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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.
especially about the future....Berra
Title and summary don't agree. There is a difference between "surpass coal and gas by 2027" and "surpass gas by 2027 and surpass coal by 2037".
Even ignoring the date differences, there's a difference between "surpass gas", "surpass coal", and "surpass gas and coal".
And let's not get into the whole base load thing. Gas and solar isn't baseload, but coal is....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
I agree, however this is Slashdot. Here, climate change is an evil hippy illuminati conspiracy. It's all about taking your money away, or something.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So the first question is just, do renewables actually work to replace base load?
Some renewables already do work identically to base load sources (hydro, geothermal, solar thermal, etc) so to some degree the answer is clearly yes. The other arguments are more nuanced but also at the end are a clear yes.
With sufficient scale, more variable renewables like wind and solar effectively load balance themselves by being geographically dispersed. The wind is always blowing somewhere and the sun is always shining somewhere during the day. As long as you can transmit the power where it is needed, the variations are smooth and the problem is functionally identical to dealing with fluctuating demand. The grid already deals with variations in demand and supply so this is nothing new and we're no where close to our limit in being able to handle variation.
There also is the option of further smoothing of fluctuations with power storage systems (batteries, hydro storage, etc). Generate power from your solar panels during the day and put the extra into batteries for use overnight or on cloudy days. The goal is to smooth the variations not eliminate them.
The biggest flaw in the base load argument however is that it assumes that we cannot have some fossil fuel power sources. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate them altogether (which is probably impossible anyway) but to reduce their impact to less than what the Earth's climate regulation can handle. Right now we simply have more CO2 and other pollutants being generated than the planet can handle. If much/most of our power comes from renewables (plus probably nuclear) and we have to supplement from time to time with fossil fuels that's fine. We just need to get the fossil fuel use low enough that climate change doesn't render the planet uninhabitable.
Many events are perpetually 10 years from now. Diabetes cures, global collapse for various reasons, commercial fusion reactors, peak oil. My BS detector goes off for any dramatic prediction 10 years in the future.
When windmills don't work because the winds are so high that they'd cause damage.
When wind speeds are so high that wind mills don't work, you have different problems than lack of electricity.
Hint: I suggest to read till what speeds wind mills actually do operate. And then check how often you have a storm that covers whole Canada that exceeds those speeds. I would wager it is already impossible to even have a storm that big, regardless of wind Speed.
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.
And there are some parts of the world where people have electric grids and can transport electric power from the producers to the consumers, facepalm.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sure, but what is the solution then? Subsidize pollution? Pay the coal mines not to produce, like the Farm Bill does with corn growers?
To be honest, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for these "whole communities being wiped out." Maybe they should have thought about that possibility before basing their entire economy on one industry.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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
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.
Ah, but what of the pollution costs of rare earth mining and refining ? **MY** background is as a geologist.
... and not a semiconductor engineer. Silicon solar cells (and for that matter, the rest of the glass-encapsulated solar array) don't require rare earth materials.
> You know in places like Canada where the vast majority of our winters are overcast, same with the spring, fall is hit or miss.
You've clearly never actually bothered to look a solar resource map, have you?
Canada has some of the best solar resources for its latitude. Calgary, for instance, has a solar resource not much lower than Mohave. Compare to southern German or Switzerland and we're downright balmy.
> When windmills don't work because the winds are so high that they'd cause damage.
And again, you clearly don't have the slightest clue what you're on about.
Any power source, *any*, has downtime. We consider that in a figure known as the "capacity factor", or CF. Basically you take how much power actually comes out of the plant in a period of time, normally a year, and divide that by how much would have come out if it was running at perfect capacity 24/7. So that "too fast" gets lumped into the "too slow" and the "down for maintenance" and even the "tree fell on lines". All of that goes into the CF.
A typical reactor has a CF around 85 to 90%. A typical wind turbine has a CF around 30 to 35%. A reactor costs about $8 per watt peak, whereas a modern wind turbine is around $1.50/Wp. So even though you need three turbines to make the same amount of energy as that single reactor, those three turbines still cost you almost half as much. And that is precisely why no one is building reactors any more and turbines are sprouting up like weeds, yes, even here in Canada.
Don't worry, people who actually know what they are doing have the problem well in hand. As you can see, if you read the article.
Overall, the problem is that your post is about glib generalizations about an issue for which the real world details are complicated. Even a statement like "Aside from hydroelectric, coal is currently the cheapest source of electricity" isn't as simple as it seems. The price of electricity depends on where you are and when you want it. In most of the US, for example, nobody builds coal-fired plants any more, because natural gas generation is so much cheaper.
Considering the fact that most of the world is so poor they can barely afford basic food and shelter I don't see coal generated electricity disappearing any time soon.
To the contrary; for this "most of the world" living at a subsistence level, coal is about the worst option, because it has a large initial investment, and requires long-distance high-voltage transmission lines connecting to a functional electrical grid for distribution. For much of the world, solar is vastly cheaper than coal-generated electricity: if you are willing to use electricity in a five-hour block around noon. Is that a problem? Well, there are a million villages in the world that don't have any connection to an electric grid; for these places, solar for ten hours a day is an excellent bargain.