7 ms·

Alas, this is probably pointless. Some technologies (PV, batteries, wind) have improved by an order of magnitude - and swamp out all other considerations. EDI

Alas, this is probably pointless. Some technologies (PV, batteries, wind) have improved by an order of magnitude - and swamp out all other considerations. EDIT: to be clear, i loved the original book, and have re-read it several times over the years.

bjelkeman-again 5y ago
David MacKay’s work was for me very important. It showed how one should do a systems analysis for a country to understand how one can achieve the change required. I was astonished when I talked to several of the leading people responsible for energy policy in several political parties in my country, to find they really had no clue about what they where doing on a systems level. I think that updating this book is not pointless, but more importantly doing the same for more countries is really important.
- phreeza 5y ago
  It would be fantastic to turn the chapters into Templates where one has to plug in the relevant parameters for a country and see the calculations for that country.
  - algo_trader 5y ago
    And multiple PhD students have done so! For example, the Stanford/Jacobson study on powering the world with wind/solar/water. Some results were famously silly, such as filing Finland with solar panels, or adding the cost of nuclear war to nuclear reactors. Jacobson sued other academics then backed down. The point is, 5-10 years on, these models turned out to be over pessimistic! Australia doesn't need fancy modelling - simple roof top solar there is on target to meet full day time demand in 2-3 years. Conversely we still dont really know how to meet the last 5% of outlier energy demand scenarios.
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      Has Jacobson stopped suing people though
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      > Some results were famously silly, such as ... adding the cost of nuclear war to nuclear reactors. Is that really silly? The incremental increase in the risk of nuclear war for each gigawatt of civilian nuclear power generation might be small, but the costs of a nuclear war could be quadrillions of dollars (for example if it set the world back by 100 years). Obviously measuring that risk is difficult, but to give an example, imagine that civilian nuclear power were limited to just the countries which currently have nuclear weapons. That would greatly reduce the proliferation risk and the chance of nuclear breakout in countries like Iran. The urgency of addressing climate change may take precedence over these concerns in the short term, but if we do manage to reach net zero with a mixture of renewables and nuclear energy, then it's not inconceivable that over-provisioning renewables might allow us to phase out nuclear energy later on. Suppose it would take 50 years to build up that renewable energy capacity, and 10 years to build a new nuclear power station. That would mean the nuclear power station would only be useful for 40 years, which limits the amount of time they'd have to recoup their costs over.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      > Conversely we still dont really know how to meet the last 5% of outlier energy demand scenarios. Hydrogen w. combustion turbines. When a simple cycle turbine power plant is 5% of the cost of a nuclear plant of the same output, we can back up the entire grid and not have it be too expensive.
- rufuspollock 5y ago
  > It showed how one should do a systems analysis for a country to understand how one can achieve the change required. I was astonished when I talked to several of the leading people responsible for energy policy in several political parties in my country, to find they really had no clue about what they where doing on a systems level. Massive +1. And i agree that perhaps "reusing" the book would be useful. E.g. take the key factual approach and update analyses for particular technologies and then plug those together - which to some extent is what the pathway calculator did which is why it is worth trying to get the source for that https://github.com/life-itself/climate/issues/2 https://github.com/life-itself/climate/issues/2
- epistasis 5y ago
