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> That is an insane amount of land
If any of Texas, Thailand, or Botswana can singlehandedly power the entire planet's marketed energy consumption, which is what that "insane amount of land" adds up to, there's no land shortage for solar.
> If you're covering an area of 550 thousand km² with panels, there is an equivalent volume that you need to dig up somewhere else
550 thousand km² times "40 pounds" per m² is only ten billion tonnes, which is the weight of a 1-kilometer-radius sphere of rock. Botev Peak in Bulgaria, say, or the Matterhorn, although of course in practice you'd want to use ten or twenty billion tonnes of sand and bauxite that don't require climbing mountains to get them. Please do the math yourself before bringing up irrelevant trivialities like this.
> For all the talk about wind and solar being the energy of the future, I don't actually see where solar and wind are actually powering a modern economy.
Well, it's possible you're unaware of the relevant facts, so I'll explain.
Until four years ago, solar energy was more expensive than other sources of energy, so modern economies were built on those other sources of energy. Until about seven years ago, solar was much more expensive. Now, solar energy is cheaper. But most power plants are more than four years old; I think the median age is something like 15 years old, 30 years for nuclear plants, 40 years for both US nuclear plants and US coal plants. Typically planning and building a power plant is a process that takes a few years, too, and utilities and regulators are justifiably cautious about innovations.
So let's look at new installations rather than installed capacity.
For example, China built 38.4 GW of coal capacity last year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U and 71.7 GW of wind capacity and 48.2 GW of solar capacity https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-climatechange-idUSKBN29Q0JT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-climatechang.... Taking into account typical capacity factors of 40% for wind, 25% for solar, and 60% for coal, that adds up to 23 GW average new coal, 29 GW average new wind, and 12 GW average new solar. That last number doubles about once every three years. So I think it's fair to say that, even in the coal-heaviest country in the world, the transition to solar (and, I grudgingly admit, even more toward wind) is quite clear: the great majority of new power plants are running on renewable energy.
You may not be aware of this, but Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal company, went bankrupt in 02016. They've emerged from bankruptcy but their latest annual report says they lost US$211 million in 02019, after turning a profit briefly the year before — but nothing compared to how they lost US$2 billion in 02015.
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1064728/000106472820000007/btu20191231-10k.htm#s64BFFA53AF915D67A621D9D64E335BDB https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1064728/0001...
Their latest quarterly report from 02020 has them losing US$1.6 billion in 9 months.
One of the factors in Peabody's problems is that in the Southwest of the USA, where some of their major customers are, continuing to operate already built coal power plants like the San Juan Generating Plant and the now-defunct Navajo Generating Station is no longer economic; solar energy has driven down prices (averaging US$26.58/MWh at the Palo Verde trading hub in 02019 according to this article) well below the coal plants' operating expenses (for example, US$44.90/MWh at the San Juan Generating Plant).
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas-in-the-southwest-means-carbon-capture-is-not-going-to-save-coal-plants/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas...
> I see Germany building pipelines to ship natural[sic] from Russia and signing multi-decade contracts with that nation while being held up as a model nation. Why not invest in solar and wind deployment instead,
This is another question I answered in the comment you are purportedly responding to: Germany's solar capacity factor is an abysmal 10%.
Let's unpack what that means. A 280Wp solar panel module in California with a 28.1% capacity factor produces 79 watts average (690 kWh/year, worth about US$28 at a wholesale price of US$40/MWh); the same module in Germany produces about 28 watts (245 kWh/year, worth about US$9.80 at wholesale). But the module costs about US$50 wholesale in both places, or US$300 if you buy it on Amazon. So, absent subsidies, a solar plant is a much worse investment in Germany than in, say, Qatar.
Why is Germany often held up as a model nation? Germany was an early pioneer in a variety of energy reforms (the "Energiewende"), including massive investment in utility-scale solar, rooftop solar, and utility-scale wind, as well as energy-efficiency programs like Passivhaus. Still, in Germany it's still cheaper to run existing coal and gas plants than to build new solar plants, so Germany is no longer a leader in this field; the leaders are now countries like China, India, Qatar, and Chile.
Also, I didn't mention this, but Germany uses about 80 gigawatts in only 357 thousand km² of land, largely due to its high population density of 230 people per km². By contrast, the world has about 50 people per km², using 18 terawatts in 150 million km². So Germany, despite its high efficiency, uses about 0.2 W/m², almost twice as high as the world's 0.12 W/m².
