11–18 of 18 posts
« a remaining challenge of implementing their roadmaps is that they require coordination across political boundaries » Maybe it’s the main one ?
« a remaining challenge of implementing their roadmaps is that they require coordination across political boundaries » Maybe it’s the main one ?
Indeed. Energy is like currency. It has to be under the control of a political authority with complete control over it. At the moment that structure is still the nation state. Once you step outside the nation state you need sufficient geopolitical diversity of supply between nations that you can abandon one if necessary. As ever you need highly cohesive units, loosely coupled if you want them to be responsive to chan…
Energy has been harvested by plants for millions of years before nation states were a thing. It is nothing like currency, which requires advanced political and technological development to exist as we have it today as a form of electronic credit. The only link at all is we can agree that both energy and currency have measurable value.
The only reason political authorities get involved in energy is to secure it for their own people, or for Safety/Environmental reasons. How energy gets used is a somewhat political question - but only in the sense that literally everything humans do is a somewhat political question. I could harvest and use energy for myself with very little state involvement, for example.
My experience tells me that reducing consumption from the average American amounts by 50% to 90% is hard for the first 5% because you have to learn new ways of doing things, but then improves quality of life for the next 45% to 85%.
A negligible fraction of Americans have looked past that first 5%, let alone acted on it, but those who have keep finding more ways to improve their lives by reducing more.
« a remaining challenge of implementing their roadmaps is that they require coordination across political boundaries » Maybe it’s the main one ?
What he means in the paper is, geopolitical boundaries. For example, Japan and China depending on each other's grids. Or the various African countries depending on each other. Or the middle eastern countries sharing a grid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What he means in the paper is, geopolitical boundaries. For example, Japan and China depending on each other's grids. Or the various African countries depending on each other. Or the middle eastern countries sharing a grid.
Good luck with that. The study could have concentrated on how to balance electrical grids using PHEV and flywheel storage instead on scifi solutions that are either inefficient, not applicable in the current geopolitical context or both.
It's just the current amount of storage is tiny compared to the need. California has had 15 GW ramps before to give you the scale of what you'd need for only a grid with renewables and storage and technically you need much more than that.
Uncertainty is one of the big topics in this area. Load forecast is very accurate, but wind and solar is difficult to get right in the day out timeline.
Reading the Do The Math blog https://dothemath.ucsd.edu and Low Tech Magazine http://lowtechmagazine.com , the obvious starting point is to consume drastically less. My experience tells me that reducing consumption from the average American amounts by 50% to 90% is hard for the first 5% because you have to learn new ways of doing things, but then improves quality of life for the next 45% to 85%. A negligible fraction…
I wake up earlier: walk or jog twice a day. It's quite relaxing if you have a park nearby, you breath better air, eat less, sleep better, and do more.
comical bonus point: saving the gym membership money.
We should invent an hybrid of modern and vintage. Go back to a lot of crafting (because it is ultra satisfying for your body and mind to have such skills), just no to primitivetechnology levels (not that I have anything against it personally). Keep a bit of modern but do more ourselves and in groups.
Mark Jacobson, the author of the study, files libel suits against people who disagree with him. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
So at the core of it, the previous paper depended on adding a lot more turbines into existing dams so that they could be burstier, and didn't provide justification for, or even really mention the need for, the ability to add that many turbines. This got called a "modeling error", which among other things made him mad enough to sue for libel. Well, quality of legal decisions aside, one of the main points of the new pa…
What the talk actually claims is that nuclear is cheaper than renewables + short term storage (batteries, for example) for 100% CO2-free power. Long term storage, like hydrogen, changes this greatly, as the cost of the short term storage solution is dominated by foolishly using batteries for seasonal load leveling/very rare prolonged outages. It's fascinating to watch the guy in the talk dance around this.
So with that disclaimer out of the way, I want to say that this research is incredibly misleading, particularly when it is presented as 'ways to avoid blackouts'.
What they present is an 'adequacy' model. That means, essentially running an accounting simulation of energy in and energy out. It is what power system engineers refer to as 'copper plate' model, in that it replaces the entire transmission and distribution network with a hypothetical infinite conductor where everything connects to everything else. Such a copper plate would never have a 'blackout' as long as Energy In = Energy Out.
Therein lies the bullshit. Blackouts don't occur just because Energy In =/= Energy out. They are incredibly complicated and nuanced, and often result from multiple minor events cascading into something larger [0].
You need, at a minimum, a steady-state power flow simulation to be able to analyse power system security. Particularly when assessing low inertia power systems (such as the systems proposed in this paper). The fact that the word inertia is not mentioned in a paper advocating high-penetration of wind and solar is a massive red flag (I'm talking, Moroccan palace style large).
I laughed out loud when I read "LOADMATCH runs quickly (e.g., ~2.6 min for a 5-year, 5.3 milliontime-step, simulation on a single Nehalem 5580 3.2 GHz processor)" knowing that it takes around that time to simulate a load flow on the pan-european grid, or around that long to do a basic security assessment on a single country's grid.
I worry that policy makers will be 'informed' by this research and will unknowingly sweep a lot of complexity under the rug until blackouts become more common.
[0] - https://www.entsoe.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/_library/publica...