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These trends are excellent and impressive. > But these problems are distant. Renewables will start to encounter them in earnest when solar makes up >20-30% of

These trends are excellent and impressive. > But these problems are distant. Renewables will start to encounter them in earnest when solar makes up >20-30% of electricity and when wind makes up >40-50% of electricity. Today, worldwide, solar is only 2% and wind is only perhaps 6% of global electricity. Cheap multi-hour storage will arrive before that (indeed, in the next few years), lowering the price of using solar to meet the evening peak, and of dealing with intermittency on the order of minutes to several hours. Only seasonal storage (and perhaps the political challenges of long-range transmission) seem to be truly difficult problems. And we have time before they begin to impair the growth of renewables. This is where things get hard. Besides electricity, we also have to clean up all transportation, industrial, and space heating. This isn't so distant in an energy systems perspective. This is where having things like nuclear power plants with district heating will likely be important. Until then, it's great to see wind and solar performing so excellently. I still can't believe San Bernardino county already NIMBY-banned more large solar installations in the California deserts.

philwelch 8y ago
I don't know if it's absolutely necessary to completely zero our carbon emissions. We're going to need to do some sequestration and other countermeasures anyway to lower the current CO2 levels to a safe level, and it may very well end up more cost-effective to continue using those countermeasures than to try to invent an electric jet engine.
- kaybe 8y ago
  If we manage to make that jet fuel from anything else but fossil energy that should do. The only issue is that the CO2 emission up there has so much more impact, but I think we should be able to manage if we have the rest under control.
- ergothus 8y ago
  I'll feel more confident when we have large scale sequestration methods that are beyond the drawing board. I loosely agree with your conclusion, but until we KNOW the numbers, it seems worth it to shoot for as close to zero emissions as we can get while figuring out the sequestration options. The closest I've heard of is some seabed oilfield sequestering from Nordic countries, IIRC, but that has some built in limitations. Are you aware of sequestering efforts I've missed?
  - chalst 8y ago
    There's new research that suggests that there are soil-based sequestration methods that work far faster than the well-studied approach of growing forests: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08636-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08636-w
  - philwelch 8y ago
    We should invest the R&D effort into as many places as we can. I just have a hunch that "electrifying everything" isn't going to win out over, say, "use electricity to synthesize energy-dense liquid fuels", which can even be generalized to the sequestration strategy of "use electricity to synthesize liquid fuels and then store them in underground salt caverns like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve". Though I have no idea if we can make enough salt caverns, at least it would be a fixed amount of salt caverns, since you could establish a closed-loop supply of liquid fuel this way that was long-run carbon-neutral.
    - ergothus 8y ago
      No argument here - I'm just saying we shouldn't lay off the emission reductions BEFORE we have any technological answers. Likewise, we should research such options rather than assuming someone will.
      - philwelch 8y ago
        I think we're in full agreement. It appears that we've figured out how to electrify automobiles already, for instance. That's a good thing. It's just that some emission reductions are also open technological questions, and sometimes they're more or less open than the questions around sequestration, so hard-and-fast rules are hard to come by. Is it easier to sequester the emissions from space rockets than it is to build a Lofstrom loop? Is it easier to synthesize jet fuel from the atmosphere than to electrify jets? Where should R&D resources be optimally allocated, especially if we're taking a risk that certain approaches won't work out?
DontGiveTwoFlux 8y ago
With electricity going towards renewables, it seems clear that the best strategy will be to get the other major uses of energy on electricity as well. Vehicles have a clear (if long) path to electrification. But what about heating buildings? My understanding is that electric heating is not cost effective compared to carbon based fuels. Lower costs driven by renewables can help here, but will it be enough? Are there alternatives being developed to tackle this major energy use?
- tomp 8y ago
  A lot can be done just by upgrading technology, regardless of the energy source. For example, heat pumps achieve more than 100% (!) efficiency (i.e. by exchanging heat between outdoors and inside of the building, you can heat it up more than you could by just converting the spent energy straight into heat). I imagine similar can be achieved with better insulation.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    I don't think that's quite the right energy balance for heat pumps ;) You can upgrade equipment but that's not even remotely a solution to decarbonize at the rates we apparently need. There are lots of quadrillion BTUs that need to be decarbonized, and upgrades alone won't get us there. We need clean energy sources to ramp up and replace natural gas, oil, and coal.
    - bluGill 8y ago
      A modern furnace is only expected to last 20 years or so. Upgrading equipment is a solution is the upgrade isn't too expensive. I've looked into geothermo heat pumps a few times in the past, and they never worked out because of cost. I'm thinking seriously about replacing my current (working) furnace with a heat pump though just because I want some zoning that the natural gas furnace cannot do.
    - dashundchen 8y ago