So, in summary, Germany has a higher energy demand, higher competition for land, and a terrible solar resource, so it's one of the last places in the world you'd expect solar to be cost-competitive.
> I look at all that, I shudder at the amount of solar and wind collectors that will be required to manufacture and deploy and the stress it will put on existing ecosystems.
If you were to chop down a forest to build a PV farm, it would put stress on an existing ecosystem, but in a desert it will provide shade and windbreaks, and in arable land it will return cultivated land to being a habitat usable by native plants and animals. And those are typically much cheaper than chopping down forests. (They also don't concrete over the site anymore. Too expensive.) And, as outlined above, the mining and manufacturing are of a trivial scale compared to the deployment. So there is no reason to suspect that the environmental effect of solar energy will be net negative in the next couple of decades, even if compared to a nuclear alternative.
It's likely that in 20–50 years, as solar energy production vastly exceeds current world energy production, that it will become environmentally devastating, as people desperately seek to cover any scrap of land or ocean with increasingly efficient solar panels to harness every last little bit of terrestrial insolation. Unless we have greener ways of making such decisions by then.
> we have an energy-dense alternative, with no engineering challenges to solve and with decades of experience
Now that solar is so cheap, the alternatives are too expensive except for niche uses, and most of the alternatives are also wrecking the climate — nuclear, hydro, and geothermal being the exceptions. Even in the 1970s, before Three Mile Island, nuclear power plants cost over US$1 per average watt, which is about twice what PV plants in favorable locations cost now.
> This kind of emotional appeal is not conducive to good discourse
You know what's conducive to good discourse? Basing your
discourse
on easily verifiable facts instead of easily falsified
nonsense is conducive to good discourse.
Rigorous arguments based on specific, easily checkable
calculations are conducive to good discourse.
Responding point by point
to what other people have actually said,
instead of baselessly accusing them of
"forgetting about" one of the primary topics
of their comments,
is conducive to good discourse.
Trying to inundate careful consideration of relevant points
with piles of nonsense you haven't done the most
basic consistency checks on,
thus challenging others to do your homework for you
if they want to disagree — that
is not conducive to good discourse.
And that is what you were doing.
I don't know how to appeal to you to step up your game,
if not emotionally.
It looks to me like you're trying to monkeywrench
good discourse and prevent it from happening, and you're
immune to appeals to your shame.
>One of the factors in Peabody's problems is that in the Southwest of the USA, where some of their major customers are, continuing to operate already built coal power plants like the San Juan Generating Plant and the now-defunct Navajo Generating Station is no longer economic; solar energy has driven down prices (averaging US$26.58/MWh at the Palo Verde trading hub in 02019 according to this article) well below the coal plants' operating expenses (for example, US$44.90/MWh at the San Juan Generating Plant).
And thank you for providing the context for CA's rolling blackouts.
Drive base load generation off the market for the current darling "renewables", then when the renewables that ARE NOT predictable or consistent do the inevitable and fluctuate, the base load plants are no longer available to fill the gap.
I'd be right there with you celebrating the solar win if solar was able to 100% replace the functionality of those plants. But it can't!
Eliminate the plants but don't replace the functionality and what do you get? Rolling blackouts. A common occurrence in CA. Why visit the 3rd wold when you can just bring it home?!?
I don't think this is the full context for CA's rolling blackouts, although it's true that the Navajo Generating Station did sell to California.
The California rolling blackouts were back in the summer, when solar energy production is highest. If reliance on solar were the whole story, those blackouts would have gotten worse and worse from summer through fall and winter. Instead, they only lasted a total of about three hours over two days.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-10-06/california-rolling-blackouts-climate-change-poor-planning https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-10-06/califor...
> Officials have consistently said that intermittent power sources such as solar panels and wind turbines didn’t cause the rolling blackouts.
> Energy providers collectively under-scheduled the amount of electricity they expected to need. That allowed power plant operators to sell their juice to customers in other states, resulting in thousands of megawatts being exported even as the Independent System Operator warned that rolling blackouts were imminent.
But "officials" turned out to be wrong. Intermittent power sources did cause the rolling blackouts — though they weren't alone.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/california-releases-final-root-cause-analysis-of-august-rolling-blackouts/593436/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/california-releases-final-r...
http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Final-Root-Cause-Analysis-Mid-August-2020-Extreme-Heat-Wave.pdf http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Final-Root-Cause-Analysis-Mid...
