. The damage wrought by the tsunami at fukushima, for instance, was many times greater than the damage wrought by the meltdown at fukushima.
There is a private component to nuclear insurance, as well, paid by the operators, which totals, across all nuclear plants, approximately 10 times the total damages incurred by the three mile island incident every year. It is extremely unlikely that a nuclear accident will ever exceed these damages.
This is in stark contrast to other historical insurance requirements. As a case study, I recommend learning about the early history of oil spills starting with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Torrey_Canyon and the subsequent founding of TOVALOP in 1968. Up until that point, oil transport insurance was implicitly subsidized by the nature of a limited liability corporation. Note that this was not an artefact of the times, since insurance requirements for the nuclear industry were implemented by congress a decade earlier, in 1957.
On the other hand, we subsidize coal and natural gas implicitly by not charging them for the use of their exhaust channels and also not structurally supporting torts for worse health outcomes with no easily identified proximate cause. For a concrete example, I think we have a pretty good idea of the number of additional hurricanes per year we can expect as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, but we do not require oil and gas to pay for marginal additional hurricane insurance, despite that doing demonstrably more damage than even very bad nuclear meltdowns. The unsuitability of tort as an avenue of collecting externalities is an enormous implicit subsidy for the fossil fuel industry.
We are 100% in agreement that societies subsidies of fossil generation far outstrip anything else.
My question was about your claim that nuclear has the lowest subsidy of any generator.
> It is extremely unlikely that a nuclear accident will ever exceed these damages.
I mean, the Fukushima cleanup (~$500B) is costing about three orders of magnitude above the liability ceiling ($450M) of the private insurance component of US nuke liability.
First of all, these numbers for the Fukushima cleanup don't make sense. 500B is the annual budget of medicare, or roughly the market cap of a FAANG. Your source appears to be wikipedia, so I looked into it, and their figure is from a scientific american article in which the Japanese government is quoted as saying 15 billion USD for the cleanup and 60 billion USD for relocation damages. Quite a lot of money, but definitely an order of magnitude less than the cost of the earthquake and tsunami themselves. A "private think tank" in Japan then wildly conjectured this number to actually be between 400 billion and 700 billion USD, and for some reason, this is the figure that Wikipedia uses. So, interestingly, I am claiming that this is the same phenomenon as before. This think tank might even be the CATO institute, for all we know.
Second, I said for reliable power. That was sneaky of me, but gas, coal, nuclear, and to some extent hydro, are the only reliable power sources I am aware of. Wind is not completely random, but cannot be relied upon, and solar cannot be run at night. Hydro is reliable, but represents a much bigger population risk than nuclear, with no real possibility of safe failure. I like hydroelectric power, I think it's neat, but it's definitely a sleeping dragon.
Assuming your lower estimate of 15B + 60B, that remains two orders of magnitude above the insurance policy you claim "is extremely unlikely" to be exceeded, so arguably my point stands.
"Reliable power" is well.. this keeps coming up, and it's always this black-and-white thing; sometimes the wind doesn't blow, so you can't rely on it.
And then the other side will counter that the downtime of wind is predictable, unlike that of nuclear (see the need to raise the price ceiling in EU day-ahead markets to deal with the unplanned nuke outages in France going on right now). This side will say the predictable 45% capacity factor of wind is preferable to the unpredictable 90% capacity factor of nukes.
In reality, a stable energy system is built by combining energy sources of different strengths. Wind and solar provides bulk cheap power most of the time, with hydro and nukes ramping to match production changes. This is identical to how the grid is already ramping to match demand changes every day.
We see this dynamic every day in EU markets, with wind+hydro slotting together, hydro flexing up and down as wind ebbs and flows. You can see this live in the "Origin of Electricity" charts on electricitymap: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/SE
Honestly curious about how you come to the conclusion that the risk of hydro is that much bigger than nuclear. One would assume that this is a pure engineering problem and therefore "mitigated many times over" just as well as in nuclear?
My point is, the combination of wind, solar, storage is orders of magnitude less subsidized. If you account for risks (nuclear) and externalities (fossil fuel). This is not propaganda. But your claims about nuclear are.
