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Going 100% Green Will Pay for Itself in Seven Years, Study Finds

bernierocks 7y ago
Uprooting a system in 7 years that's been in place for at least a 100 will have no downsides? Who actually believes this? "Even some clean-power advocates acknowledge technology isn’t available yet to run power grids entirely on renewables without jeopardizing reliability" This is exactly true. It's not really practical at this point to switch over to renewable energy because the technology just isn't there. Not to mention the fact that the only way you are going to get China and India to switch away from fossil fuels completely is through a war. Together, they output the majority of the CO2 emissions and China for sure has been lying about the amount of coal plants they are building. It really makes me wonder if the Liberals of the 60s-90s wouldn't have made it so difficult to build Nuclear power plants, if this all would be solved by now.
- woodandsteel 7y ago
  So what do you think we should be doing? Staying on fossil fuels indefinitely, or moving to renewables more slowly or what.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
    That's a fair question but is the western world commiting energetic suicide first the solution? The biggest problem for the green revolution type of people to understand is that electricity just doesn't come from the wall, just like the rest of they energy needs. People can't imagine to live in a world where it's not reliable.
  - pasttense01 7y ago
    You can have natural gas backup generating capacity equal to most demand--but which is used only a few days a year. This 95% Green solution is going to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than a 100% Green solution.
    - strainer 7y ago
      There is no good reason to expect the ¨last 5%¨ of demand will be more economically met by the next generation of nuclear plants - than by the generation of renewable tech which will be developed by the time it is already supplying the other 95% ;)
    - speedplane 7y ago
      > This 95% Green solution is going to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than a 100% Green solution. Right now our energy is roughly 5-10% green. Arguing whether green energy should eventually be 95% or 100% is purely pedantic at this point. There is approximately 95% of common ground between green energy purists and pragmatists. Lets get in line.
      - scarejunba 7y ago
        California's over 40% on solar+hydro+wind+geothermal.
        toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Who downvotes facts? https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_system_power.html https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_sys... Large Hydro 10.68% Renewables (including geothermal, solar, and wind) 31.36% Nuclear 9%
        jeffrallen 7y ago
        "I refuse your reality and substitute my own." - Adam Savage, a man ahead of his time.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      Sure, but the problem is most demand occurs when intermittent sources do not produce energy. This plan really aims for about 40% green energy not 95% green energy. Hence why Germany's emissions have remained flat despite large increases in solar and wind generation.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  You’re right. There will be downsides, but your snide remark at “liberals” was uncalled for. Not every person has the same beliefs. Limping every left leaning person into a “liberals” category is demeaning.
  - Ericson2314 7y ago
    I dunno the New Left's participation in anti-nuclear politics will hopefully be remembered as a horrible and irresponsible mistake. There are tons of other bad things born of politics of course, but most of those stem from the right :P.
    - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
      You may wish to look into the economic case against nuclear since it's been dire for a few years now. It's good in comparison with coal (if you include externalities) but solar and wind have undercut it today and are forecast to keep getting cheaper. It's getting to the point that just the steam turbine part of the nuclear plant is more expensive than solar/wind/battery. The fact this is such a powerfully held opinion I'd put down to highly effective anti-renewable propaganda having a pernicious effect. Most people seem more anti-renewable than pro-nuclear, probably from absorbing fossil fuel funded propaganda. In fact I spoke to a Green Party member the other day who thought Tesla batteries only lasted 5 years before needing replaced. It's amazing how well propaganda works if you just repeat stuff enough.
      - merpnderp 7y ago
        Speaking of propaganda, I’d love to see citations on solar and battery being cheaper than just the turbine of a nuclear plant. This seems so hyperbolic as to have gone well into the realm of silliness, but I’d love to learn I’m wrong.
        ZeroGravitas 7y ago
        You can see this fairly clearly in the Lazard LCOE report. It shows how much it costs to build each type of plant seperate from running and fuel costs. (Pages 11 and 12 specifically, note the low end coal has no carbon capture so that's more appropriate here for just steam cost, and why the cost of coal overlaps nuclear at the high end) https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019 https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019 So low end, coal is about half the cost of nuclear to build, and gas turbines, which are simpler to build as they don't need the phase change (though some add secondary steam generation based on waste heat to enhance efficiency) are about a third of the cost. Now obviously, to run those coal and gas systems you need to burn fossil fuels which you need to pay for and they generate CO2 (both things that nuclear will win on and regain lost ground, as seen by the high end coal costs with 90% carbon capture included) but we're excluding all of those things entirely from this comparison to try to get the cost of merely building and running a steam turbine. You could say that not all the cost of the coal plant is the cost of the turbine, but it's unlikely to be much less than the cheaper end of gas plants, and we're not even counting maintenance and operation costs, which again are less for gas than for coal, so that gives us a lower bound. So in this slightly rigged comparison, gas comes out well ahead of steam generation alternatives, they simply cost more to build and run, even just the coal one with no fancy nuclear stuff. But renewables are matching that gas cost in many places today. Not only are they the same price to build, if you ignore the build cost of coal and gas entirely they're still cheaper than just the fuel and running costs in many cases. That's why many existing fossil fuel plants are being closed as uneconomic and replaced with newly built renewables even in places with flat energy demand. I think everyone kind of knows this implicitly. Is there anyone, even their biggest fan, who has ever claimed current nuclear can compete with gas on price if you ignore carbon costs? I've never seen it. Renewables plus batteries are wrecking the business case for building new gas plants and even rkeeping existing ones open. This will only become clearer as prices drop further. The dramatic price decline of renewables is projected to continue. Solar plus battery storage is predicted to be cheaper than just gas running costs by 2045. Which seems like a long way away in some senses, but if you build a gas plant today, you'll probably be relying on projections of still making money at that point, which makes gas less economic to build today. And if you start planning a fission plant, then you'll be planning for it to come online around that timeframe and run for 40 years. So unless that fission plant will cost less in total than just the cost of running a gas plant, there's no point starting to build it just on economics alone.
