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Wind and Solar Can Power Most of the United States, Says Study (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian reports of a recent paper, published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, that helps explain how wind and solar energy can power most of the United States: "The authors analyzed 36 years of hourly weather data (1980-2015) in the U.S. They calculated the available wind and solar power over this time period and also included the electrical demand in the U.S. and its variation throughout the year. With this information, the researchers considered two scenarios. In scenario 1, they imagined wind and solar installations that would be sufficient to supply 100% of the U.S. electrical needs. In the second scenario, the installations would be over-designed; capable of providing 150% of the total U.S. electrical need. But the authors recognize that just because a solar panel or a wind turbine can provide all our energy, it doesn't mean that will happen in reality. It goes back to the prior discussion that sometimes the wind just doesn't blow, and sometimes the sun isn't shining. With these two scenarios, the authors then considered different mixes of power, from all solar to all wind. They also included the effect of aggregation area, that is, what sized regions are used to generate power. Is your power coming from wind and solar in your neighborhood, your city, your state or your region?
The authors found that with 100% power capacity and no mechanism to store energy, a wind-heavy portfolio is best (about 75% wind, 25% solar) and using large aggregate regions is optimal. It is possible to supply about 75-80% of U.S. electrical needs. If the system were designed with excess capacity (the 150% case), the U.S. could meet about 90% of its needs with wind and solar power. The authors modified their study to allow up to 12 hours of US energy storage. They then found that the 100% capacity system fared even better (about 90% of the country's energy) and the optimal balance was now more solar (approximately 70% solar and 30% wind). For the over-capacity system, the authors found that virtually all the country's power needs could be met with wind, solar, and storage."
The authors found that with 100% power capacity and no mechanism to store energy, a wind-heavy portfolio is best (about 75% wind, 25% solar) and using large aggregate regions is optimal. It is possible to supply about 75-80% of U.S. electrical needs. If the system were designed with excess capacity (the 150% case), the U.S. could meet about 90% of its needs with wind and solar power. The authors modified their study to allow up to 12 hours of US energy storage. They then found that the 100% capacity system fared even better (about 90% of the country's energy) and the optimal balance was now more solar (approximately 70% solar and 30% wind). For the over-capacity system, the authors found that virtually all the country's power needs could be met with wind, solar, and storage."
If we start using a lot less energy. Using less is the only clean energy. Nicole Foss on renewables @AutomaticEarth http://bit.ly/2rzS5Pq
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
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.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There are 800 KV DC transmission lines being built in Europe and Asia that have losses of 3% per 1000 km. Very modest excess production capability can compensate for this, a mere 10% for a 3250 km run (far enough to take southwest solar energy to New England).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
You will notice that the blog in question is a "climate skeptic" blog, which is a nice way of saying, "denier". Also, let me draw your attention to the fact that Matt Ridley offers a ton of facts and figures, without offering a single citation or link. Also "Coyote Blog" also doesn't provide any links or citations. Just weasel-phrases like, "Such numbers are not hard to find" except apparently he couldn't find any to link to It's a 17-paragraph article without a single link. Has there ever been a 17-paragraph article on the Internet without a single, solitary link?
Matt does say things like "From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption". Except there's one problem. If you actually navigate manually to the International Energy Agency's 2016 Key Renewable Trends, you will find a very different picture. there's actually steady growth in the worldwide energy share created by renewables of all kinds and second (please pay attention here) THE REPORT REFERS TO WORLDWIDE ENERGY CREATION AND NOT FOR THE US SO WHY ARE YOU EVEN TELLING US ABOUT THIS JODKA? How the FUCK do you come here and try to compare worldwide energy use and generation in 2016 to US-ONLY use and generation in
2018?
Strangely, there are IEA reports from 2017 which apparently Coyote Blog has not chosen to report.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The USA has plenty of real estate that can be used for solar and the number of birds killed by wind turbines has always been vastly over estimated and a tiny fraction of the kills by domestic cats. Finally, the latest, larger, turbines kill even fewer birds per kWh generated.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I wondered what they assumed about transmission losses. From the paper, last paragraph of introductory section:
Perfect transmission and energy storage, with no losses or
constraints, was assumed, yielding a best-case scenario for
realizing the benefits of geographic anti-correlation of the
resources and to allow isolation of the limitations associated
purely with geophysical characteristics of wind and solar energy
resources. Specific transmission constraints, higher-resolution
resource data, energy storage inefficiencies, optimization of the
choice of generation locations to minimize their mutual correlation
as opposed to maximization of local energy production, and
operational limits and market dynamics, among other practical
considerations, will play important roles in determining the details
of system- and site-specific design and operation of an actual
electricity system of this magnitude.
Looking up transmission losses in Wikipedia . A few numbers: 160km of 765kV transmission line has losses of 1.1% to 0.5%. Transmission losses in the USA were estimated at 6.5% in 2007.
As this plan will require more transmission, losses would be higher, and you'd need to spend quite a lot to upgrade transmission lines. I think this study is a useful starting point, but should be read as "getting beyond 80% renewable is really hard" rather than "getting to 80% renewable is easy".
