6 ms·

The subtitle in the article you link is exactly my point. At the moment, we are just now getting better at tracking methane leaks. No one knows for sure how muc

The subtitle in the article you link is exactly my point. At the moment, we are just now getting better at tracking methane leaks. No one knows for sure how much is leaked from the infrastructure. It may easily be just as bad or worse than coal, and is absolutely "roughly" as bad as coal. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/climate/texas-methane-super-emitters.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/climate/texas... Take the average IPCC meta-analysis numbers [1] at face value: 820 gCO2-eq/kWh for coal, 490 for gas. Those are both extraordinarily high. This is because they both combust carbon in the presence of oxygen to form energy and CO2. They're both very high-carbon fuel sources. If we are trying to reduce carbon emissions, we need to build things that do not combine C + O2 to make CO2 + energy. Options with less than 50g CO2-eq/kWh (in decreasing order of emissions) include solar (41), geothermal (38), hydro (24), tidal (17), nuclear (12), and wind (11). [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... Given this situation it makes no sense to switch from coal to gas for the sake of the climate. Both endpoints have wholly unacceptably high carbon. If you build a bunch of $2B shiny new gas facilities, as we are doing today, utilities will want to run them for decades. And gas companies are portraying themselves as climate heros, and people are believing them because emissions are going down (again, towards an unacceptable final destination). To me it seems crazy.

