16 ms·

> Hell, eleven percent of the energy that America currently uses, according to Saul Griffith’s excellent book Electrify, simply goes to finding more energy. Th

> Hell, eleven percent of the energy that America currently uses, according to Saul Griffith’s excellent book Electrify, simply goes to finding more energy. That's a pretty shocking stat too! The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. It won't be free to transmit that energy, and the intermittent nature of the abundance will play hell with most capital intensive uses (eg crypto mining), but I'm super curious to see what new capabilities that people figure out for humanity.

nine_k 5y ago
One of my bets is on synthesizing more hydrocarbons from water and CO₂, because planes and helicopters will still mostly run on it.
- lapinot 5y ago
  Surely that's much easier and less ressource intensive than using less planes and helicopters.
  - thepangolino 5y ago
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    It doesn't matter how energy intensive it is. If people are willing to pay a premium (they are), there will be a market. Right now, the market is artificially big, because you don't have to pay for the negative externalities of carbon.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      > you don't have to pay for the negative externalities of carbon. We aren't yet seeing much indication that there will be a global tax/fee on the externalities of carbon. That means even if local policies are implemented for certain cases (eg. no gas cars in the city, no coal power in one state), there will always be somewhere on earth willing to burn dirty coal to make helicopter fuel for export.
      - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
        So you tax the carbon at the importing country. This is a solved problem.
        londons_explore 5y ago
        The WTO most favoured nation rules don't allow that. Which is why nobody does it.
- okl 5y ago
  You might find this resource interesting: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-michael-liebreich/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic... (Yeah, linkedin sucks)
- empedocles 5y ago
  There are some interesting start-ups betting on just that, that carbon capture to general hydrocarbons in a neutral way will outcompete electrifying certain sectors, e.g. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/01/scaling-carbon-capture/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/01/scaling-carbon...
newyankee 5y ago
I feel that demand shifting is something that is talked about least but will automatically happen at a larger scale than we envision when marginal cost of electricity is low. Hopefully that leads to cheaper versions of many expensive items with high embedded energy costs.
iqanq 5y ago
>The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. Well, by now, it seems like completely the opposite: thanks to nuclear plants shutting down and CO taxes, we are starved of energy.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  The abundance of cheap energy is based on renewable sources. They need to be built in the form of wind power and photovoltaics and others first. Blocking this of course raises the energy costs.
  - iqanq 5y ago
    Nobody has blocked wind power or photovoltaics. If anything, they are pretty well subsidised as it is. They don't (currently?) provide enough power.
    - Semaphor 5y ago
      I think the poster might have meant "blocking" as in planning/building? Not quite sure how to parse the comment otherwise.
    - _ph_ 5y ago
      In Germany, the previous government has done a lot to stall further builtup of renewable energies. The builtup was only a fraction in recent years compared to the top years. If the builtup had continued (or even accellerated), Germany would be an even larger exporter of electricity than it is.
      - fivea 5y ago
        > In Germany, the previous government has done a lot to stall further builtup of renewable energies. I find this assertion hard to believe. Merkel has been in charge of Germany's federal government for the past two decades, and throughout this period Germany's energy production from renewable sources has skyrocketed from virtually none to the leading energy source, with a share of over 60% of the nation's energy production. In fact, if anything, Germany's production from renewables has been accelerating. https://vizzlo.com/gallery/time-series-graph/example/power-generation-by-energy-source-in-germany https://vizzlo.com/gallery/time-series-graph/example/power-g... Could you provide any source that supports your assertion that the previous government has been stalling renewables?
barney54 5y ago
People used to say that nuclear would lead to power to cheap to meter. That never happened. I’m not sure it’s going to happen with renewables because of the large land use requirements. Also is there anywhere in the world where adding wind and solar has led to lower electricity rates for ratepayers? European electricity and nat gas prices should go up about 50% this year. Lastly, there was a story yesterday on HN about high fertilizer prices. The biggest reason for that is high natural gas prices, in part because of a lack of recent investment in new natural gas sources. There will be an energy transition, but so far the prices for energy and things derived from energy sources are really high.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  Providing a set amount of electricity 24/7 of course has a cost as well as setting up renewable sources. But especially solar cells have only fixed/maintenance costs, but no "fuel" cost per amount of electrictiy produced. This leads to a price for the electricity, which mostly has to be reconed up to the point where the grid demands are satisfied. Any excess electricity is literally free and can be repurposed, as long as that purpose can utilize intermittant supply. If you look at the German electricity prices at the power exchange, high renewable output correlates with very low prices. The amortized costs of renewables by now are distinctly lower than for fossil fuel and of course nuclear power. While large investments have to be taken, a further expansion of renewables should lower the electricity price in Germany (and the rest of Europe via trade) Current prices are very high, because of gas shortage. I don't have a clear idea how it all started, but it seems there was a too large dependency on the spot markets vs. long term contracts, and now the spot markets have skyrocketed. There are political aspecst too - Russia for sure could extend their deliveries, but barely deliver what was contractually agreed upon. It didn't help, that several French nuclear plants have been shut down without warning as safety problems were detected and have now to be fixed. Finally, the weather has been not so friendly for renewables in the last year, for the first time in many years, Germany had a small decrease in production year over year.
