8 ms·
Solar and wind can meet world energy demand 100 times over
- steve918 5y agoThere are a lot of ways to generate lots of power, what we're generally lacking is ways to _store_ power to handle things like peaks.
- ogre_codes 5y agoWe know a lot of ways to store power. The trick is storing it efficiently. If we have enough surplus power (which may be the case in a few years), efficiency becomes less important.
- Panino 5y agoJust as an alternative to prioritizing storage (we should still do it, but it's not the only constructive use), we could use a lot of excess electricity to create hydrogen, desalinate sea water and pump it inland, create biochar without kickstarting the heating process via combustion, etc. The hydrogen could be used for hydrogen vehicles and other purposes. Seawater desalination (very partially) addresses sealevel rise while also getting water to dry areas. Biochar sequesters carbon while helping more plants to grow with less water and less chemical fertilizer. So from a certain point of view, the above pursuits are like investing most of your "excess money" in the stock market rather than putting most of it in a savings account. And since we're starting to address climate change so late we need something better than just a savings account or battery.
- mgarfias 5y agoImagine a san Joaquin valley that feeds everyone/doesn’t lie fallow, and yet the rivers run free, and the delta smelt can live. Oh and California’s native salmon runs come back.
- makomk 5y agoThe difficult part is storing it on the kind of massive scale required full stop. Sacrificing efficiency can only do so much to help solve this, especially since the wasted energy has to go somewhere and dealing with that has its own costs...
- ogre_codes 5y agoA lot of these problems solve themselves with proper pricing. For example if power is nearly free during daylight hours and expensive in the evening, businesses will shift some percentage of energy intensive operations to daylight hours. EV charging stations will charge more during evening hours. Charging EVs during daylight hours while they are parked at work places instead of overnight at employees homes is another way we can shift use. Some of these things might be done via pricing, others perhaps government incentives.
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y agoStoring power doesn't seem like an intractable problem. With the huge incentives with the coming electric car market, technology, renewables storage and god knows what else, I imagine there will be a lot of investment pouring into solving this. It's only a matter of time.
- aqme28 5y agoWell if you generate enough excess power, you hardly need to store any.
- richwater 5y agoThis makes no sense. Without storage excess power is useless at best, dangerous at worst.
- qayxc 5y agoNow you shifted the problem to power transmission, because there's no way to generate an excess of power at all times in all locations using just wind and solar. So while in my region at the time of posting this, 100% of electricity is generated by wind, there'd be 100% less if there was no wind (which happens from time to time). Solar wouldn't help either, because right now it's dark outside and it will stay dark for another 6 hours. So right now, even if there's an abundance of power generated elsewhere, it would have to get transmitted efficiently to here (and from here to where it's needed if applicable). Local storage and massive interconnected power transmission capacity is what's required. And that ain't cheap.
- aqme28 5y agoMy point is that if you have enough of something, it stops mattering as much how efficient you are with it.
- Junk_Collector 5y agoUnfortunately no. Whatever power you generate you have to send somewhere. Excess generation will push the grid frequency high and destabilize the grid in much the same way that insufficient generation will pull the frequency down and destabilize the grid. Storage doesn't just provide power during low generation, it provides somewhere for power to go when generation outpaces demand.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
- angelbar 5y ago- One is to move back the excess to the grid and then to pump water over dams. - Compress air into sealed caverns - Elevating mass - Store hot water locally - Crypto currencies maybe?
- ogre_codes 5y agoIt feels like within the next 20 years we are going to have a good handle on “green” power to fixed locations. The tricky piece we have left is how do we move people and freight over long distances. EVs can do a decent job of transporting a few people a short distance, but aircraft and long distance freight has a whole other set of issues. Look at container ships, one of the biggest polluters and sources of carbon on the planet. How do you remove the need for massive amounts of diesel on those? How about passenger and air freight? How do we eliminate all the CO2 from jet fuel? In the US we are terrible at infrastructure, but do we invest in a super-train system? This is likely the next big challenge.
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y agoIf you talk to Airbus, the current plan is hydrogen, which is emission free, besides water. Since you can extract it from water by electrolysis, there is an essentially endless supply, assuming you have endless clean electricity.