Solar and wind are just fine as generation sources, provided that you consider solar / wind + storage as the whole generation system and base your arguments and costs on that number. When you consider both together solar and wind are pretty expensive but have nice properties as far as carbon generation. Solar and wind by themselves are somewhere between mildly useful and actively very bad in terms of grid stability.
> Clever writing can let you argue for any viewpoint. That doesn’t make it true.
If you lead with this, I expect a refutation of the points in the article. But in each of the statements you take issue with, I don't see any refutation, just additional data.
> However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited.
Does the article claim that it is a long term solution?
> So green energy has supported economic and social development through electrification without adding new pollution sources.
How does that conflict with what the article said?
> Nuclear is the safest way to generate electricity, but that safety comes at a financial cost. Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper.
Again, does this conflict with anything in the article?
Do you think anything in the article is untrue, as you implied?
Unless you are being extremelly pedantic than I would agree with the parent. The thesis of the article is essentially "Solar and Wind aren't the way forward, Nuclear is the way". While it is reasonable to acknowledge the solar and wind still face many challenges, the parent is pointing out that they are already doing a good job in accelerating decarbonization and Nuclear, while appealing, isn't the clear cut winner the article is saying it is.
I agree with your criticisms and support of the parent, but the thesis also included a chunk of "here is why I switched from a purely clean energy perspective to one that tolerates a bunch more nuclear."
I have in the past year undergone a similar shift, so perhaps I felt more tolerant of some of the article's slickness. A few centuries of "financially expensive" nuclear energy feels like it could provide a longer runway for science to figure out some alternatives.
It's really strange for me to hear people saying that. I was pro-nuclear a decade ago and thought solar/wind were pipe dreams. The cost situation is now so much in favor of solar/wind now that I no longer really see the point in nuclear. We should be subsidizing scaling up of storage technologies, not nuclear plants.
If the cost of storage gets cut in half in the next 10 years, we won't need subsidies, nuclear plants will simply be boondoggles. I really don't think we should invest in nuclear until we're sure the cleaner alternatives can't scale.
Here's a question for the group:
Regardless of whether you advocate for green energy or not, do you think that it's a wise strategy to create an artificial scarcity of fossil fuels to force a transition to green energy? After decades of green energy adoption, the world is still (conservatively) 84% reliant on fossil fuels. Without them, many people would freeze and/or starve, and whole economies would collapse.
I think we should be focusing on creating abundance of clean fuels. I do think it's worthwhile to tax fossil fuels to make people less likely to use them. Probably with dramatic taxes. But really there's no such thing as "natural scarcity" or "natural abundance" these things are all based on our choices. 30 years ago we could have created an abundance of nuclear power and we would be better off. Today it seems like creating abundance of other things is a superior option. We knew that persisting in leaving fossil fuels as the abundant option was a mistake but we did it anyway and continue to do it.
Focusing on clean fuels is just fine. My question had to do with a highly destructive national policy that is doing tremendous damage to the US/world economies (except for Russia and China).
I'm not sure we're the pure antinuclear stand would even come from
He clearly can't build a nuclear power plant so what he can do is build solar and wind.
And sure nuclear has plenty of problems like amount of uran, cooling water in the summer etc.
Independent of this, we have not even seen yet how a real solar society would look like because while we installed plenty, we have not really started to install what would be possible.
It should be a total no brainer for everyone to want to leverage their roof real estate by investing in solar.
> Nuclear is the safest way to generate electricity, but that safety comes at a financial cost. Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper.
If fossil fuel use was burdened with the level of safety regulations that nuclear fission is, sufficient enough to make it as safe and clean as nuclear, we might suddenly find that nuclear is actually very cheap.
To me it seems like a false dichotomy to suggest that nuclear is competing with solar/wind. At best it's competing with solar/wind + batteries, but in reality it's competing with natural gas and coal. And natural gas & coal have an unfair advantage because society and our governments have drastically more tolerance for it's absurdly greater lethality and pollution compared to nuclear.
Fun fact, since the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was founded in the US in 1975, they have not approved ANY new nuclear sites, only a few expansions of existing sites. I honestly wonder how many deaths the NRC is responsible for by beating down nuclear development to the benefit of the fossil fuel industry.
