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Relying on Renewables Alone Significantly Inflates the Cost of Overhauling Energy (technologyreview.com)
A growing number of US cities and states have proposed or even passed legislation that would require producing all electricity from renewable energy sources like solar and wind within a few decades. That might sound like a great idea. But a growing body of evidence shows it's not. From a report: It increasingly appears that insisting on 100 percent renewable sources -- and disdaining others that don't produce greenhouse gases, such as nuclear power and fossil-fuel plants with carbon-capture technology -- is wastefully expensive and needlessly difficult. In the latest piece of evidence, a study published in Energy & Environmental Science determined that solar and wind energy alone could reliably meet about 80 percent of recent US annual electricity demand, but massive investments in energy storage and transmission would be needed to avoid major blackouts. Pushing to meet 100 percent of demand with these resources would require building a huge number of additional wind and solar farms -- or expanding electricity storage to an extent that would be prohibitively expensive at current prices. Or some of both.
Gee, it's as if overhauling an infrastructure which was built predominantly on oil might cost a lot of money to retrofit to handle solar, wind, water, and nuclear!
No fucking duh. However, once you've got the renewable energy sources in place and harvested, the cost will die out, quickly. It's called ROI, and the smart people have obtained almost insane ROI (on the order of 3 months in some related techs like LEDs powered by renewable resources up to 5 years for full solar+wind-powered farms) so they really don't have to worry about this.
Which means Americans have this problem, and not many other people.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm about as much of a greenie as you are likely to run across. I'm strongly of the opinion that we cannot get solar and wind power to be major parts of the grid fast enough. We also need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels (which we do globally to the tune of about $5 Trillion annually) and force them to cost the full economic value of the pollution they cause. That said, the notion that we can rely solely on wind and solar (and hydro where available) in the near future is preposterous. Doing that in a rational way would take a century just due to the cost alone. Fossil fuels simply aren't going away for many decades at minimum no matter what. Fortunately we don't need to get carbon emitting energy sources to zero. We need to get them to a level that the ecosystem can handle which is obviously much lower than it is today. Use nuclear to replace fossil fuels where possible and solar and wind for most of the rest. Yes we will need batteries too. The grid WILL need to be updated no matter what so I don't see that as a bad thing. But if we need to spend the money to keep the planet habitable then no real benefit to waiting.
One beef with the summary is that there currently is no such thing as fossil fuels with carbon capture technology. There is NO industrial scale carbon capture or carbon sequestration technology available nor any reasonable prospect of such technology in the near future. So take that off the table as an option until such time as it becomes a real thing.
I live in the US, particularly Washington state, where most of our electricity is derived from hydro. It's used because it's readily available but it does have its side effects. Just like where I live solar is used with a diminished effect. (I live on the western side of the state with tall trees and cloud cover) If I lived in Arizona, I could bank a very good output of solar, but not so much on the hydro. Shouldn't this be the way we look at our energy? A combination of all power types would be good in the correct situations. Not all areas are blessed with natural resources to be 100% renewable.
...adapt devices to power output. Use them only when electricity is available.
What are the odds that a whole town would decide to run their AC on the same day?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The alternatives are just kicking-the-can-down-the-road... How much will it cost to retrofit or decommission that nuclear plant in 15 or 20 years? How much will it cost to get the carbon out of the atmosphere after it messes up our weather to the point where the growing season is unstable and it's hard to grow crops reliably?
There's an old saying... You can pay now or you can pay later, but it usually costs more later.
Coal should have died in the 60s but groups like Green Peace saved it by driving the cost of nuclear through the roof. 60s nuclear technology was safe, we even knew how to safely dispose of waste in the 60s. We couldn't dispose of it with zero radiation leak but guess what the world is mildly radio active anyway and coal, that thing that replace nuclear, spreads radio active material more than nuclear does.
Ten years ago we solved a lot of the problems with renewables, it was called variable pricing for electricity. People and their appliances can be incentivized to use electricity when it is produced by changing less when the wind blows or the sun is shinning and charging over $0.70/kwh when it isn't. This saved consumers money and saved the utilities even more. Unfortunately the utilities that took a risk and tried this got fucked over by their public utility commissions. (Oklahoma public utility commission almost single handedly set back renewable energy by 5 years)
Last it will never make sense for urban homes to have battery back up. It is always better to share your capacity among several houses, or several thousand houses. Like maybe make it a public utility to store and deliver electricity
Also get white roof shingles!!!
These are all easy things, things that could have already done with a little leadership and maybe getting some of these Green groups to actually think instead of parade around trying to get attention for themselves.
Lastly fuck the pro-rail crude oil transportation advocates. They often go by the anti pipeline crusade.
The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically. And will do it more often as they age. The model does not include the cost of the damage done by global warming. Or rather, it assigns that cost to renewables by failing to credit them for saving the Earth. The model does not consider the effect that radical energy use reductions would have on the overall cost.
This sounds more like the death knell of status quo energy interests and not so much like a reasoned appeal to fact. If these guys know so much, why didn't they tell us last year that alternative energy could provide 80% of needs. Wonder what the number will be next year.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Possibly, but that maxes out at around 40 percent of our current electical power needs (not including HVAC and transportation, even). So what else do we do?
I sincerely hope you religious fanatics don't get us all killed. The right is in denial about the problem, but the left is in denial about the solutions.
Wrong: Coal power is. It's destroying the planet, and yet we're still using a lot of it.
You have price confused with "cost"-- our energy markets are no where near sane about capturing externalities (with the possible exception of nuclear, where we insist on paying full-life cycle charges up front, including waste handling).
once more EVs are sold and charged at home, they can become part of the grid backup plan. same as once more homes have solar with battery backup, they also become part of the grid
Wait, so leaving my EV plugged in overnight would no longer guarantee it would be fully charged when I need to use it, and indeed it actually could be largely discharged depending on other people's consumption patterns that I have no control over? That sounds about as workable as making everyone's pantry part of the grocery store.
It's irrational rationality. Running an unsafe nuclear power plant because you don't like paying taxes and don't trust the government is irrational. But if you've already accepted that level of irrationality then the next rational thing to do is not run the plant in the first place.
If I understand what you're saying, you're suggesting that nuclear power plants will be privatized, and therefore unsafe? Maybe you are suggesting this because of what happened with Fukushima?
The thing is, a majority of nuclear power plants in the U.S. are already privatized (but heavily regulated). That exact arrangement has provided the extraordinary safety record that we observe from nuclear energy. Why would you think things would be any different in the future? There's no movement I'm aware of to abandon those proven safety regulations, and so the most reasonable expectation is that nuclear energy will continue to demonstrate the same, exceptional level of safety and reliability that it always has.