11 ms·

US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

177 points by epistasis 4y ago

TurkishPoptart 4y ago
OK, fine, but to what extent will it impoverish working people or reduce their wealth? It's more important to consider human happiness and wealth, rather than sacrificing the poor on the altar of carbon emissions.
- orthecreedence 4y ago
  True, we should serverely reduce military spending to divert into a comprehensive fission program while reintroducing 1950s-level tax brackets and eliminating capital gains exemptions. We could solve the upcoming energy crising while saving money for the impoverished.
- acdha 4y ago
  Rich people generate far more carbon emissions than the poor, and the heaviest impacts of climate change will be borne by the poor, who have the least reserves to cushion the blow.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > It's more important to consider human happiness Do you think that the people that are starving to death in Madagascar from climate-change induced drought are happy? When the problem comes further north, do you think we will be happy?
  - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
    People driving cars in the Americas =/= a seasonal drought in Africa.
- fulafel 4y ago
  Poor people are disproportionately affected by the climate catastrophe and benefit most from mitigating it.
mionhe 4y ago
At the beginning of the article is says: "But it does not explain how adequate land to reach a 90% clean electricity penetration can be acquired or how reliability will be protected beyond that 90% penetration, stakeholders acknowledged." I'm confused that they can put a time frame on a problem they have no idea how to solve yet.
- epistasis 4y ago
  These are roadmaps about how to get somewhere, but the map is not the terrain, and there are a few parts that are known to only be 90% mapped. That doesn't say that the 10% unmapped contains an impassable cliff or easily crossable plains, but we will likely find out.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > confused that they can put a time frame on a problem they have no idea how to solve yet The purpose of the study [1] was to explore what a realistic solution would look like. Then you can work backwards and identify roadblocks. For example, if land acquisition is really the sole bottleneck, there are a myriad of legislative solutions that could address it. [1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/nrel-study-identifies-opportunities-and-challenges-achieving-us-transformational-goal https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/nrel-study-identifies-o...
  - zamalek 4y ago
    Or just put stuff on water.
- bjt2n3904 4y ago
  You'd think what they want is a solution to switch over to renewable energy sources that can meet or exceed current demands at comparative costs. No, they just want to get rid of fossil fuels. It doesn't matter if the new system can meet the demand at all, or how much it will cost. Look at California. Banning lawn mowers and ICE cars. Their power grid can't even support EV charging, and they're sending out notices asking people to charge their cars at off hours. It doesn't have to work. It just has to disrupt oil at any cost, even if the cost is human suffering.
rllearneratwork 4y ago
"Nuclear is likely to be 9% to 12% of generation in 2035" - this is absurd. We should have much more aggressive targets for nuclear. Because it is the cleanest, safest and most reliable source of 0-emission power. France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear now.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  From reactors built 40 years ago. https://www.reuters.com/article/france-nuclear-edf-idINKBN2AP102 https://www.reuters.com/article/france-nuclear-edf-idINKBN2A...
  - sgu999 4y ago
    It apparently took about a decade or so to go from planning to running most of these power plants...
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      What does the cost of nuclear vs renewables and storage look like in a decade? The cost curve is what will define success. Nuclear never gets cheaper.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  The US can't build a nuclear plant in 13 years.
  - newsclues 4y ago
    The US can build a plant in 13 years. It's a matter of dedication and willingness. And pissing off a minority of vocal opponents. It takes longer because of the crazy regulations driven in part by environmentalists who complained about nuclear for decades while fossil fuels were the only other option. But the USA has the resources, skills, technology and money to do so in a short period of time.
    - 4y ago
gregwebs 4y ago
We can have 100% clean energy by 2035 if we assume the US is China and the state can build whatever it wants despite any local objections. And assume we increase battery supply by 40x (even though lithium price is going up dramatically now). And assume that clean power is actually 100% clean. It's good to have a vision for clean energy though that is shared with the country that we start working towards. I can see the benefit of not letting reality weight down an initial brainstorm of that. Hopefully we can come up with a realistic vision as a next step.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Lithium price declined recently due to over supply. The US can do this without objection by declaring a state of emergency. We’ve done it before and we can do it again
  - milsorgen 4y ago
    That's a huge problem, you think that's a viable way to get things done and I don't fault you as I am sure you truly believe it's an emergency. However ,I don't see things as being that dire and instead I see your state of emergency being an act of authoritarianism.
- davidw 4y ago
  > local objections That's a big component of all this. NIMBYism in this country is becoming a big problem in a lot of ways. Want to build a dense, mixed use development that is less carbon-intensive than single family suburbia? NIMBYs oppose it. Build a transmission line from your green energy source? NIMBYs, again! Build a solar farm? NIMBYs will try and block it.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    If by NIMBYs you mean paid actors attending council meetings and incredibly loud reactionaries from other places, then yeah. There aren't that many actual NIMBYs for this shit.
asien 4y ago
Appreciate the graph in the article , this time the numbers actually are calculated by engineers from DoE , not by Journalists... Even if the plan is there , without an “economy of war” and the implication of basically every single American it’s nearly impossible to reach those types of deployment. Money is not the answer to everything , as pointed we are also going to reach “civilization” types of limits with land and ressource exhaust... My humble opinion is we should simply consume far less energy and accept a much simpler lifestyle, that would be much easier ...
