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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.
Just as long as renewables ALSO don't get any subsidies. I would note that the pollution for wind and solar is remote from the operational location: smelting and refining the rare earths for magnets and solar panels isn't exactly what you would call a "green" process. . .
Question is, is there enough factory capacity and available rare earths to MAKE sufficient solar panels to do so ?
Factory capacity is an adjustable resource and if the demand is there the factory capacity will follow. There are plenty of rare earth minerals available. We aren't actually utilizing much of the capacity available but if solar panel production scaled sufficiently it would become economically viable to open up more mines. The US has substantial rare earth reserves as do a few other places but there currently isn't enough demand to justify reopening the mines at this time.
Logistics is always the tough part of the solution.
My background is in industrial engineering and I'm also an accountant. The logistics of solar panel production are a solved problem. The hard part is the economics. You have competing fossil fuels being sold below actual cost (their cost doesn't currently include the full cost of the pollution they generate), you have solar panels that are getting more competitive every day but still are pretty expensive, and we have a grid that needs updating to handle large scale solar. Scale would solve some of the cost problems but technology improvements are still needed to really get them where they need to go.
So long as "smart grid" isn't like "smart bomb", ie. yeah it's better, but innocents still die, as it were. The so-called "renewables" can help in some places, but not enough to really make a difference? ie. replace fossil fuels. And it is up to the enthusiasts for renewables to show that they could. I want my green paradise Earth as much as anyone. And humanity is like a cancer that will keep eating everything. So unless renewables actually do work, people will simply keep using coal or whatever they can afford, and nobody can stop that. It isn't a question of whether people are willing to get with the program, it is that when people are stressed, they'll resort to whatever means they can, and if that means completely abandoning green initiatives, then they'll do that. So the first question is just, do renewables actually work to replace base load? It'll only make it harder later if they don't. It is up to champions of renewable energy to SHOW that they can.
It's possible to supply base load and everything else by renewables, it will just take some time to get there.
First you build up your intermittent renewable sources and long distance high voltage DC lines for distribution. Then you replace your relatively modest base load requirements with a mixture of non-intermittent renewable (geothermal, biomass/waste, hydro, ocean thermal etc.) and storage (pumped, battery, compressed gas etc.) Finally you adjust your usage to ease the burden a bit, since for example many of your factories are now "lights out" and it doesn't really matter what time of day they are running, and your smart appliances and EVs can all help by reducing draw when asked to.
It's not an easy thing to arrange and will take some time to happen, but we don't actually need coal, gas or nuclear to have a better standard of living and cheaper, more plentiful energy than we do now.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Coal only APPEARS to be inexpensive if you ignore the costs of spreading mercury and uranium everywhere in the fly ash, environmental impacts of mining and runoff, the long term impacts of health problems for employees and the global warming impacts of releasing massive amounts of co2.
If you consider those costs, and remediate them, then coal is significantly more expensive than other sources of energy
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/08/coals-cost-climate-change