scarmig 7y ago
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Natural gas is roughly half as bad as coal, and it's an easy win, compared to the alternatives. It's also better in terms of particulates. If we sit around waiting for reduction of energy use and increase in renewables to save us, we are screwed. Gotta take what we can get for now, and continue fighting for even better solutions.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  > The perfect is the enemy of the good. In this case, high-carbon (coal and gas) is the enemy of low-carbon (wind/solar/tidal/hydro/nuclear/geo). I said this in another thread, but switching from terrible to awful is not something we should take as what we can get. The starting point and the end point are unacceptable in a coal to gas transition. No point celebrating that. For example, fracked gas is so cheap that it's starting to cause near zero-carbon nuclear plants to close early. Unlike gas, nuclear plants are actually low carbon (12 gCO2-eq/kWe vs. 490 for gas). Thus, fracked gas being cheap and not considered the high-carbon fuel it is is preventing us from reaching our climate goals. This is really serious stuff.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    > This is really serious stuff. Yes, we're in agreement on that. And "celebrating" gas is a million miles away from my perspective. Every reduction in CO2 emissions today saves lives not just today but a century from now. Suppose we could instantaneously replace coal with natural gas, today. And we also have a choice of replacing all coal with low-carbon sources, but at some point in N years in the future. How long does it take to break even? 2N years in the future. So even assuming we could fully decarbonize the world economy in 25 years, it'd be a half century before we even get to the break even point in terms of accummulated emissions. And that doesn't even account for a significant part of the carbon emissions from the first 25 years being absorbed by various processes, or the ability to simultaneously push for low carbon and natural gas energy. Even if natural gas pushes the timeline for full decarbonization from 25 to 35 years out, it's still a clear win. That scenario I acknowledge is bleak, but bleak is better than... really fucking bleak, which is what we're headed for with coal.
  - naiveprogrammer 7y ago
    What you say makes perfect sense but when you transpose to the real world the story changes. See how the most vocal and powerful climate activists work day and night to stifle nuclear energy as a perfectly good solution to fight climate change, by far the best solution out there to reduce emissions. Maybe gas is the second best solution to reduce emissions while we develop other solutions in the meantime.
    - scarmig 7y ago
      > See how the most vocal and powerful climate activists work day and night to stifle nuclear energy as a perfectly good solution to fight climate change I don't think that conforms with reality. Off the top of my head, I looked up McKibben and Greta, and both see a role for nuclear power in decarbonization. The bigger issue is that it's not prioritized because it'd split the environmental movement, but that's a far cry from "work day and night to stifle nuclear energy."
      - mattrp 7y ago
- jcampbell1 7y ago
  Natural Gas is also load following and plants are efficient at a much smaller scale, which means it is easier on the grid and makes more renewables possible. Moving from coal to gas enables solar and wind. I personally think the US or Canada should build massive LNG plants in the PNW, and export gas to China. It would help the nasty particulate problems in the cities, and also make their infrastructure more amenable to renewables.
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Why would we invest in and build more very-high carbon systems like fracked natural gas when we have so many incredible low-carbon resources around like solar, geothermal, tidal, hydro, nuclear, and wind!? This seems really backwards to me considering the gravity of the climate situation.
    - jdmichal 7y ago
      Your parent already said why. The ability of gas plants to quickly adjust to changing loads is one of the things enabling those solar, tidal, and wind plants to be on the grid. Nuclear, hydro, and geothermal are great for baseline load, but adjust very slowly to changing load requirements. Gas is filling a legitimate technical gap right now within the power grid, bridging between slow baseline plants and unpredictable renewable sources.
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        Even ignoring that we have a well known, much more renewable option on the table (nuclear), it is a technical gap that is also rapidly shrinking from advancements in storage tech (batteries and hydrogen fuel cells).
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - incangold 7y ago
        Does pumped-storage hydroelectricity meet a similar need? Or does it take longer to come online than natural gas?
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  Part of the problem is the life of a power plant is on the order of decades. Every new natural gas plant is a plant that will exist for 50+ years. Because investors need to make their money back.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    Investors want to get their money back. They frequently don't, when conditions change.
    - MiroF 7y ago
      But they also frequently lobby the government in order to ensure that they do. Nothing good comes from having a large class of investors with significant amounts of money tied up in high-carbon power plants for the next half century.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > The perfect is the enemy of the good. As often said when trying to push a bad solution instead of a good one. Replacing coal plants with gas plants is a bad solution. Rapid deployment of nuclear+renewables is merely good. Perfect would be overhauling the economy to be less dependent on growth and much less carbon intensive.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    And everyone should get a pony!
    - goo 7y ago
      The thing is, everyone _could_ get a pony, if we decided that doing so was a priority. Ponies cost about $1000. If it mattered enough, the US government could ABSOLUTELY afford $330 billion to get everyone a pony. It's not that tremendous things aren't possible, it's that we aren't doing them.
      - bzbarsky 7y ago
        Not to take away from your main point, but the capitalized total cost of ownership for a pony is _much_ larger than $1000 (which, by the way, is the price for a not-very-good-natured pony; breeds with nice temperaments cost a lot more according to https://pets.costhelper.com/pony.html https://pets.costhelper.com/pony.html ). Doing some quick checking, food for a pony is ~$1-2k per year. Lodging is $2-3k per year. Basic preventative veterinary care is $1k per year; if the pony gets old this could get a lot more. That's $4-6k a year for upkeep, and ponies live for 20+ years. So the actual cost of a pony, even with discounting and whatnot for future dollars, is probably at least $50k, not $1k.
