Slashdot Mirror
Coal Market Set To Collapse Worldwide By 2040 As Solar, Wind Dominate (bloomberg.com)
Jess Shankleman reports via Bloomberg: Solar power, once so costly it only made economic sense in spaceships, is becoming cheap enough that it will push coal and even natural-gas plants out of business faster than previously forecast. That's the conclusion of a Bloomberg New Energy Finance outlook for how fuel and electricity markets will evolve by 2040. The research group estimated solar already rivals the cost of new coal power plants in Germany and the U.S. and by 2021 will do so in quick-growing markets such as China and India. The scenario suggests green energy is taking root more quickly than most experts anticipate. It would mean that global carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels may decline after 2026, a contrast with the International Energy Agency's central forecast, which sees emissions rising steadily for decades to come.
The report also found that through 2040:
-China and India represent the biggest markets for new power generation, drawing $4 trillion, or about 39 percent all investment in the industry.
-The cost of offshore wind farms, until recently the most expensive mainstream renewable technology, will slide 71 percent, making turbines based at sea another competitive form of generation.
-At least $239 billion will be invested in lithium-ion batteries, making energy storage devices a practical way to keep homes and power grids supplied efficiently and spreading the use of electric cars.
-Natural gas will reap $804 billion, bringing 16 percent more generation capacity and making the fuel central to balancing a grid that's increasingly dependent on power flowing from intermittent sources, like wind and solar.
The report also found that through 2040:
-China and India represent the biggest markets for new power generation, drawing $4 trillion, or about 39 percent all investment in the industry.
-The cost of offshore wind farms, until recently the most expensive mainstream renewable technology, will slide 71 percent, making turbines based at sea another competitive form of generation.
-At least $239 billion will be invested in lithium-ion batteries, making energy storage devices a practical way to keep homes and power grids supplied efficiently and spreading the use of electric cars.
-Natural gas will reap $804 billion, bringing 16 percent more generation capacity and making the fuel central to balancing a grid that's increasingly dependent on power flowing from intermittent sources, like wind and solar.
Gods but that Dino sludge and other fuels in the ground for us. If he didn't want us to use them, they wouldn't be there.
Because the verified warming trend will suddenly stop because we're slightly ahead of schedule to stop producing as much CO2 and other gases as we thought. It's like watching movies about spacecraft who, when they cut off their engines, magically come to a stop in space.
Same principle.
I can understand lithium ion batteries for portables and maybe for a home, but grid scale batteries will likely be flow batteries or other such tech. Why because they are big and stationary. You don't need particularly compact or space efficient batteries on that scale. It is more important to be durable, low toxicity, and inexpensive (relatively).
The rate of increase for CO2 is in decline. CO2 is not in decline and it will take hundreds of years for it to decline.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Well, this is the first I have heard this. The things to be considered are that coal fired plants are generally operated for 40 or 50 years. So, is the cost of solar cheaper than continuing to use the coal plants that exist? No. What is going to happen if they are correct is the construction of new coal plants will slow and stop by 2026. The remaining coal plants will continue to operate for some time.
Further, even if the CO2 emissions are lower than was originally predicted, no where in the article did it suggest that will happen quick enough to prevent some of the bad side effects of all the carbon released into the atmosphere. You seem to assume, because coal use will slow down the that everything will be hunky dory. I suspect that is wishful thinking on your part.
Just wait until other countries start putting a carbon tax on US products produced with dirty fossil fuels.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
All of the models that indicate signifincant warming are predicated on the continued rise of CO2 emissions.
Yet that is madness, The quickening rise in Solar power and electric cars mean that CO2 levels will be in decline by the end of this decade, never mind the ones after.
The push for renewables is precisely to avoid a climate catastrophe. The models are based on CO2 rise because, thus far, that's exactly what the trend has been.
