This is the kind of news that gives me a little glimmer of hope for the future. The best part is that all this is being installed because its economical to do so, not because of a moral obligation...
This is the kind of news that gives me a little glimmer of hope for the future. The best part is that all this is being installed because its economical to do so, not because of a moral obligation on the part of the installers. It's nice to believe that people would do the right thing for the right reason, but in reality that pretty much never happens at scale, so doing the right thing for the "wrong" reason is the next best thing
I find it telling that even the PV magazine seems to be making the classic mistake of assuming modest linear growth of PV deployment. The PV revolution has seen years of energy agencies and...
I find it telling that even the PV magazine seems to be making the classic mistake of assuming modest linear growth of PV deployment. The PV revolution has seen years of energy agencies and associations chronically under predicting PV deployment. There are some humorous plots you can find online showing decades of under predictions of PV deployment by national energy agencies. But interestingly, even this PV website, even in 2023, seems to be still making this mistake. Their plot on this page shows what is clearly exponential growth in PV deployment, but they then assume only very modest linear growth over the next decade or so.
Yeah, it looks odd, but I give them a pass on this because predicting when an exponential-looking curve turns into an S-curve (peaks) is a really tough problem. In this case, I think it means...
Yeah, it looks odd, but I give them a pass on this because predicting when an exponential-looking curve turns into an S-curve (peaks) is a really tough problem.
In this case, I think it means making a call on Chinese industry and trade relations with other countries. Do you assume they just keep ramping up? And for installing solar, are grid connections somehow no longer a bottleneck?
Going through the predictions we made for solar at the start of the year. 317GW new build in 2023? Lol no 413GW. $0.22/W modules? Lol no $0.122/W. N-type >15% of market, fair. Grid still a bottleneck, well that wasn't much of a prediction, was it.
I agree, since it is profitable it means it is more likely to happen. Hopefully soon there will not be a (real) justification for building any more nuclear fission power plants. The world doesn't...
I agree, since it is profitable it means it is more likely to happen.
Hopefully soon there will not be a (real) justification for building any more nuclear fission power plants.
The world doesn't need any more pollution, especially nuclear waste which remains hazardous for at least 10,000 years.
The world, particularly the US, doesn't need nuclear power plants to be targets for domestic terrorists.
At least in the USA, nuclear plants are not sensible targets for terrorists. The locations are remote, security for anyone entering the site is extremely thorough and severe, carried out by...
At least in the USA, nuclear plants are not sensible targets for terrorists. The locations are remote, security for anyone entering the site is extremely thorough and severe, carried out by heavily armed guards, and there's contingencies in place to address anything impinging on the airspace. There are few better guarded pieces of infrastructure. Domestic terrorists are far more likely to destroy substations, as we've already seen people do.
If the world does install 413 GW of solar, we will have witnessed a growth of over 58% from the 260 GW installed in 2022, which itself marked an almost 42% increase from the 183 GW installed in 2021. During this two year period, the world will have experienced 125% growth – indicating that a doubling of deployed annual capacity occurred in around one and a half years.
This capacity growth is driven by several factors. Foremost is China, which plays a dual role: by being expected to install 240 GW of capacity, and secondly, through its massive scaling of manufacturing capacity, which has driven the price of solar modules toward $0.10/W.
…
If our deployment pace is maintained, the world will be on track to reach its second terawatt of solar installations by 2024, achieving this in less than three years – a stark contrast to the approximately 40 years it took to reach the first terawatt.
Edit: I'm an idiot who messed up my decimals. That new solar produces 1,800 TWh. Much of my initial thoughts were invalidated by this. I probably should be slightly less generous with running at...
Edit: I'm an idiot who messed up my decimals. That new solar produces 1,800 TWh. Much of my initial thoughts were invalidated by this. I probably should be slightly less generous with running at max capacity though. My own solar system only runs at max capacity for about 3-5 hours from about April till August. Between clouds and shorter days the rest of the year basically mean on average the rest of the year I'm producing a miniscule fraction. I personally don't think that we can double installs for 10 years, much like hydro and wind we're gonna hit a plateau of cheap install sites. But if we can things actually look good. I'm still 100% behind supporting building nuclear too, mostly because otherwise those winter months will suuuucccckkkkk. I don't think we'll ever be able to build enough storage capacity to be able to tide us over the winter months.