        goo 7y ago
        If you really think through the implications of every individual in America owning a pony, it gets a lot more interesting than that! It means that everyone in every city would own a pony -- would that mean that perhaps a proxy ownership situation would occur, where you had a certificate of pony ownership, but the pony would be housed and maintained anywhere in the country that could do so cheapest? It would cost a lot more than 2-3k/year to house a pony in NYC! Let alone the sudden demand for housing about 5 million of them... My guess is that these ponies would be kept in horrible conditions similar to the way domesticated cattle are raised for milk and meat. I would hazard that all of our assumptions about the actual price of ponies and maintenance would come down if we all needed to have a pony, and would come down by a LOT.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > The perfect is the enemy of the good. The bad is also the enemy of the good. Nuclear would be an example of a good solution that isn't perfect. Natural gas is an example of bad solution, in that it doesn't actually fit the definition of a solution because it doesn't in any way contribute to solving the problem. > Natural gas is roughly half as bad as coal, and it's an easy win, compared to the alternatives. This is simply false. Given methane emissions, we don't actually know that it's better at all, let alone half as bad. > If we sit around waiting for reduction of energy use and increase in renewables to save us, we are screwed. Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal-improvement-that-might-not-even-be-an-improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable. > Gotta take what we can get for now, and continue fighting for even better solutions. Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here?
  - scarmig 7y ago
    > This is simply false. Given methane emissions, we don't actually know that it's better at all, let alone half as bad. Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. It's literally an order of magnitude difference: methane is significantly worse for a short period, but over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse. That lopsidedness gets even worse when you go out to a millenium. Thinking out to a century from now, it's appropriate to more or less ignore methane and focus on carbon dioxide. > Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable. "It's unacceptable for ten million people to die, so we shouldn't have a preference between ten and twenty million people dying!" > Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here? As someone who has actually worked full-time on climate solutions and whose carbon emissions are in the bottom 1% of Americans, it's presumptuous of you to assume that you're doing more for the climate because you're regurgitating an article you saw on the Facebook newsfeed.
    - gxon 7y ago
      I really respect anyone who's chosen to willingly sacrifice their lifestyle to reduce their carbon emissions. Very few people are actually willing to do that. So I'm curious about your opinion. Do you think that promoting hope that what we're doing is enough is the right play at this point in time? Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse. Sure, you can argue for marginal progress here and there. But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter? I know we tend to think of panic and despair as something that prevents us from finding solutions, or even make the problem worse. But maybe pretending that we're going to mostly be OK and figure out climate change is just causing us to be complacent and procrastinate on the problem until it's too late. It may already be too late due to tipping points being triggered. Like I said, I'd love to hear your thoughts, but I've increasingly started to believe that panic is an idea worth spreading. It may be the only way we can ever hope to collectively wake up and start making the sacrifices necessary to survive this extinction event.
- briandear 7y ago
  And particulates are far more dangerous than CO2. People don’t get asthma or cancer from CO2.
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    That's the first concession of my comment at the top of this thread. Coal and oil kills today (~6 million/yr). Gas kills tomorrow via climate change.
- didibus 7y ago
  Natural gas seems like tech dept to me. Take short term gain over long term. Hope that you'll address the tech dept sooner rather then later. Sometimes that's the right call, and sometime the wrong call. I'm not qualified to tell, but I don't think this is a case of perfect being the enemy of the good, since all the other alternatives aren't perfect either, and seem equally viable, as opposed to a perfect over engineered solution that would never ever be able to actually materialize and ship, which is generally when the phrase perfect is the enemy of the good applies.
- StuffedParrot 7y ago
  > Natural gas is roughly half as bad as coal Not if you enter a feedback cycle of greenhouse gas emissions. That is DEFINITELY the enemy of good.
- shinryuu 7y ago
  Considering that we really need to reduce emissions every year by about 15% by now it is not enough at all https://mobile.twitter.com/CarbonBrief/status/1213272332464082944 https://mobile.twitter.com/CarbonBrief/status/12132723324640...
mschuster91 7y ago
The thing is that while coal plants are tied to coal and can't reasonably be adapted to other fuel sources, gas plants can be adapted to anything that burns - which includes CO2-neutral gas such as methane from biowaste, or methane made from electrolysis H2. Therefore it is very viable to build gas plants now, especially for peak demand.
- VBprogrammer 7y ago
  There is nothing which stops you converting from coal to natural gas. Plenty of coal plants have it or are in the process. Coal power plants pulverise coal until it is so small that it can be picked up in hot air and blown into the furnace. The already usually use oil or gas to initially warm the furnace.
philipkglass 7y ago