  > I think that updating this book is not pointless, but more importantly doing the same for more countries is really important. While MacKay's work is excellent for a general lay audience to understand general scales of the issue, there are now far more advanced models for this that do things like replay historical weather and demand, down to 15 minute scales, to more least cost systems for zero carbon grids. They are also so advanced as to take into current grid structure and generation resources, and the cheapest way to transition to zero carbon from our current resources. Christopher Clack's models are probably the most advanced. The latest iteration has the very surprising finding that deploying lots of grid-edge solar and storage right now will save us a ton of money because it will use current transmission and distribution assets more effectively and reduce the need for future investment in these assets (T&D is the majority of our electricity bills, not generation!)
  - redisman 5y ago
    Are there any books or journals you’d recommend that are more up to date? I’m trying to find something more worthwhile to read during downtime
    - bjelkeman-again 5y ago
      Maybe something like this. https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/56/1/jamc-d-16-0175.1.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/56/1/jamc-d-... But it isn’t particularly helpful when trying to explain policy imho.
wiz21c 5y ago
FTBook: > Wind turbines are getting bigger all the time. Do bigger wind turbines change this chapter’s answer? > Chapter B explains. Bigger wind turbines deliver financial economies of scale, but they don’t greatly increase the total power per unit land area, because bigger windmills have to be spaced further apart. A wind farm that’s twice as tall will deliver roughly 30% more power. So, did wind turbine production actually increased by an order of magnitudes since the book ?
- 7952 5y ago
  But the constraint on growth may not be land (or sea) availability. So why worry? Optimise the thing that is holding you back.
- algo_trader 5y ago
  Amazingly, yes! Turbines have gone from 1-2MW to 10-16MW Capacity factors have gone from 20% to 50%-60% Annual additions gave gone from sub-GW to 70GW last year And with turbine spacing of 1km you can actually do stuff with the land in between. On the other hand, transmission projects still take 10-20 years, and new transmission projects are often over booked by 300%-400% before they are even started.
  - oezi 5y ago
    And did the general conclusion change that wind wouldn't be able to provide more than even half the energy we need for transport?
    - algo_trader 5y ago
      Yes. The conclusion has changed! Electric cars are ridiculously efficient. A 100kwh tesla drives approx 500km. So 50km/day/car needs just 10kwh. The UK also has 2 persons per car (plus additional cats and dogs..) So just the on-shore book projection is already enough AND only requires a tenth of the turbines. Lets keep nuclear as well. Invest in efficiency. Lots of hard work ahead. But we are probably closer to "problem solved" than to "civilization collapse". Cheers.
DennisP 5y ago
They've gotten cheaper by an order of magnitude, but their basic physical characteristics haven't changed that much. A big point of the book is to show what it looks like to really deploy this stuff at the necessary scale.
- derriz 5y ago
  The issue is that we now have real experience of deploying this stuff at scale and integrating intermittent sources into grids. Many countries in Europe have 30% or more of their electricity supplied by intermittent but it turns out that the integration problem isn't as difficult as envisaged. The consensus amongst engineers is that up to about 70% is manageable without any big tech breakthroughs. Network reliability has actually increased in many European countries despite the increasing reliance on intermittent sources. The current approach certainly depends on having back-up deployable generation capacity (natural gas) but that was always required for demand following even with thermal sources so most grids already have the infrastructure to incorporate more intermittent generation.
  - cbmuser 5y ago
    Germany has a large share (50%) of renewables and their specific CO2 emissions per kWh are up to ten times higher as compared to France with 70% nuclear. Volatile renewables don’t effectively help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?tab=table&country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
    - derriz 5y ago
      "Volatile" renewables absolutely do help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As the renewables share of generation has been increasing, the CO2 intensity of electricity generation in Germany has dropped from 542gCO2/kWh in 2000 to 296gCO2/kWh in 2020[1]. Btw, your link brings me to a table on agricultural CO2 emissions? [1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/development-of-co2-emission-intensity-of-electricity-generation-in-selected-countries-2000-2020 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/development-o...
