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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

#191

Post by fluoridation »

Gehlitio wrote: post #144

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…

Nonsense. Uranium is plentiful in Earth's crust. There's enough to last for the foreseeable future. Obviously it's not infinite, but that's not the same as "there's not enough of it".

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

#192

Post by 77pt77 »

pfdietz wrote: post #152
nightski wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The waste produced by a renewable energy system will be small (and of the same kind) compared to the waste produced by industrial society as a whole. If the renewable energy system isn't sustainable because of waste, then neither will be that industrial society, even if it were nuclear powered. To be fair, waste isn't really the issue with nuclear power either.

> waste isn't really the issue with nuclear power either.

So what is?

Because you're working overtime here against it without giving any reasons whatsoever.

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

#193

Post by scythe »

pfdietz wrote: post #101
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.

Thanks for the correction. I will add that the equivalent cost basis (i.e. the expected cost of carrying out a similar project today) is probably higher than inflation due to Baumol's cost disease and increased regulation.

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

#194

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

vkou wrote: post #170
thehappypm wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re letting perfect be the enemy of good. How do we get to zero? First cut in half. Then cut the second half. Waiting for a perfect solution today when there’s incremental progress to be made is foolish

That's not going to happen, though. What is going to happen is we'll invest trillions of dollars into natgas infrastructure and then go all whoopsie-daisies-we-can't-afford-to-just-let-it-sit-idle, and we'll be permanently locked into it. Temporary hacks have an odd way of becoming permanent features, especially when mind-blowing amounts of money are on the line.

That's exactly why you don't do that kind of temporary hack. Temporary hacks come in a variety of colors.

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

#195

Post by IX-103 »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #89

So many comments here are acting like this guy is just some random Substacker pundit type opining on topics he knows little about. If you read his background it sure sounds like he has a lot of experience in energy policy and economics. I’m far more inclined to believe his analysis over a gaggle of random HN commenters.

Yep, he definitely has strong contacts within the energy sector. From his postings it seems like he's shaken ~checkbooks~hands with them on numerous occasions.

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

#196

Post by pessimizer »

FreqSep wrote: post #82
api wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Clever writing can let you argue for any viewpoint. More people should participate in a debate club. A common assignment is to argue eloquently for a position you don't believe in, allowing you to see how eloquent sophistry can be placed in service of any position. When it comes to technical questions like energy it should be logic, math, and real data or go home.

> When it comes to technical questions like energy it should be logic, math, and real data or go home. If those questions have real implications for human beings, you need to consider more than just the technicals.

Ignoring the "technicals" when considering questions that have real implications for human beings is usually an rhetorical excuse given to focus on particular implications and ignore other, less favorable ones.

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

#197

Post by hairytrog »

fghorow wrote: post #24
323 wrote: post #14

During the current situation I learned an interesting thing about nuclear power plants: if you bomb them, the amount of radioactivity that will be released into atmosphere because of waste products storage on site is vastly larger than the one that would be released by a nuclear explosion in a random place. Because unfortunately most nuclear waste is stored on site because of the NIMBY problem. So every nuclear power…

Long term nuclear storage is one problem. Who pays for the decommissioning is another one. In many cases it turns out to be the taxpayer.

This is not true. Every power plant that produces waste must pay money into the waste repository fund totaling nearly $50B - which is probably overkill for building a long term facility by a factor of 5 or more.

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

#198

Post by dpierce9 »

arcticbull wrote: post #162
dpierce9 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transmissio…

> Solar panels don’t waste sunlight and have no input costs. Not exactly, the point is that building and installing solar panels consumes resources and physical space. A solar plant with 100% efficient panels is 1/10th the size of today's solar plant, and as I mentioned, to generate comparable amounts of power to conventional sources requires huge amounts of landmass. Plus input materials. And it has to be replaced e…

Not sure why I am responding since you moved the goal posts from operating efficiency to lifecycle efficiency but even there you are wrong.

To your point re: land use, this is why I said rooftop solar. The roof is already there, the structure is already there, there is zero additional land use and very little opportunity cost for the space. Further, the land use for coal is much broader than the plant area because of mining, transit, and waste heat management. There was a recent post on HN comparing total land usage by prime mover.

Solar is only deadlier per unit than coal if you ignore substantial local health effects that aren’t priced in.[0]

Your implied rate of degradation to go from 20-10 is more than 7%. Even 15-10 is more than 2.5% and again that is an absurd number that contradicts observed performance. You misunderstand what degradation means in this context, to your point.

[0] https://surgery.duke.edu/news/despite-studies-health-effects...

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

#199

Post by arcticbull »

dpierce9 wrote: post #198
arcticbull wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Solar panels don’t waste sunlight and have no input costs. Not exactly, the point is that building and installing solar panels consumes resources and physical space. A solar plant with 100% efficient panels is 1/10th the size of today's solar plant, and as I mentioned, to generate comparable amounts of power to conventional sources requires huge amounts of landmass. Plus input materials. And it has to be replaced e…

Not sure why I am responding since you moved the goal posts from operating efficiency to lifecycle efficiency but even there you are wrong. To your point re: land use, this is why I said rooftop solar. The roof is already there, the structure is already there, there is zero additional land use and very little opportunity cost for the space. Further, the land use for coal is much broader than the plant area because of…

I never said anything about coal, and I updated the degradation numbers per your suggestion, but the degradation numbers themselves come from NREL. I think you're confusing the derating due to temperature with degradation. They are additive.

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

#200

Post by ktpecot »

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…

Methane has roughly twice the energy density of coal.
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