6 ms·

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

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).
        hutzlibu 8y ago
        Hm, this is the first time I heard that you can build a fissoon reactor which cant melt down. Or can't be made into weapons. But I don't know much about the topic. Short google search shows that your claims are not proven and at least controversal: https://theecologist.org/2017/oct/03/james-hansens-generation-iv-nuclear-advocacy-deconstruction-nuclear-fallacies-and https://theecologist.org/2017/oct/03/james-hansens-generatio...
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.

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).
      - hutzlibu 8y ago
        Hm, this is the first time I heard that you can build a fissoon reactor which cant melt down. Or can't be made into weapons. But I don't know much about the topic. Short google search shows that your claims are not proven and at least controversal: https://theecologist.org/2017/oct/03/james-hansens-generation-iv-nuclear-advocacy-deconstruction-nuclear-fallacies-and https://theecologist.org/2017/oct/03/james-hansens-generatio...

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.