10 ms·

Limits to green energy are becoming much clearer

21 points by cribbles 5y ago

newbie2020 5y ago
I remember in one of my engineering classes, we did a depressing calculation. Even if we covered the entire earth with maximally efficient Silicon-based solar panels (that would not be feasible to make in reality), we wouldn’t even generate a tenth of the energy the world needs… and our energy demands only keep getting higher
- timpattinson 5y ago
  Please provide numbers for this if you're going to make such an extroadinary claim.
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  I think you got that calculation wrong. Most estimates put it at about the size of the South Africa could power the world
- salmonlogs 5y ago
  Using the efficiency of solar panels available today and the current energy needs of the world you could produce enough power with an area the size of Arizona. Assuming you ignore losses from distribution, storage etc. If you did the calculations say 30 years ago when solar was orders of magnitude less efficient you might have gotten to those numbers, but today we are in a very different situation. Nuclear base load with solar and wind will absolutely provide the vast majority of clean energy for future generations.
- morsch 5y ago
  https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+556.63+exajoules%2F%28175+kWh%2Fsquare+meter%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+556.63+exajoules%2F%28... 1.6x total area of France Sources (these aren't great, feel free to substitute better numbers from better sources): 175 kWh/m2 per year: https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_8/advanced/a8_3_1.html https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_8/advanced/a8... About 550 Ej world primary energy usage: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265598/consumption-of-primary-energy-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/265598/consumption-of-pr... Obviously this is ignoring energy storage etc etc
- hlieberman 5y ago
  EIA says world primary energy usage was 6.346×10^20 J in 2020 for the year (https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/data/pdf/ref/A01_r.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/data/pdf/ref/A01_r.pdf) The average peak solar irradiance is 1,000 watts/meter^2. Assuming we get that only for 4 hours a day and no sunlight any other time, that's 1.44×10^7 J/m^2/day, or 5.26×10^9 J/m^2/year. Dividing those numbers together, we get 1.21×10^11 square meters needed. Texas is 6.957×10^11 square meters. You might want to take that class again.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  > and our energy demands only keep getting higher That’s why a lot of environmentalist’s focus is on reducing energy consumption.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Which is a total nonstarter and dead on arrival. Focus needs to be elsewhere (like nuclear)
    - john_the_writer 5y ago
      Could be both.. My power usage today is way less than half what it was 20 years ago. With remote working, my travel consumption is way way down. Food delivery has all but stopped my need to ever get in my car. I mean it's not the end solution, but it's not a non-starter Nuclear though. 100%
      - samus 5y ago
        Works for those that can work from home. Lots of people can't though.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        > Food delivery has all but stopped my need to ever get in my car. Is it better though? Depends on your car, but someone on a scooter loitering, then going to a restaurant/store for you, and then to your home, and then the same thing again, is drastically less efficient than you doing a round-trip.
        john_the_writer 5y ago
        Ah.. I mean groceries. I never "order in".. Can't be bothered.
Pelam 5y ago
As with any established industry there is going to be massive inertia in everything between the contractor supply chains and the executive gray matter. This is understandble as it makes the efficient and comfortable value extraction possible. Maybe the current events are the black swan that forces deep changes, innovation and rethinking in the energy sector that may save the humanity from the Mad Max future. It will be very painful, but there could be a silver lining. (I admit I’m desperately looking for one.)
joe__f 5y ago
I was expecting the post to mention how nuclear energy fits into this modelling somewhere, and I was surprised when it didn't. It looked to me that it could be at least a partial solution to most of the points raised.
- timbit42 5y ago
  Also, large-scale geo-thermal. We don't need volcanos like Costa Rica to do it. We will have to dig deeper so it will cost more but it's still a great solution. It might also work as a battery to store excess solar and wind energy for use at night and when the wind isn't blowing.
salmonlogs 5y ago
I can't help but feel the views of the author are carefully crafted to support the agenda of lobbyists and pro fossil fuel groups. The logic is really quite weak and doesn't support the current situation. The author also posted articles that are anti-vax. A comment left on this blog post: Interesting that we think we can substitute millions of years of natures energy (fossil fuels) with a few techno gimmicks; solar wind, nuclear. Similarly we think we can substitute millions of years of immune system natural evolution with a techno gimmick; mRNA injections. Both are woke ideas from the asleep who rule over us. The author responded Good way of putting the problem.
