One thing that feels a bit strange to me is that he uses timelines of 1000 years when calculating nuclear reserves. I don’t believe we need a plan for the next 1000 years - think of what our understanding of power generation and transmission was a millennium ago. Assuming that we will still be using the same technologies in 1000 years seems a bit pessimistic to me.
Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
11–20 of 138 posts
Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
#12Alas, this is probably pointless. Some technologies (PV, batteries, wind) have improved by an order of magnitude - and swamp out all other considerations. EDIT: to be clear, i loved the original book, and have re-read it several times over the years.
They've gotten cheaper by an order of magnitude, but their basic physical characteristics haven't changed that much. A big point of the book is to show what it looks like to really deploy this stuff at the necessary scale.
Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
#13Alas, this is probably pointless. Some technologies (PV, batteries, wind) have improved by an order of magnitude - and swamp out all other considerations. EDIT: to be clear, i loved the original book, and have re-read it several times over the years.
I think this fact is under-appreciated. It has undermined most of the quantitative analysis done in the past. So most of the analysis available is stale.
It has also undermined a lot of business plans - even those based on renewables. For example the Xlink project in the UK - this involved building a huge solar PV plant (with complimentary wind and battery storage) in Morocco where panels are twice as efficient and an underwater HVDC cable to the UK. The problem is that panel prices have dropped so much, that it's now cheaper, easier and quicker to just buy twice as much PV panels and site them in the UK - compensating for the relative lack of efficiency in northern Europe by volume of panels.
This is why there's huge growth in utility solar PV in northern and western Europe in the last year or two despite the less-than-ideal conditions there - the panels are just so cheap that the lack of optimal efficiency becomes a non-issue.
My prediction is that wind, solar and batteries will dominate because they're riding on the benefits of mass-production - the capital cost for these is dominated by off-the-shelf component costs - installation is relatively trivial. This has delivered continuous and steep price declines while the prices for other forms of generation are stagnant (coal) or rising (nuclear). And there's no sign that the fall in prices is stopping at the moment so their price/value advantage will only grow in future.
Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
#14Alas, this is probably pointless. Some technologies (PV, batteries, wind) have improved by an order of magnitude - and swamp out all other considerations. EDIT: to be clear, i loved the original book, and have re-read it several times over the years.
I don't understand what you mean. Just because it's cheap, how is it suddenly not a consideration anymore whether we want to fill a large share of nature or farmland with PV, batteries, wind? There are more considerations than cost.
Also because one needs to keep in mind that renewable electricity is only about 10% of the energy demand. I sometimes see headlines like "61% of electricity in Germany came from wind last month!" which kind of miss the point, as that means we have only 94% to go. We really need a huge amount of surface area if we want to go for a monoculture of wind and solar power with battery storage.
Edit to be clear: I'm not against wind or solar or batteries. We will most definitely need it and must invest in both building them and innovating them further (in that order of priorities). But I also think we cannot just rely on them solving the whole problem. (Sometimes it is also assumed that this plummeting price curve will continue at the same rate for at least another decade, which I suspect is also not going to materialize.)
Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
#15Alas, this is probably pointless. Some technologies (PV, batteries, wind) have improved by an order of magnitude - and swamp out all other considerations. EDIT: to be clear, i loved the original book, and have re-read it several times over the years.
They've gotten cheaper by an order of magnitude, but their basic physical characteristics haven't changed that much. A big point of the book is to show what it looks like to really deploy this stuff at the necessary scale.
The issue is that we now have real experience of deploying this stuff at scale and integrating intermittent sources into grids. Many countries in Europe have 30% or more of their electricity supplied by intermittent but it turns out that the integration problem isn't as difficult as envisaged. The consensus amongst engineers is that up to about 70% is manageable without any big tech breakthroughs.
Network reliability has actually increased in many European countries despite the increasing reliance on intermittent sources.
The current approach certainly depends on having back-up deployable generation capacity (natural gas) but that was always required for demand following even with thermal sources so most grids already have the infrastructure to incorporate more intermittent generation.
Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
FTBook: > Wind turbines are getting bigger all the time. Do bigger wind turbines change this chapter’s answer? > Chapter B explains. Bigger wind turbines deliver financial economies of scale, but they don’t greatly increase the total power per unit land area, because bigger windmills have to be spaced further apart. A wind farm that’s twice as tall will deliver roughly 30% more power. So, did wind turbine production…
Amazingly, yes! Turbines have gone from 1-2MW to 10-16MW Capacity factors have gone from 20% to 50%-60% Annual additions gave gone from sub-GW to 70GW last year And with turbine spacing of 1km you can actually do stuff with the land in between. On the other hand, transmission projects still take 10-20 years, and new transmission projects are often over booked by 300%-400% before they are even started.
> Turbines have gone from 1-2MW to 10-16MW
Okay, but GP's point was that these bigger turbines need to be spaced further apart instead, so we can place fewer of them. That we could build bigger turbines was not in question I think. Do you happen to know whether the MW per km² increased more than the 30% expected amount that GP cited?
And regarding doing things between the turbines, I wasn't "awake" yet in 2006 so I don't remember how it was then, but were they ever placed so close together that you couldn't have farmland in between turbines? The problem seems to be that people don't want to live near them and find nature filled with wind turbines ugly, not so much that you can't do anything else in between.
(Just to note, I don't find them that ugly (even if, of course, nature would be prettier without them... but that's not an option) and I also didn't find them to be very loud when I visited some nearby wind turbines. Perhaps it's different at night when it's all quiet, but personally I don't think I'd mind living next to one. The blades are a bit scary though, I can't help but imagine the consequences if one of them lets loose... but that's like being afraid of air travel I guess.)
Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
#17Alas, this is probably pointless. Some technologies (PV, batteries, wind) have improved by an order of magnitude - and swamp out all other considerations. EDIT: to be clear, i loved the original book, and have re-read it several times over the years.
Pointless in what sense?
The very reason I'd like to see it updated is to see whether the conclusions change materially when we take into account technological progress.
As far as I understand it, whilst costs may be substantially lower that he envisaged, MacKay argued there are fundamental physical constraints on solar and wind that mean they still are unlikely to be able to provide all our energy needs (in the UK at least, without piping in energy from e.g. the Moroccan desert a la Xlinks).
(Yes, I realise solar can do an awful lot if you're willing to 'go big' and have huge batteries. https://www.robinlinacre.com/fill_country_solar/)
Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've gotten cheaper by an order of magnitude, but their basic physical characteristics haven't changed that much. A big point of the book is to show what it looks like to really deploy this stuff at the necessary scale.
The issue is that we now have real experience of deploying this stuff at scale and integrating intermittent sources into grids. Many countries in Europe have 30% or more of their electricity supplied by intermittent but it turns out that the integration problem isn't as difficult as envisaged. The consensus amongst engineers is that up to about 70% is manageable without any big tech breakthroughs. Network reliability…
Fossil backup isn't tenable past 2050 at the latest.
Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
#19One thing that feels a bit strange to me is that he uses timelines of 1000 years when calculating nuclear reserves. I don’t believe we need a plan for the next 1000 years - think of what our understanding of power generation and transmission was a millennium ago. Assuming that we will still be using the same technologies in 1000 years seems a bit pessimistic to me.
Physics won’t change in a thousand years and it’s very unlikely we’ll find anything more powerful and energy-dense beyond nuclear fission and fusion.
Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
#20Have a look at http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk/ (I was David's Editor for "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air". There's been quite a bit of interest in updating the book, but there are obvious difficulties. If have suggestions, let me know. Niall Mansfield sewtha-2.0@uit.co.uk )
I wonder if this is correct. Setting the nuclear slider to max single-handedly reduces emissions by 30%, decreases energy costs rather than increases, does not require land use change, improves air quality, and also reduces electricity demand by using the waste heat for district heating.
Now add: (1.) electrification of freight transport, (2.) tackling the (relatively) quick wins in industry electrification, and (3.) carbon capture, and one gets to 75% emissions reduction with less than one percent of cost increase and zero behavioural changes (such as eating less meat or flying less often) are required.
I can't find any other combination in this calculator that leaves nature so untouched, requires so little land use, requires no behaviour adjustment, or is so cheap while still reducing emissions meaningfully. (Well, geothermal is nearly as good but then its maximum potential is only a small percentage of energy demand and it's also a bit more expensive per Joule.)
Probably the most unrealistic part is public support for the choice, but in a perfect world? Would it be this simple?!