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."

Comments

use less energy

[js290]

If we start using a lot less energy. Using less is the only clean energy. Nicole Foss on renewables @AutomaticEarth http://bit.ly/2rzS5Pq

Re:use less energy

[Anonymous Coward]

The switch to CFLs and LEDs in the last decade has had a pretty significant impact on residential electric use. More efficient appliances coupled with hipsters never ironing their clothes has also contributed significantly.

Re:use less energy

[Narcocide]

Hipsters didn't think of that first. They just made it popular.

Re:use less energy

[thegarbz]

And some perspective can come from this graph: https://www.financialsense.com...

Re:use less energy

[XXongo]

And some perspective can come from this graph: https://www.financialsense.com...

Nice graph, but it would be good to see it extended through 2017 if you wanted to look for the effect of LED lights and other such things.

Re:use less energy

[Applehu Akbar]

If we start using a lot less energy. Using less is the only clean energy.

So you're the one writing those physics problems that assume spherical cows grazing in a vacuum?

Re:use less energy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the key... Use less energy and be aware of what you are using. Factories and other high-power use operations could evolve to work around the sun/power availability.

I have a $5000 solar electric system and live off-grid(far north east; 2 sunhr/day) with all the amenities(microwave,digital pressure cooking, washing machine, 24/7 router/computer/securitycameras, 16/7 40" TV, lights, dc fridge,etc)... Picking the right appliances and waiting for the sun to come out to do major work to reduce your storage needs at night/through cloudy week works very well.

Theres no good reason every house with their own private roof(and view of sky) couldn't be run off solar; and cheaper than grid alone.. off-grid or connected; The main problem is government regulation in the name of 'safety' which just drives costs up 4x higher than they could be.

Perhaps a new regulation that ended regulation for anything less than 32Volts say.. and approved grid-tied inverters wouldn't need 'approved people' to install.

Re:use less energy

[apoc.famine]

Yeah, it was the last half of 2017 where I switched mostly to LEDs. That's when I started to run into LED replacement bulbs for absolutely everything - appliances, bathroom globes, candelabra, etc.

I did a survey a couple of weeks ago - we've got about 12 CFLs left in the house, and that's it. Everything else is LED except for the fridge and oven bulbs, and the giant fluorescent lights in the kitchen and laundry.

It's mindblowing to me that LEDs are drawing an order of magnitude less power than the bulbs I was using a decade ago. Now, if manufacturers would only stop sticking ultra-bright always-on ones in fucking everything, we might be able to reduce power even further.

Re:use less energy

[js290]

So you're the one writing those physics problems that assume spherical cows grazing in a vacuum?

I'm assuming we're using more energy that is necessary to survive & thrive. Technological salvation is a faith based proposition.

Re:use less energy

[amicusNYCL]

I'm assuming we're using more energy that is necessary to survive & thrive.

"We" as in people in the US, or Europe, or developing countries in general, or "we" as in everyone, as in all those people in Africa, Asia, and South America living in poorly-developed countries trying to improve their own situations? Are the people in Africa using too much energy? Because I think they need a lot more.

Re:use less energy

[Shirley Marquez]

Those LED pilot lights draw very little power. They use a few mA at 2 to 4 volts, depending on color, so we're talking about something in the neighborhood of 1/100 of a watt. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of power that the rest of the device uses.

Doesn't stop them from being annoying, though!

C. M. bruns will not like this

[Joe_Dragon]

C. M. bruns will not like this

Re:C. M. bruns will not like this

[jfdavis668]

Don't worry, he already has a plan to block out the Sun.

Re:C. M. bruns will not like this

[RatherBeAnonymous]

Burns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Burns) or Bruns (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DsPjR_kAAAAJ&hl=en)?

I rather suspect C M Bruns of the Environmental Systems Research Institute is OK with renewable energy.

Nuclear

[Frosty Piss]

It's not "kosher" to say this, but we really should have got back into nuclear 20 years ago. The nuclear technology of today is cleaner and safer and more efficient than anything out there. But people are still stuck on *old technology* and Fukashima and so forth when that's *NOT* the technology we would use today. The simple fact is that nuclear is really the only energy technology that can reliably fill the growing need for energy.

Re:Nuclear

[Soft]

The simple fact is that nuclear is really the only energy technology that can reliably fill the growing need for energy.

Technically you're right, but only if we develop both reliable industrial-scale breeder reactors and the technology to extract seawater uranium on a large scale. There's just not enough U235 to generalize the use of nuclear energy on a worldwide scale, so we need breeders to burn U238, and get more of it than current reserves. Not sure about thorium reserves, but that would also require breeders. But indeed, with the aforementioned technologies we can sustain some growth, though not indefinitely. Further down the road, the only technology I'm sure would leave room for lots of growth is deuterium fusion; not deuterium-tritium (which would need to tap into lithium reserves to make tritium) but deuterium-deuterium, which is of course harder and much, much less certain than fission with breeder reactors.

What makes your point correct is that, although renewables can probably sustain us at current consumption rates, they won't allow for any significant growth. OTOH, any significant growth with any energy source will incur lots more waste heat, which would compound global warning. I don't have numbers for how waste heat would compare to current greenhouse-gas emissions in terms of warming the planet. But the numbers supporting my post can be found in Sustainable energy without the hot air, a bit dated but still a must-read.

Re:Nuclear

[careysub]

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.

Re:Nuclear

[angel'o'sphere]

You obviously have no idea how much lithium we have on the planet.
Just saying ...

Re:Nuclear

[Qwertie]

More specifically, Fukushima and Chernobyl were "generation II" reactors, newer reactors are "generation III" (which achieve greater safety via expensive safety systems - hence the death of the dream of electricity "too cheap to meter").

Soon we will have "generation IV" reactors, and in this category the grassroots favorite is Molten Salt Reactors or MSRs. It's odd to call these things "generation IV" actually - it's like referring to the jet engine as a "generation IV propeller". MSRs, which are liquid-fueled and salt-cooled, are on a totally separate technology path from traditional reactors that are solid-fueled and water-cooled. They achieve higher safety and lower cost simultaneously through a philosophy of "don't manage risks - eliminate them."

The LFTR (liquid fuel thorium reactor) is the most well-known proposed MSR, and this has led to some confusion, because people sometimes think that the use of thorium is the main innovation, when in fact the molten salt is the main innovation. The main advantage of thorium is that the world supply is unlimited - we can never run out of it, making LFTR a fully sustainable technology. The advantages of molten salt reactors include high safety, lower cost, higher efficiency, high temperature (so they can use the same inexpensive turbines as fossil fuel plants), production of waste heat (which can be combined with desalination or negative carbon emission technology), ability to burn existing nuclear waste as fuel, and better load-following ability.

Re:Nuclear

[Frosty Piss]

You obviously have no idea how much lithium we have on the planet

I take it daily.

Re:Nuclear

[AmiMoJo]

In a few decades even the US will have a vast fleet of battery electric vehicles, and I expect vehicle-to-grid will become a popular feature due to being able to store solar power and get some feed in tariffs.

Re:Nuclear

[Gavagai80]

We should've invested much more heavily in nuclear 50 years ago all around the world, and then we wouldn't be in the climate bind we're in today. But since this is today, frankly nuclear is an irrational investment today. That's partly because of the insane legal hoops nuclear plants have to clear which make it take decades to build a plant, but even that is partly due to their centralized giant-project nature. Wind and solar work at any scale, which makes it a lot easier to get them built.

the growing need for energy

It's important to note that the need for energy in the USA is -- for the first time since the invention of electricity -- no longer growing. That's one of the problems for nuclear, a nuclear plant has to replace a huge chunk of the local energy market at once whereas wind and solar can be added gradually as previous sources are retired.

Re:Nuclear

[Gavagai80]

It's easy for something to be cheap when it's still on the drawing board. The space shuttle was going to drastically reduce the cost of space flight, too, until it actually flew. Hopefully it all works out with generation IV, but we can't assume and plan on that.

Re:Nuclear

[volodymyrbiryuk]

And how do you solve the waste problem..you know the stuff that'll stay highly radioactive for a couple of millenia or even longer? Do you make Homer Simpson eat it with a spoon?

Re:Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

More broken promises to leave our grandchildren.

Nuclear has always been a disaster WRT decommissioning and NOTHING you've said suggests than will change. It's always made a lot of promises which it's never delivered on.

I'm not saying you can't have 'safe' nuclear, but for sure you can't do it if it's driven by cost.

Re:Nuclear

[LynnwoodRooster]

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.

Re:Nuclear

[angel'o'sphere]

ability to burn existing nuclear waste as fuel
Why do people constantly repeat this nonsense?

Nuclear waste is:
Strontium/Yttrium
Cesium
Promethium
Zircconium
Strontium
Ruthenium
Niobium
Barium/Lanthanum
Iodine
Tritium
(and many others - I only copied the most dangerous because they get absorbed by the body)

Nothing of those above you can 'burn' in any reactor.

The only thing you can do is reprocess spent fuel, remove the decay products above, and mix the remaining non spend Uranium into your Thorium based fuel.

You could simply put the spend fuel without reprocessing into the Thorium fuel ... if it does not influence the chain reaction, no idea. That migth be diffiult because old fuel us usually some kind of Uranium-Oxyde.

Anyway: there is no reactor that 'burns radioactive waste' that is a complete silly claim!

Re:Nuclear

[jabuzz]

All current nuclear power plants are "actively safe". That is someone has to be constantly doing something to make sure they don't have a problem.

All three major nuclear power plant accidents (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima) occurred due to failures in the active safety systems.

The proposal for Generation IV nuclear reactors is to make them passively safe. That is unless someone is actively doing something the reactor will safely shutdown without any intervention from humans. A general consequence of this is that if you try and skimp on things your reactor just shuts down a lot, which turns out to rather costly to the bottom line.

That said a mixture of solar, wind and geothermal with storage can cover everything for less money. Heck around 30 years ago I read that the USGS had concluded that there was enough extractable thermal energy 1.5km below the surface of the continental USA to provide enough power for at least 1000 years. Drilling technology has improved enormously in the interim, so the cost is like to be much lower.

But this is the USA, where the state of Hawaii which sits on top of active volcanoes and is dam sunny imports oil to generate electricity. I mean it's so incredibly deranged that you head would explode if you tried to work out what the hell is going on.

Re:Nuclear

[thegarbz]

which achieve greater safety via expensive safety systems

They do nothing of the sort. The safety systems in GenIII reactors are effectively off the shelf. Chemical plants install them by the dozen all the time. What becomes expensive is the regulatory overhead imposed on the project.

My own anecdote installing a Triconex system in a power plant in Spain was that by the time we finished that god forsaken 6 year long project we got a lifecycle notice from the vendor saying the system is soon to be obsolete. I literally just finished installing such a system in a nuclear plant only to move to the very next project at a hydrogencyanide plant and pull out an identical model and age system in the form of an obsolescence upgrade project. (That took 2 months by the way).

I never want anything to do with the nuclear industry again. On the upside the billable hours were huge. We never got anything done but boy did we get paid for it.

Re:Nuclear

[CrimsonAvenger]

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)....

Re:Nuclear

[Mr D from 63]

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. .

Didn't you even try to valide your assumption before wrongly stating it as fact? Its not even remotely correct. But I am sure you will rationalize it somehow and keep repeating it.

https://www.lazard.com/perspec...

Re:Nuclear

[Trailer Trash]

The levelized cost of nuclear power, cost over plant lifetime. is the most expensive form of electricity on the market.

Exactly right!*

* If you add in every single externality for nuclear while ignoring every single externality for all other power generation technologies.

Re:Nuclear

[phantomfive]

It's important to note that the need for energy in the USA is -- for the first time since the invention of electricity -- no longer growing.

When energy grows cheap enough, it becomes economical to turn lead into gold.There is no problem with *using* energy, the problem is when you damage the environment in the process.
Cheap, clean energy is a *very* good thing.

Re:Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

Since "highly radioactive" is pretty much synonymous with "short half-life", you're not actually going to see "highly radioactive for a couple millennia or even longer" in the Real World (tm)....

Indeed, the thing that all too many ignorant people mistake is the difference between "highly radioactive" and "long half-life". The real issue with radioactivity is energy over time. A long half-life merely means that there's a low energy release and frankly, the substance is fairly safe. The short half-life stuff is quite dangerous, but because the half-life is short, the substance doesn't stay around very long. And as for the "massive amounts of radioactive waste" generated by nuclear power plants, you just might want to take a closer look. About 90% of the nuclear fuel waste generated by a nuclear power plant can be reprocessed into new fuel. In fact, the industry was built using that assumption. But in early 1977, the Carter administration halted work the Barnwell reprocessing facility and instantly caused the amount of waste needing to be stored by a factor of ten. The vast majority of the waste problem is therefore a political, not a technological problem, and can be quickly solved if the politicians would just get out of the way. Additionally, the actual amount of high level waste generated is actually quite small. A 1 gigawatt plant only generates about 1 cubic yard of waste per year (of which 90% can be reprocessed as mentioned above). And the media tends to not distinguish between high level waste (used fuel) and low level waste (gloves, boots, tools, etc). The low level waste is of negligible hazard, but is quite useful in inflating the numbers so they're scarier. If all of the electricity in the United States were to be generated via nuclear power, the high level waste produced would be enough to kill ten billion people. That's quite scary sounding.... But consider the context. We produce enough barium to kill one hundred billion people. We produce enough ammonia to kill six trillion. enough hydrogen cyanide to kill six trillion as well. And enough phosgene to kill twenty trillion. Finally, enough chlorine to kill four hundred trillion. To be honest, we produce enough other substances to kill everyone on Earth many times over. And if we store the high level waste for a mere ten years, it only becomes as toxic as barium (remember, the short half-life substances are the really dangerous ones and ten years is quite a long time). After a hundred years, the waste is only one ten-thousandth as toxic as barium.

So, for those of you who are rabidly anti-nuclear, please try harder to not be an useful idiot. There's far too many of them out there already.

Re:Nuclear

[eth1]

OTOH, any significant growth with any energy source will incur lots more waste heat, which would compound global warning.

Not really...

The cross-sectional area of earth is about 1.2x10^14 sq m. Times about 1.3kW insolation per sq m at the top of the atmosphere. About 1.4 billion TWh/year. That dwarfs our puny attempts at power generation.

Re:Nuclear

[epine]

The space shuttle was going to drastically reduce the cost of space flight, too, until it actually flew.

Oh, come on. Nobody serious ever believed that. I was there where the sparkly unicorn farts were still fresh on the air.

Generation IV nuclear cycles would certainly have extremely costly teething problems, but little I've seen there makes me roll my eyes like the space shuttle propaganda once did.

Nothing defies economic common sense quite like sending human beings into outer space (times ten if you expect to retrieve them again, in working condition).

What actually happens is that we use the romance factor of the space program to organize damn hard things to do, simply because they are damn hard—and deeply embedded in the mil-space sector (which always adds a few more psi to national penis size, no matter what about the economic fallout).

Long ago the nuclear romance turned into an acrimonious divorce. Nothing nuclear will ever get financed on a giant romantic bag of unicorn farts.

The risk profiles have nothing in common.

Re:Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of details that get glossed over when talking about nuclear power. Analogies only work so well. Breeder reactors can turn (some) nuclear waste into usable fissionable nuclear fuel.

Nuclear waste became a greater concern by the 1990s. In broad terms, spent nuclear fuel has two main components. The first consists of fission products, the leftover fragments of fuel atoms after they have been split to release energy. Fission products come in dozens of elements and hundreds of isotopes, all of them lighter than uranium. The second main component of spent fuel is transuranics (atoms heavier than uranium), which are generated from uranium or heavier atoms in the fuel when they absorb neutrons but do not undergo fission. All transuranic isotopes fall within the actinide series on the periodic table, and so they are frequently referred to as the actinides.