- Retric 5y ago
  Electrical grids change slowly, over half of all electrical equipment worldwide is 20+ years old and solar only very recently became cheap. Many places are seeing lower rates due to recent renewable energy investments, others are seeing higher costs due to heavily subsidized early adoption. Some like Germany have both effects at the same time. So remember, the economics going forward on a 20+ year time horizons look very different from existing infrastructure. We still have extremely overpriced concentrating solar installations that are not even vaguely competitive with sub 2c/kWh PV solar. However when you sign a 20 year contract for all power produced at price X you don’t get to drop it when something else becomes cheaper.
PretzelPirate 5y ago
Won’t the intermittent nature hurt crypto less than other industries? We currently have a crypto mining company setting up in Texas where energy is cheap with the understanding that they might have to shut down and start up at a moments notice due to demand from the rest of the grid. As long as these sources are available at all times in aggregate across the globe, crypto mining should be one of the most resilient industries.
- ema 5y ago
  I don't know how the situation is now but when I looked into it a few years ago the rapidly increasing hash rate of the mining hardware meant that running them only half the time didn't meant that it just takes twice the time to recoup your investment but that you might not make back at all.
cesarb 5y ago
> The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. It won't be free to transmit that energy [...] It won't be free to transmit that energy, but that transmission will also be zero-marginal cost. The cost to operate power lines and transformers doesn't depend on how much power it's going through them.
- beerandt 5y ago
  This is absolutely wrong. Transmission is not a near zero marginal cost, and the cost to operate absolutely does depend on the design capacity, including the operating voltages and number of sources and taps. Additionally, wider geographic distribution of power sources greatly increases the number of transmission lines and overall amount of right-of-way and materials needed per generated kwh. And because you can't assume a usage of near 100% of transmission capacity due to intermittent solar and wind, having to over-build transmission capacity reduces overall efficiency even greater, meaning even higher transmission costs for equivalent grid capacity.
fivea 5y ago
> That's a pretty shocking stat too! Is it, though? It sounds like plain old production costs. I mean, unless you build a coal plant right into a coal mine, a natural gas generator at each gas well, you don't store any surplus wind power... Energy is needed in parts of the energy production chain to keep it working.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  I agree! I 1:9 ratio of energy-in to energy-out is pretty good!
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    There was a whole subspecies of climate change denialists who claimed modern society would collapse if we dropped below 13:1 ratio on this. Fortunately for the future of civilization: a) EROI is a BS metric which is basically meaningless. b) modern renewables score much, much higher on this score than fossil basically ever did.
    - bjourne 5y ago
      Why is EROI BS?
      - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
        https://bountifulenergy.blogspot.com/2016/06/eroei-is-unimportant-and-is-being-used.html https://bountifulenergy.blogspot.com/2016/06/eroei-is-unimpo... > For example, suppose we had single 1KW solar panel, and the panel had a very low ERoEI of 4 (which is certainly an underestimate [1]). Even if you increased the ERoEI from the very low value of 4, all the way up to to infinity, so that no energy was required to replace that solar panel, it would make little difference--it would increase the amount of NET energy obtained by only 25%. On the other hand, if you could build 3 such solar panels, instead of 1, then you would triple the net energy obtained. In this case, building two more solar panels had 12x greater effect than increasing the ERoEI to infinity.
pmorici 5y ago
The intermittent nature is going to be handled by large battery storage farms. Battery storage is already displacing peaker plants. I’m confused by what you mean by zero marginal cost? Solar will be cheap but not zero marginal cost.
- epistasis 5y ago
  Right now in certain seasons there's huge amounts of curtailed renewable power. For example in 2020 California threw away 1.5TWh of solar power that was in excess of what the grid needed. As renewables go to higher and higher percentages of generation, this amount of curtailment will increase dramatically. Battery farms won't solve this entirely, because regardless of the mix of batteries, we are going to be building a system that serves a seasonal minimum of energy production. During the seasonal maximum of energy production, probably in California alone, we will have dozens of TWh per year that can not be consumed on the grid, and may not even be able to be transmitted on the grid. There's even a good amount of slack in most current solar farm designs. Due to the cost balance between inverters and panels, it's quite common to have more DC power from panels than the inverters can convert to AC for the grid. As batteries get cheaper, batteries are taking some of that DC power right now. But there's still the seasonal effects of generation.
