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

newyorker.com

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

#551

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

GrumpyNl wrote: post #476
jillesvangurp wrote: post #175

The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine. That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized.…

Despite all the great technology and improvements over the years, consumer energy in Europe has never been so expensive.

We have started to tax carbon in form the of the ETS system while now LNG keeps being the marginal producer in the grid.

Meaning - the interconnection queue for storage and new renewables is absolutely enormous but getting enough online to meaningfully alter the electricity bills will take years.

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

#552

Post by maxglute »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #540
jillesvangurp wrote: post #175

The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine. That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized.…

HVCD Was supposed to be the answer for china’s big renewable energy surplus out west while most of its energy needs are in the east, but for some reason it hasn’t worked out so they are leaning on nuclear and coal more for eastern power needs. I guess when the imbalance is huge, it’s not that easy. They could move more manufacturing out west, and I think they are doing that to a point, but water supply becomes an iss…

UHVDC is progress is "fine", I think utilization is 60-70%, ideally it would be 80-90% but hurdles now mostly political, many central govs still want to prop up local coal, so new policies on national unified electric / spot market by 2026. Current UHVDC capacity is ~150GW, utilization around ~100GW, PRC peak demand ~1000GW, i.e. UHVDC transmitting like 10% national power, could be 15%. Rollout for next 10 years is to hit ~25%, something like 300GW (70-80% from western renewables), assuming peak power demand grows to peak 1200-1500GW. But this is based on outdated 14th 5-year plan projections (~2021), PRC currently on trend to 1800-2000GW peak. Don't know if there's new policies to scale UHVCD accordingly.

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

#553

Post by kragen »

pjc50 wrote: post #327
hydrogen7800 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Budgeted at €550 million, and completed at a cost of €600m Amazing.

That's pretty good! Just a 10% overrun. By comparison, Hinkley Point C is now at "up to" £46bn from an initial £18bn. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68073279

It's good in its adherence to the budget (almost) and maybe its absolute price: €600M for 700MW is €0.86 per watt. That might sound terrible when compared to current mainstream solar panel wholesale prices of €0.11/Wp, but solar plants in the Netherlands have a capacity factor of only about 10% IIRC, so that is €1.10 per average watt, not counting balance of plant, permitting, etc. The cable may not run at a 100% capacity factor but it'll probably be over 50%.

Still, if module prices continue falling, even at poor capacity factors lime 10%, it'll be increasingly hard to justify paying such high prices to move energy around the continent; local overprovisioning and storage will be cheaper even if Norway is willing to produce the energy for free.

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

#554

Post by fastball »

dalyons wrote: post #548
fastball wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More expensive in what way? "Cost" is what everyone quotes about why nuclear isn't great, but isn't the whole idea behind shelving fossil fuels and switching to alternatives due to downsides that are secondary to cost? To me, renewables (solar and wind namely) have many more downsides than nuclear. So if we are doing things not because of cost anyway , why not nuclear? What do you fundamentally care about? The power…

in $/kwh. We are in fact doing things soley because of cost, and pretty much only because of cost, because capitalisim. Solar and wind are now cheaper than all alternatives in most situations, so they are rapidly becoming all thats being built. We are doing the cheapest thing, which just so happens to be great for carbon, luckily for us. If we get out of this climate mess it will almost be by accident, because we mad…

The fundamental disagreement here is (in my opinion) on what needs to be encouraged. If what you say is true and renewables are cheaper anyway, then also as you say capitalism should in out and that's what we will use in the near term anyway. So shouldn't we be investing more now on the things that you think are 10-20 years out, in order to accelerate them?

Becuase I'm interested in the future. The math with wind and solar checks out if all you care about is current energy needs. But we've already achieved most of the efficiency we can with at least PV. Even in a hypothetical future where you have some sort of quantum PV panels using MEG, your best possible hope is only 3x current efficiencies. But again, I'm more interested in our long-term future. Nuclear (fission and fusion) have much more unbounded potential than wind and solar.

Back to cost, the numbers in the article you link are cherry-picked. They rely on deploying solar to "the sunniest regions in the world" to get that performance. Most of the world is not the sunniest, unfortunately. Beyond that, the corn fields and insane amounts of empty space you mention are generally not co-located with areas of high power usage, making transmission another factor (which is doubly a factor since PV is such low-voltage that you require significant transformer infrastructure in order to step things up for transmission). So I strongly disagree, land usage is absolutely still an issue. There are also externalities caused by covering huge swathes of land with PV panels.

And it would need to be huge swathes of land, because in case it wasn't clear I would like to see humanity have huge amounts of power at our disposal – significantly more than we are using today. My back of the napkin map is that it would take 50,000 km2 of solar to accommodate current US energy needs. But I'd like to 100x our energy supply. That would require 5m km2, which is half the entire land area of the USA.