- megaman821 4y ago
  Did we read the same article? The land usage for wind and solar is about that of golf courses and coal. Getting permits to use the land is the main obstacle. As for resource constraints, the limiting factor is the speed on which a lithium mines can come online. The bulk of the that being environment reviews and lawsuits. Americans are just going to have to come to terms with building or mining stuff causes localized environmental damage and other externalities for the communities that live close by. We should weight the pros and cons and move swiftly with whatever the decision is.
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    Lithium isn't even in the top twenty of mined metal. It would also be relatively cheap to recycle at scale. Problems are political, i.e monied interests not environmental, technological, or even financial. Should also be optimistic about non lithium solid state batteries! >https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/all-tonnes-metals-ores-mined-in-one-year/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/all-tonnes-metals-ore...
  - kjkjadksj 4y ago
    Honestly as a golfer, a windmill in the middle of the fairway would make for an interesting hole
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Mini-golf, but life size?
RadixDLT 4y ago
does that mean nuclear power?
- Krasnol 4y ago
  No it doesn't since nuclear waste is not clean and as the article says: renewables are cheaper already.
  - orthecreedence 4y ago
    Oh, nice! Didn't know battery tech and PV panel production were clean now. That's a great leap.
    - Krasnol 4y ago
      Much cleaner than nuclear waste. Predictable derailment though.
- acdha 4y ago
  Maybe, but that’s the slow option so we should be doing renewables now, which can come online in just months, while the much slower process of adding nuclear capacity unfolds. If we shift the large amount of power generation which renewables can provide over that buys us enough time to build nuclear.
verdverm 4y ago
What is the plan for revamping all the residential units that have non-electrical heating in the parts of the country which have winter?
- epistasis 4y ago
  Heat pumps! They work great on cold weather now, as long as you can find a competent HVAC contractor. HVAC folks tend to not like new tech, though, so it's hard to find one.
  - verdverm 4y ago
    I think the cost is more the issue than the tech. There are plenty of electric options as well. Per room conditioning can help
- acdha 4y ago
  We switched to a heat pump a couple years ago. It soaks up all but the coldest (5-15°) days in winter (when the resistive heater kicks in as well) and uses only a little more energy than our old gas system’s fans did. It’s way more efficient in the summer than our old AC was so our annual usage actually went down and we have less maintenance. Over the course of the year, our entire HVAC load is roughly what our modest solar setup produces. Obviously there are distribution issues, which is why we buy wind-generated electricity, but this is something we can do now and I’m quite confident the thousands of engineers working in the space will improve as it becomes our generation’s Apollo project.
  - verdverm 4y ago
    How much did that cost you?
    - acdha 4y ago
      It was about $20k as part of a larger project replacing things like our water heater & closing up the old gas line. Solar panels were like $15k and should hit break even on SREC sales in another 4 years.
propogandist 4y ago
This is the same DOE that is tapping strategic petroleum reserves to manipulate gas prices, right? This is PR to support the “inflation reduction act”.
- kibwen 4y ago
  Relevant username?
- epakai 4y ago
  The alternative is being at the behest of foreign oil price manipulation. Moving away from oil seems like a pretty good way to prevent dipping into strategic reserves to me.
dheera 4y ago
Finds? Or predicts?
OrvalWintermute 4y ago
I didn't see enough data to understand how 100% clean power will be achieved that can satisfy baseload energy demand. The simple fix of course, would be to add a substantial amount of Nuclear to handle the intermittency problem of the renewables. Also, given how much untapped methane we have on ocean floors, and how we appear to be accumulating it still, it might be smart to think about it as a somewhat renewable resource also.
trollski 4y ago
wankle 4y ago
Storage is the bottleneck that makes 100% clean energy even before 2099 unlikely. I recommend the whole video but this part is relevant to my comment: https://youtu.be/ptI6BRVC1Kw?t=108 https://youtu.be/ptI6BRVC1Kw?t=108
- ajross 4y ago
  Link is to a a Stossel TV segment which right out of the gate misrepresents the problem. They cite some staggering numbers about how many batteries you'd need to match "the energy Europe has in storage right now" failing to note that those are petroleum reserves stored for geopolitical insurance, not to buffer instantaneous shortfalls in electricity generation. Those reserves are designed to be many months of use; no one thinks you need that for grid buffering, where a few days is plenty. And in any case that oil is going to be used for vehicle fuel, where the linked article is talking about electrical grid generation. No one thinks we're going to be off of fossil fueled vehicles in a decade, though it's definitely possible to reduce the net usage by a ton. Sorry, that's just a terribly spun video segment. What the linked article claims is absolutely doable.
- pythonaut_16 4y ago
  Imagine saying this 80 years ago about any number of technologies that are cheap and commonplace today.
anonymousiam 4y ago
Okay, so I'll assume that 2035 is their most optimistic estimate. Assuming it's true, why have we dramatically reduced our energy supply now in 2022? Has the role of our governments changed into one that forces policy upon us, even when the policy is ill planned? How does this make us stronger, better, or safer? I'm not trying to shoot it down, but shouldn't such a drastic national/worldwide government policy get some review and maybe even a vote from the people (under the democratic governments)?
Proven 4y ago
xutopia 4y ago
Technically feasible... unfortunately you had too many politicians with ties to fossil fuel industry telling the locals that windmills and solar cause cancer or some other inane thing.
citizenpaul 4y ago
This post really is a scathing look into a deep hostility I would not expect from HN readers. The number of people on here that seem OK with institutiying some form of boot in face opression to all those OTHER people causing the problem. Very few conversations about personal choices that could make a difference.

