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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

#261

Post by Schroedingersat »

dTal wrote: post #258
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…

1) I don't believe this for a moment, not when you include capacity factor and storage requirements for renewables to actually compete with on-demand power. What do you do when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow? How long can your storage solution sustain that? If it's anything less than "infinity", it's inferior to nuclear. 2) This is just trying to spin reliability as a disadvantage. You can throttle n…

How many terawatt-years of electricity can the entirety of accessible uranium reserves produce?

How many terawatt years of non-low-grade-heat energy do we need between now and 2030?

Now that we know that PWRs are irrelevant, can we move on from the constant gaslighting about how 'the next one will he cheaper we swear' or 'it's totally safe if everything goes perfectly always, just ignore the mines'. Or are you just trying to distract from the only thing that can replace the majority of (or even a tiny minority of) fossil fuels?

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#262

Post by pfdietz »

roenxi wrote: post #254
pfdietz wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, you've confirmed to me you don't know what you're talking about. Living standards may be correlated with energy consumption, in a narrow sense, in some cases, but we don't consume energy, we consume things we can produce with energy. If we do that more efficiently, then our living standard increases even as our energy use decreases. You seem to be saying a 60W incandescent bulb indicates a higher standard of livi…

You've made two mistakes in your reasoning. One is explained as Jevon's paradox [0]. If there is a move from 60W light-bulbs to 10W then people usually end up finding a new use for the 50W. It would be unusual for them to use less energy overall - indeed, as they get more productive they could end up demanding more energy (if it made sense to win X kW for Y production, it often makes sense to win X++ kW for Y++++ pro…

I reject your Jevons argument. No, it would not be unusual for them to use less energy overall. Whether they do or not is dependent on specifics of the situation.

I think you are misled by historical contingency. When moving from "not mechanized" to "mechanized", energy use increases. People didn't have air conditioning, or refrigeration, or TVs, etc. and then they did. Energy use went up because new use cases were being created. But once they have them, at some point the satisfaction those produce saturates, and the natural progression of efficiency pulls the energy use back down again. We don't eat ever increasing quantities of food just because agriculture has become more efficient. We don't scale the number of TVs we watch because their power use has declined.

Your argument is depending on the existence of ever increasing numbers of new activities to consume the energy, that produce sufficient value to justify them. I am skeptical that such exist, or could exist.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#263

Post by kaskakokos »

mpweiher wrote: post #223
kaskakokos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the article leaves me with a taste of self-delusion as a society. I mean, we take 3 pollution parameters very limited in time and space, we see how they decrease, and we open the bottle of champagne to celebrate... If we don't look at the big picture, we are fooling ourselves, and in my opinion only degrowth will save us, just keep in mind that previous societies that consumed fewer resources collapsed for ex…

So instead we take no parameters, no data whatsoever, and predict absolutely certain doom. Hmm.

Or... we can use the information that experts collect and share: https://www.ipcc.ch/

* I edit to copy paste an extract of the report: Emissions reductions in CO2 from fossil fuels and industrial processes (CO2-FFI), due to improvements in energy intensity of GDP and carbon intensity of energy, have been less than emissions increases from rising global activity levels in industry, energy supply, transport, agriculture and buildings

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#264

Post by fedeb95 »

nathias wrote: post #107
fedeb95 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solved isn't the exact word. It's something. It's the best we can do. That doesn't justify reckless behaviours in my opinion, just because we don't yet have scientific evidence that they are

without evidence, how do we know what reckless is?

We can take time to evaluate things and study more. That's not usually the case: immediate profit is usually the driver

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#265

Post by roenxi »

pfdietz wrote: post #262
roenxi wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've made two mistakes in your reasoning. One is explained as Jevon's paradox [0]. If there is a move from 60W light-bulbs to 10W then people usually end up finding a new use for the 50W. It would be unusual for them to use less energy overall - indeed, as they get more productive they could end up demanding more energy (if it made sense to win X kW for Y production, it often makes sense to win X++ kW for Y++++ pro…

I reject your Jevons argument. No, it would not be unusual for them to use less energy overall. Whether they do or not is dependent on specifics of the situation. I think you are misled by historical contingency. When moving from "not mechanized" to "mechanized", energy use increases. People didn't have air conditioning, or refrigeration, or TVs, etc. and then they did. Energy use went up because new use cases were b…

> Your argument is depending on the existence of ever increasing numbers of new activities to consume the energy

There are literally an infinite number of useful activities that consume energy. The only limit is at some point we transform so much energy that the earth becomes unlivable because we can't vent it fast enough. At that point we'd have to give up and ... oh wait, no. We'd use the energy to move off the planet. Energy solves that problem too!

