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The Road to Deep Decarbonization (bnef.com)
Michael Liebreich, writing for Bloomberg New Energy Finance: In the past fifteen years we have witnessed several pivotal points along the route towards clean energy and transport. In 2004, renewables were poised for explosive growth; in 2008, the world's power system started to go digital; in 2012, it became clear that EVs would take over light ground transportation. Today I believe it is the turn of sectors that have resisted change so far -- heavy ground transportation, industry, chemicals, heat, aviation and shipping, agriculture. One after the other, or more likely as a tightly-coupled system, they are all going to go clean during the coming decades.
Astonishing progress is being made on super-efficient industrial processes, connected and shared vehicles, electrification of air transport, precision agriculture, food science, synthetic fuels, industrial biochemistry, new materials like graphene and aerogels, energy and infrastructure blockchain, additive manufacturing, zero-carbon building materials, small nuclear fusion, and so many other areas. These technologies may not be cost-competitive today, but they all benefit from the same fearsome learning curves as we have seen in wind, solar and batteries. In addition, in the same way that ubiquitous sensors, cloud and edge-of-grid computing, big data and machine learning have enabled the transformation of our electrical system, they will unlock sweeping changes to the rest of our energy, transportation and industrial sectors.
Astonishing progress is being made on super-efficient industrial processes, connected and shared vehicles, electrification of air transport, precision agriculture, food science, synthetic fuels, industrial biochemistry, new materials like graphene and aerogels, energy and infrastructure blockchain, additive manufacturing, zero-carbon building materials, small nuclear fusion, and so many other areas. These technologies may not be cost-competitive today, but they all benefit from the same fearsome learning curves as we have seen in wind, solar and batteries. In addition, in the same way that ubiquitous sensors, cloud and edge-of-grid computing, big data and machine learning have enabled the transformation of our electrical system, they will unlock sweeping changes to the rest of our energy, transportation and industrial sectors.
That's when I knew he was full of hot air.
They are firing carbon based life form workers and are installing silicon based robots.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Orcs just wanna have fun!
I always like how everything is just a few decades away. 2012 did not see EV outselling ICE at any point, even today. "Clean energy" is still a mere fraction of total power output, especially for long term 365/24/7 reliability.
I'm not very sanguine about the prospects for voluntary decarbonization. So it's probably worth wondering what the end game of carbonization looks like. We do read about lots of uncomfortable change like a warmer equator and rising seas. Both of these are inconvenient but I would bet they are adaptable. Climate zones will rise on mountains but there will be areas for food growth. Cities will need to move back. There will be mass disruption probably mostly due to the inhogeneity in how these burdens are distributed. If there weren't borders then people could just move from the inhospitable areas. But there are borders.
However I suspect that long before we even get to that point another much more massive force will depopulate the united states and other countries. Namely the spread of malaria, yellow fever, dengue and the like. These have never been tamed just held in check below there threshold for spreading for a couple hundered years, and historically caused death rates among new colonists as high as 90% when the americas were first colonized.
Unlike the slow spread of rising temperatures, plagues are enough to topple nations in a decade, faster than any governement can react. Ask the Irish or Maya or Inca or east coat native americans.
Thus the problems with global warming may not be an unihabitable planet but the death of nations and the ensuing warfare from border and resource re-adjustment.
But I suspect that eventually a new equilibrium will take hold where a new regime of globally warmer temperatures comes into balance and life will go on.
Basically, post a armageddon equilibrium. If disease is the first horseman than it's almost certainly to happen in during the lives of the current generation. Your children will grow up speaking canadian.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
By the way, when human dieoff's hit 50-90% then decarbonization can occur as nations collapse and return to pre-industrial carbon usage. Could that actually happen. A growing body of research suggests that, with a healthy dose of scienctific controvery, that the century of the little ice age was caused by deaths in the highly populated americas.
https://www.scientificamerican...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...
https://phys.org/news/2011-10-...