177 points by epistasis 4y ago

OK, fine, but to what extent will it impoverish working people or reduce their wealth? It's more important to consider human happiness and wealth, rather than sacrificing the poor on the altar of carbon emissions.

orthecreedence 4y ago
True, we should serverely reduce military spending to divert into a comprehensive fission program while reintroducing 1950s-level tax brackets and eliminating capital gains exemptions. We could solve the upcoming energy crising while saving money for the impoverished.
acdha 4y ago
Rich people generate far more carbon emissions than the poor, and the heaviest impacts of climate change will be borne by the poor, who have the least reserves to cushion the blow.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> It's more important to consider human happiness Do you think that the people that are starving to death in Madagascar from climate-change induced drought are happy? When the problem comes further north, do you think we will be happy?
- TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  People driving cars in the Americas =/= a seasonal drought in Africa.
fulafel 4y ago
Poor people are disproportionately affected by the climate catastrophe and benefit most from mitigating it.

mionhe 4y ago

At the beginning of the article is says: "But it does not explain how adequate land to reach a 90% clean electricity penetration can be acquired or how reliability will be protected beyond that 90% penetration, stakeholders acknowledged." I'm confused that they can put a time frame on a problem they have no idea how to solve yet.

epistasis 4y ago
These are roadmaps about how to get somewhere, but the map is not the terrain, and there are a few parts that are known to only be 90% mapped. That doesn't say that the 10% unmapped contains an impassable cliff or easily crossable plains, but we will likely find out.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> confused that they can put a time frame on a problem they have no idea how to solve yet The purpose of the study [1] was to explore what a realistic solution would look like. Then you can work backwards and identify roadblocks. For example, if land acquisition is really the sole bottleneck, there are a myriad of legislative solutions that could address it. [1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/nrel-study-identifies-opportunities-and-challenges-achieving-us-transformational-goal https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/nrel-study-identifies-o...
- zamalek 4y ago
  Or just put stuff on water.
bjt2n3904 4y ago
You'd think what they want is a solution to switch over to renewable energy sources that can meet or exceed current demands at comparative costs. No, they just want to get rid of fossil fuels. It doesn't matter if the new system can meet the demand at all, or how much it will cost. Look at California. Banning lawn mowers and ICE cars. Their power grid can't even support EV charging, and they're sending out notices asking people to charge their cars at off hours. It doesn't have to work. It just has to disrupt oil at any cost, even if the cost is human suffering.