If you build a bunch of $2B shiny new gas facilities, as we are doing today, utilities will want to run them for decades. They'll want to run them for decades if they remain the cheapest options. Any combination of these developments could retire them well short of their technically achievable lifetimes: - States and municipalities implement more ambitious decarbonization laws. - Storage-backed clean energy costs fall. - Natural gas prices rise as unprofitable producers exit the market. Additionally, gas plant load factors can decline even without shuttering the facility if renewables bid below their pricing much of the time. Burning half as much gas in a year is a big emissions improvement even if the plant remains in business. Natural gas plants are less "sticky" than coal plants for a number of reasons. They employ small numbers of people compared to coal plants, so there is less political incentive to subsidize them just to prevent job losses. There are few, if any, new natural gas plants co-located with gas production facilities. "Mine mouth" coal power plants had an additional element of stickiness because the mining jobs and plant jobs are eliminated together when the power plant closes, amplifying the local incentives to keep coal plants running for jobs. Natural gas plants are much cheaper to construct than coal plants, so their costs are recouped faster. See Table 1 in this 2016 report: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capcost_assumption.pdf https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... Natural gas combined cycle plants have overnight capital costs of $978/kW, while the cheapest new coal option is $3636/kW. This report from 2017 indicates that NGCC plants might be even cheaper than that: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31912 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31912 It says that the actual cost of NGCC plants built in 2015 was $614/kW, nearly 6 times cheaper than the estimated cost of a coal plant.
neodymiumphish 7y ago
Out of curiousity, are the emissions numbers you're quoting for solar, geothermal, hydro, etc accounting for the carbon costs associated with their construction? Additionally, don't those all require at least large-capacity battery systems, if not full nuclear/gas/coal plant backups in case the power can't be generated by those low-emissions systems? I'm not trying to imply anything, just sincerely curious.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Yes, they are the result of full lifecycle anaysis from mining raw construction materials to final decommissioning. Yes, for intermittent sources to lead to a low carbon system, vast energy storage or other low-carbon dispatchable load following is required. Nuclear is the one low-carbon dispatchable source with very low life cycle land & material requirements and high energy return on investment. For this reason, I like all low-carbon sources, but I love nuclear. Disclaimer: I'm professionally dedicated to solving the cost and public acceptance issues with nuclear.
wahern 7y ago
> If you build a bunch of $2B shiny new gas facilities, as we are doing today, utilities will want to run them for decades. Utilities will want to run anything for decades, but gas plants are crazy cheap. A $2B natural gas power plant is inconceivable. A 500MW plant costs more like $500M (probably less), but AFAIU they're typically built smaller. And construction is very fast, on the order of 1-2 years. We've been building many, relatively small plants, which means phasing them out can likewise be done incrementally. All of which means that even if we need to ditch natural gas, it won't be that painful, ignoring the comparative costs of natural gas itself. Sources: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.p..., https://www.eia.gov/electricity/generatorcosts/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/generatorcosts/, via https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=487&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=487&t=3
- epistasis 7y ago
  We are at the tipping point of price curves where building new natural gas plant will likely be a stranded asset before its end of life: https://rmi.org/a-bridge-backward-the-risky-economics-of-new-natural-gas-infrastructure-in-the-united-states/ https://rmi.org/a-bridge-backward-the-risky-economics-of-new... Given the nature of many utility executives of expecting static costs of renewables from old estimates (a problem that also plagued the EIA and IEA), couples with regulations on what sort of profits utilities are allowed to collect, I expect that we will invest in far more natural gas than is economically rational. And that's excluding the economic externalities of carbon emission; if we properly priced things we'd probably only build natural gas in some very extreme cases, and we'd be retiring far more natural gas. It's frustrating to have such fast technology change, but have it go unacknowledged by key decision makers and decision influencers in both industry and government.
  - wahern 7y ago
    I'm not disputing that there'll be pain, or that we shouldn't be building them so quickly. I'm disputing how much pain and structural lock-in there'd be. The article says that "planned investment in new gas power plants and pipelines totals over $100 billion", but that "by 2035, over 90 percent of proposed combined-cycle gas plants, if built, would be uneconomic to run compared to the cost of building a new clean energy portfolio." Considering how quickly plants can built and how clean they are, at least in the sense of environmental regulations requiring long lead times (and therefore sunk costs) in preparing sites, if the predictions are true then energy executives should be able to pivot rather quickly. Most of the risk in a roadmap for building a bunch of gas plants isn't in being locked into building the gas plant, it's in the opportunity cost of not preparing for whatever the alternative will be. So long as wind and PV have similar initial costs, then pivoting should be easy. "Planning" to build $100 billion in gas plants is alot different than planning to build $100 billion in nuclear or hydro. FWIW, I'm not disagreeing that maybe we should be incentivizing renewables more, but I can't get too worked up about it, either. The factors that make natural gas easy to switch to also make it easy to walk away from, particularly if you're walking away from planned construction.
ed_balls 7y ago
How come wind is 4x better than solar? I'd image a solar panel would last on average 30+ years with almost no maintenance. Does wind calculation include maintenance, decommission and recycling? Does wind have to work 24/7 to meet this number? Is production the major contributor for solar?
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  These calculations are full lifecycle including everything listed. I belive the big difference here is related to energy used during fabrication of the solar panels and the mining of raw materials. These are all per kWh so capacity factor of wind or solar is not relevant for this metric
  - ed_balls 7y ago
    Let me clarify: Does solar have 41CO2-eq/KWh on average or in optimal conditions? Just wonder if solar panel could possible be worse than gas (Alaska, north facing roof, heavy snow)
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      Ah yes, you're right. Capacity factor does matter. They give ranges to cover the point you're making. I'm using the medians. This is from Table A.III.2 from [1]. Solar PV utility ranges from 18 to 180. Hydro peaks out at a terrifying 2200 (due to biogenic methane emissions, still being researched). [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... You can get a solar panel to be worse than gas for sure in Alaska in winter. But we have to assume some intelligence in what people choose to do with their money.
konschubert 7y ago
The good thing about atmospheric methane though is that at its half life is only about 30 years.

