7 ms·

Mostly agreed, but: "If you want clean power in your lifetime, support fission plants." Not anti nuclear or anything, but you really want a large share of wind

Mostly agreed, but: "If you want clean power in your lifetime, support fission plants." Not anti nuclear or anything, but you really want a large share of wind+solar. Less hard to handle waste and cheaper. Once we are approaching 80% wind+solar we can discuss how to best deal with the difficult remaining 20% (load shifting, expanded transmission grids, storage, CCX and Carbon2Gas gas plants and nuclear are all options that are possibly going to play a role).

apendleton 8y ago
They're only cheap and low-waste if you don't have to worry about storage, and that needs to be solved well before the 80% point. Battery manufacture is pretty dirty, and even if the environmental issues were not a concern, it's not clear that enough raw materials (rare earths, etc.) exist in the world to move the entire power grid to intermittent sources plus battery storage. And so far, no alternative storage sources have proven themselves broadly viable (pumped hydro is probably closest but requires fairly specific climate and geography). Personally I'm with Bill Gates on this one: we basically need an innovation miracle to solve our energy and climate problems, but probably just one, and it can be in any of four or five different fields (renewables + storage, fission, fusion, biofuels, carbon capture, etc.). Success in any one of those spaces is far from guaranteed, so we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket, and should be aggressively pursuing all of them in the hopes that at least one will pan out.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Solar thermal that stores energy in molten salt sounds like a cool technology that can drastically reduce the need for batteries. You could probably set up large solar thermal plants in the Sahara and power Europe via HVDC lines without needing many batteries.
  - hutzlibu 8y ago
    Yes, you could do that, also in the other deserts for other parts of the world. There is a big Initiative with that goal, desertec. But unfortunately it got very quiet around them.
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  To make Fusion work, there is a lot of unproven technology required. For renewables not. And the storage is a problem yes, but not one that requires miracles. Just investing. (And there are much more technologys around than just batteries. Air-pressure storages for example. Or hydrogen. Or different H2 based ones like Methan, etc. or artifical lakes for water pump storage, etc.) But to make Fusion work any time soon, there are indeed miracles required. If it works one day, nice. But I would not bet on it, to solve any problems we have today.
  - Semirhage 8y ago
    Fusion requires lots of time, or a few miracles. Renewable storage and transmission requires some breakthroughs. Maybe we could do it Soon, maybe in decades. Fission requires political will, no miracles, no breakthroughs. We could have been doing it last year.
    - Certhas 8y ago
      I think this is incorrect. Renewables + Storage is possible now. It's only a matter of price. At marginal cost right now solar+wind are cheaper than alternatives, at total system costs it's within a factor of two (or at break even for optimistic studies) of the current system and falling. Fusion is not possible now. As climate change is happening now, any delay in transitioning to clean and available solutions is purely ideology driven.
      - hutzlibu 8y ago
        Also, Fission is a potential dangerous technology. Not only for accidents, also for intentional missuse. The wider it is avaiable, the easier it is for certain groups to get more dangerous.
        apendleton 8y ago
        This too is a political will problem. Designs for proliferation-resistant gen IV nuclear plants have existed for a long time, and many have been tested. We don't use them because nobody builds nuclear plants any more out of overblown fears of meltdowns (which, incidentally, also can't occur in most gen IV designs).
- Certhas 8y ago