derriz 5y ago
I think this fact is under-appreciated. It has undermined most of the quantitative analysis done in the past. So most of the analysis available is stale. It has also undermined a lot of business plans - even those based on renewables. For example the Xlink project in the UK - this involved building a huge solar PV plant (with complimentary wind and battery storage) in Morocco where panels are twice as efficient and an underwater HVDC cable to the UK. The problem is that panel prices have dropped so much, that it's now cheaper, easier and quicker to just buy twice as much PV panels and site them in the UK - compensating for the relative lack of efficiency in northern Europe by volume of panels. This is why there's huge growth in utility solar PV in northern and western Europe in the last year or two despite the less-than-ideal conditions there - the panels are just so cheap that the lack of optimal efficiency becomes a non-issue. My prediction is that wind, solar and batteries will dominate because they're riding on the benefits of mass-production - the capital cost for these is dominated by off-the-shelf component costs - installation is relatively trivial. This has delivered continuous and steep price declines while the prices for other forms of generation are stagnant (coal) or rising (nuclear). And there's no sign that the fall in prices is stopping at the moment so their price/value advantage will only grow in future.
lucb1e 5y ago
I don't understand what you mean. Just because it's cheap, how is it suddenly not a consideration anymore whether we want to fill a large share of nature or farmland with PV, batteries, wind? There are more considerations than cost. Also because one needs to keep in mind that renewable electricity is only about 10% of the energy demand. I sometimes see headlines like "61% of electricity in Germany came from wind last month!" which kind of miss the point, as that means we have only 94% to go. We really need a huge amount of surface area if we want to go for a monoculture of wind and solar power with battery storage. Edit to be clear: I'm not against wind or solar or batteries. We will most definitely need it and must invest in both building them and innovating them further (in that order of priorities). But I also think we cannot just rely on them solving the whole problem. (Sometimes it is also assumed that this plummeting price curve will continue at the same rate for at least another decade, which I suspect is also not going to materialize.)
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Supplying the US using solely solar power would only require 20,000 square miles of land. We have more land in parking lots. The battery land requirements are approximately 1 square mile. And wind requirements are effectively 0 since wind can very easily co-exist with other land usages.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    Getting rid of parking lots (and the energy- and ressources-hungry individual cars sitting on them) would certainly be a big step forward to a sustainable future.
    - jetbooster 5y ago
      I don't think they were suggesting getting rid of the the car parks, but rather putting solar over the top of them. Which would also reduce the amount of petrol used to AC the car when you get back in it too (though this effect is probably negligible)
      - 5y ago
RobinL 5y ago
Pointless in what sense? The very reason I'd like to see it updated is to see whether the conclusions change materially when we take into account technological progress. As far as I understand it, whilst costs may be substantially lower that he envisaged, MacKay argued there are fundamental physical constraints on solar and wind that mean they still are unlikely to be able to provide all our energy needs (in the UK at least, without piping in energy from e.g. the Moroccan desert a la Xlinks). (Yes, I realise solar can do an awful lot if you're willing to 'go big' and have huge batteries. https://www.robinlinacre.com/fill_country_solar/ https://www.robinlinacre.com/fill_country_solar/)
- pfdietz 5y ago
  If I recall correctly, he reached that conclusion by assuming a lot of biomass energy. Biomass is extremely inefficient at converting sunlight to usable energy (and burning biomass derived fuels in IC engines is very inefficient at converting that chemical energy to work.) PV + battery vehicles would drastically reduce the land area needed.

