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Wind and Solar Can Power Most of the United States, Says Study (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian reports of a recent paper, published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, that helps explain how wind and solar energy can power most of the United States: "The authors analyzed 36 years of hourly weather data (1980-2015) in the U.S. They calculated the available wind and solar power over this time period and also included the electrical demand in the U.S. and its variation throughout the year. With this information, the researchers considered two scenarios. In scenario 1, they imagined wind and solar installations that would be sufficient to supply 100% of the U.S. electrical needs. In the second scenario, the installations would be over-designed; capable of providing 150% of the total U.S. electrical need. But the authors recognize that just because a solar panel or a wind turbine can provide all our energy, it doesn't mean that will happen in reality. It goes back to the prior discussion that sometimes the wind just doesn't blow, and sometimes the sun isn't shining. With these two scenarios, the authors then considered different mixes of power, from all solar to all wind. They also included the effect of aggregation area, that is, what sized regions are used to generate power. Is your power coming from wind and solar in your neighborhood, your city, your state or your region?
The authors found that with 100% power capacity and no mechanism to store energy, a wind-heavy portfolio is best (about 75% wind, 25% solar) and using large aggregate regions is optimal. It is possible to supply about 75-80% of U.S. electrical needs. If the system were designed with excess capacity (the 150% case), the U.S. could meet about 90% of its needs with wind and solar power. The authors modified their study to allow up to 12 hours of US energy storage. They then found that the 100% capacity system fared even better (about 90% of the country's energy) and the optimal balance was now more solar (approximately 70% solar and 30% wind). For the over-capacity system, the authors found that virtually all the country's power needs could be met with wind, solar, and storage."
The authors found that with 100% power capacity and no mechanism to store energy, a wind-heavy portfolio is best (about 75% wind, 25% solar) and using large aggregate regions is optimal. It is possible to supply about 75-80% of U.S. electrical needs. If the system were designed with excess capacity (the 150% case), the U.S. could meet about 90% of its needs with wind and solar power. The authors modified their study to allow up to 12 hours of US energy storage. They then found that the 100% capacity system fared even better (about 90% of the country's energy) and the optimal balance was now more solar (approximately 70% solar and 30% wind). For the over-capacity system, the authors found that virtually all the country's power needs could be met with wind, solar, and storage."
This book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, although a bit dated, is a good reference on how much energy we actually consume, and what can possibly be produced with renewables and others. The conclusion agrees with TFA: North America probably can live on solar, wind and enough storage. Not that easily, but it seems possible.
There are 800 KV DC transmission lines being built in Europe and Asia that have losses of 3% per 1000 km. Very modest excess production capability can compensate for this, a mere 10% for a 3250 km run (far enough to take southwest solar energy to New England).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
You will notice that the blog in question is a "climate skeptic" blog, which is a nice way of saying, "denier". Also, let me draw your attention to the fact that Matt Ridley offers a ton of facts and figures, without offering a single citation or link. Also "Coyote Blog" also doesn't provide any links or citations. Just weasel-phrases like, "Such numbers are not hard to find" except apparently he couldn't find any to link to It's a 17-paragraph article without a single link. Has there ever been a 17-paragraph article on the Internet without a single, solitary link?
Matt does say things like "From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption". Except there's one problem. If you actually navigate manually to the International Energy Agency's 2016 Key Renewable Trends, you will find a very different picture. there's actually steady growth in the worldwide energy share created by renewables of all kinds and second (please pay attention here) THE REPORT REFERS TO WORLDWIDE ENERGY CREATION AND NOT FOR THE US SO WHY ARE YOU EVEN TELLING US ABOUT THIS JODKA? How the FUCK do you come here and try to compare worldwide energy use and generation in 2016 to US-ONLY use and generation in
2018?
Strangely, there are IEA reports from 2017 which apparently Coyote Blog has not chosen to report.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The USA has plenty of real estate that can be used for solar and the number of birds killed by wind turbines has always been vastly over estimated and a tiny fraction of the kills by domestic cats. Finally, the latest, larger, turbines kill even fewer birds per kWh generated.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I wondered what they assumed about transmission losses. From the paper, last paragraph of introductory section:
Perfect transmission and energy storage, with no losses or
constraints, was assumed, yielding a best-case scenario for
realizing the benefits of geographic anti-correlation of the
resources and to allow isolation of the limitations associated
purely with geophysical characteristics of wind and solar energy
resources. Specific transmission constraints, higher-resolution
resource data, energy storage inefficiencies, optimization of the
choice of generation locations to minimize their mutual correlation
as opposed to maximization of local energy production, and
operational limits and market dynamics, among other practical
considerations, will play important roles in determining the details
of system- and site-specific design and operation of an actual
electricity system of this magnitude.
