FWIW "Net Zero" is using carbon offsets to have "net output" of zero carbon emissions, but you can still emit as much carbon as you can buy credits for. Credits have been widely regarded as ineffectual and even worsening carbon emissions, deforestation etc.
Some utilities now have programs where you can pay them extra money "to get a portion of your power from a clean energy source". This money is used effectively to buy carbon credits. So they're asking customers to subsidize them in not needing to eliminate carbon emissions.
Actually not emitting carbon is what some utilities now call "real zero". But their commitments to "real zero" are a long ways away, and they're just corporate goals & in no way binding.
Technically the difference between "net zero" and "carbon neutral" is supposed to be that "net zero" first eliminates all but "residual" emissions, and only then depends on offsets, whereas "carbon neutral" is more like what you describe (no required emissions cuts; possible to just buy — often dubious — offsets).
Science Based Targets Initiative for example requires companies signing up to their scheme to have credible plans to cut emissions by ~50% by 2030 and 90% by 2050 to claim that they're aiming for "net zero" [1] (SBTI itself was recently in the news because employees felt that recent policy changes leaned too heavily on offsetting; I don't really know what the current situation there is).
In practice usage of these terms my not be well regulated, so it's always worth checking out exactly whose definitions are being used.
This is made worse by the sheer, but actual, complexity that surrounds all this. Especially the "scopes¹".
So someone buying and selling, say, diesel in solar-powered-fuel stations, can still have "net zero" because they themselves don't emit, but both the people buying it, and the companies producing it, still emit immense amounts of carbon.
Which is then a very easy way to "greenwash" your business. To have marketing, that's not even a lie, but still being very misleading.
(I used to build accounting software for carbon emission accounting, it's way, way more complex that this diesel-example)
Net zero would make sense if there were some sort of legal backing to it.
I’ll happily pay $100 for a ton of carbon if it comes with a video of it being captured from the atmosphere (or reasonable chain of custody documentation) and it’s delivered to me in the form of biologically inert bricks.
In fact, we have some trees we haven’t cut down this year in the back yard. I’d happily sell you some bullshit carbon capture credits in exchange for not cutting them down next year if I could then convert that money into atmospheric carbon capture bricks. (It’d be more tax efficient for you to buy the brick directly though…)
When we tried to install solar panels, one of the MANY roadblocks our coop put in the way was that we had to opt out of additional charges for carbon credits before they would begin processing the solar installation.
So because we applied for a solar inspection to have solar installed, we were automatically enrolled in a program that costs us more money, for their carbon offsets. And they were selling it to us as if that's just the same as us installing solar panels.
Garbage. And that was just one of about a dozen different blocks they have as part of their process.
If I lived somewhere with other utility providers, I would tell them to fuck right off.
> to have any hope of achieving this goal would require the addition, every year, of 630 gigawatts of solar photovoltaics and 390 GW of wind starting no later than 2030—figures that are around four times as great as than any annual tally so far.
But according to Bloomberg:
> developers deployed 444 GW of new PV capacity throughout the world in 2023.
So rather than 25% towards the 2030 goal we are 66% there on PV.
Bloomberg continues:
> It says new installations could reach 574 GW this year, 627 GW in 2025, and 880 GW in 2030.
So hitting the target 5 years ahead of schedule by this estimate.
Bloomberg seems to be talking about capacity (does not take into account capacity factor, only max output when it's sunny), maybe the article is talking of average actual production? (which is between three and four times lower as far as I know)
With the advent of solar and HVDC, is there a potential future where AC stops being the backbone of the grid, letting us drop the whole notion of grid-scale frequency? It sure sounds simpler not to have do the delicate phase matching dance, among other things.
This is unlikely. While transmission lines may go DC, all of the distribution, the lines that goes from a substation to peoples houses, in the US is AC. Although it’s possible to wire a house for DC, and people have done that, many of the appliances we use, use AC power.
Although AC phase matching is a delicate technical problem, it’s one we’ve solved for over a hundred years. DC presents other engineering challenges that are non-trivial. For example, circuit breakers for AC power are designed to “break” when the AC curve hits zero volts. This eliminates the chance of arcing and makes breakers smaller and cheaper to manufacture. A DC breaker has a chance of arcing and it may be necessary to make them larger, or use exotic gasses with high dielectric values to prevent this from occurring. Either of these increase costs for homeowners.
Transmission has a bunch of problems with DC as well. Transformers are fundamentally AC devices; if you want to use them in a DC circuit, you need an inverter anyway to convert the DC to AC and back again. There are ways to step up DC voltage, but none are as cheap or reliable at utility scale as a transformer is. If you don't step up the voltage, you'll lose basically all your power to transmission losses, since delivering high power at low voltage requires high current, and power loss increases with the square of the current.
High-voltage DC is also extremely dangerous, as it's prone to arcing and electrocution.
> A DC breaker has a chance of arcing and it may be necessary to make them larger, or use exotic gasses with high dielectric values to prevent this from occurring.
That's a problem for mechanical switches (were conductors move to make contact or disconnect).