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We should terraform Earth making it a little warmer to stay away from Little Ice Ages anyway, which will make much more growable land in Canada, Asia, and Alaska.
This would have seemed reasonable in the 1960s or 1970s.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
When did it become clear EVs would take over light ground transportation? Do they mean golf carts? I see some convincing use cases for EV (basically to get around a city) but prices have not come down enough for the mainstream to buy them 'just to get around a city' .Even if you have a Tesla and Supercharger stations, you're going to have to do a lot of planning and your road trip vacation will likely be governed in some respect to where the stations are. A lot of problems to be solved first. They're going to have to be financially and logistically reasonable before they become mainstream.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I got buzzword bingo everyone. Seriously was the article written by an AI fed only buzzwords?
In the past fifteen years we have witnessed several pivotal points along the route towards clean energy and transport. In 2004, renewables were poised for explosive growth; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...> in 2008, the world's power system started to go digital ; in 2012, it became clear that EVs would take over light ground transportation https://www.businessinsider.co... .>
So out of his three main points one is irrelevant, one is misleading at best, and one is basing an awful lot on a very small sample. Cracking job matey.
Yeah good luck with that.
Sorry, they still make up a tiny percentage of total renewable energy.
And the capacity to build the quantities we need for utility-grade applications would basically hijack the markets for an entire year.
You want to decarbonize NUCLEAR POWER. End of discussion. Stable baseline power. Zero carbon emissions.
Add in remaining utility-grade large hydro, geothermal and augment with small hydro to bring up baseline to today's PEAK demand.
You can offset peaks in demand with renewables then.
But the real gains have NOTHING to do with power generation.
40-something percent of all power consumption in this country is from BUILDINGS.
Build better insulated, more efficient buildings, and watch demand on the grid plummet.
Build for longevity and sustainability.
Retrofit less efficient buildings.
HVAC being offset with BTU batteries and careful timing of power use.
Then use any power excesses in the system to do things like desalinate water and carbon capture into hydrocarbon fuels which can be used to stay carbon-neutral or stored to be carbon positive.
Because if you think coating the planet in solar panels and wind turbines is going to fix everything, you're delusional.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Clearly carbon and silicon must have equal rights ! We cannot have this kind of discrimination !
Ned L.
This is nothing but buzzwords that sound like real things.
Fossil fuels will still be in use by the end of the century. Count on it.
Right?
The low hanging fruit is stationary electricity (solar panels), which *have* gained traction. The tricky part about transportation is that you have to carry the fuel with you. One of the very best ways to carry fuel is to store it in chemicals, and then use it as you go. Chemicals can store dense amounts of energy. Batteries, not even close, in fact about three orders of magnitude less (for the great unwashed, that's about 1/1000). A single 100 horsepower car needs 100 horsepower of energy. That's 74,600 watts. A 400 horsepower truck needs 400 horsepower of energy, that's 298,400 watts (or 298.4 kilowatts). The power ratings are *conservative* for cars and trucks, just saying "maybe we can use half that much" doesn't really fly. Its really the minimum needed. A typical solar panel produces 800 watts, so to run the truck, you need 373 panels. The car would need 93. If you say you only need the car about 1/10 of the day, then you still need 9. Most transport trucks are going day and night though. Oh, and the power grid can't handle all of that. One car uses the same power as about 37 homes. What would be best would be a micro-sized molten salt reactor that fits in the car or truck, and then you could produce steam and power the vehicles that way. Sorry to all the greenies who are wanting to dispute reality and/or set their hair on fire. Its just the way it is.
Central Planning is the hallmark of failed governments. Despite the best intentions no one can predict the future. Government subsidies pick technological winners and inadvertently sniffle other, perhaps superior. If people want EV's then companies with make them, but let the market decide. Put your efforts into persuasion, not more regulation and subsidies.
insightful, interesting
nuff said
Quite. As if apartment landlords are going to add dozens or hundreds of $2,000.00 charge points to their parking lots?