I'll preface that I do think solar is a worthwhile endeavor. I'm putting this here for the anti-nuke crowd.
Math time. 413 GW. Let's suppose generously it produces full capacity 12 hours a day year round. That's 1.8 TWh of power for the year.
In 2022, the world produced approximately 29,000 TWh. Energy consumption increases globaly roughly 3% per year. So that's an increase of 870 TWh in 2023 and for next year and 896 TWh in 2024.
So new solar deployments cover approximately 0.2% of the annual increase of power demands. If we manage double deployments for the next 10 years, by 2034 we'll be close to meeting the annual increased of demand for power with solar, generating about 970 TWh, while the new demand for 2034 will be 1169.
It will have done nothing to eat into the existing fossil fuel plants, and additional fossil fuel capacity is still being added.
Peach Bottom, a single nuclear power plant in the USA with a total of 2.6GW capacity, produced 22.2 TWh on its own in 2021.
A major area where nuclear has an advantage is land use. Those big declines in PV costs have been driven by utility-scale solar, which requires a lot of land for relatively low capacity factors....
A major area where nuclear has an advantage is land use. Those big declines in PV costs have been driven by utility-scale solar, which requires a lot of land for relatively low capacity factors. Rooftop solar is still a good bit more expensive than utility-scale.
It's true that fission has a benefit of low land use, but it's a pretty trivial benefit. I could just as well point out that solar has better "vibes" than nuclear. People are generally just much...
It's true that fission has a benefit of low land use, but it's a pretty trivial benefit. I could just as well point out that solar has better "vibes" than nuclear. People are generally just much more comfortable with a solar plant near them than they are nuclear plants. Regardless of how objectively safe modern fission plants may be, solar will always have the minor, but very real advantage of simply putting people more at ease. And just because something is psychological, doesn't mean it isn't real. If you could demonstrate that some portion of the population will have less stress with a solar than a fission plant near them, that lower stress would have some very real, but minor, benefits in terms of quality of life, health, etc. Solar simply does have better vibes than nuclear, and those better vibes really do serve as a minor psychological advantage for solar over fission.
Now, do I advocate for solar over nuclear because of these superior vibes? No. I want to use whatever the most affordable and practical low-carbon energy source we have is. If fission can be that source, I'm for fission. But if solar proves far more affordable and practical, even including the cost of storage, then I'll prefer solar of nuclear.
I mention vibes because the superior vibes of solar are of similar irrelevance to the superior required footprint of fission. Is the lower land footprint an advantage in fission's column? Certainly. But the superior vibes of solar are a similar advantage in the solar column.
But ultimately, both vibes and land footprint are similarly irrelevant and trivial distinctions between the two power sources. Psychological benefits are a real thing to consider, but they're nowhere near a top priority when considering the threats of climate change. Land footprint is similarly a real benefit of fission, but a completely irrelevant one in all but the most extreme of edge cases. There's no shortage of space on top of homes, commercial and industrial buildings, car parks, etc to place solar panels. Hell, you can typically cover the entire energy needs of a building, just with rooftop solar, for any building under a few stories tall. It's only when you get into midrises and higher that you can't generate enough power on-site to meet on-site needs. Or, you have to be considering really energy intensive and compact buildings, like an electric arc furnace at a steel mill. And even if you do need to place panels in the countryside, there's usually no shortage of low-productivity non-arable land available. Desert and scrub lands abound. And if there's not enough of that, floating PV is an option. And even if you have to build panels on agricultural land, agriphotovoltaics are a thing. In many applications, co-locating agriculture and PV panels can increase the productivity of both.
Ultimately, the land footprint of PV is trivial for all but the edgiest of edge cases. Only extremely tiny and dense city states will really experience this as a problem. The Vatican and Singapore may have trouble finding land for enough panels to meet their needs, but it's trivial for everyone else. In almost all cases, the land advantage of fission plants is as trivial and irrelevant an advantage as the general vibes and psychological benefits of solar.
I'm gonna need a 'citation needed' for that. I've got a 15KW system, with net metering. My electricity costs $0.22/kwh. I have a fully electrified home with a natural gas backup generator. I only...
you can typically cover the entire energy needs of a building, just with rooftop solar, for any building under a few stories tall.
