5 ms·

> The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this ... solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, yet so

> The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this ... solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, yet somehow that's not good enough for the people who claim to be realists. Odd.

Scaevolus 7y ago
You still need baseload power plants, and the economics of battery-based storage plants aren't there yet. Hydropower is a nice solution, but highly geography-dependent. China is attacking this problem by investing heavily in ultra-long-range HVDC power transmission from dams in the west to cities on the east.
- graeme 7y ago
  For using power to suck carbon out of the air, would you need baseload power, or could you have a machine that ran whenever cheap solar electricity was available. Removing CO2 is important, and urgent in the medium term, but it isn't urgent in the "must happen this second" sense. Intermitten removal would be fine if the removal tech could be power intermittently.
  - jandrewrogers 7y ago
    Most steps of an industrial process will work with intermittent power, albeit with substantial loss of process efficiency that will therefore require building more infrastructure for the same effect than if you were using baseload power. Some steps of an industrial process may effectively require non-stop baseload power because restarting it is prohibitively slow and costly. It may be possible to do atmospheric CO2 removal with intermittent power, I haven't attempted any kind of chemical engineering deep dive into what that process entails, but that is likely to incur a significant loss of productivity. Given that it is already an extremely expensive proposition, we will probably need to maximize process efficiency, which means reliable continuous power.
- ofrzeta 7y ago
  Hydropower is actually not so nice when you take into account that it's the reason that many fish species are on the brink of extinction. That's in Europe at least but it seems that it's also a problem in the US, see https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gvm7vq/power-plants-are-boiling-salmon-trout-and-sturgeon-alive https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gvm7vq/power-plants-are-b...
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    It will also start to have problems as temperature further increases, requiring fully closed storage systems rather than current use of rivers and aquifers. That changes economics a lot.
falcolas 7y ago
When it's sunny and windy. Thus far we don't have a large scale way to take sunny and windy day energy and store it for less sunny and windy days (or even to transfer it from sunny and windy locations across thousands of miles to non-sunny/windy places). EDIT: I'd appreciate knowing where I'm wrong.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  The problem with the simplistic comment is we do already have large scale ways to store and move energy, and wind is typically available offshore 24/7, though some coasts are better served than others. We haven't chosen to build that storage yet. We also have ways to move demand to times of excess. Trying to keep it short and intentionally ignoring new ideas like molten salt and winched weights etc: + A smart grid allows demand and load to be managed, home and industrial storage and devices to be controlled to vary the load. This is a direction Europe is moving in. Your industrial heavy user might willingly sign up to a service that can be cut to stop grid crash in exchange for discount on the vast amount of electric used - this has quietly existed for decades. Getting smarter, homes and other premises can have charging and in building devices controlled to move demand, and in home spare solar battery added to grid storage for the overnight. Again for discounts. There are examples of this working already. + Pumped hydro can add TWh of storage if built at scale. It needs suitable geography, but we don't lack potential sites. Sites that would attract a NIMBY reaction can take the "hollowed out mountain" approach, invisible when finished. Again, plenty of examples exist. Unlike battery will last hundreds of years needing only turbine replacement periodically. The higher build cost can amortise beyond a lifetime. + It is very unlikely the whole of the US will completely lack wind at the same time, especially offshore. It's just about unheard of for tiny UK to be becalmed, though admittedly we're more "blessed" with wind than many regions. Over specify to allow the regions with wind to assist any region currently becalmed. + Last, use neighbours as storage - sell and buy electric from surrounding countries to smooth each other's demand. Once again this is already coming into being across Europe with the super-grid. In short, we have ample ways to store and move electricity, along with managing demand today. It's already being done in many places. We just need the political will do more of it to support a fully renewable grid. FWIW, I also tend to agree 10 of his 11 closing points. I'm not at all convinced by his argument renewables can't scale up to cover all global electric generation.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, The issue is that scaling is about relative growth, and to solve climate change we need absolute growth. Despite all the optimistic growth, the truth is that our world runs on fossil fuels and is likely to do so in the future as more and more parts become developed and use more energy.
vkou 7y ago
Solar and wind are scaling quickly. But do you know what is scaling even quicker? Natural gas. The year-over-year growth in natural gas deployment is greater than the entire historic deployment of solar power. Let that sink in. I'll be optimistic when the total fossil fuel footprint stops growing. Hell, I'll be optimistic when it stops growing exponentially. We aren't there. We aren't anywhere near there. We don't have the foggiest plan of how we will get there. Germany killed its coal power industry, and transitioned right into burning Russian natural gas. And this is just in electrical generation. Electrical generation is only 20% of our overall energy usage. In order to transition the rest of our society to green energy, we'd have to triple our overall electricity production. Solar and wind deployments aren't even able to keep up with increased demand in electricity growth. How you expect them to triple our overall electricity generation capacity anytime soon is beyond me.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Natural gas is at best a bridge technology. Resources are ultimately more limited than oil, and have grown only through extremely expensive, and environmentally damaging (groundwater contamination, earthquakes) hydrofracking. Simply on a financial basis that appears unsustainable. Natgas has and will help smooth the transition. It's not a stable goal, however. Lifeboat, not safe land.
