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Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

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Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#261
post #260
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, can you indicate some of such tech? Personally I have a classic LiFeP battery (casually from a Chinese company, like 99% of those on sale) who can actually power my home without heating for a day, can last potentially ten years (6000 recharge "guaranteed"). Nothing that can scale more, behind pumped hydro who demand mountains and water to be done do better, and actually you can't sustainably power a factory from…

Assuming nothing exists except what you already know about gets you reliably wrong answers. In fact there are a lot of hills. Few places are very far away from any, even in Nebraska. Any hill may serve for pumped hydro, although those over 2000 ft (600m) and have a natural depression are best. A simple earthen levee suffices, otherwise, with a penstock extending down. But we also can compress air, for "CAES". And we…

Reading your post I can only conclude that no such storage tech usable on scale exists. You talk about potential tech, so far used only experimentally at little scale with many issues.

Hydrogen is a dream and nothing really seems to arrive, beside the obscene complexity and high costs of all existing prototypes. Pumped hydro with small fall and unfavorable orography it's formally still working but practically useless since it cost much and produce very little energy: we basically need a hill for a single home.

grid-connected domestic lithium batteries are the sole effective tech, only at that small scale, with a high but still a bit sustainable cost, actually available commercially. If you want a domestic or city-side compressed-air storage good luck, you'll have to design it as an artisanal prototype. Hydrogen is the very same and so on.

Consider a thing: we need energy NOW and in 10, 20+ etc years. Stating that we have some potential tech that might work at a certain scale in a future is stating that IF we survive without food for a decade well... Perhaps at the end of it we will be able to source some food. Is just a scam, not a plan nor something we can do. In the meantime our national grids falter DUE to the amount of connected renewables that makes the grid load vary too quickly of significant amounts for big power plants to compensate quickly enough. Actually the theory of the new deal is that with a smart-grid (that do not exists so far, while p.v., eolic etc do) and a large private BEV connected (because on average many are connected to the grid at the same time) we can compensate high and low demand peaks allowing classic power plant to keep the network up. So far we have much p.v. because grid connected p.v. works enough (roughly 50% cut in electricity fees, relatively quick break even, not so high initial capex) and wind power have many incentives BUT number of BEV on roads are very modest and none of them is "smart grid ready" with power connection and proper inverter/meter to follow the frequency sucking or pumping energy from/to the grid instant by instant with correct billing as an extra bonus. In most countries it's not even legal inject power from batteries to the grid.

Please tell me with something valid on scale today, something that exists currently, that we can store energy and keep the network up with massive renewables if you know it. I do not. I tried, I follow news etc and see nothing but the offload of many costs to the public, pretending that's a good thing, and an uneven new deal implementation whose results will be a very deep big mess.

All presented with classic PR fanaticism, not much different than nazi propaganda of a new bright future no one feel or foresee in tangible manners. A bit like classic meddle-age church rhetoric that you have to suffer the whole life for a promise of a paradise no one can prove it exists. Again not different than URSS propaganda for a future worker paradise no one see.

Just try to figure out a thing: how much thermal energy you need for your own home. How much electricity and equipment costs you need to heat with electricity. Then extend such computation to the mean citizens try to find how many can afford such investments and if yes how much extra power we need from the grid. This normally suffice without adding industry needs. Because it's already clear that if you live in inner lands (cold nights) or sufficiently at northern/southern latitudes (depending on the hemisphere) most people simply can't choose to go electric without rebuilding the home from scratch and most of them can't rebuild the home.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#262
post #261
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming nothing exists except what you already know about gets you reliably wrong answers. In fact there are a lot of hills. Few places are very far away from any, even in Nebraska. Any hill may serve for pumped hydro, although those over 2000 ft (600m) and have a natural depression are best. A simple earthen levee suffices, otherwise, with a penstock extending down. But we also can compress air, for "CAES". And we…

Reading your post I can only conclude that no such storage tech usable on scale exists. You talk about potential tech, so far used only experimentally at little scale with many issues. Hydrogen is a dream and nothing really seems to arrive, beside the obscene complexity and high costs of all existing prototypes. Pumped hydro with small fall and unfavorable orography it's formally still working but practically useless…

I see that you are not earnest and mean only to waste my time. Good day.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#263
post #213
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the joker in the pack. Did you see the papers about the evidence for the ice pack on Greenland having completely melted before? It left me wondering about how much we can trust the ice core readings from there.

Obviously it has all melted off before. Many, many times. That does not mean anything is wrong with the current ice cores. It only means they go back only as far as they go, and there may be gaps where partial melting happened before accumulation resumed. Tipping over into a new ice age would not be a better outcome than where we seem headed without that.