  Could you please point me to reputable studies that back up your claim that storage will be needed before very high penetration? Even for extremely high carbon reductions (95% on 1990) the best models I've seen consider transmission lines and sector coupling considerably cheaper. And these models make very aggressive assumptions on the fall of battery prices. E.g.: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf Edit: The thing to look at is figure 11. on page 16. It gives a policy trade off. Given political limits on the amount of transmission grid extension (x axis) what is the cost of the economically optimal mix of technologies (y axis). Left graph shows sector coupling, right graph shows sector coupling. The second graph almost completely eliminates the need for battery storage. Nuclear is not in this mix, partly because this is exploring policy constraints on transmission capacity in the context of Europe (and nuclear is pretty much a non-starter politically) but it clearly shows that the idea that large amounts of battery are inevitable is outdated. I'll leave you with a quote from the conclusions: "The All-Flex-Central scenario with optimal transmission costs just 13% more than today’s system [even when excluding health benefits]"
  - jabl 8y ago
    There are papers claiming that the various 100% renewable work by Jacobson, Breuer etc. suffer from a number of wildly optimistic assumptions. See e.g. doi:10.1016/j.rser.2017.03.114 . Also see work by Christopher Clack et al. (one of which caused the infamous Jacobson lawsuit, FWIW), and Jesse Jenkins et al.
    - Certhas 8y ago
      Then you are no doubt aware of the response article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032118303307?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211... Which I find considerably more convincing, given that it addresses the concerns raised in detail and gives a much wider overview of the literature and ideas around. In my view the response article actually demonstrates that Heard et.al. had an ideological motivated conclusion they wanted to get to and chose evaluation criteria to fit their desired outcome.
rotexo 8y ago
Take a look at the consumption of various forms of energy globally in figure 1 of this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#cite_note-BP-Review-2013-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#cite_... (sourced from BP's Statistical Review of World Energy https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...) Now look at some of the figures in this slide deck: https://www.svensktnaringsliv.se/Bilder_och_dokument/mattias-lantz_analysgruppenpdf_634627.html/BINARY/Mattias%20Lantz_Analysgruppen.pdf https://www.svensktnaringsliv.se/Bilder_och_dokument/mattias... (in particular, slide 3, showing rate of added generation/year for various countries, comparing nuclear to wind+solar+geo+bio energy, compared to the needed rate of addition of carbon-neutral energy to hit 2 deg C warming goals.) These data are also sourced from the BP statistical review and the World Bank. If you trust that information, evaluate for yourself whether or not we can reach 80% penetration of wind and solar in time to avoid anything short of catastrophic warming. If your response is to extrapolate current trends in cost reductions for wind and particularly solar, please bear in mind that there are no indefinite exponential growth processes in the real world where transfers of matter and energy are concerned, only processes that show logistic growth. And we can't necessarily predict when we'll reach the plateau phase of logistic growth. What I conclude from that, personally, is that we shouldn't gamble on continued trends in solar and wind adoption to get us to decarbonization.
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  So what is your conclusion? Bet on fusion? I would bet on nuclear, but in the long term indeed switch to solar + wind, starting now. Which is happening... at least the last.
  - rotexo 8y ago
    My bet is on pursuing everything that gets us closer to decarbonization, but it appears there is the most potential in the immediate future for fission. The challenge there is of course economics, which is why I think we need a carbon tax to add the future impact of climate change into our accounting for various technologies.