  - beerandt 5y ago
    Negative spot prices are not good for a market, and lead to overall higher prices, not lower ones. It's a mechanism of the market over correcting. Investors don't want to spend capital for a product that they might have to regularly pay someone to "buy".
jollybean 5y ago
"is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. " We're nowhere near that. I don't believe that energy will be truly available in abundance until fusion or later. The 'new capabilities' we need are in storage, smarter regulation about transmission because the monopolies are ugly etc.. Any new technical game changers are in the works. Disruptive technologies don't come out of nowhere. There's someone in a lab, working away on something, already publishing papers for what will one day be fairly transformative.
- epistasis 5y ago
  I don't think that fusion will ever provide terrestrial energy abundance. The current fusion schemes under consideration all resort back to being a heat source to boil water and drive a turbine. Renewable energy + storage is within striking distance of undercutting the just the steam turbine side of fusion. Since the only benefit of fusion I've ever heard is a huge amount of energy from a small amount of space, which presumably allows lower costs for that heat energy, let's assume best case of zero cost for fusion. In that scenario, fusion-driven electricity is more expensive than renewables, so it will be renewables providing abundance, not fusion. If somebody figures out direct conversion of fusion to electricity, that would change my projections. Also it's possible that for non-terrestrial applications, fusion might be the best applications. But I think it's far too early in the development of space travel to predict what sort of energy mechanisms we may use.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    Renewables are nowhere near what you indicate, that's the problem. There is no future in which a Canadian throws up a panel and gets vast amounts of cheap energy. Fission would by far and away be the cheapest form of energy: it's literally hot rocks that boil water. What makes it expensive is dealing with the radiation ans safety. Fusion, without those artifacts might yield vast amounts of free energy. But we don't really know. Wind and Sun are never going to provide vast surpluses of electricity, they're just going to help us come down a bit off of fossil fuels.
Gatsky 5y ago
I feel your last statement is imprecise and overly optimistic. It seems unusually difficult to find proper calculations about what a fully implemented low emissions strategy would look like for a particular country. The only example I have found is this report for the UK [1]. This report makes a number of key points: 1. The UK has to bring in solar power from other countries to meet emissions targets or have more Nuclear capacity. 2. Reduction in energy consumption is just as important as energy sources. This involves use of more efficient technologies, primarly through electrification. These factors highlight that abundant renewable energy is actually not abundant enough in reality and is unlikely to be for a country like the UK, even with efficiency gains from massive electrification. Without nuclear investment, renewable energy needs to be imported which has infrastructure and geoplitical considerations, as well as being a single point of failure. [1] http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ (synopsis at http://www.withouthotair.com/synopsis10.pdf http://www.withouthotair.com/synopsis10.pdf)
- epistasis 5y ago
  While great for its time that book has been thrust hopelessly out of date by technology change. I think some of MacKay's former students are looking to update it, since he is so sadly no longer with us. In particular, wind and solar and storage are dropping exponentially in cost, and it is no longer realistic to think that we could ever build nuclear within 20 years. The nuclear industry is in shambles, a collection of fuckups that can't build, can't ship, can't plan, can't even be honest, and results in jailtime for executives, whether they are from the US (can't build), or South Korea (can build, but faked the safety inspections). The renewable industry is in contrast an incredible engine of technological advancement. Even enhanced geothermal systems, which have progressed perhaps the least, have advanced since MacKay's time. Ramez Naam has a great concise slide deck on this ongoing transformation: https://t.co/2WnIrtuLpN https://t.co/2WnIrtuLpN I would like to refute your assertion that my statement was imprecise. It was extremely precise. And it is not overly optimistic, either. The amount of energy over-production will be determined by how cheap storage in relation to the costs of generation. If storage gets really cheap, then we will have less over-production, because it will be economical to store the production. But if zero-marginal-cost renewable energy continues to get cheaper faster than storage gets cheaper, it will be less expensive to have massive overproduction than to have lots of storage. Napkin math leads to predicitons very similar to RethinkX's prediction, which "traditional" energy wonks discount, but traditional energy wonks also accept ridiculous projections like the IEA's uncritically (sees Naam's slides for just how bad those are) https://www.rethinkx.com/energy https://www.rethinkx.com/energy The UK and Japan are probably the two most difficult geographic locations to power with just solar and wind. But the dramatic drop in cost of off-shore wind is changing that dynamic. As are longer-term grid batteries, like those coming out of Form Energy, that are designed to be profitable from day one on the grid but with only occassional discharge.
bendbro 5y ago
From what I have heard from my energy business acquaintances, the only alternative source that has a hope of surpassing fossil is nuclear. Solar panels and wind have their own issues: rare earth minerals, difficult upkeep, and in the case of the non-mirror solar- toxic pollution as they breakdown. I hope some combination of nuclear, geothermal, hydro, mirror-solar, and wind can combine to satisfy energy needs, but I am not optimistic.