- pxi 5y ago
  Yeah these people are no better than Guy McPherson. Let's all give up and become mars. I say we fight like Zelenskyy and try to solve the climate crisis.
- cribbles 5y ago
  As the original submitter, I will one-up your ad hominem by pointing out that the blogger was an enthusiastic booster of peak oil theory in the mid-00s (as one might infer from the domain name). I don’t endorse her analysis, but I nevertheless found the data compelling and was interested to hear others’ perspectives.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    Isn't that an obvious red flag? Given the hundreds of years of oil reserves available in the oil sands, peak oil theory is complete bunk now, and only slightly less obviously so 20 years ago.
    - invalidname 5y ago
      The theory didn't say we'd run out of oil. It said we'd run out of "cheap" oil that's easy to get to. Sands are harder to extract oil from at an affordable cost. They only became financially viable as the cost of oil rose. Technology improved in drilling and exploration so the theory is less relevant today. Still the current cost of oil (due to politics mostly) is pretty much that.
sharken 5y ago
It took around 22 years for Finland to get their latest nuclear plant operational, that's a long time to wait. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653220 Yes, the second plant should be built faster but right now nuclear energy is a very long game.
- sofixa 5y ago
  It was of an entirely new design, so the long wait time was to be expected. And it's projected life is in the multiples that of any solar or wind installation, so there's that.
abetusk 5y ago
This, unfortunately, reads like FUD to me. There are limits to solar and wind, both in terms of their carbon footprint, their operating window and their storage, but all these costs are quickly dropping and availability is quickly ramping up. Solar and battery technology are experiencing a similar "Moore's Law" of their own (Swanson's law [0] for solar and Wright's law for the more general scenario [1]). Solar is at $.75 at the consumer level and sub $0.30 at the commercial level, with costs only going down (exponentially so). Deep cycle lead acid batteries are available, right now, at the consumer level, for $0.15 / Wh with LiFePo4 sub $0.10 / Wh in some cases. I would expect non lead acid batteries to also undergo exponential decay in price. I unfortunately don't have the talk I saw it in, but there's a cute anecdote they give. They show a picture of a busy street in the middle of New York city, with the street filled with horses, carriages and only one or two cars. They show the same spot 10 years later filled with cars and only one or two horses and carriages. Where I live (upstate New York state in the USA), I see solar farms popping up. My expectation is that solar will become widely deployed and adopted in the next 10-15 years. The author looks to dismiss ideas of exponential growth and adoption. I also am finding more and more FUD against solar and other "green" technology, falsely claiming the coal and the carbon footprint in it's manufacture is commensurate or outweighs the fossil fuel equivalent (it doesn't). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
- melomal 5y ago
  By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
  - Gare 5y ago
    Better to bury the waste than to pump it as CO2 into the air, no?
- 5y ago
morsch 5y ago
Eh, we haven't been trying very hard. Germany has essentially stopped building new wind turbines (1, second graph). Even now, when its become blindingly obvious that massive reliance on fossil fuels from foreign dictatorships is an immediate national security concern in addition to a intergenerational moral hazard, there has not been a decisive push for more buildout. It takes half a decade to build a wind park, if you can find a place where insane NIMBY rules let you build one. Generation has still gone up (the first graph), because existing turbines are replaced by more powerful ones. We could have been in an entirely different place if the government hadn't stopped pushing for it 15 years ago. (1) https://www.wind-energie.de/themen/zahlen-und-fakten/deutschland/ https://www.wind-energie.de/themen/zahlen-und-fakten/deutsch...
atoav 5y ago
It is a bit more complex as well (the load on a grid has a real and an imaginary component). Many problems stem from the fact that most solar inverters can source Watts (real) but not VAs (imaginary). That means where traditional generators are able to use their inertia to deal with sudden bursts of capacitive or inductive loads in the net, inverters need to become smarter (or better coordinated) to stabilize the grid in all situations. Four quadrant inverters exist (inverters that can deal with all four quadrants of the real/imaginary coordinate system), but they are not especially wide deployed. Inverters with electronic inertia are in developement. This aside of course one issue is storage, but it is not unsolveable at all.