The physical behavior of the fission products is markedly different from that of the transuranics. In particular, fission products do not themselves undergo fission, and therefore cannot be used for nuclear weapons. Furthermore, only seven long-lived fission product isotopes have half-lives longer than a hundred years, which makes their geological storage or disposal less problematic than for transuranic materials.[11]

With increased concerns about nuclear waste, breeding fuel cycles became interesting again because they can reduce actinide wastes, particularly plutonium and minor actinides.[12] Breeder reactors are designed to fission the actinide wastes as fuel, and thus convert them to more fission products.

Re:Nuclear

[admin7087]

It's called "nuclear energy", you fucking moron.

Re:Nuclear

[Rakarra]

They do nothing of the sort. The safety systems in GenIII reactors are effectively off the shelf. Chemical plants install them by the dozen all the time. What becomes expensive is the regulatory overhead imposed on the project.

I hear this a lot, but I rarely hear actual specifics. I'm curious the sort of regulatory overhead that is added. Is it study time? Form-filling time? Work that starts and then a court order pauses it (and then you still have to pay people while they stand idle)? I've always wondered what offices actually end up driving the cost.

Re:Nuclear

[Rakarra]

Every generation of engineers has said "no, those were old technology, the new generation of reactors could never do that".

But they always run into the law of economics, which says that if you deploy nuclear power as a commercial venture, it will be pushed to the absolute limits of safety, whatever those are. The safer the reactor, the harder it will be pushed. How much of your country are you willing to bet on the proposition that this reactor design just can't leak, no matter how much it's abused?

Because sooner or later, it will be abused to exactly that level. That is the lesson of TMI and Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The history of nuclear in the US is pretty good. I'm willing to bet a lot of my country on it. No other usable energy source has been as safe.

Re:Nuclear

[thegarbz]

I'm curious the sort of regulatory overhead that is added. Is it study time?

So am I. From what I can gather it is just an endless string of busybodies asking endless questions about what ultimately is standard off the shelf designs. There is really nothing remarkable about reactor safety systems and they are highly prescriptive with even less room for design cockups than a typical safety system. I have no idea what goes on in the regulatory agencies, but typically when you submit documents to a client with minor changes they come back in a days, not months. Then every change requires a level of justification that makes me question why whatever regulatory body this shit gets submitted to doesn't just design the system themselves.

I wasn't project manager, so I really didn't care what the name of the department was. But ultimately we were in no rush either. Only the initial documents were paid for by the sheet, work after that was billed by the hour so we were "happy" to accommodate any further requests as they came.

Got paid, but the amount of paperwork necessary to install a handful of transmitters and 3 Tricons just sapped the life out of me. I'm happy to have that behind me.

Re:Nuclear

[DarthVain]

However I believe they are still working out some of the practical kinks with molten salt based coolants, at least in a realistic test basis. If I recall correctly the issue is that the molten salt is highly corrosive (or much more corrosive than conventional coolants), which is a maintenance issue for the piping which will need more often replacement and a system in place for that to occur.

Though one of the advantages you missed I think was the fact that you could build much smaller independent and redundant reactors (or just smaller in place reactors), which would much reduce both the potential impact as well as some of those larger capitol investment costs. Would also let you distribute them a bit more in the later case to defray the cost of centralized distribution.

However the history of older plants designed largely to produce nuclear weapons, as well as public opinion, the resultant regulatory environment, etc... is going to make that pretty difficult, at least in the US. Countries will continue to use Coal/Gas as base load for the immediate future. However eventually gas will become expensive, and coal usage has it's own problems. Some other countries will continue to advance reactor technology, and eventually they will be selling the systems to everyone who hasn't.

Re:Nuclear

[GuB-42]

The really bad stuff is actually the middle ground, such as cesium 137.
Half lives are measured in decades. Radioactive enough to cause harm and it stays long enough for long term management. That's the stuff that turned the surroundings of Chernobyl and Fukushima into a desert (well, a desert for humans, because wildlife is thriving).

Re:Nuclear

[LynnwoodRooster]

Look again - solar is more expensive than advanced nuclear. Onshore wind is the only "renewable" that beats advanced nuclear (in many places, like California, hydro is considered non-renewable and geothermal is typically not allowed either as it requires expensive, damaging drilling and pumping). Wind and solar actually lag advanced nuclear in terms of levelized-cost-of-energy.

Re:Nuclear

[david_thornley]

Depends on what you mean by "highly radioactive". Radium is normally considered dangerous, and it's got a half-life of something like 1600 years. On the other hand, that cesium isotope we had problems with after Fukushima has a half-life of a little over 40 years, which means a millennium of storage will reduce its danger by about a factor of a million. (The iodine isotope that people were concerned with is almost certainly completely gone, considering its half-life, number of atoms released, and the fact that it decays into a stable isotope.)

Electricity is only a small part of the problem

[Soft]

That study is quite interesting. However, if you account for the global energy consumption, especially in transportation, heating, manufacturing, etc., electricity is only a fraction of the required energy. This may, I'd even say must, change in an electric-car future; but this will increase a lot the electricity demand.

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.

Re:Electricity is only a small part of the problem

[whoever57]

Any analysis that is more than a couple of years old is very likely to be wrong.

The cost of renewable energy has dropped significantly faster than predictions made just a few years ago. In the past 12 months, most, if not all bids for installation of renewable power have not required any subsidies.

A trial offshore floating wind power generation system recently installed off the British Isles is producing more electricity than anticipated, which translates into lower cost of energy. Because it is floating and not on the sea bed, this type of system can be installed in far more locations than traditional offshore wind power generators.

Re:Electricity is only a small part of the problem

[Soft]

Any analysis that is more than a couple of years old is very likely to be wrong.

The cost of renewable energy has dropped significantly faster than predictions [...]

The book I mention is not about cost, but about available energy, as in e.g. how many kWh the sun is giving you over time per unit of area. That won't change; the efficiency of solar panels does, but the book already takes an optimistic stance, looking for fundamental rather than technological limits.

12 hours of storage is not feasible

[atomicalgebra]

Yeah we can get to 80% renewable with 150-200% times solar and wind capacity, HVDC and 12 hours of storage. It will be expensive and difficult. In California if you count all of our pumped hydro storage and if you include every battery in every phone and car we have about 23 minutes of storage. 12 hours of storage will be hard to achieve.

Also due to continental weather patterns we would need weeks of storage to get to 100% renewable. 12 hours is not feasible and 14 times that will be near impossible.

Re:12 hours of storage is not feasible

[DogDude]

Yeah, lots of batteries and wires would be expensive, but certainly not "impossible". We can send people to other planets. We can build lots of wires and batteries. It is, quite literally, not rocket science. It's just a matter of willpower. Unfortunately, people are incredibly short-sighted, and incredibly selfish.

Re:12 hours of storage is not feasible

[El_Muerte_TDS]

> We can send people to other planets.

We haven't done such a thing yet.

Re: 12 hours of storage is not feasible

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry but the world has never been improved by people who say it can't be done. Solar doesn't have to be PV when there are molten salt systems that remain hot overnight. We haven't begun to look at tidal energy which is extremely predictable. Solar PV was completely infeasible as a serious energy system only 20 years ago. Now they are appearing on rooftops.

Re:12 hours of storage is not feasible

[DamnOregonian]

No, we haven't... But you'd have to be pretty ignorant to argue that we couldn't, I think.

Re:12 hours of storage is not feasible

[DamnOregonian]

Note: I am not advocating for anything brought forward here.

That being said... Yes, it *is* a matter of willpower... and who is going to pay the costs.. But then again, those "high" costs aren't so high in the grand scheme of things.
Take a look at the federal budget, some time. It's... obscene. Our federal income tax expenditures pay for a military... and about 9 more countries worth of military.
We could subsidize any power solution we dreamed up without even denting peoples current taxation.

Re:12 hours of storage is not feasible

[Barsteward]

the beauty of renewables is that they don't need refuelling. New tech is more expensive initially but thats is capital expenditure and wasteful expense in constantly buying fuel, and the renewable output is now cheaper than coal and catching upto gas. To follow your scare scenario, you'd better close all the coal stations now as they are killing off large sections of the poorest with expense and the added killer pollution. Business are now beginning to invest in their own solar as it makes sense.
try following a site like cleantechnica.com or a video channel called fullychargedshow - it'll expand your knowledge of renewables and their costs/benefits

Re:12 hours of storage is not feasible

[BlueStrat]

the beauty of renewables is that they don't need refuelling. New tech is more expensive initially but thats is capital expenditure and wasteful expense in constantly buying fuel, and the renewable output is now cheaper than coal and catching upto gas. To follow your scare scenario, you'd better close all the coal stations now as they are killing off large sections of the poorest with expense and the added killer pollution. Business are now beginning to invest in their own solar as it makes sense.
try following a site like cleantechnica.com or a video channel called fullychargedshow - it'll expand your knowledge of renewables and their costs/benefits

I've read what they had to say and I am unconvinced of their arguments.

I am especially unconvinced that there is a climate "crisis" on the horizon that would .lend particular urgency to renewables such that they should be pushed ahead before they are cost effective. Global temperatures have not significantly risen over the past nearly 2 decades.

Forcing adoption before they are cost effective in my view is actually counter-productive. Guess what happens when electricity and heating fuel prices get too high? Poor people will use kerosene heaters, wood-burning traditional fireplaces that exist in many homes, or even just plain burn-barrels and other more-polluting but cheaper methods to survive.

Many who push renewables do not seem concerned about the effect of higher energy prices upon the poor. They appear to hold similar attitudes as the Chinese do in that the loss of life among the poor is not of great concern as there are always more poor, just as there are always more Chinese. Not surprising, as many hold collectivist views on society and government similar to the Chinese.

Strat

Re:12 hours of storage is not feasible

[Barsteward]

"I am especially unconvinced that there is a climate "crisis" on the horizon that would .lend particular urgency to renewables such that they should be pushed ahead before they are cost effective." What is "on the horizon" in your eyes? Tomorrow, next year, next decade? As far as i'm concerned the sooner renewables are in place the less chance of the problem getting any worse for later generations. How do you make any cost effective if you do not start to produce it and put it in place and allow more innovation? Remember how expensive mobile phones (and the lack of features compared to today) were when they were introduced?
Repeating "to not seem concerned about the effect of higher energy prices upon the poor. " does not make it true, i know that with my electricity provider i can choose to buy from 100% renewable, a mix or non-renewable sources. The pollution from fossil fuels kills lots of people or creates a lot of respiratory problems for people in those areas of high pollution output, this is an expense to the people i.e. medical bills. Renewables are a one off capital expense with some maintenance and no fuel to run it, fossil fuels also has some capital expense but has enormous amount of recurring expense of transporting fuel and burning it and polluting the air with it and maintenance.

Re: 12 hours of storage is not feasible

[atomicalgebra]

I said 12 hours is not feasible. It isn't. If 12 hours is not feasible, neither is 100% renewable. In fact the best solution would be using next generation nuclear see NuScale. Personally I actively make the world a better place. More then you do.

Re:12 hours of storage is not feasible

[Anonymous Coward]

We can do better then hydro: go hydraulic. Hydro storage is essentially mass times height in a gravitational field potential energy storage. We can pack much more potential energy by hydraulic lifting heavy stuff, like a big chunk of material several times denser than water. It means frack the bedrock, pump water in under pressure to store energy (lifting the ground a bit), then release it back (like an Artesian well) through turbines when you want to recoup the energy stored. Yes, it will cause minor earthquakes every time, but small shakes are innocuous and in some parts of the world so ubiquitous that none pays attention to them.

Re:12 hours of storage is not feasible

[DogDude]

Are you kidding? Hundreds of thousands of people already die every year from dirty energy production: https://www.statista.com/stati...

Re:12 hours of storage is not feasible

[BlueStrat]

Are you kidding? Hundreds of thousands of people already die every year from dirty energy production:

The difference between a somewhat shorter lifespan and freezing the fuck to death is stark.

Please do give the latter a try if you think they are in any way equivalent.

Strat

Re:12 hours of storage is not feasible

[david_thornley]

Global temperatures have not significantly risen over the past nearly 2 decades.

Depends on what you're looking at. 1998 was a very hot year. Next year, it won't be the case that there hasn't been that much warming in 20 years, as 1999 was a more normal year. Look at any sort of smoothed average, and it's clear we've been warming up.

Global warming is going to have a disproportionate effect on the poor, worldwide. Keeping energy prices low at the cost of lots more CO2 is not a good deal for them.

Burning wood is carbon-neutral. The trees get the carbon out of atmospheric CO2, it gets burned into CO2 again, and there's no net change in the amount of carbon in the cycle.

Lossless Transmission Lines

[aaarrrgggh]

Aside from the glaring issue regarding Transmission, I was surprised that 12h of storage had as much impact as it did. I had modeled an off-grid location on the leeward side in Hawaii and found I needed 72h of battery for the system to support 90% of the hours in the year with PV only, or 48h with a wind/PV mix.

It would be interesting to see exactly what the production vs consumption map looks like to see what the real impact of transmission losses and capacity would be. As the wind turbines start to exceed 7MW, wind can become a much more stable resource.

Also curious how they established "100%"-- does it build in capacity factors? Peak-day or annualized?

Re:Lossless Transmission Lines

[careysub]

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).

Re:Lossless Transmission Lines

[bill_mcgonigle]

If you can shift energy across the country for free it gets better than if you're "stuck" on an island and totally responsible for your own local conditions.

The superconducting line they put in across New Jersey cools itself the whole way and the cooling costs less than the resistive losses would have otherwise. But those economics are only valid for the highest density areas, as least provably. Running that same line across Nebraska may not be cost effective at all.

Re:Lossless Transmission Lines

[thegarbz]

As cool as those projects are, they are frigging expensive.

Re:Lossless Transmission Lines

[aaarrrgggh]

Plus a minimum of 3% at each end for inverting and rectifying. My point is that you need to include it in how you evaluate a system because you don’t have infinite lossless transmission capacity. Wind turbines in Wyoming would be hard pressed to provide all the power for the Northeast for two days in a storm.

I don’t dispute the findings in concept— just wish that they could have accounted for one of the major holes... or that I could see the information myself to understand the impact.

Re:Lossless Transmission Lines

[tomhath]

The article was mostly hand waving and false assumptions. But with regard to transmission line efficiencies, if it was cost effective we would do it regardless of how the power is generated. That should tell you something.

Re: Everything is possible!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look at the numbers, you can plainly see it.

538352852736826265237563846357353378352836384883628472937529472 and 8.

Re:Na na na, I can't hear you...

[PopeRatzo]

But seriously, the manufacture of solar collectors is not exactly environmentally friendly...

That depends upon what type of "solar collectors" you're talking about. If you're talking about photovoltaic panels, then yes there are hazardous materials used in their manufacture, but a lot less hazardous materials than used in say, hydraulic fracturing. And once you've got the solar panels made, there are no hazardous emissions created as they make electricity.

On the other hand, if you're talking about concentrating solar thermal plants (like the ones described in this story) there are no hazardous materials involved in their manufacture, which is definitely environmentally friendly.

And, once they are manufactured, there are no emissions when they make electricity.

Regarding "all the dead birds", I remember when I lived in Texas and a group of hunters was complaining on the radio about wind turbines killing birds before they could shoot them. It is one of my defining memories of the state of Texas.

Nuclear is done.

[Brannon]

It's a huge capital investment, huge on-going maintenance, outrageously huge decommissioning costs, and the penalty for falling asleep at the wheel (i.e., hiring a few MBAs to improve 'efficiency') is catastrophe. It's also centralized and makes a nice juicy target for terrorism. Oh, and it costs more than solar or wind--once you fully account for all the actual costs. Westinghouse just went out of business (ask South Carolina).