My quick glance impression was that the author seems to dismiss renewables based on their low fraction of total energy use (including direct use that doesn't go through electricity as an intermediate step when served by fossils, e.g. transport, metallurgy and so on) but ignores that nuclear has never substituted those energy use case either (ignoring a few aircraft carriers and subs)
Yes, a future with enough renewables to also substitute direct fossil use is quite hard to imagine. But a future with that much nuclear would be no less crazy.
Yeah, I thought this point in the article was off target:
> Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
Isn't this because we are at the beginning of an exponential curve? Or at least a sigmoid curve. That money wasn't wasted. A growth curve will look like nothing much until suddenly one day it takes over.
Also let's compare apples to apples and check how much money was spent to generate the 87% of energy... I'm guessing it's much higher than the trillions
Edit: and let's not forget that the capital spent on moving the needle to 84% will keep generating energy at marginal cost.
It’s by no means a given that wind/solar will be a major source of energy for the long term. If we’re lucky advancements in wind/solar and energy storage will make it a big part of our future energy supply. If we’re unlucky we’ve spent many trillions and made very little headway towards a more sustainable future.
Maybe the solution will turn out to be molten salt nuclear along with synthetic oil and carbon capture. Maybe something else altogether. Who knows, it’s still early.
I don’t think we should presume solar/wind will someday take over, and I’d like to see an “all of the above” energy strategy instead.
I went to work in construction to build energy-efficient homes, and I started a company that built composting systems for cities and businesses. I became executive director of an organization that championed green building policies and became CEO of a consulting firm that commercialized clean energy technologies and ran energy-efficiency programs. I then founded a software startup to help promote green home upgrades, and I led business development for a company making wireless power technology.
This is more than "clever writing" to me and you are just adding more data that do not invalidate his points.
I think it seems like yet another environmentalist that’s realized they were wrong on nukes and is now overcorrecting.
This is a “yes, and”, not an “or”. Yes we should build nukes and we should continue the massive ongoing deployment of renewables.
Recall the IEA estimates at current rates of consumption, we will be out of nuclear fuel in 200 years. Replacing fossil plants with nukes would mean accelerating that consumption rate such that we will be out of fuel in 25 years or so. Yes, there are non-commercial and experimental systems to run on other fuels and extract uranium from other places, but we should not bet the planet on them panning out. We should invest in all available options.
Why do you trust him about his credentials? Who is paying him now? He has no articles older than 2020 on his website, and the same is true of his podcasts. Where are his thoughts prior to that?
> Upgrading coal to gas is a great intermediate step. However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited. Plus, many countries have already done it.
I don't see the author as arguing that we should all switch to natural gas.
Rather, I believe that they're trying to illustrate what they view to be a idealistic flawed thinking pattern ("utopian energy" or "green energy maximalism" or whatever you want to call it) and calling for a more rigorous and empirical engineering-like approach where a much larger trade-space is considered - even if that new approach leads to exactly the same conclusion/solution.
> Clever writing can let you argue for any viewpoint.
More people should participate in a debate club. A common assignment is to argue eloquently for a position you don't believe in, allowing you to see how eloquent sophistry can be placed in service of any position.
When it comes to technical questions like energy it should be logic, math, and real data or go home.
The source article here uses the rhetorical method of 'once I was a true believer in X, but then I saw the light about Y, let me share the revelation with you' and then tosses out a few highly questionable stats. It's a pretty tedious PR-centric approach.
More people should participate in a debate club. A common assignment is to argue eloquently for a position you don't believe in, allowing you to see how eloquent sophistry can be placed in service of any position.
I believe the opportunity for that has passed. Every debate competition I've watched in the last decade was just people trying to be as emotive and loud as humanly possible.
Ignoring the "technicals" when considering questions that have real implications for human beings is usually an rhetorical excuse given to focus on particular implications and ignore other, less favorable ones.
This is a huge problem for humanity to solve. We're more afraid of acute horrors that are statistically insignificant than we are of diffuse, but statistically horrifying dangers.
Would you rather live near a nuclear accident or a solar farm/wind turbine accident?
A simple consideration shows nuclear accidents are above and beyond the worst humans have ever experienced. There is no comparison, not even a close second.