I'm gonna need a 'citation needed' for that. I've got a 15KW system, with net metering. My electricity costs $0.22/kwh. I have a fully electrified home with a natural gas backup generator. I only go net-negative May/June and neutral in April/September. But as October creeps in and temps start dropping below 40F, heating bills start kicking in. My average bill in Dec/Jan/Feb is $400....and I'm not even in a terribly cold climate. And that's after converting half the home to heat pumps. Before that, my electric bill was $700 in that window. The average monthly bill, despite $20,000 of improvements to this home, is still over $170/mo.
Admittedly, the home definitely needs more insulation in the walls, but that project is gonna be a lot more expensive and not able to be financed over 5 years at 0% APR. Heat pumps were an easy win.
Basically every home built before 1960 is going to need massive renovations in order for solar panels to meet their needs. Most, especially north of Virginia, were built to breathe with intent of heating with fireplace or coal/oil furnace.
And you can't just blow insulation in the walls of old homes. Old homes rely on that breathability to let moisture escape...if you just add insulation without carefully accounting for that you'll rot the frame out. If the home was built before 1950ish, there's a chance it has knob and tube wiring that may still be live and it will burn the house down if it gets insulated.
Probably worth calculating the total renewables electrical production and not just solar. Its on track for 4,500 GW next year and is growing rapidly. Still falls well short of our needs, but its...
Probably worth calculating the total renewables electrical production and not just solar. Its on track for 4,500 GW next year and is growing rapidly. Still falls well short of our needs, but its more promising than initially thought.
See how I goofed. The thing is we already picked most of the good hydro sits clean decades ago. I don't anticipate hydro growth maintaining long, especially given all the other water supply...
See how I goofed. The thing is we already picked most of the good hydro sits clean decades ago. I don't anticipate hydro growth maintaining long, especially given all the other water supply issues.
I think wind is heavily underutilized, especially at the small-scale. This is where I think the bigger gains will sustain longer.
I have absolutely 0 idea if this is feasible, but I've always been curious if combining geothermal tech with nuclear cooling towers would be viable to extract even more power out.
Oh i mean "hook up a geothermal plant to the nuclear plant's cooling rather than the ground" In that vein, on a small scale, I've been pondering how a chimney with a wood pellet stove could be...
Oh i mean "hook up a geothermal plant to the nuclear plant's cooling rather than the ground"
In that vein, on a small scale, I've been pondering how a chimney with a wood pellet stove could be worked into a minisplit heat pump system...something like running the refridgerant lines on the outer walls outside the liner. Capture some of the waste heat and redistribute through the rest of the house in a more controlled way than trying to pipe air everywhere.
I don’t see any inherent barriers, although the binary cycle geothermal system is less efficient. And you’d add a significant amount of complexity to the overall system. There’s also...
I don’t see any inherent barriers, although the binary cycle geothermal system is less efficient. And you’d add a significant amount of complexity to the overall system. There’s also safety-related questions. How does the geothermal system perform in the event of an accident? Would it inhibit emergency cooling systems for the reactor?
Safety is in fact a very big barrier and is why I probably shouldn't be involved in that design process. Although I would certainly hope emergency cooling is automatically priority number 1 and...
Safety is in fact a very big barrier and is why I probably shouldn't be involved in that design process. Although I would certainly hope emergency cooling is automatically priority number 1 and nothing interferes with it.
I would still be very curious to know how that math plays out. It seems like a potentially symbiotic relationship.
That's really where hydrogen power will shine. If PV is cheap enough, rather than using nuclear, we can build far more panels than we need for our needs during the summer months. Then we use the...
I'm still 100% behind supporting building nuclear too, mostly because otherwise those winter months will suuuucccckkkkk. I don't think we'll ever be able to build enough storage capacity to be able to tide us over the winter months.
That's really where hydrogen power will shine. If PV is cheap enough, rather than using nuclear, we can build far more panels than we need for our needs during the summer months. Then we use the excess power to power electrolysis for seasonal power shifting. Alternately, we might use excess solar to power atmospheric carbon capture, turn some of the captured carbon into hydrocarbon fuels, and burn those during the winter.