If you use semiconductors to do the switching, it becomes a problem of how fast they switch, how much energy is dissipated during the switch, and how much energy those semiconductors can absorb momentarily (thermal mass).
For small equipment, this is a solved problem. Fast switching FETs are cheap & robust.
For utility-scale, semiconductors are an entirely different ballgame. Big advances have been made over the last decades.
So a HVDC grid might in theory be possible. But in practice, it'll be an engineering tradeoff between HVDC+semiconductors almost everywhere vs. HVAC+more traditional gear like transformers.
And even if a HVDC grid were practical with modern tech, in most places there's existing AC-based grid & power plants. I suspect the "sync AC phases" is an easier problem to solve than "re-do the grid to use HVDC".
But for 'simple' point-to-point connections like an offshore windpark or long international lines, HVDC is sometimes practical (and used, if so).
I think a DC grid is likely. But it's still 100 years away.
Over time, more and more components will be built DC (DC long distance cables are already popular, due to being slightly cheaper. DC for electronics is popular due to AC being poorly suited to microprocessors/logic. DC sees wide use in cars. USB-C brings computer peripherals into the DC world).
Eventually, whenever two DC bits of power infrastructure are touching oneanother, someone will notice that removing the DC->AC->DC conversion steps saves money and increases efficiency.
Eventually enough bits of the grid will be DC that AC 'islanding' can occur - whenever every link from A to B is DC, there is nothing to keep the phase locked between place A and place B. Initially that will be solved with software locking means.
But finally maintaining that anti-islanding tech will be too costly, and all remaining bits of the AC grid will be removed.
But it's gonna take 100 years because grid tech changes slowly, and infrastructure like buried cables can be 70+ years years old.
There may be a potential for more localized grids that are interconnected by HVDC transmission lines. I'm not sure what the impetus for that would be, however. I agree that it would be unlikely.
Interestingly, HVDC actually becomes a more efficient method of transmission over longer distances. Perhaps it's feasible to generate electricity half a continent away. Maybe tile the Sahara with solar panels and power all of Africa with it.
You're assuming that, in the future, we'll still have huge, centralized plants. With solar, it's very possible that we'll have small stations in each town or area, and only need to balance between them infrequently, greatly reducing the amount of energy we need to carry across large distances.
The arcing is no joke. In my building they have a new assembly of three coupled water pumps and an electrical box that is waiting to be installed that has a scary warning about how the electrical box could create a dangerous arc.
Probably not. Spinning inertia and grid frequency are a core component of running a stable grid. Gives you a large store of energy that can absorb sudden spikes in demand or drops in supply, so systems have time to react before really bad things happen.
The grid frequency is an incredibly useful communication tool that allows any piece of equipment to easily and accurately measure the current health the overall grid, and automatically make adjustments to help balance and improve the health the of the grid (either by increasing or decreasing load/supply). Because the frequency is set by physically large spinning turbines it means it’s also a direct and inseparable measure of total grid health, not something that’s dependent on another system to monitor and communicate grid health.
It’s hard to overstate how much of our electricity grids depend on grid frequency, and one having thousands of systems monitoring and adapting to grid frequency, to remain as robust and stable as they are. In a DC world you don’t get that anymore, and keeping a grid balanced becomes substantially more complex requiring potentially unreliable side-channel communication to allow equipment on the grid to coordinate themselves. Its really hard to beat a system where one of it core fundamental attributes (frequency) needed for power transmission, is also the perfect attribute for distributed coordination of load and supply.
> Gives you a large store of energy that can absorb sudden spikes in demand or drops in supply, so systems have time to react before really bad things happen.
Capacitors do the same for DC. They are also more efficient and reliable.
The thing about a communication channel is true. But it will become true for AC after almost all of the generation becomes free of rotational inertia too (PV, modern wind, and batteries). And you need side-channel communication to decide what generator will take over what load right now.
The grid needs to run at multiple voltages - transmission, distribution, industrial/commercial/residential service - which is complex on a DC grid. Synchronizing the phases is an easier problem.
Synchronization is a one time event. Once the networks are coupled the physics itself keeps it in sync.
The problem is that physics also dictates that the interconnection links need to be big enough to handle the power imbalance between the different parts of the networks. So grid management is mostly about balancing production and demand as a whole and in sub-grids.
Vermont is considering installing Tesla Powerwalls for every home in the state to create distributed storage of power which they can then control to optimize the grid. Theoretically those Powerwalls could be fed with DC instead of AC and use their inverters to power each home with no need for grid synchronization. Each home would have its own AC frequency. One issue might be devices which use the grid frequency to run clocks. If the frequency in each home is different or drifts then clocks across the state might not tell the same time or get out of sync. I'm not sure how common grid synced clocks are any more, most clocks these days use a quartz crystal as a time reference instead of the grid. Industry will have to remain on the AC grid and they probably do use grid frequency for a variety of things, but there aren't inverters and batteries big enough to power the largest industries anyway. So perhaps a hybrid grid will develop, legacy AC for industry and DC for homes to remove one stage of conversion inefficiencies (both to the home and in feeding power back to the grid from the batteries). Seems like it would be easy to test this on a small scale to start with on a small group of homes.