Looking up transmission losses in Wikipedia . A few numbers: 160km of 765kV transmission line has losses of 1.1% to 0.5%. Transmission losses in the USA were estimated at 6.5% in 2007.
As this plan will require more transmission, losses would be higher, and you'd need to spend quite a lot to upgrade transmission lines. I think this study is a useful starting point, but should be read as "getting beyond 80% renewable is really hard" rather than "getting to 80% renewable is easy".
Here is an interesting bit from the "discussion" section:
One proposed, and modeled,
U.S.-wide transmission system consists of an estimated
34 000 km (21 000 miles; 7 lengths of the US from Los Angeles,
CA to Portland, Maine) of line with a capacity of up to 12 GW.
An installed cost of $1 MM GW^-1 km^-1 implies a capital
expenditure on the order of $410 billion, as compared to >$1
trillion that would be required to install 12 hours of storage in
the US (mean demand is ~450 GW) assuming an installed cost
at present of $200 per kW h (pumped hydro; most other
systems (e.g. batteries, flywheels, etc.) have current costs in
excess of $500 per kW h).
So that gives some idea of the costs involved.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
For those of you who aren't following along, the article SuperKendall links to talks about how the giant sollar thermal collection plant in California kills 6000 birds a year.
What it doesn't tell you is that the federal Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that a minimum of 10 BILLION birds breed in the United States every year and that as many as 20 BILLION may be in the country during the fall migratory season. It also doesn't tell you that during the 2016-2017 hunting season, Texas hunters killed over 24 MILLION birds for sport. And they do this every goddamn year.
To summarize, 6000 birds die at a power station and it's the fucking bird apocalypse, but 24 MILLION birds get blown all to shit by Texas hunters and it's a manly and culturally significant ritual. I wonder what all that birdshot does to the lead levels in Texas surface water.
Oh, here's the statistics from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, in case you want to see for yourself what goes on in that god-forsaken state.
https://tpwd.texas.gov/publica...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Fortunately on a continent with a third of a billion people and a $18 trillion dollar economy, we don't need to have just one source of electricity.
The levelized cost of nuclear power, cost over plant lifetime. is the most expensive form of electricity on the market. There is no dispute about it, any study will show this. So where ever possible you would Not want to use it, you would want to use one of the cheaper alternatives.
So you can have a distributed system of power plants of many different types, with the cheaper ones providing most of the aggregate demand.
And basic economics dictates that the cheaper power source will be deployed overwhelmingly.
Solar/wind do fine most of the time, you can push over 80% without much difficulty.
At worst then solar power deployment stalls at that point, with natural gas peaking plants taking up the slack.
But this is a problem some 30 years in the future - they provided 7.6% of U.S. electricity in 2017, it is going to be awhile before the >80% problem is encountered.
Ways will be found by then to push costs for gap-filling power below what is currently available, pushing the reasonable cost power gap closer to 100%. Perhaps we never get to 100% but keep use natural gas for that last little bit.
Getting nuclear power plants into the picture requires altering economic decision making - imposing carbon taxes to make nuclear more cost-effective (but this does not help against wind/solar, its long term competitors), or mandating construction by legal compulsion (or have the government build them). These last two are more-or-less what France did, and China is doing.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I remember looking at another article on that site and it was full of misleading, out of date and outright wrong information.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Both Exxon-Mobile and BP have wind and solar generation in 2016 in the 4-5% range. Predictions based 5-6 year old data is useless in the energy markets.
Plug in numbers here:
http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatt...
I used retail pricing here: https://sunelec.com/home/
If cost is no object, then yes, it is possible that we can power the country with wind and solar. However, it is not currently cost effective and will not likely be cost effective for a very long time.
Solar electricity generation is highly inefficient.
If it were cost effective, we'd all be doing it. Same goes with electric cars.
