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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

#101

Post by lazide »

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…

So you are saying that the geography and socioeconomics of an established (over 10's of thousands of years) country in an already well developed and urbanized continent with high population density is different than one that is sparsely populated and only recently started to be developed by any modern definition?

Weird.

Maybe in another thousand years, it'll seem more similar.

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

#102

Post by OrvalWintermute »

I didn't see enough data to understand how 100% clean power will be achieved that can satisfy baseload energy demand.

The simple fix of course, would be to add a substantial amount of Nuclear to handle the intermittency problem of the renewables.

Also, given how much untapped methane we have on ocean floors, and how we appear to be accumulating it still, it might be smart to think about it as a somewhat renewable resource also.

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

#103

Post by _8j50 »

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…

Eminent domain might overcome NIMBY

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

#104

Post by whartung »

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…

To be blunt, they weren't saying "Don't charges EVs". They were pretty much saying "Don't do ANYTHING that requires a lot of power.".

Don't wash you clothes.

Don't dry your clothes.

Don't run your oven, hair dryer, blender. Let the arc furnace lie idle. Practice your metal turning hobby later in the day.

Oh, and if you could, shut down the A/C kthx.

That's what they were saying.

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

#105

Post by epistasis »

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?

A big flaw with most current models is that their learning curves for tech are either completely ignored, or are way too small to match empirical reality. Here's a popular news article about research using empirical modeling of the learning curves, which says that the models are overestimating the cost:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/the-decreasing-cost-...

And here's a podcast episode about it that goes into a lot more detail:

https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-159-the-cost-of-d...

However, if you're not willing to take the other link in a sibling comment because it comes from an investor, I'm not sure what you consider to be a neutral source.

I would say that what's actually wild are the "accepted" models from the IEA, which have been catastrophically wrong year after year because they encapsulate "common sense" of the industry instead of data based methods:

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/06/iea-gets-hilariously-sl...

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

#106

Post by matrix_overload »

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…

Some objections are reasonable. Achieving 100% clean energy in one country by moving "dirty" industries to less scrupulous countries is not a very good idea. It kills the local engineering culture, destroys meaningful jobs and makes us dependent on dictatorships that would just lie to your face.

If you want a more meaningful goal, how about "all physical goods consumed in the U.S. being manufactured with 100% clean energy"? Otherwise, it's just not fair to say "look, we are all green" while completely ignoring the emissions from refining lithium and making non-recyclable batteries from it.

If we go further down that lane, we will discover that 100% will never be realistic, but there are some nice compromises to be had, and we might end up with some economic growth that is not about reselling crypto tokens and ads in a circular fashion.

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

#107

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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…

1) sodium ion goes into mass production next year: CATL 150 wh/LG.

2) there's this thing called roofs. Residential / commercial solar can go into lots of places and makes the buildings they are on partially / fully grid independent.

3) battery supply will go up by that amount, I'd bet earlier than 2035 by years.

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

#108

Post by lazide »

988747 wrote: post #90
bryanlarsen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's not enough lithium on planet Earth even for all the electric cars we'll need, don't even start on using lithium batteries for large-scale storage. The only hope here is that Magnesium-based batteries will become a thing. EDIT: OK, it seems that I mistook the "mineable lithium deposits" number for the whole lithium available :) Anyway, unless there is a major technological breakthrough we are looking at few de…

doubts

Lithium is roughly 0.002–0.006 wt% of the earths crust (concentrated in brines to much higher levels of course).

It's no Iron (5% of the earths crust), but it is widely prevalent, and at #33ish most common elements on Earth, it's more about proving reserves of what used to be a niche material, than ACTUAL rarity. Nickel, Zinc, Copper are #23, 24 and #25 for instance, and lead is #36.

We have no shortage of Lead, but mostly because it is a byproduct of Silver mining. It's typical for lead to go for $1/lb.

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

#109

Post by woodruffw »

lazide wrote: post #101
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So you are saying that the geography and socioeconomics of an established (over 10's of thousands of years) country in an already well developed and urbanized continent with high population density is different than one that is sparsely populated and only recently started to be developed by any modern definition? Weird. Maybe in another thousand years, it'll seem more similar.

This is a bizarre response: even in larger US cities, Americans produce more emissions (and waste) per capita than their European counterparts.

Density plays a large role, but consumer behaviors play a larger one. And American consumes prefer diets with more meat, cars that burn fuel less efficiently, and products that are designed to be disposed more frequently.

Edit: we also prefer larger houses, built more cheaply.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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