I'm guessing the future [for most of the US] looks like solar roofs with local battery storage, connected to a grid backed by natural gas peaking/backup plants and various other forms of utility power generation and storage.

Re:Nuclear is done.

[bill_mcgonigle]

You just completely ignored the GP's point that "we're" stuck on old nuclear and wouldn't use that technology today but describing all the problems with old nuclear.

Try here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

Re:Nuclear is done.

[Barsteward]

yawn.... someone needs to do some real research about renewables rather than plucking shit out of their heads

Re:Nuclear is done.

[AmiMoJo]

New nuclear isn't much better. The old stuff was supposed to be meltdown-proof and totally safe. And even if we believe the new claims, the really safe and low waste reactors are all theoretical at this point. Thorium? Get back to us when you have spent several billion building and proving one without any major issues, and come up with a way to dismantle it at reasonable cost.

Re:Nuclear is done.

[Anonymous Coward]

New nuclear's main advantage is that it hasn't been implemented yet so we don't know what real world problems it will face. Take for example pebble bed reactors which were all the rage on Slashdot a decade ago. They were going to be safe and clean and solve our problems, so take that dirty hippies. Then someone actually built one. Oops. Turns out they produce massive amounts of radioactive dust that gets everywhere and down the memory hole they go.

Nuclear power as it exists today is expensive and everything else is unproven engineering fantasies. Doesn't mean we shouldn't experiment with them, but they're decades away from being a practical solution.

Re:Nuclear is done.

[jhol13]

You forgot one thing. Making solar or wind plant is going to produce electricity with robust price estimate for the next 20 years.
Starting a new nuclear reactor ... either you are lucky and get a bit cheaper than solar/wind, or you get Olkiluoto 3.

Re:Nuclear is done.

[AmiMoJo]

They found a solution to that in the UK. Just demand a special deal from the government where you have a guaranteed market for the power and a guaranteed price that is 2x the renewable cost, for 35 years.

Re:Nuclear is done.

[hey!]

The problem with Gen III and later reactors isn't confidence in their safety. The problem is that fracking has made new reactors economically unattractive. Natural gas is dirt cheap here in the US -- $3.50 per million BTUs. A natural gas plant can be constructed at 1/10 the cost per kw of capacity of a nuclear plant, and in a fraction of the time.

The most recent US nuclear projects started back in 2008, before fracking really took off. Those projects actually received construction green lights from the NRC after Fukushima, and the Obama administration even secured them billions of dollars of federal loan guarantees.

So the problem isn't government hostility to nuclear power, it's private sector reluctance to tie up billions of dollars in a nuclear plant that won't earn them a dime back for twelve years or more when they can have a gas plant up in less than half that time.

The only way nuclear plants will get built in the US is with federal government support.

Re:Nuclear is done.

[slack_justyb]

Get back to us when you have spent several billion building and proving one without any major issues, and come up with a way to dismantle it at reasonable cost.

We have literally done plenty with less evidence than you suggest. In fact, I can't think of any human endeavor where risk mitigation had brought it to the level that apparently you're asking nuclear to be at before we ever build the next reactor. It's quite easy to armchair it and say that such and such has to prove beyond a doubt to be whatever level of safe you've got in your mind, but in reality we don't do that, we've never done that, and more than likely we will never do that. You will die one day in the future waiting for a world that will never happen. The sooner you realize that, the more you'll begin to understand why folks take risks.

We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[rsilvergun]

if we could stop the 8 some odd wars we're fighting. We blow 600 billion a year more or less protecting our oil interests. But sad to say folks like war. I remember a story where Trump got a momentary bump in the polls from droping a $500k bomb in Afghanistan. And lots of folks want to go war with Korea and/or Iran. We'd need a huge change in how people think and vote to get around that. It's just frustrating, since we could tell OPEC to sod off if we'd just spend the money on our infrastructure.

Re:We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's just frustrating, since we could tell OPEC to sod off if we'd just spend the money on our infrastructure.

a) the USG is a member of OPEC
b) the oil-based economy enriches some of the biggest political donors
c) the oil wars benefit the power of the USG, the riches of the MIC (also huge political donors), and provide cover for petrodollar hegemony.
d) the oil wars benefit the projection of US power and excite those who want a world dominated by the US War Machine
e) the financiers make mint on all those wars and war spending and are some of the biggest political donors
f) most Americans are content to let it all happen as long as they have reality TV and the grocery store shelves have product.

After fixing those we should just spend our money on our infrastructure. Without fixing those they'll never allow it. There's a reason the Clinton Administration shut down the IFR program - we'd be facing vast amounts of cheap and clean energy right about now if the program had gone forward to commercialization, just by cleaning up the existing nuclear waste that already needs dealing with. But Al Gore makes money by pushing carbon taxes, not by enjoying a post-modern high-tech society.

We need a societal evolution before we can get the technological one. If Americans can ever throw off their shackles of domination, we'd stand a very good chance of progress.

Re: We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[LynnwoodRooster]

Better check your own pipes, because apparently (and to my surprise as well), the US is the number 1 producer of oil, pumping nearly 15 MM barrels per day.

Re:We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[LynnwoodRooster]

Assuming we bought Ivanpah-equivalent systems? It would get us about 20% of our electrical needs. And basically non of our pharmaceutical, industrial, or petroleum-based transportation needs.

Re:We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[K. S. Kyosuke]

$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?

Re: We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[dunkelfalke]

Hey, genius, oil is a commodity that is sold on global markets. If a supply in Bumfuckistan is gone, the oil price will go up worldwide. Remember the embargo in 1973? Yep, despite the USA pumping more oil back then than ever before (and reaching the same level again only a year ago). You do fight wars for oil, very much so, together with your vassals. But only Poland was ever honest about it.

Re:We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Storing that much energy for use around the clock and building a heavily interconnected nation-wide grid to distribute it across the continent, is wishful thinking at best.

And yet, in the future, you'll still need something like 150GW of average generation just to displace the US gasoline usage alone. One would think that this and other kinds of dispatchable consumption are going to significantly ameliorate the issues of what to do with the generated electricity beyond what is required for the "traditional" grid usage. So it turns out that just to generate enough power for electric vehicles, you'll need $600-$1900 billion worth of solar installations (probably something in the middle), but you'll actually be offsetting something like $300B per year of gasoline consumption. All things considered, even if renewable electricity can't go all the way, it can easily do a very large portion of what is required to power your country. Which, unsurprisingly, is what TFA is saying.

Meanwhile, nuclear has already been proven at large scale, and can be built on former coal plant sites and reuse the existing grid as is. The plants also impose a much much smaller burden at end of life, owing to the use of a tiny fraction of the resources to start with.

Tell that to all the nuclear projects that ended up with underfunded decommissioning. (And as a bonus, solar plants can be built on former coal mining sites, too!)

Re: We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[Stephan Schulz]

Better check your own pipes, because apparently (and to my surprise as well), the US is the number 1 producer of oil, pumping nearly 15 MM barrels per day.

Yes, thanks to expensive and environmentally questionable fracking techniques used on shale oil deposits, with a lousy energy balance and oodles of extra CO2. Not something to be proud of...

Re:We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[K. S. Kyosuke]

How are electric cars, which everyone assures us will mostly be charged at night during periods of low demand, supposed to accumulate solar energy?

Easily: they will accumulate it during the day. After all, most cars in personal ownership are stationary most of the time. Assuming that most of the charging will be done at night in a world with high solar power penetration is obviously wrong.

Re: We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[soc_cost_priv_gains]

Doesn't the US consume 19 MM barrels per day? Seems like we still need to import oil.

Re: We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[Rakarra]

Better check your own pipes, because apparently (and to my surprise as well), the US is the number 1 producer of oil, pumping nearly 15 MM barrels per day.

Yes, thanks to expensive and environmentally questionable fracking techniques used on shale oil deposits, with a lousy energy balance and oodles of extra CO2. Not something to be proud of...

Maybe not, but it undercuts the constant narrative that every meddling in the Middle East is because we're there for oil. That hasn't been true in a long long time if it ever was.

Re:We could do this in 5 or 10 years

[david_thornley]

My car is often found in the parking lot at work during the daytime, but normally is at my house at night, where I can put it into a standard location. (This does not apply for people without reserved off-street parking, of course.)

Re:I'll see it when I believe it.

[PopeRatzo]

Matt Ridley quoted at Coyote Blog here [coyoteblog.com]:

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.

Diversity of energy sources is more important

[Tony Isaac]

"Renewable" energy is good, sure. But every energy source has its drawbacks. Solar panels take up lots of real estate, both solar and wind can kill wildlife, and some consider both to be unsightly. It's better, I think, to use all kinds of sources of energy, so that the drawbacks of a single source are not so pervasive. Even oil wasn't such a bad thing when there were only a few cars on the road.

Re:Diversity of energy sources is more important

[whoever57]

Bullshit fossil fuel industry talking points...

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.

Re:Diversity of energy sources is more important

[zieroh]

and some consider both to be unsightly.

More unsightly than a coal plant? More unsightly than a mountain in Kentucky that's been leveled, ground up, and re-deposited on the same spot as a giant pile of gravel? More unsightly than a nuclear plant on a river? (there are lots of them)

I call BS. If "unsightly" is really the objection to renewable energy, I think I would like to kindly invite you to go fuck yourself.

Re:Diversity of energy sources is more important

[DamnOregonian]

Yes, but cats are really cute...

Re:Diversity of energy sources is more important

[DamnOregonian]

We've actually got a nuclear plant on a river about 100 miles south of me. I think it looks... cool as hell. I don't find anything unsightly about it. To each their own, I guess

Re:Diversity of energy sources is more important

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but cats are really cute...

That's an opinion.

Can we re-engineer the turbines to kill cats instead of birds? Then it'd be a win-win.

Re:Diversity of energy sources is more important

[Tony Isaac]

There is nothing redeeming about coal, and I never mentioned coal as a good source of energy.

Do you deny that every energy source, in great enough quantities, has some kind of drawback?

Re:Diversity of energy sources is more important

[zieroh]

There is nothing redeeming about coal, and I never mentioned coal as a good source of energy.

You mentioned aesthetics. I was comparing the aesthetics of renewable energy sources to those of traditional energy sources, and finding your reasoning less than acceptable.

Re:How many?

[AHuxley]

Re: "How may solar panels and wind turbines would it require to generate that much electricity?"

Think in terms of the wealth redistribution.
Wind and solar get massive new subsidy so "poor" people all over the USA can get their new solar on the roof and a set size of new battery.
A fair share of new low cost solar power for the poor that all power users have to support every utility bill.
That wins votes. The side of US politics that put solar on the roof of poor people.

The solar and a set size of battery per citizen would keep the low cost power on all day and night.
Want more power beyond that set limit?
Put in place a US wide heating and cooling tax beyond a set usage limit per citizen.
Air conditioning gets regulated so it will only run in a home when the power company can support all the grid connected air conditioning.
Grid conditions change and all air conditioning gets a remote command to stop. To protect the wind and solar grid.
All existing and new air conditioning has to have an energy company disconnect. No disconnect installed? No air conditioning and a fine.

Grid connected is the only way to get city approval for all other services in any part of the USA.
Big government and environmentalists can make wind and solar work. They will ration power and make all citizens pay for air conditioning.
Air conditioning and heating becomes a part of an energy luxury tax.

the good ship venus

[bigtreeman]

The Second Mate's name was Carter,
By God, he was a farter,
When the wind wouldn't blow and the ship wouldn't go,
We'd get Carter the farter to start her.

(to fill in the gaps between sun and wind)

H2 technology is coming along nicely and could soon be powering vehicles and be used for storage.

You dont need batteries

[technosaurus]

There are other ways to store energy. As heat using a large storage tank of hot working fluid. As potential energy by pumping water up into a large tank during times of excess. Using heat storage (with sterling engine solar) would also help to minimize bird kills since the heat could be directed at the heat reservoirs instead of up to the engine itself. Hell you could use a giant flywheel on a motor that is directly solar powered using the principles of thermal expansion. Batteries arent the only thing and the batteries best suited to mobile arent good for fixed locations where weight is not a concern - Robert Murray Smith's all carbon batteries would be a better fit and 1/100th the cost.

Re:You dont need batteries

[atomicalgebra]

I mentioned pumped hydro. In fact pumped hydro accounts for 96% of all active tracked storage installations worldwide, with a total installed nameplate capacity of over 168 GW. It is unlikely will be able to double our pumped hydro storage let alone increase it ~30 times for 12 hours of storage. Solar thermal has not functioned as well as people hoped. The capacity factor of solar thermal is poor. Ivanpah had a 20.5% capacity factor in 2016. I am also not convinced flywheels can store 1000's of GWh's. I also think you are underestimate the material costs of such systems.

Re:You dont need batteries

[zieroh]

It is unlikely will be able to double our pumped hydro storage let alone increase it ~30 times for 12 hours of storage.

Why? And if not pumped hydro, why not increases in any (or all) of the other alternatives? What's the actual limiting factor?

I'll tell you what the limiting factor is: it's your imagination.

People right here on Slashdot have been saying for years that electric cars would never achieve enough range to be marketable, and yet here we are in 2018 with people driving around in them all over the world, and almost every manufacturer planning new electric models. The slashdot pessimists were just flat-out wrong. Shocking.

If you've learned nothing else from slashdot, it's that the naysayers here are largely unimaginative dolts.

Re:You dont need batteries

[technosaurus]

What we really could sell if the infrastructure supported it is all carbon (lithium is not the best solution for fixed batteries) "PowerWalls" for the home/business that could store and release energy back to the grid. People could reduce their power bill and have peace of mind wrt power outages.

Re:You dont need batteries

[atomicalgebra]

The limiting factor is my hardly my imagination. You are a douche. I am arguing math and physics and your response is calling me a dolt. You inflate electric cars (which I was always in favor of with) with grid level storage even though they are 2 separate things. Grow up.

Re:You dont need batteries

[hackertourist]

The limit to pumped hydro is geology: you need two lakes near each other with the biggest elevation difference you can find (ideally, a hundred meters or more). There's a limited number of those, and a limited tolerance for creating new lakes by wiping out existing land.
Pumped hydro has been proposed with small elevation differences (Plan Lievense was one proposal, putting a storage area in the middle of an existing lake, with the storage area only a few meters higher than the surrounding lake), but these are inefficient.

Re:You dont need batteries

[technosaurus]

A mesa could support man made lakes or tanks at the top and bottom with the solar cells providing shade to minimize evaporation. but ... environmentalists

Re:You dont need batteries

[zieroh]

The limiting factor is my hardly my imagination.

I work in tech. I can tell you with certainty that nothing is accomplished by saying "it won't work". Breakthroughs are made when people say "this is really hard, but what would it take to overcome this obstacle?"

That's the imagination part. Compare and contrast to your response.

You are a douche.

That's hardly the point.

I am arguing math and physics and your response is calling me a dolt.

You're not arguing math and physics. You're arguing that it's too hard. The two are definitely not the same.

You inflate electric cars (which I was always in favor of with) with grid level storage even though they are 2 separate things.

I used electric cars as an example -- it matters not whether you were in favor of them. Electric cars are a good proxy for the kind of subject where slashdotters are notoriously wrong simply because they lack imagination. You've just fallen into the same trap -- scaling current technology with "math and physics" (cough*bullshit*cough) and concluding that it couldn't possibly work.

They were wrong. And so are you. Grid storage will happen.

Grow up.

So that I can be as unimaginative as you? No thanks.

Re:You dont need batteries

[zieroh]

The limit to pumped hydro is geology: you need two lakes near each other with the biggest elevation difference you can find (ideally, a hundred meters or more). There's a limited number of those, and a limited tolerance for creating new lakes by wiping out existing land.

That's certainly one way to do it. Can you really imagine no other versions of that?

And why does it have to be *only* pumped hydro? Why not other forms of energy storage? It seems obvious that multiple solutions can be harnessed depending on location and geography.