> the three major causal factors contributing to the August outages were related to extreme
weather conditions, resource adequacy and planning processes, and market
practices. In summary, these factors were the following:
> 1. The climate change-induced extreme heat wave across the western United States resulted in demand for electricity exceeding existing electricity resource adequacy (RA) and planning targets.
> 2. In transitioning to a reliable, clean, and affordable resource mix, resource planning targets have not kept pace to ensure sufficient resources that can be relied upon to meet demand in the early evening hours. This made balancing demand and supply more challenging during the extreme heat wave.
> 3. Some practices in the day-ahead energy market exacerbated the supply challenges under highly stressed conditions.
If I'm reading this report right, the immediately precipitating event was that the Blythe Energy Center, a gas plant, went down, so when solar generation had declined enough at 18:38 on August 14, there wasn't enough reserve power, so they started rolling blackouts on half a million people until 20:38, when solar generation was just about at 0.
Then, the next day, storm clouds and lowered winds reduced the power generation available throughout the peak-usage afternoon hours, until the CAISO scheduling coordinator erroneously ordered the Panoche Energy Center (another gas plant) to ramp down generation. So at 18:28 they started rolling blackouts, which lasted 20 minutes until 18:48.
The Governor appealing to people to conserve electric power, and no more big gas generating stations failing, allowed them to avoid rolling blackouts in the following days.
So it sounds like they need more batteries. Two more hours of batteries would have been sufficient in this case (for about 5% of their 45 GW load, about 2500 MW: 5000 MWh, or 16 TJ in SI units), but ultimately you'll need a few days of batteries, over a million MWh for California, about 3 or 4 PJ. (Pessimistically assuming there's no demand response or other storage.)
At the US$111/kWh cost for lithium-ion batteries cited in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/energy-storage-efficiency.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/energy-storage-efficiency.h... this means about they would have needed US$555M in batteries in this case, or probably about a billion dollars for the whole facility, and a million MWh of batteries to move California entirely to solar would of course be US$111B of batteries, which could be invested US$11B per year over the next ten years. This is a significant investment, but hardly unaffordable — PG&E, for example, has about US$17B in yearly revenues, and Southern California Edison US$12M, so even the financial savings from switching to cheaper solar energy are likely enough to pay for storage. Presumably as battery prices come down these numbers will shrink further, and there will probably be substantial demand response due to the residential TOU migration described at greater length below.
Part of the problem is that their planning process was structured around peak demand, which is the hardest thing to handle with baseload-type plants like coal and nuclear; but, in this case they handled peak demand fine, even in the face of higher-than-usual loads! The problem was after the peak-demand hour: demand declined, but solar generation declined even faster, which was a thing they hadn't taken into account in capacity planning!
Another aspect of the problem was that the gas plants they were relying on for peaking couldn't operate at their normal capacity at such high outdoor temperatures, so the very heat wave they were struggling to survive in was also impairing their generation capacity.
With respect to the potential impact of things like the Navajo Generating Station and the San Juan Generating Plant, they California's imports were limited not by available generation capacity but by available transmission capacity:
> The imports category includes both non-resource-specific resources as well as resource-
specific imports like those from Hoover Dam and Palo Verde Nuclear Generating
Station. Total import bids received in the day-ahead market were between 2,600 MW
and 3,400 MW (40-50%) higher than the August shown RA requirements from imports.
Despite this robust level of import bids, transmission constraints ultimately limited the
amount of physical transfer capability into the CAISO footprint.
So, for the reduction in coal generation in New Mexico or Arizona specifically to be a causative factor in California's blackouts, someone would have had to build more transmission lines from Arizona. But the transition to renewables in general, that was a causative factor.
(However, it's not entirely clear to me that all the transmission lines were operating at capacity — they emphasize the California–Oregon lines.)
One of the big things they're doing in response is moving residential customers to time-of-use rates, which means that they'll be able to save money on your electrical bill by using energy during the day instead of at night. That should make it possible to sell appliances that save money by, for example, freezing ice during the day and using it for cooling in the afternoon and at night.
It's hard to tell through the insane level of CYA bureaucratese in this report but it looks like they're also installing more battery capacity.