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But you get how big of a failure that is for climate change right? Like we’ve been doing this for some 20 years now and renewables still don’t have any real ans

But you get how big of a failure that is for climate change right? Like we’ve been doing this for some 20 years now and renewables still don’t have any real answer for storage which is what would be needed to meaningfully increase that absolute number further. And you need way more than half of new power generation capacity to actually meaningfully shift the mix. It needs to be above 100% because we have a fuckton of already existing power generation capacity and all that power generation is a problem because it needs replacement and we can’t wait for plants to simply age out and get replaced with new installations. We’re waaay past that point. And again, you can’t get there because of storage and storage is an intractable technical problem where “just throw batteries at it” is a flippant answer. We grow battery energy density very slowly. It’s expected to double by 2030 and triply by 2040. But our energy demands grow very quickly & we’re talking about a world where most people don’t actually have as cheap easy access to energy as we take for granted in the West. We also are talking about using a significant chunk of that capacity and using it to replace existing cars (which don’t get me wrong - you 100% need batteries for cars because it’s the only way to connect renewables to automotive). Then you’ve got shipping which everyone ignores and I don’t see a path forward there except to have nuclear reactors on commercial ships going all over the place (but that would 100% require molten salt or other reactors that can’t melt down).

bryanlarsen 3y ago
In absolute terms we've accomplished very little in 20 years. But 2023 is way ahead of 2003 in three significant ways. 1) EV's have a TCO lower than gasoline vehicles. 2) Renewable power generation is cheaper than fossil power generation. 3) Heat pumps are cheaper than fossil heating In 2003 nobody ever thought that we would ever get to this stage. Everybody assumed that we'd need massive subsidies to switch to carbon free sources. They were hopeful that once we got to mass scale rollout that the prices would be competitive but getting below parity was seen as completely unrealistic.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Well we did need quite substantial subsidies to get there so that part wasn’t wrong. And heat pumps are orthogonal to this. Like the stuff that’s happening now with heat pumps is exciting and I hope the ideas pan out but that feels orthogonal. I’m sure getting below parity was the primary concern but that was just the first one with storage being an even bigger second hurdle that hasn’t been cleared and we don’t know if we can clear. Like making enough batteries to sustain EV manufacturing & replace all existing vehicles is already a challenge. I’m sure we can muster it but grid-scale storage is an order magnitude larger problem than that. Renewables have all these order of magnitude technical scaling problems that nuclear doesn’t seem to have. The biggest technical scaling problem for nuclear is building a reactor that physically can’t melt down. We’ve been doing research on that with threadbare funding for a long time. If we meaningfully invested in it we could do it. Hell, China is targetting to build a production 370 MW molten salt reactors by 2030. Nuclear is really where we should be investing R&D dollars at government scale because that resolves self-imposed regulatory hurdles. Private investments seem to be generally sufficient for solar and wind.
- api 3y ago
  In 2003 a huge proportion of people including many scientists and engineers believed that modern society is impossible without fossil fuels and that fossil depletion would inevitably lead to collapse if climate change didn’t first. Remember sites like The Oil Drum and dieoff.org? Where we are today was considered laughably impossible and those arguments came with pages of calculations. We are on track for what might be peak CO2 emission this decade. At that point we will start moving in the right direction emission wise. This is not good enough to avoid some amount of dangerous climate change, but it’s better than the doom scenarios of 20 years ago. GDP is decoupling from carbon emissions too, which is massively important. Now it seems we’re back to the big existential risks being war and awful politics with the latter driven by social media algorithms that prioritize the most toxic ideas for “engagement.” (Unless you buy AI doom. I don’t.)
RandomLensman 3y ago
Fission is expensive - there is unlikely to be a world where everything is nuclear. There might be more of it, but the price point might not be great. Storage has lots of options, for example, batteries, pressure, gravity (incl. underground). Things like shipping could run perhaps on other fuels and planes will be on high energy density fossil fuel (or synthetic) for a while (at least long haul).
- vlovich123 3y ago
  There’s nothing intrinsically expensive about fission. It’s all regulatory, a not insignificant amount of which is driven by hypothetical rather than realized fears. And what a movement of goal posts. When people said that renewables were too expensive and we should direct research R&D dollars to nuclear, the issue was nuclear safety. Now that renewables are cheap after 2 decades of substantial R&D investment, the argument is “why invest in nuclear - renewables are cheaper”. But renewables are still only cheaper because they’re not being asked to do base load replacement. So from that perspective renewables are still more expensive because storage costs are excluded. And from that perspective it still doesn’t matter because it’ll take forever to build enough generation and storage capacity for renewables that in the same time we could be dropping a bunch of nuclear GW power plants all over the place. Even today fission and renewables have very similar generation prices. And no, it’ll be a long time before batteries are a solution to the energy density needs for grid scale solar to truly allow replacement and shuttering of fossil fuel plants (automotive electrification is going to eat up a huge amount of battery manufacturing capacity world wide).
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    You can look at the cost trajectories of various energy production technologies through time - the one for fission does not look encouraging. Interesting that you see costs for fission and renewable as very similar. Data I have seen has huge differences.(https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/publications/no-2021-01-empirically-grounded-technology-forecasts-and-the-energy-transition/ https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/publications/no-2021-01-empiricall...) Where did I advocate batteries as only storage? There are many options. I might potentially be better to put more money into fusion rather than chase fission for anything beyond materials, medical, research, and weapons applications.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