It's a really interesting article. It does not really talk about Net zero much, but it talks more about reliability of grids that are fed by renewables and do not have classical generators.
It seems the correlation between the article title ("Getting the Grid to Net Zero") and the subject that is actually discussed (maintaining a power grid stability in presence of inverters) is very weak.
Don't get me wrong: the article is very interesting. I really learnt something: I discovered "system inertia", I was not aware of stability issues linked to inverters, and did not know about grid-forming & grid-following inverters, and the research about finding the minimal amount of grid-forming to keep a power-grid stable in case of an issue in a given power plant. All of these topics are very interesting.
But making a connection between inverters and ecology through the "net zero" terms seems either off topic, misleading or irrelevant. First because this "net zero" term is heavily criticized as it means carbon are still emitted but companies are paying for carbon credits (that are not compensating at all the carbon emitted for many reasons [1]). Here building solar panels, wind turbines & batteries emits CO2, and their lifespan is relatively short (at most 10 years for batteries, ~25 years for wind turbines & solar panels, compared to hundreds of years for a dam[7]). Second because climate change is not the only concern about ecology, there are concerning questions about mineral resource extraction, like lithium[2] that is heavily used in batteries, but more generally, we are already extracting the whole Mendeleev periodic table[3]: we don't have alternative mineral resources for batteries or other technologies, the only solution is to extract, produce & consume less. Third, if your only goal is to reduce carbon dioxide equivalent (eqCO2), you should advertise nuclear power plant as the solution. Depending on studies, they produce the same amount or less eqCO2 compared to a wind turbine without batteries[4]. Of course, often eqCO2 is not the only important subject here (being renewable/sustainable is also important, and uranium is a limited resource). And finally, the fact we use renewable energy more and more did not lead to a worlwide energy transition, but an addition. Having a transition will require way more than technologies[5], something that is also not discussed here.
Speaking about solutions to pack a higher percentage of Intermittent renewable energy sources (IRES)[6] in a power-grid through the help of batteries and inverters would have been more accurate in my opinion. Maybe "Why we were not able to achieve 100% renewable energy before?" if you want to be catchy, and it's not perfect, as you are still hiding that you rely on lot of batteries, that are far from being renewable.
As a conclusion, I would say it would be great to be careful when engineers (here IEEE) discuss specific technologies (here power-grid inverters) to not draw conclusion too quickly (having a positive environmental impact), as it's far from being obvious. I know they want to be read, I know that the title must be catchy to attract readers, but it's not an excuse as illustrated above.
First, there is no proof that "LFP grid scale batteries" last longer than regular batteries today as your question may imply.
It seems the first "grid scale batteries" were derived from EV batteries, and are planned for 1 or 2 decades[1].
Basically, we are discussing battery ageing here, which is a complex problem[2].
According to the different studies on the topic I found, mentioning specifically "large-scale" installation like the ones discussed here, the answer is definitely and deceptively the same: between 10 and 20 years[3][5]. More precisely.
From [3]:
> To address the global effort to decrease carbon emissions, many consumers, corporations, and energy providers are adopting the use of electric vehicles and stationary energy storage systems paired with renewable electricity generation. These systems often utilize large-format lithium-ion batteries [...]. Real-world battery lifetime is evaluated by simulating residential energy storage and commercial frequency containment reserve systems in several U.S. climate regions. Predicted lifetime across cell types varies from 7 years to 20+ years, though all cells are predicted to have at least 10 year life in certain conditions.
From [5]:
> In the 2020 report, calendar life for both LFP and NMC Li-ion systems was stated as 10 years. The 2022
report takes additional information from long-term laboratory work (Saft, 2021) and product data into
account (Baxter, 2021b) to establish new calendar lives of 16 years for LFP and 13 years for NMC. The
calendar life is unchanged for 2030.
I also claim that battery are not renewable. One might argue that, if we can recycle batteries like we recycle regular glass, it could be considered as renewable. However, today there are 2 industrialized processes that are not satisfying (pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical processing) which "require high energy, and/or complex wet-chemistry steps"[4]. Some explored processes called "direct recycling"[4], which also has severe drawbacks but at least is more promising.
Which makes me think: we are, at least, making huge bets on the future here, as we risk 1) having huge amount of aged batteries in 1 or 2 decades, 2) no more mineral resources to extract.
> Reaching net-zero-carbon emissions by 2050, as many international organizations now insist is necessary to stave off dire climate consequences, will require a rapid and massive shift in electricity-generating infrastructures.
The tl;dr is that net zero by 2050 would require all major economies to spend 15-20% of GDP for the next 26 years uninterrupted. For reference, the entire US federal budget was around 23.7% of GDP in 2023.
It simply is not going to happen, and pretending it will greatly undermines the pragmatic conversations we should be having about adaptation.