We also need to consider ways to shift energy demand that don't involve energy storage at all. At least in the temperate regions, we don't grow food in the winter. We grow food in the warmer months and subsist off our stockpiles through the winter months. Right now in the northern hemisphere, we're not growing anything. This time of year, we as a civilization are just living out of our collective pantry. We're just a bunch of glorified squirrels slowly eating our way through our stores of nuts. We don't see this as an emergency. We're not panicking and building immense greenhouses so we can keep a constant grain output going throughout the year. Food production is seasonal; it's always been that way, and we have simply built our whole society around that fact.
This is traditionally the exact same approach we took to our energy needs. Traditionally, you would gather wood or make charcoal during the summer and use your energy stores to keep warm in the winter. In the age of fossil fuels, we got used to having constant energy supplies year-round. And for that time, such consumption patterns made the most sense. But there's no law of science or nature that says we can only sustain a technological civilization on seasonally invariant energy supplies. There's no reason we can't return to a more traditional pattern of gathering our energy in the summer and using it in the winter. That's the very strategy we've used for 95%+ of all human history, and there's no reason we can't go back to that pattern, if that proves the most economical way of running a low-carbon economy.
I agree that batteries are unlikely to provide the kind of seasonal energy shifting that we need for a low-carbon renewables-based economy. Batteries, especially lithium ion, will likely be limited to shifting power demand over intervals of a few hours or a day or two at most. But for seasonal power shifts, options do exist. Storage options are available, including hydrogen and synthetic fuels derived from atmospheric carbon. However, one powerful non-storage option we do have is to make some of our most energy-intensive industries seasonal. Does aluminum smelting need to be a year-round affair? Farmers work on seasonal schedules, why can't aluminum smelters? If you work as an aluminum smelter, maybe your work just shifts so you work 8 hour days in the fall and spring, 12 hour days in the summer, and have the whole winter off. Historically, many of our industries were seasonal, and there's little reason we couldn't return some of our most energy-intensive industries back to a seasonal work schedule. Sometimes the simplest solution is best. How do you store enough renewable energy to power a giant steel mill in the middle of the winter? Maybe the simplest and best answer is, you just don't. You lock the gates on December 1 and shutter the whole plant until March 1. Workers just have the winter off and work long summer hours. Farmers work seasonally, as do fishermen and teachers. No reason steel workers can't work in the seasons when there's enough wind and solar available to power the steel mill.
Hydrogen as storage batteries doesn't make much sense - it's inefficient and expensive, and it tends to require stable electrical input which means it works poorly with just solar. For storing...
Hydrogen as storage batteries doesn't make much sense - it's inefficient and expensive, and it tends to require stable electrical input which means it works poorly with just solar.
For storing energy, I think you're missing one of the best forms of storage we have: heat batteries. As in, hot rocks that directly store and output heat. They're not useful for providing electricity, but they're great for providing heating and they're literally dirt-cheap. Check out Polarnight energy and Rondo energy, for two examples of the tech.
Hydrogen is also portable in a way heat batteries are not. Hydrogen is the future of big industrial/commercial vehicles. Building out green infrastructure for that, and relying on it for backup...
Hydrogen is also portable in a way heat batteries are not.
Hydrogen is the future of big industrial/commercial vehicles. Building out green infrastructure for that, and relying on it for backup generation will be a massive win.
Heat batteries aren't supposed to be portable. They're a partial solution to the problem. Mobility is out of scope. And no, hydrogen is not the future of big industrial/commercial vehicles....
Heat batteries aren't supposed to be portable. They're a partial solution to the problem. Mobility is out of scope.
And no, hydrogen is not the future of big industrial/commercial vehicles. Hydrogen has great specific energy, but its energy density is awful to the point where anytime people talk about using it for vehicles, they're implicitly assuming it'll be pressurized or liquefied, which increases cost of both infrastructure and vehicle considerably. It's substantially worse than fossil fuels and always will be. The only reason we're even considering it is because it's a good short term solution, except it's not even that - right now, hydrogen is expensive and the cheapest method to produce it is still steam methane reforming. Electrolysis might be a medium-term solution but it's not a short term solution.
So, you might say, so what if it's worse than fossil fuels? Fossil fuels are a non-option with climate change.
