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Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

economist.com

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Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#171

Post by strken »

pstrateman wrote: post #96
radicalbyte wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was skeptical until I saw how good my sun panels work. We only have installed about 50% of capacity and they generate enough to cover 120% of our annual electric usage. Everything here is electric except the heating and I work from home all day (with an energy-drinking PC set-up). I live in The Netherlands - the same panels will generate about 2x as much energy a year if they were in Spain or North Africa. I wouldn…

You might be generating 120% but what happens if everybody installs? Do you have storage installed to smooth out the dead hours? Unfortunately the answer is that you need days of storage for solar and wind to be anywhere near 100% of the energy mix. The cost of that is astronomical.

What do you mean by astronomical? My back-of-the-napkin estimate is that you'd pay about $8k a year in battery costs to supply a household ($20k 18kWh battery system lasting 5 years, then double it).

Obviously that's missing commercial power, utility-scale storage, heavy industry, electric vehicle charging, etc., but it seems like factoring those in would give you a big yet feasible cost, especially if storage gets cheaper over the next decades.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#172

Post by mlindner »

thelastgallon wrote: post #118
pstrateman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be generating 120% but what happens if everybody installs? Do you have storage installed to smooth out the dead hours? Unfortunately the answer is that you need days of storage for solar and wind to be anywhere near 100% of the energy mix. The cost of that is astronomical.

A comment like this comes up in every discussion of renewables and needs to die. We don't need separate stationery storage, enormous storage capacity will be free as car batteries. EVs will have 17 times the battery capacity of stationary storage systems by 2030 [1]. By the time we completely transition to EVs, it will be 100s of times of storage. All this storage capacity is available at zero cost, people buy cars a…

Car batteries are not going to be a substantial source of grid energy. You need those for driving and additionally the battery chemistries used in cars isn't optimized for the kind of loading that a grid would put on it.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#173

Post by api »

eloff wrote: post #100
pixl97 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the new question then becomes, can we make enough solar panels for everyone without destroying the Earth?

Yes. Quite easily, the materials are common. They require energy to process and ship, but that does not have to come from fossil fuels. I'm confident we'll get there. There will be lots of mitigating the damage from climate change, because that train wreck is still in motion. But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century.

The biggest risk to this is that efforts to decarbonize will lead to cost of living increases that disproportionately impact the poor and working class, leading to a populist uprising against these measures and an enthusiastic return to burning coal. (Coal remains the cheapest way to generate energy in most places.)

We have already seen a little bit of this. It's only been a preview of what a more serious revolt would look like.

It's important to realize that anything that increases energy costs is regressive. The wealthy can afford these cost increases and their lifestyle is barely impacted. For the poor and working class increases in these costs can be absolutely devastating.

The upper classes can also afford EVs, solar panels, batteries, and can very often telework at least some of the time. Working classes are stuck with older technology that is more expensive to fuel and generally have to commute to work jobs in person with no option for remote work.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#174

Post by weberer »

ceras wrote: post #152
weberer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A typical American in the suburbs certainly does not go on a highway to go to the supermarket or park. Those are all local amenities. I know some regions have problems with sidewalk coverage like Florida and way out west, but the suburbs are perfectly walkable anywhere in the northeast. Cities less so due to crime. And you definitely wouldn't have highway traffic in the suburbs, that's more of a downtown thing.

> suburbs are perfectly walkable anywhere in the northeast. Cities less so due to crime This isn't true. I've lived in and visited plenty of northeastern suburbs and cities. The suburbs are largely not walkable: no sidewalk, long distances, and as a result basically nobody walks to any shop. The cities are walkable and with a large amount of residents actually walking.

I don't know where you lived, but everywhere around Philadelphia/NYC/Boston had sidewalks unless you were way out in the sticks. I lived within a 10 minute walk to the closest supermarket, and 5 minutes to the closest Wawa. You'd see people jogging and walking their dogs at all hours of the day. Conversely, in North Philadelphia the general advice was to stay off the streets after dark unless you were in a car.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#175

Post by Mvandenbergh »

marcosdumay wrote: post #142
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more pertinent question is possibly can we make enough storage to smooth the supply sufficiently to allow adoption of solar as the principal electricity supply technology. Seems like we're going to need to become more diurnal and more seasonal in our approach to industry? Make hay while the sun shines, as the idiom says.

Sodium-sulfur batteries are made of two very abundant elements, where the other active elements are mostly aluminum oxides and the structural elements are iron and carbon. Hydrogen is hard to store, but there is sufficient space for satisfying most of our needs by itself. Hydrogen generators are also mostly made of iron, carbon, and aluminum, or alternatively a lot of organic chemicals and aluminum. Pumped hydro has…

Hydrogen is extremely easy to store underground. It is expensive to make (i.e. inefficient and capital intensive) and to move around with compressors but actually storing it if you have access to salt domes and depleted gas fields is not hard at all.