Here is an interesting bit from the "discussion" section:
One proposed, and modeled,
U.S.-wide transmission system consists of an estimated
34 000 km (21 000 miles; 7 lengths of the US from Los Angeles,
CA to Portland, Maine) of line with a capacity of up to 12 GW.
An installed cost of $1 MM GW^-1 km^-1 implies a capital
expenditure on the order of $410 billion, as compared to >$1
trillion that would be required to install 12 hours of storage in
the US (mean demand is ~450 GW) assuming an installed cost
at present of $200 per kW h (pumped hydro; most other
systems (e.g. batteries, flywheels, etc.) have current costs in
excess of $500 per kW h).
So that gives some idea of the costs involved.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
For those of you who aren't following along, the article SuperKendall links to talks about how the giant sollar thermal collection plant in California kills 6000 birds a year.
What it doesn't tell you is that the federal Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that a minimum of 10 BILLION birds breed in the United States every year and that as many as 20 BILLION may be in the country during the fall migratory season. It also doesn't tell you that during the 2016-2017 hunting season, Texas hunters killed over 24 MILLION birds for sport. And they do this every goddamn year.
To summarize, 6000 birds die at a power station and it's the fucking bird apocalypse, but 24 MILLION birds get blown all to shit by Texas hunters and it's a manly and culturally significant ritual. I wonder what all that birdshot does to the lead levels in Texas surface water.
Oh, here's the statistics from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, in case you want to see for yourself what goes on in that god-forsaken state.
https://tpwd.texas.gov/publica...
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Plug in numbers here:
http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatt...
I used retail pricing here: https://sunelec.com/home/
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.
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.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
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.
No sig today...
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
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
That's a load of horse manure. Solar energy and Wind energy are currently cheaper than coal and are about to beat gas for electricity production.
All your /. links aside, the levelized cost of energy shows wind and solar as on the upper end of the spectrum.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Solar electricity generation is highly inefficient.
It's absolutely the opposite. Direct solar electricity generation is extremely efficient compared to all the other ways that energy can possibly get from the stars to us. Coal? Photosynthesis is worse than PV junctions, and most of the plants in the past didn't become coal in the first place, so most of the historical photosynthesis is lost to us. Oil? Ditto. Wind? Most of the heat hitting Earth doesn't become mechanical movement of wind either, as the temperature differences are too low. Nuclear? The way stars work, synthesis of heavy elements is rare, and most of those that Earth got we can't mine anyway. And of their decay heat we can's extract too much energy either, again because of the low temperature differentials. Etc. etc. But of the solar flux hitting Earth right now, every panel can convert 20% directly into electricity. I mean, it seems low until you realize how convoluted and lossy all the other pathways are. So, no, it's not "highly inefficient", at least not in the sense that we have anything better.
If it were cost effective, we'd all be doing it.
But it is already cost effective, and will be even more in the future, so you will be doing it, whether you want it or not. (Of course, you Americans with artificially inflated prices of residential solar are fucked, but it's up to you to reform your own rules, solar can't be blamed for that.)
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Why would there be no plan for recycling perfectly fine silicon sources like old panel? ...
Only an idiot would put them on a land fill. On top of that they contain useful metals
Solar you build mostly on existing buildings, because that is also the place the power gets consumed.
Wind plants you build offshore, and even on land they don't use much land, you simply put them on farms and farm around them, like everyone else does.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
How may solar panels and wind turbines would it require to generate that much electricity? I remember seeing someone talk about this and if I remember correctly, it would cover an area the size of a small to medium U S. State.
Musk claimed it needed 100 miles times 100 miles for solar alone (10000 square miles), which is about the size of Massachusetts. See this article and the accompanying image. Massachusetts is the 7th-smallest US-State. The average US state is about 7.5 times larger. Or, in other terms, it's 0.2% of the total US land area. With the US Interstate Highway System having about 50000 miles, it would be a 200 m strip to the left and right of every interstate highway.
It's not trivial, but a) it not going to be solar alone, and b) other energy forms also have significant land use, from mountaintop removal to roads for fuel shipment.
Stephan
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.
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.
Battery production prices are dropping like a rock, too. Most of these studies budget something like $500/kWh, but I would not be surprised in the least to see ~$100/kWh in commercially available products in a few years time. And that's a gamechanger for solar timeshifting.
It works double when you need the pack for something else, too (for example, as a buffer to EV fast charging). Your buffer also contains at least an hour's worth of its peak consumption (multiple hours when charges are spread out) just in order to have enough power to feed the vehicles it's charging. No need to "double pay" for the battery.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
If we start using a lot less energy. Using less is the only clean energy.
Talk about a false equivalency. Yes using less is ideal. It doesn't follow that all sources of power are equally bad however. It's clear that fossil fuels are irredeemably polluting. When you need to use energy (and we all do) then you want to use the cleanest form of power generation available to you.
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.
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...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
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.