Sure, but synthetic e.g. propane is a far better option, if we can make it cheaply from atmospheric CO2 (it has lower GHG coefficient than its equivalent mass in CO2, so fugitive emissions are a non-issue unlike methane). We can't make it cheaply, but we can't make hydrogen cheaply either. Hydrogen is not a short-term solution; there's a reason nobody is buying hydrogen cars and trucks.
So, let's talk about hydrogen as a medium-term solution: we'll have to build a ton of infrastructure for hydrogen (or ammonia, which is a health hazard and not a great option but is much more efficient to transport), that we'll have to build out extensively and expensively for a fuel that we can't cheaply produce yet, and which we expect to eventually be replaced by synthfuels that are far friendlier to existing infrastructure in the future anyway. Anyone with a brain will ask themselves if they can't hold out long enough to skip over hydrogen completely and go straight to synthfuel.
Hydrogen has some uses - for instance, some commercial hydrogen forklifts are in use because the forklift is used 24/7 and can't be given the downtime to recharge that batteries would need, and diesel forklifts aren't an option due to emissions being a health hazard when running 24/7 in the enclosed spaces of a warehouse without proper ventilation - but for big vehicles that need a long range they really suck and are far more expensive.
Again though: hydrogen for backup generation makes no sense. It can't be used as a battery for straight solar as electrolysis can't run off intermittent renewables (so the hydrogen battery would itself need a battery or firming, to charge), and it's quite inefficient and expensive. In the long term, I expect flow batteries, compressed-air batteries, molten metal batteries etc to win out - hydrogen is a hell of a moving part, it's not a great option for grid storage even if it didn't require its own battery.
The biggest benefit is cargo ships, but I just don't see cargo ships switching to hydrogen at 10x the cost, when we can barely make them ditch bunker fuel for a few cents more.
This is the kind of news that gives me a little glimmer of hope for the future. The best part is that all this is being installed because its economical to do so, not because of a moral obligation on the part of the installers. It's nice to believe that people would do the right thing for the right reason, but in reality that pretty much never happens at scale, so doing the right thing for the "wrong" reason is the next best thing
I find it telling that even the PV magazine seems to be making the classic mistake of assuming modest linear growth of PV deployment. The PV revolution has seen years of energy agencies and associations chronically under predicting PV deployment. There are some humorous plots you can find online showing decades of under predictions of PV deployment by national energy agencies. But interestingly, even this PV website, even in 2023, seems to be still making this mistake. Their plot on this page shows what is clearly exponential growth in PV deployment, but they then assume only very modest linear growth over the next decade or so.
Yeah, it looks odd, but I give them a pass on this because predicting when an exponential-looking curve turns into an S-curve (peaks) is a really tough problem.
In this case, I think it means making a call on Chinese industry and trade relations with other countries. Do you assume they just keep ramping up? And for installing solar, are grid connections somehow no longer a bottleneck?
Jenny Chase (a solar analyst who works there that I follow on social media) doesn’ t think they did well on their predictions either:
I agree, since it is profitable it means it is more likely to happen.
Hopefully soon there will not be a (real) justification for building any more nuclear fission power plants.
The world doesn't need any more pollution, especially nuclear waste which remains hazardous for at least 10,000 years.
The world, particularly the US, doesn't need nuclear power plants to be targets for domestic terrorists.
At least in the USA, nuclear plants are not sensible targets for terrorists. The locations are remote, security for anyone entering the site is extremely thorough and severe, carried out by heavily armed guards, and there's contingencies in place to address anything impinging on the airspace. There are few better guarded pieces of infrastructure. Domestic terrorists are far more likely to destroy substations, as we've already seen people do.
From the article:
…
Edit: I'm an idiot who messed up my decimals. That new solar produces 1,800 TWh. Much of my initial thoughts were invalidated by this. I probably should be slightly less generous with running at max capacity though. My own solar system only runs at max capacity for about 3-5 hours from about April till August. Between clouds and shorter days the rest of the year basically mean on average the rest of the year I'm producing a miniscule fraction. I personally don't think that we can double installs for 10 years, much like hydro and wind we're gonna hit a plateau of cheap install sites. But if we can things actually look good. I'm still 100% behind supporting building nuclear too, mostly because otherwise those winter months will suuuucccckkkkk. I don't think we'll ever be able to build enough storage capacity to be able to tide us over the winter months.