rllearneratwork 4y ago

"Nuclear is likely to be 9% to 12% of generation in 2035" - this is absurd. We should have much more aggressive targets for nuclear. Because it is the cleanest, safest and most reliable source of 0-emission power. France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear now.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
From reactors built 40 years ago. https://www.reuters.com/article/france-nuclear-edf-idINKBN2AP102 https://www.reuters.com/article/france-nuclear-edf-idINKBN2A...
- sgu999 4y ago
  It apparently took about a decade or so to go from planning to running most of these power plants...
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    What does the cost of nuclear vs renewables and storage look like in a decade? The cost curve is what will define success. Nuclear never gets cheaper.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
The US can't build a nuclear plant in 13 years.
- newsclues 4y ago
  The US can build a plant in 13 years. It's a matter of dedication and willingness. And pissing off a minority of vocal opponents. It takes longer because of the crazy regulations driven in part by environmentalists who complained about nuclear for decades while fossil fuels were the only other option. But the USA has the resources, skills, technology and money to do so in a short period of time.
  - 4y ago

gregwebs 4y ago

We can have 100% clean energy by 2035 if we assume the US is China and the state can build whatever it wants despite any local objections. And assume we increase battery supply by 40x (even though lithium price is going up dramatically now). And assume that clean power is actually 100% clean. It's good to have a vision for clean energy though that is shared with the country that we start working towards. I can see the benefit of not letting reality weight down an initial brainstorm of that. Hopefully we can come up with a realistic vision as a next step.

bushbaba 4y ago
Lithium price declined recently due to over supply. The US can do this without objection by declaring a state of emergency. We’ve done it before and we can do it again
- milsorgen 4y ago
  That's a huge problem, you think that's a viable way to get things done and I don't fault you as I am sure you truly believe it's an emergency. However ,I don't see things as being that dire and instead I see your state of emergency being an act of authoritarianism.
davidw 4y ago
> local objections That's a big component of all this. NIMBYism in this country is becoming a big problem in a lot of ways. Want to build a dense, mixed use development that is less carbon-intensive than single family suburbia? NIMBYs oppose it. Build a transmission line from your green energy source? NIMBYs, again! Build a solar farm? NIMBYs will try and block it.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  If by NIMBYs you mean paid actors attending council meetings and incredibly loud reactionaries from other places, then yeah. There aren't that many actual NIMBYs for this shit.

asien 4y ago

Appreciate the graph in the article , this time the numbers actually are calculated by engineers from DoE , not by Journalists... Even if the plan is there , without an “economy of war” and the implication of basically every single American it’s nearly impossible to reach those types of deployment. Money is not the answer to everything , as pointed we are also going to reach “civilization” types of limits with land and ressource exhaust... My humble opinion is we should simply consume far less energy and accept a much simpler lifestyle, that would be much easier ...

megaman821 4y ago
Did we read the same article? The land usage for wind and solar is about that of golf courses and coal. Getting permits to use the land is the main obstacle. As for resource constraints, the limiting factor is the speed on which a lithium mines can come online. The bulk of the that being environment reviews and lawsuits. Americans are just going to have to come to terms with building or mining stuff causes localized environmental damage and other externalities for the communities that live close by. We should weight the pros and cons and move swiftly with whatever the decision is.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  Lithium isn't even in the top twenty of mined metal. It would also be relatively cheap to recycle at scale. Problems are political, i.e monied interests not environmental, technological, or even financial. Should also be optimistic about non lithium solid state batteries! >https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/all-tonnes-metals-ores-mined-in-one-year/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/all-tonnes-metals-ore...
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  Honestly as a golfer, a windmill in the middle of the fairway would make for an interesting hole
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Mini-golf, but life size?

RadixDLT 4y ago

does that mean nuclear power?

