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While great for its time that book has been thrust hopelessly out of date by technology change.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 i

While great for its time that book has been thrust hopelessly out of date by technology change.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.

Gatsky 5y ago
To be clear, I am not advocating for nuclear energy. I don't have a preference for one non-fossil fuel energy source over an other. It is good to see that off-shore wind is becoming much more viable. That slide deck repeats over and over that renewable prices have come down. That's great, but as I said in my original comment, it is hard to find actual calculations about this being implemented in a real country rather than breathless exhortations about the coming revolution. That MacKay report is valuable for the energy distribution numbers - for example, it talks about the massive amount of panels and windfarms that would be required to meet demand and that this is unlikely to be feasible (notwithstanding the fact that the UK isn't very sunny). Maybe this isn't so true any more, but you seem to be saying that the UK should install an even more than massive amount of renewable capacity, along with various storage solutions to store the excess (presumably to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar). Maybe I don't have that right, but it seems to me to be overly optimistic. The recent energy crisis in Europe would seem to suggest that is the case in the medium term.
- epistasis 5y ago
  The "energy" crisis in Europe is a fossil fuel crisis, not a general energy crisis, the same as so many energy crises in the past, but this time the fossil fuel companies excellent PR engines have been able to cast it as the fault of energy sources that are not dominant on the grid. The MacKay report was hopelessly and fruitlessly pessimistic on renewable energy, while embracing fraudulent technology like "clean coal" that has proven over and over to be a scam. It's not a fair shake at the world, and much less at the UK. I've been revisiting it since your comment, and though I thought it useful when I first read it, I no longer think it is helpful in understanding the scale of what we can do, and what needs to be done. The RethinkX report I linked is one sort of model about a future energy grid, using very rough details. Christopher Clack's modeling is far more fine-grained, and his latest models are using historical weather combined with modeling down to the distribution node to run cost optimization strategies. I don't think he's fully published his latest yet (which shows huge cost savings by doing massive storage and solar deployments to homes and businesses within the next five years). But other reports are here: https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/media/reports/ https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/media/reports/ IMHO, 90%+ renewables by 2040 is a foregone conclusion for 90%+ of the globe, unless governmental corruption requires that people are bilked by the coal and natural gas industries. The key design question for grids is going to be about the amount transmission & storage versus and amount of excess generating capacity from renewables nearby. Transmission is expensive, and not falling much in cost, if at all, so I have a feeling that future and new grids will have much less of it. Looking at those curves from Naam's slide deck should make you think about where we will be in another decade, or in two decades. Our current energy system has costs are split roughly equally fixed capex and fluctuating opex (based on fuel costs). The future grid will have nearly zero opex, and drastically lower capex. For the extreme outliers like the UK, they may lay down a few dozen GW of high-voltage DC to higher resource areas.

Gatsky 5y ago

To be clear, I am not advocating for nuclear energy. I don't have a preference for one non-fossil fuel energy source over an other. It is good to see that off-shore wind is becoming much more viable. That slide deck repeats over and over that renewable prices have come down. That's great, but as I said in my original comment, it is hard to find actual calculations about this being implemented in a real country rather than breathless exhortations about the coming revolution. That MacKay report is valuable for the energy distribution numbers - for example, it talks about the massive amount of panels and windfarms that would be required to meet demand and that this is unlikely to be feasible (notwithstanding the fact that the UK isn't very sunny). Maybe this isn't so true any more, but you seem to be saying that the UK should install an even more than massive amount of renewable capacity, along with various storage solutions to store the excess (presumably to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar). Maybe I don't have that right, but it seems to me to be overly optimistic. The recent energy crisis in Europe would seem to suggest that is the case in the medium term.

epistasis 5y ago
The "energy" crisis in Europe is a fossil fuel crisis, not a general energy crisis, the same as so many energy crises in the past, but this time the fossil fuel companies excellent PR engines have been able to cast it as the fault of energy sources that are not dominant on the grid. The MacKay report was hopelessly and fruitlessly pessimistic on renewable energy, while embracing fraudulent technology like "clean coal" that has proven over and over to be a scam. It's not a fair shake at the world, and much less at the UK. I've been revisiting it since your comment, and though I thought it useful when I first read it, I no longer think it is helpful in understanding the scale of what we can do, and what needs to be done. The RethinkX report I linked is one sort of model about a future energy grid, using very rough details. Christopher Clack's modeling is far more fine-grained, and his latest models are using historical weather combined with modeling down to the distribution node to run cost optimization strategies. I don't think he's fully published his latest yet (which shows huge cost savings by doing massive storage and solar deployments to homes and businesses within the next five years). But other reports are here: https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/media/reports/ https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/media/reports/ IMHO, 90%+ renewables by 2040 is a foregone conclusion for 90%+ of the globe, unless governmental corruption requires that people are bilked by the coal and natural gas industries. The key design question for grids is going to be about the amount transmission & storage versus and amount of excess generating capacity from renewables nearby. Transmission is expensive, and not falling much in cost, if at all, so I have a feeling that future and new grids will have much less of it. Looking at those curves from Naam's slide deck should make you think about where we will be in another decade, or in two decades. Our current energy system has costs are split roughly equally fixed capex and fluctuating opex (based on fuel costs). The future grid will have nearly zero opex, and drastically lower capex. For the extreme outliers like the UK, they may lay down a few dozen GW of high-voltage DC to higher resource areas.