8 ms·
I would like to see how the renewable section breaks down in to carbon-intensive varieties vs others. Non-solar, non-hydro renewables make up the bulk of renew
by blix 7y ago
I would like to see how the renewable section breaks down in to carbon-intensive varieties vs others.
Non-solar, non-hydro renewables make up the bulk of renewable energy, and with the notable exceptions of wind and geothermal, many of these methods are very dirty. Burning of waste/biomass is probably not significantly better than coal from an emissions or pollution standpoint.
- noneckbeard 7y agoWhile burning waste/biomass adds air pollution it does not introduce new carbon into the system, making it far better than burning coal.
- blix 7y agoIt takes carbon that was not in the air and puts it into the air. The marginal decision to burn a bunch of wood or coal for a unit of energy produces roughly the same effect. It would be better to keep that carbon out of the atmosphere. Especially when grown specifically, biofuels may have a strong net negative effect as conversion from forest/swamp to arable land releases a huge amount of stored carbon. Burning a forest to grow palm ethanol is a step in the wrong direction.
- i2amsam 7y agoBiomass is a very small percentage of US electric generation.
- p1necone 7y agoIf you keep growing, cutting down, burning and regrowing trees the co2 load in the atmosphere will look like a sine wave (ish). The long-term trend will be flat, not upwards. We can't "regrow" coal in the same way (across reasonable time scales). (Although burning coal, and planting a corresponding amount of trees and never cutting them down is also an option)
- lostapathy 7y agoBut if the waste biomass is just going to rot if we don’t burn it, the carbon will return to the atmosphere without having any energy harvested along the way. Might as well get something out of the cycle. Granted, we are speeding up the cycle by burning it now vs rotting over time, it the balance of carbon is the same.
- blix 7y agoThat is not the only possible cycle. It could be stored and set on it's way to beoming a fossil fuel in the distant future; the carbon removed from the current short-term cycle. Perhaps not as profitable as the cycle you describe though.
- ForHackernews 7y agoHow? No really, how? Have you invented some new process for long-term carbon sequestration from waste biomass? These are hard problems that don't lend themselves well to the HN-preferred format of one-line tech solutionism. If it were as simple and easy as all that, we wouldn't be in this crisis to begin with.
- jogjayr 7y agoWould stuffing it down in empty mine shafts or oil wells, and sealing up the opening, work?
- ForHackernews 7y agoYes. You just solved global warming. Please go collect your noble prize.
- blix 7y agoI don't think you need to be so condescending. There's no need for any sort of "new process for long-term carbon sequestration". We just need to stop taking carbon that is in the process of being sequestered by natural cycles and putting it back into the atmosphere. This is an economic challenge not a technical one.
- msisk6 7y agoYou can go here and download a spreadsheet of Fuel Mix Reports for the ERCOT grid: http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation In ERCOT wind is 2nd in generation to Gas Combined-Cycle generation (basically jet engines running natural gas). Coal is slightly behind wind and solar and biomass is tiny.
- blix 7y agoI dug a little deeper into the EIA reports and their non-hydro renewables category is almost 90% wind. Wind and hydro alone are almost even with coal in April, with the other contributions being quite small.
- Robotbeat 7y agoSolar (if you include non-utility solar) was about 3.5% of the total electricity produced in April. That's actually pretty significant. Solar only scraped 1 percent starting in 2015. (Although I worry about the second derivative... solar's growth is not as impressive in the last 12 months as it was the 12 months prior.)
- Spooky23 7y agoSolar punches higher than its weight because it produces marginal electricity at times of peak demand.
- Gibbon1 7y agoYeah people compare solar pricing to subsidized baseload prices. Which is unfavorable. Instead of the more lucrative peeking plant pricing which is higher. Often a lot higher.
- chrisco255 7y agoThere is a huge wind power boom in north Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. I saw thousands of windmills driving through there a couple months ago, and must have passed two dozen semis loaded up with blades to build more. It's a sight to see.
- rsj_hn 7y agoFrom https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... We see that in 2018 coal produced 1,146,393 thousand Megawatts, which is a decrease of ~60,000 from 2017 (corrected!). Solar produced 66,604 thousand MW in 2018, an increase of ~13,000 from 2017. In terms of percent of coal, the sources are: * solar 6% * hydro 25% * nuclear 70% * natural gas 100% * other renewables (mostly waste/biomass) 31%
- RobAtticus 7y ago2017 had 1,205,835 thousand Megawatts of coal, so 2018 was a decrease of ~60,000. Not an increase of 20k.
- rsj_hn 7y agoThanks, corrected!
- pso 7y agoWhy are you assuming other renewables is mostly waste/biomass? In the notes below the table, wind is cleary mentioned. My guesstimate would be that wind was a large proportion. I confirmed by checking wikipedia. EIA Total for year was listed as 4,177,810 in 1000s of MWhr Other Renewables 354,445 in 1000s of MWhr From wikepedia - national trends section graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_State... 2018 Wind power generated 274,962 in 1000s of MWhr. So makes up over 75% of other renewables. Chart shows wind has grown from 94,000 in 2009. Which combining with the EIA data, showing 143,388 in 2009, means most of the growth in non-solar renewables is from wind.
- shereadsthenews 7y agoIs that true across the nation? I know California isn't the whole energy market but their renewable energy mix is solar, hydro, fission, wind, geothermal, and biomass in that order. It's true that non-hydro, non-solar sources are larger than hydro+solar, but not by a lot and none of the renewable supplies are carbon-intensive. Wind, by the way, is growing much faster than solar in California and could be larger than solar within a few years.