I think there's a strong optimistic case that the private sector can get us there by 2100 or so - lots of fundamental advancements can happen in that timeframe - but hamfisted government policy in the EU and America that blunts economic growth will mean there's less money to spend on solving these problems in the future.
While a good read, I'm not sure how anyone can take this seriously. He says " Efficiency gains from the electrification of industrial processes would vary widely, and not all of them could be electrified. And there will be negligible gains for space heating , with 100% efficiency for electric resistance heating compared to as much as 93-99% for modern gas furnaces (Lennox 2023)."
Heat pumps have a COP of 1.5 - 4, which are eventually going to replace all heating/cooling. He does not consider efficiency from heat pumps at all.
IEA has historically been bad at forecasting renewables.
The GDP numbers you mention are very far from the studies I've seen over the years.
I've been following debates about renewables for probably 15 years. Most common objections are: It's too expensive, it's impossible, it's not worth doing anything about, we should wait until later to do anything about it.
The truth is that the transition is happening, we have most of the things in place we need, and the rest we'll develop as we go along - they are mostly not developed much because their big market opportunity hasn't happened yet.
Emphatic agreement. Now it's a choice between faster (more Bidenomics) or slower (rear-guard obstruction by the loyal opposition).
> the rest we'll develop as we go along
Yes and:
Per Saul Griffith and others, we have the tools today to achieve net zero. The primary hurdles are legal, capacity, and financing. Not technology.
For example, there's a huge backlog of renewable energy just waiting to join the power grid. But the utilities remain loyal to natural gas, refuse to upgrade or expand.
IIRC, the 4 major categories of (human) CO2 pollution are transportation, manufacturing, buildings, and agriculture.
We now have the tech to achieve net zero for all but agricultural.
Successor legislation (BBB/IRA 2, 3, 4, etc) must address agricultural. And the stubbornly carbon-based industry segments, like "fast fashion", which alone accounts for > 2% of CO2 pollution (and growing).
> Primary energy demand is going to shrink, not grow.
What? Absolutely nobody is predicting a shrinking primary energy demand. You can hand-wave and say "yeah but electrification", but nobody is predicting a decline in global demand before 2050, if at all this century. I'd argue that demand will more than make up for the efficiency gains as we've seen in the past - look at the growth in deployment of electricity-hungry GPUs as one example of robust demand growth.
It also doesn't matter if US demand shrinks if China and India more than make up the difference. The planet doesn't care what country CO2 emissions come from.
> The truth is that the transition is happening
Who said otherwise? Nobody is arguing that renewables aren't growing.
Vaclav Smil's argument is that historical evidence strongly suggests that primary energy transitions take a lot longer than people want to think, and even as the renewable share of energy is growing the absolute demand for fossil fuels is still increasing. Again, the planet doesn't care about relative share.
People who believe the future will somehow be different from the past (like you) need to provide extraordinary evidence for why they believe this will be the case, and there is none. Installing solar panels, or wind turbines, or upgrading distribution lines, or selling electric vehicles all do not follow any kind of Moores law-like curve, so what factors would drive future results to be different?
Maybe robots will install solar panels faster than humans? Like what's the thesis here?
You can live in a fantasy world and cling to wishful thinking, but it will be a great recipe for mass disillusionment when activists are selling a vision of the future that is at odds with reality.
> I think there's a strong optimistic case that the private sector can get us there by 2100 or so
So, never. The private sector has been dragged kicking and screaming to where we are now; Oil CEOs today are still resisting calls to decarbonize (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ceraweek-big-oil-exe...) like it's the 1990s. Trillions in corporate sharedholder value are diametrically opposed to transitioning. They have vested interests, and a massive sunk cost with the current fossil fuel economy. We are so utterly screwed.
> that blunts economic growth
While economies have somewhat decoupled carbon from economic growth, putting economic growth as a master priority above all others is exactly what got us here and looking increasingly like a bad move.
What would motivate the private sector to solve the problem?
What economic incentive does a specific company have to make decisions that may negatively impact its short term earnings to address a global issue that will manifest slowly over the course of a century?
What if the "economically sustainable" path to net zero by 2100 results in existential issues for large parts of the human population, food supply, etc? There is an economic cost to allowing the climate to continue on its current path and actually net zero doesn't necessarily reverse that change, it just prevents its continued acceleration. If the "economically sustainable" path results in the destruction of the economy, then it's no longer sustainable.
> What would motivate the private sector to solve the problem?
Money.
Cost of grid-solar is somewhere between 50% - 70% of coal and the trend is decreasing renewable cost. [1] If you are a utility, what is the next plant you are going to install? If you can get solar for a fraction of the cost of a coal plant, it's a pretty easy decision. Plus, you can probably keep the rates the same and pass on that savings to your shareholders.
Every time I visit family in Oklahoma I see more and more wind farms. Texas is has one of the highest level of renewable energy. These are states that have a knee-jerk opposition to "the liberal agenda", and yet Texas the largest producer of renewable energy (solar + wind handily beats California), and the most "anti-liberal" red states are generating the most renewable energy: Oklahoma (42%), Kansas (47%), Iowa (60%), S. Dakota (57%).