bjelkeman-again 5y ago

David MacKay’s work was for me very important. It showed how one should do a systems analysis for a country to understand how one can achieve the change required. I was astonished when I talked to several of the leading people responsible for energy policy in several political parties in my country, to find they really had no clue about what they where doing on a systems level. I think that updating this book is not pointless, but more importantly doing the same for more countries is really important.

phreeza 5y ago
It would be fantastic to turn the chapters into Templates where one has to plug in the relevant parameters for a country and see the calculations for that country.
- algo_trader 5y ago
  And multiple PhD students have done so! For example, the Stanford/Jacobson study on powering the world with wind/solar/water. Some results were famously silly, such as filing Finland with solar panels, or adding the cost of nuclear war to nuclear reactors. Jacobson sued other academics then backed down. The point is, 5-10 years on, these models turned out to be over pessimistic! Australia doesn't need fancy modelling - simple roof top solar there is on target to meet full day time demand in 2-3 years. Conversely we still dont really know how to meet the last 5% of outlier energy demand scenarios.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    Has Jacobson stopped suing people though
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > Some results were famously silly, such as ... adding the cost of nuclear war to nuclear reactors. Is that really silly? The incremental increase in the risk of nuclear war for each gigawatt of civilian nuclear power generation might be small, but the costs of a nuclear war could be quadrillions of dollars (for example if it set the world back by 100 years). Obviously measuring that risk is difficult, but to give an example, imagine that civilian nuclear power were limited to just the countries which currently have nuclear weapons. That would greatly reduce the proliferation risk and the chance of nuclear breakout in countries like Iran. The urgency of addressing climate change may take precedence over these concerns in the short term, but if we do manage to reach net zero with a mixture of renewables and nuclear energy, then it's not inconceivable that over-provisioning renewables might allow us to phase out nuclear energy later on. Suppose it would take 50 years to build up that renewable energy capacity, and 10 years to build a new nuclear power station. That would mean the nuclear power station would only be useful for 40 years, which limits the amount of time they'd have to recoup their costs over.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    > Conversely we still dont really know how to meet the last 5% of outlier energy demand scenarios. Hydrogen w. combustion turbines. When a simple cycle turbine power plant is 5% of the cost of a nuclear plant of the same output, we can back up the entire grid and not have it be too expensive.
rufuspollock 5y ago
> It showed how one should do a systems analysis for a country to understand how one can achieve the change required. I was astonished when I talked to several of the leading people responsible for energy policy in several political parties in my country, to find they really had no clue about what they where doing on a systems level. Massive +1. And i agree that perhaps "reusing" the book would be useful. E.g. take the key factual approach and update analyses for particular technologies and then plug those together - which to some extent is what the pathway calculator did which is why it is worth trying to get the source for that https://github.com/life-itself/climate/issues/2 https://github.com/life-itself/climate/issues/2
epistasis 5y ago
> I think that updating this book is not pointless, but more importantly doing the same for more countries is really important. While MacKay's work is excellent for a general lay audience to understand general scales of the issue, there are now far more advanced models for this that do things like replay historical weather and demand, down to 15 minute scales, to more least cost systems for zero carbon grids. They are also so advanced as to take into current grid structure and generation resources, and the cheapest way to transition to zero carbon from our current resources. Christopher Clack's models are probably the most advanced. The latest iteration has the very surprising finding that deploying lots of grid-edge solar and storage right now will save us a ton of money because it will use current transmission and distribution assets more effectively and reduce the need for future investment in these assets (T&D is the majority of our electricity bills, not generation!)
- redisman 5y ago
  Are there any books or journals you’d recommend that are more up to date? I’m trying to find something more worthwhile to read during downtime
  - bjelkeman-again 5y ago
    Maybe something like this. https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/56/1/jamc-d-16-0175.1.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/56/1/jamc-d-... But it isn’t particularly helpful when trying to explain policy imho.

wiz21c 5y ago

FTBook: > Wind turbines are getting bigger all the time. Do bigger wind turbines change this chapter’s answer? > Chapter B explains. Bigger wind turbines deliver financial economies of scale, but they don’t greatly increase the total power per unit land area, because bigger windmills have to be spaced further apart. A wind farm that’s twice as tall will deliver roughly 30% more power. So, did wind turbine production actually increased by an order of magnitudes since the book ?

7952 5y ago
But the constraint on growth may not be land (or sea) availability. So why worry? Optimise the thing that is holding you back.
algo_trader 5y ago
Amazingly, yes! Turbines have gone from 1-2MW to 10-16MW Capacity factors have gone from 20% to 50%-60% Annual additions gave gone from sub-GW to 70GW last year And with turbine spacing of 1km you can actually do stuff with the land in between. On the other hand, transmission projects still take 10-20 years, and new transmission projects are often over booked by 300%-400% before they are even started.
- oezi 5y ago
  And did the general conclusion change that wind wouldn't be able to provide more than even half the energy we need for transport?
  - algo_trader 5y ago
    Yes. The conclusion has changed! Electric cars are ridiculously efficient. A 100kwh tesla drives approx 500km. So 50km/day/car needs just 10kwh. The UK also has 2 persons per car (plus additional cats and dogs..) So just the on-shore book projection is already enough AND only requires a tenth of the turbines. Lets keep nuclear as well. Invest in efficiency. Lots of hard work ahead. But we are probably closer to "problem solved" than to "civilization collapse". Cheers.

DennisP 5y ago

They've gotten cheaper by an order of magnitude, but their basic physical characteristics haven't changed that much. A big point of the book is to show what it looks like to really deploy this stuff at the necessary scale.