Agreed... far worse in fact.

the issue in particular with the ice core melting is how much we can trust the peak readings for things like methane and co2.... what we consistently see in the cores is that these things increase steadily until they suddenly drop. If we are missing the top part of that information, it could be quite important.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#264
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for my tone. Op mentioned someone doing a simulation that claimed that scaled up solar+wind+hydro generation with only 5 hours of storage capacity would be sufficient to meet the needs of Australia. That seems odd given that cloudy, windless conditions can last for days in many cases. You would at least need sufficient storage+hydro capacity to cover several days worth of shortfalls from wind+solar. Battery sys…

I thought the other poster's comment was relevant, so I didn't answer (I posted an earlier comment being replied to). FWIW, I instead would have suggested that natural gas could cover any shortages, since this type of power is easy to turn on and off, and fits more with the theme of "this is potentially possible today". The simulation over produced energy from green source. Looking at the chart - looks like the wind…

Natural gas could well be cheaper, if it's available and the CO2 charges aren't extremely high. Hydrogen is there as a rebuttal to claims that RE can't reach 100% of the grid. It can, and the evidence indicates it will do so more cheaply than a solution involving new nuclear power plants, unless the cost of the latter can be radically reduced.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#265
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting counterpoint, thanks. > A "raw" solar panel in China costs about 25 cents / W, and each watt should produce about 45kWh over its lifetime (5W per day for 25 years). I imagine that you're making assumptions on having sufficient luminosity all year round, right? So perhaps that depends on where on Earth you are. According to Jancovici [1], in most of Europe, solar panels produce about 100 kWh/m²/year, assum…

The numbers in your linked article are from 2000. The price of solar panels per watt is about 5% of what it was in 2000. Most of that cost reduction was from reduced energy use, so you need to multiply Jancovici's numbers by 5%. You're also assuming that you have to store 100% of the energy to get to a green grid. But in a grid with a good mix of different renewable sources, grid ties large enough to cover areas with…

Good point. Thanks for the insight.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#266
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the energy density canard. It's becoming a dog whistle for identifying people who don't know what they're talking about. Energy density doesn't matter; cost does. It's possible to have a high energy density and a high cost -- for example, nuclear fission.

The sun has lower energy density than a sandwich :P I guess it's useless!

The sun has lower power density than a compost pile. But the energy density of the sun is pretty high. In the Sun's core, the thermal energy of a cubic meter is about the same as the yield of a 5 megaton bomb. The energy that could be liberated by complete fusion of the hydrogen in that cubic meter is even larger.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually synthetic fuel will become economically viable.

Eventually is right now. Hydrogen and ammonia electrolyzers are being built by the tens of megawatts as we speak. Presently for chemical synthesis, but use in fuel cells or turbines is not far behind. Simple synthetic hydrocarbons follow soon after that.

Hydrogen is still cheaper to get from methane. And synthetic hydrocarbons are still expensive.

But we are moving towards economic viability.

The desired point to get to is to have fossil fuel extraction unprofitable, economically nonviable. At that point even the most ardent deniers of climate change will have to give up fossil fuels or face bankruptcy.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually is right now. Hydrogen and ammonia electrolyzers are being built by the tens of megawatts as we speak. Presently for chemical synthesis, but use in fuel cells or turbines is not far behind. Simple synthetic hydrocarbons follow soon after that.

Hydrogen is still cheaper to get from methane. And synthetic hydrocarbons are still expensive. But we are moving towards economic viability. The desired point to get to is to have fossil fuel extraction unprofitable, economically nonviable. At that point even the most ardent deniers of climate change will have to give up fossil fuels or face bankruptcy.

Once you include the risk profile any government which is actually governing (I know this is getting rarer) will want a fair bit of synthetic production capacity to reduce the impact of price shocks.

The costs of ammonia and urea shortages to a country are much higher than the sticker price when trucking and agriculture depend on them.

This strategic capacity investment is sufficient to set off economies of scale which will see the baseline prices start to look less appealing -- even with the current state of massively subsidized fossil fuels.

The hard part is getting neoliberal governments to do the thing that is actually the only economically sane option when they've all got massive conflicts of interest.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aluminium production, desalination, and more

Aluminum production is a bit problematic, since aluminum pots cannot be turned off too long without failing (either freezing up or overheating the walls).

This is simple and not that costly to change.

There are retrofit systems that allow a factor of 2 or 3 variability in electricity consumption, and even the ability to completely switch off for a few hours can smooth demand if it's planned rather than last resort.

This allows a country like Australia to turn on or off 3-5% of its total electricity demand which is a decent chunk of the duck curve.

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