It depends on the reactor type. High pressure and plutonium fuel? Sure! Low pressure and natural uranium is much safer. Thorium and molten salt reactors may be better still.
People have been claiming peak oil since the 1930's. Yawn.
> So green energy has supported economic and social development through electrification without adding new pollution sources.
Except for the manufacture and disposal of these "green" sources.
> Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper.
Solar and wind are cheaper? Ha! We already have problems recycling blades from wind turbines and most are still not at the end of their lifespan. Same for solar - what do you do with all this crap a the end of it's 20 year lifespan?
*Total* cost of ownership. And never mind solar and wind still suck for base load management since we still lack cost effective energy storage that can scale at the grid level.
If the cost of extraction rises due to oil and gas being more and more difficult to access (because it's limited, obviously), you could claim demand has peaked but it would still be due to production cost (i.e production peaking). "The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil" (Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former SA Minister of Oil)
> We already have problems recycling blades from wind turbines and most are still not at the end of their lifespan.
> And never mind solar and wind still suck for base load management since we still lack cost effective energy storage that can scale at the grid level.
There have been articles for many decades now that we are reaching the peak of what can be pulled out of the ground. That we will simply run out of oil.
This is a lie. There is plenty of supply.
This is the argument op is making.
Whether to burn it or not is a different question.
The war may force Russia to sell their oil to non-Western countries but the crisis helped support oil price and made global investments in O&G profitable for them again (and for every other producers too). Just like with the war in Iraq - which explains why Putin did not oppose the US invasion for long after they realized it would bring enormous profits to Russia.
The peak oil producing month so far is November 2018. With COVID-19, and now war in Ukraine and an impending global recession combined with the progress of electric vehicles and solar production, it is entirely possible that this record will stand.
Love ten principles, but it’s always going to be specific insights to specific people. Answering ten questions is again seeking the utopian solution. Some people may be happy with just getting three of the right questions. There is no silver bullet and we will tackle climate change, but not by 10 questions but 1,000,000 little questions everywhere.
The default should be let’s not burn things. While we deploy the nuclear powered negative CO2 technologies
> I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissionsduring the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas.
Sure, but that's not a long term solution. Eventually we will have to entirely rid the system of fossile fuels. Had we not invested in, an continued to develop wind and solar these last 20 years, and only focused on natural gas, would our chances to prevent global warming be any better?
I don't think so.
> I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillionsof dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
How much was invested in fossile fuel energy during the same period? Many times more! If investments in fossile energy continues at high levels, why would the worlds dependency on them decrease?
You are too pessimistic about the outlook for solar and wind. There are problems with renewables such as variance in production. If nuclear is competitive let's us have some of that as well. No reason to only have one or the other.
During the current situation I learned an interesting thing about nuclear power plants: if you bomb them, the amount of radioactivity that will be released into atmosphere because of waste products storage on site is vastly larger than the one that would be released by a nuclear explosion in a random place.
Because unfortunately most nuclear waste is stored on site because of the NIMBY problem.
So every nuclear power plant is a giant liability in case of conflict.
This is not true. Every power plant that produces waste must pay money into the waste repository fund totaling nearly $50B - which is probably overkill for building a long term facility by a factor of 5 or more.
My (not totally serious but kinda serious though uninformed) solution to the problem: Build a few big underground atomic bunkers around the world and store the long term waste there until we can find a solution (or leave it there). Do it in the middle of a desert far away from any people. No NIMBYs, not interesting for attacks.
My reading of your comment was that you were piggybacking on the above:
> Build a few big underground atomic bunkers around the world and store the long term waste there until we can find a solution (or leave it there).
And your comment specifically mentioned Yucca mountain, which was indeed planned to be a big underground repository for nuclear waste, and therefore vulnerable to the same type of catastrophic failure I referred to above. Am I missing something?
> I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissionsduring the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas.
That one needs a citation to back it up. It might be true, but natural gas leaks a lot of Methane (CH4) into the atmosphere, which way stronger greenhouse gas effect than CO2. So it might be worse than coal actually.
Most of us tech folks are WAY out of our depth regarding the energy sector. Everyone on this forum is so freaking heated all the time when in reality, most of us don't know shit about our energy infrastructure.