I'll preface that I do think solar is a worthwhile endeavor. I'm putting this here for the anti-nuke crowd.Math time. 413 GW. Let's suppose generously it produces full capacity 12 hours a day year round. That's 1.8 TWh of power for the year.
In 2022, the world produced approximately 29,000 TWh. Energy consumption increases globaly roughly 3% per year. So that's an increase of 870 TWh in 2023 and for next year and 896 TWh in 2024.
So new solar deployments cover approximately 0.2% of the annual increase of power demands. If we manage double deployments for the next 10 years, by 2034 we'll be close to meeting the annual increased of demand for power with solar, generating about 970 TWh, while the new demand for 2034 will be 1169.It will have done nothing to eat into the existing fossil fuel plants, and additional fossil fuel capacity is still being added.Peach Bottom, a single nuclear power plant in the USA with a total of 2.6GW capacity, produced 22.2 TWh on its own in 2021.
A major area where nuclear has an advantage is land use. Those big declines in PV costs have been driven by utility-scale solar, which requires a lot of land for relatively low capacity factors. Rooftop solar is still a good bit more expensive than utility-scale.
It's true that fission has a benefit of low land use, but it's a pretty trivial benefit. I could just as well point out that solar has better "vibes" than nuclear. People are generally just much more comfortable with a solar plant near them than they are nuclear plants. Regardless of how objectively safe modern fission plants may be, solar will always have the minor, but very real advantage of simply putting people more at ease. And just because something is psychological, doesn't mean it isn't real. If you could demonstrate that some portion of the population will have less stress with a solar than a fission plant near them, that lower stress would have some very real, but minor, benefits in terms of quality of life, health, etc. Solar simply does have better vibes than nuclear, and those better vibes really do serve as a minor psychological advantage for solar over fission.
Now, do I advocate for solar over nuclear because of these superior vibes? No. I want to use whatever the most affordable and practical low-carbon energy source we have is. If fission can be that source, I'm for fission. But if solar proves far more affordable and practical, even including the cost of storage, then I'll prefer solar of nuclear.
I mention vibes because the superior vibes of solar are of similar irrelevance to the superior required footprint of fission. Is the lower land footprint an advantage in fission's column? Certainly. But the superior vibes of solar are a similar advantage in the solar column.
But ultimately, both vibes and land footprint are similarly irrelevant and trivial distinctions between the two power sources. Psychological benefits are a real thing to consider, but they're nowhere near a top priority when considering the threats of climate change. Land footprint is similarly a real benefit of fission, but a completely irrelevant one in all but the most extreme of edge cases. There's no shortage of space on top of homes, commercial and industrial buildings, car parks, etc to place solar panels. Hell, you can typically cover the entire energy needs of a building, just with rooftop solar, for any building under a few stories tall. It's only when you get into midrises and higher that you can't generate enough power on-site to meet on-site needs. Or, you have to be considering really energy intensive and compact buildings, like an electric arc furnace at a steel mill. And even if you do need to place panels in the countryside, there's usually no shortage of low-productivity non-arable land available. Desert and scrub lands abound. And if there's not enough of that, floating PV is an option. And even if you have to build panels on agricultural land, agriphotovoltaics are a thing. In many applications, co-locating agriculture and PV panels can increase the productivity of both.
Ultimately, the land footprint of PV is trivial for all but the edgiest of edge cases. Only extremely tiny and dense city states will really experience this as a problem. The Vatican and Singapore may have trouble finding land for enough panels to meet their needs, but it's trivial for everyone else. In almost all cases, the land advantage of fission plants is as trivial and irrelevant an advantage as the general vibes and psychological benefits of solar.
I'm gonna need a 'citation needed' for that. I've got a 15KW system, with net metering. My electricity costs $0.22/kwh. I have a fully electrified home with a natural gas backup generator. I only go net-negative May/June and neutral in April/September. But as October creeps in and temps start dropping below 40F, heating bills start kicking in. My average bill in Dec/Jan/Feb is $400....and I'm not even in a terribly cold climate. And that's after converting half the home to heat pumps. Before that, my electric bill was $700 in that window. The average monthly bill, despite $20,000 of improvements to this home, is still over $170/mo.
