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Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)

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Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)

#111

Post by pfdietz »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #101
sdenton4 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also, peak uranium : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium 2017 known supply is enough for 130 years at current usage (supplying about 10% of global energy). Each doubling of production halves the peak timeline. Basically no one expects discovery to outpace usage. So, at best, nuclear is a stop gap and part of a different long term solution. Which could be fine! But the extremely low LCOE and fast build ti…

There's more to it than that. The long-term plan for nuclear fission always has been and remains to use breeder reactors after we have ~1000 GW-scale non-breeder reactors in place. Because they can utilize the majority isotope of uranium (U-238) and Thorium rather than just the small natural amount of fissile U-235, breeders enable us to make 100% of the world's primary energy for about 4 billion years (e.g. roughly…

Which means that nuclear proponents should use the cost of breeder reactors with reprocessing, not burner reactors with a once-through fuel cycle, when calculating the cost of nuclear energy. This will likely increase the cost of energy from nuclear.

Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)

#112

Post by KennyBlanken »

ghouse wrote: post #57
credit_guy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Utility scale solar PV [...] is now the cheapest form of new energy to deploy. I've been hearing this claim for a few years now, and I took it at face value, until a few days ago. I was having a discussion with a friend and told him that PV's share of electricity generation must by quite high, and then I checked the EIA website [1], and it turns out only 2.3% of the electricity comes from PV, while about 40% come f…

Only recently did PV becomes the least-cost source of new electric generation.[0] And new utility-scale projects take 2-7 years to develop. For example, TX is anticipated to add 10 GW of new solar generation in 2022.[1] As I write this (while the sun is up, noon in TX), the current demand in TX is 38 GW.[2] Source: Have been developing solar power plants since 2008. [0] The tipping point for solar is different in dif…

Hijacking your comment to say that the fine print in the EIA chart cited by the person you're replying to says they're only accounting for new and utility scale generation. Utility installs dwarf residential, but if you add all non-utility generation it's quite a bit more substantial, and it was 'only' until early to mid 2010's that utility installations outpaced other installs.

According to an industry group, 20GW of solar was installed last year (3.1GW residential), representing 43% of new generation capacity: https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight...

According to EIA, new wind generation in 2020 was a bit over 14GW.

Walking back from 20GW being 43%, that means in 2020 we had 46GW installed overall, so wind was 30%.

By any measure, 73% of new generation being renewable is pretty impressive. Worldwide the number of solar installs looks almost logarithmic.

Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)

#113

Post by pfdietz »

algo_trader wrote: post #8
phreeza wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be fantastic to turn the chapters into Templates where one has to plug in the relevant parameters for a country and see the calculations for that country.

And multiple PhD students have done so! For example, the Stanford/Jacobson study on powering the world with wind/solar/water. Some results were famously silly, such as filing Finland with solar panels, or adding the cost of nuclear war to nuclear reactors. Jacobson sued other academics then backed down. The point is, 5-10 years on, these models turned out to be over pessimistic! Australia doesn't need fancy modelling…

> Conversely we still dont really know how to meet the last 5% of outlier energy demand scenarios.

Hydrogen w. combustion turbines. When a simple cycle turbine power plant is 5% of the cost of a nuclear plant of the same output, we can back up the entire grid and not have it be too expensive.

Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)

#114

Post by KennyBlanken »

wcoenen wrote: post #62
credit_guy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Utility scale solar PV [...] is now the cheapest form of new energy to deploy. I've been hearing this claim for a few years now, and I took it at face value, until a few days ago. I was having a discussion with a friend and told him that PV's share of electricity generation must by quite high, and then I checked the EIA website [1], and it turns out only 2.3% of the electricity comes from PV, while about 40% come f…

Wind was cheaper. The levellized cost of electricity from solar has only recently dropped below that of wind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Yep, wind was the cheapest form of energy starting around mid 2010's.

