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US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

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Re: US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

#51

Post by BitwiseFool »

davidw wrote: post #37
gregwebs wrote: post #10

We can have 100% clean energy by 2035 if we assume the US is China and the state can build whatever it wants despite any local objections. And assume we increase battery supply by 40x (even though lithium price is going up dramatically now). And assume that clean power is actually 100% clean. It's good to have a vision for clean energy though that is shared with the country that we start working towards. I can see th…

> local objections That's a big component of all this. NIMBYism in this country is becoming a big problem in a lot of ways. Want to build a dense, mixed use development that is less carbon-intensive than single family suburbia? NIMBYs oppose it. Build a transmission line from your green energy source? NIMBYs, again! Build a solar farm? NIMBYs will try and block it.

Our local library wanted to put in an automated drop-off bin that patrons could drive up to and return books into. It was bitterly contested because the adjacent home owners association was worried about the increased noise and traffic. Keep in mind they were already living next to this library and it already had a parking lot. The city paid to construct a high wall as a compromise. It wasn't terribly expensive, but it wasn't cheap either.

I really do think there is such a thing as "over democratizing" our development process. Sometimes you really do just need to tell someone "this is getting built" and they can get bent if they don't like it.

Re: US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

#52

Post by kornhole »

gregwebs wrote: post #10

We can have 100% clean energy by 2035 if we assume the US is China and the state can build whatever it wants despite any local objections. And assume we increase battery supply by 40x (even though lithium price is going up dramatically now). And assume that clean power is actually 100% clean. It's good to have a vision for clean energy though that is shared with the country that we start working towards. I can see th…

And if Americans simplify their lives and stop using so much energy.

Re: US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

#53

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #40
davidw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> local objections That's a big component of all this. NIMBYism in this country is becoming a big problem in a lot of ways. Want to build a dense, mixed use development that is less carbon-intensive than single family suburbia? NIMBYs oppose it. Build a transmission line from your green energy source? NIMBYs, again! Build a solar farm? NIMBYs will try and block it.

If by NIMBYs you mean paid actors attending council meetings and incredibly loud reactionaries from other places, then yeah. There aren't that many actual NIMBYs for this shit.

> If by NIMBYs you mean paid actors attending council meetings

Exactly, most anti-renewable objections are outright fraud by the oil companies, it is groups like 'Citizens for responsible solar' that are recieve fossil fuel donations through shell companies. Theu go and complain that a solar farm will spoint the veiw on somw derelic wasteland and robbing locals of job opportunities ities. There isnt a single local person in those groups.

Re: US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

#54

Post by acdha »

infamouscow wrote: post #33
epistasis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not represent anything in the article. > Their power grid can't even support EV charging, This is categorically false, and a ridiculous thing to say.

> The California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s power grid, sent a Flex Alert asking all residents to voluntarily reduce their electricity use between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday and warned that more alerts were possible through the Labor Day weekend. > A spokeswoman for the governor, Erin Mellon, said that the request to avoid charging electrical vehicles has been misrepresent…

That’s peak air conditioning load, and it nicely disproves the claim you’re defending: most cars charge aren’t plugged in at peak commuting time but they’ll charge just fine in the middle of the day when solar production is maximized or at night when the grid has plenty of excess capacity after AC demand has dropped significantly.

Re: US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

#55

Post by epistasis »

roenxi wrote: post #30
epistasis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we were to start that now, it would add only 1% generation capacity, and that's assuming that all projects finish within 13 years (unlikely) and that none of the construction projects are abandoned as unfinishable in any way that makes financial sense (which happened to 50% of the reactors started in the US in the 2000s). There's an assumption that we can simply rebuild what we built in the past, but technology ha…

> ... and in France, and in Finland ... We might be about to discover that every power policy in Europe has failed, there are a lot of people hoping for a warm winter. I'd be very nervous if their fossil fuel, nuclear, renewable or gas policies were being adopted where I live. There is a serial problem in the west where people aren't taking energy security seriously. If we were, we'd have been building nuclear reacto…

The plan for Texas was never to rely on wind, and how could they, wind is not reliable!

The plan was to rely on natural gas and nuclear, which are supposed to be reliable, but which were not in Texas.

Therefore, more solar and storage is probably the best way for Texans to gain reliability. Texas had the same problem with frozen gas and nuclear plants a decade earlier, knew it was a problem, and refused to fix it.