Krasnol 4y ago
No it doesn't since nuclear waste is not clean and as the article says: renewables are cheaper already.
- orthecreedence 4y ago
  Oh, nice! Didn't know battery tech and PV panel production were clean now. That's a great leap.
  - Krasnol 4y ago
    Much cleaner than nuclear waste. Predictable derailment though.
acdha 4y ago
Maybe, but that’s the slow option so we should be doing renewables now, which can come online in just months, while the much slower process of adding nuclear capacity unfolds. If we shift the large amount of power generation which renewables can provide over that buys us enough time to build nuclear.

verdverm 4y ago

What is the plan for revamping all the residential units that have non-electrical heating in the parts of the country which have winter?

epistasis 4y ago
Heat pumps! They work great on cold weather now, as long as you can find a competent HVAC contractor. HVAC folks tend to not like new tech, though, so it's hard to find one.
- verdverm 4y ago
  I think the cost is more the issue than the tech. There are plenty of electric options as well. Per room conditioning can help
acdha 4y ago
We switched to a heat pump a couple years ago. It soaks up all but the coldest (5-15°) days in winter (when the resistive heater kicks in as well) and uses only a little more energy than our old gas system’s fans did. It’s way more efficient in the summer than our old AC was so our annual usage actually went down and we have less maintenance. Over the course of the year, our entire HVAC load is roughly what our modest solar setup produces. Obviously there are distribution issues, which is why we buy wind-generated electricity, but this is something we can do now and I’m quite confident the thousands of engineers working in the space will improve as it becomes our generation’s Apollo project.
- verdverm 4y ago
  How much did that cost you?
  - acdha 4y ago
    It was about $20k as part of a larger project replacing things like our water heater & closing up the old gas line. Solar panels were like $15k and should hit break even on SREC sales in another 4 years.

propogandist 4y ago

This is the same DOE that is tapping strategic petroleum reserves to manipulate gas prices, right? This is PR to support the “inflation reduction act”.

kibwen 4y ago
Relevant username?
epakai 4y ago
The alternative is being at the behest of foreign oil price manipulation. Moving away from oil seems like a pretty good way to prevent dipping into strategic reserves to me.

dheera 4y ago

Finds? Or predicts?

OrvalWintermute 4y ago

I didn't see enough data to understand how 100% clean power will be achieved that can satisfy baseload energy demand. The simple fix of course, would be to add a substantial amount of Nuclear to handle the intermittency problem of the renewables. Also, given how much untapped methane we have on ocean floors, and how we appear to be accumulating it still, it might be smart to think about it as a somewhat renewable resource also.

trollski 4y ago

wankle 4y ago

Storage is the bottleneck that makes 100% clean energy even before 2099 unlikely. I recommend the whole video but this part is relevant to my comment: https://youtu.be/ptI6BRVC1Kw?t=108 https://youtu.be/ptI6BRVC1Kw?t=108

ajross 4y ago
Link is to a a Stossel TV segment which right out of the gate misrepresents the problem. They cite some staggering numbers about how many batteries you'd need to match "the energy Europe has in storage right now" failing to note that those are petroleum reserves stored for geopolitical insurance, not to buffer instantaneous shortfalls in electricity generation. Those reserves are designed to be many months of use; no one thinks you need that for grid buffering, where a few days is plenty. And in any case that oil is going to be used for vehicle fuel, where the linked article is talking about electrical grid generation. No one thinks we're going to be off of fossil fueled vehicles in a decade, though it's definitely possible to reduce the net usage by a ton. Sorry, that's just a terribly spun video segment. What the linked article claims is absolutely doable.
pythonaut_16 4y ago
Imagine saying this 80 years ago about any number of technologies that are cheap and commonplace today.

anonymousiam 4y ago

Okay, so I'll assume that 2035 is their most optimistic estimate. Assuming it's true, why have we dramatically reduced our energy supply now in 2022? Has the role of our governments changed into one that forces policy upon us, even when the policy is ill planned? How does this make us stronger, better, or safer? I'm not trying to shoot it down, but shouldn't such a drastic national/worldwide government policy get some review and maybe even a vote from the people (under the democratic governments)?

Proven 4y ago

xutopia 4y ago

Technically feasible... unfortunately you had too many politicians with ties to fossil fuel industry telling the locals that windmills and solar cause cancer or some other inane thing.

citizenpaul 4y ago

This post really is a scathing look into a deep hostility I would not expect from HN readers. The number of people on here that seem OK with institutiying some form of boot in face opression to all those OTHER people causing the problem. Very few conversations about personal choices that could make a difference.