Re:You dont need batteries

[atomicalgebra]

It is okay if you call me unimaginative, I am not. A five minute conversation with me would reveal how creative I actually am. I also work in tech, specifically education technology.

96% of current storage is pumped hydro and in many parts of the country(California) it is illegal to add more hydro. Pumped hydro is cheaper then batteries or other electrical storage solutions(thermal, flywheel, etc). How do you plan to expand that 30x in time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? 30x is just for 12 hours of storage which is 80% renewable. In order to get to 100% renewable we would need to increase it at least 300x times. Even if that is possible it would still take a century to construct, and we do not have that much time. I am also not okay using peaking natural gas. I want a 100% clean grid with cheap and abundant energy.

I have a better solution to climate change and clean energy, and it is 4th generation nuclear. I do not know why that is hard for you to understand. They can be factory built, are meltdown proof, and can recycle spent fuel(waste). NuScale is building their prototypes in Idaho, and Terrapower is building their prototype in China. Why do you oppose better options for solving climate change? Shouldn't we pursue an all of the above strategy for solving climate change?

Re:You dont need batteries

[Altus]

What math and physics. All you did was state the current numbers for existing pumped hydro storage. You have not quoted any costs associated with pumped hydro on a per MW basis, you have not talked at all about any limiting factors that might impact the ability to increase the amount of pumped hydro storage for flywheel storage you simply state that you don't think it will be possible without giving any evidence at all.

All you have done is say "we haven't built a ton of power storage, therefor we will be unable to build more power storage" totally neglecting the fact that our entire history of power generation didn't require large scale power storage in most locations. The fact that we don't have this in place today doesn't prove that we will never have it in the future.

Re:You dont need batteries

[atomicalgebra]

we haven't built a ton of power storage

Except we have built a ton of power storage, and it will only last 23 minutes. It is not feasible to increase that by 30x for 80% and it would be near impossible to increase that by ~300x for a 100% renewable grid. If we could have built hours of storage we would have done it decades ago. Remember feasible means possible to do easily or conveniently. Any estimate for this much pumped-hydro would be in the trillions. Limiting factors include geography, cost, NIMBY's, materials, etc.

Re:You dont need batteries

[hackertourist]

The thing with all gravity-based storage is, you need a lot of mass to achieve anything. As in, thousands of tons.
Water is the easiest way to manipulate these large masses. There is one company that uses trains with ballasted rail cars - but the last news article on their site is a year old so they may be bankrupt by now.

Re:You dont need batteries

[zieroh]

A five minute conversation with me would reveal how creative I actually am.

At this point, I've spent more than 5 minutes conversing with you. I'm still not convinced.

96% of current storage is pumped hydro and in many parts of the country(California) it is illegal to add more hydro. Pumped hydro is cheaper then batteries or other electrical storage solutions(thermal, flywheel, etc). How do you plan to expand that 30x in time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? 30x is just for 12 hours of storage which is 80% renewable. In order to get to 100% renewable we would need to increase it at least 300x times.

As I've already explained, scaling current solutions up (the so-called "math and physics") will almost always yield a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Just as with electric cars, people took the cost (and the energy density, at the time) of lithium and scaled up the current costs, and concluded that electric cars would never succeed. What those supposedly reasonable "math and physics" types missed was that scaling battery production would lower costs, and improving energy density would move things along even further. They also failed to anticipate the effect that California's mandate on automakers had on the technology development.

And that's why I reject your argument as unimaginative. You're just multiplying current numbers by essentially arbitrary factors and concluding that it can't be done. You've failed to account for the fact that many of those technologies can be improved further, or approached from a different angle. For instance, an entirely different version of pumped hydro is to run a giant locomotive laden with huge weights up a grade, and then let it roll back down to recapture most of the energy. These have already been built, in fact. There are doubtless other gravity-based solutions.

Even if that is possible it would still take a century to construct

You pulled that number out of the rectal database. And it stinks, too. The panama canal was built in 11 years. The hoover dam was built in 5. both of those were built with very primitive tools, by today's standards. I think your estimate of "a century" lacks more than just imagination.

You also seem fixated on pumped hydro. There are plenty of other alternatives. Some doubtless haven't even been thought of yet. And if everyone had an attitude like yours, nothing would ever be invented again.

I have a better solution to climate change and clean energy, and it is 4th generation nuclear. I do not know why that is hard for you to understand.

What makes you say I don't understand it? Please point me to the spot where I ever discussed 4th generation nuclear?

Why do you oppose better options for solving climate change?

Why are you resorting to blatant straw-man arguments? Where did I say I was opposed to other options? In fact, I've said quite the opposite. Seems like you're grasping here.

Re:You dont need batteries

[mikael]

Mostly for pumped hydro, we just use existing natural geography like a mountain plateau with a river, add a pile of rocks to raise the water level, use the water flow downwards to drive turbines, then use the spare capacity to pump water up. The natural water cycle of evaporation, transport, rain, snow and melting forms the other half of the cycle.

  Downside was that fish used those rivers to breed, native people lost lands.

We could build the reservoirs underground, inside hollowed out mountains.

Re:You dont need batteries

[atomicalgebra]

First the definition of feasible is possible to do easily or conveniently which I do not think you understand.

You're just multiplying current numbers by essentially arbitrary factors

We have ~23 minutes of storage. In order to increase that to 12 hours we need to increase by 12*60/23 = 31.304 times which I rounded down to 30. In order to build storage for 100% renewable we would need to build weeks of storage because analysis of weather patterns demonstrated gaps in wind and solar generation on a continental scale (from the paper). Which would be at least 14*31 = 434 times. Increase our current storage by 31 times is going to be really hard (ie not feasible). If increasing our current storage by 31 times is really hard (ie not feasible), increasing it by 400+ times will be impossible to do in the time scale we have.

You also seem fixated on pumped hydro

96% of all current storage is pumped hydro making it important to any discussion of storage.

If a breakthrough in technology occurs, my calculus will change. In fact I would suggest research in superconducting, anodized, and self-similar batteries. We shouldn't bet the farm on a magic breakthrough occurring though.

scaling current solutions up (the so-called "math and physics") will almost always yield a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

Not true. Scaling 4th generation nuclear is not an insurmountable obstacle. Factory built reactors can solve climate change. I prefer an all of the above approach meaning I support wind, water, sunshine, geo, and nuclear.

You've failed to account for the fact that many of those technologies can be improved further

Why is there always an assumption batteries will have exponential improvements like the microprocessor has? We have been investing in batteries since the 19th century. Flow batteries were invented in the 1880's. Lithium ion batteries were invented in the 1970's. If you are so creative why don't you build a super battery.

And if everyone had an attitude like yours, nothing would ever be invented again.

Damn you are an arrogant fuck. You are making unfounded assumption based on your inflated ego and myopic perspective. I actually have a viable solution for climate change(4th generation nuclear). How does wanting to build 4th generation reactors result in nothing ever being invented again? Talk about a strawman argument.

Where did I say I was opposed to other options?

You seemed to want a 100% renewable grid which would mean you opposed nuclear energy. Why else would you be mad when I said 80% is non feasible(ie really hard) and 100% is impossible in current time scales?

To be honest nothing you have presented has been imaginative or original. You are arguing for a non-viable dream. You have not provide a creative solution to climate change. I did provide a solution, and it is a workable viable option.

Re:You dont need batteries

[zieroh]

First the definition of feasible is possible to do easily or conveniently which I do not think you understand.

Another straw-man argument. Feasible was your word, not mine.

You're just multiplying current numbers by essentially arbitrary factors

We have ~23 minutes of storage. In order to increase that to 12 hours we need to increase by 12*60/23 = 31.304 times which I rounded down to 30. In order to build storage for 100% renewable we would need to build weeks of storage because analysis of weather patterns demonstrated gaps in wind and solar generation on a continental scale (from the paper). Which would be at least 14*31 = 434 times. Increase our current storage by 31 times is going to be really hard (ie not feasible). If increasing our current storage by 31 times is really hard (ie not feasible), increasing it by 400+ times will be impossible to do in the time scale we have.

And there you go again, just relying on multiplication instead of new approaches. Honestly, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You just can't help yourself, I guess.

96% of all current storage is pumped hydro making it important to any discussion of storage.

If a breakthrough in technology occurs, my calculus will change. In fact I would suggest research in superconducting, anodized, and self-similar batteries. We shouldn't bet the farm on a magic breakthrough occurring though.

At some point in the past, if you wanted to travel over long distances, your primary option was probably to take a train. And then air travel became a thing. Get my drift? What we use now is irrelevant if it doesn't scale or meet future needs. Think out of the box, maybe?

Not true. Scaling 4th generation nuclear is not an insurmountable obstacle. Factory built reactors can solve climate change. I prefer an all of the above approach meaning I support wind, water, sunshine, geo, and nuclear.

Straw man argument. But for the record, I'm not against 4th gen nuclear. But this was a discussion on grid storage

Why is there always an assumption batteries will have exponential improvements like the microprocessor has? We have been investing in batteries since the 19th century. Flow batteries were invented in the 1880's. Lithium ion batteries were invented in the 1970's. If you are so creative why don't you build a super battery.

Who says it has to be batteries? Or, more precisely, who says it has to be electrical storage batteries? The point is not to bet on one technology and try to scale it, but to explore other possible solutions. If we just tried to scale up train travel to meet all long distance travel needs, we'd quickly find the inherent limitations in that technology. The point is to be open to new ideas, instead of just scaling up current solutions on paper and concluding they won't work.

And if everyone had an attitude like yours, nothing would ever be invented again.

Damn you are an arrogant fuck. You are making unfounded assumption based on your inflated ego and myopic perspective. I actually have a viable solution for climate change(4th generation nuclear). How does wanting to build 4th generation reactors result in nothing ever being invented again? Talk about a strawman argument.

No. This is not an unfounded assumption. You're dismissing the possibility of grid storage based on a defeatist approach -- this is not how innovation happens. Ask anyone in the innovation business.

You seemed to want a 100% renewable grid which would mean you opposed nuclear energy.

Please point me to where I said that. I think you will find that in fact I did not. I was talking about grid storage -- nothing more, nothing less.

Why else would you be mad when I said 80%

Re:You dont need batteries

[david_thornley]

I agree. Consider peak demand. Power companies have to build lots of excess capacity to cover it. It there was a feasible storage system, they could avoid a lot of expensive construction and operation and save a lot of money.

We've got the incentive. We don't have the storage. There's a conclusion there.

Re:You dont need batteries

[atomicalgebra]

Feasible was your word, not mine.

And you did not understand it which is why I defined it.

And there you go again, just relying on multiplication instead of new approaches. Honestly, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You just can't help yourself, I guess.

Using math to describe a scientific/engineering problem is stupid, right? My audacity.

Who says it has to be batteries? Or, more precisely, who says it has to be electrical storage batteries? The point is not to bet on one technology and try to scale it, but to explore other possible solutions....The point is to be open to new ideas, instead of just scaling up current solutions on paper and concluding they won't work.

I didn't. Remember I talked about pumped-hydro. I am also in favor of hydrogen. We can produce it through electrolysis and it can be done so cheaply when energy prices are negative. I dismissed 0 alternatives. In fact I have presented more storage ideas in this conversation then you have.

this is not how innovation happens. Ask anyone in the innovation business.

Nobody who actually innovates calls it "innovation business." It is just another tech buzz word. It sounds to like you are drinking the "Kool-aid." It is like calling yourself a "genius" to make yourself feel smarter. Or telling someone they have "no imagination" to make yourself feel smarter.

you feel it necessary to prove that grid storage is impossible.

I think people who want grid level storage underestimate what it will take to get there(that is why I used math). It is important to temper ideas with scientific reality. We shouldn't bet the farm on grid storage.

Re:You dont need batteries

[zieroh]

Whelp, it's clear you're not interested in anything I have to say, and likewise I have concluded that you're not actually interested in discussing grid storage. Maligning it, yes. But not discussing it.

So I'll here bid you adieu.

Re:You dont need batteries

[atomicalgebra]

Maligning it with math

Re:You dont need batteries

[zieroh]

And an utter lack of imagination.

Re:You dont need batteries

[atomicalgebra]

Nothing you presented demonstrated a drop of creative problem solving. Honestly you are just butt-hurt because you lost the argument.

Re:You dont need batteries

[zieroh]

Not in the least. I'm satisfied that you were never actually interested in grid storage. Thus, there's not really an argument. What I said about imagination applies to any difficult problem, not just bridge storage. That you fail to recognize that says more about you than me.

So no, not butt-hurt at all. But I would like to point out that during this conversation, I remained civil, while you resorted to name-calling. Thus, you lost the argument the moment you called me a douche.

Re:You dont need batteries

[atomicalgebra]

You do not know anything about me yet you called me out as lacking imagination. You were unable to provide a single creative solution or counter to any scientific point I made. Possible because more creative people then you have been pursuing storage since the 18th century. In fact you were against me using math to even explain the problem. You are also unable to acknowledge the storage ideas I did present.

Imagination and ideas are like assholes--everyone has one and most of them stink.

Why don't you go back to your "innovation business" and leave the real problems to stronger minds?

No transmission losses

[Michael Woodhams]

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.

Re:No transmission losses

[Chas]

It's worse than that.

To assure the power dependability of a baseline powerplant in renewables, you have to build multiple times the initial capacity.

To build 1GW of Wind power, you'd need approximately 133 square miles of land area.
But, due to efficiency factors, you'd have to build 2-3x the capacity.

To build 1GW of Solar power, you'd need approximately 14 square miles of land area.
But, due to efficiency factors , you'd have to build 3-6x the capacity.

1GW of Nuclear requires approximately 1.3 square miles of land area.

Re:No transmission losses

[mikael]

Let's hope they can build room temperature superconducting cables using nanotechology or other advanced crystallography.

Re:No transmission losses

[Chas]

1. Move to liquid fueled reactors. They don't blow up. They don't require the water resources. And most of what is left when fuel is spent decays within several human lifetimes.
2. You have exactly THREE instances of reactor failures in the entire history. All of them old (VERY OLD in Chernobyl's case) Boiling Water Reactors.
3. 1. Three Mile Island (equipment failure). How evacuated and "forever" is that? Deaths. None.
   2. Chernobyl (Raging dumbasses playing with a nuclear reactor and not mentioning it to anyone. 31 direct deaths because they were lied to and kept in highly radioactive conditions WELL beyond their exposure limits. 15 more from attributed thyroid cancer.
   3. Fukushima (Survived an earthquake, but failed in a Tsunami because TEPCO cheaped out and didn't follow engineering specifications on the seawall, leading to a flood and power loss). Deaths. None.
4. So you're okay with just dumping megatons of dangerous, possibly toxic waste from panels and turbines into a landfill every 30-ish years. But the thought of proper storage for radioactive material for a couple centuries (not the hundreds of millennia of current solid fuel reactors) scares you shitless?

Re:No transmission losses

[Chas]

1: Liquid fueled reactors. Dry fuel and water cooling is stupid. 90% of the facility is a veritable Rube Goldberg machine of multiply redundant systems trying to head off every "what if". With liquid fuel, the default "no power" situation is that the reactor turns itself off and cools down. It also uses the fuel through it's complete cycle. So what's left over is highly radioactive. But, it's highly radioactive for a comparably short period of time. A couple centuries at most.

2: Most of what you see in nuclear waste are "spent" fuel rods. They're not ACTUALLY cooked out. They've used about 10-15% of their fuel, but have been removed because the cladding begins cracking and sloughing off. It's kinda like filling a van up with 20 gallons of gas, driving 40-50 miles, then siphoning the tank dry and filling up again with fresh gas.