doctorpangloss 7y ago
I agree that his technological arguments are basically wrong, so out goes the rest of what he’s saying. Pennsylvania is a fossil fuel economy now, through fracking, and we are idiosyncratically beholden to it in our federal election. Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Ukraine, Venezuela, Mexico, Norway, Denmark, Sudan, the Middle East and Iran... these are all volatile fossil fuel and mineral extraction economies, they do not export much else to us besides a declining pool of cheap labor or in Denmark’s case, cheese. Many countries aspire to be mineral economies, not the other way around, life is much simpler that way. That some places extract minerals from the earth, and others “extract minerals” by converting their control of the worldwide supply of attention into ads, and that the Earth extractors are in Pennsylvania and other parts of the world while the Attention extractors are in San Francisco and Los Angeles, is also a big part of the issue. It is indeed more complicated than “who’s to blame, consumers or producers?” This forum is constantly full of people whose opinions boil down to, “I should get paid for my thing, and everyone’s else’s thing can go suck it.” It isn’t workable. This guy isn’t advancing a workable politic for global action against global warming. And yet neither is solar power, despite obviously fixing the carbon problem. They do not make solar panels in Indonesia or Iran or Saudi Arabia or Mexico or Brazil or Sudan, that’s a billion people right there who depend on fossil fuel economics. What do you think their opinion is about solar panels? Making solar panels is hard, squeezing oil out of the ground is easy. And if there’s anything history has taught us, people will fight violently to protect not their profitable means of making money, but their easy means of making money. That’s the problem dude.
Merrill 7y ago
The problem with wind and solar is that they both require extensive spatially distributed energy collection systems, storage to overcome intermittent generation, and complex transmission networks to collect, manage, and distribute the electrical power. It seems unlikely that such can be secured in a world where conflict is steadily increasing, and where a tiny, but significant, percentage of the population is bent on disrupting or destroying infrastructure. On the other hand, nuclear fission and fusion plants are spatially compact and can be located in secured areas near the industrial and residential users connected by short transmission lines. Nuclear plant heat and power can also be harnessed to generate synthetic fuels for transportation and chemical feedstocks as required for military and civilian purposes.
- RickJWagner 7y ago
  I agree. Sooner or later, we'll need to have a serious discussion about nuclear energy. It's the best way out of this mess.
  - jfnixon 7y ago
    Annnnnd the downvotes start. What is it about nuclear energy that terrifies the ycombinator crowd?
    - mark-r 7y ago
      Proposing nuclear power is an easy knee-jerk reaction. But it ignores a few critical facts. First, nuclear plants are impractical due to NIMBY and out-of-control building costs. Second, the pesky problem of nuclear waste has not been solved yet. All indications are that renewable power is more practical at this time than nuclear.
noobermin 7y ago
A little dismissive when you have a whole article here making the other argument.
40four 7y ago
The article directly addressed this point & why it is a wash, at best. New demand every year is at parity or maybe outpacing the new production of wind & solar. Not to mention the huge amounts of glass, plastic, concrete (which by the way, we are apporoaching a shortage of suitable sand for making it), and rare earth metals required to build wind & solar infrastructure. Dont get me wrong, I'm with you. I want to beat climate change as much as the next guy, but this article is saying what we need to hear. The situation is dire & it might be too late to avoid the worst. Man, I hope not. I'm very hopeful. But I often get worried, & pessimistic like the author. If you really look at it objectively, everything is still trending in the wrong direction. Even at the rate renewable energy is coming online. Electricity is only part of the problem. Only 20% according to this guys numbers. And it's still predominantly created by coal. What about all the gasoline/ diesel for cars? Oil heating homes & buildings? There's too many people. Crap it's hard to not be pessimistic :(
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  It's fixable by concentrated arcologies, central heating and further electric plus hub and spoke transit and transport systems. But social change for energy efficiency is slow. Especially if you cannot convince the majority that it matters. Not easy to fix air travel either. Metals, glass and concrete are easy enough to make (the shortages of sand are mostly driven by economics of mining and not availability), the rare earths and batteries are the hard part.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    By the way, a major problem that cannot be fixed is transport of basic resources for processing and manufacturing. Localization makes no sense as you have to transport the raw resources to where they're needed anyway and it is almost impossible that you have the necessary materials or parts on hand. Concentration works better as you can use bulk transport, cheaper per unit. But reducing consumption and replacing materials with locally available equivalents is king. In this regard, most plastics can be made locally (or the equivalents) so local assembly would win, but for advanced technologies or metal products there's no way most of the time to replace it. We can use less - plastic cars, earthworks and plastics (esp. biopolymers) rather than glass and concrete for structure as much as possible and more.