- deeviant 7y ago
  > jeopardizing reliability... Like being without power for a week and half, like my elderly mother was, because pg&e can't upkeep their transmission lines? Pretty sure microgrids would make this problem better not worse. And shield against a state-level attack on our very fragile national grid. > It really makes me wonder if the Liberals of the 60s-90s wouldn't have made it so difficult to build Nuclear power plants, if this all would be solved by now. And I really wonder, if every country in the world used nuclear power as it's primary power source, if there would still be a human-habitable world today.
  - lstodd 7y ago
    > Pretty sure microgrids would make this problem better not worse. They can't make it better, since they have to have same transmission capacity and be more complex than existing grids. And who's going to maintain it? When there are problems maintaining simpler existing grids already. > And I really wonder, if every country in the world used nuclear power as it's primary power source, if there would still be a human-habitable world today. What the problem with that? Nuclear is pretty well spread over the world already, and it's not like there are any problems with habitability. If anything, it's coal that makes places barely habitable.
m0zg 7y ago
I propose we start by taking the author's money (all of it, +debt), and converting his lifestyle to be 100% "green", as a proof of concept. No car, no Hawaii vacations, no meat, no fruit in the dead of winter, no computers or cell phones either, of course. Let's see how quickly this will "pay for itself".
- pstuart 7y ago
  I propose you reconsider what "green" means.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    That's exactly what it means, if you consider it rigorously and you want to be "100% green". You can't get fruit or electronics from the other side of the world without burning kerosene. You can't get meat without methane. Even public transportation is far from "green" unless it's electric and powered entirely from renewable sources. If the author is talking "100% green" that's what it's gonna be. That's the trouble with woke activism: it's always someone else's lifestyle that needs to change. It's always someone else's money that needs to be spent. I can't take such people seriously unless they practice what they preach. And none of them do.
    - j-pb 7y ago
      Except for the hundreds of thousands of europeans who travel exclusively by bike and train (100% renewables here), are vegan, eat local all year round, own a fairphone, and invest their money into renewables. But sure project your unwillingness for mild inconvenience in return for a sustainable lifestyle onto others. Going 100% green doesn't mean 0% fossil fuel btw, it can also mean that said fossil fuel is offset with CO2 capturing projects like reforestation or rewetting bogs. Besides, the whole point of the article is that it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive to make money and switch 100% to renewable energy sources. The whole point of government is to pool resources and coordinate policy so that the collective can achieve goals that would not be achievable by individuals. One can could easily invert you argument to expose its fallacies: "These conservatives are only good at spending other peoples money on the military budget and sending other peoples children to die. We should all give them a gun paid for by their personal funds and send THEM to fight overseas."
Proven 7y ago
Paywall, can't even see what they're saying because a subscription offer masks most of text. But I did see some claims about a lower cost. If the cost is lower, why do we need the government to "do something"? I haven't seen it in the article but the usual statist routine is to claim that if the government first "invests" in something (we are somehow too stupid to recognize these opportunities and avoid the overhead of government), it will somehow pay back for itself in only X years. First, it usually doesn't. We just end up with more debt (and more expensive energy too.) Second, it certainly won't pay back for the people who got taxed to pay for it. Has the government ever taxed less anyone who paid for some spending with an above-zero ROI? So it simply is a call for more violence (increased taxation or forcing taxpayers to take on ever more debt) and statism/socialism (ever-increasing role of the state). Does anyone here not wonder why Tesla investors prefer to invest in Tesla rather in those green schemas that are guaranteed to provide a 100% ROI in just 5 years? Or why is Musk running a struggling, loss-making Tesla when he could easily save the world and make a profit by simply "going 100% green"? Or why despite being (supposedly) smarter about long-term investing, no government employee ever got rich investing unless it happened thanks to corruption, insider trading or regulatory influence?
bcwarner 7y ago
The paper referred to in the article: https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-8 https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-...
- gexla 7y ago
  Thank you, this is a productive answer to the comments critical of paywalls.
j-pb 7y ago
Ok, boomer. If you read the article it makes exactly the point that you can go to 100% renewables with keeping our current industrial level, but since you apparently don't even want to read it... Your argument with storability of perishable goods is just laughably absurd. News flash, we now have fridges and cans and pickles.
nickik 7y ago
Whenever I read headlines close to this or a study that find such insane conclusions I automatically dismiss it out of hand. You can only get to numbers this extreme with lots, and lots of hidden assumptions that you need to totally spin your way to get there. In a world with limited time you need to think about what to study and after many studies that I find totally unrealistic, diving into another one is just not what I'm gone be doing.
- downerending 7y ago
  Along those lines, if the break-even time on the investment is really just seven years, why isn't everyone doing it already?
  - woodandsteel 7y ago
    I don't know if it would break-even that fast, but I would say much of why people are not doing it yet is that the technology is so new people don't know about it, and also there are some very powerful entrenched interests fighting it. Like the present US administration.

