This would have happened a bit earlier if the most efficient and long-lasting solar panels, monocrystalline silicon, had been developed by US manufacturers instead of by Chinese ones. All the tariffs applied by state and federal regulators on the import of these panels have been about slowing the rate of solar PV production in the USA on behalf of the fossil fuel and investor-owned utility sectors.
Claims that these tariffs have some human rights motivations are nonsensical, would the US block imports of Saudi oil over human rights abuses there? Of course not - but silicon solar panels, oh my!
It's no surprise that the pushback by politicians owned by investors in fossil fuels and utilities has been so intense - energy is one of the most lucrative investments, and it's rather difficult to control and meter the flow of sunlight to homes, in comparison to natural gas or crude oil.
Notably, the USA has no R & D programs or subsidy programs like the CHIPS act (for semiconductors for computation, not for power production) aimed at rapidly expanding monocrystalline silicon production.
You're forgetting labor costs in the US are much higher and environmental regulations are much more strict. So US made panels will unlikely to ever be price competitive with the Chinese made ones.
Come on, you can make silicon monocrystalline products without pollution with appropriate controls, it's no different from the computer chip production process. See CHIPS act?
China doesn't have a big natural gas / crude oil sector trying to block development of alternatives to their products, that's the difference.
Why should the US try to lead solar panel technology ? China has many talented engineers and plenty of venture capital. I'd prefer them to invest it in solar panel manufacturing and power electronics rather than social media, ai or Telco technology.
Relying on a non-friendly country for something so crucial as energy is generally not a great position to be in, particularly if that country has rival world power ambitions. Europe and Russia have provided a great recent example of why you don't want to be reliant on potential enemies for your energy needs, and while the situation between the US and China is not the same and solar is different than fossil fuels, it's still a factor worth thinking about. The US would be a lot more secure being able to rely on a domestic solar industry as solar becomes more and more important.
German speaking here. This position brought a lot of harm and made the German economy very fragile. The German business model in the last decades was based on cheap security (NATO), cheap gas (Russia) and a huge market to sell cars (China).
And here we are in 2023, paying 100s of billions of tax money for (maybe) having a working army in a couple of years, a near collapsing economy bc of zeroed gas imports and a tightening market in China.
Still relying on boundless global trade in 2023 is just.. a funny position.
My comment isn't directly related to the OP, but figured it'd be an interesting insight to share as it's very recent for me.
Just finished a motorbike trip in Laos. Fun fact, their largest export is electricity.
Would've never guessed that, right?
90% of the electricity they generate is exported to neighboring countries - mostly Thailand.
80% is renewable - Go Laos!
But wait, it may be renewable... but turns out the government is corrupt and constantly sells rights to the highest bidder wanting to build a dam for hydroelectric wherever they want, and usually without any sort of environmental survey - oops. It's the driest country I've been to in a while, many villages had their water access completely destroyed due to upstream dams.
Just a cautionary tale as "renewable" doesn't necessarily mean better - green-washing is absolutely still a thing out there and we should be sure to thoroughly vet information before assuming it's more viable solution for us.
It's also worth noting that dams aren't just built for electricity. They're also built to control flooding and to control water supply. I'm not saying that's the case in Laos, but it does happen.
People can live without electricity, but it's difficult to live without water.
I cringe each time that I hear a foreigner complain about China's Three Gorges Dam as an "environmental damage". The number of people who have died from floods on those rivers in the last 2000 years in mind-boggling. Yes, it generates a lot of electricity, but it is dual purpose to also control flooding.
People can live without electricity, but it's difficult to live without water.
This part is also interesting. While traveling in developing countries in East/South/Southeast Asia, the driest places and always the poorest. The only way to overcome is irrigation. The wealthiest places find a way to move water from wet lands to dry lands.
People can live without electricity, but only for very brief periods of time. If we had to go extended periods, I don't think it would be a stretch to say civilisational collapse would be immanent.
It's the driest country I've been to in a while, many villages had their water access completely destroyed due to upstream dams.
Completely destroyed, or just no longer enough to support wasteful methods of irrigation? It's been over a decade since I was in SE Asia, but my impression was that they relied heavily on flooding fields for irrigation.