21 points by cribbles 5y ago

newbie2020 5y ago

I remember in one of my engineering classes, we did a depressing calculation. Even if we covered the entire earth with maximally efficient Silicon-based solar panels (that would not be feasible to make in reality), we wouldn’t even generate a tenth of the energy the world needs… and our energy demands only keep getting higher

timpattinson 5y ago
Please provide numbers for this if you're going to make such an extroadinary claim.
simonbarker87 5y ago
I think you got that calculation wrong. Most estimates put it at about the size of the South Africa could power the world
salmonlogs 5y ago
Using the efficiency of solar panels available today and the current energy needs of the world you could produce enough power with an area the size of Arizona. Assuming you ignore losses from distribution, storage etc. If you did the calculations say 30 years ago when solar was orders of magnitude less efficient you might have gotten to those numbers, but today we are in a very different situation. Nuclear base load with solar and wind will absolutely provide the vast majority of clean energy for future generations.
morsch 5y ago
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+556.63+exajoules%2F%28175+kWh%2Fsquare+meter%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+556.63+exajoules%2F%28... 1.6x total area of France Sources (these aren't great, feel free to substitute better numbers from better sources): 175 kWh/m2 per year: https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_8/advanced/a8_3_1.html https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_8/advanced/a8... About 550 Ej world primary energy usage: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265598/consumption-of-primary-energy-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/265598/consumption-of-pr... Obviously this is ignoring energy storage etc etc
hlieberman 5y ago
EIA says world primary energy usage was 6.346×10^20 J in 2020 for the year (https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/data/pdf/ref/A01_r.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/data/pdf/ref/A01_r.pdf) The average peak solar irradiance is 1,000 watts/meter^2. Assuming we get that only for 4 hours a day and no sunlight any other time, that's 1.44×10^7 J/m^2/day, or 5.26×10^9 J/m^2/year. Dividing those numbers together, we get 1.21×10^11 square meters needed. Texas is 6.957×10^11 square meters. You might want to take that class again.
nicoburns 5y ago
> and our energy demands only keep getting higher That’s why a lot of environmentalist’s focus is on reducing energy consumption.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Which is a total nonstarter and dead on arrival. Focus needs to be elsewhere (like nuclear)
  - john_the_writer 5y ago
    Could be both.. My power usage today is way less than half what it was 20 years ago. With remote working, my travel consumption is way way down. Food delivery has all but stopped my need to ever get in my car. I mean it's not the end solution, but it's not a non-starter Nuclear though. 100%
    - samus 5y ago
      Works for those that can work from home. Lots of people can't though.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      > Food delivery has all but stopped my need to ever get in my car. Is it better though? Depends on your car, but someone on a scooter loitering, then going to a restaurant/store for you, and then to your home, and then the same thing again, is drastically less efficient than you doing a round-trip.
      - john_the_writer 5y ago
        Ah.. I mean groceries. I never "order in".. Can't be bothered.

Pelam 5y ago

As with any established industry there is going to be massive inertia in everything between the contractor supply chains and the executive gray matter. This is understandble as it makes the efficient and comfortable value extraction possible. Maybe the current events are the black swan that forces deep changes, innovation and rethinking in the energy sector that may save the humanity from the Mad Max future. It will be very painful, but there could be a silver lining. (I admit I’m desperately looking for one.)

joe__f 5y ago

I was expecting the post to mention how nuclear energy fits into this modelling somewhere, and I was surprised when it didn't. It looked to me that it could be at least a partial solution to most of the points raised.

timbit42 5y ago
Also, large-scale geo-thermal. We don't need volcanos like Costa Rica to do it. We will have to dig deeper so it will cost more but it's still a great solution. It might also work as a battery to store excess solar and wind energy for use at night and when the wind isn't blowing.

salmonlogs 5y ago

I can't help but feel the views of the author are carefully crafted to support the agenda of lobbyists and pro fossil fuel groups. The logic is really quite weak and doesn't support the current situation. The author also posted articles that are anti-vax. A comment left on this blog post: Interesting that we think we can substitute millions of years of natures energy (fossil fuels) with a few techno gimmicks; solar wind, nuclear. Similarly we think we can substitute millions of years of immune system natural evolution with a techno gimmick; mRNA injections. Both are woke ideas from the asleep who rule over us. The author responded Good way of putting the problem.