      > I don't think that's quite the right energy balance for heat pumps ;) It's exactly right. A good heat pump will have a coefficient of performance (COP) of 5, which means for every watt of electricity put in, 5 watts of heat is moved from outside to inside - effectively an efficiency of 500%. While resistance electric heat and fossil fuel can never give more heat than the energy put in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Performance_considerations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Performance_consider...
beefield 8y ago
> Only seasonal storage (and perhaps the political challenges of long-range transmission) seem to be truly difficult problems. Seasonal storage of heat is not that difficult a problem, given that you have large enough need of low enough temperature heat. Which at least district heating offers. And converging electricity to heat is not exactly expensive or difficult...
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Can you elaborate? How many TW-hours of energy storage are you talking about being not difficult? Imagine for example the US Midwest and northeast from October through May.
  - beefield 8y ago
    Wikipedia has a decent article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag... At least this one seems to be commercially viable: https://www.solarthermalworld.org/content/denmark-52500-m2-additional-collector-area-vojens https://www.solarthermalworld.org/content/denmark-52500-m2-a... And here seem to be some numbers: https://www.gsenergy.eu/central-solar-heating/ https://www.gsenergy.eu/central-solar-heating/ To me these numbers are a bit confusing, though, it seems like they are production and not storage numbers. Anyway, heat storage capacity goes on third power of the size of the storage size while heat losses go only on second power. So after some point the heat losses are small enough. And as an order of magnitude, storage of tens of GWh seems to be in the commercially viable range. Today, that is.
0815test 8y ago
Seasonal storage is a pretty huge issue which means some baseline capacity will most likely be kept, though not nearly at the same scale as today. Keep in mind that sometimes it's overcast/dark and the wind doesn't blow, and that this can occur for extended periods of time over large geographical areas. Demand response can help even then, by shutting down some energy-intensive industry - but you still need to provide a baseline supply for more critical stuff.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Seriously. I plotted these data in Dec. 2017 of the entire Pacific Northwest's wind resources drop to zero for ten full days. Not overly uncommon. https://partofthething.com/thoughts/wp-content/uploads/december_generation-1.png https://partofthething.com/thoughts/wp-content/uploads/decem...
- philipkglass 8y ago
  I think that recently built gas-fired plants are going to be around for a long time. But like marginal coal plants today, they may shut down for entire seasons and only go to standby-active during high demand seasons. It's possible to reduce emissions a lot without entirely retiring combustion plants if the plants don't burn any fuel for 8 or 9 months out of the year.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    That kind of duty cycle changes the economics of those plants drastically. The capital efficiency becomes much lower - basically turbines are very mature, efficient, but high capital. Then to only operate them 25-30% of the time seasonally, they lose even more economic efficiency. But, if that seasonal load becomes the operating demand, then certain kinds of other technologies like flow batteries become more attractive to the degree they can decouple the power regeneration equipment costs from the capacity of storage. i.e. if you only need to size the power generation equipment to the fairly small instantaneous demand, but have to some degree a separate capacity storage cost for the next added unit of run time.
    - 8y ago
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
>and space heating // Perhaps we can skip this and use wearables for "personal climate control" to some extent? We manage a daytime domestic temperature range in the UK of about 20degC (14-34degC) just by changing clothes. Though if I'm sitting using a computer in 14degC then I'll stick a hot-water bottle up my jumper; and a paddling pool nearby is handy in 30+degC. Better insulation/architecture can negate the need for Winter heating/Summer cooling in some regions.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  In some regions, sure! But in places like the US Midwest and northeast, no. We need massive and I mean massive conversions to clean energy that aren't even on the radar yet for heating. Natural gas does not count as clean in a carbon constrained world. It's -20C out there for many days in a row. Not to mention heating greenhouses, hospitals, commercial spaces, etc. Plus, convincing everyone to bundle up may be harder than switching to clean carbon free energy like nukes or wind+mega-storage
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  I did something like this when I got an electric mattress pad.
village-idiot 8y ago
Don’t forget steel and concrete! Every pound of concrete releases 1 pound of CO2
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  I think you mean cement. Cement is only 10-15% of concrete. The rest is water and rock/sand.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    Yes, I do.
- philipkglass 8y ago
  Half of that is from the chemical transformation of limestone to quicklime, and half of it is from the fuel energy currently used to drive the transformation: https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-cement-industry/ https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-... So if carbon-neutral fuels or clean electricity were substituted in the calcination process, the CO2 burden would be reduced by half without any additional downstream changes.
AtlasBarfed 8y ago
I would bet it is 100% about property values. If yourview has the disruptive harmony of hypnotically rotating windmills or solar panels lazily soaking up the sun embodying a rebellion and rejection of the economy you exploited to make your money, well, what rich people would want to buy your view that has such a noxious interjection into your narcissistic self-contained idyll?