3: The US already has massive surpluses of things like Thorium, as most rare earths are generally ound embedded in Thorium and it was an government equirement that it be properly stored. And, if the US restarts its rare earth mining operations (closed because China was able to undercut drastically due to complete lack of environmental regulation), the tailings (mining waste) from even a modest mine can power a reactor for life.

4: Solar and wind make NO provisions for EOL, other than "dump it in a landfill". So, every 30-40 years, we just throw away several megatons of potentially toxic materials in landfills around the country?

5: And yes. The ratio for solar is still 14 square miles per Gigawatt. California's Alta Wind Farm is the largest single installation wind farm in the world. It's estimated maximum output is somewhere between 1.3 and 1.5 Gigawatts. But, calculating capacity factor, it's putting out less than 1/3rd of that on average). I will say that the land area used is well below the stats I put up. Why this is, I don't know, and I'd have to do more looking into the facility.

The largest solar PV plant in the country is Topaz. It carries a maximum output of around 550MW. In practice, it puts out just over 26% of that on average and sits on 9.5 square miles.

6: In the US, large (or carrier) hydro refers SPECIFICALLY to dams. Not wave power. Other forms, like low-head turbines, water wheels, and most wave projects are classed as "small hydro" or "micro hydro" (depending on how large the implementation is.

7) And I don't think anyone in their right mind is suggesting transmitting from coast to coast. However, some locations in the country simply are not logical places to put down carrier-grade wind and solar. They quite simply won't generate enough power in the facility's first-use lifetime to pay off the investment.

Chicago, the "Windy City"? Call that because of POLITICAL reasons. The wind resources are actually relatively poor (usable for micro installs, but not really carrier grade).

8) The main problem is that the initial proposal was basically made foregoing any form of energy storage whatsoever.
That just doesn't wash. And the type of storage capacity needed, not just batteries but flywheels and pumped hydro (basically using excess power to pump water uphill, then allowing it to run back down past a dam-like structure with turbines when demand is required). Flywheels of this sort are MASSIVE and EXPENSIVE. The type of battery capacity is just unheard of and unfeasible in thie current marketplace. And you have to have proper geology on your side for pumped hydro. Just like you do with geothermal.

In the end, you STILL need a stable form of power generation for baseline power.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[PopeRatzo]

You are a fucking monster [latimes.com].

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...

Re:I'll see it when I believe it.

[whoever57]

I remember looking at another article on that site and it was full of misleading, out of date and outright wrong information.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[zieroh]

On the other hand, if you're talking about concentrating solar thermal plants (like the ones described in this story) there are no hazardous materials involved in their manufacture, which is definitely environmentally friendly.

You are a fucking monster.

And you didn't actually refute PopeRatzo's statement. Let me repeat it, since you seem to have misread it the first time:

On the other hand, if you're talking about concentrating solar thermal plants (like the ones described in this story) there are no hazardous materials involved in their manufacture

Can you tell us, SuperKendall, exactly what the hazardous materials involved are?

Re:I'll see it when I believe it.

[dprimary]

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.

Re:Everything is possible!

[thinkwaitfast]

Depends on where you live. In Phoenix, $4160 of solar panel will produce roughly $1432 of electricity/year.

Plug in numbers here:

http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatt...

I used retail pricing here: https://sunelec.com/home/

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[thinkwaitfast]

At least they eat their birds which brings down the 10 billion chickens that die every year number.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Narcocide]

The whole point of the article is to point out that your canard is at best hopelessly out-of-date and at worst provably wrong for the majority of the geographical region of the continental United States during the majority of the year.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[Narcocide]

I wonder what all that birdshot does to the lead levels in Texas surface water.

More people should be asking this question. And not just about Texas, either.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[PopeRatzo]

At least they eat their birds which brings down the 10 billion chickens that die every year number.

I can guarantee that 1) Not all birds shot in Texas are eaten (at least not by humans). Other non-drunk predators probably eat half of them off the ground and get to swallow all that lead shot which adds to the circle of death. Oh, and those are just the ones taken legally. There are tens of thousands of poachers in Texas. They go out there and believe it's their god-give right to blast anything that moves with the most inappropriate firearm imaginable. I knew someone who shot turkeys with a fucking AR-15. Just empty his clip, drink a few cans of Shiner Bock and load up another 30 round clip. Rinse and repeat. He was otherwise a decent human being. He took me fishing off Baytown and Galveston. Oh, and 2) there are a lot more birds killed than Parks & Wildlife have in their reports, because the reports are on the honor system, and a lot of the bird holocaust takes place on private lands, well away from rangers.. Figure all together there are at least 30 million birds massacred every year in Texas all together. Since there are only 28 million people in the whole state, there are way too many people there who have never tasted a game bird for all those birds to have been eaten.

Re:Everything is possible!

[mikael]

Energy budget for a one meter square column of the Earth's atmosphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

On average, 370 w/m^2 is received from the Sun. The energy in the form of light and heat ping-pongs around a bit between clouds, air, the ground and oceans. This is converted into kinetic energy like wind, waves. Orbit of the moon add more energy in the form of tides. Scaled up to the size of the planet, these values go into the Terawatt range.

Re:I'll see it when I believe it.

[shilly]

Matt Ridley presided over the downfall of Northern Rock. His energy would be better spent reimbursing the people who were ruined by that disaster.

Re: How many?

[DamnOregonian]

If they owned a home they'd be a lot less poor.

Not sure this is accurate... My girlfriend is significantly poorer after purchasing a house. We call it house-poor. Of course she owns the negative equity in a house, so that's cool... Me, I make 4x as much as her, and I'm still renting.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Freischutz]

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.

Math is not just Math

[bill_mcgonigle]

I ran the numbers a few years ago with very optimistic assumptions, and the land area required for the solar component is about 1/4 the size of New Mexico.

Yes, it's "possible". It's just that no society has ever built anything that big before in the entire history of the planet. That doesn't make it "impossible" but it makes assuming that such a thing could be accomplished a huge leap of faith with nothing to back it up except for hope and wishful thinking. Possibly the Great Wall of China measures up in terms of man-hours and complexity but that took hundreds of years and totally-didn't-use-slave-labor, neither of which are on the table now.

Doing it in a distributed fashion only increases costs (though doing a portion of it in a distributed fashion might be the best odds for success - which is what is already happening now).

Re:Math is not just Math

[Bongo]

I ran the numbers a few years ago with very optimistic assumptions, and the land area required for the solar component is about 1/4 the size of New Mexico.

Yes, it's "possible". It's just that no society has ever built anything that big before in the entire history of the planet. That doesn't make it "impossible" but it makes assuming that such a thing could be accomplished a huge leap of faith with nothing to back it up except for hope and wishful thinking. Possibly the Great Wall of China measures up in terms of man-hours and complexity but that took hundreds of years and totally-didn't-use-slave-labor, neither of which are on the table now.

Doing it in a distributed fashion only increases costs (though doing a portion of it in a distributed fashion might be the best odds for success - which is what is already happening now).

Trouble is, math is irrelevant to the continual cultural movement of eco romantics, deep ecologists, post modern anti-capitalists, anti phallo logo centrists, and anti colonialists. Not to mention the religiously inspired vegans and vegetarians, who are often city dwellers. We also have a 3000 year cultural history of being rather obsessed with ideas of sin, and ideas of purity. Now on the one hand, culture has helped build civilisation, but on the other hand, a great deal of of what we have inherited, and which continues to be part of our psychology, whether we notice or not, (and the whole point of post modernism is that we are all culturally constructed, a secret only postmodernists claim to be aware of), and so these dreams of a better world that's clean and sin free, are dominant. And then people like you say, but what about the math! :-D

Re:Math is not just Math

[angel'o'sphere]

Yes, it's "possible". It's just that no society has ever built anything that big before in the entire history of the planet.
Thats nonsense. We have plenty of 'constructions' on the planet that are hundrets or even thousands of years old and have succh sizes, e.g. the irrigation and water storage system in Cambodia, or the irrigation systems in Iran/Persia.

Re:Math is not just Math

[thegarbz]

It's just that no society has ever built anything that big before in the entire history of the planet.

A quick look at the earth from google maps will show that we have built many such things, not only flat covering surface area but also with multiple layers of vertical structure beneath.

We just haven't built it as a single project in one place. You could put solar panels on every roof in America for less than the cost of the annual military budget. We don't have the construction capability to do so at this stage, but the point is don't be afraid to think big. A lot of problems are easily surmountable when broken down.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[Joce640k]

I wonder what all that birdshot does to the lead levels in Texas surface water.

That's already been answered: It makes them want to go out and shoot things.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[Barsteward]

"The mining processes involved for the materials necessary are incredibly environmentally unfriendly." -what mining is environmentally friendly? I hope you didn;t get fooled by the photos going around the internet of copper mining that was labelled as lithium mining.

Re:I'll see it when I believe it.

[Barsteward]

oh shit.. a link to a blog ... remember what President Washington wrote on his blog, just because its on the internet it does not mean its true especially with a blogger who does not provide any creditentials

Re:Everything is possible!

[volodymyrbiryuk]

Like the wall...if Mexico pays for it?

Re:Everything is possible!

[LynnwoodRooster]

We use about 18 TWh per day, worldwide. That means we'd need at least 9 TW of generation capacity (13.5 TW for the 150% case) for any arbitrary 50% of the Earth. That's quite a bit away from where we're at...

Re:Everything is possible!

[LynnwoodRooster]

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.

Re:Everything is possible!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.)

Re:Na na na, I can't hear you...

[LynnwoodRooster]

On the other hand, if you're talking about concentrating solar thermal plants (like the ones described in this story) there are no hazardous materials involved in their manufacture, which is definitely environmentally friendly.

And, once they are manufactured, there are no emissions when they make electricity.

Ahh, yes the clean solar thermal plants like Ivanpah which consume tens of billions of BTUs per month from its natural gas generators required to get it running each day!

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There's no hazardous materials mentioned in the article. Your point is?

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Don't forget the one billion killed by cats, collisions with rise buildings, and power transmission and distribution lines.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[LynnwoodRooster]

Just need to destroy the Salar of Atacama in Chile for your lithium! Pump the dirty water bearing lithium from a few hundred feet underground, let the water evaporate in the sun, scrape up the residue, and ship it across the ocean on big freighters! Definitely friendly...

Re:Everything is possible!

[LynnwoodRooster]

Too bad you only get to generate solar for - at most - 12 hours a day, and a conservative estimate for wind is about the same...

Re:Everything is possible!

[Rei]

When it comes to wind and solar (particularly solar), using data from just a couple years ago is already well obsolete. And even then, your link (under "Projected LCOE in the U.S. by 2022 (as of 2016) ") shows "wind onshore" as some of the cheapest electricity around, and solar around the middle of the list. Your link also includes a nice graph of how badly cost predictions missed reality. E.g. in 2010, EIA was predicting that solar in 2016 would cost $396.1/MWh - nearly an order of magnitude too expensive.

Re:Land use problems, as well as resource issues

[angel'o'sphere]

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.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Rei]

Generally people mean "land use efficiency". But even in that regard, solar isn't bad (and of course, rooftop uses no land). It's generally less (sometimes a lot less) than hydro (when accounting for reservoir area), way less than biomass, much less than wind if you count the entire area of a wind farm (but much more if you only count the tower bases and access roads), and not that much more than coal when you compare the size of mines for several decades of power generation. Nuclear and gas, however, both handily beat solar in terms of land footprint.

The spot where solar really shines (pardon the pun) is when you compare the amount of area you'd need to take up to power an electric car with solar, vs. the amount of land you'd have to cultivate to power an equivalent ICE with biofuels. It's orders of magnitude different (not even accounting for all of the water, fertilizer, etc)

When talking footprints, you also need to compare impacts, not just area taken up. For example, the main criticism of hydro is that it wipes out rare and sensitive ecosystems (river canyons) - exceptional places in the middle of more mundane surroundings. But solar is just the opposite - it works best in endless, mundane, identical stretches of indistinct flatland that don't in any way represent unique ecosystems. Furthermore, while sometimes solar is deployed with the ground kept cleared, this isn't always the case; when allowed to cooexist with its environment, it has significant potential to help, not hurt, habitats. In the desert, sun is not in short supply; water is. Places that provide shade tend to turn into oases of life. Solar panels also encourage dew collection. There's also some really interesting work going on paring solar with desert agriculture (such as is performed in the US around the Colorado River). The panels, spaced apart, basically act in the same way as agricultural shade cloth, and for some crops can even increase yields, while at the same time saving large amounts of water that's in short supply.

Re:How many?

[Stephan Schulz]

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.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[Rei]

Just need to destroy the Salar of Atacama in Chile for your lithium!

Lithium mines on salars usually take up a few/several percent of the surface area. And complex life actually on the salars themselves generally ranges from "minimal" to "none"; where present at all, most complex life is usually confined to the periphery.

Pump the dirty water

The salt water. The same salts that form the salars. Salars that in many cases flood annually, erasing the evaporation ponds and causing them to have to be rebuilt (for example, the largest lithium salar in the world, Salar de Uyuni is like this). Remember that we're talking about salt. Water soluble.

ship it across the ocean on big freighters

There's about 7kg of lithium in a typical Tesla battery pack, or about 35kg of carbonate. Even jumping into a future with 500k Model 3s produced per year and 700k Model Ys and the equivalent of 300k "other", that's 52,5 kT of carbonate per year. A large bulk carrier can carry over 80 kT in a single trip.

Lithium mining from salars is one of the least environmentally destructive forms of "mining" you can have, only proportionally small amounts are needed, and you make yourself look desperate to find a talking point when you act like it's the greatest scourge of mankind. Ever looked into the sort of mines that produce the alloying agents used in the steel for engines, or the platinum used in spark plugs and pollution control systems, mined at low-PPM/high-PPB quantities with significant overburden? Just ignoring what you're blasting out the tailpipe every time you drive, dumping on average the car's entire mass worth of fuel into combustion products into everyone's air to breathe.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[Rei]

Ed: dumping on average the car's entire mass worth of fuel into combustion products into everyone's air to breathe every year .

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell hunts turkeys with a .223?

Reality Always Intrudes

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of notes from Green energy obsessed Ontario in the middle of a wind farm under construction -- these huge investments in solar and wind capture technology are bets on the stability and predictability of the weather. Any casual observer will note that this is not what we are getting. And even my backyard weather station shows that as the climate warms (a small but very visible effect) the winds are slowly dying off -- instead of being windy all the time it is calmer with more violent moments. And we have more clouds... And the many acres of solar panels in the area do have to be cleared of snow in the winter... which no one seems to want to do -- likely because there is a huge power surplus that the costs of all this stuff discourage the locals from using. So Ontario pays several US states to take the power... lucky you. We see enough in the news about the 'rare' failures of wind turbines to suspect that the service life of these things are less than advertised -- sort of like the gen II nukes that everyone rushed to deploy. And finally, the visions of a continent-wide grid taking sunlight power from Arizona and easily moving it to New England have a small flaw... the dynamic properties of a huge interconnected grid with varying levels of automation and control are still unknown when perturbed by failures or a big coronal mass ejection. The 2004 blackout report makes interesting reading. Only the sales folk think it would be easy or cheap. As for me... local standby generator is my vote of no confidence.

Re:Everything is possible!

[rally2xs]

You need to read your levelized cost of energy link more carefully. Those big numbers you're talking about are for solar-thermal and offshore wind, both admittedly the most expensive ways to use their respective power sources.

Look on the right end of the spectrum and you'll see onshore wind as being extremely cheap. Solar PV is still cost challenged, but there's hope for improvement. For some reason, people still keep building solar PV collection systems, so apparently its viable.

Re:I'll see it when I believe it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ridley is heavily involved in coal mining.

Re:Everything is possible!