Uprooting a system in 7 years that's been in place for at least a 100 will have no downsides? Who actually believes this? "Even some clean-power advocates acknowledge technology isn’t available yet to run power grids entirely on renewables without jeopardizing reliability" This is exactly true. It's not really practical at this point to switch over to renewable energy because the technology just isn't there. Not to mention the fact that the only way you are going to get China and India to switch away from fossil fuels completely is through a war. Together, they output the majority of the CO2 emissions and China for sure has been lying about the amount of coal plants they are building. It really makes me wonder if the Liberals of the 60s-90s wouldn't have made it so difficult to build Nuclear power plants, if this all would be solved by now.

woodandsteel 7y ago
So what do you think we should be doing? Staying on fossil fuels indefinitely, or moving to renewables more slowly or what.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
  That's a fair question but is the western world commiting energetic suicide first the solution? The biggest problem for the green revolution type of people to understand is that electricity just doesn't come from the wall, just like the rest of they energy needs. People can't imagine to live in a world where it's not reliable.
- pasttense01 7y ago
  You can have natural gas backup generating capacity equal to most demand--but which is used only a few days a year. This 95% Green solution is going to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than a 100% Green solution.
  - strainer 7y ago
    There is no good reason to expect the ¨last 5%¨ of demand will be more economically met by the next generation of nuclear plants - than by the generation of renewable tech which will be developed by the time it is already supplying the other 95% ;)
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > This 95% Green solution is going to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than a 100% Green solution. Right now our energy is roughly 5-10% green. Arguing whether green energy should eventually be 95% or 100% is purely pedantic at this point. There is approximately 95% of common ground between green energy purists and pragmatists. Lets get in line.
    - scarejunba 7y ago
      California's over 40% on solar+hydro+wind+geothermal.
      - toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Who downvotes facts? https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_system_power.html https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_sys... Large Hydro 10.68% Renewables (including geothermal, solar, and wind) 31.36% Nuclear 9%
        jeffrallen 7y ago
        "I refuse your reality and substitute my own." - Adam Savage, a man ahead of his time.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    Sure, but the problem is most demand occurs when intermittent sources do not produce energy. This plan really aims for about 40% green energy not 95% green energy. Hence why Germany's emissions have remained flat despite large increases in solar and wind generation.
colejohnson66 7y ago
You’re right. There will be downsides, but your snide remark at “liberals” was uncalled for. Not every person has the same beliefs. Limping every left leaning person into a “liberals” category is demeaning.
- Ericson2314 7y ago
  I dunno the New Left's participation in anti-nuclear politics will hopefully be remembered as a horrible and irresponsible mistake. There are tons of other bad things born of politics of course, but most of those stem from the right :P.
  - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
    You may wish to look into the economic case against nuclear since it's been dire for a few years now. It's good in comparison with coal (if you include externalities) but solar and wind have undercut it today and are forecast to keep getting cheaper. It's getting to the point that just the steam turbine part of the nuclear plant is more expensive than solar/wind/battery. The fact this is such a powerfully held opinion I'd put down to highly effective anti-renewable propaganda having a pernicious effect. Most people seem more anti-renewable than pro-nuclear, probably from absorbing fossil fuel funded propaganda. In fact I spoke to a Green Party member the other day who thought Tesla batteries only lasted 5 years before needing replaced. It's amazing how well propaganda works if you just repeat stuff enough.
    - merpnderp 7y ago