philwelch 8y ago

I don't know if it's absolutely necessary to completely zero our carbon emissions. We're going to need to do some sequestration and other countermeasures anyway to lower the current CO2 levels to a safe level, and it may very well end up more cost-effective to continue using those countermeasures than to try to invent an electric jet engine.

kaybe 8y ago
If we manage to make that jet fuel from anything else but fossil energy that should do. The only issue is that the CO2 emission up there has so much more impact, but I think we should be able to manage if we have the rest under control.
ergothus 8y ago
I'll feel more confident when we have large scale sequestration methods that are beyond the drawing board. I loosely agree with your conclusion, but until we KNOW the numbers, it seems worth it to shoot for as close to zero emissions as we can get while figuring out the sequestration options. The closest I've heard of is some seabed oilfield sequestering from Nordic countries, IIRC, but that has some built in limitations. Are you aware of sequestering efforts I've missed?
- chalst 8y ago
  There's new research that suggests that there are soil-based sequestration methods that work far faster than the well-studied approach of growing forests: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08636-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08636-w
- philwelch 8y ago
  We should invest the R&D effort into as many places as we can. I just have a hunch that "electrifying everything" isn't going to win out over, say, "use electricity to synthesize energy-dense liquid fuels", which can even be generalized to the sequestration strategy of "use electricity to synthesize liquid fuels and then store them in underground salt caverns like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve". Though I have no idea if we can make enough salt caverns, at least it would be a fixed amount of salt caverns, since you could establish a closed-loop supply of liquid fuel this way that was long-run carbon-neutral.
  - ergothus 8y ago
    No argument here - I'm just saying we shouldn't lay off the emission reductions BEFORE we have any technological answers. Likewise, we should research such options rather than assuming someone will.
    - philwelch 8y ago
      I think we're in full agreement. It appears that we've figured out how to electrify automobiles already, for instance. That's a good thing. It's just that some emission reductions are also open technological questions, and sometimes they're more or less open than the questions around sequestration, so hard-and-fast rules are hard to come by. Is it easier to sequester the emissions from space rockets than it is to build a Lofstrom loop? Is it easier to synthesize jet fuel from the atmosphere than to electrify jets? Where should R&D resources be optimally allocated, especially if we're taking a risk that certain approaches won't work out?

DontGiveTwoFlux 8y ago

With electricity going towards renewables, it seems clear that the best strategy will be to get the other major uses of energy on electricity as well. Vehicles have a clear (if long) path to electrification. But what about heating buildings? My understanding is that electric heating is not cost effective compared to carbon based fuels. Lower costs driven by renewables can help here, but will it be enough? Are there alternatives being developed to tackle this major energy use?

tomp 8y ago
A lot can be done just by upgrading technology, regardless of the energy source. For example, heat pumps achieve more than 100% (!) efficiency (i.e. by exchanging heat between outdoors and inside of the building, you can heat it up more than you could by just converting the spent energy straight into heat). I imagine similar can be achieved with better insulation.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  I don't think that's quite the right energy balance for heat pumps ;) You can upgrade equipment but that's not even remotely a solution to decarbonize at the rates we apparently need. There are lots of quadrillion BTUs that need to be decarbonized, and upgrades alone won't get us there. We need clean energy sources to ramp up and replace natural gas, oil, and coal.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    A modern furnace is only expected to last 20 years or so. Upgrading equipment is a solution is the upgrade isn't too expensive. I've looked into geothermo heat pumps a few times in the past, and they never worked out because of cost. I'm thinking seriously about replacing my current (working) furnace with a heat pump though just because I want some zoning that the natural gas furnace cannot do.
  - dashundchen 8y ago
    > I don't think that's quite the right energy balance for heat pumps ;) It's exactly right. A good heat pump will have a coefficient of performance (COP) of 5, which means for every watt of electricity put in, 5 watts of heat is moved from outside to inside - effectively an efficiency of 500%. While resistance electric heat and fossil fuel can never give more heat than the energy put in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Performance_considerations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Performance_consider...