nine_k 5y ago

One of my bets is on synthesizing more hydrocarbons from water and CO₂, because planes and helicopters will still mostly run on it.

lapinot 5y ago
Surely that's much easier and less ressource intensive than using less planes and helicopters.
- thepangolino 5y ago
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  It doesn't matter how energy intensive it is. If people are willing to pay a premium (they are), there will be a market. Right now, the market is artificially big, because you don't have to pay for the negative externalities of carbon.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    > you don't have to pay for the negative externalities of carbon. We aren't yet seeing much indication that there will be a global tax/fee on the externalities of carbon. That means even if local policies are implemented for certain cases (eg. no gas cars in the city, no coal power in one state), there will always be somewhere on earth willing to burn dirty coal to make helicopter fuel for export.
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      So you tax the carbon at the importing country. This is a solved problem.
      - londons_explore 5y ago
        The WTO most favoured nation rules don't allow that. Which is why nobody does it.
okl 5y ago
You might find this resource interesting: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-michael-liebreich/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic... (Yeah, linkedin sucks)
empedocles 5y ago
There are some interesting start-ups betting on just that, that carbon capture to general hydrocarbons in a neutral way will outcompete electrifying certain sectors, e.g. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/01/scaling-carbon-capture/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/01/scaling-carbon...

newyankee 5y ago

I feel that demand shifting is something that is talked about least but will automatically happen at a larger scale than we envision when marginal cost of electricity is low. Hopefully that leads to cheaper versions of many expensive items with high embedded energy costs.

iqanq 5y ago

>The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. Well, by now, it seems like completely the opposite: thanks to nuclear plants shutting down and CO taxes, we are starved of energy.