And honestly, I'm still skeptical of the price difference. PV needs lots of things (transformers, transmission, storage, disposal, land use, etc) that are frequently not priced in. Meanwhile the numbers quoted for nuclear fission reactors are frequently absolutely all in, including the cost of decommissioning the reactor at some indeterminate point in the future and pre-allocating funds for disposal.

tl;dr – your right that solar/wind is already quite cost effective and moving rapidly on its own pace just fine. So if anything needs collective support to me it is nuclear which has potential for the future that solar/wind just lacks.

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

#555

Post by adrianN »

buckle8017 wrote: post #547
adrianN wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power2Gas and using the existing infrastructure for gas storage is a known solution for storing months of power. It might not be the cheapest solution though.

Methane storage is only like a few weeks at most. Storing months worth of power is not something we do with natural gas or even oil today.

Germany has like three months worth of nat gas reserves. See for example https://www.intellinews.com/how-many-days-of-gas-consumption.... Building bigger gas tanks is not rocket science either.

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

#556

Post by ben_w »

pfdietz wrote: post #526
ben_w wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true, with sufficiently cheap transmission, no storage is needed. But only the Chinese have either the capability to, or interest in, building a one-square-meter-cross-section aluminium belt around the planet, and that means a geopolitical faff.

> While true, with sufficiently cheap transmission, no storage is needed. Where "sufficiently cheap" here means "affordable over intercontinental distances". I believe storage costs are falling faster than transmission costs.

The "intercontinental distances" part is simpler, and potentially* cheaper at current aluminium prices, than the domestic grid upgrades and repairs much of the west needs anyway.

* The scale is such that it's more of an opportunity cost than a dollar cost, what else can be done with 5% of Chinese aluminium per year for the next 20-or-so years.

But also, much research needed before a true price tag can be attached, rather than just a bill of materials

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

#557

Post by Tade0 »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #454
Tade0 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a non-issue. Copper isn't that short in supply. A typical car uses ~25kg of copper - that's enough for approximately 0.5m of HVDC. The EU currently produces 12mln cars annually, down 3mln from the 2017 peak. In other words there should be no issue with ramping up demand for the equivalent of 1500km of HVDC annually in the EU alone - a rate much higher than the local bureaucracy could manage issuing permits for.

Do any of these HVDC lines really use copper? I think aluminum is much much more common.

I'm no expert but it appears both materials are used - there must be a trade-off of some sort.

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

#558

Post by jadeopteryx »

ErigmolCt wrote: post #132

While the US is busy trying to revive the oil-soaked 20th century, places like Namibia are leapfrogging straight into a distributed, solar-powered future with YouTube tutorials... It's like watching the fossil era get out-hustled in real time.

[dead]

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

#559

Post by pydry »

fastball wrote: post #554
dalyons wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in $/kwh. We are in fact doing things soley because of cost, and pretty much only because of cost, because capitalisim. Solar and wind are now cheaper than all alternatives in most situations, so they are rapidly becoming all thats being built. We are doing the cheapest thing, which just so happens to be great for carbon, luckily for us. If we get out of this climate mess it will almost be by accident, because we mad…

The fundamental disagreement here is (in my opinion) on what needs to be encouraged. If what you say is true and renewables are cheaper anyway, then also as you say capitalism should in out and that's what we will use in the near term anyway. So shouldn't we be investing more now on the things that you think are 10-20 years out, in order to accelerate them? Becuase I'm interested in the future. The math with wind and…

>And honestly, I'm still skeptical of the price difference. PV needs lots of things (transformers, transmission, storage, disposal, land use, etc) that are frequently not priced in.

You should be less skeptical.

With a LCOE difference of 5x there is more than a little wiggle room to price in extra storage and transmission costs and still end up way cheaper.

That is how every kilowatt hour generated with solar and wind, stored with power2gas (the most expensive form of storage) and used on a cold, windless night still ends up being cheaper than nuclear power generated on a sunny, windy day.

Nuclear power survives exclusively because of its relationship with the military industrial complex. Thats why it gets deluged with lavish subsidies, that's most governments only want a few and that's why the governments who build them either have a bomb or want the ability to build one in a hurry (e.g. Iran who joined this club a long time ago or Poland who joined recently).

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

#560

Post by lukan »

kragen wrote: post #532
lukan wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do, but even in peacetimes not without issues. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills But the problem mentioned above was about war.

I think the idea of "peacetime" is probably outdated. Not in the sense that I think people should fight, but in the sense that their fighting will no longer be limited to certain geographic areas, and people will fight, so all of us will be at constant risk of both infrastructural damage and violent death.

I don't think peacetime is outdated, but we do live in a time of increasing tensions and classical and asymetric conflicts, mixed with an increasing amount of people who believe they have nothing left to loose. So yes, I also prefer the concept of local ressilience as opposed to having many critical infrastructure points where everything else will collapse if those are damaged. Solar, Wind and batteries can go a long way here, to keep at least critical systems running.
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