I live full time in Indonesia, and their irrigation system is much more complex. I saw nothing of the sort in Laos, so perhaps that could be a factor too.
I don't think it is helpful to celebrate countries that won the "geography birth lottery" and have huge rivers that are easy to dam. See: Laos, Paraguay, Norway, Austria, etc. Nothing is "amazing" that they are mostly green energy.
Also, for other readers, Laos is a repressive "communist" dictatorship. It is no surprise that the gov't welcomed Belt & Road programme by China (with high interest loans!) to build a giant dam that enriched few at the expense of many. This is green washing at its very best.
The future of green energy is mostly about solar and wind. Yes, there are some places with easy-to-dam rivers remaining (sub-Saharan Africa), but they are few and far between.
It is still crazy to me that North Africa is not covered in solar panels that export to Europe. Same for Australia, South Africa, and many Gulf countries. Sunshine and wind is the "new oil" of the 21st Century. They can export to neighboring countries or produce green hydrogen.
The same exact story can be said about Iceland, which is very far from being a communist dictatorship (and it bears mentioning that Laos government is not repressive compared to many capitalist democratic governments; I don’t know where you would get that from except preconceived biases).
Iceland sells majority of its renewable energy to foreign aluminum companies. Along with fish it is the biggest export. The government is corrupt and constantly sells rights to build factories to bidders while neglecting environmental impacts. Whole towns are often run by a single Canadian aluminum company. And the green origin certificates is then sold to EU countries (just like indulgence was sold by the Catholic church), so “green” energy consumers are buying in Germany, are actually just coal power, where the energy company bought the origin certificates from Iceland.
See, you don’t need to be communist, nor a dictatorship, to do industrial scale greenwashing
You think the energy transition can be achieved without harming people? Yes if you are a river fisherman you do not live in the right century. Nor do people living in mountain villages. There are those who will get cancer from working in a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. Still it's not going to be that bad because the pollution from fossil fuel electricity generation is also causing a lot of disease and killing a lot of people.
There are those who will get cancer from working in a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant.
It doesn't have to be this way, the engineering controls needed are well known. It requires the country in question to be financially committed to doing things right. For nuclear power this is already considered an essential prerequisite, yet coal power plants already release vastly more radioactivity and increase the cancer risk of everone around them. As far as reducing total cancer, nuclear is the way to go.
One thing that's often overlooked in statistics like this is roof top solar because it's just not that easy to account for. In places like Australia, where double digit percentages of homes have solar and where building codes are actually being changed to require solar panels, this is a non trivial amount that is putting a lot of pressure on energy suppliers to adapt. Effectively whole states are running on solar when the sun comes out (which it does a lot over there). Whether they like it or not, demand for grid electricity drops a lot whenever these panels are producing. And of course a lot of people are installing batteries as well. That must be happening in the US as well and it must be having some impact.
https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-research-data This article seems to suggest that the amount of installed solar has doubled in the last four years and that the pace is accelerating. Also it states that the solar market expanded by 40% last year.
I don't really understand the advantage of rooftop solar over just putting the same number of solar panels in a field somewhere. Id think it would be a lot cheaper to install the panels in one-place then having to distribute them to a bunch of differently shaped and oriented roof tops, and cheaper to have a few large inverters instead of a bunch of small ones.
rooftop solar has the advantage that it doesn't depend on installing new transmission lines to get a grid connection
this is especially important in backwards countries like the usa with their so-called license raj preventing modernization
since most household energy is used for low-grade heating and cooling (refrigerator, air conditioner, oven, clothes dryer) i think thermal energy storage is likely to be a crucial enabling factor; mit's solar house used phase-change materials, but i suspect thermochemical energy storage is a better option
(why thermal energy storage instead of batteries? in the limit it's about three orders of magnitude higher capacity for a given price)
> ...have solar and where building codes are actually being changed to require solar panels...
Do you have a source for that? It sounds kinda silly. The maintenance + OH&S aspects of solar panels are nontrivial and it doesn't make sense to mandate them on residential homes.