_ph_ 5y ago
The abundance of cheap energy is based on renewable sources. They need to be built in the form of wind power and photovoltaics and others first. Blocking this of course raises the energy costs.
- iqanq 5y ago
  Nobody has blocked wind power or photovoltaics. If anything, they are pretty well subsidised as it is. They don't (currently?) provide enough power.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    I think the poster might have meant "blocking" as in planning/building? Not quite sure how to parse the comment otherwise.
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    In Germany, the previous government has done a lot to stall further builtup of renewable energies. The builtup was only a fraction in recent years compared to the top years. If the builtup had continued (or even accellerated), Germany would be an even larger exporter of electricity than it is.
    - fivea 5y ago
      > In Germany, the previous government has done a lot to stall further builtup of renewable energies. I find this assertion hard to believe. Merkel has been in charge of Germany's federal government for the past two decades, and throughout this period Germany's energy production from renewable sources has skyrocketed from virtually none to the leading energy source, with a share of over 60% of the nation's energy production. In fact, if anything, Germany's production from renewables has been accelerating. https://vizzlo.com/gallery/time-series-graph/example/power-generation-by-energy-source-in-germany https://vizzlo.com/gallery/time-series-graph/example/power-g... Could you provide any source that supports your assertion that the previous government has been stalling renewables?

barney54 5y ago

People used to say that nuclear would lead to power to cheap to meter. That never happened. I’m not sure it’s going to happen with renewables because of the large land use requirements. Also is there anywhere in the world where adding wind and solar has led to lower electricity rates for ratepayers? European electricity and nat gas prices should go up about 50% this year. Lastly, there was a story yesterday on HN about high fertilizer prices. The biggest reason for that is high natural gas prices, in part because of a lack of recent investment in new natural gas sources. There will be an energy transition, but so far the prices for energy and things derived from energy sources are really high.

_ph_ 5y ago
Providing a set amount of electricity 24/7 of course has a cost as well as setting up renewable sources. But especially solar cells have only fixed/maintenance costs, but no "fuel" cost per amount of electrictiy produced. This leads to a price for the electricity, which mostly has to be reconed up to the point where the grid demands are satisfied. Any excess electricity is literally free and can be repurposed, as long as that purpose can utilize intermittant supply. If you look at the German electricity prices at the power exchange, high renewable output correlates with very low prices. The amortized costs of renewables by now are distinctly lower than for fossil fuel and of course nuclear power. While large investments have to be taken, a further expansion of renewables should lower the electricity price in Germany (and the rest of Europe via trade) Current prices are very high, because of gas shortage. I don't have a clear idea how it all started, but it seems there was a too large dependency on the spot markets vs. long term contracts, and now the spot markets have skyrocketed. There are political aspecst too - Russia for sure could extend their deliveries, but barely deliver what was contractually agreed upon. It didn't help, that several French nuclear plants have been shut down without warning as safety problems were detected and have now to be fixed. Finally, the weather has been not so friendly for renewables in the last year, for the first time in many years, Germany had a small decrease in production year over year.
Retric 5y ago
Electrical grids change slowly, over half of all electrical equipment worldwide is 20+ years old and solar only very recently became cheap. Many places are seeing lower rates due to recent renewable energy investments, others are seeing higher costs due to heavily subsidized early adoption. Some like Germany have both effects at the same time. So remember, the economics going forward on a 20+ year time horizons look very different from existing infrastructure. We still have extremely overpriced concentrating solar installations that are not even vaguely competitive with sub 2c/kWh PV solar. However when you sign a 20 year contract for all power produced at price X you don’t get to drop it when something else becomes cheaper.