In absolute terms we've accomplished very little in 20 years. But 2023 is way ahead of 2003 in three significant ways. 1) EV's have a TCO lower than gasoline vehicles. 2) Renewable power generation is cheaper than fossil power generation. 3) Heat pumps are cheaper than fossil heating In 2003 nobody ever thought that we would ever get to this stage. Everybody assumed that we'd need massive subsidies to switch to carbon free sources. They were hopeful that once we got to mass scale rollout that the prices would be competitive but getting below parity was seen as completely unrealistic.

vlovich123 3y ago
Well we did need quite substantial subsidies to get there so that part wasn’t wrong. And heat pumps are orthogonal to this. Like the stuff that’s happening now with heat pumps is exciting and I hope the ideas pan out but that feels orthogonal. I’m sure getting below parity was the primary concern but that was just the first one with storage being an even bigger second hurdle that hasn’t been cleared and we don’t know if we can clear. Like making enough batteries to sustain EV manufacturing & replace all existing vehicles is already a challenge. I’m sure we can muster it but grid-scale storage is an order magnitude larger problem than that. Renewables have all these order of magnitude technical scaling problems that nuclear doesn’t seem to have. The biggest technical scaling problem for nuclear is building a reactor that physically can’t melt down. We’ve been doing research on that with threadbare funding for a long time. If we meaningfully invested in it we could do it. Hell, China is targetting to build a production 370 MW molten salt reactors by 2030. Nuclear is really where we should be investing R&D dollars at government scale because that resolves self-imposed regulatory hurdles. Private investments seem to be generally sufficient for solar and wind.
api 3y ago
In 2003 a huge proportion of people including many scientists and engineers believed that modern society is impossible without fossil fuels and that fossil depletion would inevitably lead to collapse if climate change didn’t first. Remember sites like The Oil Drum and dieoff.org? Where we are today was considered laughably impossible and those arguments came with pages of calculations. We are on track for what might be peak CO2 emission this decade. At that point we will start moving in the right direction emission wise. This is not good enough to avoid some amount of dangerous climate change, but it’s better than the doom scenarios of 20 years ago. GDP is decoupling from carbon emissions too, which is massively important. Now it seems we’re back to the big existential risks being war and awful politics with the latter driven by social media algorithms that prioritize the most toxic ideas for “engagement.” (Unless you buy AI doom. I don’t.)

RandomLensman 3y ago

Fission is expensive - there is unlikely to be a world where everything is nuclear. There might be more of it, but the price point might not be great. Storage has lots of options, for example, batteries, pressure, gravity (incl. underground). Things like shipping could run perhaps on other fuels and planes will be on high energy density fossil fuel (or synthetic) for a while (at least long haul).

vlovich123 3y ago
There’s nothing intrinsically expensive about fission. It’s all regulatory, a not insignificant amount of which is driven by hypothetical rather than realized fears. And what a movement of goal posts. When people said that renewables were too expensive and we should direct research R&D dollars to nuclear, the issue was nuclear safety. Now that renewables are cheap after 2 decades of substantial R&D investment, the argument is “why invest in nuclear - renewables are cheaper”. But renewables are still only cheaper because they’re not being asked to do base load replacement. So from that perspective renewables are still more expensive because storage costs are excluded. And from that perspective it still doesn’t matter because it’ll take forever to build enough generation and storage capacity for renewables that in the same time we could be dropping a bunch of nuclear GW power plants all over the place. Even today fission and renewables have very similar generation prices. And no, it’ll be a long time before batteries are a solution to the energy density needs for grid scale solar to truly allow replacement and shuttering of fossil fuel plants (automotive electrification is going to eat up a huge amount of battery manufacturing capacity world wide).
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  You can look at the cost trajectories of various energy production technologies through time - the one for fission does not look encouraging. Interesting that you see costs for fission and renewable as very similar. Data I have seen has huge differences.(https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/publications/no-2021-01-empirically-grounded-technology-forecasts-and-the-energy-transition/ https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/publications/no-2021-01-empiricall...) Where did I advocate batteries as only storage? There are many options. I might potentially be better to put more money into fusion rather than chase fission for anything beyond materials, medical, research, and weapons applications.