I don't even have a larger point here...but I swear the loudest most passionate commentary on energy comes from people with no expertise. Nobody should hold dogmatic beliefs without demonstrable knowledge in the area.
I have a few buddies who work as electrical engineers designing power systems. I've witnessed them receive lectures on energy infrastructure from people that have backgrounds in completely unrelated fields like sales, law, marketing...etc. It's bonkers!
A major point missing is growth in overall energy usage. Developing countries tend to be in places with good conditions for solar, and there isn't an entrenched idea about having a huge share of 24/7 "base load".
Never confuse effort with results. Brian is confusing 20 years of professional effort with global results. According to Brian, decades of his professional effort were driven by a staunch belief that this effort was "protecting the environment", but now Brian no longer holds this belief, citing a supposedly "utterly failed" government contract with his company and three bullet points that highlight lackluster progress on the whole of the market and the supposed missed opportunity of nuclear power.
None of these results are materially affected by Brian's effort over the last 20 years. Federal and local government regulation and investment as well as corporate business decisions are responsible for reducing coal plants, constructing nuclear plants, and incentivizing "utopian energy". Brian's effort mostly falls into the corporate business decision category, but all we see of this in his article is a statement that his company failed to fulfill a $60M government contract. This experience really stands out as Brian's real inflection point, but the results of this effort are not only NOT discussed, they are--by his own admission--completely opposite of the government's perception of the results.
The main social issue is that green energy is better used as marketing than to really do something about the ever rising levels of emissions.
After all, most people don't care to read the actual facts on supposedly new, superior technology, they just endorse it because it's supposed to be green.
> better used as marketing than to really do something about the ever rising levels of emissions.
We've known for centuries if not millenia that social and political and habitual change - the only things that would amount to "really doing something about the ever rising levels of emissions" - are hard, really hard, much harder than technological development. Getting people to substantively change their behavior and lifestyle is almost certainly not going to happen, at least not on a timescale that is relevant for climate change.
Cynical me says it's a big money maker / captialism; green energy projects receive billions in subsidies. At one point you could get "green energy" from your electricity provider at a few cents / kWh extra which they would (supposedly) invest in green energy projects. Then green energy became a marketing term at no extra cost.
In Germany, fossil and nuclear received billions in subsidies over decades too. And still will, even when decomissioned. See:
-There would be social subsidies for layed off fossil workers, as there is a massive discussion, while the solar / wind industry almost completely broke down, massive layoffs, after subsidies where cut and china took over (with subsidies there too). It is estimated that more jobs where lost there than actually working in coal (which is the primary discussion about).
Forced moving of people / villages to make space for coal mining also holds a money-less cost to the people moved.
-Nuclear is a massive field of unknown money holes, as there is up of today still no final reasoning where to put the waste, and it has to be secured for 10k - 1000k years - of course opinions are different there - but there is no reasonable economic plan how to make sure the waste dump is financed for this time less then hundred years ago german society, and the soil to some extend was completely
turned over - how include that into risk calculations for 10k+ years to come?
So handling the waste will drop out of the private sector more earlier than later, and the state / people will keep it's finacial burden for generations. That is a massive subside, for sure.
Everyone talks about how many lives climate change will ruin, but not enough talk about how many lives are lifted out of poverty from energy abundance from fossil fuels.
Amazing that this guy could write this and not realize he was just thinking on a time horizon that is way too short. Such an American mindset (and I say that as an American). Of course there are tradeoffs with any energy source. The point is that some are FAR worse than others. Sad this guy managed to get so disillusioned because he lost sight of the big picture and long term horizon.
I gave up on this when I realized that nuclear was perceived as the worst source of energy by both the people and the people in charge, while I don't see any other better alternative to help us out.
> But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions during the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas.
Can someone explain the chemistry of this ? I thought perfect combustion produces CO2 and that burning natural gas is closer to that ideal than what you get with coal (where you also get CO and probably lots of other stuff). So I would expect that producing a given amount of energy by burning natural gas would produce at least as much CO2 as that some amount produced from burning coal.
From a very simplistic "high school chemistry" point of view, coal is mostly carbon, natural gas is mostly hydrogen.
