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Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

briangitt.com

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Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#101

Post by pfdietz »

scythe wrote: post #71

>Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%. A lot of that money was spent on R&D. Tens of billions of [inflation-adjusted] dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project, but the net effect on fossil fuel usage was zero (outside of two cities in Japan). If this is the author's key argume…

> Trillions of [inflation-adjusted] dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project

This is a gross overestimate. It's maybe $40B in 2022 dollars.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#102

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F »

seibelj wrote: post #60
tsjackson wrote: post #13

The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas…

If renewable is so radically better then why did the City of Boston automatically increase everyone's electricity bills by 30%, requiring customers to opt-out? https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2021/01/08/eversource-co... I keep hearing its so much cheaper, but renewables keep requiring dark patterns, more money, more subsidies. If it was so much cheaper it would just win automatically because of the market.

Did you know that electricity prices have exploded in France because EDF (French power company) have lowered their production from 360 to ~300 TWh year over year? That's due to technical problems with the nuclear plants (half of the fleet is still offline).

https://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/espaces-dedies/journalistes/to...

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#103

Post by telchar »

andruby wrote: post #64
tsjackson wrote: post #13

The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas…

> Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage That will work for shifting day & night, but I don't see any feasible energy solutions for summer-winter shifting, or even to bridge weeks with limited sunshine (and/or wind). There are large populations living relatively far from the equator, which see huge differences in daylight during summer & winter. We should try to get as much energy from renewabl…

There are different types of storage with different trade-offs. In my opinion we'll eventually see lower-efficiency but low cost-per-kWh storage like CO2->hydrocarbon storage used for longer-term seasonal or disaster-preparedness storage, while higher-efficiency higher cost-per-kWh or limited-capacity means like battery and pumped hydro will be primarily used for short term day/night storage.

The cost of inefficiency is a function of energy stored, not storage capacity per se, so effectively its cost scales as (storage capacity) * (# of times charged/discharged). Therefore low efficiency isn't particularly expensive for long-term storage.

So maybe we'll see gas turbines continue to provide power that ultimately is sourced from wind and solar via hydrocarbon conversion, but that's perfectly OK since it would be carbon neutral.

The upshot is this is all a reason to be sanguine about solar and wind.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#105

Post by modeless »

elil17 wrote: post #26

Clever writing can let you argue for any viewpoint. That doesn’t make it true. >I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissionsduring the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas. Upgrading coal to gas is a great intermediate step. However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited…

Yeah, I thought this point in the article was off target:

> Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.

Isn't this because we are at the beginning of an exponential curve? Or at least a sigmoid curve. That money wasn't wasted. A growth curve will look like nothing much until suddenly one day it takes over.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#106

Post by layer8 »

jacobsimon wrote: post #54
modeless wrote: post #6

I recently heard (on HN, maybe you did too) about a form of energy that sounds pretty utopian to me. Ultra deep bore geothermal. Geothermal has been around for a long time and has problems like causing earthquakes and needing very specific geological formations that only exist in certain places. But these limitations are mostly due to the fact that we can't bore that deep. Geothermal energy exists under every point o…

Sounds too good to be true! Is geothermal truly renewable? Or is it just abundant enough that it would last us for thousands of years? I wonder if there are other long term side effects of releasing heat from the core.

Read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy#Renewability...

It should probably last until the sun becomes a red giant. (And earth will have lost its atmosphere long before that.)

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#107

Post by throwaway5752 »

https://mobile.twitter.com/BrianGitt/status/1495890938065199...

"#Bitcoin enables value to be sent instantly anywhere in the world 24/7/365 for almost no cost.

Bitcoin mining uses less than 0.1% of global energy & soaks up stranded & wasted energy.

Bitcoin is programmed to become more energy efficient as it grows.

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Oh goodness. Let's look at LinkedIn

"Energy investor & writer briangitt.com Nov 2020 - Present1 year 8 months

San Francisco Bay Area

I help investors in the energy sector maximize financial returns [...]"

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#108

Post by thehappypm »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #96
tsjackson wrote: post #13

The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas…

Storage is a big, unsolved problem. As a quantitative resource on that I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" by the great (and unfortunately recently deceased) David MacKay [1], it's available for free. For a large country like the UK or Germany you need to increase electricity production with a slew rate of 6-8 GW/h in the morning, and decrease it with the same rate in the evening. Currently the…

Does storage matter short term?

If my utility runs a gas generator, wind and solar allow it to run at some fraction of its capacity most of the time. Sure, overnight when there’s little wind, the gas might go full throttle. But that’s still a huge reduction in emissions if most of the time the grid is fully wind/solar.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#109

Post by nightski »

pfdietz wrote: post #86
glitchc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and wind will always suffer from a storage problem. The key to modern power is not potential but throughput and consistency. Modern infrastructure needs x Watts delivered 24/7, shifting to y Watts during on-peak hours and z Watts during off-peak hours. Because of inconsistency, solar and wind will remain non-viable as a primary source of power.

Making solar and wind consistent with various kinds of storage is likely going to be more economical than producing said energy with nuclear power plants. As for comparison to natural gas and such, CO2 taxes will be increased until those are phased out. Still economical? Taxes will be raised until they aren't. We have to leave most of the carbon in the ground.

Economical is one thing, but what about sustainability? Isn't nuclear more sustainable in that it produces less overall waste?

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#110

Post by treeman79 »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #90
EricE wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>natural gas reserves are limited People have been claiming peak oil since the 1930's. Yawn. > So green energy has supported economic and social development through electrification without adding new pollution sources. Except for the manufacture and disposal of these "green" sources. > Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper. Solar and wind are cheaper? Ha! We already have problems recycling blades…

>People have been claiming peak oil since the 1930's. Yawn. Are you claiming fossil fuels aren't limited? Also, oil peak is widely believed to have been reached already https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-world-has-already-passe... If the cost of extraction rises due to oil and gas being more and more difficult to access (because it's limited, obviously), you could claim demand has peaked but it would still be due t…

There have been articles for many decades now that we are reaching the peak of what can be pulled out of the ground. That we will simply run out of oil.

This is a lie. There is plenty of supply.

This is the argument op is making.

Whether to burn it or not is a different question.

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