PretzelPirate 5y ago

Won’t the intermittent nature hurt crypto less than other industries? We currently have a crypto mining company setting up in Texas where energy is cheap with the understanding that they might have to shut down and start up at a moments notice due to demand from the rest of the grid. As long as these sources are available at all times in aggregate across the globe, crypto mining should be one of the most resilient industries.

ema 5y ago
I don't know how the situation is now but when I looked into it a few years ago the rapidly increasing hash rate of the mining hardware meant that running them only half the time didn't meant that it just takes twice the time to recoup your investment but that you might not make back at all.

cesarb 5y ago

> The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. It won't be free to transmit that energy [...] It won't be free to transmit that energy, but that transmission will also be zero-marginal cost. The cost to operate power lines and transformers doesn't depend on how much power it's going through them.

beerandt 5y ago
This is absolutely wrong. Transmission is not a near zero marginal cost, and the cost to operate absolutely does depend on the design capacity, including the operating voltages and number of sources and taps. Additionally, wider geographic distribution of power sources greatly increases the number of transmission lines and overall amount of right-of-way and materials needed per generated kwh. And because you can't assume a usage of near 100% of transmission capacity due to intermittent solar and wind, having to over-build transmission capacity reduces overall efficiency even greater, meaning even higher transmission costs for equivalent grid capacity.

fivea 5y ago

> That's a pretty shocking stat too! Is it, though? It sounds like plain old production costs. I mean, unless you build a coal plant right into a coal mine, a natural gas generator at each gas well, you don't store any surplus wind power... Energy is needed in parts of the energy production chain to keep it working.

geoduck14 5y ago
I agree! I 1:9 ratio of energy-in to energy-out is pretty good!
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  There was a whole subspecies of climate change denialists who claimed modern society would collapse if we dropped below 13:1 ratio on this. Fortunately for the future of civilization: a) EROI is a BS metric which is basically meaningless. b) modern renewables score much, much higher on this score than fossil basically ever did.
  - bjourne 5y ago
    Why is EROI BS?
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      https://bountifulenergy.blogspot.com/2016/06/eroei-is-unimportant-and-is-being-used.html https://bountifulenergy.blogspot.com/2016/06/eroei-is-unimpo... > For example, suppose we had single 1KW solar panel, and the panel had a very low ERoEI of 4 (which is certainly an underestimate [1]). Even if you increased the ERoEI from the very low value of 4, all the way up to to infinity, so that no energy was required to replace that solar panel, it would make little difference--it would increase the amount of NET energy obtained by only 25%. On the other hand, if you could build 3 such solar panels, instead of 1, then you would triple the net energy obtained. In this case, building two more solar panels had 12x greater effect than increasing the ERoEI to infinity.

pmorici 5y ago

The intermittent nature is going to be handled by large battery storage farms. Battery storage is already displacing peaker plants. I’m confused by what you mean by zero marginal cost? Solar will be cheap but not zero marginal cost.

epistasis 5y ago
Right now in certain seasons there's huge amounts of curtailed renewable power. For example in 2020 California threw away 1.5TWh of solar power that was in excess of what the grid needed. As renewables go to higher and higher percentages of generation, this amount of curtailment will increase dramatically. Battery farms won't solve this entirely, because regardless of the mix of batteries, we are going to be building a system that serves a seasonal minimum of energy production. During the seasonal maximum of energy production, probably in California alone, we will have dozens of TWh per year that can not be consumed on the grid, and may not even be able to be transmitted on the grid. There's even a good amount of slack in most current solar farm designs. Due to the cost balance between inverters and panels, it's quite common to have more DC power from panels than the inverters can convert to AC for the grid. As batteries get cheaper, batteries are taking some of that DC power right now. But there's still the seasonal effects of generation.
- beerandt 5y ago
  Negative spot prices are not good for a market, and lead to overall higher prices, not lower ones. It's a mechanism of the market over correcting. Investors don't want to spend capital for a product that they might have to regularly pay someone to "buy".

jollybean 5y ago

"is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. " We're nowhere near that. I don't believe that energy will be truly available in abundance until fusion or later. The 'new capabilities' we need are in storage, smarter regulation about transmission because the monopolies are ugly etc.. Any new technical game changers are in the works. Disruptive technologies don't come out of nowhere. There's someone in a lab, working away on something, already publishing papers for what will one day be fairly transformative.