Admittedly, the home definitely needs more insulation in the walls, but that project is gonna be a lot more expensive and not able to be financed over 5 years at 0% APR. Heat pumps were an easy win.
Basically every home built before 1960 is going to need massive renovations in order for solar panels to meet their needs. Most, especially north of Virginia, were built to breathe with intent of heating with fireplace or coal/oil furnace.
And you can't just blow insulation in the walls of old homes. Old homes rely on that breathability to let moisture escape...if you just add insulation without carefully accounting for that you'll rot the frame out. If the home was built before 1950ish, there's a chance it has knob and tube wiring that may still be live and it will burn the house down if it gets insulated.
Probably worth calculating the total renewables electrical production and not just solar. Its on track for 4,500 GW next year and is growing rapidly. Still falls well short of our needs, but its more promising than initially thought.
Hydropower alone produced an estimated 4,370 TWh of the roughly 26,000 TWh total global electricity in 2020. Not as insignificant as I would have thought. Some estimates put us north of 30% of electricity production to be renewables as of right now.
See how I goofed. The thing is we already picked most of the good hydro sits clean decades ago. I don't anticipate hydro growth maintaining long, especially given all the other water supply issues.
I think wind is heavily underutilized, especially at the small-scale. This is where I think the bigger gains will sustain longer.
I have absolutely 0 idea if this is feasible, but I've always been curious if combining geothermal tech with nuclear cooling towers would be viable to extract even more power out.
Many of the geothermal plants already have cooling towers, they are just smaller mechanical draft ones versus the large hyperboloid ones.
Oh i mean "hook up a geothermal plant to the nuclear plant's cooling rather than the ground"
In that vein, on a small scale, I've been pondering how a chimney with a wood pellet stove could be worked into a minisplit heat pump system...something like running the refridgerant lines on the outer walls outside the liner. Capture some of the waste heat and redistribute through the rest of the house in a more controlled way than trying to pipe air everywhere.
I don’t see any inherent barriers, although the binary cycle geothermal system is less efficient. And you’d add a significant amount of complexity to the overall system. There’s also safety-related questions. How does the geothermal system perform in the event of an accident? Would it inhibit emergency cooling systems for the reactor?
Safety is in fact a very big barrier and is why I probably shouldn't be involved in that design process. Although I would certainly hope emergency cooling is automatically priority number 1 and nothing interferes with it.
I would still be very curious to know how that math plays out. It seems like a potentially symbiotic relationship.
That's really where hydrogen power will shine. If PV is cheap enough, rather than using nuclear, we can build far more panels than we need for our needs during the summer months. Then we use the excess power to power electrolysis for seasonal power shifting. Alternately, we might use excess solar to power atmospheric carbon capture, turn some of the captured carbon into hydrocarbon fuels, and burn those during the winter.
We also need to consider ways to shift energy demand that don't involve energy storage at all. At least in the temperate regions, we don't grow food in the winter. We grow food in the warmer months and subsist off our stockpiles through the winter months. Right now in the northern hemisphere, we're not growing anything. This time of year, we as a civilization are just living out of our collective pantry. We're just a bunch of glorified squirrels slowly eating our way through our stores of nuts. We don't see this as an emergency. We're not panicking and building immense greenhouses so we can keep a constant grain output going throughout the year. Food production is seasonal; it's always been that way, and we have simply built our whole society around that fact.
This is traditionally the exact same approach we took to our energy needs. Traditionally, you would gather wood or make charcoal during the summer and use your energy stores to keep warm in the winter. In the age of fossil fuels, we got used to having constant energy supplies year-round. And for that time, such consumption patterns made the most sense. But there's no law of science or nature that says we can only sustain a technological civilization on seasonally invariant energy supplies. There's no reason we can't return to a more traditional pattern of gathering our energy in the summer and using it in the winter. That's the very strategy we've used for 95%+ of all human history, and there's no reason we can't go back to that pattern, if that proves the most economical way of running a low-carbon economy.
