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Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

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Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#121

Post by audunw »

ambientenv wrote: post #112

I just can't get that exuberant when I also read things like this [1]. [1] - https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-two-ene...

I only skimmed the article but there didn’t seem to be much written about how much of that non-electric fossil fuel is waste heat. I know there are versions of the energy source-sink graph which shows wasted energy. Why didn’t the author use it? Weird.

There are studies on how much energy is required to decarbonise everything, not just local electricity production. The energy required is far less than what you’d think if you look at the primary energy of all the energy we use today.

One aspect of this is what you see with the transition to EV or from gas to induction cook tops. It comes with a huge reduction in wasted energy.

The other aspect is the transition to heat pumps, which is over 100% efficient, so you need a lot less energy to provide the same amount of heat. There are now commercial industrial heat pumps that has reached 200°C, which enables the use in more industrial applications.

The third is the transition to recycling. At some point we will have enough materials for all that we need to do. The green energy transition requires a big temporary jump in the amount of lithium and copper we need. But once all vehicles have been transitioned to EVs, most of those material will come from recycled materials, cutting the energy required to acquire those materials to a tiny fraction of what we need now.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#122

Post by cess11 »

myrmidon wrote: post #71
alex_duf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect. I think renewable have accelerated to the point of matching the electricity growth worldwide: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electrici…

I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades-- maybe by the end of the century. Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al. If we were on track for lots of CO2 capture by 2050, we would see the beginnings already (massive investm…

"Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al."

Might want to take a look at China, or at least what IEA writes about CCUS and the like there.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202505/09/WS681d52e5a310a04a...

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#123

Post by VBprogrammer »

fpoling wrote: post #111
myrmidon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades-- maybe by the end of the century. Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al. If we were on track for lots of CO2 capture by 2050, we would see the beginnings already (massive investm…

If electricity is sufficiently cheap it can be cheaper to capture carbon from the atmosphere for chemical industry than to use oil or coal there.

Do you have any source for this extraordinary claim? It's practically a claim of perpetual motion.

Carbon dioxide a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, even in concentrations which are immediately harmful to human life.

At the moment it's 400 parts per million. So in order to extract 1kg of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere you have to pump 2500kg of air through the system. This alone makes it unlikely we can do this profitability.

You then need to extract the carbon dioxide using some technique which will probably involve cooling or pressuring that volume of air. Before finally transforming carbon dioxide, a very stable chemical compound, into a reagent which is actually useful (probably carbon monoxide).

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#124

Post by audunw »

bot403 wrote: post #105
zmmmmm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms There's going to be a beautiful synergy here between electric vehicles and solar. Because an EV battery is already easily enough to power most houses through 14-16 hours of darkness, so if it can be a sink for solar during the day it can then be a source during the n…

I can't see how this could be true. Many people will need to drive the ev to work during the day, and if you discharge it at night then when are you really charging? It may be true for some who WFH often or in some cases, but not enough EVs will be able to discharge overnight for a v2g battery revolution.

There are several scenarios where it would contribute:

1. You have access to a charger at work 2. You’re retired 3. You take public transportation or bike to work (fairly common scenario in Europe) 4. Work-from-home (got more common after covid, I know many people who do it at least once a week now, and that’s generally enough to charge what you need to drive for a week) 5. You charge only during the day on weekends (should be enough to cover the week for most people, even if you feed say 20% of it back to the grid through the week) 6. Rental fleet operators (booking data can inform charge/discharge policy) 7. Residential batteries, where you charge the EV at night with what you got during the day, every day, but set up a policy where you allow both the home battery and the EV battery to discharge if the electricity is expensive enough. I could see myself making decisions about WFH or biking to work based on electricity pricing.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#125

Post by audunw »

I would recommend reading or watching what Tony Seba has put out. He has correctly predicted where we ended up with solar, and his predictions for the next stage of the energy transition is very remarkable and uplifting. It seems overly optimistic at first but makes a lot of sense when you look at the trend lines.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#126

Post by p2detar »

Kon5ole wrote: post #80
nemomarx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you. Same reason public transit and police run at a loss, in theory.

>Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you Short-term perhaps, but pretending that something expensive is cheap doesn't really work in the long run. Investments are supposed to be an initial cost upfront that pays off later. Like building roads, bridges and such. For energy, an investment would be to take the cost of a renewable infrastructure, energy storage,…

I’m honestly not sure I understand. All electricity export charts I see show France as a net exporter of electricity and by a huge margin. What am I missing?

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#127

Post by cess11 »

Biologist123 wrote: post #65
alex_duf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect. I think renewable have accelerated to the point of matching the electricity growth worldwide: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electrici…

My apologies. By available carbon budget, I meant the carbon we can burn before we exceed 1.5 degrees, or 2 degrees etc.

1.5 degrees was last year.

https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/news-archive/copernic...

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#128

Post by Loic »

From a geopolitical point of view, if we increase solar/renewable, we decrease dependencies on fossil fuels. As fossil fuels are traded in USD, we decrease our needs of USD, so we decrease the value of the USD.

Isn't it what the current US administration want? A weak USD to boost export?

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#129

Post by aredox »

ambientenv wrote: post #112

I just can't get that exuberant when I also read things like this [1]. [1] - https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-two-ene...

All of OECD countries are lying about their growth numbers, and Russia is "gaining strength".

A base sanity check shows this is a load of BS.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#130

Post by distances »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #60
pydry wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll probably be fulfilled in 3 stages 1) Gas peakers - where every kilowatt hour delivered by solar or wind is just a kilowatt hour of gas that would otherwise have been burned. We are generally still here - still burning gas while it's sunny and windy. 2) Pumped storage and batteries gets us to 98% carbon free grids with ~5 hours of storage with 90% roundtrip efficiency - https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per…

My google-fu is failing to resurface the links, but IIRC: One study determined the cheapest energy grids for many countries. IOW, if you had to rebuild the energy grid from scratch today, what would be the cheapest way to meet your needs? And the answer was 90 - 95% renewables, depending on country. Solar + wind + batteries for 90 - 95% of the power, with natgas peakers for the rest. And that 90-95% number increases…

Finland does not have any geothermal. The country lies on two billion years old basement rock with approximately zero geothermal activity.

Wind is the dominanting renewable source, with enough of it for Finland to enjoy the second cheapest electricity in Europe last year. And indeed, even solar is profitable, hindered by the winters but helped by the long days during summer.

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