[burtosis]

Exactly. The only real problem to solve before solar and wind can do a 100% replacement is storage. Solar dosent work at night, works half well during heavy overcast or rainy conditions, and can stop if the panels get snowed on (until they are cleared or melt thier way to freedom). Wind power obviously needs wind, too much or little can also be a problem. You can pump water to store electric power, but it requires large volumes of water and expensive equipment. Batteries would be an ideal way, but they are still too expensive. I think Musk has the right idea, if we can use old electric car packs that are near the end of useful life for the needs of a car, the cost per kWh of storage should get quite cheap as electric cars go mainstream. Not only that, but wind solar and on site storage can remove the need for an electrical grid and centralized production, electric power companies are crapping thier grundies over this.

We Have to Be Careful...

[rally2xs]

...when we estimate the need for future electrical energy usage by using historical electrical energy usage. Why? Electric cars. The demand for electrical energy should rise sharply if and when we get viable (cheap enough, with enough range and a short enough recharge time) electric cars. Converting all cars, trucks, ships, airplanes, and locomotives to battery power means an enormous activity in charging those batteries. We will be building wind generators to the point that absolutely every horizon in the country will look like fur, with wind generators taking the part of individual hairs. Its fortunate that they are beautiful / majestic, but still hoping to keep them off some of the notable scenic areas such as the Grand Canyon, half-dome, painted desert, etc.

If we make the switch to renewables

[mark_reh]

where will all successive generations of coal miners get black lung, bury their fathers at 30 years old, and die in holes in the ground? How will the salmon meet their daily nutritional requirement of mercury? Who will the rest of the world point to and say "if they can do it, so can we"?

#MAGA!

Re:Everything is possible!

[Rei]

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.

False equivalency

[sjbe]

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.

Re:False equivalency

[js290]

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.

Re:False equivalency

[Green Mountain Bot]

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.

Which is why the GP said:

When you need to use energy (and we all do) then you want to use the cleanest form of power generation available to you.

The fact that solar and wind still use some fossil fuels (as does nuclear) in their manufacture is a pretty crappy reason to not use them and instead rely solely on fossil fuels for energy production.

Re:False equivalency

[js290]

In perfect lab conditions, solar panels are barely 20% thermodynamically efficient, saying nothing of the toxicity of the manufacturing and disposal processes. Nature figured out solar; it's called photosynthesis.

Re:Not This Study

[Mr D from 63]

Unfortunately, not a single author of the study has any experience at all in electrical transmission or distribution, not to mention zero experience or background in grid management. It is simply a math exercise that ignores the many real constraints on the grid.

But those that want to hear this don't care, they'll take this and run with it.

Yes, the study is does not seem to adequately depict reallity, such as the massive transmission buldiout required if such a plan were even feasible. It also glosses over the true meaning of "150%" of total US energy. This would be 150% annual production, not capacity, so given an averge 35% capacity factor of wind, and 20% capacity factor of solar, we would actually require about 450% of us rated capacity. That not only would be extremely cost prohibitive up front, but the amount of curtailment would be absolutely huge and costly as well.

Even the 90% case would have huge curtailments, as curtailments get pretty significant after 30%. Why no talk of the cost of curtailment folks? And if anyone ever sat down and calculated the cost of 12 hour of storage for the entire US demand, they'd quickly realize how unrealistic it is. Remember, with storage you pay for your power twice, once for generating the power, and again for storing it.

Maybe a study where there is at least one guy that actually worked at a utility or power plant or even something close would be a bit more practical.

Nuclear has drawbacks too

[sjbe]

It's not "kosher" to say this, but we really should have got back into nuclear 20 years ago.

It's not an unreasonable view point, just a politically impossible one. People are afraid of nuclear and you can't argue they are entirely wrong even if they aren't entirely well informed. It's somewhat a pity that they aren't as afraid of fossil fuels because fossil fuels are probably actually more dangerous.

The nuclear technology of today is cleaner and safer and more efficient than anything out there.

While I have no problem with using fission as a power source, no form of fission is safe. That's not even a debate. Most of the time it is fine but there is always a non-zero chance of a serious catastrophe. That's why there are so many regulations around it and why private insurance won't touch it without government guarnatees. When the people who have a profit motive to evaluate risk won't touch it that is the clearest possible evidence that it is not safe..

Nuclear fission is only "clean" in relation to fossil fuels. Nobody has come up with a workable plan for the spent fuel waste which is quite obviously not clean or safe. And because of the regulations and safety requirements around it, nuclear is not clearly more economically efficient than alternatives.

The simple fact is that nuclear is really the only energy technology that can reliably fill the growing need for energy.

That is clearly not true. Wind and solar have been shown to be able to fill a substantial portion of the need for clean energy. That is the whole point of the main article. Nuclear can (and should) be a piece of the portfolio but to pretend it is the only option is both untrue and unrealistic.

Re: Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't allow leadshot and haven't for decades.

Three Mile Island is closing

[jfdavis668]

Electricity prices are so low currently that it is difficult to fund new or old technologies. Cheap natural gas has driven all other power sources into the red. Three Mile Island is scheduled to close due to being unable to charge enough for electricity to make enough to operate the plant. This is an established, long running nuclear plant (with one broken unit). Operating costs are not that high, but you still need to generate money. Building other new technologies is equally difficult when the break even mark keeps being pushed to the right.

Re:Everything is possible!

[burtosis]

True. To get to 80% wind and solar across most of the US without you would need something like a minimum of 12 hours storage, 48+ would really start to shine. To get 100% robustly I'm guessing a full week. As soon as the price drops, and the secondary use market picks up, this will start being feasible.

12h of US energy storage and that last 10% ?

[dbateman]

Peak US energy consumption will be about 250 GW. So worst case 12h of storage is 3 TWh. Over 12h the consumption won't always be at the peak, so a good guess at what 12h US energy storage really means is about 1TWh of storage capacity and this storage must be capable of delivering 250GW peak !! Wow that I big dam with hundreds of massive turbo-generators attached.. Assuming that we need to call on that 12h of storage several times per year, say 5, that about 5TWh/yr of hydro-electric capacity

About the only storage mecanism actual capable of delivery that type of storage is hydro-electric, the question is now is that realistic. At the moment the US has 282 TWh/yr and a peak of 80 GW. About half of that 282 TW/h is probably run of the river type and so must be used immedately or risk severe local flooding. But even still 140 TWh/yr of other hydro-electric capacity is well and truly in the ball park of the author estimations, though might need bigger dams to store the water and deliver power over 12 hours rather than over shorter periods.

One remaining problem is the peak production capacity which would need to be tripled. The logistics of doing that without creating waves you could surf on in US rivers will be amusing but probably not insurmountable. In any case there would need to be a massive investment program in hydro-electric power as well.

The last problem is that last 10% of production that the authors haven't addressed. If its not wind, solar or hydro, what is it ? With current technology, about the only thing that would make sense is combined-cycle gas turbines, allowing for high efficiency and rapid deployment when the wind ain't blowing, the sun ain't shining and after you've used your 12h of energy storage. So the authors are asking the energy industry to build 250GW of production capacity that is only used 10% of the time. That's ok, but it means the infrastructure costs need to be amortized over few production hours, and the price of a MW/h from the combined-cycle generation will cost many times the current cost.

In short, yes the authors proposal seems highly possible on paper, though the US citizens must decide that they are willing to pay much more for power that they are now, and/or go without 10% of the time. Seems to me its a politico-economic choice in that case rather than a technological one. Unfortunately, recent history in the US with the massive exploitation of shale oil and reduction in cost per MW/h of power in the US is the reverse of the decision the authors are advocating, and I'm not sure that US political system has the balls to stand up tell everyone they have to pay more.

D.

Re:How many?

[tomhath]

All this at a time when the solar energy sector is shrinking due to the end of the subsidies that kept it going.

Re:Everything is possible!

[ThurstonMoore]

The article is about the US not the whole world.

The future is hard to predict

[XXongo]

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.

Today, that is true (if you are considering the 100% case-- it is cost effective in some markets).

I don't think you have any basis to say "will not likely be cost effective for a very long time." That becomes untrue if you have efficient storage or efficient long-distance power transfer. Both of these technologies are improving rapidly.

Solar electricity generation is highly inefficient.

No, it's pretty efficient. you can buy 20% efficient solar panels today. That's roughly the same efficiency as your car's engine. You can make 35% efficient cells, but they're expensive. You can also make 35% efficient car engines, but they're expensive, too.

If it were cost effective, we'd all be doing it. Same goes with electric cars.

And, in fact, the world is rapidly installing solar capacity. https://octoenergy-production-...

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[Barsteward]

"Pump the dirty water " - eh? What do they do to make it "dirty"? Its nothing like the chemical contaminated water used in fracking

Re:Everything is possible!

[jbmartin6]

artificially inflated prices of residential solar

That is interesting claim, I have not heard that. Would you mind clarifying a bit? How are the prices artificially inflated?

Re:Everything is possible!

[Applehu Akbar]

The ozone hole kills hundreds of thousands of people every year.

The ozone hole that has been closing up again ever since AC refrigerant was refurmulted?
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g...

Land [Re:Everything is possible!]

[XXongo]

Generally people mean "land use efficiency".

No, they don't.

Often, yes, people don't even know what they mean, but when they do mean efficiency, they mean efficiency.

Re:Land [Re:Everything is possible!]

[Rei]

Okay, then wind and hydro power are awesome, and nuclear is lousy. Is that what you're going for?

Re:Land [Re:Everything is possible!]

[XXongo]

Okay, then wind and hydro power are awesome, and nuclear is lousy. Is that what you're going for?

I don't even know what you mean by "awesome," or how to measure it.

Re:Land [Re:Everything is possible!]

[Rei]

Are you deliberately trying to be difficult? "High efficiency"

No, not toxic

[XXongo]

But seriously, the manufacture of solar collectors is not exactly environmentally friendly...

That depends upon what type of "solar collectors" you're talking about. If you're talking about photovoltaic panels, then yes there are hazardous materials used in their manufacture

No, not inherently. That's a myth. Today's solar panels are basically made of silicon and glass. There's no reason that you can't make them in an environmentally friendly, low-waste way. Silicon production uses chlorosilane, of course, but you don't release this to the environment-- you want to use it up. The main waste is actually the solvents used for cleaning, but with economy of scale it's cheaper to recycle these.

People talking about how hazardous solar panels are usually point to cadmium telluride panels, which had a -- hold on to your hats-- two-micron thick layer incorporating cadmium. But CdTe never got traction as a solar array material; silicon technology just evolved to so low a cost that CdTe (whose only selling point was low price) got priced out of the market.

but a lot less hazardous materials than used in say, hydraulic fracturing.

That's definitely true.

The "Big Wind" lobby

[Quake1v1]

This will be a thing the instant that Wind/Solar become the prime money mover.

Re:Everything is possible!

[taskiss]

If you'd read the article, you'd realize that the premise is quite impossible given today's technology to be cost effective -

"Assuming minimal excess generation, lossless transmission, and no other generation sources..."

Lossless transmission requires super conductor transmission lines. While it's possible, it's not when you factor in the logistical reality.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Ol Olsoc]

Too bad you only get to generate solar for - at most - 12 hours a day, and a conservative estimate for wind is about the same...

Many of the same solutions that are used by traditional power sources are also applicable in the case of solar. And then there is wind.

At present, we can power houses and buildings via solar, and all of the wind turbines popping up just north of here are providing a lot of power - they are doing the peaking to the point that you can see them switch on and off. They are even capable of shutting down individual turbines if they sense a raptor within a couple miles.

What exactly is your hard-on for the once alternative, now turning mainstream power sources? The stuff works, no matter how much you yell at it.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[turp182]

Let's not forget about cats.

Cats that live in the wild or indoor pets allowed to roam outdoors kill from 1.4 billion to as many as 3.7 billion birds in the continental U.S. each year.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

Re: Everything is possible!

[Type44Q]

I'm afraid that this forum is off-limits even to English illiterates; sorry, chum!

Re:Everything is possible!

[Ol Olsoc]

Depends on where you live. In Phoenix, $4160 of solar panel will produce roughly $1432 of electricity/year.

Plug in numbers here:

http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatt...

I used retail pricing here: https://sunelec.com/home/

Damn, they used to talk about payback in 15 years, not in 3.

I've found that many of the payback points to be outlandishly pessimistic. My costs for installing extra installation and changing to natgas for heating paid off in just a few years, when the "experts" were telling me no less than 10.

My biggest issue with going totally solar at home is that I have a spa, which even with a very efficient unit would stress the storage batteries. But I'm expecting even that barrier will fall, sooner rather than later.

Re:Everything is possible!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I have no idea how exactly it happens but the fact is that residential solar prices in the US hovering around or above $3/Wp are a significant outlier even in the ordinarily more expensive developed world. Even in Germany, the rooftop installation price is around 1.3 Euros/Wp now.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

I live in coal country, where the coal fired plants are a few miles from the mines. The cost of production has to be about as low as coal can go. Yet they are aging out. Our friend who thinks it is too expensive to produce solar or wind needs to research out the costs of new turbines.

So here in the place when coal should blow out other forms of generating power - it isn't.

But we are still meeting demand for power. Wind power is carrying the load, providing the electricity.

And for individual houses, solar is becoming significantly cheaper. If you build new outside of a development, and need to run power lines to your new house, you'll find that the cost of running those poles and lines will be higher than a solar install in many cases - with no payback period.

So the haters - probably a group of frustrated nuclearphiles and those who cannot handle change can yell all they want. This is happening, and t is happening now.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Has this worked in Germany?

[walterbyrd]

My understanding is: they have tried this in Germany, and it has turned out to be astronomically expensive. Energy costs have gone through the roof.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Anon-Admin]

Put them in orbit of the sun and beam the energy back with a laser or microwave beam. Sure we may fry a few birds but it is 24 hour energy. :P

Wind/Solar is the CFL bulb of power generation

[RogueWarrior65]

There was a massive push to replace incandescent bulbs with CFL bulbs, an arguably far inferior lighting technology. It had to be done within a few years or global warming would kill us all. LED bulbs that have mostly taken over the market are a far superior technology. One can make the case that the CFL bulb industry was trying to recoup their development costs and eventual losses by getting politicians to help them out before it was too late. The LED writing was on the wall. One can make the same case with wind and solar power. They are inferior power generation methods compared to nuclear, natural gas, and more importantly, fusion power. What better way to make a killing quickly before a superior technology borks your industry than to fake your data.

Re: Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[PopeRatzo]

They don't allow leadshot and haven't for decades.

There is still a lot of lead shot used in Texas. Ask someone who reloads their own cartridges.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Everything is wind and solar. Other forms of energy are just storage methods for these two. Fossil fuels are just a chemical storage method for solar energy. Hydro is just a storage method for wind.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Marxist Hacker 42]

" there are no market fluctuations in the price "

For some elitists, that is why they are against it.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Rob Y.]

It's kind of amazing how some SlashDotters, who would normally be inclined to love technological solutions like solar or wind power (and even take naturally to solving their challenges), still come out against them, and presumably in favor of continued reliance on fossil fuels. It's almost as if some tribal anti-government (or at least anti Democratic Party) prejudice is steering them away from these technologies.

If those types embrace any technological fix (at least they do acknowledge that some kind of fix is needed) to climate change, they tend to push for increased use of nuclear power. While there's certainly some interesting technology there, the challenges are well known. And certainly an anti-government bias ought to apply to nuclear, which was developed with enormous government backing. But politically induced blindness is indeed selective.

Now here's where I'll be accused of politically induced blindness for my demonization of fossil fuels. But hey, nobody said it would be cheap or easy to wean ourselves from carbon-based energy. Just necessary. And with the endgame involving a free, non-polluting resource, tons of jobs and a weakening of corrupt petro-states around the world, it sure beats an endgame of isolating nuclear waste for centuries while continuing to mine the stuff...

Re:Everything is possible!

[jbmartin6]

Ok thanks, I'll dig around later if I remember. Maybe subsidies in Europe, or trade barriers in the US, or both. Or maybe in Europe you get better terms if you can't buy outright.

