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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

#91

Post by S201 »

megaman821 wrote: post #68
S201 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can the design be standardized? Each location has its own risks to deal with. Extreme heat in Arizona, earthquakes in California, flooding in Florida. Every nuclear plant is a bit different. There is no economics of scale when building nuclear plants.

Reactor designs such as the AP1000 can be and are standardized.

> Extreme heat in Arizona, earthquakes in California, flooding in Florida.

Earthquakes happen everywhere to varying degrees and flooding typically doesn't happen with some warning. I'm not sure about extreme heat being a large problem? If it is, then don't build there. Build elsewhere and then build powerlines to get the power where it's needed. Sure, different areas involve different threats, but you can make a set of designs that work in different areas instead of doing bespoke designs for every one.

> There is no economics of scale when building nuclear plants.

There is to a certain degree. Consider the Vogtle 3 & 4 project. It was hugely over budget in costs and time. Westinghouse went bankrupt during its construction. One (of many) reasons for this was the lack of nuclear construction knowledge left in the US because we stopped building reactors. There are other pending nuclear projects that will now benefit from the knowledge and experience that was re-learned from the Vogtle project. Having an active industry most certainly does bring some economies of scale to life.

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

#92

Post by ClumsyPilot »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #32

OK, fine, but to what extent will it impoverish working people or reduce their wealth? It's more important to consider human happiness and wealth, rather than sacrificing the poor on the altar of carbon emissions.

> It's more important to consider human happiness

Do you think that the people that are starving to death in Madagascar from climate-change induced drought are happy?

When the problem comes further north, do you think we will be happy?

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

#93

Post by cypress66 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #75
kornhole wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Indeed, noone talk about this. An average french person emits 3 or 4 times less CO2. Does an average american live 4 times better than an average frenchman? French people live longer on average, have less obsesity and other health issues. Insulated homes or apartments, smaller cars and less meat in diet could cut CO2 footprint 2x. But also we must not fool ourselves, majority of energy emissions are industrial - as a…

> Does an average american live 4 times better than an average frenchman?

I don't know about that "4 times better" (how do you measure that, diminishing returns, etc).

But your average house in the US is for sure more comfortable than your average house in France.

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

#94

Post by epistasis »

shapefrog wrote: post #79
bryanlarsen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air conditioners were the problem, not EV's.

The solution for air conditioners ... more solar power.

Except for those hours 4-9... the solution to that is more storage, a solution which is ready today, shipping, and in demand in excess of current supply, even though supply is ramping up at tremendous speeds.

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

#95

Post by tcmart14 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #15
newsclues wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US can build a plant in 13 years. It's a matter of dedication and willingness. And pissing off a minority of vocal opponents. It takes longer because of the crazy regulations driven in part by environmentalists who complained about nuclear for decades while fossil fuels were the only other option. But the USA has the resources, skills, technology and money to do so in a short period of time.

The USA hasn't built a sizable number of reactors for 40 years. We haven't completely lost the skills, but they've sure atrophied. It takes China 10 years to build a reactor, and they've built lots of them in the past 20 years and don't have the regulations you decry. There's no way that the US can do it in anywhere close to the same time frame that China can. It's not just the rules and attitudes about nuclear makin…

I believe there are some. If you want to build new reactor designs, it is almost impossible because of the approval you have to get for the design. If I recall, Terrapower was pretty much told they had to prove the tech somewhere else before building here. They planned to build a reactor in China but that was halted because of the trade war? If you are building a reactor with older designs most people say we shouldn't build with, yea there isn't as much push back.

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

#96

Post by lazide »

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.

Clearly you haven't dealt with the over 60's crowd-who-has-nothing-better-to-do.

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

#97

Post by S201 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #83
988747 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar power also has a decades long history of only working during a day.

And lithium batteries have a 3 decade history of 80% price reductions per decade.

So that means the price reductions will continue at that same rate? Extrapolation of a trend is not a forgone conclusion with anything. In fact, the price of lithium has gone UP in the past two years. Batteries may very well not be getting cheaper for the foreseeable future.

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

#98

Post by lazide »

roenxi wrote: post #89
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reconstituting all of society's energy consumption is a large project with a lot of technical uncertainties that will be discovered along the way. These sort of forecasts routinely turns out to be very wrong I frequently see this type of comment, and I like to imagine what if people with this attitude won the debate that was happening 300 yeara ago. 300 years ago, thousands of people in London were dying of cholera…

Do you have an example more current than 3 centuries past? Because Germany launched an impressive project to reconstitute their grid quite recently and are now at risk of freezing because it turns out their plan didn't work, they shut down a bunch of perfectly serviceable nuclear plants and went heavily in on Russian gas rather than developing local options. The 20th century was full of big ambitious projects that le…

Well, that giant impressive green energy project was also put in place by the voted in (democratically) folks in power, and widely popular at the time I believe?

Despite a minority that was objecting it would cause these exact issues?

What's that quote? "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken

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

#99

Post by DeRock »

angrycontrarian wrote: post #72
epistasis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A clean power grid means cheaper power. And the faster we push towards that future, the more money we save. Every day of delay, every bit of FUD about renewables, only serves to keep our energy costs higher, and make our future CO2 cleanup problem harder. The future for energy is cheap and clean, and the major roadblock are the people who profit from expensive and dirty electricity.

> A clean power grid means cheaper power. That's a pretty wild assertion, given current events. Care to back it up with some evidence from a neutral source?

Not who you are asking, but here is some recent research using probabilistic cost forecasts: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X

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

#100

Post by maxerickson »

roenxi wrote: post #41
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…

You left out an important step - assuming that all the planning and modelling has been done correctly in and doesn't turn out to be politically motivated, have mistakes or miss unknown unknowns. Reconstituting all of society's energy consumption is a large project with a lot of technical uncertainties that will be discovered along the way. These sort of forecasts routinely turns out to be very wrong. Centrally planne…

The International Energy Agency has under-forecasted renewable growth for something like 20 of the last 20 years. I don't think it's a given that a model is overly optimistic.

Their recent adjusts are not little tweaks...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/exceptional-new-norma...

(I realize that this article is about a different, US DOE forecast, I'm just saying that they are working from a model that has assumptions in it and it has proven difficult to model this space)

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