I've always assumed that once the economics make sense it'll be easier to build a massive solar farm and let people use the grid as usual. Much less risk of people falling off roofs,heavy objects falling off roofs, wiring being misconnected, weird maintenance problems, managing the ebb and flow of energy, etc. I don't want to have to look after my own panels.
I will install solar(not in US) but AFAIK batteries are not yet cost effective, Am I wrong and someone invented some cheap batteries? I expect that a company could be more efficient building giant batteries(chemical, gravity, etc) then a household buying something and maintaining it.
> Replacing over a billion ICE cars seems with EV’s is going to be so much more work, for example.
Instead we could replace ICE cars with no cars and get much more bang for our buck. A few changes to how we build so that you can walk/bike within 15 minutes for many daily needs would reduce energy consumption, save families money, still allow for a car, and everyone would be much happier and healthier.
Cars for all transit is a bad solution regardless of ICE or EV.
> The economics of renewables are hard to beat until night falls and the wind stops blowing, at which point the cost jumps to $infinity/MWh
I can understand why you might think that. But there is one place on the planet that's done the renewable transition now. And it proves you wrong.
Let me introduce the state of South Australia. It's an advanced OECD economy, situated at the base end of Australia so far from anywhere it has only 1 transmission line connecting to a neighbouring state, and it's renowned for going down. Unusually for Australia, South Australia also has no coal or gas, and is famous for wild storms taking down kilometres of it's 100kv power lines.
The transition was expensive. SA already had the most expensive electricity in Australia, and during the transition prices did go up for years. But at 80% the transition is almost over (although they need to build more storage), and the price of electricity in SA has been dropping. In fact it's dropped below the pre-transition price, so it's often below the rest of Australia's coal fired generation:
With that example to follow, the rest of the Australian states are gritting their teeth and following South Australia's lead. Teeth gritting is required because we are predicting a 50% jump in electricity prices, during the transition. It's already starting to bite: https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/power-bills-to-rise-by-... . But that price hike only lasted 5 years in SA, and the light at the end of the tunnel is lower prices than we have now.
If the wind stops blowing that means no new weather systems are being formed. In which case the sun must have stopped shining and the entire planet is doomed.
Another way to look at it, renewables are so cheap 100% renewable usage will be dominated by grid-scale battery cost. What is the magnitude of battery price drops that we will see over the next 10-15 years? The cheaper the batteries are the greater the incentive to build renewables.
One thing I have idly considered - what to do with the excess daily solar energy? Presumably the problem is only going to magnify over the coming years. Net-metering agreements are continuing to get worse, so it seems that the surplus electricity will go to waste.
Outside of bitcoin mining, is there any energy sink a residential user could engage to suck up the spare capacity? At the industrial scale - what processes can intermittently engage in production which is still cost effective if the equipment lays idle for a majority of the day?
Electrolyzing excess energy to produce hydrogen is a good option. Sure, it is not that efficient but you can store hydrogen and it's a useful base ingredient for many industrial processes. And if you need electrical energy you just burn it in a gas-fired power plant.
Solar gives lots of electricity in the summer. But you have light and warmth then. In the winter when you need the electricity, you get maybe 1/10 of whatever the solar array is capable of.
Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations.
Biogas (eg anaerobic digestors) seems much more possible - but even these need warmth to run well - so aren't as good in the winter.
And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so), but that the battery will only last a few years - how people think the economics make sense is a mystery to me.
I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps.
PS - the battery thing also applies to cars. Old electric cars are basically not worth keeping after 10 years. Who would replace the old battery that costs as much as the car? Esp when the battery slots are incompatible with the latest advances - ie you can't upgrade to a better battery, but only install yesterday's tech.
"I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps."
That sounds like unfounded paranoia. It has literally never been easier to be an energy-independent anarchist living in a hut somewhere than today.
Sure 100% solar powered homes might be harder to do in the colder hemispheres but in many parts of the world it is already possible.
During spring, summer and autumn you can cover most of your electricity with a 3kW solar panel set up. Shift your dishwasher, washing machine and dryer to mid day, charge devices when the sun shines etc.
