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Renewables Are Set To Overtake Gas and Coal By 2027 (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: Renewable energy, including solar, wind and hydroelectric will overtake natural gas as an energy source by 2027. According to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, ten years later those same renewables will have surpassed the largest electricity-generating fossil fuel: coal. Solar and wind will account for almost 60% of the $11.4 trillion invested in energy over the next 25 years, according to Bloomberg's New Energy Outlook 2016 report. One conclusion that may surprise, Bloomberg noted, is that the forecast shows no golden age for natural gas, except in North America. As a global generation source, gas will be overtaken by renewables in 2027. The electric vehicle boom will increase electricity demand by 2,701TWh (terawatt hours), or 8% of global electricity demand in 2040. The rise of EVs will drive down the cost of lithium-ion batteries, making them increasingly attractive to be deployed alongside residential and commercial solar systems.
I see no reason why polluting industries like (oil/gas companies) should be subsidized at all. Frankly, we should be taxing them based on how much pollution they emit and how damaging it is. We are eventually going to have to remove CO2 from the air and it's going to be a pricey project. We might as well start saving money for it now.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Large scale maybe, but if every home could provide 75% of their load through local solar panels during a hot summer day then the overall grid will be better. As the usage wouldn't spike as much.
I've wondered for a long time why we don't have every commercial building rooftop covered in solar panels. Particularly any building that utilizes air conditioning. It's just wasted space right now. Rather than put the panels in fields somewhere, use the space we already have for something productive.
I realize there are some economic and technical hurdles but in principle it's insane not to use solar panels on rooftops wherever possible. Install some battery systems and smarts to the grid to distribute the power adequately.
Gas and solar isn't baseload, but coal is....
"Baseload" is defined as the lowest point on the demand curve over a fixed time period, it would be meaningful to this discussion if there was a city somewhere on this planet that had a flat demand curve. Such a city does not exist so "baseload" generators must store electricity in giant batteries called hydroelectric dams. When the batteries are still not enough to meet peak demands they have to fire up the gas turbines. There is absolutely no logical/technical reason why renewables cannot use the same infrastructure to match the supply and demand curves.
Agree, the title is misleading but so is every 20yr economic forecast I've ever seen.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Large scale maybe, but if every home could provide 75% of their load through local solar panels during a hot summer day then the overall grid will be better. As the usage wouldn't spike as much.
Sure, and how about the winter? Spring? Fall? You know in places like Canada where the vast majority of our winters are overcast, same with the spring, fall is hit or miss. When windmills don't work because the winds are so high that they'd cause damage. In some parts of the world renewables are a pipe dream and only work when there's something else(mainly nuclear, coal or hydro-electric in Canada) there to back up the energy that's not produced when the environment itself doesn't cooperate.
Om, nomnomnom...
No, it's just that pretending climate change doesn't exist has been succesfully made part of conservative identity, just like being anti-abortion and anti-gay is part of evangelical identity. Some believers rationalize the dogma through conspiracy theories, some by re-interpreting the data, but the real reason is that enough lobbyists told them that people like them believe climate change doesn't exist.
It's actually a pretty fascinating view into the human psyche.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You are mixing things up :D
A base load plant must be capable of meeting the grid's minimum demand 24x7x365.
No it must not. That is the way how old base load was generated traditionally. Meanwhile it is no longer done that way.
The definition is btw the other way around: we need x% base load!! Solution: we build the cheapest plant thinkable and build enough of them and then let them run close to 100% all year, 24/365.
No where in this question and solution is mentioned that a base load plant needs to run allways like that. You can simply replace them by anything else, if the costs are fine. Bottom line every plant type is "base load capable".
Wind and especially solar can never guarantee that.
They don't need to do that, see: Germany, Portugal, Denmark as a few examples. Neither of them has as many base load plants as they need base load.
What you are doing is allowing the base load plants to be idle during times the intermittent plants are generating.
So they are not running always at 100% nice that you figured that.
Modern grids have basically no base load plants anymore, and future grids definitely wont have them anymore at all. That is a no brainer.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ah, but what of the pollution costs of rare earth mining and refining ?
Probably substantial and it should be factored into the cost of any products that use them. My guess is that the pollutants that result from such refining are substantially easier to mitigate than the CO2 and other crap that spews from every fossil fuel power plant, mine and transport. If for no other reason than scale. I'm no expert so I could be wrong but I doubt it. The amounts of rare earth minerals needed for a typical solar panel is minute. Compare this to the (literally) tons of coal burned for every human on earth it seems improbably that the pollution footprint for the rare earth mining and use would be greater than the footprint for coal mining and use.
I don't think anyone who understands the technology is arguing that there is no pollution from wind or solar. There clearly is. But it also seems clear from the available data that it is an improvement. We're looking for least-worst here. There is no useful form of power without some drawbacks. Even photosynthesis has some negative implications in certain circumstances. Where the problem lies is that some forms of energy (particularly fossil fuels) aren't realizing even close to the full cost of the pollution they generate. It's a tough problem. The solutions are mostly straightforward (taxes mostly) but politically that is very difficult to realize.
No, you're not. What you are doing is allowing the base load plants to be idle during times the intermittent plants are generating.
But there's no requirement for the base load to be provided by a designated base load plant. Base load can be provided by a combination of solar, wind, hydro, and whatever would be otherwise designated as a peaker, assuming the combined cost is acceptable. There are no separate circuits in the grid for base load plants and other plants. Traditionally, it has been the case that some plants were designated like that, but that's simply because that was deemed convenient and the consequences of pushing megatonnes of carbon through these plants and into the air were ignored.
Ezekiel 23:20
This is a wild, fantastic, totally unrealizable dream. The fact that people are sold this bs, and some believe it, is the reason your grandkids, or maybe your great-grandkids are going to starve. There is no way to reduce CO2 emissions without heavy emphasis on nuclear power (clean, incredibly safe) through about 2050-2060. Wake up, and support your grandchildren's right to live.
No. Coal will never be reestablished. But there is something very wrong about changing governmental regulations that result in whole communities being wiped out and doing nothing about it. I'm a #Never Trump but here he is talking sense. You can't simply destroy whole communities with a stroke of a pen. And the solution is not welfare and food stamps.
Nonetheless coal has been supplanted by natural gas and renewables are getting more and more cost efficient.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
No, that's not even slightly true. Coal mining has always been a horrible, polluting, dangerous business. Everyone involved with it has known -- or should have known -- for decades that it's unsustainable in the long run not only due to government recognition of its environmental impact (which itself has been a long time coming) but also the simple economics and the fact that mines are eventually depleted. These communities have had ample warning and opportunity to plan for this entirely expected and inevitable outcome!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Coal isn't being destroyed by the stroke of a Pen. Fracking is destroying coal. The new coal regulations aren't even into effect yet and coal has already been devastated by competition with gas. Coal has gotten a free pass for nearly 300 years to dump uranium, mercury and dozens of other heavy metals all over our cities and crops. It's high time that changed, regardless of the impact to the industry. There is so much mercury in fish these days that you probably shouldn't even eat it.
What you see with Trump is selling the narrative that the coal companies would like to see sold. That is the idea that government regulations are destroying their industry, not competition with cheap gas.
Your right, installing solar panels north of a certain latitude is just nuts, you know like Germany, that's at the latitude as Quebec and cloudy all the time, it would be just stupid to install solar panels there.