apendleton 8y ago

They're only cheap and low-waste if you don't have to worry about storage, and that needs to be solved well before the 80% point. Battery manufacture is pretty dirty, and even if the environmental issues were not a concern, it's not clear that enough raw materials (rare earths, etc.) exist in the world to move the entire power grid to intermittent sources plus battery storage. And so far, no alternative storage sources have proven themselves broadly viable (pumped hydro is probably closest but requires fairly specific climate and geography). Personally I'm with Bill Gates on this one: we basically need an innovation miracle to solve our energy and climate problems, but probably just one, and it can be in any of four or five different fields (renewables + storage, fission, fusion, biofuels, carbon capture, etc.). Success in any one of those spaces is far from guaranteed, so we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket, and should be aggressively pursuing all of them in the hopes that at least one will pan out.

adrianN 8y ago
Solar thermal that stores energy in molten salt sounds like a cool technology that can drastically reduce the need for batteries. You could probably set up large solar thermal plants in the Sahara and power Europe via HVDC lines without needing many batteries.
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  Yes, you could do that, also in the other deserts for other parts of the world. There is a big Initiative with that goal, desertec. But unfortunately it got very quiet around them.
hutzlibu 8y ago
To make Fusion work, there is a lot of unproven technology required. For renewables not. And the storage is a problem yes, but not one that requires miracles. Just investing. (And there are much more technologys around than just batteries. Air-pressure storages for example. Or hydrogen. Or different H2 based ones like Methan, etc. or artifical lakes for water pump storage, etc.) But to make Fusion work any time soon, there are indeed miracles required. If it works one day, nice. But I would not bet on it, to solve any problems we have today.
- Semirhage 8y ago
  Fusion requires lots of time, or a few miracles. Renewable storage and transmission requires some breakthroughs. Maybe we could do it Soon, maybe in decades. Fission requires political will, no miracles, no breakthroughs. We could have been doing it last year.
  - Certhas 8y ago
    I think this is incorrect. Renewables + Storage is possible now. It's only a matter of price. At marginal cost right now solar+wind are cheaper than alternatives, at total system costs it's within a factor of two (or at break even for optimistic studies) of the current system and falling. Fusion is not possible now. As climate change is happening now, any delay in transitioning to clean and available solutions is purely ideology driven.
    - hutzlibu 8y ago
      Also, Fission is a potential dangerous technology. Not only for accidents, also for intentional missuse. The wider it is avaiable, the easier it is for certain groups to get more dangerous.
      - apendleton 8y ago
        This too is a political will problem. Designs for proliferation-resistant gen IV nuclear plants have existed for a long time, and many have been tested. We don't use them because nobody builds nuclear plants any more out of overblown fears of meltdowns (which, incidentally, also can't occur in most gen IV designs).
Certhas 8y ago
Could you please point me to reputable studies that back up your claim that storage will be needed before very high penetration? Even for extremely high carbon reductions (95% on 1990) the best models I've seen consider transmission lines and sector coupling considerably cheaper. And these models make very aggressive assumptions on the fall of battery prices. E.g.: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf Edit: The thing to look at is figure 11. on page 16. It gives a policy trade off. Given political limits on the amount of transmission grid extension (x axis) what is the cost of the economically optimal mix of technologies (y axis). Left graph shows sector coupling, right graph shows sector coupling. The second graph almost completely eliminates the need for battery storage. Nuclear is not in this mix, partly because this is exploring policy constraints on transmission capacity in the context of Europe (and nuclear is pretty much a non-starter politically) but it clearly shows that the idea that large amounts of battery are inevitable is outdated. I'll leave you with a quote from the conclusions: "The All-Flex-Central scenario with optimal transmission costs just 13% more than today’s system [even when excluding health benefits]"
- jabl 8y ago
  There are papers claiming that the various 100% renewable work by Jacobson, Breuer etc. suffer from a number of wildly optimistic assumptions. See e.g. doi:10.1016/j.rser.2017.03.114 . Also see work by Christopher Clack et al. (one of which caused the infamous Jacobson lawsuit, FWIW), and Jesse Jenkins et al.
  - Certhas 8y ago
    Then you are no doubt aware of the response article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032118303307?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211... Which I find considerably more convincing, given that it addresses the concerns raised in detail and gives a much wider overview of the literature and ideas around. In my view the response article actually demonstrates that Heard et.al. had an ideological motivated conclusion they wanted to get to and chose evaluation criteria to fit their desired outcome.

rotexo 8y ago

Take a look at the consumption of various forms of energy globally in figure 1 of this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#cite_note-BP-Review-2013-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#cite_... (sourced from BP's Statistical Review of World Energy https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...) Now look at some of the figures in this slide deck: https://www.svensktnaringsliv.se/Bilder_och_dokument/mattias-lantz_analysgruppenpdf_634627.html/BINARY/Mattias%20Lantz_Analysgruppen.pdf https://www.svensktnaringsliv.se/Bilder_och_dokument/mattias... (in particular, slide 3, showing rate of added generation/year for various countries, comparing nuclear to wind+solar+geo+bio energy, compared to the needed rate of addition of carbon-neutral energy to hit 2 deg C warming goals.) These data are also sourced from the BP statistical review and the World Bank. If you trust that information, evaluate for yourself whether or not we can reach 80% penetration of wind and solar in time to avoid anything short of catastrophic warming. If your response is to extrapolate current trends in cost reductions for wind and particularly solar, please bear in mind that there are no indefinite exponential growth processes in the real world where transfers of matter and energy are concerned, only processes that show logistic growth. And we can't necessarily predict when we'll reach the plateau phase of logistic growth. What I conclude from that, personally, is that we shouldn't gamble on continued trends in solar and wind adoption to get us to decarbonization.

hutzlibu 8y ago
So what is your conclusion? Bet on fusion? I would bet on nuclear, but in the long term indeed switch to solar + wind, starting now. Which is happening... at least the last.
- rotexo 8y ago
  My bet is on pursuing everything that gets us closer to decarbonization, but it appears there is the most potential in the immediate future for fission. The challenge there is of course economics, which is why I think we need a carbon tax to add the future impact of climate change into our accounting for various technologies.