scarmig 7y ago

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Natural gas is roughly half as bad as coal, and it's an easy win, compared to the alternatives. It's also better in terms of particulates. If we sit around waiting for reduction of energy use and increase in renewables to save us, we are screwed. Gotta take what we can get for now, and continue fighting for even better solutions.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
> The perfect is the enemy of the good. In this case, high-carbon (coal and gas) is the enemy of low-carbon (wind/solar/tidal/hydro/nuclear/geo). I said this in another thread, but switching from terrible to awful is not something we should take as what we can get. The starting point and the end point are unacceptable in a coal to gas transition. No point celebrating that. For example, fracked gas is so cheap that it's starting to cause near zero-carbon nuclear plants to close early. Unlike gas, nuclear plants are actually low carbon (12 gCO2-eq/kWe vs. 490 for gas). Thus, fracked gas being cheap and not considered the high-carbon fuel it is is preventing us from reaching our climate goals. This is really serious stuff.
- scarmig 7y ago
  > This is really serious stuff. Yes, we're in agreement on that. And "celebrating" gas is a million miles away from my perspective. Every reduction in CO2 emissions today saves lives not just today but a century from now. Suppose we could instantaneously replace coal with natural gas, today. And we also have a choice of replacing all coal with low-carbon sources, but at some point in N years in the future. How long does it take to break even? 2N years in the future. So even assuming we could fully decarbonize the world economy in 25 years, it'd be a half century before we even get to the break even point in terms of accummulated emissions. And that doesn't even account for a significant part of the carbon emissions from the first 25 years being absorbed by various processes, or the ability to simultaneously push for low carbon and natural gas energy. Even if natural gas pushes the timeline for full decarbonization from 25 to 35 years out, it's still a clear win. That scenario I acknowledge is bleak, but bleak is better than... really fucking bleak, which is what we're headed for with coal.
- naiveprogrammer 7y ago
  What you say makes perfect sense but when you transpose to the real world the story changes. See how the most vocal and powerful climate activists work day and night to stifle nuclear energy as a perfectly good solution to fight climate change, by far the best solution out there to reduce emissions. Maybe gas is the second best solution to reduce emissions while we develop other solutions in the meantime.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    > See how the most vocal and powerful climate activists work day and night to stifle nuclear energy as a perfectly good solution to fight climate change I don't think that conforms with reality. Off the top of my head, I looked up McKibben and Greta, and both see a role for nuclear power in decarbonization. The bigger issue is that it's not prioritized because it'd split the environmental movement, but that's a far cry from "work day and night to stifle nuclear energy."
    - mattrp 7y ago
jcampbell1 7y ago
Natural Gas is also load following and plants are efficient at a much smaller scale, which means it is easier on the grid and makes more renewables possible. Moving from coal to gas enables solar and wind. I personally think the US or Canada should build massive LNG plants in the PNW, and export gas to China. It would help the nasty particulate problems in the cities, and also make their infrastructure more amenable to renewables.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Why would we invest in and build more very-high carbon systems like fracked natural gas when we have so many incredible low-carbon resources around like solar, geothermal, tidal, hydro, nuclear, and wind!? This seems really backwards to me considering the gravity of the climate situation.
  - jdmichal 7y ago
    Your parent already said why. The ability of gas plants to quickly adjust to changing loads is one of the things enabling those solar, tidal, and wind plants to be on the grid. Nuclear, hydro, and geothermal are great for baseline load, but adjust very slowly to changing load requirements. Gas is filling a legitimate technical gap right now within the power grid, bridging between slow baseline plants and unpredictable renewable sources.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      Even ignoring that we have a well known, much more renewable option on the table (nuclear), it is a technical gap that is also rapidly shrinking from advancements in storage tech (batteries and hydrogen fuel cells).
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - incangold 7y ago
      Does pumped-storage hydroelectricity meet a similar need? Or does it take longer to come online than natural gas?
bcrosby95 7y ago
Part of the problem is the life of a power plant is on the order of decades. Every new natural gas plant is a plant that will exist for 50+ years. Because investors need to make their money back.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Investors want to get their money back. They frequently don't, when conditions change.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    But they also frequently lobby the government in order to ensure that they do. Nothing good comes from having a large class of investors with significant amounts of money tied up in high-carbon power plants for the next half century.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> The perfect is the enemy of the good. As often said when trying to push a bad solution instead of a good one. Replacing coal plants with gas plants is a bad solution. Rapid deployment of nuclear+renewables is merely good. Perfect would be overhauling the economy to be less dependent on growth and much less carbon intensive.
- scarmig 7y ago
  And everyone should get a pony!
  - goo 7y ago