      Speaking of propaganda, I’d love to see citations on solar and battery being cheaper than just the turbine of a nuclear plant. This seems so hyperbolic as to have gone well into the realm of silliness, but I’d love to learn I’m wrong.
      - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
        You can see this fairly clearly in the Lazard LCOE report. It shows how much it costs to build each type of plant seperate from running and fuel costs. (Pages 11 and 12 specifically, note the low end coal has no carbon capture so that's more appropriate here for just steam cost, and why the cost of coal overlaps nuclear at the high end) https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019 https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019 So low end, coal is about half the cost of nuclear to build, and gas turbines, which are simpler to build as they don't need the phase change (though some add secondary steam generation based on waste heat to enhance efficiency) are about a third of the cost. Now obviously, to run those coal and gas systems you need to burn fossil fuels which you need to pay for and they generate CO2 (both things that nuclear will win on and regain lost ground, as seen by the high end coal costs with 90% carbon capture included) but we're excluding all of those things entirely from this comparison to try to get the cost of merely building and running a steam turbine. You could say that not all the cost of the coal plant is the cost of the turbine, but it's unlikely to be much less than the cheaper end of gas plants, and we're not even counting maintenance and operation costs, which again are less for gas than for coal, so that gives us a lower bound. So in this slightly rigged comparison, gas comes out well ahead of steam generation alternatives, they simply cost more to build and run, even just the coal one with no fancy nuclear stuff. But renewables are matching that gas cost in many places today. Not only are they the same price to build, if you ignore the build cost of coal and gas entirely they're still cheaper than just the fuel and running costs in many cases. That's why many existing fossil fuel plants are being closed as uneconomic and replaced with newly built renewables even in places with flat energy demand. I think everyone kind of knows this implicitly. Is there anyone, even their biggest fan, who has ever claimed current nuclear can compete with gas on price if you ignore carbon costs? I've never seen it. Renewables plus batteries are wrecking the business case for building new gas plants and even rkeeping existing ones open. This will only become clearer as prices drop further. The dramatic price decline of renewables is projected to continue. Solar plus battery storage is predicted to be cheaper than just gas running costs by 2045. Which seems like a long way away in some senses, but if you build a gas plant today, you'll probably be relying on projections of still making money at that point, which makes gas less economic to build today. And if you start planning a fission plant, then you'll be planning for it to come online around that timeframe and run for 40 years. So unless that fission plant will cost less in total than just the cost of running a gas plant, there's no point starting to build it just on economics alone.
deeviant 7y ago
> jeopardizing reliability... Like being without power for a week and half, like my elderly mother was, because pg&e can't upkeep their transmission lines? Pretty sure microgrids would make this problem better not worse. And shield against a state-level attack on our very fragile national grid. > It really makes me wonder if the Liberals of the 60s-90s wouldn't have made it so difficult to build Nuclear power plants, if this all would be solved by now. And I really wonder, if every country in the world used nuclear power as it's primary power source, if there would still be a human-habitable world today.
- lstodd 7y ago
  > Pretty sure microgrids would make this problem better not worse. They can't make it better, since they have to have same transmission capacity and be more complex than existing grids. And who's going to maintain it? When there are problems maintaining simpler existing grids already. > And I really wonder, if every country in the world used nuclear power as it's primary power source, if there would still be a human-habitable world today. What the problem with that? Nuclear is pretty well spread over the world already, and it's not like there are any problems with habitability. If anything, it's coal that makes places barely habitable.