That's a load of horse manure. Solar energy and Wind energy are currently cheaper than coal and are about to beat gas for electricity production. With both of these technologies and storage you can guarantee prices for decades, there are no market fluctuations in the price of the solar energy or the wind that powers them.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Solar and wind also employ more people in the US than oil, coal and gas combined:
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
Throw in some smart grid technology and modern grid planning and we are likely to end up with a grid in places like Germany and China (which at one point installed more wind/solar than the US had online at the time) and we are likely to end up with power mixes that are up to 70% wind/solar with the rest being always-on powerplants. Anybody who thinks there is future in natural gas, oil or (*snicker*) 'Trump digs coal' is quite frankly delusional.
yawn.... someone needs to do some real research about renewables rather than plucking shit out of their heads
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
That's a load of horse manure. Solar energy and Wind energy are currently cheaper than coal and are about to beat gas for electricity production.
All your /. links aside, the levelized cost of energy shows wind and solar as on the upper end of the spectrum.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Solar electricity generation is highly inefficient.
It's absolutely the opposite. Direct solar electricity generation is extremely efficient compared to all the other ways that energy can possibly get from the stars to us. Coal? Photosynthesis is worse than PV junctions, and most of the plants in the past didn't become coal in the first place, so most of the historical photosynthesis is lost to us. Oil? Ditto. Wind? Most of the heat hitting Earth doesn't become mechanical movement of wind either, as the temperature differences are too low. Nuclear? The way stars work, synthesis of heavy elements is rare, and most of those that Earth got we can't mine anyway. And of their decay heat we can's extract too much energy either, again because of the low temperature differentials. Etc. etc. But of the solar flux hitting Earth right now, every panel can convert 20% directly into electricity. I mean, it seems low until you realize how convoluted and lossy all the other pathways are. So, no, it's not "highly inefficient", at least not in the sense that we have anything better.
If it were cost effective, we'd all be doing it.
But it is already cost effective, and will be even more in the future, so you will be doing it, whether you want it or not. (Of course, you Americans with artificially inflated prices of residential solar are fucked, but it's up to you to reform your own rules, solar can't be blamed for that.)
Ezekiel 23:20
The levelized cost of nuclear power, cost over plant lifetime. is the most expensive form of electricity on the market. There is no dispute about it, any study will show this.
This page which references the EIA's numbers, says you're wrong.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
$5 trillion would buy you about 4000 GW of solar power capacity today. Much more than that in the future, in fact. Depending on the place and type of installation, this would provide roughly between 400 and 1200 GW of average generation. The US apparently uses about 400 GW on average. So, what was the problem again?
Ezekiel 23:20
Why would there be no plan for recycling perfectly fine silicon sources like old panel? ...
Only an idiot would put them on a land fill. On top of that they contain useful metals
Solar you build mostly on existing buildings, because that is also the place the power gets consumed.
Wind plants you build offshore, and even on land they don't use much land, you simply put them on farms and farm around them, like everyone else does.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
How may solar panels and wind turbines would it require to generate that much electricity? I remember seeing someone talk about this and if I remember correctly, it would cover an area the size of a small to medium U S. State.
Musk claimed it needed 100 miles times 100 miles for solar alone (10000 square miles), which is about the size of Massachusetts. See this article and the accompanying image. Massachusetts is the 7th-smallest US-State. The average US state is about 7.5 times larger. Or, in other terms, it's 0.2% of the total US land area. With the US Interstate Highway System having about 50000 miles, it would be a 200 m strip to the left and right of every interstate highway.
It's not trivial, but a) it not going to be solar alone, and b) other energy forms also have significant land use, from mountaintop removal to roads for fuel shipment.
Stephan
Since "highly radioactive" is pretty much synonymous with "short half-life", you're not actually going to see "highly radioatctive for a couple millenia or even longer" in the Real World (tm)....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Battery production prices are dropping like a rock, too. Most of these studies budget something like $500/kWh, but I would not be surprised in the least to see ~$100/kWh in commercially available products in a few years time. And that's a gamechanger for solar timeshifting.
It works double when you need the pack for something else, too (for example, as a buffer to EV fast charging). Your buffer also contains at least an hour's worth of its peak consumption (multiple hours when charges are spread out) just in order to have enough power to feed the vehicles it's charging. No need to "double pay" for the battery.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
If we start using a lot less energy. Using less is the only clean energy.
Talk about a false equivalency. Yes using less is ideal. It doesn't follow that all sources of power are equally bad however. It's clear that fossil fuels are irredeemably polluting. When you need to use energy (and we all do) then you want to use the cleanest form of power generation available to you.
Wind & solar today still depend on fossil fuels in its life cycle.
So what? That doesn't mean they will continue to do so in perpetuity. Once solar and wind are a sufficient percentage of the supply to the grid (which seems almost inevitable) your argument vanishes in a puff of logic.