    The thing is, everyone _could_ get a pony, if we decided that doing so was a priority. Ponies cost about $1000. If it mattered enough, the US government could ABSOLUTELY afford $330 billion to get everyone a pony. It's not that tremendous things aren't possible, it's that we aren't doing them.
    - bzbarsky 7y ago
      Not to take away from your main point, but the capitalized total cost of ownership for a pony is _much_ larger than $1000 (which, by the way, is the price for a not-very-good-natured pony; breeds with nice temperaments cost a lot more according to https://pets.costhelper.com/pony.html https://pets.costhelper.com/pony.html ). Doing some quick checking, food for a pony is ~$1-2k per year. Lodging is $2-3k per year. Basic preventative veterinary care is $1k per year; if the pony gets old this could get a lot more. That's $4-6k a year for upkeep, and ponies live for 20+ years. So the actual cost of a pony, even with discounting and whatnot for future dollars, is probably at least $50k, not $1k.
      - goo 7y ago
        If you really think through the implications of every individual in America owning a pony, it gets a lot more interesting than that! It means that everyone in every city would own a pony -- would that mean that perhaps a proxy ownership situation would occur, where you had a certificate of pony ownership, but the pony would be housed and maintained anywhere in the country that could do so cheapest? It would cost a lot more than 2-3k/year to house a pony in NYC! Let alone the sudden demand for housing about 5 million of them... My guess is that these ponies would be kept in horrible conditions similar to the way domesticated cattle are raised for milk and meat. I would hazard that all of our assumptions about the actual price of ponies and maintenance would come down if we all needed to have a pony, and would come down by a LOT.
kerkeslager 7y ago
> The perfect is the enemy of the good. The bad is also the enemy of the good. Nuclear would be an example of a good solution that isn't perfect. Natural gas is an example of bad solution, in that it doesn't actually fit the definition of a solution because it doesn't in any way contribute to solving the problem. > Natural gas is roughly half as bad as coal, and it's an easy win, compared to the alternatives. This is simply false. Given methane emissions, we don't actually know that it's better at all, let alone half as bad. > If we sit around waiting for reduction of energy use and increase in renewables to save us, we are screwed. Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal-improvement-that-might-not-even-be-an-improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable. > Gotta take what we can get for now, and continue fighting for even better solutions. Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here?
- scarmig 7y ago
  > This is simply false. Given methane emissions, we don't actually know that it's better at all, let alone half as bad. Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. It's literally an order of magnitude difference: methane is significantly worse for a short period, but over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse. That lopsidedness gets even worse when you go out to a millenium. Thinking out to a century from now, it's appropriate to more or less ignore methane and focus on carbon dioxide. > Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable. "It's unacceptable for ten million people to die, so we shouldn't have a preference between ten and twenty million people dying!" > Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here? As someone who has actually worked full-time on climate solutions and whose carbon emissions are in the bottom 1% of Americans, it's presumptuous of you to assume that you're doing more for the climate because you're regurgitating an article you saw on the Facebook newsfeed.
  - gxon 7y ago
    I really respect anyone who's chosen to willingly sacrifice their lifestyle to reduce their carbon emissions. Very few people are actually willing to do that. So I'm curious about your opinion. Do you think that promoting hope that what we're doing is enough is the right play at this point in time? Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse. Sure, you can argue for marginal progress here and there. But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter? I know we tend to think of panic and despair as something that prevents us from finding solutions, or even make the problem worse. But maybe pretending that we're going to mostly be OK and figure out climate change is just causing us to be complacent and procrastinate on the problem until it's too late. It may already be too late due to tipping points being triggered. Like I said, I'd love to hear your thoughts, but I've increasingly started to believe that panic is an idea worth spreading. It may be the only way we can ever hope to collectively wake up and start making the sacrifices necessary to survive this extinction event.
briandear 7y ago
And particulates are far more dangerous than CO2. People don’t get asthma or cancer from CO2.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  That's the first concession of my comment at the top of this thread. Coal and oil kills today (~6 million/yr). Gas kills tomorrow via climate change.
didibus 7y ago
Natural gas seems like tech dept to me. Take short term gain over long term. Hope that you'll address the tech dept sooner rather then later. Sometimes that's the right call, and sometime the wrong call. I'm not qualified to tell, but I don't think this is a case of perfect being the enemy of the good, since all the other alternatives aren't perfect either, and seem equally viable, as opposed to a perfect over engineered solution that would never ever be able to actually materialize and ship, which is generally when the phrase perfect is the enemy of the good applies.
StuffedParrot 7y ago
> Natural gas is roughly half as bad as coal Not if you enter a feedback cycle of greenhouse gas emissions. That is DEFINITELY the enemy of good.
shinryuu 7y ago
Considering that we really need to reduce emissions every year by about 15% by now it is not enough at all https://mobile.twitter.com/CarbonBrief/status/1213272332464082944 https://mobile.twitter.com/CarbonBrief/status/12132723324640...

