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

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

#141

Post by thomasmg »

ShockTohp wrote: post #115
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…

But solar and wind are no where near sustainable, or efficient. They are extremely fragile and have serious detrimental effects on their local environment. Nuclear is the best option and gas is a massive improvement. The whole point of this article is that we are chasing a utopian ideal instead of actually fixing the problems. Once again, perfect is being the enemy of improvement.

Solar + wind are actually fixing problems. They are not perfect, but as you said, perfect is the enemy of improvement. Solar + wind are cheaper than almost anything else, specially nuclear. They have much less detrimental effects to the local environment than fossile fuels (specially coal). Yes, they are not guaranteed, so you need a grid (which you have), and some batteries (for short-term storage; like batteries of electric cars) + pumped storage (for medium term storage) + maybe some other storage like hydrogen / ammonia.

Nuclear is way too expensive, specially if you account for risks of disasters (no insurance company will insure them, so the risk is on the population).

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

#142

Post by tgflynn »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #121
tgflynn wrote: post #100

> But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions during the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas. Can someone explain the chemistry of this ? I thought perfect combustion produces CO2 and that burning natural gas is closer to that ideal than what you get with coal (where you also get CO and probably lots of other stuff). So I would expect that producing a given amount of energy by bur…

From a very simplistic "high school chemistry" point of view, coal is mostly carbon, natural gas is mostly hydrogen. Burning coal will produce lots of carbon dioxide (and other nasties because of things like sulphur compounds but let's ignore that for now) and very little water. Burning methane will produce lots of water and carbon dioxide.

Hmm, I'd always assumed that most of the energy from burning natural has came from the oxidation of the carbon, not the hydrogen, but maybe that's not the case.

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

#143

Post by CyanBird »

TheBlight wrote: post #127
ZetaZero wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are solar and wind not sustainable or efficient? We've just recently hit the 20% mark here in the US. I'm all for a smart blend of nuclear/wind/solar/etc to achieve clean energy https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/us-hits-a-record-20-of-electr...

How does solar work in the winter in northern latitudes?

Most of the planet is not "winter in northern latitudes"

Indeed, most of the world is rather sunny and "not" located in "northern latitudes"

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

#144

Post by Gehlitio »

Not only is the blog post black and white, the comments here are similar.

We have not leveraged yet the potential solar and wind have. They are easy to build easy to understand, make you self sufficient and are now the cheapest option from all.

In parallel there are plenty of countries who have lots of space and uran and could do more nuclear (ignoring the storage issue).

And geothermal is a good option in plenty of countries as well.

But funny enough people still think that nuclear IS THE solution while ignoring that the thorium reactor is still not viable, that we don't have enough uran and that they are highly dependent on water for cooling which becomes a big problem in the summer for plenty of countries.

Let's finally stop talking about our future energy mix and trying to do the best option for were you are.

We need to get a ton of energy changed from high co2 production to the lowest possible very fast.

And btw. Whoever this dude is he is probably not someone who would be able or allowed to build a nuclear reactor so his best option is probably to still be in the solar business.

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

#145

Post by throw10920 »

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…

> Upgrading coal to gas is a great intermediate step. However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited. Plus, many countries have already done it.

I don't see the author as arguing that we should all switch to natural gas.

Rather, I believe that they're trying to illustrate what they view to be a idealistic flawed thinking pattern ("utopian energy" or "green energy maximalism" or whatever you want to call it) and calling for a more rigorous and empirical engineering-like approach where a much larger trade-space is considered - even if that new approach leads to exactly the same conclusion/solution.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by teachrdan »

Splendor wrote: post #117
teachrdan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear waste repositories are not immune to accidents. Putting all our nuclear waste in one place may not be the solution we're looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#20...

I don't remember saying it was. Did you reply to the wrong comment?

My reading of your comment was that you were piggybacking on the above:

> Build a few big underground atomic bunkers around the world and store the long term waste there until we can find a solution (or leave it there).

And your comment specifically mentioned Yucca mountain, which was indeed planned to be a big underground repository for nuclear waste, and therefore vulnerable to the same type of catastrophic failure I referred to above. Am I missing something?

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

#149

Post by jdvh »

modeless wrote: post #105
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 o…

It’s by no means a given that wind/solar will be a major source of energy for the long term. If we’re lucky advancements in wind/solar and energy storage will make it a big part of our future energy supply. If we’re unlucky we’ve spent many trillions and made very little headway towards a more sustainable future.

Maybe the solution will turn out to be molten salt nuclear along with synthetic oil and carbon capture. Maybe something else altogether. Who knows, it’s still early.

I don’t think we should presume solar/wind will someday take over, and I’d like to see an “all of the above” energy strategy instead.

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

#150

Post by dpierce9 »

arcticbull wrote: post #133
ZetaZero wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are solar and wind not sustainable or efficient? We've just recently hit the 20% mark here in the US. I'm all for a smart blend of nuclear/wind/solar/etc to achieve clean energy https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/us-hits-a-record-20-of-electr...

They're not efficient at turning sunlight into power - somewhere around 20% depending on the technology, which continues to improve albeit slowly. This efficiency goes down about 2.5% in the first year and another [edit](0.5%-1%) in each subsequent year [1]. These numbers are all at 25C, which is significantly lower than a black solar panel is going to be out in the sun - which reduces its efficiency a further 10-25%…

This is some bad reasoning. Solar efficiency is very different from say engine efficiency. A very efficient combustion engine is 35% efficient meaning it wastes 65% of the energy in the input fuel. Solar panels don’t waste sunlight and have no input costs. Rooftop solar turns 20% of something that would have been 100% wasted into high grade energy. A very efficient coal power plant is 45% efficient before transmission losses. That means more than half the energy in the coal is wasted. Solar wastes nothing.

Your numbers on solar panel degradation are also incorrect based on my experience in the industry. They do degrade but not at that at 7+% per year for ten years.

Edit: corrected degradation amount

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