6 ms·

>But don’t be fooled. The world’s economies are moving away from fossil fuels. To what?!? If your geography does not allow for large scale hydro or geothermal

>But don’t be fooled. The world’s economies are moving away from fossil fuels. To what?!? If your geography does not allow for large scale hydro or geothermal development, then your only alternative is Nuclear or Fossil Fuels. Solar and wind need base load provided by Fossil Fuels to be remotely viable and clearly are not capable of replacing fossil fuels.

teraku 6y ago
This is not true. There is a bunch of papers and releases by universities, that show that if you manage your power grid properly, which is already done for any grid having more than 15% renewables, you actually gain an advantage with their flexibility and can work around any base-load problem.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >you actually gain an advantage with their flexibility and can work around any base-load problem. I'm not sure what you mean by 'base-load problem', but what I mean is that you need a fossil-fuel base-load.
  - gerbal 6y ago
    Do various sorts of batteries (gravity, fly-wheels, LiON) provide reasonable alternatives for some base load and peak generation?
    - imtringued 6y ago
      I personally am a fan of gravity batteries but the amount of scammy companies operating in the space is dragging the entire field down. The energy density of weights is really low so manufacturing a weight is absolutely uneconomical. What you want to do is take material from a landscape. Usually this means pumping water up a hill but you can also carve out a hydraulic cylinder out of the landscape and use water to lift it. [0] It has absolutely insane scaling potential. Energy capacity grows like so: r^4. Doubling the radius increases energy capacity 16 fold. Energy storage up to 1.6TWh is definitively possible. Of course this is so ambitious that it might never get built but I can definitively tell you that a crane system like this would be barely economical [1] because weights are really expensive but it's a good attempt and can be refined further. And finally here is an example of a scam concept: [2] Digging shafts is unaffordable unless you reuse old mine shafts which would reduce the number of shafts in the picture to just a single one. If you can only have one weight per generator that means the system doesn't scale. The power density of lifting a 1000 ton rock 100m high is pathetic. It's just 270kWh. The cost of the concrete is negligible in this scenario but you won't find a generator that is cheap enough to compete with a conventional battery. However, to stay realistic. Gravity batteries are about as likely to happen as everyone suddenly switching to nuclear power. The odds aren't great. [0] http://www.eduard-heindl.de/energy-storage/energy-storage-system.html http://www.eduard-heindl.de/energy-storage/energy-storage-sy... [1] https://insights.globalspec.com/images/assets/784/10784/Energy_Vault_35MWh_Storage_System.jpg https://insights.globalspec.com/images/assets/784/10784/Ener... [2] https://offgridquest.com/images/banners/gravitybattery.png https://offgridquest.com/images/banners/gravitybattery.png
      - stainforth 6y ago
        [1] Echoes Tower of Hanoi, slightly interesting
    - jes5199 6y ago
      theoretically yes, but we have to scale production way up, there just aren't enough batteries in the world right now
  - teraku 6y ago
    >you need a fossil-fuel base-load. Basically saying this is wrong. Technically, base-load refers to the minimum amount of energy demand on a given day. All sources and studies I have are from Germany, but our parliament, their adjacent (technical) offices and the universities here have concluded that "base-load" as a concept is wrong with today's power generation and the way a power grid works. Today they usually talk about residual-load, turning the paradigm around. Regardless of how it works, there are also renewable energies which can fulfil this classical "base-load" idea: Namely organic gas or geothermal power plants.
    - macspoofing 6y ago
      >Regardless of how it works, there are also renewable energies which can fulfil this classical "base-load" idea: Namely organic gas or geothermal power plants. Why is Germany investing billions in NEW pipeline projects to ship natural gas from Russia for the next few decades? Germany says a lot of nice sweet-nothings, but their actions don't match their words.
      - teraku 6y ago
        Well, first of all the parliament and the government are distinct entities. Government also is very corrupt and slowly changing. An advantage of gas pipelines is they can potentially be repurposed, for example to ship organic gas. Your statement says nothing about the feasibility, just politics.
johanvts 6y ago
In Denmark we have switched largely to solar and wind with backup provided by burning of biomass (largely imported wood pellets from Canada and the USA, but also domestic bio-trash which is sorted separately in many homes). But even without that, nuclear, wind and solar combined with lots of batteries (stationary and in all the cars) seems like a totally achievable solution. Especially in Europe and America where you have lots of varied geography and can get hydro, solar, thermal and wind to supplement each other, see example the plans for Denmark (wind), Norway (hydro), UK (nuclear).
- koheripbal 6y ago
  30-40% of Denmark's power is still fossil fuels, and another 10-15% is imports from neighbors when the wind isn't blowing. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Denmark#Gross_electricity_consumption_&_production_in_GWh_with_renewables_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Denmark#... Also, RE Bio & waste emit CO2 - they are not particularily clean. source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1757-1707.2011.01102.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1757-1707....
  - teraku 6y ago
    Outdated sources are outdated. https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DK-DK1 https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DK-DK1
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      How is showing us one day's data evidence of anything?
  - Androider 6y ago
    Even in this already a few year old data you linked, the fossil fuel share has gone from 70%+ to just 30% since 2005. That's nothing short of amazing, and the trend is clear.
imtringued 6y ago
I don't know why you talk about "base load". Base load is incompatible with intermittent energy sources. What you need is something that can be turned on and off to follow the current demand. Natural gas plants are generally used for this role. I think it is unfortunate that many people are vilifying natural gas. It's almost as if they aren't aware that the main benefit of natural gas plants is that you can turn them off when needed. Grids have to become more flexible if they want a high percentage of renewable energy. It's not like natural gas is cheaper than renewables. The plants will only burn gas when necessary. What is happening right now is that "Base load" (aka coal plants) is clogging up the electric grid in Germany. On some days you have a really good amount of renewables but the coal keeps running because it can't adjust quickly enough. When you consider that thanks to the EEG surcharge the operators of renewable power plants still get paid despite producing no power you can see how this lead to the unreasonably high electricity prices in Germany. This is not a problem with renewables though. The EEG is one of the most poorly though out political instruments to encourage renewables. Basically almost every energy intensive business gets an exemption so all the costs are borne by consumers. A carbon tax would have none of these issues. The coal plants would be shut down because they are bad for business.
pfdietz 6y ago
Solar and wind and storage can supply 100% of the grid more cheaply than a CO2-free solution also using newly constructed nuclear. Many nuclear advocates still don't understand this new reality.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >Solar and wind and storage What storage? The reality is that there is no storage solution that is capable of storing enough energy to power even a modestly sized city for days or even hours (or minutes for that matter). Certain approaches, like gravity-based storage, also require particular geography. Did you notice that there is no region on earth that gets 100% of their power from solar/wind/storage? Why is that? Why is Germany signing multi-decade, mulit-billion-dollar deals to build pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades still? And any region that claims 100% fossil-fuel free power ALWAYS relies on hydro, nuclear or geothermal to achieve that level. Why is that?
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Diurnal storage via batteries or pumped hydro, long term storage via hydrogen. The combinations now optimize to 0% nuclear. Hydrogen round trip efficiency is low but the very low cost per kWh of storage capacity makes it win for long term storage. That no location is currently 100% renewable is an obviously irrelevant point. I m talking about 100% CO2-free solutions. And new nuclear not sunk costed existing power plants.
    - macspoofing 6y ago
      You're just throwing things against the barn door hoping something sticks. Every proponent of renewables has a favorite miraculous battery technology that solves the intermittency problem. And yet I look at world, and nobody has actually deployed any storage technology at scale (and by 'scale', I mean using some battery technology that stores enough energy to power a modestly sized city of a few hundred thousands people for even a few hours).
      - 6y ago