m0zg 7y ago

I propose we start by taking the author's money (all of it, +debt), and converting his lifestyle to be 100% "green", as a proof of concept. No car, no Hawaii vacations, no meat, no fruit in the dead of winter, no computers or cell phones either, of course. Let's see how quickly this will "pay for itself".

pstuart 7y ago
I propose you reconsider what "green" means.
- m0zg 7y ago
  That's exactly what it means, if you consider it rigorously and you want to be "100% green". You can't get fruit or electronics from the other side of the world without burning kerosene. You can't get meat without methane. Even public transportation is far from "green" unless it's electric and powered entirely from renewable sources. If the author is talking "100% green" that's what it's gonna be. That's the trouble with woke activism: it's always someone else's lifestyle that needs to change. It's always someone else's money that needs to be spent. I can't take such people seriously unless they practice what they preach. And none of them do.
  - j-pb 7y ago
    Except for the hundreds of thousands of europeans who travel exclusively by bike and train (100% renewables here), are vegan, eat local all year round, own a fairphone, and invest their money into renewables. But sure project your unwillingness for mild inconvenience in return for a sustainable lifestyle onto others. Going 100% green doesn't mean 0% fossil fuel btw, it can also mean that said fossil fuel is offset with CO2 capturing projects like reforestation or rewetting bogs. Besides, the whole point of the article is that it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive to make money and switch 100% to renewable energy sources. The whole point of government is to pool resources and coordinate policy so that the collective can achieve goals that would not be achievable by individuals. One can could easily invert you argument to expose its fallacies: "These conservatives are only good at spending other peoples money on the military budget and sending other peoples children to die. We should all give them a gun paid for by their personal funds and send THEM to fight overseas."

Proven 7y ago

Paywall, can't even see what they're saying because a subscription offer masks most of text. But I did see some claims about a lower cost. If the cost is lower, why do we need the government to "do something"? I haven't seen it in the article but the usual statist routine is to claim that if the government first "invests" in something (we are somehow too stupid to recognize these opportunities and avoid the overhead of government), it will somehow pay back for itself in only X years. First, it usually doesn't. We just end up with more debt (and more expensive energy too.) Second, it certainly won't pay back for the people who got taxed to pay for it. Has the government ever taxed less anyone who paid for some spending with an above-zero ROI? So it simply is a call for more violence (increased taxation or forcing taxpayers to take on ever more debt) and statism/socialism (ever-increasing role of the state). Does anyone here not wonder why Tesla investors prefer to invest in Tesla rather in those green schemas that are guaranteed to provide a 100% ROI in just 5 years? Or why is Musk running a struggling, loss-making Tesla when he could easily save the world and make a profit by simply "going 100% green"? Or why despite being (supposedly) smarter about long-term investing, no government employee ever got rich investing unless it happened thanks to corruption, insider trading or regulatory influence?

bcwarner 7y ago

The paper referred to in the article: https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-8 https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-...

gexla 7y ago
Thank you, this is a productive answer to the comments critical of paywalls.

j-pb 7y ago

Ok, boomer. If you read the article it makes exactly the point that you can go to 100% renewables with keeping our current industrial level, but since you apparently don't even want to read it... Your argument with storability of perishable goods is just laughably absurd. News flash, we now have fridges and cans and pickles.

nickik 7y ago

Whenever I read headlines close to this or a study that find such insane conclusions I automatically dismiss it out of hand. You can only get to numbers this extreme with lots, and lots of hidden assumptions that you need to totally spin your way to get there. In a world with limited time you need to think about what to study and after many studies that I find totally unrealistic, diving into another one is just not what I'm gone be doing.

downerending 7y ago
Along those lines, if the break-even time on the investment is really just seven years, why isn't everyone doing it already?
- woodandsteel 7y ago
  I don't know if it would break-even that fast, but I would say much of why people are not doing it yet is that the technology is so new people don't know about it, and also there are some very powerful entrenched interests fighting it. Like the present US administration.