I'm beginning to believe that the continued existence of humanity (let alone human civilization) requires net zero by way sooner than 2050. Kurt Vonnegut may be proved right after all that we'll go extinct because of economics.
I'll save you all a click. Vaclav Smil doesn't do any analysis around costings. He pulls the figure from a Mckinsey report[1] (now 2 years old) and multiplies it by 2. To have a meaningful discussion about this, you would have to read the Mckinsey report and understand the input assumptions. In particular, what are the assumptions around cost curves?
> hamfisted government policy in the EU and America that blunts economic growth will mean there's less money to spend on solving these problems in the future.
Disasters brought on by climate change that blunt economic growth will also mean there's less money to spend on solving these problems in the future.
Yes, private industry is famously very good at solving existential threats to the species when solving those problems also results in a loss in the quarterly earnings.
Nonsense. And also I find it rather amusing that technologists so passionately predict exponential innovation in all areas of science except for sustainability. If you want to find the truth, it's best to discount propaganda from banks like JPMorgan Chase. Blaming the government for slowing economic growth instead of corporations, in this age of unrestrained late stage crony capitalism and neoliberalism, is not a great look either.
What I see coming is that the powers that be will crash the global economy and ignite more proxy wars in the next 6 months before the US presidential election to throw it and cement minority rule for as many more years as possible. That looks like sewing suspicion around such basic American values as democracy. Because we're all struggling so hard just to survive that we turn on each other instead of the owner class which funds most tech companies and even HN itself.
I can't really blame them, as they have the power. This is all just a big game to them, as they dip into our money supply to ratchet up their fortunes at perhaps 1% per day whenever they need money, through stock market algorithmic trading which we don't have access to.
So it makes little sense to talk about societal investment when over 50% of Americans no longer have any disposable income to speak of. Regulatory capture has sunk what was once our retirement and social safety net into a $30+ trillion national debt paid as treasury yield to the same wealthy financiers who are buying up over 40% of US homes through private equity groups to convert us to a renter society.
It would cost next to nothing to convert to a solar grid-tie infrastructure amortized over a decade, with positive dividends paid back to all of us after that. But they won't even give us nothing to spend, they just keep us perpetually in debt so we can't improve our situation at even the most basic level.
Readit News
Some utilities now have programs where you can pay them extra money "to get a portion of your power from a clean energy source". This money is used effectively to buy carbon credits. So they're asking customers to subsidize them in not needing to eliminate carbon emissions.
Actually not emitting carbon is what some utilities now call "real zero". But their commitments to "real zero" are a long ways away, and they're just corporate goals & in no way binding.
Science Based Targets Initiative for example requires companies signing up to their scheme to have credible plans to cut emissions by ~50% by 2030 and 90% by 2050 to claim that they're aiming for "net zero" [1] (SBTI itself was recently in the news because employees felt that recent policy changes leaned too heavily on offsetting; I don't really know what the current situation there is).
In practice usage of these terms my not be well regulated, so it's always worth checking out exactly whose definitions are being used.
[1] sciencebasedtargets.org/blog/net-zero-jargon-buster-a-guide-to-common-terms
So someone buying and selling, say, diesel in solar-powered-fuel stations, can still have "net zero" because they themselves don't emit, but both the people buying it, and the companies producing it, still emit immense amounts of carbon.
Which is then a very easy way to "greenwash" your business. To have marketing, that's not even a lie, but still being very misleading.
(I used to build accounting software for carbon emission accounting, it's way, way more complex that this diesel-example)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_accounting#Frameworks_a...
I’ll happily pay $100 for a ton of carbon if it comes with a video of it being captured from the atmosphere (or reasonable chain of custody documentation) and it’s delivered to me in the form of biologically inert bricks.
In fact, we have some trees we haven’t cut down this year in the back yard. I’d happily sell you some bullshit carbon capture credits in exchange for not cutting them down next year if I could then convert that money into atmospheric carbon capture bricks. (It’d be more tax efficient for you to buy the brick directly though…)
So because we applied for a solar inspection to have solar installed, we were automatically enrolled in a program that costs us more money, for their carbon offsets. And they were selling it to us as if that's just the same as us installing solar panels.
Garbage. And that was just one of about a dozen different blocks they have as part of their process.
If I lived somewhere with other utility providers, I would tell them to fuck right off.
> to have any hope of achieving this goal would require the addition, every year, of 630 gigawatts of solar photovoltaics and 390 GW of wind starting no later than 2030—figures that are around four times as great as than any annual tally so far.
But according to Bloomberg:
> developers deployed 444 GW of new PV capacity throughout the world in 2023.
So rather than 25% towards the 2030 goal we are 66% there on PV.
Bloomberg continues:
> It says new installations could reach 574 GW this year, 627 GW in 2025, and 880 GW in 2030.
So hitting the target 5 years ahead of schedule by this estimate.