Re: Everything is possible!

[reanjr]

Because "energy storage" is a massive fucking unexplained handwave. We absolutely have nowhere near the energy storage capacity to make these "solutions" work. And recognition of the negative economic impact of increasing fossil fuel costs is another giant handwave, where the liberals suddenly embrace the Invisible Hand of the market to make everything wonderful.

Re: Everything is possible!

[reanjr]

It's not that people are against wind and solar; they just hear you claim things like reimplementing the electrical grid on wind and solar and it sounds like you're promising flying cars.

Re:Everything is possible!

[rgbatduke]

David MacKay says it all, quantitatively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

More bad logic

[sjbe]

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.

Re:More bad logic

[js290]

"Lisa, in this house, we obey the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics." --Homer Simpson There are efficiency losses throughout that entire conversion cycle. The only clean way to minimize those efficiency losses is to use less energy.

Re:More bad logic

[amicusNYCL]

The only clean way to minimize those efficiency losses is to use less energy.

How are you planning on convincing the rest of the people in the world that they should use less energy? Countries categorized as "developing economies" are found all over central and south America, Asia, and Africa (all of Africa other than SA, actually). Countries like Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Indonesia are classified as newly industrialized countries. Now, obviously, less-developed countries will seek to become more developed, because along with that comes a stronger economy, higher life expectancy, higher education and literacy, and higher incomes.

How are you going to convince all of those countries and people that they should just stop trying to develop, stay where they are? Because, obviously, in order to develop, they need energy. They will require more and more energy the more they develop. So, first, who are you to tell them they shouldn't develop? Second, since development is going to happen, wouldn't it make more sense to put efforts into producing cleaner energy instead of your Sisyphean quest to get everyone to just use less energy?

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[cyberchondriac]

Just curious, but I would imagine there are more species affected by the indiscriminate solar plant than the hunters. Environmentalists don't just look at all birds as a lump group. Hunters are going after fowl like ducks, pheasant, and geese, but which kind of avian are getting fried by the solar plant other than those? If there's anything on the endangered list, they'll have a fit.

Re:Everything is possible!

[thinkwaitfast]

That is for just the panels. Payback is just under 5 when you consider the rest of the system and inverters need replacement about every 10 years.

Re:Everything is possible!

[thinkwaitfast]

As an engineer, his book is the only thing worth reading on energy. It's all math which turns most people off because if you disagree with him you have to show why.

Re:Everything is possible!

[rgbatduke]

Precisely. MacKay is (well, was) an internet acquaintance of mine -- his book on Information Theory, AI, NNs etc is a classic, and we share(d) the same philosophy towards making the books we write available in print for money but free online (so you can actually still read his book online for free -- I bought a hard copy just to ensure he made some money from it and because hard copies are still sometimes useful).

This Ted talk is so f-ing sane that it should be mandatory viewing for all of the people participating in the discussion. Interestingly, when I discovered it I'd already done his first exercise in scaling to keep my mind occupied while driving back from the NC coast (something I do almost weekly at this point) to Duke. I was doing it more for solar -- if we completely filled the median strip of most US interstates with solar panels (or imagine making the road surface itself out of drivable solar panels) would it be enough to power 100% of the traffic on those roads? But I also did it for biofuels. The problem is that nobody pays the slightest attention to the scaling issues. One gallon of gasoline (for example) is IIRC 34 kWh. To "fill a car with gasoline" (say, a 20 gallon tank) is roughly 700 kWh. This is somewhere between half and a third the ENTIRE CAPACITY of a 16 kW premium cell array pretty much covering my SW facing roof for a MONTH. If I bought a roof-covering array and used it for nothing but running two cars for the month, with NO long trips, I'd be barely breaking even. It would, however, on average cover my electrical bill.

So far, there just isn't a good replacement for gasoline in energy density and (the thing nobody thinks of) POWER density. It isn't JUST having the battery capacity needed to equal the range of a gas car between fillups, one has to be able to deliver 700 kWh of energy in (say) five minutes. That is, one needs close to 10 MW of POWER -- a small, dedicated power plant -- to fill a car in the same amount of time it takes to fill it now with gasoline. Obviously, one could take an hour to fill and do it with more like 1 MW, or ten hours and do it with 10 KW, etc, but bottom line is that even 10 KW is maybe 5x the typical peak power consumption of an entire household. Thermodynamic efficiencies and so on screw around with this some, but in a "back of the envelope" calculation like this, they still total less than an order of magnitude difference, and that is STILL too much.

That isn't to say we can't eventually make cars all electric -- but to do so will very likely require a massive restructuring of the concept of "the car", possibly a restructuring of urban and suburban developments everywhere, and much more. Or, as MacKay points out, major lifestyle changes.

Minimal != Zero

[sjbe]

There are efficiency losses throughout that entire conversion cycle. The only clean way to minimize those efficiency losses is to use less energy.

We're going to utilize energy. Your argument is null and void if you pretend otherwise. Yes using less is optimal but not realistic with a growing and economically advancing civilization. Your argument is akin to a company trying to endlessly cut expenses to become profitable. It works to a point but then it becomes counterproductive. We're not going to all go back to living in caves with no electricity, no plumbing, and no transportation. If you want to go off grid and live in the woods knock yourself out. The rest of us will be living here in the real world where we have an optimization problem.

Re:Land use problems, as well as resource issues

[jbengt]

Also, we'd be smart to start pushing better building science into "code minimum" building specifications.

You mean like this? Which is already adopted by my state into their building codes, and overrides local home rule codes. (The state also allows use of ASHRAE 90.1, which is very similar)

Re:Everything is possible!

[thinkwaitfast]

A 1.350kwh battery (225Ah x 6v) is $83 from costco for $62/kwh ($83/1.35kwh).

Re:Everything is possible!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There are no subsidies for solar in Europe anymore. The installation prices are somewhat higher than raw hardware prices because the installers have to eat, too, but they're fairly efficient at their jobs and there's (perhaps surprisingly) not much bureaucracy in the field. Either US installers are greedy, or inefficient, or someone skims a lot of money in extra fees.

Re:Everything is possible!

[thinkwaitfast]

T105 (true deep cycle golf cart batteries) are an even better value @ ~$61/kwh.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Ol Olsoc]

That is for just the panels. Payback is just under 5 when you consider the rest of the system and inverters need replacement about every 10 years.

Even at 5 years, it's pretty good. I would hope that they'd wait for a failure before simply replacing them instead of cluttering landfills or some third world recycling dump with perfectly good electronics.

I have some small solar installs that aren't showing any signs of deterioration after 10 years now. They're used for powering radios. The batteries (gel cels) get rotated out, then used for other purposes before failure and recycling. Its difficult to determine any payback for that, because traditionally generated power simply isn't available for that use. If I had to design a difficult to access system with extreme life, I'd probably go with Solar/Nickel-Iron batteries.

Re:Everything is possible!

[fatwilbur]

I have to disagree there is no future in hydrocarbons. Though a poster below makes mention of rapidly falling costs in renewables, we are also seeing the same in hydrocarbons as competing energy sources and newer production methods come online. For anyone who knows industry well (and I will venture this does not include you or Rei in this thread), you would know there are simply a large number of applications where fuel is far more advantageous, even if they were to cost more. If we find an easy way to synthesize fuels, and emission technology improves at the speed it does, we may actually find there is no future in wind/solar.

Re: Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[c6gunner]

He's a special little tyke.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Rei]

This was in reference to li-ion battery packs with an expected lifespan of ~15 years in typical grid duty. Longevity strongly factors into the economics equation. There's also issues of efficiency.

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So, basically

[jtrainor]

It'll work, under conditions that don't and never have existed in the real world.

Wind and solar -never- operate at 100% of capacity. Not even close.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Ol Olsoc]

This Ted talk is so f-ing sane that it should be mandatory viewing for all of the people participating in the discussion.

There are some pretty wicked assumptions in all of that. While I wasn't speaking of gasoline specifically, I was speaking of electrical generation. And here's the rub.

The assumptions are rather rigid. While none of us can predict with 100 percent accuracy exactly how the future will pan out, but aoow me to take a stab at what I consider some errors. Why on earth would we decide to produce biofuels via old school farming? Might biofuel from algae be practical? You'll probably note that after a promising start, a lot of the companies pulled back from algae biofuel. At which point I'll point out that battery technology of today was considered impossible by engineers I worked with in the 1970's. Not being feasible now does not mean never feasible.

As well - he seems to assume that the only way to be really efficient is for people to revert to pre-industrial levels. Sorry, none of this requires a lifelstyle change. I pay only a bit more than than my neighbors for electricity, even though the ones on the north side are only there a couple days a month and presumably hardly use any electricity.

I have a spa too. I bought an efficient one, I insulated my place over the good quality insulation that is already there. I converted to a 99 percent efficient gas furnace which extracts so much heat from the natgas that it's chimney is a 2 inch PVC pipe. I have all LED lights in the house. No lifestyle changes at all, and an arguably better lifestyle than my neighbors

Now yes if we use a supply only setup that uses a paradigm that only present methods are allowable, that it is not possible to produce energy more efficiently and that any changes on the consumer end will result in markedly lowered standard of living - you are 100 percent correct - this is not possible. We might as well just use up the petroleum and move back to the caves. Because nothing is as good, and nothing will ever be as good.

But even the level with alternatives we are at now was considered completely impossible 50 years ago. I was doing it more for solar -- if we completely filled the median strip of most US interstates with solar panels (or imagine making the road surface itself out of drivable solar panels) would it be enough to power 100% of the traffic on those roads?

Well, to be certain, modern medians won't be accessible because they are constructed a specific way for safety, whereas a car in an accident will be more likely to end up coming to rest in the median rather than in the middle of the opposite lane. So the idea isn't worth pursuing other than as a BOTE exercise.

But I also did it for biofuels. The problem is that nobody pays the slightest attention to the scaling issues. One gallon of gasoline (for example) is IIRC 34 kWh. To "fill a car with gasoline" (say, a 20 gallon tank) is roughly 700 kWh. This is somewhere between half and a third the ENTIRE CAPACITY of a 16 kW premium cell array pretty much covering my SW facing roof for a MONTH.

Come on now, your idea that no one is paying the slightest attention to scaling is patting yourself on the back a bit too hard. Yes, there is nothing like the energy density of Gasoline and diesel fuel 116,090 and 128,488 BTU/gal respectively. But what are we going to do with that now? Simply say well, they are the best, so when we use most of it up, we'll fold the tents and go die? We have what we have - or are you arguing for nuc reactors in cars?

If I bought a roof-covering array and used it for nothing but running two cars for the month, with NO long trips, I'd be barely breaking even. It would, however, on average cover my electrical bill.

So far, there just isn't a good replacement for gasoline in energy density and (the thing nobody thinks of) POWER density.

Sigh, c

Re:Everything is possible!

[harrkev]

And with the endgame involving a free, non-polluting resource, tons of jobs

This is EASILY accomplished. You need a large population and a lot of stationary bicycles hooked up to small generators. Yeah, you would need a LOT of people spinning away, but more jobs!

Seriously, making energy with FEWER jobs is kind of the actual goal. If more jobs is a good thing, then my solution works great.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[soc_cost_priv_gains]

These are the same people who assure us fracking fluid is perfectly safe even though we are not allowed to know what is in it because of trade secrets and all that.

Re:Everything is possible!

[Guy Smiley]

One gallon of gasoline (for example) is IIRC 34 kWh. To "fill a car with gasoline" (say, a 20 gallon tank) is roughly 700 kWh.

That assumes gasoline is used 100% efficiently to move the car, which it definitely is not. I've read more like 30% efficiency, but don't have a source handy. If you have, say, a 30 MPG car and a 20 gallon tank (which is IMHO on the large side for most cars), that is 600 miles range. A 100 kWh Tesla Model S has a rated range of 335 miles, so by that estimate you need a 180 kWh equivalent battery for 600 miles range.

This is somewhere between half and a third the ENTIRE CAPACITY of a 16 kW premium cell array pretty much covering my SW facing roof for a MONTH.

Even with the over-inflated 700kWh estimate, that is 700 / 16 = 43 hours of peak generation to fully charge. With a more accurate 180 kWh estimate that is about 11 hours to fully charge. Most panels get between 1-6 kWh/kW/day depending on location and time of year (say 3 kWh/kW/day), so more realistically it would take about 180 kWh / (3 kWh/kW/day * 16 kW) = 3.7 days to fully charge for a 600 mile drive. Fortunately, most people only drive about 60 miles/day, which is 10% of your tank, so you need only about 37% of your daily generation to charge the car.

It isn't JUST having the battery capacity needed to equal the range of a gas car between fillups, one has to be able to deliver 700 kWh of energy in (say) five minutes. That is, one needs close to 10 MW of POWER -- a small, dedicated power plant -- to fill a car in the same amount of time it takes to fill it now with gasoline.

Or not. Fill up overnight, as I do, and you have a full "tank" every day. Don't even spend the 10-15 minutes at the gas station, ever. I have a 10kW charger, but I actually limit it to about 4kW so that the battery charges more slowly overnight, and is still warm in the morning (useful in the winter).

Re:How many?

[Rakarra]

Why not just ban single family homes?

Because plenty of people strongly dislike the idea of being packed in a small box like rats along with all the other rats.

Re: Everything is possible!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The important thing to notice is that even with rather fast adoption of renewable generation, large scale grid storage still won't be needed for quite some time. Maybe a decade or two. So the fact that we don't have that storage right now is irrelevant. The question is whether we'll have it once we need it in the future.

Re:Everything is possible!

[philmarcracken]

With solar being that 20% figure, how good is molten salt towers by comparison? The CSP mirror things.

Re: Everything is possible!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Just hydrogen would be enough. Assuming very cheap inputs in the future, even the 40% round-trip efficiency in an electrolyzer/CCGT cycle wouldn't be unacceptable, especially in the light of storage capacity disconnected from generation capacity in this scenario (unlike with batteries, you only need a really large tank here) and the ability to re-use, e.g., the natural gas storage infrastructure in many countries. For example, for seasonal storage in Germany (to get through winter), it's a likely application in the future.

Re:Everything is possible!

[LynnwoodRooster]

Personally I believe we should be pursuing next gen nuclear right now. Storage requirements and mass of deployments required to make wind/solar a tenable solution are simply fantastical at this point. Nuclear could easily do it - we'd need about 100 of the Kashiwazaki plants in Japan, to provide 100% of our needs, and it would be, effectively, 100% reliable (due to the always-available nature of nuclear plants). Each plant occupies a little more than 1 square mile, meaning we'd need about 30 or so Ivanpah-sized plants around the US to provide all that power. To me, that makes much more sense. Modern society pretty much demands constant, reliable power and without massive storage options renewables simply are not tenable.

Re: Everything is possible!

[LynnwoodRooster]

Consider that all of the US is dark for several hours at a time, every day. We need several hours of storage capacity at a minimum, especially since the current mantra is for everyone to recharge their cars at home, overnight - when it's dark.

Re:Land use problems, as well as resource issues

[Chas]

Yes. Things like this are a step in the right direction.

Will stuff like this drive up the initial cost of homes?

Maybe?

Right now everyone's focus is on cosmetic crap in their homes.

But, strategically pointed out, many people will forgo expensive "bling" on a home that dramatically reduces their bills and stills gives them a great space to use.
So a house that, built to code, might cost $300K. But, built to these new standards, might wind up costing $315-330.

Yet it's built in such a way that what would normally be a $250 total utilities bill winds up being reduced to a $65 electric/water bill (or $0 if enough grid-tied solar is factored in), creating a payback in 6.7-13.5 years without solar and 5.3-10.6 years without. And, properly maintained, panels are usually good for 10-20 years beyond the end of life for their support. So imagine 25-30 years without anything more than a $15-20 water bill. It's enough to spend out for a new system IN CASH and STILL be looking at $50-70K in savings (meaning you could pay your home off earlier...