Scaevolus 7y ago

You still need baseload power plants, and the economics of battery-based storage plants aren't there yet. Hydropower is a nice solution, but highly geography-dependent. China is attacking this problem by investing heavily in ultra-long-range HVDC power transmission from dams in the west to cities on the east.

graeme 7y ago
For using power to suck carbon out of the air, would you need baseload power, or could you have a machine that ran whenever cheap solar electricity was available. Removing CO2 is important, and urgent in the medium term, but it isn't urgent in the "must happen this second" sense. Intermitten removal would be fine if the removal tech could be power intermittently.
- jandrewrogers 7y ago
  Most steps of an industrial process will work with intermittent power, albeit with substantial loss of process efficiency that will therefore require building more infrastructure for the same effect than if you were using baseload power. Some steps of an industrial process may effectively require non-stop baseload power because restarting it is prohibitively slow and costly. It may be possible to do atmospheric CO2 removal with intermittent power, I haven't attempted any kind of chemical engineering deep dive into what that process entails, but that is likely to incur a significant loss of productivity. Given that it is already an extremely expensive proposition, we will probably need to maximize process efficiency, which means reliable continuous power.
ofrzeta 7y ago
Hydropower is actually not so nice when you take into account that it's the reason that many fish species are on the brink of extinction. That's in Europe at least but it seems that it's also a problem in the US, see https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gvm7vq/power-plants-are-boiling-salmon-trout-and-sturgeon-alive https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gvm7vq/power-plants-are-b...
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  It will also start to have problems as temperature further increases, requiring fully closed storage systems rather than current use of rivers and aquifers. That changes economics a lot.