Burning coal will produce lots of carbon dioxide (and other nasties because of things like sulphur compounds but let's ignore that for now) and very little water. Burning methane will produce lots of water and carbon dioxide.
Hmm, I'd always assumed that most of the energy from burning natural has came from the oxidation of the carbon, not the hydrogen, but maybe that's not the case.
I live in one of the beautiful western states where due to the wide open spaces, wind, and carbon reliance due to lack of many of their economic options, wind farms are taking off.
Up front, I get it. Wind and solar are likely a large part of how we avoid burning down the world. Without it, Climate change hits this area just as hard.
That said, wind farms built to preserve the environment aren’t exactly preserving natural spaces themselves.
They occupy huge acreage, and whatever unfortunate (read: low income and remote) town they get installed in is bearing the costs of a major environmental change by installing them.
During the day, 100s of these things occupy every horizon for about 30-40 mins of driving. During the night, they all (so all 300 of them across acres and acres and acres) blink red lights you can see for miles and miles.
It might be the only way out, but it’s not like a smoke stack or two occupying your skyline. The windmills become the skyline, and ruin the night sky which is part of what makes these places worth living in.
It comes down to I really dislike that the rural west and all its beauty is the location paying for the costs of a nationwide carbon mistake, and it’s paying in the way that changes completely what makes this area special.
If this is what it takes to not boil the ocean, these wind farm better go up in New York and Boston Harbor, Miami coast line, around DC, and in the Bay of the Bay Area. Or, we do solar farms. You’re going to have very disgruntled western states otherwise.
I apologize if it sounds like I’m dismissing your concern, but who do you think owns the land these windmills are sitting on? Most of the time, private land owners who lease pad sites to renewable energy developers. Sometimes those landowners are local, sometimes not, but it’s not like these are going up in national parks.
Your state legislature could make it impossible or impracticable to erect these facilities. For anyone else who agrees that these are ruining the character of your community, you should start lobbying your legislators, because I promise you the landowners have been for a very long time.
Sounds like I get to drive around the open land in your state for hours and 3-40 minutes of driving is line of sight to a power installation. The wind farms will go up in NY, Boston etc but it will take a while because of the same NIMBYs. They do wield more NIMBY power because they can raise more money. Income inequality is the system working as designed, we won't nationalize any part of our power industry because the benefit would go to workers and ratepayers.
Not sure on what you mean by the first part? But if you’re saying they’re pretty out of way except for 30-40 mins of a long drive, that’s not really the case unfortunately although I could see how that’s your impression. Installs or planned installs are common across the state so getting hard to avoid.
Important caveat perhaps is I’ve lived in the coastal centers for long stretches. Def aware of the financial and power imbalance, but they’re making a mistake by flexing it or dismissing it this way. As the all of these natural resource and climate concerns heat up, the state out here have some important leverage - breadbasket, minerals, headwaters of the 2-3 major US rivers, and so on. I’m interested to see how it all plays out, but I disagree that the schedule of change will be dictated by he NIMBYs.
Reading past what the author is saying...My takeaway is that the problem is that power generation is a really really really big problem. Really really big problems take lots of time and money to solve. Expecting it to not take lots of time and money is wishful thinking and the time spent trying to solve them is very much not a waste.
This is how you fix CO2 emissions:
Add a $200/MWH tax on coal ($500 for lignite)
Add a $100/HWH tax on natural gas and oil.
Make all energy sources comply to the same safety standards (like $X in taxes per 1 million expected lost life-years, from radiation, air polution, floods, etc)
THEN make the free market sort out how to produce energy.
Finally a rational and spot-on discussion about energy. Great article!
Especially a rational take on the nuclear boogyman - if you care at all about CO2 emissions then nuclear should be your highest priority! Instead of burying "nuclear waste" we should be burning it in modern reactors.
How many production plants have been deployed with that technology? How long have they been deployed and what is their ROI?
We know these answers for solar and wind because they've been around for years. Last I heard these new nuclear reactors were just expensive prototypes. I'm not confident that these power plants have the technological readiness to scale up to cover our energy needs in the time we have left.
Now, solar and wind have the energy storage problem that has similarly immature solutions. The difference there is that building wind and solar plants is something that can be done (at scale) today to reduce our carbon footprint and buy time. These investments can be further leveraged as storage comes online to wean us off fossil fuels.