Families in poorer countries are likely on a much smaller carbon footprint and it is therefore easier to replace their energy needs with solar or solar thermal.
Small, medium as well as large scale island grids are already possible and in operation. https://reneweconomy.com.au/wa-off-grid-school-runs-100-on-s...
For colder climates the solar alone will not cut it, insulated homes, heat pumps and solar can however.
> Solar gives lots of electricity in the summer. But you have light and warmth then. In the winter when you need the electricity, you get maybe 1/10 of whatever the solar array is capable of.
The third phase of the energy transition will see massive overcapacity in the summer being turned into chemical energy, to be stored until winter. Hydrogen and synthetic methan will be burned, and the dissipating heat used for district heating. Efficiency is north of 70% for this. I don't see a fundamental problem.
It seems you are basing your thoughts just anecdotally. For instance, I'm sure "winter" in USA doesn't mean 6 months of snow and cloud. I'm sure in some areas winter actually is probably better. And sure wind isn't good energy in all locations - but in areas where it is you can probably harness it at quite high density. I'm in Australia and was just looking at this research here looking at cost effectiveness. It seems to both look at the actual generation capability (that is amount of sun and wind) but also cost of distribution and whether it is going to impact wilderness or other uses. Have a look at the heat maps they have created. I'm sure there are similar studies in the USA. https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/heatmaps/#map-links
Yes, but often too much of it, so lots of people use AC, which uses a LOT of power. Electricity is needed all the year.
"Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations."
And there is wind everywhere, but only if you build high enough.
So yes, there are places where it makes no sense to build them, but there are a lot more other places, where it does.
"I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy"
So a solar + battery powered off grid home is deep controlled by the government?
May you explain how that works?
"And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so),"
Have you looked up any actual numbers? Maybe do so. Also maybe that part, that tracks how the battery prices are changing. They are constantly getting cheaper.
Also maybe you are aware, that the whole industry that was and is fossil based needs to change. Your criticism comes from an angle, that assumes that should be for free?
Burning fossil fuels is cheap. But only if you ignore the external costs of climate change and air pollution.
Lots of southern places where solar is great all year. For more northern locations, cutting down on coal/gas usage for half the year is much better than nothing.
> I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps.
As opposed to government-sanctioned utility companies and petrol companies? Its pretty easy to make your own solar panel (not an efficient one, but something). It is very capital intensive to mine for natural gas and crude these days. Surely the solar panel + battery offers more independence (as evidenced by the fact that nearly every large RV owner is thinking about getting solar now).
Really? What control does the government have over renewables? Fossil fuels bought the government and nuclear is entirely controlled by the government.
Edit: Tesla cars at 200k miles typically retain 80% of their total capacity. The 10 years you quote is the full warranty period. Additionally it costs about $10k to replace the batteries. House hold battery’s last about 20+ years, with 30+ possible without daily draw (quoted based on Tesla power wall specs).
I don’t know where you’re getting your battery facts from, but they’re essentially wrong. I suspect it’s not renewables that’s been captured but your biases.
Ironically most renewables are far more distributed and local than something like gas plants. Instead of maintaining continent-spanning supply chains you can just put your panels up and leave them for a decade or two.
Long-term trends clearly demonstrate the energy grid’s transition to renewable energy sources.
However, renewables like solar and wind come with unique challenges due to their intermittent nature. They are more variable, harder to forecast, have location constraints, and can benefit from battery storage. These factors lead to a more dynamic grid than before.
For instance, several regions in the country provide five-minute updates on their energy generation mix, enabling near real-time observations of renewable energy effects throughout the day
For example, numerous regions across the country provide updates on their energy generation mix at five-minute intervals, allowing for close to real time observations of these effect of renewables throughout the day.
To help those involved in the energy transition, I created an open-source project called Grid Status (https://github.com/kmax12/gridstatus) that provides fuel mix, wholesale pricing, load, load forecasts, and more.
Additionally, I've developed real-time visualizations to make this data more accessible and easier to comprehend: https://www.gridstatus.io
I hope making this data more accessible and understandable will accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.