Decentralization is the only way for people to protect themselves with grid mismanagement like that, which means home solar and storage.

Re: US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

#56

Post by S201 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #26
S201 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That page doesn't really describe how to fix the problems. Clearly you didn't actually read it because there's a large section describing exactly how to improve the economics of nuclear construction: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nu...

From the conclusion: - Multiple hypothetical approaches to reduce nuclear costs are ongoing. No one knows for sure if any of them will work, or which one will work best And it didn't address the time scale issue at all. OTOH, solar power has a 5 decade history of 90% cost reductions per decade.

What's your point? The guy doesn't have a few billion to single handedly throw at the problem to test them out. There are feasible solutions to make it less expensive, whether or not they get put into practice is a different topic. The point is that nuclear is not inherently and permanently as expensive as it has been for the past few decades.

> And it didn't address the time scale issue at all.

The time scale issue is directly related to the cost issue. Costs are so high not due to material costs, but because of the engineering and construction overheads. Standardize the designs, streamline the approval processes and both construction time & costs will decrease.

And to your solar point, until there's a viable way to store the energy that solar produces it's not a solution on its own regardless of how cheap it is. Same goes for any renewable that doesn't have the on-demand characteristic of nuclear.

To be clear: I'm not saying to not use solar. I'm saying to build solar, wind, nuclear, AND whatever else. I honestly don't really care how expensive any of them are anymore because the costs of not stopping carbon emissions will be far higher than the cost of building these renewable/nuclear generating stations.

Re: US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

#57

Post by orthecreedence »

Krasnol wrote: post #50
RadixDLT wrote: post #39

does that mean nuclear power?

No it doesn't since nuclear waste is not clean and as the article says: renewables are cheaper already.

Oh, nice! Didn't know battery tech and PV panel production were clean now. That's a great leap.

Re: US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

#58

Post by zardo »

plasticchris wrote: post #34
roenxi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and in France, and in Finland ... We might be about to discover that every power policy in Europe has failed, there are a lot of people hoping for a warm winter. I'd be very nervous if their fossil fuel, nuclear, renewable or gas policies were being adopted where I live. There is a serial problem in the west where people aren't taking energy security seriously. If we were, we'd have been building nuclear reacto…

I think the wind turbines froze up: https://www.newsweek.com/texas-wind-turbines-frozen-power-wh...

And it comes down to, utilities didn't spring for the cold weather package on their turbines. Effectively deciding that during extreme cold snaps they would rely on natural gas power plants. Which were also brought down by the cold snap.

Re: US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

#59

Post by epistasis »

melling wrote: post #35
rllearneratwork wrote: post #3

"Nuclear is likely to be 9% to 12% of generation in 2035" - this is absurd. We should have much more aggressive targets for nuclear. Because it is the cleanest, safest and most reliable source of 0-emission power. France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear now.

That’s less than the 20% we get now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_... “ for 20% of the nation's total electric energy generation.[3] In 2018, nuclear comprised nearly 50 percent of US emission-free energy generation.” Didn’t the United States build 100 nuclear power plants in about 25 years?

Yes, and the problem was that way too many of them were over budget and delayed. Even before Three Mile Island, orders for new nuclear had slowed massively because utilities realized that ther massive risk for financial boondoggles.

Those nuclear reactors are now reaching their end of life, and will need to be phased out. France is realizing what happens when you don't replace your aging fleet fast enough: massive unreliability and extended shutdowns for maintenance and fixing things.

France also started to build new nuclear in the 2000s, at Flamanville, but it has been an utter debacle, that's ongoing to this day. It's to the point that even though the president has said he's going to order more reactors, it seems unlikely that many of them will ever complete.

Re: US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

#60

Post by acdha »

verdverm wrote: post #43

What is the plan for revamping all the residential units that have non-electrical heating in the parts of the country which have winter?

We switched to a heat pump a couple years ago. It soaks up all but the coldest (5-15°) days in winter (when the resistive heater kicks in as well) and uses only a little more energy than our old gas system’s fans did. It’s way more efficient in the summer than our old AC was so our annual usage actually went down and we have less maintenance.

Over the course of the year, our entire HVAC load is roughly what our modest solar setup produces. Obviously there are distribution issues, which is why we buy wind-generated electricity, but this is something we can do now and I’m quite confident the thousands of engineers working in the space will improve as it becomes our generation’s Apollo project.

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