Arguing that we don't need renewables because renewables will save us is circular reasoning.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
There are also some cool designs using molten salt. This plant "...has achieved continuous production, operating 24 hours per day for 36 consecutive days, a result which no other solar plant has attained so far." Pretty neat! And one advantage of molten salt (and perhaps flow batteries, too?) is that unlike, say, lithium ion, the energy can't really come out all at once explosively -- you'd get essentially a lava flow rather than an explosion, AFAIK.
...by drawing a straightish line on a graph.
Yes, it would be somewhat moronic to draw a straightish line on this graph. Something exponential-ish (or logistic, or...) would be much more sensible.
And "nighttime solar" is already a thing (though they don't call it that). This plant generated electricity for 36 days straight, 24 hours/day.
All forms of energy have problems, it's just a matter of which problems you prioritize. Storage is an engineering (=money) problem, coal an environmental problem, etc.
Solar and wind work in low % of overall generation. It doesn't work at high % of total generation. Same with net metering at home installs.
People will keep saying this until it does work in high % of total generation, and then they'll find something else to complain about.
Not that the problems with solar aren't real, but the people working to solve those problems are real also, and sooner or later (and more likely sooner, given the amount of effort being invested), they will solve them.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
There was absolutely no mention of nuclear power in this article. Is not China and India investing in that technology too?
It would be great if solar could in fact be cheaper than coal in 20 years or so but I've already been told for 20 years that solar will be cheaper than coal in 20 years. I stopped believing these claims a long time ago. Solar has a lot of issues that merely lowering the price of the panels will not solve.
I do believe that wind can get their prices down to where it could compete with other energy sources. Like solar though it has problems of being intermittent. I hear claims that batteries and other storage systems can address this but I ask, what stops people from charging these batteries with cheap and reliable coal or nuclear? Batteries can follow load changes better then coal or nuclear can, so use those for peak load and forget about wind or natural gas.
One thing that puts a limit on the costs between wind and nuclear, wind takes ten times the steel and concrete of nuclear per megawatt of installed capacity. People ask, where is all that concrete? All I you are steel towers and a three big blades turning about. The answer is that the concrete is in the anchor that holds up that tower. If we can assume that the concrete anchors fatigue in 50 years or so, just like it would in a nuclear reactor, then we will need a continuous recycling of concrete to keep up with even an unchanging demand for electricity. If you need X tons of concrete for a gigawatt nuclear power plant then you will need 10X tons for a gigawatt of wind power.
Making concrete has a carbon footprint associated with it. That means that nuclear not only can have a smaller carbon footprint than wind but already does. Future nuclear reactors will likely require less concrete and steel than it does now with advancements in technology. So wind is already behind and the competition is not standing still.
So, it's great that we can look forward to cheap wind and solar in a decade or three. What should we do until then? We can keep burning coal. We can shutdown large sectors of our economy, which would likely delay this new wind and solar advancement. Or we can use nuclear power.
I believe that nuclear power is the only logical choice today. When or if wind and solar catch up then we can switch to that.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Nuclear already collapsed. Notwithstanding the technical merits, humans cannot be trusted to manage it effectively.
You are ignorant of what's going on in the energy market, your clue should be that your own assessment is in contravention of the wall street press. Storage is there, it's already viable and it's already cheaper than gas. They just executed a 20 year purchase agreement for a solar + storage contract (IIRC it was in Texas) at less than 4cents kwh. That's cheaper than any other source of generation and guarantees 24/7 power.
This isn't even with the big drop in battery prices that's expected as the major battery factories come on line. In case you aren't aware the Tesla gigafactory is one of about 30 similarly sized factories being built right this minute around the world. Batteries prices are projected to fall below the price threshold that they will disrupt entirely the idea of base load. Wall streets been moving money toward this as the trend has intensified, it's been all over the wall street news since 2008 and it's accelerating every year.
Unlike you these people are betting real money on this, billions of dollars are flowing to renewables because of this massive shift in energy production pricing and has been since 2008.