It demonstrates, quite clearly, that energy cost is not a concern. We can just barrel through to the electric revolution without a single care to cost, availability, or reliability.
This article is a mess. Energy is NOT power. Reporting on energy (which is what the original publication does; and even they confuse it) is almost pointless.
We need power. Not energy.
Let me explain. There is no such thing as a useful measure of energy reliability. Energy is the accumulation of power over time. Here's a super simplistic example to illustrate the point:
You spend all day walking through the desert. Your water bottle is empty. You drank it all. You really need water, yet there's none to be found. You nearly die a few times, yet manage to make it out to a settlement by nightfall.
Someone there fills your bottle with water.
A reporter says your bottle, over that 24 hour period, was full.
That's the way you compute energy. You can have zero power for 12 hours and then have some for another 12. Energy just adds-up all the bits of power you had over 24 hours and reports it as one number.
Energy comparisons are useless.
Here's reality:
Solar is, nominally, about 50% reliable (if this term isn't comfortable, think "available").
No?
It turns off at night.
Roughly 50% of the time...it does not work.
Wind, on the other hand, does not suffer from this issue. It is much more reliable.
With the addition of a nominal amount of storage wind can easily get up to 95% reliability. Solar, with the same amount of storage, runs about 70% reliability.
This is about power delivery. Consistent. Water bottle in the desert, to use when you need water.
Ignoring all other factors (environmental, wildlife, NIMBY, noise, etc.), wind is a far better technology than solar.
Yet, again, to pull this back into the realm of what we should discussing: We need to talk about power, not energy. When you go to charge your electric car at the same time a million other people want to do the same thing, you need power.
Both are great, since while the daily cycle is a problem with solar, the seasonal variations are a far larger issue (since much mobe energy storage is needed). But both complement each other.
Wind is stronger in the winter and solar is strong in the summer. The best consistency is achieved when both are used, not one or the other.
No, not really. That's the impression most people have. For example, solar, in the northern hemisphere, is --to use your term-- stronger in March/April, not the summer. This is due to the panel negative temperature coefficient.
> The best consistency is achieved when both are used, not one or the other.
No. Wind with approximately three hours of storage is about 95% reliable.
Including hydro in the renewables column made the math work. Makes it seem like we've made more progress than perhaps we have. Hydro and wind are the biggest chunks in their pie chart. And much of hydro is decades, if not centuries old infrastructure.
This would be better news if coal wasn't also being replaced by new fossil gas plants like crazy. If you look at coal vs fossil gas in the US it's a lot more depressing.
On paper that is sometimes true, and gas companies try to lean in hard on that. Gas can do 480 gCO2/kWh vs. coal's 800+. But when you include wellhead and pipeline losses of methane they end up looking almost exactly equal, according to many studies. So it's not really progress. Also, half the CO2 of coal is nowhere even close to acceptable. We need things that do about 1/20th the carbon of coal or less, so wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, tidal only. Gas is out.
>> And even when projects are approved, developers often discover they need to pay for new transmission lines to deliver power to residents and businesses. Those transmission lines often face further permitting delays.
Just discovering this? Yeah, this has not been well planned.
Readit News
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/04/14/the-weekend-read-chin...
Claims that these tariffs have some human rights motivations are nonsensical, would the US block imports of Saudi oil over human rights abuses there? Of course not - but silicon solar panels, oh my!
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/exclusive-us-blocks-more...
It's no surprise that the pushback by politicians owned by investors in fossil fuels and utilities has been so intense - energy is one of the most lucrative investments, and it's rather difficult to control and meter the flow of sunlight to homes, in comparison to natural gas or crude oil.
Notably, the USA has no R & D programs or subsidy programs like the CHIPS act (for semiconductors for computation, not for power production) aimed at rapidly expanding monocrystalline silicon production.
China doesn't have a big natural gas / crude oil sector trying to block development of alternatives to their products, that's the difference.
The tariffs boosted domestic production of solar panels.
The tariffs also increased the cost of solar panels, so they slowed adoption of solar.
You can have Made in America, or you can have cheap, but you cannot have both.