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

You are discounting how much carbon living screaming birds on fire generate.

Was going to mod you down, but realized it would be more satisfying to just tell you what a fucking idiot you are.

Re:Everything is possible!

[thinkwaitfast]

I know. It's much closer, but when you do the math, lead acid still comes out ahead. There is the problem of maintenance and you have to know what you're doing.

Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[Rei]

That pdf is completely riddled with errors on every page, and most of its links are either dead, obsolete, or both. And when you can find the links, they're usually riddled with errors. For example, in their attempts to talk up a lithium "water crisis", they link to "DClithiumfullreportenglish.pdf", but the link is dead. However, you can find it scattered around elsewhere, such as here. Here's what it says on the subject:

One major problem that lithium development could cause is a major water crisis. The region already suffers from a serious water shortage, impacting quinoa farmers, llama herders, the region’s vital tourism industry, and drinking water sources. While Bolivian officials contend that the lithium project’s water requirements will be minimal, their estimates are based on very limited and incomplete information.

This is, of course, an absurdity (no references, of course!). The water lithium is produced from is not freshwater. It's brine. You don't dump brine on quinua or give it to llamas and people to drink. Furthermore, there are no farmers, herders, and tourism lodgings in the middle of salars. It's salt. You can't grow crops and graze animals on salt.

This pdf is from "Rebecca Hollender and Jim Shultz, May 2010". So first off, 8 years old. Secondly, who are these world-renowned mining experts? This appears to be her. Samples of her work:

"A Politics of the Commons or Commoning the Political Distinct Possibilities for Post Capitalist Transformation"
"Prescription for Failure: Examining the Drug Policy and Development Nexus for Shaping the UNGASS 2016 Discussion"
"Northern Fixes and Southern Realities: Three Climate Policy Debate Primers, Primer Three: Climate Finance and Bolivia"

Etc. Clearly a mining expert! Well, what about Jim? This appears to be him:

I was raised in Whittier California, President Richard Nixon’s hometown, while he was President, which has a lot to do with how I became a political activist at an early age. After college at UC Berkeley I spent two decades deeply involved in California politics, as staff to the California Legislature, and as an advocate with Common Cause and Consumers Union (and in the middle took a detour to Harvard to earn a master’s degree). In 1991 my wife Lynn and I spent our first year of marriage as volunteers in an orphanage in Cochabamba and came home with a surprise daughter (today I am a father of three and soon to be a grandfather). In 1998 we returned to Bolivia for what was supposed to be a year and have stayed for almost twenty. As executive director of the Democracy Center for 25 years, it has been my privilege to work with citizen activists on five continents, from indigenous communities in Bolivia to senior leaders in the United Nations. I’ve also written three books, many articles and all along the way have done my level best to make sure David beats Goliath as often as possible. I publish on Medium, and I Tweet

You know, the author of such articles about intricate mining details such as "Feeling ‘the Bern,’ Before Bernie Sanders and After" and "When Anti-Immigrant Politics Came Back to Haunt the Republican Party"

Re:Everything is possible!

[rgbatduke]

I'm perfectly happy with the possibility of advances in technology -- I'm watching the slide in PVC solar prices and expect that any year now they'll reach the point where I can amortize the cost of going solar in less than a decade. I've actually followed a path in my own house that isn't that different from yours, except that I live where electricity costs around $0.11/kWh (and comes from a nuclear plant, buffed out with commercial Solar as NC is second in the nation behind CA in large scale solar implementation -- mid-scale 50 acre or so solar "farms" are popping up all over the state, one of my ex-student/mentees just got a job at a big commercial solar company located ten miles away). The difficulty is that investing in super efficient HVAC -- where I'm over $20K in and ALSO have PVC pipes for outflow chimneys, as well as external condensers for the AC that are three times the size of the units they replaced -- PLUS overhead R40 insulation PLUS low E double pane windows PLUS tight doors PLUS CFS that I'm replacing with LEDs as fast as they burn out -- has dropped by electrical bill by roughly 40%, maybe a bit more and dropped my gas bill by close to the same amount. That's still amortizing the investment in the HVAC units and will be for the rest of my life, but the original equipment had literally worn out so in some sense I'm only amortizing the marginal cost of the good units compared to the cheapest possible adequate units and might recover that sort of "break even" in another five years of payback.

However, it only leaves me with a monthly budget of $147 for payback on going fully solar, assuming that I can cram enough panels on my roof to go full solar. There the biggest problem is going to be dormer windows -- I don't have a single flat expanse on the SW facing section that otherwise would be perfect and will have to patch it out in between, which the wife and neighborhood association may or may not tolerate. $147 won't even service the interest on the cost of full solar, so amortization time is still "infinity", especially since I'll literally have to borrow the money to do it as we don't have $20K or so lying around (a rough estimate of the cost, but as you note highly variable as technology improves). I'm guessing sometime in the next 3-5 years dropping prices, especially in storage, will intersect my means and I'll put something together, more likely on our house at the ocean than here first, because that one has the least reliable and most expensive electricity in an all-electric house, no natgas at all. Hence one of the lessons -- the more one invests in energy efficiency, the lower the available residual for amortizing further investment. But I digress.

I think you miss the point of the TED talk. It isn't intended to be the last word. It is intended to clearly distinguish between a public debate all too often based on science fiction and ignorance and one that is based on the sober contemplation of the scaling of various solutions. To give you an extreme example -- I continue to have fond hopes for thermonuclear fusion as "the" inexhaustible power source that will catapult us into becoming a full type 2 civilization. If we master DD fusion in commercial scale reactors with anything like a reasonable efficiency, we will evolve before we burn 10% of the D in the ocean alone, and have the rest of the solar system to mind for D, He3, and other fusibles if need be. Should I go around and buy up suitable sites for future fusion plants in anticipation, or build lots of not-quite-break even plants anticipating that by doing so I'll somehow stimulate the physics of fusion into "working"? I could wax similarly poetic about LFTR -- on paper it sounds almost heavenly -- a thousand year energy supply for the US PLUS all those lovely rare earths using Monazite sands in NC alone, or some such, burns nuclear waste, can't melt down -- except for the wee fact that it doesn't yet "exist" as an actual implementation. Again, should I be buying up suitable real estate containing Monazit

Re: Do you know what thermal plants do to birds

[c6gunner]

I sometimes purposely misuse the term "clip" because it triggers gun extremists and throws them into fits of pedantry which exposes ...

No you don't, pope fatso. You're just too stupid to know any better. Nice attempt to be anonymous though. Not at all transparent.

Efficiency is not awesomeness

[XXongo]

Are you deliberately trying to be difficult?

No. Are you deliberately trying to be stupid?

"High efficiency"

Efficiency I can define. "Awesome" I can't.

How high "high efficiency" is will be a judgement call. I had pointed out that the efficiency of photovoltaic panels is roughly the same as efficiency of the gasoline engine in your car, so if conversion efficiency is actually your criterion, actually, photovoltaics are not terribly bad compared to other engines. They're slightly lower in efficiency than the chemical-to-electrical-energy conversion efficiency of coal-fired power plants, but that's only the generating efficiency-- add in the fact that the coal has to be mined and transported to the plant, and the electricity has transformer and transmission losses, and they are comparable to on-site solar efficiencies. However, if (as the original topic proposes) the PV energy is to be distributed over long distances to smooth out geographical variations in power production, or stored, then transforming and transmission and storage losses have to be added to PV, too. As with many things, efficiency depends on application, and assumptions.

In general, though, "efficiency" is not the same as "awesome," and neither one is the same as "cost effective for a particular market."

commentator K. S. Kyosuke above had an interesting calculation of efficiency starting with the solar photons, pointing out that fossil fuel is actually just solar energy that was absorbed millions of years ago. Interesting, and in some ways insightful to trace the energy back to the source... but not terribly relevant.

Re:Efficiency is not awesomeness

[Rei]

In general, though, "efficiency" is not the same as "awesome,"

In general, one reads a post in the context it was written, which in this case, was efficiency. Thus causing the adjective to be describing efficiency.

It's embarrassing that I have to spell this out.

Re:Efficiency is not awesomeness

[XXongo]

In general, though, "efficiency" is not the same as "awesome,"

In general, one reads a post in the context it was written

Which is why I was so puzzled that, in a discussion of efficiency, you suddenly decide to discussing awesomeness.

But misuse of words, random changes to off-topic discussions, and whataboutism are not unusual in slashdot posts

Oy

[Doctrinsograce]

Just because something "can" doesn't mean it "ought."

Re: Everything is possible!

[c6gunner]

So the fact that we don't have that storage right now is irrelevant. The question is whether we'll have it once we need it in the future.

Right, and that's the handwave. If you're going to depend on technology which doesn't yet exist then you may as well just keep burning fossil fuels and hope that fusion becomes a thing in 20 years.

100% of _current_ electrical needs.

[stoatwblr]

This has been known for a while.

But that isn't enough by a long shot and here's why:

Electricity generation only accounts for about 30-40% of carbon emissions.

When you factor in replacing carbon used in domestic heating, transportation and industrial processes, electrical demands are set to rise by a factor of 6-8

Come back when solar and wind can fiil that gap. The problem is that they simply can't and the only way forward is nuclear - preferably Molten Salt as these can load-follow and virtually every commercial nuclear incident has been caused or exacerbated by water.

I will bet that study will be shot down

[WindBourne]

Here is a QUICK shoot down of it
What happens if Yellowstone blows? Keep in mind that our grid is supposed to work 100% of the time. That is ESP. true during emergencies. More importantly, if we are moving to EVs, then during emergencies we need that grid.
And yet, with just wind/solar, it would not work.

I would also be curious about the economics of this. I will bet again, that this will go up in price quite a bit. CA's has. So has Germany and Portugal.
OTOH, Sweden, Iceland, Costa Rica, all have CHEAP or relatively cheap energy. Why? Because they use a MIX.
We need to add in Geo-thermal and Nuclear. The idea of depending on JUST wind/Solar is about as stupid as you can be.

Re:Everything is possible!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

They don't have to use molten salt, although storage would be welcome in future projects. You're right, they're quite decent, they should be able to reach similar efficiencies as other types of heat engines. There are two major problems, though. First, radiative balance means there's a loss in the concentration process itself - you want the "hot end" of your heat engine cycle to be at hot as possible, but in case of radiative heating (as opposed to burning fuel), the heat transfer process goes both ways and the Stephan-Boltzmann law, by causing some losses, limits your range of efficiencies and operating temperatures. Having said that, efficiency is as much of a red herring for concentrated thermal solar power as it is for photovoltaics because the input is free (which is why solar panel efficiency debates are mostly irrelevant).

The second problem is more prominent in practice, but it has nothing to do with conversion efficiency as such: Due to its nature, concentrated solar power of any kind (not just thermal power but concentrating photovoltaics as well) is sensitive to clouds. Of course even flat photovoltaic panels decrease their output when it's cloudy but they do readily accept light from any side hitting their surface so they still generate at least some output. Concentrators, however, require a point source of light (the solar disk) and in cloudy conditions, their output diminishises way more sharply. This changes the ratio of capacity factors of CSP plants and PV plants in cloudier regions in favour of PV plants. For the same reason, CSP plants require mechanical tracking and are therefore not as maintenance-free as flat PV panels. That makes them generally more expensive to operate.

Re: Everything is possible!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It's not a handwave and the technology exists. It just needs to come down in price, which is a thing it is doing already. It merely trails behind power generation itself, hitting similar milestones like fifteen years later, but it's not like we don't have an idea what will be used in the future. We absolutely do.

Re:Everything is possible!

[lsatenstein]

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.

I'm of the opinion that individually, solar costs are prohibitive, for the amount of electricity we need. However, if residents formed an energy union (like a credit union), and transmission stations could be erected to ship surplus electricity to the areas in the dark, then it is possible that uninterrupted electricity could be made available everywhere at low cost. That is the theory.
When you bring in profit motive, private enterprise, and contracts that give long term favouritism to certain investors, the average homeowner is going to get screwed.

Hydro Quebec made a deal with NY state, Vermont, and Mass for electricity that is below 4 cents per kwhr. Electricity producers in Mass rejected the construction of transmission lines between Quebec and Mass. Electricity lines are not oil or gas.
So, Plattsburg residents pay around 4.2 cents per KWH, and so do other locations in the N.E USA.
Plattsburg council has put a stop to new bitcoin mining, as that raises the total city consumption to where the infrastructure cost goes out of reach.

     

Re: Everything is possible!

[WorBlux]

You can't re-use methane infrastructure for hydrogen, and hydrogen causes metal embrittlement. Ammonia would be a better target for that.

Re:Everything is possible!

[WorBlux]

Comparing MW*hr to MW*hr, wind and solar are the cheapest option out there right now to adding capacity to the grid. Yes storage and timing is an issue, but a well planned system could use solar/wind to supplement during peak demand. Right now base-load at EOL should shift to natural gas, and anything more than 5 years out should seriously signal a willingness to use 4th gen nuclear designs.

Re:Everything is possible!

[WorBlux]

You also get regenerative braking essentially for free with an electric car. A reasonably effecient electric car with consume 15 kW*hrs per 100 km.

But for most people to charge their car from solar, you'd need a battery bank at home and lose a lot of efficiency there. If you have solar, you're better off sending excess to the grid an charging the car at night during off-peak hours. Right now if a household has more than one car, having one on them electric is not going to be too much of a pain to manage.

Re: Everything is possible!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You can't re-use methane infrastructure for hydrogen

Strange that Germans are considering it, then, or even implementing it in pilot projects.

Re:Everything is possible!

[LynnwoodRooster]

For offshore wind or solar, no, nuclear is still cheaper on a levelized cost of energy. And that is just for generation, it does NOT include the cost of the backup needed for "always available" power, which nuclear pretty much guarantees. Solar should be dropped until its costs come down quite a bit, and wind should be used for intermittent things like desalinization to refill reservoirs and such - things where a 1 to 100 hour interruption is a non-issue.

Re:Everything is possible!

[WorBlux]

Your source is two years old. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/a... The cost of solar PV is rapidly decreasing, while advance nuclear projections are nearly static, and the only current nuclear construction project has gone way over budget. Right now storage is mostly infeasible, but long distance transmission lines are quite feasible and being built at a fast pace. If the sun isn't shinning where you are, the wind might be blowing strong two states over.

So yes, all solar and wind is silly given current tech and prices, but "a good bit more" is not, especially compared to currently approved nuclear designs.

Re:Everything is possible!

[LynnwoodRooster]

Digging in, I can see they rate PV as lower. But something isn't adding up to me... Check table 1A. Nuclear has 40% more capital cost - sounds reasonable. It has about 75% more fixed operational costs. But check the next column - apparently PV has ZERO variable operational/maintenance costs? And the first column - capacity - has nuclear at 2.7 times that of solar. Yet somehow PV is cheaper? Something's not making sense at all with those numbers...

As far as transmission of power, the cost of transmission for solar is ~3.7 times that of nuclear, per that report. Again, something is pretty wonky there - they should be about the same (one major grid-tied point versus several major grid-tied points, for a grid with hundreds of thousands of existing tie-points).

Re:Everything is possible!

[WorBlux]

It good your digging into the data. Look at the footnote 3 on that table. Costs are expressed based on energy delivered to the grid, not raw Watt ratings. And variable costs are costs based on variation in production. PV maintainance is basically the same no matter how much or little the sun shines. (clean once a weak, replace failed panels).

As for transmission cost, it includes upgrades and extensions to the gird, as utility-scale PV and wind are located far away from consumption centers. A lot of times I see wind farm locations being considered because a new line has been installed. At work we joke we're chasing that same damn power line across the country. It's still a cost though, but may or may not be internalized to the final wholesale price.