I think wind's problem is that wind installations get massive pushback in a lot of communities. I wish I were joking when I said a turbine near me was permanently shut down after a federal judge declared the plaintiff's objections for health reasons to be valid.

The court fight triggered a poison pill town bylaw that a turbine inactive for X amount of time has to be removed. All the idiots had to do was get an injunction and then tie the whole thing up in court for long enough.

Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)

#115

Post by pfdietz »

lucb1e wrote: post #33
bryanlarsen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supplying the US using solely solar power would only require 20,000 square miles of land. We have more land in parking lots. The battery land requirements are approximately 1 square mile. And wind requirements are effectively 0 since wind can very easily co-exist with other land usages.

That's fair; I'm mainly looking at this from a western European perspective. If you're from a more southernly country with large unused deserts... that tends to help.

If Europe doesn't have the land for cheap energy, industry will move elsewhere.

Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)

#116

Post by smaddox »

chess_buster wrote: post #71
cbmuser wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nearly 100% effective power generation from matter via hawking radiation from a nano-sized black hole that was grown from one formed in the upper atmosphere via ultra-energetic cosmic rays.

What could possibly go wrong :-D

Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)

#117

Post by SamBam »

cbmuser wrote: post #19
542458 wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Sure, but fusion wasn't a part of that calculus, and in 1000 years it absolutely may be.

Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)

#118

Post by AtlasBarfed »

credit_guy wrote: post #53
mcot2 wrote: post #36

It sounds like this should have a date attached to it as the numbers are quite outdated for todays world. This did have some good data for back when it was written of course. * An efficient EV will do less than 12kWh/100km these days. * Utility scale solar pv cost declines have been dramatic. It is now the cheapest form of new energy to deploy. * Developments in deep water off-shore wind have led to much larger turbi…

> Utility scale solar PV [...] is now the cheapest form of new energy to deploy. I've been hearing this claim for a few years now, and I took it at face value, until a few days ago. I was having a discussion with a friend and told him that PV's share of electricity generation must by quite high, and then I checked the EIA website [1], and it turns out only 2.3% of the electricity comes from PV, while about 40% come f…

Because it has only recently become cheaper to invest in solar rather than "ride out" existing coal investments.

I believe that the natural gas generators are still not at the "ditch as soon as you can" moment that hit coal hit a few years ago, and even then there's only so much solar being made right now.

The other factor is that solar manufacturing isn't being full-bore developed because as soon as you get a plant up, you're at risk of a paradigm shift beating you out. The promise of perovskites might be holding back silicon panel investment.

The Chinese, for as much as US media has been portraying them as a big bad, did a massive solid for the world in pushing solar panel manufacturing and battery manufacturing from the top down.

Granted they wanted to push everyone out/monopolize manufacturing, but who cares WHY, the net effect is to change our possible future for decarbonization. The US would never do that with the dominance of petroleum lobbying.

South Korea should also get a fair amount of credit for supporting Samsung in this direction.

Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)

#119

Post by tinco »

7952 wrote: post #61
lucb1e wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

But why is it important to optimise MW per km2? Seems like premature optimization of something that is not the bottleneck.

The goal of the book is not to find quick wins in reducing CO2 output, the goal is to give a complete overview over what is necessary to achieve carbon neutrality. And MW/km2 might be a bottleneck if we're to replace all oil & gas with electric power. If you read the book you can actually see what percentage of the seas around the UK would have to be fully covered, to achieve carbon neutrality. If that number really is outdated by an order of magnitude, perhaps MW/km2 is not a bottleneck.

Re: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)

#120

Post by spodek »

barathr wrote: post #49

I highly recommend Prof. Tom Murphy's new book "Energy and Human Ambitions" (freely available as well) that is sort of a deeper dive into some of the questions that Mackay explored: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m

I came here to write about Tom's book. I consider it Mackay's successor and called it The Science Book of the Decade in my review of it. He wrote it for non-science undergraduates.

Here's the review: https://joshuaspodek.com/the-science-book-of-the-decade-ener...

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