Still relying on boundless global trade in 2023 is just.. a funny position.
It is utterly inefficient to produce stuff far, far from where it will be used.
Spreading things out like this is balls.
Lets start building again. If we're to get off this dust-ball, we have to learn to do things ourselves, again.
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Just finished a motorbike trip in Laos. Fun fact, their largest export is electricity.
Would've never guessed that, right?
90% of the electricity they generate is exported to neighboring countries - mostly Thailand.
80% is renewable - Go Laos!
But wait, it may be renewable... but turns out the government is corrupt and constantly sells rights to the highest bidder wanting to build a dam for hydroelectric wherever they want, and usually without any sort of environmental survey - oops. It's the driest country I've been to in a while, many villages had their water access completely destroyed due to upstream dams.
Just a cautionary tale as "renewable" doesn't necessarily mean better - green-washing is absolutely still a thing out there and we should be sure to thoroughly vet information before assuming it's more viable solution for us.
People can live without electricity, but it's difficult to live without water.
Completely destroyed, or just no longer enough to support wasteful methods of irrigation? It's been over a decade since I was in SE Asia, but my impression was that they relied heavily on flooding fields for irrigation.
I live full time in Indonesia, and their irrigation system is much more complex. I saw nothing of the sort in Laos, so perhaps that could be a factor too.
Also, for other readers, Laos is a repressive "communist" dictatorship. It is no surprise that the gov't welcomed Belt & Road programme by China (with high interest loans!) to build a giant dam that enriched few at the expense of many. This is green washing at its very best.
The future of green energy is mostly about solar and wind. Yes, there are some places with easy-to-dam rivers remaining (sub-Saharan Africa), but they are few and far between.
It is still crazy to me that North Africa is not covered in solar panels that export to Europe. Same for Australia, South Africa, and many Gulf countries. Sunshine and wind is the "new oil" of the 21st Century. They can export to neighboring countries or produce green hydrogen.
The same exact story can be said about Iceland, which is very far from being a communist dictatorship (and it bears mentioning that Laos government is not repressive compared to many capitalist democratic governments; I don’t know where you would get that from except preconceived biases).
Iceland sells majority of its renewable energy to foreign aluminum companies. Along with fish it is the biggest export. The government is corrupt and constantly sells rights to build factories to bidders while neglecting environmental impacts. Whole towns are often run by a single Canadian aluminum company. And the green origin certificates is then sold to EU countries (just like indulgence was sold by the Catholic church), so “green” energy consumers are buying in Germany, are actually just coal power, where the energy company bought the origin certificates from Iceland.
See, you don’t need to be communist, nor a dictatorship, to do industrial scale greenwashing
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It doesn't have to be this way, the engineering controls needed are well known. It requires the country in question to be financially committed to doing things right. For nuclear power this is already considered an essential prerequisite, yet coal power plants already release vastly more radioactivity and increase the cancer risk of everone around them. As far as reducing total cancer, nuclear is the way to go.
That doesn't imply we can't compare alternatives and say "This one will result in less harm than that one."
Tell me you're in a privileged western country without telling me.
https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-research-data This article seems to suggest that the amount of installed solar has doubled in the last four years and that the pace is accelerating. Also it states that the solar market expanded by 40% last year.
Not disagreeing with your statement, just pointing out that there's many headwinds to a greener energy future.
this is especially important in backwards countries like the usa with their so-called license raj preventing modernization
since most household energy is used for low-grade heating and cooling (refrigerator, air conditioner, oven, clothes dryer) i think thermal energy storage is likely to be a crucial enabling factor; mit's solar house used phase-change materials, but i suspect thermochemical energy storage is a better option
(why thermal energy storage instead of batteries? in the limit it's about three orders of magnitude higher capacity for a given price)
Do you have a source for that? It sounds kinda silly. The maintenance + OH&S aspects of solar panels are nontrivial and it doesn't make sense to mandate them on residential homes.
I've always assumed that once the economics make sense it'll be easier to build a massive solar farm and let people use the grid as usual. Much less risk of people falling off roofs,heavy objects falling off roofs, wiring being misconnected, weird maintenance problems, managing the ebb and flow of energy, etc. I don't want to have to look after my own panels.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/859266/number-of-coal-po...
