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“Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

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Re: “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

#41

Post by brnt »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #8
fny wrote: post #6

I hate to say it, but if energy prices keep rising this perspective is going to be disposed of rapidly. High energy prices mean rampant inflation and social unrest. With crude and natural gas prices skyrocketing, developing nations will again turn to coal as an energy source. Developed nations will return (see Germany) to coal as a heating source. Green energy will be thrown to the wayside for the sake of social stab…

You know what else causes social unrest? Starvation induced by crop failure. We’re already seeing the first signs with recent extreme weather and the megadrought. Wait just a short few years until it really gets moving.

Syria collapsed due to crop failure (3 or 4 years in a row). Thats a decade ago now.

Re: “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

#42

Post by Juliate »

Guthur wrote: post #40
woodruffw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might have been true 20 years ago, but the economic envelope has changed: solar and wind power are both consistently cheaper than fossil fuels. This holds true even in developing nations[1], which means that countries that are still building out their initial power generation and distribution systems stand to benefit from skipping a costly transition entirely (not to mention eliminating a geopolitical lever.) [1…

Solar and wind are strategically untenable. I can harden, concentrate and layer my defenses around dense energy production facilities. I can also concentrate my remedial assets to bring them back online asap. With the solar in particular it's one cluster munition away from massive degradation.

In times of scarcity and uncertainty, strategy becomes a lesser focus than just survival.

It works the same with money: when you barely have what’s necessary to live, you don’t have the reserve to invest/save strategically to improve your situation, and you don’t necessarily have the peace of mind required to think about it.

Re: “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

#43

Post by mbgerring »

tsimionescu wrote: post #37
jlmorton wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important point to be made is that as electric vehicles take off, we'll soon start to find ourselves with an avalanche of worn batteries that no longer adequately support EVs, but work just fine as grid storage. There are 280 million vehicles in the US. If fifty million of those were electric vehicles, then ten years later we'd have enough already-produced batteries to power the entire United States overnight. The…

Do you really believe it is feasible to collect 50 million used car batteries in various states of wear and connect them to the grid while expecting this to be a stable solution to solar power during the night?

You could probably get a couple million in VC money to try it. Somebody probably should!

Re: “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

#44

Post by mbgerring »

londons_explore wrote: post #39
tsimionescu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really believe it is feasible to collect 50 million used car batteries in various states of wear and connect them to the grid while expecting this to be a stable solution to solar power during the night?

If the power market is fully 'open', then yes, it will happen. All it takes is for a car scrap dealer to realise that for every EV battery he grabs out and hooks up to the grid he'll earn $200/year. Before long, every scrap dealer will be doing it to every car. However, I suspect that small players will be barred from the electricity markets via mountains of bureaucracy and certification, so that might not happen.

You can come work on the problem of opening up the electricity market to small players today: https://www.arcadia.com/careers

Re: “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

#45

Post by brnt »

ben_w wrote: post #12
barney54 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not valid to compare the levelized cost of non-dispatchable sources of generation like wind and solar and dispatachable sources of generation like coal and nuclear. It’s an apples to oranges comparison, unless you some storage costs to the wind and solar. In that study you see there is overlap between coal and PV systems and batteries.

Only for rooftop batteries. The estimate for utility scale batteries is entirely lower than coal.

Afaik thats one of the challenges: there is no such thing as utility scale batteries. Nothing that stores a summers worth of PV and releases it in winter.

Re: “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

#46

Post by black_puppydog »

Guthur wrote: post #40
woodruffw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might have been true 20 years ago, but the economic envelope has changed: solar and wind power are both consistently cheaper than fossil fuels. This holds true even in developing nations[1], which means that countries that are still building out their initial power generation and distribution systems stand to benefit from skipping a costly transition entirely (not to mention eliminating a geopolitical lever.) [1…

Solar and wind are strategically untenable. I can harden, concentrate and layer my defenses around dense energy production facilities. I can also concentrate my remedial assets to bring them back online asap. With the solar in particular it's one cluster munition away from massive degradation.

This seems ridiculous to me. Are you suggesting it'd be easier to disrupt at scale thousands and thousands of turbines, rather than one nuclear plant?

Re: “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

#47

Post by tsimionescu »

londons_explore wrote: post #39
tsimionescu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really believe it is feasible to collect 50 million used car batteries in various states of wear and connect them to the grid while expecting this to be a stable solution to solar power during the night?

If the power market is fully 'open', then yes, it will happen. All it takes is for a car scrap dealer to realise that for every EV battery he grabs out and hooks up to the grid he'll earn $200/year. Before long, every scrap dealer will be doing it to every car. However, I suspect that small players will be barred from the electricity markets via mountains of bureaucracy and certification, so that might not happen.

That doesn't really scale. The power grid needs to be reliable, and there needs to be some idea of how much capacity you actually have.

If people simply hook up an unknown number of batteries of unknown capacities in unknown spaces, how can you rely on the resulting power grid? How can you plan extensions?

Not to mention high capacity batteries are huge fire risks, especially worn out high capacity batteries. Can you imagine how much water you'd need to put out a 200 car battery lithium fire? Iw would be truly irresponsible to let scrapyards build makeshift power storage stations like this.

Re: “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

#48

Post by londons_explore »

mbgerring wrote: post #44
londons_explore wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the power market is fully 'open', then yes, it will happen. All it takes is for a car scrap dealer to realise that for every EV battery he grabs out and hooks up to the grid he'll earn $200/year. Before long, every scrap dealer will be doing it to every car. However, I suspect that small players will be barred from the electricity markets via mountains of bureaucracy and certification, so that might not happen.

You can come work on the problem of opening up the electricity market to small players today: https://www.arcadia.com/careers

Alas, I see no way they'll be successful, because the 'old players' who need disrupting own all the electricity cables and get to set the rules.

Re: “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

#49

Post by tsimionescu »

mbgerring wrote: post #43
tsimionescu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really believe it is feasible to collect 50 million used car batteries in various states of wear and connect them to the grid while expecting this to be a stable solution to solar power during the night?

You could probably get a couple million in VC money to try it. Somebody probably should!

To me it seems pretty obvious from first principles that it can't work.

It's also not something that you can just try out. I'm sure it will "work" in some sense at small scales - you can probably buy a few worn batteries off a used car and connect them to the grid and perhaps make a profit.

But the problem is that this can't be relied on by a whole country as a solution to ensuring power generation. This type of storage is by definition "best-effort" : you don't know at what rate you'll be able to increase storage capacity (how many car batteries will be retired and with how much remaining capacity?), you don't know how much capacity you actually have (what is the actual remaining capacity of these batteries, and what is the risk each will malfunction in some way in the next charge/discharge cycle?).

Not to mention, the risk of fires while amassing worn-out lithium batteries in close proximity to each other is gigantic, and there is no simple way of putting out a lithium battery fire. It could even be that this alone is enough to make such an operation unprofitable when accounting for insurance costs, even if it were allowed to run and connect to the grid.

Re: “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

#50

Post by tsimionescu »

kodah wrote: post #38
tsimionescu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really believe it is feasible to collect 50 million used car batteries in various states of wear and connect them to the grid while expecting this to be a stable solution to solar power during the night?

If you were rich enough to buy a Tesla wouldn't you try to talk the government into buying your battery off of you?

You might, but that's not the question, it's the other side that's more important.

Will any state be willing to rely on used car batteries as a critical component of their power grid?

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