Although AC phase matching is a delicate technical problem, it’s one we’ve solved for over a hundred years. DC presents other engineering challenges that are non-trivial. For example, circuit breakers for AC power are designed to “break” when the AC curve hits zero volts. This eliminates the chance of arcing and makes breakers smaller and cheaper to manufacture. A DC breaker has a chance of arcing and it may be necessary to make them larger, or use exotic gasses with high dielectric values to prevent this from occurring. Either of these increase costs for homeowners.
High-voltage DC is also extremely dangerous, as it's prone to arcing and electrocution.
That's a problem for mechanical switches (were conductors move to make contact or disconnect).
If you use semiconductors to do the switching, it becomes a problem of how fast they switch, how much energy is dissipated during the switch, and how much energy those semiconductors can absorb momentarily (thermal mass).
For small equipment, this is a solved problem. Fast switching FETs are cheap & robust.
For utility-scale, semiconductors are an entirely different ballgame. Big advances have been made over the last decades.
So a HVDC grid might in theory be possible. But in practice, it'll be an engineering tradeoff between HVDC+semiconductors almost everywhere vs. HVAC+more traditional gear like transformers.
And even if a HVDC grid were practical with modern tech, in most places there's existing AC-based grid & power plants. I suspect the "sync AC phases" is an easier problem to solve than "re-do the grid to use HVDC".
But for 'simple' point-to-point connections like an offshore windpark or long international lines, HVDC is sometimes practical (and used, if so).
Over time, more and more components will be built DC (DC long distance cables are already popular, due to being slightly cheaper. DC for electronics is popular due to AC being poorly suited to microprocessors/logic. DC sees wide use in cars. USB-C brings computer peripherals into the DC world).
Eventually, whenever two DC bits of power infrastructure are touching oneanother, someone will notice that removing the DC->AC->DC conversion steps saves money and increases efficiency.
Eventually enough bits of the grid will be DC that AC 'islanding' can occur - whenever every link from A to B is DC, there is nothing to keep the phase locked between place A and place B. Initially that will be solved with software locking means.
But finally maintaining that anti-islanding tech will be too costly, and all remaining bits of the AC grid will be removed.
But it's gonna take 100 years because grid tech changes slowly, and infrastructure like buried cables can be 70+ years years old.
Interestingly, HVDC actually becomes a more efficient method of transmission over longer distances. Perhaps it's feasible to generate electricity half a continent away. Maybe tile the Sahara with solar panels and power all of Africa with it.
The grid frequency is an incredibly useful communication tool that allows any piece of equipment to easily and accurately measure the current health the overall grid, and automatically make adjustments to help balance and improve the health the of the grid (either by increasing or decreasing load/supply). Because the frequency is set by physically large spinning turbines it means it’s also a direct and inseparable measure of total grid health, not something that’s dependent on another system to monitor and communicate grid health.
It’s hard to overstate how much of our electricity grids depend on grid frequency, and one having thousands of systems monitoring and adapting to grid frequency, to remain as robust and stable as they are. In a DC world you don’t get that anymore, and keeping a grid balanced becomes substantially more complex requiring potentially unreliable side-channel communication to allow equipment on the grid to coordinate themselves. Its really hard to beat a system where one of it core fundamental attributes (frequency) needed for power transmission, is also the perfect attribute for distributed coordination of load and supply.
Capacitors do the same for DC. They are also more efficient and reliable.
The thing about a communication channel is true. But it will become true for AC after almost all of the generation becomes free of rotational inertia too (PV, modern wind, and batteries). And you need side-channel communication to decide what generator will take over what load right now.
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The problem is that physics also dictates that the interconnection links need to be big enough to handle the power imbalance between the different parts of the networks. So grid management is mostly about balancing production and demand as a whole and in sub-grids.
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Don't get me wrong: the article is very interesting. I really learnt something: I discovered "system inertia", I was not aware of stability issues linked to inverters, and did not know about grid-forming & grid-following inverters, and the research about finding the minimal amount of grid-forming to keep a power-grid stable in case of an issue in a given power plant. All of these topics are very interesting.
But making a connection between inverters and ecology through the "net zero" terms seems either off topic, misleading or irrelevant. First because this "net zero" term is heavily criticized as it means carbon are still emitted but companies are paying for carbon credits (that are not compensating at all the carbon emitted for many reasons [1]). Here building solar panels, wind turbines & batteries emits CO2, and their lifespan is relatively short (at most 10 years for batteries, ~25 years for wind turbines & solar panels, compared to hundreds of years for a dam[7]). Second because climate change is not the only concern about ecology, there are concerning questions about mineral resource extraction, like lithium[2] that is heavily used in batteries, but more generally, we are already extracting the whole Mendeleev periodic table[3]: we don't have alternative mineral resources for batteries or other technologies, the only solution is to extract, produce & consume less. Third, if your only goal is to reduce carbon dioxide equivalent (eqCO2), you should advertise nuclear power plant as the solution. Depending on studies, they produce the same amount or less eqCO2 compared to a wind turbine without batteries[4]. Of course, often eqCO2 is not the only important subject here (being renewable/sustainable is also important, and uranium is a limited resource). And finally, the fact we use renewable energy more and more did not lead to a worlwide energy transition, but an addition. Having a transition will require way more than technologies[5], something that is also not discussed here.