epistasis 5y ago
I don't think that fusion will ever provide terrestrial energy abundance. The current fusion schemes under consideration all resort back to being a heat source to boil water and drive a turbine. Renewable energy + storage is within striking distance of undercutting the just the steam turbine side of fusion. Since the only benefit of fusion I've ever heard is a huge amount of energy from a small amount of space, which presumably allows lower costs for that heat energy, let's assume best case of zero cost for fusion. In that scenario, fusion-driven electricity is more expensive than renewables, so it will be renewables providing abundance, not fusion. If somebody figures out direct conversion of fusion to electricity, that would change my projections. Also it's possible that for non-terrestrial applications, fusion might be the best applications. But I think it's far too early in the development of space travel to predict what sort of energy mechanisms we may use.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Renewables are nowhere near what you indicate, that's the problem. There is no future in which a Canadian throws up a panel and gets vast amounts of cheap energy. Fission would by far and away be the cheapest form of energy: it's literally hot rocks that boil water. What makes it expensive is dealing with the radiation ans safety. Fusion, without those artifacts might yield vast amounts of free energy. But we don't really know. Wind and Sun are never going to provide vast surpluses of electricity, they're just going to help us come down a bit off of fossil fuels.

Gatsky 5y ago

I feel your last statement is imprecise and overly optimistic. It seems unusually difficult to find proper calculations about what a fully implemented low emissions strategy would look like for a particular country. The only example I have found is this report for the UK [1]. This report makes a number of key points: 1. The UK has to bring in solar power from other countries to meet emissions targets or have more Nuclear capacity. 2. Reduction in energy consumption is just as important as energy sources. This involves use of more efficient technologies, primarly through electrification. These factors highlight that abundant renewable energy is actually not abundant enough in reality and is unlikely to be for a country like the UK, even with efficiency gains from massive electrification. Without nuclear investment, renewable energy needs to be imported which has infrastructure and geoplitical considerations, as well as being a single point of failure. [1] http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ (synopsis at http://www.withouthotair.com/synopsis10.pdf http://www.withouthotair.com/synopsis10.pdf)

epistasis 5y ago
While great for its time that book has been thrust hopelessly out of date by technology change. I think some of MacKay's former students are looking to update it, since he is so sadly no longer with us. In particular, wind and solar and storage are dropping exponentially in cost, and it is no longer realistic to think that we could ever build nuclear within 20 years. The nuclear industry is in shambles, a collection of fuckups that can't build, can't ship, can't plan, can't even be honest, and results in jailtime for executives, whether they are from the US (can't build), or South Korea (can build, but faked the safety inspections). The renewable industry is in contrast an incredible engine of technological advancement. Even enhanced geothermal systems, which have progressed perhaps the least, have advanced since MacKay's time. Ramez Naam has a great concise slide deck on this ongoing transformation: https://t.co/2WnIrtuLpN https://t.co/2WnIrtuLpN I would like to refute your assertion that my statement was imprecise. It was extremely precise. And it is not overly optimistic, either. The amount of energy over-production will be determined by how cheap storage in relation to the costs of generation. If storage gets really cheap, then we will have less over-production, because it will be economical to store the production. But if zero-marginal-cost renewable energy continues to get cheaper faster than storage gets cheaper, it will be less expensive to have massive overproduction than to have lots of storage. Napkin math leads to predicitons very similar to RethinkX's prediction, which "traditional" energy wonks discount, but traditional energy wonks also accept ridiculous projections like the IEA's uncritically (sees Naam's slides for just how bad those are) https://www.rethinkx.com/energy https://www.rethinkx.com/energy The UK and Japan are probably the two most difficult geographic locations to power with just solar and wind. But the dramatic drop in cost of off-shore wind is changing that dynamic. As are longer-term grid batteries, like those coming out of Form Energy, that are designed to be profitable from day one on the grid but with only occassional discharge.

bendbro 5y ago

From what I have heard from my energy business acquaintances, the only alternative source that has a hope of surpassing fossil is nuclear. Solar panels and wind have their own issues: rare earth minerals, difficult upkeep, and in the case of the non-mirror solar- toxic pollution as they breakdown. I hope some combination of nuclear, geothermal, hydro, mirror-solar, and wind can combine to satisfy energy needs, but I am not optimistic.