If the thesis is that electrical energy will be hyper abundant 80% of the time and deeply scarce the remaining 20% (which is the case if you use only solar and wind) and that periods of scarcity are correlated - so a "bad" day is likely to be preceded and followed by other "bad" days, then large scale hydrogen storage is quite a good match to get you through your worst week.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#176

Post by ericpauley »

radicalbyte wrote: post #75
anemoiac wrote: post #35

I'll be casting my vote with the skeptics for this one. That said, even if economic activity was fully decoupled from emissions, Earth's environmental problems would remain overwhelming. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures. My inner cynic sees headlines like the above and assumes that A) the writer/publish…

I was skeptical until I saw how good my sun panels work. We only have installed about 50% of capacity and they generate enough to cover 120% of our annual electric usage. Everything here is electric except the heating and I work from home all day (with an energy-drinking PC set-up). I live in The Netherlands - the same panels will generate about 2x as much energy a year if they were in Spain or North Africa. I wouldn…

> except heating

How much of an impact did this actually make, though, since heating was probably the majority of your emissions to begin with?

Solar may be sexy, but depending on your heat source you possibly could have done better by installing a heat pump on grid power.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#177

Post by mlindner »

myrmidon wrote: post #120
samatman wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are, as a sibling comment demonstrates, deluded, after decades of being maliciously lied to by 'environmental' movements with ties to the fossil industry. Anyone against nuclear is a shill for petrochemical power, there are no exceptions. There are the deluded and the liars, that's it.

Completely disagree. And I used to be strong nuclear proponent until 2015 or so. Nuclear power is no longer a viable pathway for a government to throw tax dollars at, and there are multiple reasons: 1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind. 2) Nuclear power costs explode if the capacity factor of your plants decreases: Meaning that they are basi…

> 1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind.

This argument is an important one, but most of the reasons that this is the case is a related problem to the ever lasting light bulb problem, they last too long. Because we're not building them they're expensive to build. Once we start building them the costs go down.

> 3) Nuclear power failed to deliver on safety promises, mainly with the Fukushima incident: If a modern, technologically competent nation like Japan can not be expected to keep their reactors running incident-free, then how are you going to convince e.g. Italians, Indians or other nationalities with significant (perceived?) government corruption/incompetence that their government can be trusted with regulating nuclear tech?!

Fukushima is the latest in scare tactics. The level of radiation released was low and the government overreacted to that danger. Further, it was built right next to the ocean which was itself right next to a major fault line running under that ocean, with backup generators that were at ground level.

> 4) Building plants is slow, extremely expensive and a huge commitment: Considering how rapidly PV/wind/batteries decrease in cost currently, committing on nuclear power right now would be economically irresponsible, and also has huge latency on acutally delivering power, unlike PV or wind, which you can basically buy off the shelve, install and hook up within the year.

See my response to point #1. Because we're not building them, we're not used to building them so they're slow to build.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#178

Post by diordiderot »

w1nst0nsm1th wrote: post #130
myrmidon wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree. And I used to be strong nuclear proponent until 2015 or so. Nuclear power is no longer a viable pathway for a government to throw tax dollars at, and there are multiple reasons: 1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind. 2) Nuclear power costs explode if the capacity factor of your plants decreases: Meaning that they are basi…

Not to mention nuclear waste, which is still an unresolved issue at current level of nuclear energy production.

This is just false. Annual nuclear wast in the US in volume is "roughly equivalent to less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool."

With more modern plants you could recycle that material and cut it down to a fifth the size.

Its a political problem, forced by dishonest actors

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#179

Post by duckmysick »

stephen_g wrote: post #149
pstrateman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be generating 120% but what happens if everybody installs? Do you have storage installed to smooth out the dead hours? Unfortunately the answer is that you need days of storage for solar and wind to be anywhere near 100% of the energy mix. The cost of that is astronomical.

The answer actually isn’t that you need days of storage. A researcher I follow on Twitter here in Australia called David Osmond has been running a simulation for over a year that scales up the wind and solar we have to the levels we would need to achieve around 100% renewable energy, and using real time data simulates storage requirements. He’s found that for the NEM grid in Australia at least, just six hours of stor…

Is there any code for that simulation available publicly? I'd like to plug in numbers for other locations.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#180

Post by Schroedingersat »

samatman wrote: post #88
collyw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It amazes me that climate activists never seem to push for nuclear, the most obvious solution.

They are, as a sibling comment demonstrates, deluded, after decades of being maliciously lied to by 'environmental' movements with ties to the fossil industry. Anyone against nuclear is a shill for petrochemical power, there are no exceptions. There are the deluded and the liars, that's it.

Lay it out for me then.

There are roughly 40,000t of accessible fissile material (U235 and Pu239) on earth.

You need about 3.5t to run a GW of PWR for 6 years. This generates up to half a tonne of Pu239.

Primary energy is about 17TW. You need about 12TWe to meet this. We'll assume 5TW of heat needs can be met with a geographically isolated low head steam generator.

Assume your reactors are free and all mining capacity grows at 100% p.a. from the current ~200t of U235 that isn't in inaccessible tails per year and reactors are constructed in record times of 5 years.

Make it make sense. Provide a net zero solution for 2050.

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