If we could work with them cost effectively humanity could probably find a use for every joule of energy in the universe. Every single one. Because in the limit, energy can basically fabricate new mass out of nothing and make a universe perfectly hospitable to a very large number of humans - a race that grows exponentially. Whatever the limits are we're nowhere near reaching them with what we have right now.

> No, it would not be unusual for them to use less energy overall

In that case we'd see a country somewhere with steady electricity prices and shrinking demand. I don't think that country exists. Do you have some examples in mind? Because the countries I've seen that use less energy tend to have massively spiking energy prices, usually because they just ran out of available fossil fuels.

You are taking a bold stance. Jevon came up with the paradox after observing that this specific effect applies in energy markets. They observed the effect contemporary to the Watt being named the Watt. You're going to need a stronger argument than "I reject..." and "I think...". Because the Jevons' argument is an "Economists have observed and come up with a theory to explain...".

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#266

Post by Schroedingersat »

londons_explore wrote: post #132
thelastgallon wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Power prices have been going negative and spiking up 100x in the UK for a decade or more. Yet the vast majority of EV's don't have the ability to discharge into the grid to earn money... Most can't even charge when power is negatively priced unless you pay for a third party charger and service. Basically, Car owners, charger owners, Utility companies, and EV manufacturers would all like to earn the money by charging/…

Most of the benefit can be achieved in one step by putting an 'eco mode' button on home chargers that makes it dispense power if and only if there is curtailment (which can be looked up over network) or the car battery is critically low. Make this an overridable default with some messaging about owners doing their part for a greener future to make it palateable and you don't need the battery to feed back out for the EV to be acting as storage.

This benefits the grid operator because they get to massively overcharge for curtailed energy. It benefits the EV manufacturer because they get to greenwash. And the consumer doesn't get a say because they don't actually own their DRM'd remote controlled car and charger.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#267

Post by stephen_g »

duckmysick wrote: post #179
stephen_g wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think so unfortunately, he just posts the results, e.g. https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1590215438323322880

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#268

Post by stephen_g »

evilos wrote: post #181
stephen_g wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How many gigawatt hours is 6 hours of storage though? Also is this just to cover current electricity demand or total primary energy?

In Australia, based on current electricity demand it's 24 GW / 120 GWh.

Primary energy replacement obviously will require more than that, but it won't be so bad as people make out, since electrification can drive massive efficiency increases - electric cars are 3-4x as energy efficient as ICE cars, and there are very few places in the parts of Australia that get decently cold that are too cold for air source heat pumps, so that's a 3x efficiency increase over gas space and hot water heating (even as much as 5x for CO2 hot water heat pumps!).

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#269

Post by realusername »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #229
realusername wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about developed countries here so yeah tons of stuff has been dematerialised, I call my doctor by video instead of driving there, I download movies instead of driving to the cinema, I get deliveries which are batched instead of going to the mall, I no longer need to send letters and buy paper maps, I don't need to drive to the library anymore to get books, the electricity company does not need to drive…

Let me guess, you live in the US/North America? I also live in a developed country in Europe and here you have to go to the doctor in person for almost everything except COVID, people still go to the cinema (at every new blockbuster the cinema is almost full), people still go shopping for groceries as grocery deliveries aren't a thing here or most people can't afford the extra costs, WFH is very rare so everyone stil…

No I live in western Europe.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#270

Post by gergi137 »

strken wrote: post #171
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.

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 c…

The batteries alone have actually gotten quite affordable. https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-lifepower4-lithium-batteries-...

Here is 30kWh of LFP batteries for $9,000. Now that doesn't include the inverters or installation or anything but LFP batteries have excellent longevity, in this case 7000 cycles to 80% depth-of-discharge. That means charging and discharging the battery every day for 19 years and at that point, you still have 80% of the remaining capacity.

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