WTF does graphene or aerogel have to do with transportation infrastructure? "Oh wait, I have to load this pig up with all the current buzzwords to get attention."
Well Michael, let's throw in some mouldy oldies, just to give your article the correct level of stink and irrelevance: Bubble memory! Germanium transistors! Cold fusion! Manganese nodules! Peking Man! The Chess Playing Turk!
"....several pivotal points along the route towards clean energy and transport. In 2004, renewables were poised for explosive growth; in 2008, the world's power system started to go digital; in 2012, it became clear that EVs would take over light ground transportation. "
No they didn't, mostly no, and absolutely no.
Ergo, no.
-Styopa
" 2012, it became clear that EVs would take over light ground transportation."
Won't matter, at all, until you can go the same distance as a standard gas saving sedan can with only 1 charge.
Until then, it won't take over much of anything.
I'm sure that with your extensive experience in analysing real world data (it's my day job) you'd agree that extrapolating the second derivative from noisy data is a bit silly. As soon as the idiotic subsidies for regen disappear, so will the growth in regen installations, or at least their second derivative. Bear in mind in that graph I posted the %age of regen was actually falling, since it had the same slope as oil and coal.
I'm not putting any time into actually doing the numbers but if I get any interesting responses to this I will.
No, you are out by a factor of about 5, sorry. Here's a comparison I did recently
Best battery around at the moment is probably Tesla. Their 85 kWh battery weighs 540 kg. A typical car has a 72 litre tank, so we could replace that with a 9 kWh battery. 9 kWh is of course 33 MJ. 72 litres of fuel is about 2500 MJ. The efficiency of whatever ancient technology they use on the gas car is perhaps 15% or a little better. So on a /like for like/ basis the BEV has 9% of the energy available at the wheel compared with a not very efficient gasoline car. Admittedly the electric motors are lighter than the gasoline powertrain, but that wasn't your argument. A more sensible approach would be to add up the total mass of fuel+tank+powertrain and comparing it with the same overall mass of motors+transmission+electronics+battery.
Since you think you are good with numbers perhaps you could do that for me.
Whats the perfect amount of carbon in our atmosphere for humanity. I dont think people have figured this out yet, and its important. Perhaps the amount is what we have now.... any more things will get bad... any less bad as well.
[($)]
Electrically-powered aircraft, at first small single-engine types, are not far off at all given the rates of advancement we've seen regarding electric battery storage technology combined with new materials like carbon-fiber.
"New materials like carbon fiber"? Carbon fiber has been around for decades. It's not even close to new. And as for the rate of advancement of battery tech, storage improves by a few percent per year. It's slow steady incremental progress. The volumetric energy density of Li-Ion batteries has doubled since 1995. Good but hardly mind blowing rate of improvement. Doubling every 25 years isn't exactly speedy.
We have a few prototype small electric planes. Commercial airliners are in no danger of being displaced any time soon. Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to see all electric planes but it's going to be a few decades at minimum before they become commercially viable even under the most optimistic assumptions.
Not many years ago the majority of RC model airplanes of any size were powered by ICEs. Now ICE-powered models, especially aircraft and quad-rotors, are becoming the exception rather than the rule..
Irrelevant because the forces and thermodynamics involved do not scale linearly. You can't simply take an RC plane and make it 10 or 100 times bigger with everything working the same. Aircraft big enough to carry people have to be able to travel a LOT faster than your typical RC toy and wind resistance scales up exponentially. Doubling your speed requires far more than double the power. And I'm not even getting into the economics of building a real plane that costs millions versus your several hundred dollar toy.
Electrically powered cars and freight trucks are now beginning to become a reality as our ability to store electricity densely steadily improves. Aircraft cannot be far behind.
Actually electric powered aircraft are quite a bit behind because the physics involved are very different. Power to weigh matters a LOT more for aircraft than it does for automobiles. While we might one day see commercially viable electric aircraft it is going to be decades later than for cars because of the power to weight requirements.
