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“Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects

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

#51

Post by londons_explore »

tsimionescu wrote: post #47
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.

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…

There are plenty of grids with wide deployment of community solar, which are also unknown-capacity, unknown-delivery. They work because in aggregate they are predictable. The demand side of most power grids is the same - you don't need to tell anyone that you want to switch on the oven, but if everyone in the world switched on their oven at the same time, the worlds electricity grid would collapse.

At scale, everything becomes more predictable, because individual failures no longer have much impact.

Battery operators also will configure their systems to make money, so they will in fact have a big incentive to buy power when it's cheap and sell when expensive, so they will form a strong stabilising force. (unlike say solar, where operators don't track the price and just inject whatever power they produce, even if the spot price of electricity might occasionally go negative, and when it is negative, there is unconstrained overproduction)

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

#52

Post by tsimionescu »

woodruffw wrote: post #13
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…

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…

Unfortunately, solar and wind and even nuclear do almost nothing to alleviate the impact that oil price has on the price of goods.

BEVs are far from being ready to be a part of the goods distribution market, even by land - power/weight is still far too low. Electrical trains are useful, but building up new rail infrastructure has been neglected and takes a long time. Even if BEVs were viable, battery production is limited, and electrifying the transportation industry would directly compete with increasing renewables on the power grid and the need to expand storage capacity to do so. The price of batteries would sky-rocket and cause inflation this way.

Secondly, oil and other fossil fuels are used for their chemical properties in a large amount of industries - plastics and fertilizer being the most obvious. The cost of oil going up significantly directly impacts all of these industries. Some uses could be replaced with cheap power generation (e.g. H2 production through electrolysis instead of natural gas breakdown), but that requires a massive expansion of the power grid.

So even if we were able to keep power from the grid cheap through renewables, fossil fuel prices exploding would still rapidly increase inflation, probably to unacceptable levels.

Of course, that still doesn't mean we should drill more. The right answer, given the unprecedented threat of global warming, is neither to increase oil supply nor to hope that increasing renewable will be enough. The right answer is to decrease demand - stop producing many unnecessary goods and burying them in plastic then shipping them halfway across the world. Ration the existing oil supply to the highest impact industries, and let other industries replace it.

Don't allow industry to keep using expensive oil while shunting the price off on consumers.

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

#53

Post by tsimionescu »

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…

While I agree with you that this is what will most likely happen, I don't think it's the only possible alternative.

The best solution to keep both short and long term in mind is to regulate prices on basic goods to prevent the worse social impacts, while allowing commodities to explode in price. This should greatly encoyrage all industries that can get rid of fossil fuels from their supply chains to do so, but also reduce overall consumption of unnecessary items and thus of fossil fuels. If the plastic toy you were importing from China suddenly costs 50$ instead of 5$, perhaps you simply won't buy it, so it won't get produced and wrapped in even more plastic and shipped halfway across the world.

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

#54

Post by belorn »

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.

A few weeks ago there was a link paper by an green energy investment advisor firm posted on HN. It displayed the economics pretty clear. Depending on location, a battery with capacity up to 6 hours can be economical viable as long they get a full discharge (ie they sell all the energy) each day at peak price and can charge when the price is at the bottom. It depend in location, how big the difference is between bottom and peak price, and how long that the price sits at each price point.

For wind all those assumptions are wrong and thus won't work. You do not get a daily discharge where you can sell all the energy, you don't get a significant price change each day where you can utilize the price difference, and the capacity needed is a few orders of magnitude greater. Green hydrogen is one of the bigger bets people are hoping on, and right now it only cost several times more than nuclear. Except rather than using nuclear countries are burning fossil fuels because that is cheaper, and thus coal.

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

#55

Post by yourusername »

shadowgovt wrote: post #21
guerrilla wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This crisis. > Macro trends are what matter. No, it's not all that matters to everyone that can't afford to pay these skyrocketing prices because there's no way to keep up with demand other than reverting to coal. The OP is about social unrest and burning coal now not long-term trends. There is no long term if everything collapses before that. Germany is already burning more coal right now because alternatives cannot…

Is burning coal now even an option? Unless there's some significant strategic coal reserves that I'm unaware of, you'll be dealing with the issue that a lot of the coal extraction infrastructure has been decommissioned over the past decades due to market implosion. There's a lot more to extract and coal from a mine than putting a pick in the wall. > and we'll outbid everyone else into starvation for what there is...…

Coal extraction infrastructure hasn't been shut down in Germany. The open pit lignite strip mines are still swallowing up new towns and forests.

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

#56

Post by ben_w »

brnt wrote: post #45
ben_w wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s kinda why Tesla is doing what it’s doing. I’m not sure the exact production, but it looks like nearly 4 GWh in fixed storage last year, and at least 50 GWh (0.93 megacars * 54 kWh smallest battery) in their cars required the ability to rapidly make factories that can make batteries that could also be used in grid storage (I’m assuming making the batteries is the hard part of both electric cars and grid storage, if I’m wrong about that it breaks my argument).

(And inter-season storage is too high a threshold: not many people are living in the artic/antarctic circles away from grids connecting them to places that still get some sun even in winter).

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

#57

Post by ben_w »

belorn wrote: post #54
ben_w wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A few weeks ago there was a link paper by an green energy investment advisor firm posted on HN. It displayed the economics pretty clear. Depending on location, a battery with capacity up to 6 hours can be economical viable as long they get a full discharge (ie they sell all the energy) each day at peak price and can charge when the price is at the bottom. It depend in location, how big the difference is between botto…

(Wind + batteries) wasn’t something I saw in what I linked to, so in this sub-thread I’m focussed on (PV + batteries) even though the link said the LCOE of onshore wind (by itself) was lower than that of coal.

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

#58

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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?

In some alternate dimension where wind power didn't exist, yeah, that could easily work.

In this dimension, EVs that charge during the midday solar peak and overnight from wind will make an important contribution to rolling out reneweables, cheaper energy and ditching oil and gas.

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

#59

Post by qwertox »

I was interested in knowing the reason for Saudi Arabia's high emissions and found a site [0] which has information which could explain it a bit. Some information, like the one from Saudi Arabia, is relatively outdated (2018), but informative nonetheless.

[0] https://www.climate-transparency.org/countries/africa/saudi-...

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

#60

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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 think that regulatory capture of the government by rich, individual Tesla owners is a key energy policy concern? That seems outlandish.
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