I agree that batteries are unlikely to provide the kind of seasonal energy shifting that we need for a low-carbon renewables-based economy. Batteries, especially lithium ion, will likely be limited to shifting power demand over intervals of a few hours or a day or two at most. But for seasonal power shifts, options do exist. Storage options are available, including hydrogen and synthetic fuels derived from atmospheric carbon. However, one powerful non-storage option we do have is to make some of our most energy-intensive industries seasonal. Does aluminum smelting need to be a year-round affair? Farmers work on seasonal schedules, why can't aluminum smelters? If you work as an aluminum smelter, maybe your work just shifts so you work 8 hour days in the fall and spring, 12 hour days in the summer, and have the whole winter off. Historically, many of our industries were seasonal, and there's little reason we couldn't return some of our most energy-intensive industries back to a seasonal work schedule. Sometimes the simplest solution is best. How do you store enough renewable energy to power a giant steel mill in the middle of the winter? Maybe the simplest and best answer is, you just don't. You lock the gates on December 1 and shutter the whole plant until March 1. Workers just have the winter off and work long summer hours. Farmers work seasonally, as do fishermen and teachers. No reason steel workers can't work in the seasons when there's enough wind and solar available to power the steel mill.
Hydrogen as storage batteries doesn't make much sense - it's inefficient and expensive, and it tends to require stable electrical input which means it works poorly with just solar.
For storing energy, I think you're missing one of the best forms of storage we have: heat batteries. As in, hot rocks that directly store and output heat. They're not useful for providing electricity, but they're great for providing heating and they're literally dirt-cheap. Check out Polarnight energy and Rondo energy, for two examples of the tech.
Hydrogen is also portable in a way heat batteries are not.
Hydrogen is the future of big industrial/commercial vehicles. Building out green infrastructure for that, and relying on it for backup generation will be a massive win.
Heat batteries aren't supposed to be portable. They're a partial solution to the problem. Mobility is out of scope.
And no, hydrogen is not the future of big industrial/commercial vehicles. Hydrogen has great specific energy, but its energy density is awful to the point where anytime people talk about using it for vehicles, they're implicitly assuming it'll be pressurized or liquefied, which increases cost of both infrastructure and vehicle considerably. It's substantially worse than fossil fuels and always will be. The only reason we're even considering it is because it's a good short term solution, except it's not even that - right now, hydrogen is expensive and the cheapest method to produce it is still steam methane reforming. Electrolysis might be a medium-term solution but it's not a short term solution.
So, you might say, so what if it's worse than fossil fuels? Fossil fuels are a non-option with climate change.
Sure, but synthetic e.g. propane is a far better option, if we can make it cheaply from atmospheric CO2 (it has lower GHG coefficient than its equivalent mass in CO2, so fugitive emissions are a non-issue unlike methane). We can't make it cheaply, but we can't make hydrogen cheaply either. Hydrogen is not a short-term solution; there's a reason nobody is buying hydrogen cars and trucks.
So, let's talk about hydrogen as a medium-term solution: we'll have to build a ton of infrastructure for hydrogen (or ammonia, which is a health hazard and not a great option but is much more efficient to transport), that we'll have to build out extensively and expensively for a fuel that we can't cheaply produce yet, and which we expect to eventually be replaced by synthfuels that are far friendlier to existing infrastructure in the future anyway. Anyone with a brain will ask themselves if they can't hold out long enough to skip over hydrogen completely and go straight to synthfuel.
Hydrogen has some uses - for instance, some commercial hydrogen forklifts are in use because the forklift is used 24/7 and can't be given the downtime to recharge that batteries would need, and diesel forklifts aren't an option due to emissions being a health hazard when running 24/7 in the enclosed spaces of a warehouse without proper ventilation - but for big vehicles that need a long range they really suck and are far more expensive.
Again though: hydrogen for backup generation makes no sense. It can't be used as a battery for straight solar as electrolysis can't run off intermittent renewables (so the hydrogen battery would itself need a battery or firming, to charge), and it's quite inefficient and expensive. In the long term, I expect flow batteries, compressed-air batteries, molten metal batteries etc to win out - hydrogen is a hell of a moving part, it's not a great option for grid storage even if it didn't require its own battery.
The biggest benefit is cargo ships, but I just don't see cargo ships switching to hydrogen at 10x the cost, when we can barely make them ditch bunker fuel for a few cents more.