They generate something like 25% of greenhouse gases. When should be expect these to be replaced, and get the 25% drop in emissions?
Replacing over a billion ICE cars seems with EV’s is going to be so much more work, for example.
An immediate 25% drop in emissions might even buy us a few more years before we need to get to net zero emissions.
Instead we could replace ICE cars with no cars and get much more bang for our buck. A few changes to how we build so that you can walk/bike within 15 minutes for many daily needs would reduce energy consumption, save families money, still allow for a car, and everyone would be much happier and healthier.
Cars for all transit is a bad solution regardless of ICE or EV.
I can understand why you might think that. But there is one place on the planet that's done the renewable transition now. And it proves you wrong.
Let me introduce the state of South Australia. It's an advanced OECD economy, situated at the base end of Australia so far from anywhere it has only 1 transmission line connecting to a neighbouring state, and it's renowned for going down. Unusually for Australia, South Australia also has no coal or gas, and is famous for wild storms taking down kilometres of it's 100kv power lines.
It's currently running at 80% renewables:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-hits-stunning-ne...
No, the power does no go off at night.
The transition was expensive. SA already had the most expensive electricity in Australia, and during the transition prices did go up for years. But at 80% the transition is almost over (although they need to build more storage), and the price of electricity in SA has been dropping. In fact it's dropped below the pre-transition price, so it's often below the rest of Australia's coal fired generation:
https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/sa_fact_...
With that example to follow, the rest of the Australian states are gritting their teeth and following South Australia's lead. Teeth gritting is required because we are predicting a 50% jump in electricity prices, during the transition. It's already starting to bite: https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/power-bills-to-rise-by-... . But that price hike only lasted 5 years in SA, and the light at the end of the tunnel is lower prices than we have now.
Too late to worry about electricity in that case!
Outside of bitcoin mining, is there any energy sink a residential user could engage to suck up the spare capacity? At the industrial scale - what processes can intermittently engage in production which is still cost effective if the equipment lays idle for a majority of the day?
Fuel synthesis? Desalination? SETI-like computations?
Solar gives lots of electricity in the summer. But you have light and warmth then. In the winter when you need the electricity, you get maybe 1/10 of whatever the solar array is capable of.
Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations.
Biogas (eg anaerobic digestors) seems much more possible - but even these need warmth to run well - so aren't as good in the winter.
And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so), but that the battery will only last a few years - how people think the economics make sense is a mystery to me.
I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps.
PS - the battery thing also applies to cars. Old electric cars are basically not worth keeping after 10 years. Who would replace the old battery that costs as much as the car? Esp when the battery slots are incompatible with the latest advances - ie you can't upgrade to a better battery, but only install yesterday's tech.
That sounds like unfounded paranoia. It has literally never been easier to be an energy-independent anarchist living in a hut somewhere than today.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
Sure 100% solar powered homes might be harder to do in the colder hemispheres but in many parts of the world it is already possible. During spring, summer and autumn you can cover most of your electricity with a 3kW solar panel set up. Shift your dishwasher, washing machine and dryer to mid day, charge devices when the sun shines etc. Families in poorer countries are likely on a much smaller carbon footprint and it is therefore easier to replace their energy needs with solar or solar thermal. Small, medium as well as large scale island grids are already possible and in operation. https://reneweconomy.com.au/wa-off-grid-school-runs-100-on-s...
For colder climates the solar alone will not cut it, insulated homes, heat pumps and solar can however.
The third phase of the energy transition will see massive overcapacity in the summer being turned into chemical energy, to be stored until winter. Hydrogen and synthetic methan will be burned, and the dissipating heat used for district heating. Efficiency is north of 70% for this. I don't see a fundamental problem.
Yes, but often too much of it, so lots of people use AC, which uses a LOT of power. Electricity is needed all the year.
"Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations."
And there is wind everywhere, but only if you build high enough. So yes, there are places where it makes no sense to build them, but there are a lot more other places, where it does.