I understand that nuclear is, at least theoretically, a simpler solution. It just isn't yet practical both due to technological immaturity and due to societal resistance to anything with "nuclear" or "atomic" in the name.
> I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safestand most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.
It releases less radioactivity than coal, just to make things clear.
> I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. [...]
The only way I could imagine someone being an expert, work in the industry so many years and hold this false assumption just as long is to be motivated to not know.
So many comments here are acting like this guy is just some random Substacker pundit type opining on topics he knows little about. If you read his background it sure sounds like he has a lot of experience in energy policy and economics. I’m far more inclined to believe his analysis over a gaggle of random HN commenters.
Yep, he definitely has strong contacts within the energy sector. From his postings it seems like he's shaken ~checkbooks~hands with them on numerous occasions.
Please don't use color schemes that reduce the contrast between text and background. It makes your content more difficult to read for at least some of us.
There are lot of very powerful interests behind the "energy industry", roughly divided into four large sectors:
fossil fuels, nuclear power, renewables and electrical generation itself.
At this point in time there exists a multitude of cross-investments and interdependencies, so it becomes increasingly difficult to clearly seperate the interests as it is quite lucrative to just play all sides, a convergence. There is actually a lot to gain from this stragetic move.
The technocracy movement in the 30s[0] as a third way (to capitalism and communism) had in its heart the replacement of the "fiat system" through "energy certificates" literally denoted in energy units of kWh.
In some way or another these ideas are slowly creeping up to the surface in a transformed landscape as a way of allocating resources, governing, controlling.
It worries me that this kind of top-down-single-linear-metrics social engineering isn't openly and broadly question anymore (except in "conspiratorial" niches) , quite to the contrary it is embraced by a lot of ordinary people (who have nothing to gain from it but a lot to lose) to fight climate change.
In a sense arguing over possible "clean" energy sources in the future and carefully weighing the pros and cons only touches the surface level without the actual governance model for its implementation. It is quietly and skillfully circumvented. Democracy Dies in Darkness.
Utopia is a social concept, not a practical energy system concept. Linking the physics and chemistry and biology of energy (and food) production to some social ideology makes very little sense. Thinking that one system is morally superior to another is a bit silly, and there are all kinds of counterexamples (such as, did you know that Old South slave plantations produced 100% organic cotton?).
There are a couple things to take into consideration when you go to design energy and food production systems for human communities from scratch - conservation of energy should probably be at the top of that list. Then you should lay out a list of goals:
(1) Minimal side effects: I've never met a person who wants to breathe dirty air, drink filthy water, or eat food contaminated with toxins, heavy metals, or fecal matter. This is where purely electrical systems really have the advantage over anything involving combustion - although of course combustion, fire, is among the earliest human technologies, along with tool-making (although tool-making is found in other species). Indeed, I'd argue for renaming the human species Homo ignis for this reason.
(2) Reliability: You don't want power to go off at random times when you need it the most. If you're in agriculture, you need to be able to plow and seed fields right when environmental conditions are optimal for planting, and the same goes for harvesting food. Industrial operations can't just be halted randomly either, and of course hospitals and emergency services can't be allowed to go down during natural disasters. This means you have to think about storage of energy - as electrical, physical or chemical potential energy - as well as having the means to utilize that stored energy.
(3) Independence: having something as fundamental as your communities' basic food and energy supply be entirely reliant on long-distance transport from some other part of the world is reckless and irresponsible. Interruptions are inevitable and anyone looking at the world today will realize that supply chain fragility is a major problem. Hence you want to have primary sources of power that aren't subject to such interruptions. When it comes to obtaining equipment that can utilize power, well, trade is not such a bad idea, there are things like Ricardo's notion of competitive advantage that make perfect sense.
Now, let's do a thought experiments: take 1000 communities of 1,000,000 human beings (1B people), and plop them all over the world, in randomly chosen locations that have access to farmland and water and raw materials, and ask what their optimal energy supply strategy would be.