teraku 6y ago

This is not true. There is a bunch of papers and releases by universities, that show that if you manage your power grid properly, which is already done for any grid having more than 15% renewables, you actually gain an advantage with their flexibility and can work around any base-load problem.

macspoofing 6y ago
>you actually gain an advantage with their flexibility and can work around any base-load problem. I'm not sure what you mean by 'base-load problem', but what I mean is that you need a fossil-fuel base-load.
- gerbal 6y ago
  Do various sorts of batteries (gravity, fly-wheels, LiON) provide reasonable alternatives for some base load and peak generation?
  - imtringued 6y ago
    I personally am a fan of gravity batteries but the amount of scammy companies operating in the space is dragging the entire field down. The energy density of weights is really low so manufacturing a weight is absolutely uneconomical. What you want to do is take material from a landscape. Usually this means pumping water up a hill but you can also carve out a hydraulic cylinder out of the landscape and use water to lift it. [0] It has absolutely insane scaling potential. Energy capacity grows like so: r^4. Doubling the radius increases energy capacity 16 fold. Energy storage up to 1.6TWh is definitively possible. Of course this is so ambitious that it might never get built but I can definitively tell you that a crane system like this would be barely economical [1] because weights are really expensive but it's a good attempt and can be refined further. And finally here is an example of a scam concept: [2] Digging shafts is unaffordable unless you reuse old mine shafts which would reduce the number of shafts in the picture to just a single one. If you can only have one weight per generator that means the system doesn't scale. The power density of lifting a 1000 ton rock 100m high is pathetic. It's just 270kWh. The cost of the concrete is negligible in this scenario but you won't find a generator that is cheap enough to compete with a conventional battery. However, to stay realistic. Gravity batteries are about as likely to happen as everyone suddenly switching to nuclear power. The odds aren't great. [0] http://www.eduard-heindl.de/energy-storage/energy-storage-system.html http://www.eduard-heindl.de/energy-storage/energy-storage-sy... [1] https://insights.globalspec.com/images/assets/784/10784/Energy_Vault_35MWh_Storage_System.jpg https://insights.globalspec.com/images/assets/784/10784/Ener... [2] https://offgridquest.com/images/banners/gravitybattery.png https://offgridquest.com/images/banners/gravitybattery.png
    - stainforth 6y ago
      [1] Echoes Tower of Hanoi, slightly interesting
  - jes5199 6y ago
    theoretically yes, but we have to scale production way up, there just aren't enough batteries in the world right now
- teraku 6y ago
  >you need a fossil-fuel base-load. Basically saying this is wrong. Technically, base-load refers to the minimum amount of energy demand on a given day. All sources and studies I have are from Germany, but our parliament, their adjacent (technical) offices and the universities here have concluded that "base-load" as a concept is wrong with today's power generation and the way a power grid works. Today they usually talk about residual-load, turning the paradigm around. Regardless of how it works, there are also renewable energies which can fulfil this classical "base-load" idea: Namely organic gas or geothermal power plants.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    >Regardless of how it works, there are also renewable energies which can fulfil this classical "base-load" idea: Namely organic gas or geothermal power plants. Why is Germany investing billions in NEW pipeline projects to ship natural gas from Russia for the next few decades? Germany says a lot of nice sweet-nothings, but their actions don't match their words.
    - teraku 6y ago
      Well, first of all the parliament and the government are distinct entities. Government also is very corrupt and slowly changing. An advantage of gas pipelines is they can potentially be repurposed, for example to ship organic gas. Your statement says nothing about the feasibility, just politics.