"I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy"
So a solar + battery powered off grid home is deep controlled by the government? May you explain how that works?
"And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so),"
Have you looked up any actual numbers? Maybe do so. Also maybe that part, that tracks how the battery prices are changing. They are constantly getting cheaper.
Also maybe you are aware, that the whole industry that was and is fossil based needs to change. Your criticism comes from an angle, that assumes that should be for free?
Burning fossil fuels is cheap. But only if you ignore the external costs of climate change and air pollution.
As opposed to government-sanctioned utility companies and petrol companies? Its pretty easy to make your own solar panel (not an efficient one, but something). It is very capital intensive to mine for natural gas and crude these days. Surely the solar panel + battery offers more independence (as evidenced by the fact that nearly every large RV owner is thinking about getting solar now).
Edit: Tesla cars at 200k miles typically retain 80% of their total capacity. The 10 years you quote is the full warranty period. Additionally it costs about $10k to replace the batteries. House hold battery’s last about 20+ years, with 30+ possible without daily draw (quoted based on Tesla power wall specs).
I don’t know where you’re getting your battery facts from, but they’re essentially wrong. I suspect it’s not renewables that’s been captured but your biases.
However, renewables like solar and wind come with unique challenges due to their intermittent nature. They are more variable, harder to forecast, have location constraints, and can benefit from battery storage. These factors lead to a more dynamic grid than before.
For instance, several regions in the country provide five-minute updates on their energy generation mix, enabling near real-time observations of renewable energy effects throughout the day
For example, numerous regions across the country provide updates on their energy generation mix at five-minute intervals, allowing for close to real time observations of these effect of renewables throughout the day.
To help those involved in the energy transition, I created an open-source project called Grid Status (https://github.com/kmax12/gridstatus) that provides fuel mix, wholesale pricing, load, load forecasts, and more.
Additionally, I've developed real-time visualizations to make this data more accessible and easier to comprehend: https://www.gridstatus.io
I hope making this data more accessible and understandable will accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.
We need power. Not energy.
Let me explain. There is no such thing as a useful measure of energy reliability. Energy is the accumulation of power over time. Here's a super simplistic example to illustrate the point:
You spend all day walking through the desert. Your water bottle is empty. You drank it all. You really need water, yet there's none to be found. You nearly die a few times, yet manage to make it out to a settlement by nightfall.
Someone there fills your bottle with water.
A reporter says your bottle, over that 24 hour period, was full.
That's the way you compute energy. You can have zero power for 12 hours and then have some for another 12. Energy just adds-up all the bits of power you had over 24 hours and reports it as one number.
Energy comparisons are useless.
Here's reality:
Solar is, nominally, about 50% reliable (if this term isn't comfortable, think "available").
No?
It turns off at night.
Roughly 50% of the time...it does not work.
Wind, on the other hand, does not suffer from this issue. It is much more reliable.
With the addition of a nominal amount of storage wind can easily get up to 95% reliability. Solar, with the same amount of storage, runs about 70% reliability.
This is about power delivery. Consistent. Water bottle in the desert, to use when you need water.
Ignoring all other factors (environmental, wildlife, NIMBY, noise, etc.), wind is a far better technology than solar.
Yet, again, to pull this back into the realm of what we should discussing: We need to talk about power, not energy. When you go to charge your electric car at the same time a million other people want to do the same thing, you need power.
Wind is stronger in the winter and solar is strong in the summer. The best consistency is achieved when both are used, not one or the other.
> The best consistency is achieved when both are used, not one or the other.
No. Wind with approximately three hours of storage is about 95% reliable.
Once again, it's about power, not energy.
Including hydro in the renewables column made the math work. Makes it seem like we've made more progress than perhaps we have. Hydro and wind are the biggest chunks in their pie chart. And much of hydro is decades, if not centuries old infrastructure.
But still! Lots of progress.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896
The fraction of energy that comes from low carbon sources is what matters.
in some sense that's 'low carbon'
It doesn't in a sense that meaningfully addresses the challenges we're facing, though.
Just discovering this? Yeah, this has not been well planned.