mschuster91 7y ago

The thing is that while coal plants are tied to coal and can't reasonably be adapted to other fuel sources, gas plants can be adapted to anything that burns - which includes CO2-neutral gas such as methane from biowaste, or methane made from electrolysis H2. Therefore it is very viable to build gas plants now, especially for peak demand.

VBprogrammer 7y ago
There is nothing which stops you converting from coal to natural gas. Plenty of coal plants have it or are in the process. Coal power plants pulverise coal until it is so small that it can be picked up in hot air and blown into the furnace. The already usually use oil or gas to initially warm the furnace.

philipkglass 7y ago

If you build a bunch of $2B shiny new gas facilities, as we are doing today, utilities will want to run them for decades. They'll want to run them for decades if they remain the cheapest options. Any combination of these developments could retire them well short of their technically achievable lifetimes: - States and municipalities implement more ambitious decarbonization laws. - Storage-backed clean energy costs fall. - Natural gas prices rise as unprofitable producers exit the market. Additionally, gas plant load factors can decline even without shuttering the facility if renewables bid below their pricing much of the time. Burning half as much gas in a year is a big emissions improvement even if the plant remains in business. Natural gas plants are less "sticky" than coal plants for a number of reasons. They employ small numbers of people compared to coal plants, so there is less political incentive to subsidize them just to prevent job losses. There are few, if any, new natural gas plants co-located with gas production facilities. "Mine mouth" coal power plants had an additional element of stickiness because the mining jobs and plant jobs are eliminated together when the power plant closes, amplifying the local incentives to keep coal plants running for jobs. Natural gas plants are much cheaper to construct than coal plants, so their costs are recouped faster. See Table 1 in this 2016 report: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capcost_assumption.pdf https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... Natural gas combined cycle plants have overnight capital costs of $978/kW, while the cheapest new coal option is $3636/kW. This report from 2017 indicates that NGCC plants might be even cheaper than that: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31912 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31912 It says that the actual cost of NGCC plants built in 2015 was $614/kW, nearly 6 times cheaper than the estimated cost of a coal plant.

neodymiumphish 7y ago

Out of curiousity, are the emissions numbers you're quoting for solar, geothermal, hydro, etc accounting for the carbon costs associated with their construction? Additionally, don't those all require at least large-capacity battery systems, if not full nuclear/gas/coal plant backups in case the power can't be generated by those low-emissions systems? I'm not trying to imply anything, just sincerely curious.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Yes, they are the result of full lifecycle anaysis from mining raw construction materials to final decommissioning. Yes, for intermittent sources to lead to a low carbon system, vast energy storage or other low-carbon dispatchable load following is required. Nuclear is the one low-carbon dispatchable source with very low life cycle land & material requirements and high energy return on investment. For this reason, I like all low-carbon sources, but I love nuclear. Disclaimer: I'm professionally dedicated to solving the cost and public acceptance issues with nuclear.