Speaking about solutions to pack a higher percentage of Intermittent renewable energy sources (IRES)[6] in a power-grid through the help of batteries and inverters would have been more accurate in my opinion. Maybe "Why we were not able to achieve 100% renewable energy before?" if you want to be catchy, and it's not perfect, as you are still hiding that you rely on lot of batteries, that are far from being renewable.
As a conclusion, I would say it would be great to be careful when engineers (here IEEE) discuss specific technologies (here power-grid inverters) to not draw conclusion too quickly (having a positive environmental impact), as it's far from being obvious. I know they want to be read, I know that the title must be catchy to attract readers, but it's not an excuse as illustrated above.
[1]: https://demandclimatejustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/...
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/29/a-worldwide-lithium-shortage...
[3]: https://www.euchems.eu/euchems-periodic-table/
[4]: https://www.edfenergy.com/media-centre/news-releases/over-it...
[5]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146...
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_renewable_energy
[7]: https://www.power-technology.com/data-insights/power-plant-p...
It seems the first "grid scale batteries" were derived from EV batteries, and are planned for 1 or 2 decades[1].
Basically, we are discussing battery ageing here, which is a complex problem[2].
According to the different studies on the topic I found, mentioning specifically "large-scale" installation like the ones discussed here, the answer is definitely and deceptively the same: between 10 and 20 years[3][5]. More precisely.
From [3]:
> To address the global effort to decrease carbon emissions, many consumers, corporations, and energy providers are adopting the use of electric vehicles and stationary energy storage systems paired with renewable electricity generation. These systems often utilize large-format lithium-ion batteries [...]. Real-world battery lifetime is evaluated by simulating residential energy storage and commercial frequency containment reserve systems in several U.S. climate regions. Predicted lifetime across cell types varies from 7 years to 20+ years, though all cells are predicted to have at least 10 year life in certain conditions.
From [5]:
> In the 2020 report, calendar life for both LFP and NMC Li-ion systems was stated as 10 years. The 2022 report takes additional information from long-term laboratory work (Saft, 2021) and product data into account (Baxter, 2021b) to establish new calendar lives of 16 years for LFP and 13 years for NMC. The calendar life is unchanged for 2030.
I also claim that battery are not renewable. One might argue that, if we can recycle batteries like we recycle regular glass, it could be considered as renewable. However, today there are 2 industrialized processes that are not satisfying (pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical processing) which "require high energy, and/or complex wet-chemistry steps"[4]. Some explored processes called "direct recycling"[4], which also has severe drawbacks but at least is more promising.
Which makes me think: we are, at least, making huge bets on the future here, as we risk 1) having huge amount of aged batteries in 1 or 2 decades, 2) no more mineral resources to extract.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/How-long-do-grid-storage-batteries-las...
[2]: https://cea.hal.science/cea-01791260/document
[3]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...
[4]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X2...
[5]: https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/ESGC%20C...
Vaclav Smil's excellent analysis on this is worth reading: https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/glob...
The tl;dr is that net zero by 2050 would require all major economies to spend 15-20% of GDP for the next 26 years uninterrupted. For reference, the entire US federal budget was around 23.7% of GDP in 2023.
It simply is not going to happen, and pretending it will greatly undermines the pragmatic conversations we should be having about adaptation.
I think there's a strong optimistic case that the private sector can get us there by 2100 or so - lots of fundamental advancements can happen in that timeframe - but hamfisted government policy in the EU and America that blunts economic growth will mean there's less money to spend on solving these problems in the future.
While a good read, I'm not sure how anyone can take this seriously. He says " Efficiency gains from the electrification of industrial processes would vary widely, and not all of them could be electrified. And there will be negligible gains for space heating , with 100% efficiency for electric resistance heating compared to as much as 93-99% for modern gas furnaces (Lennox 2023)."
Heat pumps have a COP of 1.5 - 4, which are eventually going to replace all heating/cooling. He does not consider efficiency from heat pumps at all.
Two thirds of fossil fuel energy is wasted: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...
Electrification is efficient and the transition won't need as much: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-en...
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/11/13/what-does-bill-gates-fa...
IEA has historically been bad at forecasting renewables.
The GDP numbers you mention are very far from the studies I've seen over the years.
I've been following debates about renewables for probably 15 years. Most common objections are: It's too expensive, it's impossible, it's not worth doing anything about, we should wait until later to do anything about it.
The truth is that the transition is happening, we have most of the things in place we need, and the rest we'll develop as we go along - they are mostly not developed much because their big market opportunity hasn't happened yet.
Emphatic agreement. Now it's a choice between faster (more Bidenomics) or slower (rear-guard obstruction by the loyal opposition).
> the rest we'll develop as we go along
Yes and:
Per Saul Griffith and others, we have the tools today to achieve net zero. The primary hurdles are legal, capacity, and financing. Not technology.