Well, sunlight is clearly something they'll all have access to, and wind is something they'll all have access to. Uranium ore? Relatively few will be anywhere near high-grade uranium ore deposits. Coal? Coal is fairly common, but burning coal for power is a dirty business, see (1). Oil and gas are not as widely distributed as coal, see (1) and (3). Wood? Wood is actually a pretty dirty fuel source when burned at scale. No, we really want a fully electrified system if (1) is a primary goal.
So, the conclusion I come to is that you need to manufacture tons of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery electric storage for each of these communities of 1,000,000 people. The scale needs to be GwH of power, but if we look at sun and wind inputs, then there's an adequate supply for 24-7 power using this approach - with exceptions as you move towards polar regions, where long dark seasonal effects make nuclear power plants more attractive as a niche option.
This article immediately raised a lot of red flags. Lots of rhetorical techniques to create false familiarity and empathy ("Feeling like you’re doing the right thing doesn’t mean you are. I just couldn’t admit it. My sense of identity was tied to my false beliefs about energy" ... implicity, just like you!). The repeated use of "false" and "untrue". The tie to basic propaganda levers like "security" and "liberty and self-determination"
You then find: https://briangitt.com/how-to-win-the-energy-war-tell-better-... where he basically admits it, "When it comes to ideological warfare, whoever tells the best story wins. Energy companies need to stop fighting a defensive battle and go on the offensive. Recapture the narrative high ground and craft compelling counter-narratives to highlight the essential contribution of fossil fuels to human well-being"
For another taste of this, https://briangitt.com/solars-dirty-secrets-how-solar-power-h..."In fact, solar panels require 10 times the minerals to deliver the same quantity of energy as a natural gas plant" Which is just a bald-faced use of misinformation there. I think a comparison to ongoing use of natural gas would look better, instead of "minerals". Intentional apples-to-orange comparisons are another part of misinformation techniques.
"Thanks to
@AlexEpstein
I had an amazing weekend discussing the future of energy with
@peterthiel
,
@ShellenbergerMD
, & other energy leaders.
I'm excited to watch Alex's book Fossil Future open people's eyes to the critical role energy plays in making the world a better place"
It's clear if you go back in archive.org and look at his podcast history, it seems that he is very interested in communication and media. I would not be surprised, based on his site and social media presence, if he was being compensated in some form for improving the image of the fossil fuel industry.
I don't disagree with him on every point, either. He's not wrong about nuclear and he's not wrong that renewables are a cure-all. That's the point of good misinformation, mixing truth in carefully to create certain outcomes.
This is frightening though, it is crafted misinformation for a HN audience.
I am flabbergasted how much governments, media and institutions lie to the public about the feasibly of wind and solar as a replacement for fossil fuels.
Hard to say. Hard to say who is even knowingly lying. It started as a hopeful message, that turned into a feedback loop where one group repeats the talking point of another, that is picked up and repeated by another, etc.
At this point, it's part of 'common knowledge' that we are transitioning to solar/wind and big oil/big gas and corrupt politicians are preventing that transition.
The government isn't preventing any transition. There is no transition. Wind/Solar cannot replace fossil fuels. But it is a talking point of every politician that wants to be seen as environmentally conscious to talk about a potential transition. I think some of those politician know that can't happen and they are lying about it. I think some of those politicians don't know that it can't happen and will never work.
Natural gas companies are some of the biggest backers of wind and solar projects. Care to guess why?
Nuclear as a lobby is dead. Do they have any institutional power? America can't even keep existing nuclear power plants open, much less build new ones.
"Natural gas provides the most cost-effective near-term solution for affordable, reliable, low-emission energy. Shifts from coal to natural gas have produced the biggest emissions reductions over the past 15 years. Natural gas produces only 10% of the air pollutants and 50% of the CO2 that coal does.[10] Natural gas also has many uses beyond providing power; fertilizers, computers, medical equipment, steel, plastic, mobile phones, cars, and most consumer products are currently made from natural gas and oil. In fact, even solar and wind require natural gas as a backup because they don’t operate most of the time.
Energy Capital Ventures (ECV) is one of the few VCs that sees the potential of natural gas. Instead of chasing popular trends, ECV correctly sees the path to achieving low-emission energy will come through investments in scaleable energy technology such as advanced leak detection and methane capture, process automation and controls, renewable natural gas, and synthetic microbes that absorb greenhouse emissions."