falcolas 7y ago

When it's sunny and windy. Thus far we don't have a large scale way to take sunny and windy day energy and store it for less sunny and windy days (or even to transfer it from sunny and windy locations across thousands of miles to non-sunny/windy places). EDIT: I'd appreciate knowing where I'm wrong.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
The problem with the simplistic comment is we do already have large scale ways to store and move energy, and wind is typically available offshore 24/7, though some coasts are better served than others. We haven't chosen to build that storage yet. We also have ways to move demand to times of excess. Trying to keep it short and intentionally ignoring new ideas like molten salt and winched weights etc: + A smart grid allows demand and load to be managed, home and industrial storage and devices to be controlled to vary the load. This is a direction Europe is moving in. Your industrial heavy user might willingly sign up to a service that can be cut to stop grid crash in exchange for discount on the vast amount of electric used - this has quietly existed for decades. Getting smarter, homes and other premises can have charging and in building devices controlled to move demand, and in home spare solar battery added to grid storage for the overnight. Again for discounts. There are examples of this working already. + Pumped hydro can add TWh of storage if built at scale. It needs suitable geography, but we don't lack potential sites. Sites that would attract a NIMBY reaction can take the "hollowed out mountain" approach, invisible when finished. Again, plenty of examples exist. Unlike battery will last hundreds of years needing only turbine replacement periodically. The higher build cost can amortise beyond a lifetime. + It is very unlikely the whole of the US will completely lack wind at the same time, especially offshore. It's just about unheard of for tiny UK to be becalmed, though admittedly we're more "blessed" with wind than many regions. Over specify to allow the regions with wind to assist any region currently becalmed. + Last, use neighbours as storage - sell and buy electric from surrounding countries to smooth each other's demand. Once again this is already coming into being across Europe with the super-grid. In short, we have ample ways to store and move electricity, along with managing demand today. It's already being done in many places. We just need the political will do more of it to support a fully renewable grid. FWIW, I also tend to agree 10 of his 11 closing points. I'm not at all convinced by his argument renewables can't scale up to cover all global electric generation.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, The issue is that scaling is about relative growth, and to solve climate change we need absolute growth. Despite all the optimistic growth, the truth is that our world runs on fossil fuels and is likely to do so in the future as more and more parts become developed and use more energy.

vkou 7y ago

Solar and wind are scaling quickly. But do you know what is scaling even quicker? Natural gas. The year-over-year growth in natural gas deployment is greater than the entire historic deployment of solar power. Let that sink in. I'll be optimistic when the total fossil fuel footprint stops growing. Hell, I'll be optimistic when it stops growing exponentially. We aren't there. We aren't anywhere near there. We don't have the foggiest plan of how we will get there. Germany killed its coal power industry, and transitioned right into burning Russian natural gas. And this is just in electrical generation. Electrical generation is only 20% of our overall energy usage. In order to transition the rest of our society to green energy, we'd have to triple our overall electricity production. Solar and wind deployments aren't even able to keep up with increased demand in electricity growth. How you expect them to triple our overall electricity generation capacity anytime soon is beyond me.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Natural gas is at best a bridge technology. Resources are ultimately more limited than oil, and have grown only through extremely expensive, and environmentally damaging (groundwater contamination, earthquakes) hydrofracking. Simply on a financial basis that appears unsustainable. Natgas has and will help smooth the transition. It's not a stable goal, however. Lifeboat, not safe land.