- ogre_codes 5y agoHydrogen power is fundamentally a power storage technology. It makes sense to use H2 for that. I've seen some technology that transforms CO2 into jet fuel which is another somewhat carbon neutral technology.
- blake1 5y agoContainer ships are massive emitters of some pollutants like SO2, but not CO2. Sources usually put the carbon number at around 3%.[1] this number has been rising in part because the denominator, global carbon emissions, has been falling as power has been emitting less. [1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/what-we-do/shipping-and-environment/shipping-and-climate-change https://www.transportenvironment.org/what-we-do/shipping-and...
- sacomo 5y agoSerious question. How do we make enough solar panels and wind turbines that will be capable of producing all of this energy without destroying all of our natural resources/habitats?
- tamaharbor 5y agoReminds me of a joke: This machine does the work of 10 men. Unfortunately it takes 15 men to operate it.
- insert_coin 5y agoIt's a funny joke, don't get me wrong. But I'll take the 15 men sitting behind a computer operating remotely a digger inside a mine instead of 10 men breaking their backs and probably risking their lives with a shovel.
- bpcpdx 5y agoNot to mention what do we do with old solar panels after they've lived their life. There's going to be a lot since a lot is needed to generate the amount of power needed. There's a good chance it will just get shoved onto some 3rd world country for them to deal with.
- soarfourmore 5y agoCould they be renovated to serve lower power items like street lamps?
- rad_gruchalski 5y agoAnd where do we build them? Because where I live, in order to have them installed, whole chunks of forests are being wiped.
- xnx 5y agoWhere is that?
- insert_coin 5y agoThe world can theoretically meet it, in practice, it is the same situation as the "food" shortage. Solar and food have a distribution problem, not only a generation problem, but since the world decided nationalism, protectionism and populism is more important than cooperation it is not going to get solved and we'll have to generate our needs and store it many times over in order for the biggest consumers of energy to be satisfied. Just in time production and energy sharing will remain a dream and we'll keep wasting resources and the planet again and again just for our petty grievances.
- dmurray 5y ago"100 times over" is a lot less than I'd have thought or hoped. We have to cover 1% of the world's surface with solar and wind farms to pay for our current energy use? That won't be easy.
- Panino 5y agoAnyone breaking even usage-wise with rooftop solar is already much of the way there, and that's excluding utility generated power and big savings from improved home design (e.g. passive solar heating) and other technologies not yet well deployed like ground source heat pumps and air source heat pumps. Once people realize that these technologies are cheaper than the current go-to options, things will happen quickly.
- sacomo 5y agoI'm not very optimistic that we have enough time, nor individuals have enough financial resources, for the market to realize how cheap / efficient these technologies are. We really need this progress implemented as part of large scale systemic programs. The market is simply too slow.
- dmurray 5y agoI don't understand rooftop solar as a large scale solution. We don't propose that every household grows its own food or mines its own ore. Let us build solar panels on the least valuable rural land, and benefit from the economies of scale and the ease of installation and maintenance - better to look after one acre of solar panels and inverters than the same number spread over a hundred houses. Transmission losses are negligible, easily single digit percent for 100km. For individuals, it may make sense if they value grid independence or if they can benefit from tax breaks imposed by a government that doesn't agree with my take.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> I don't understand rooftop solar as a large scale solution. We don't propose that every household grows its own food or mines its own ore. We do, OTOH, demand that every housing unit have, say, flush toilets, because the waste problems without them cause a negative externality we don’t want to deal with. Solar panels can be viewed as the same thing with regard to electricity use. > Let us build solar panels on the least valuable rural land, and benefit from the economies of scale and the ease of installation and maintenance Shading rural land with solar panels makes it less valuable for the one thing rural land is most likely to be valued for. Putting solar panels on rooftops doesn’t compete with other uses of the space.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y agoI worked to help develop and deploy geothermal for a few years. Like most alt energy, it is was never intended to be the single replacement for fossil fuels. But deployed to it's strengths - geothermal is yet another valuable component, that can advance the honest goal of marginalizing fossil fuel use.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sampling 5y agoThe next problem to solve is how to continue servicing demand for electricity when the sun goes down (an everyday occurrence) and when the wind stops blowing for extended periods of time. Demand for problem is constant, however the electricity generated from solar and wind is not always so.