derriz 5y ago
The issue is that we now have real experience of deploying this stuff at scale and integrating intermittent sources into grids. Many countries in Europe have 30% or more of their electricity supplied by intermittent but it turns out that the integration problem isn't as difficult as envisaged. The consensus amongst engineers is that up to about 70% is manageable without any big tech breakthroughs. Network reliability has actually increased in many European countries despite the increasing reliance on intermittent sources. The current approach certainly depends on having back-up deployable generation capacity (natural gas) but that was always required for demand following even with thermal sources so most grids already have the infrastructure to incorporate more intermittent generation.
- cbmuser 5y ago
  Germany has a large share (50%) of renewables and their specific CO2 emissions per kWh are up to ten times higher as compared to France with 70% nuclear. Volatile renewables don’t effectively help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?tab=table&country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
  - derriz 5y ago
    "Volatile" renewables absolutely do help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As the renewables share of generation has been increasing, the CO2 intensity of electricity generation in Germany has dropped from 542gCO2/kWh in 2000 to 296gCO2/kWh in 2020[1]. Btw, your link brings me to a table on agricultural CO2 emissions? [1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/development-of-co2-emission-intensity-of-electricity-generation-in-selected-countries-2000-2020 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/development-o...

derriz 5y ago

I think this fact is under-appreciated. It has undermined most of the quantitative analysis done in the past. So most of the analysis available is stale. It has also undermined a lot of business plans - even those based on renewables. For example the Xlink project in the UK - this involved building a huge solar PV plant (with complimentary wind and battery storage) in Morocco where panels are twice as efficient and an underwater HVDC cable to the UK. The problem is that panel prices have dropped so much, that it's now cheaper, easier and quicker to just buy twice as much PV panels and site them in the UK - compensating for the relative lack of efficiency in northern Europe by volume of panels. This is why there's huge growth in utility solar PV in northern and western Europe in the last year or two despite the less-than-ideal conditions there - the panels are just so cheap that the lack of optimal efficiency becomes a non-issue. My prediction is that wind, solar and batteries will dominate because they're riding on the benefits of mass-production - the capital cost for these is dominated by off-the-shelf component costs - installation is relatively trivial. This has delivered continuous and steep price declines while the prices for other forms of generation are stagnant (coal) or rising (nuclear). And there's no sign that the fall in prices is stopping at the moment so their price/value advantage will only grow in future.

lucb1e 5y ago

I don't understand what you mean. Just because it's cheap, how is it suddenly not a consideration anymore whether we want to fill a large share of nature or farmland with PV, batteries, wind? There are more considerations than cost. Also because one needs to keep in mind that renewable electricity is only about 10% of the energy demand. I sometimes see headlines like "61% of electricity in Germany came from wind last month!" which kind of miss the point, as that means we have only 94% to go. We really need a huge amount of surface area if we want to go for a monoculture of wind and solar power with battery storage. Edit to be clear: I'm not against wind or solar or batteries. We will most definitely need it and must invest in both building them and innovating them further (in that order of priorities). But I also think we cannot just rely on them solving the whole problem. (Sometimes it is also assumed that this plummeting price curve will continue at the same rate for at least another decade, which I suspect is also not going to materialize.)

bryanlarsen 5y ago
Supplying the US using solely solar power would only require 20,000 square miles of land. We have more land in parking lots. The battery land requirements are approximately 1 square mile. And wind requirements are effectively 0 since wind can very easily co-exist with other land usages.
- kergonath 5y ago
  Getting rid of parking lots (and the energy- and ressources-hungry individual cars sitting on them) would certainly be a big step forward to a sustainable future.
  - jetbooster 5y ago
    I don't think they were suggesting getting rid of the the car parks, but rather putting solar over the top of them. Which would also reduce the amount of petrol used to AC the car when you get back in it too (though this effect is probably negligible)
    - 5y ago

RobinL 5y ago

Pointless in what sense? The very reason I'd like to see it updated is to see whether the conclusions change materially when we take into account technological progress. As far as I understand it, whilst costs may be substantially lower that he envisaged, MacKay argued there are fundamental physical constraints on solar and wind that mean they still are unlikely to be able to provide all our energy needs (in the UK at least, without piping in energy from e.g. the Moroccan desert a la Xlinks). (Yes, I realise solar can do an awful lot if you're willing to 'go big' and have huge batteries. https://www.robinlinacre.com/fill_country_solar/ https://www.robinlinacre.com/fill_country_solar/)

pfdietz 5y ago
If I recall correctly, he reached that conclusion by assuming a lot of biomass energy. Biomass is extremely inefficient at converting sunlight to usable energy (and burning biomass derived fuels in IC engines is very inefficient at converting that chemical energy to work.) PV + battery vehicles would drastically reduce the land area needed.