johanvts 6y ago

In Denmark we have switched largely to solar and wind with backup provided by burning of biomass (largely imported wood pellets from Canada and the USA, but also domestic bio-trash which is sorted separately in many homes). But even without that, nuclear, wind and solar combined with lots of batteries (stationary and in all the cars) seems like a totally achievable solution. Especially in Europe and America where you have lots of varied geography and can get hydro, solar, thermal and wind to supplement each other, see example the plans for Denmark (wind), Norway (hydro), UK (nuclear).

koheripbal 6y ago
30-40% of Denmark's power is still fossil fuels, and another 10-15% is imports from neighbors when the wind isn't blowing. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Denmark#Gross_electricity_consumption_&_production_in_GWh_with_renewables_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Denmark#... Also, RE Bio & waste emit CO2 - they are not particularily clean. source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1757-1707.2011.01102.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1757-1707....
- teraku 6y ago
  Outdated sources are outdated. https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DK-DK1 https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DK-DK1
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    How is showing us one day's data evidence of anything?
- Androider 6y ago
  Even in this already a few year old data you linked, the fossil fuel share has gone from 70%+ to just 30% since 2005. That's nothing short of amazing, and the trend is clear.

imtringued 6y ago

I don't know why you talk about "base load". Base load is incompatible with intermittent energy sources. What you need is something that can be turned on and off to follow the current demand. Natural gas plants are generally used for this role. I think it is unfortunate that many people are vilifying natural gas. It's almost as if they aren't aware that the main benefit of natural gas plants is that you can turn them off when needed. Grids have to become more flexible if they want a high percentage of renewable energy. It's not like natural gas is cheaper than renewables. The plants will only burn gas when necessary. What is happening right now is that "Base load" (aka coal plants) is clogging up the electric grid in Germany. On some days you have a really good amount of renewables but the coal keeps running because it can't adjust quickly enough. When you consider that thanks to the EEG surcharge the operators of renewable power plants still get paid despite producing no power you can see how this lead to the unreasonably high electricity prices in Germany. This is not a problem with renewables though. The EEG is one of the most poorly though out political instruments to encourage renewables. Basically almost every energy intensive business gets an exemption so all the costs are borne by consumers. A carbon tax would have none of these issues. The coal plants would be shut down because they are bad for business.

pfdietz 6y ago

Solar and wind and storage can supply 100% of the grid more cheaply than a CO2-free solution also using newly constructed nuclear. Many nuclear advocates still don't understand this new reality.

macspoofing 6y ago
>Solar and wind and storage What storage? The reality is that there is no storage solution that is capable of storing enough energy to power even a modestly sized city for days or even hours (or minutes for that matter). Certain approaches, like gravity-based storage, also require particular geography. Did you notice that there is no region on earth that gets 100% of their power from solar/wind/storage? Why is that? Why is Germany signing multi-decade, mulit-billion-dollar deals to build pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades still? And any region that claims 100% fossil-fuel free power ALWAYS relies on hydro, nuclear or geothermal to achieve that level. Why is that?
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Diurnal storage via batteries or pumped hydro, long term storage via hydrogen. The combinations now optimize to 0% nuclear. Hydrogen round trip efficiency is low but the very low cost per kWh of storage capacity makes it win for long term storage. That no location is currently 100% renewable is an obviously irrelevant point. I m talking about 100% CO2-free solutions. And new nuclear not sunk costed existing power plants.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    You're just throwing things against the barn door hoping something sticks. Every proponent of renewables has a favorite miraculous battery technology that solves the intermittency problem. And yet I look at world, and nobody has actually deployed any storage technology at scale (and by 'scale', I mean using some battery technology that stores enough energy to power a modestly sized city of a few hundred thousands people for even a few hours).
    - 6y ago