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Honestly please stop citing more than a decade old data on renewable energy. It's a highly dynamic sector, and data from the stone age of renewables is complete

by hannob 5y ago

Honestly please stop citing more than a decade old data on renewable energy. It's a highly dynamic sector, and data from the stone age of renewables is completely irrelevant for the discussion.

DennisP 5y ago
The book is obsolete on financial costs, but still useful for the physical scale of infrastructure required by various technologies. A lot of people have fairly poor intuition about that.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  As I recall, it assumed lots of biomass. This is an obsolete assumption, and makes the land requirements obsolete also.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    Not a ton of biomass/wood, but some: http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_212.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_212.shtml The bigger foibles are clean coal and nuclear. Clean coal has been impossible to build and CCS of fossil fuels has been a boondoggle whereever it's been tried. Nuclear has also proven to be nearly impossible to build, from France to Finland to the US. The UK has only managed to get one site going, Hinkley, and other planned sites have not had suitable bids, like Wylfa. So more nuclear is not a feasible route. I think that enhanced geothermal systems (using heat from dry rock, kilometers down), could be a good resource that's just now getting developed in the UK, on the MW scale. Solar will never be great in the UK, but average capacity factor is at 10%, and currently provides 4% of total UK electricity, which is a remarkable feat given historical costs. I've said this in other comments, but there's a remarkable amount of hot air that went into the assumptions in this book, and its age is showing terribly. I bet that if MacKay were around still, he'd have massive updates, but the entire world was wrong when it was betting against renewables, and in favor of traditional fossil fuel companies' abilities to innovate.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      Nuclear is difficult due to political issues and the poor state of the US industry, but it's not a physical impossibility. China is building quite a lot of nuclear power, including a GenIV plant that just went on the grid.
      - epistasis 5y ago
        Political issues are not impeding France, Finland, the UK, or even the US's two sites. This is a misconception. The underlying Gen3 (or whatever the AP1000 and EPR would be called), is fundamentally incompatible with our construction and logistics capabilities. China probably can't help us fix our processes, and I'm not sure we would trust them. Same goes for Rosatom, who is also building. Even under the best of economic conditions, however, nuclear is not very favorable. Even China, with its unparalleled construction capability, is only planning a tiny tiny slice of its future energy capacity as nuclear, with much larger generation in wind and solar. And a lot of the planned nuclear will never be built, because renewables and storage are changing the economic case for nuclear.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      Every right-wing blowhard has heard about Solyndra, but they never mention that the amount wasted of coal carbon capture, which doesn't work or even exist at scale, has spent multiple Solyndras worth of federal money. https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/30/22860207/carbon-capture-coal-plants-wasted-federal-dollars-watchdog-gao https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/30/22860207/carbon-capture-...
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      > Not a ton of biomass/wood, but some: Biomass is so very inefficient at capturing solar energy (maybe 2%, if that) that even at that small fraction of energy produced it contributes very substantially to the land use of the energy system.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    Iirc it didn't really assume any arrangement, except maybe as an example. It calculated the physical requirements of different energy sources independently. The reader can start from there to get any particular combination.

by hannob 5y ago

Honestly please stop citing more than a decade old data on renewable energy. It's a highly dynamic sector, and data from the stone age of renewables is completely irrelevant for the discussion.

DennisP 5y ago

The book is obsolete on financial costs, but still useful for the physical scale of infrastructure required by various technologies. A lot of people have fairly poor intuition about that.

pfdietz 5y ago
As I recall, it assumed lots of biomass. This is an obsolete assumption, and makes the land requirements obsolete also.
- epistasis 5y ago
  Not a ton of biomass/wood, but some: http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_212.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_212.shtml The bigger foibles are clean coal and nuclear. Clean coal has been impossible to build and CCS of fossil fuels has been a boondoggle whereever it's been tried. Nuclear has also proven to be nearly impossible to build, from France to Finland to the US. The UK has only managed to get one site going, Hinkley, and other planned sites have not had suitable bids, like Wylfa. So more nuclear is not a feasible route. I think that enhanced geothermal systems (using heat from dry rock, kilometers down), could be a good resource that's just now getting developed in the UK, on the MW scale. Solar will never be great in the UK, but average capacity factor is at 10%, and currently provides 4% of total UK electricity, which is a remarkable feat given historical costs. I've said this in other comments, but there's a remarkable amount of hot air that went into the assumptions in this book, and its age is showing terribly. I bet that if MacKay were around still, he'd have massive updates, but the entire world was wrong when it was betting against renewables, and in favor of traditional fossil fuel companies' abilities to innovate.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    Nuclear is difficult due to political issues and the poor state of the US industry, but it's not a physical impossibility. China is building quite a lot of nuclear power, including a GenIV plant that just went on the grid.
    - epistasis 5y ago
      Political issues are not impeding France, Finland, the UK, or even the US's two sites. This is a misconception. The underlying Gen3 (or whatever the AP1000 and EPR would be called), is fundamentally incompatible with our construction and logistics capabilities. China probably can't help us fix our processes, and I'm not sure we would trust them. Same goes for Rosatom, who is also building. Even under the best of economic conditions, however, nuclear is not very favorable. Even China, with its unparalleled construction capability, is only planning a tiny tiny slice of its future energy capacity as nuclear, with much larger generation in wind and solar. And a lot of the planned nuclear will never be built, because renewables and storage are changing the economic case for nuclear.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Every right-wing blowhard has heard about Solyndra, but they never mention that the amount wasted of coal carbon capture, which doesn't work or even exist at scale, has spent multiple Solyndras worth of federal money. https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/30/22860207/carbon-capture-coal-plants-wasted-federal-dollars-watchdog-gao https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/30/22860207/carbon-capture-...
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    > Not a ton of biomass/wood, but some: Biomass is so very inefficient at capturing solar energy (maybe 2%, if that) that even at that small fraction of energy produced it contributes very substantially to the land use of the energy system.
- DennisP 5y ago
  Iirc it didn't really assume any arrangement, except maybe as an example. It calculated the physical requirements of different energy sources independently. The reader can start from there to get any particular combination.