wahern 7y ago

> If you build a bunch of $2B shiny new gas facilities, as we are doing today, utilities will want to run them for decades. Utilities will want to run anything for decades, but gas plants are crazy cheap. A $2B natural gas power plant is inconceivable. A 500MW plant costs more like $500M (probably less), but AFAIU they're typically built smaller. And construction is very fast, on the order of 1-2 years. We've been building many, relatively small plants, which means phasing them out can likewise be done incrementally. All of which means that even if we need to ditch natural gas, it won't be that painful, ignoring the comparative costs of natural gas itself. Sources: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.p..., https://www.eia.gov/electricity/generatorcosts/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/generatorcosts/, via https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=487&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=487&t=3

epistasis 7y ago
We are at the tipping point of price curves where building new natural gas plant will likely be a stranded asset before its end of life: https://rmi.org/a-bridge-backward-the-risky-economics-of-new-natural-gas-infrastructure-in-the-united-states/ https://rmi.org/a-bridge-backward-the-risky-economics-of-new... Given the nature of many utility executives of expecting static costs of renewables from old estimates (a problem that also plagued the EIA and IEA), couples with regulations on what sort of profits utilities are allowed to collect, I expect that we will invest in far more natural gas than is economically rational. And that's excluding the economic externalities of carbon emission; if we properly priced things we'd probably only build natural gas in some very extreme cases, and we'd be retiring far more natural gas. It's frustrating to have such fast technology change, but have it go unacknowledged by key decision makers and decision influencers in both industry and government.
- wahern 7y ago
  I'm not disputing that there'll be pain, or that we shouldn't be building them so quickly. I'm disputing how much pain and structural lock-in there'd be. The article says that "planned investment in new gas power plants and pipelines totals over $100 billion", but that "by 2035, over 90 percent of proposed combined-cycle gas plants, if built, would be uneconomic to run compared to the cost of building a new clean energy portfolio." Considering how quickly plants can built and how clean they are, at least in the sense of environmental regulations requiring long lead times (and therefore sunk costs) in preparing sites, if the predictions are true then energy executives should be able to pivot rather quickly. Most of the risk in a roadmap for building a bunch of gas plants isn't in being locked into building the gas plant, it's in the opportunity cost of not preparing for whatever the alternative will be. So long as wind and PV have similar initial costs, then pivoting should be easy. "Planning" to build $100 billion in gas plants is alot different than planning to build $100 billion in nuclear or hydro. FWIW, I'm not disagreeing that maybe we should be incentivizing renewables more, but I can't get too worked up about it, either. The factors that make natural gas easy to switch to also make it easy to walk away from, particularly if you're walking away from planned construction.

ed_balls 7y ago

How come wind is 4x better than solar? I'd image a solar panel would last on average 30+ years with almost no maintenance. Does wind calculation include maintenance, decommission and recycling? Does wind have to work 24/7 to meet this number? Is production the major contributor for solar?

acidburnNSA 7y ago
These calculations are full lifecycle including everything listed. I belive the big difference here is related to energy used during fabrication of the solar panels and the mining of raw materials. These are all per kWh so capacity factor of wind or solar is not relevant for this metric
- ed_balls 7y ago
  Let me clarify: Does solar have 41CO2-eq/KWh on average or in optimal conditions? Just wonder if solar panel could possible be worse than gas (Alaska, north facing roof, heavy snow)
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Ah yes, you're right. Capacity factor does matter. They give ranges to cover the point you're making. I'm using the medians. This is from Table A.III.2 from [1]. Solar PV utility ranges from 18 to 180. Hydro peaks out at a terrifying 2200 (due to biogenic methane emissions, still being researched). [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... You can get a solar panel to be worse than gas for sure in Alaska in winter. But we have to assume some intelligence in what people choose to do with their money.

konschubert 7y ago

The good thing about atmospheric methane though is that at its half life is only about 30 years.