doctorpangloss 7y ago

I agree that his technological arguments are basically wrong, so out goes the rest of what he’s saying. Pennsylvania is a fossil fuel economy now, through fracking, and we are idiosyncratically beholden to it in our federal election. Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Ukraine, Venezuela, Mexico, Norway, Denmark, Sudan, the Middle East and Iran... these are all volatile fossil fuel and mineral extraction economies, they do not export much else to us besides a declining pool of cheap labor or in Denmark’s case, cheese. Many countries aspire to be mineral economies, not the other way around, life is much simpler that way. That some places extract minerals from the earth, and others “extract minerals” by converting their control of the worldwide supply of attention into ads, and that the Earth extractors are in Pennsylvania and other parts of the world while the Attention extractors are in San Francisco and Los Angeles, is also a big part of the issue. It is indeed more complicated than “who’s to blame, consumers or producers?” This forum is constantly full of people whose opinions boil down to, “I should get paid for my thing, and everyone’s else’s thing can go suck it.” It isn’t workable. This guy isn’t advancing a workable politic for global action against global warming. And yet neither is solar power, despite obviously fixing the carbon problem. They do not make solar panels in Indonesia or Iran or Saudi Arabia or Mexico or Brazil or Sudan, that’s a billion people right there who depend on fossil fuel economics. What do you think their opinion is about solar panels? Making solar panels is hard, squeezing oil out of the ground is easy. And if there’s anything history has taught us, people will fight violently to protect not their profitable means of making money, but their easy means of making money. That’s the problem dude.

Merrill 7y ago

The problem with wind and solar is that they both require extensive spatially distributed energy collection systems, storage to overcome intermittent generation, and complex transmission networks to collect, manage, and distribute the electrical power. It seems unlikely that such can be secured in a world where conflict is steadily increasing, and where a tiny, but significant, percentage of the population is bent on disrupting or destroying infrastructure. On the other hand, nuclear fission and fusion plants are spatially compact and can be located in secured areas near the industrial and residential users connected by short transmission lines. Nuclear plant heat and power can also be harnessed to generate synthetic fuels for transportation and chemical feedstocks as required for military and civilian purposes.

RickJWagner 7y ago
I agree. Sooner or later, we'll need to have a serious discussion about nuclear energy. It's the best way out of this mess.
- jfnixon 7y ago
  Annnnnd the downvotes start. What is it about nuclear energy that terrifies the ycombinator crowd?
  - mark-r 7y ago
    Proposing nuclear power is an easy knee-jerk reaction. But it ignores a few critical facts. First, nuclear plants are impractical due to NIMBY and out-of-control building costs. Second, the pesky problem of nuclear waste has not been solved yet. All indications are that renewable power is more practical at this time than nuclear.

noobermin 7y ago

A little dismissive when you have a whole article here making the other argument.

40four 7y ago

The article directly addressed this point & why it is a wash, at best. New demand every year is at parity or maybe outpacing the new production of wind & solar. Not to mention the huge amounts of glass, plastic, concrete (which by the way, we are apporoaching a shortage of suitable sand for making it), and rare earth metals required to build wind & solar infrastructure. Dont get me wrong, I'm with you. I want to beat climate change as much as the next guy, but this article is saying what we need to hear. The situation is dire & it might be too late to avoid the worst. Man, I hope not. I'm very hopeful. But I often get worried, & pessimistic like the author. If you really look at it objectively, everything is still trending in the wrong direction. Even at the rate renewable energy is coming online. Electricity is only part of the problem. Only 20% according to this guys numbers. And it's still predominantly created by coal. What about all the gasoline/ diesel for cars? Oil heating homes & buildings? There's too many people. Crap it's hard to not be pessimistic :(

AstralStorm 7y ago
It's fixable by concentrated arcologies, central heating and further electric plus hub and spoke transit and transport systems. But social change for energy efficiency is slow. Especially if you cannot convince the majority that it matters. Not easy to fix air travel either. Metals, glass and concrete are easy enough to make (the shortages of sand are mostly driven by economics of mining and not availability), the rare earths and batteries are the hard part.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  By the way, a major problem that cannot be fixed is transport of basic resources for processing and manufacturing. Localization makes no sense as you have to transport the raw resources to where they're needed anyway and it is almost impossible that you have the necessary materials or parts on hand. Concentration works better as you can use bulk transport, cheaper per unit. But reducing consumption and replacing materials with locally available equivalents is king. In this regard, most plastics can be made locally (or the equivalents) so local assembly would win, but for advanced technologies or metal products there's no way most of the time to replace it. We can use less - plastic cars, earthworks and plastics (esp. biopolymers) rather than glass and concrete for structure as much as possible and more.