pxi 5y ago
Yeah these people are no better than Guy McPherson. Let's all give up and become mars. I say we fight like Zelenskyy and try to solve the climate crisis.
cribbles 5y ago
As the original submitter, I will one-up your ad hominem by pointing out that the blogger was an enthusiastic booster of peak oil theory in the mid-00s (as one might infer from the domain name). I don’t endorse her analysis, but I nevertheless found the data compelling and was interested to hear others’ perspectives.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Isn't that an obvious red flag? Given the hundreds of years of oil reserves available in the oil sands, peak oil theory is complete bunk now, and only slightly less obviously so 20 years ago.
  - invalidname 5y ago
    The theory didn't say we'd run out of oil. It said we'd run out of "cheap" oil that's easy to get to. Sands are harder to extract oil from at an affordable cost. They only became financially viable as the cost of oil rose. Technology improved in drilling and exploration so the theory is less relevant today. Still the current cost of oil (due to politics mostly) is pretty much that.

sharken 5y ago

It took around 22 years for Finland to get their latest nuclear plant operational, that's a long time to wait. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653220 Yes, the second plant should be built faster but right now nuclear energy is a very long game.

sofixa 5y ago
It was of an entirely new design, so the long wait time was to be expected. And it's projected life is in the multiples that of any solar or wind installation, so there's that.

abetusk 5y ago

This, unfortunately, reads like FUD to me. There are limits to solar and wind, both in terms of their carbon footprint, their operating window and their storage, but all these costs are quickly dropping and availability is quickly ramping up. Solar and battery technology are experiencing a similar "Moore's Law" of their own (Swanson's law [0] for solar and Wright's law for the more general scenario [1]). Solar is at $.75 at the consumer level and sub $0.30 at the commercial level, with costs only going down (exponentially so). Deep cycle lead acid batteries are available, right now, at the consumer level, for $0.15 / Wh with LiFePo4 sub $0.10 / Wh in some cases. I would expect non lead acid batteries to also undergo exponential decay in price. I unfortunately don't have the talk I saw it in, but there's a cute anecdote they give. They show a picture of a busy street in the middle of New York city, with the street filled with horses, carriages and only one or two cars. They show the same spot 10 years later filled with cars and only one or two horses and carriages. Where I live (upstate New York state in the USA), I see solar farms popping up. My expectation is that solar will become widely deployed and adopted in the next 10-15 years. The author looks to dismiss ideas of exponential growth and adoption. I also am finding more and more FUD against solar and other "green" technology, falsely claiming the coal and the carbon footprint in it's manufacture is commensurate or outweighs the fossil fuel equivalent (it doesn't). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

melomal 5y ago
By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
- Gare 5y ago
  Better to bury the waste than to pump it as CO2 into the air, no?
5y ago

morsch 5y ago

Eh, we haven't been trying very hard. Germany has essentially stopped building new wind turbines (1, second graph). Even now, when its become blindingly obvious that massive reliance on fossil fuels from foreign dictatorships is an immediate national security concern in addition to a intergenerational moral hazard, there has not been a decisive push for more buildout. It takes half a decade to build a wind park, if you can find a place where insane NIMBY rules let you build one. Generation has still gone up (the first graph), because existing turbines are replaced by more powerful ones. We could have been in an entirely different place if the government hadn't stopped pushing for it 15 years ago. (1) https://www.wind-energie.de/themen/zahlen-und-fakten/deutschland/ https://www.wind-energie.de/themen/zahlen-und-fakten/deutsch...

atoav 5y ago

It is a bit more complex as well (the load on a grid has a real and an imaginary component). Many problems stem from the fact that most solar inverters can source Watts (real) but not VAs (imaginary). That means where traditional generators are able to use their inertia to deal with sudden bursts of capacitive or inductive loads in the net, inverters need to become smarter (or better coordinated) to stabilize the grid in all situations. Four quadrant inverters exist (inverters that can deal with all four quadrants of the real/imaginary coordinate system), but they are not especially wide deployed. Inverters with electronic inertia are in developement. This aside of course one issue is storage, but it is not unsolveable at all.