Two Google Engineers Say Renewables Can't Cure Climate Change

_Sharp'r_ writes Two Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, worked for Google on the RE<C project to figure out how to make renewables cheaper than coal and solve climate change. After four years of study they gave up, determining "Renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?

Comments

Re:It boils down to energy storage costs

[Rei]

In reality, nukes are terrible as backup power. Just assuming you have a plant that can ramp up and down quickly (most can't), nuclear plants are almost all capital cost. Hence they need to run at a high capacity factor to pay back the investment; it doesn't pay to idle them. But if you're wanting to use them as gap filling in low wind/solar times, then that's exactly what you're suggesting be done - sit idle until more power is needed. It's a terrible use of a nuclear plant.

Pumped hydro isn't that expensive. It's currently the cheapest option out there by a good margin (except for uprating already-existing conventional hydro). But other techs are trying to beat it. Probably the best thing you can do is simply have a powerful HVDC grid so you can move power between different geographic regions and to use different types of renewables techs. The randomness goes way down when you do this. NG is commonly used as a peaking fuel, and I see no problem continuing to do this (instead of doing energy storage) if you can keep it down to an average of under 10% or so of the total generation mix. It's low carbon to begin with and modern NG peakers can hit upwards of 60% efficiency once warmed up. So 90% renewables, 10% efficiently-used NG, you're talking near total elimination of electricity-related CO2 emissions.

Re:Is Nuclear going to be acknowledged?

[ShanghaiBill]

The spent fuel is piling up at a rate of about 2,200 tons a year at U.S. power-plant sites.

Uranium has a density of 19.1. So 2,200 tons is about 120 cubic meters. That is a three car garage.

Nuclear won't be acknowledged as a solution.

[radtea]

Nuclear won't be accepted as a solution until people who claim to believe that climate change has the potential to end civilization accept that the only proven technology capable of replacing base-load coal is nuclear, and that climate change is a technological problem, not a social problem.

This will take a long time.

The green activist movement is completely dominated by Naiomi Klein-style social engineers who don't care one whit about the environment, but who see it as a useful tool for defeating global capitalism. Thus their opposition to any technological solution to the problem of CO2 emissions whatsoever.

Now that climate change is increasingly widely acknowledged as a real issue--the Pentagon takes it seriously, can you get realer than that?--the green activist community will increasingly be seen as the major impediment to solving the problem. The question is: will we push these utopian socialists aside quickly enough to save the planet?