China and India are the biggest markets for just about everything. That includes nuclear power. It seems odd that an article that wants to sing the praises of how wind and solar are going to power the world that they'd not even mention that nuclear power already powers a good sized portion of it, more than what wind and solar do now, and nearly as much as coal.
I see this as just another example of bias in the news. Bloomberg is an organization with a far left bias and nuclear is seen as some sort of threat or something. Like some evil entity that is only alluded to with words like "he who must not be named" or something. If they left out nuclear power in this piece then I have to wonder if it is because wind and solar don't look so great by comparison. They'll mention coal because coal is no real threat, but nuclear cannot even be mentioned once.
What we do see is that China and India are taking a true "all the above" strategy on energy since they have active development of nuclear energy. Unlike the USA which has an "all the above... except nuclear" strategy. I believe this attitude will change in time. But will it be soon enough? Until wind and solar is cheaper than coal we will be burning coal. We know nuclear is cheaper than coal, and as green as solar. Obama and friends held back the industry for a decade. We could have saved a lot of carbon in that time.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Market forces and simple exhaustion of supply will greatly reduce the use of coal to make electricity.
Bullcrap. There is no "exhaustion of supply". America, China, India, and Europe all have enough coal to last for centuries. Coal is dirt cheap and in many areas of the world it will continue to be the most cost effective source of power, as long as the emissions are ignored. Coal needs to die, and market forces alone are not going to accomplish that.
However, Ben Franklin's quote that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" did exist 30 years ago. Alas, large groups of humans have never been very good at learning things.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
No.
In every part of the world where people still live in reality, there is an understanding that climate change is happening because that's where all our observations and data point.
In bumfuck stupid conservative 'merica, true fucking morons who are so fucking stupid they think smart people are bad, but that their worthless, uninformed, uneducated, inbred opinion is somehow good... well, there's a lot of loudmouth fucking idiots who continuie to have their heads up their ass and listen to the people who would lose money if we did something to prevent climate change from disrupting the world. They basically are too stupid to give a fuck about the human species. The fact that their head-up-ass anti-science position has spread is because we have a lot of people in 'merica who are fucking stupid, and prefer themselves to remain that way.
Just telling it like it is.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
India just scrapped plans for 15 coal plants and went with solar instead. The report is way behind on cost of solar power. Solar is already below cost of coal in India and China.
Just saying it like it are.
Tesla is a mega manufacturer of a single battery technology. They will continue to tell you that their battery can do everything and is ideal in every circumstance. The existence of their product at grid scale doesn't necessarily mean it's the best one. Kind of like my nextdoor neighbour who owns a Dodge Ram (I live in a dense European city) who drives around for 15min after he gets home looking for two parking spots next to each other because he doesn't fit in a single spot. He has this car which is great for the purpose it's built, but not so good as a daily commuter.
Flow batteries are larger than Lithium by a factor of 2 currently. This is not relevant in grid scale applications. What is relevant:
- 100% depth of discharge.
- Hugely increased cycle count.
- End of cycle count means one cheap component needs to be replaced: the membrane.
- Estimated 20yr life span is much higher than lithium.
- No cooling required.
- Non-flammable, non-toxic.
- Expansion is as simple as dropping a container of liquid next to the existing battery and connecting a hose.
Lithium battery grid storage can be installed and provide energy for about 1.5 cents/kWh
The most conservative estimate for Tesla's grid storage solution which is the cheapest on the market includes daily cycling over 15 yrs is $0.15/kWh for wholesale cost of a Powerwall (double for retail), and $0.08/kWh for grid scale solution.
Vanadium flow batteries had that cost several years ago already due to their much longer life times and much deeper cycle capability. UET estimates they'll have grid storage available for under $0.05/kWh by the end of the year.
Speaking of because someone has something available it must be good: Redflow ZCell is a lovely little flow cell you can buy for your home. You can replace the Tesla Powerwall with it in a couple of years when the Powerwall is dead. The ZCell costs about 1.5x more and lasts nearly 3 times longer.