beefield 8y ago

> Only seasonal storage (and perhaps the political challenges of long-range transmission) seem to be truly difficult problems. Seasonal storage of heat is not that difficult a problem, given that you have large enough need of low enough temperature heat. Which at least district heating offers. And converging electricity to heat is not exactly expensive or difficult...

acidburnNSA 8y ago
Can you elaborate? How many TW-hours of energy storage are you talking about being not difficult? Imagine for example the US Midwest and northeast from October through May.
- beefield 8y ago
  Wikipedia has a decent article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag... At least this one seems to be commercially viable: https://www.solarthermalworld.org/content/denmark-52500-m2-additional-collector-area-vojens https://www.solarthermalworld.org/content/denmark-52500-m2-a... And here seem to be some numbers: https://www.gsenergy.eu/central-solar-heating/ https://www.gsenergy.eu/central-solar-heating/ To me these numbers are a bit confusing, though, it seems like they are production and not storage numbers. Anyway, heat storage capacity goes on third power of the size of the storage size while heat losses go only on second power. So after some point the heat losses are small enough. And as an order of magnitude, storage of tens of GWh seems to be in the commercially viable range. Today, that is.

0815test 8y ago

Seasonal storage is a pretty huge issue which means some baseline capacity will most likely be kept, though not nearly at the same scale as today. Keep in mind that sometimes it's overcast/dark and the wind doesn't blow, and that this can occur for extended periods of time over large geographical areas. Demand response can help even then, by shutting down some energy-intensive industry - but you still need to provide a baseline supply for more critical stuff.

acidburnNSA 8y ago
Seriously. I plotted these data in Dec. 2017 of the entire Pacific Northwest's wind resources drop to zero for ten full days. Not overly uncommon. https://partofthething.com/thoughts/wp-content/uploads/december_generation-1.png https://partofthething.com/thoughts/wp-content/uploads/decem...
philipkglass 8y ago
I think that recently built gas-fired plants are going to be around for a long time. But like marginal coal plants today, they may shut down for entire seasons and only go to standby-active during high demand seasons. It's possible to reduce emissions a lot without entirely retiring combustion plants if the plants don't burn any fuel for 8 or 9 months out of the year.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  That kind of duty cycle changes the economics of those plants drastically. The capital efficiency becomes much lower - basically turbines are very mature, efficient, but high capital. Then to only operate them 25-30% of the time seasonally, they lose even more economic efficiency. But, if that seasonal load becomes the operating demand, then certain kinds of other technologies like flow batteries become more attractive to the degree they can decouple the power regeneration equipment costs from the capacity of storage. i.e. if you only need to size the power generation equipment to the fairly small instantaneous demand, but have to some degree a separate capacity storage cost for the next added unit of run time.
  - 8y ago

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

>and space heating // Perhaps we can skip this and use wearables for "personal climate control" to some extent? We manage a daytime domestic temperature range in the UK of about 20degC (14-34degC) just by changing clothes. Though if I'm sitting using a computer in 14degC then I'll stick a hot-water bottle up my jumper; and a paddling pool nearby is handy in 30+degC. Better insulation/architecture can negate the need for Winter heating/Summer cooling in some regions.

acidburnNSA 8y ago
In some regions, sure! But in places like the US Midwest and northeast, no. We need massive and I mean massive conversions to clean energy that aren't even on the radar yet for heating. Natural gas does not count as clean in a carbon constrained world. It's -20C out there for many days in a row. Not to mention heating greenhouses, hospitals, commercial spaces, etc. Plus, convincing everyone to bundle up may be harder than switching to clean carbon free energy like nukes or wind+mega-storage
Scoundreller 8y ago
I did something like this when I got an electric mattress pad.

village-idiot 8y ago

Don’t forget steel and concrete! Every pound of concrete releases 1 pound of CO2

Scoundreller 8y ago
I think you mean cement. Cement is only 10-15% of concrete. The rest is water and rock/sand.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  Yes, I do.
philipkglass 8y ago
Half of that is from the chemical transformation of limestone to quicklime, and half of it is from the fuel energy currently used to drive the transformation: https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-cement-industry/ https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-... So if carbon-neutral fuels or clean electricity were substituted in the calcination process, the CO2 burden would be reduced by half without any additional downstream changes.

AtlasBarfed 8y ago

I would bet it is 100% about property values. If yourview has the disruptive harmony of hypnotically rotating windmills or solar panels lazily soaking up the sun embodying a rebellion and rejection of the economy you exploited to make your money, well, what rich people would want to buy your view that has such a noxious interjection into your narcissistic self-contained idyll?