For example, there's a huge backlog of renewable energy just waiting to join the power grid. But the utilities remain loyal to natural gas, refuse to upgrade or expand.
IIRC, the 4 major categories of (human) CO2 pollution are transportation, manufacturing, buildings, and agriculture.
We now have the tech to achieve net zero for all but agricultural.
Successor legislation (BBB/IRA 2, 3, 4, etc) must address agricultural. And the stubbornly carbon-based industry segments, like "fast fashion", which alone accounts for > 2% of CO2 pollution (and growing).
> Primary energy demand is going to shrink, not grow.
What? Absolutely nobody is predicting a shrinking primary energy demand. You can hand-wave and say "yeah but electrification", but nobody is predicting a decline in global demand before 2050, if at all this century. I'd argue that demand will more than make up for the efficiency gains as we've seen in the past - look at the growth in deployment of electricity-hungry GPUs as one example of robust demand growth.
It also doesn't matter if US demand shrinks if China and India more than make up the difference. The planet doesn't care what country CO2 emissions come from.
> The truth is that the transition is happening
Who said otherwise? Nobody is arguing that renewables aren't growing.
Vaclav Smil's argument is that historical evidence strongly suggests that primary energy transitions take a lot longer than people want to think, and even as the renewable share of energy is growing the absolute demand for fossil fuels is still increasing. Again, the planet doesn't care about relative share.
People who believe the future will somehow be different from the past (like you) need to provide extraordinary evidence for why they believe this will be the case, and there is none. Installing solar panels, or wind turbines, or upgrading distribution lines, or selling electric vehicles all do not follow any kind of Moores law-like curve, so what factors would drive future results to be different?
Maybe robots will install solar panels faster than humans? Like what's the thesis here?
You can live in a fantasy world and cling to wishful thinking, but it will be a great recipe for mass disillusionment when activists are selling a vision of the future that is at odds with reality.
So, never. The private sector has been dragged kicking and screaming to where we are now; Oil CEOs today are still resisting calls to decarbonize (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ceraweek-big-oil-exe...) like it's the 1990s. Trillions in corporate sharedholder value are diametrically opposed to transitioning. They have vested interests, and a massive sunk cost with the current fossil fuel economy. We are so utterly screwed.
> that blunts economic growth
While economies have somewhat decoupled carbon from economic growth, putting economic growth as a master priority above all others is exactly what got us here and looking increasingly like a bad move.
What economic incentive does a specific company have to make decisions that may negatively impact its short term earnings to address a global issue that will manifest slowly over the course of a century?
What if the "economically sustainable" path to net zero by 2100 results in existential issues for large parts of the human population, food supply, etc? There is an economic cost to allowing the climate to continue on its current path and actually net zero doesn't necessarily reverse that change, it just prevents its continued acceleration. If the "economically sustainable" path results in the destruction of the economy, then it's no longer sustainable.
Money.
Cost of grid-solar is somewhere between 50% - 70% of coal and the trend is decreasing renewable cost. [1] If you are a utility, what is the next plant you are going to install? If you can get solar for a fraction of the cost of a coal plant, it's a pretty easy decision. Plus, you can probably keep the rates the same and pass on that savings to your shareholders.
Every time I visit family in Oklahoma I see more and more wind farms. Texas is has one of the highest level of renewable energy. These are states that have a knee-jerk opposition to "the liberal agenda", and yet Texas the largest producer of renewable energy (solar + wind handily beats California), and the most "anti-liberal" red states are generating the most renewable energy: Oklahoma (42%), Kansas (47%), Iowa (60%), S. Dakota (57%).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
[2] https://www.fool.com/research/renewable-energy-by-state/ (switch to the second tab for percentages)
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functio...
Disasters brought on by climate change that blunt economic growth will also mean there's less money to spend on solving these problems in the future.
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
What I see coming is that the powers that be will crash the global economy and ignite more proxy wars in the next 6 months before the US presidential election to throw it and cement minority rule for as many more years as possible. That looks like sewing suspicion around such basic American values as democracy. Because we're all struggling so hard just to survive that we turn on each other instead of the owner class which funds most tech companies and even HN itself.
I can't really blame them, as they have the power. This is all just a big game to them, as they dip into our money supply to ratchet up their fortunes at perhaps 1% per day whenever they need money, through stock market algorithmic trading which we don't have access to.
So it makes little sense to talk about societal investment when over 50% of Americans no longer have any disposable income to speak of. Regulatory capture has sunk what was once our retirement and social safety net into a $30+ trillion national debt paid as treasury yield to the same wealthy financiers who are buying up over 40% of US homes through private equity groups to convert us to a renter society.
It would cost next to nothing to convert to a solar grid-tie infrastructure amortized over a decade, with positive dividends paid back to all of us after that. But they won't even give us nothing to spend, they just keep us perpetually in debt so we can't improve our situation at even the most basic level.
https://www.tiktok.com/@r4ultra/video/7350811129926536478
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-singl...
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