People won't buy EVs unless they are economically superior to ICE for the function they need it to perform. Companies won't make EVs with decent towing capacity unless people are going to buy them.
A Tesla Model X can tow the same 5000 lbs my current gas powered pickup can tow. It is trivial to build an EV with substantial towing capacity. You are right that there is a chicken and egg problem with EVs but there is clear evidence that the popularity of EVs is growing. I think in the long term (40+ years out) EVs will come to dominate the car market with hybrids and gas powered vehicles becoming specialty vehicles. But there are a lot of infrastructure and technical issues to work out before that happens.
people who are against supply side economics, really need supply side economics to get EVs to become a thing.
That's a weird and backward argument. Supply side economics is the theory that growth can be induced by lowering taxes and reducing regulation. Reasonable enough as a principle as long as you don't take it too far. Given that we subsidize oil and fossil fuels to the tune of $5 Trillion per year globally, what you are de-facto arguing is that we need MORE taxes and regulation on fossil fuels for EVs to succeed. EVs don't need supply side economics to work - they need us to stop supply side economics for the smog belching competing technologies.
Because if you think coating the planet in solar panels and wind turbines is going to fix everything, you're delusional.
Agreed, except that you don't need to cover the world. Just a 100 mi x 100 mi plot in the middle of a desert:
lol maybe they just do it for free? Who pays you?
The problem at that point becomes transportation. Oh, and the environmental impact of a 10,000 square mile heat island. How well done do you want any birds in the area?
And, while it's a desert, the area you'd be putting this in ISN'T DEAD. So you're destroying desert ecology.
Additionally, 10,000 square miles of solar panels is an absolute FUCKTON of waste when the panels reach EOL.
And what? It all just goes in a landfill? Because, currently, there's no provisions for recycling solar panels.
And not every country has the land resources to do this.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Build for longevity and sustainability.
I simply wish we did this anyway to improve the landscape.
We'd have to use better materials, so stuff wouldnt looks like econo-dumps.
We'd actually have to make it look nice, unless you want a long-term eye sore.
Now, I'm not saying we should build castles... but I dont know, castles are pretty cool.
Moore's law has worked for decades. Therefore, it applies to anything else, and everything that is currently expensive will soon enough be dirt cheap. QED. That is the gist of most such articles.
Comanche Ridge is a 125MWac plant on 900 acres, for example. Assuming no gains in efficiency, and a capacity factor below he average for the US of 27%, call that 30MW equivalent in full time power, and 1MW needs about 30 acres. (The extra 5MW we can call charging losses for juice not used during the day.) The typical US customer uses 900kWh/mo, so about 30kWh/day, 1.25kW instantaneously. Each customer is based on typical family size, but we've got businesses also, so let's say every person needs 1.25kW. Assume we've got about 20% of our load from on shore wind, 20% from off shore, 15% from hydros... so solar needs to do 55% of 300m, given 1.25kW per person, 30 acres per MW... that's 11.2 million acres.
Total acreage in golf courses: 2.2 million.
Total acreage of parking, assuming 800 million spots at 150 per acre: 5.3 million.
And how much space does a single 1GW reactor and it's cooling tower take up?
And start subtracting size when moving to MSR reactors, since all the Rube Goldberg super-extra-mega-grossly-hyper-redundant cooling machinery (the thing that makes up the bulk of a reactor's size) isn't required.
To steadily generate the same ACTUAL amount of power (within a 1 year period) a 1GW reactor produces you would need between 1.9GW-2.8GW of capacity.
The land required for this would be between 260 and 360 square miles.
To steadily generate the same ACTUAL amount of power (within a 1 year period) a 1GW reactor produces, you would need between 3.3GW and 5.4GW of capacity.
The land required for this would be between 45-75 square miles.
A 1GW reactor facility (cooling towers and all) takes up about 1.3 square miles.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!