7 ms·

For those in the know: - Is the adoption of wind and solar accelerating, or is it linear? - When do you expect 90%+ electricity generation from renewable source

For those in the know: - Is the adoption of wind and solar accelerating, or is it linear? - When do you expect 90%+ electricity generation from renewable sources (hydro, wind, solar)? - Will it be cheaper than nuclear? Will we still need nuclear? Thanks!

aperson_hello 3y ago
Accelerating and who knows - everyone is extraordinarily terrible at making predictions about power generation. New solar/wind capacity is already significantly cheaper than new nuclear (and new plants of any sort other than natural gas), but more expensive than running existing nuclear plants. Nuclear is a great way to get stable base load capacity - while wind and solar require significant storage to be used as base load (because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine). We'll ultimately probably land on a mix of power sources.
- epistasis 3y ago
  The best predictions have come from people that know the "least" that make the simplest predictions just extrapolating current trends. To get bad predictions, you need to be "deeply knowledgeable" about energy and come up with all sort of ways to bias the predictions against renewable energy. Greenpeace (not known for being very numerate in the first place) and Ramez Naam did much better: https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/ https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...
vlovich123 3y ago
It’s been accelerating exponentially for a long time, but generally seems to have taken over secondary energy sources like biofuel more than displacing fossil fuels. Wind is roughly the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but solar is still expensive. Costs continue to drop & solar bulls contend that it will be cheaper in the long run although I’m skeptical that nuclear couldn’t compete (e.g. MSR or thorium reactors would be much safer & thus cheaper to build reducing nuclear costs too). Additionally, solar bulls conveniently ignore the costs of batteries which complicate the economics by a lot & even fission built today (where costs have been going up rather than down because we don’t build a lot of it) is much cheaper than solar (even without batteries & blows battery-based solutions out of the water). The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors which would require a major social shift to make people comfortable with it (& of course there are always risks but for some reason spilling radioactive material into the ocean scares people a lot but then they conveniently ignore how much fossil fuels we spill into the ocean which creates waaaay more ecological devastation). Finally, it’s the only tech we have right now that’s energy dense enough that we can divert excess capacity into efforts to sequester excess carbon - we’ve already unlocked runaway processes on Earth and sequestration, while insanely expensive, is likely the only mechanism we have to try to undo the runaway processes.
- hgomersall 3y ago
  You make a lot of assertions here. Certainly your claims about the cost of solar are not supported by IRENA: https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-Power-Generation-Costs-in-2022 https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-Power-...
- pydry 3y ago
  >Wind is roughly the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but solar is still expensive. Its LCOE is roughly 5x lower than nuclear power: https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-solar-and-wind-power-drives-the-energy-transition/94355 https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-sol... >The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors The cost of nuclear power as shown above is *enormous*. The only reason it gets built at all is because it provides economic support to the military for maintaining and building nuclear arms: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-consumers-to-fund-nuclear-weapons-through-hinkley-point-c https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-... Or, in non-nuclear powers (like Sweden or Iran), to provide the skills and industry to quickly ramp up a fully fledged nuclear program while still adhering to the NPT. It's a shame because the money would be far more efficiently spent on solar and wind capacity and also because nuclear weapons are, well, bad.
  - hedora 3y ago
    Safe and affordable nuclear reactors have been available for 40+ years. France has been operating an existence proof with “obsolete” reactor designs for a long time. The cost overruns are a political problem. Having said that, the cost of nuclear is lower-bounded by the cost of the turbines and generators. Those exceeded the cost of solar 5-10 years ago. (i.e., if I give you a perpetual motion machine that ~turns a crank~ (edit: generates heat; turning a crank would eliminate the turbine) at a wattage of your choosing, you still can’t use it to provide cheaper power than solar). However, off peak generation still isn’t cheaper than everything else. Once you plan for “a cloudy weather front parks over our region”, the cost of energy storage is still prohibitive-ish. In the long term, I think we’ll move to nuclear plants that can rapidly respond to demand (this is a solved problem), since that’s cheaper and cleaner than batteries, and much safer and cleaner than coal. Edit: Nuclear is probably cheaper than provisioning region-scale batteries for a week of supply during depressed generation and higher than average demand.
matthewdgreen 3y ago
I’m not “in the know” but here is a fun chart showing 2023 solar PV adoption compared to past IEA predictions. You can decide which function class you want to assign it to. (I did not make this, see subsequent post in that thread for credit and sources.) https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/111505497033606507 https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/111505497033606507
- burkaman 3y ago
  That chart is so funny. What will it take for the IEA to consider changing their prediction model?
  - sgift 3y ago
    There's an "world energy outlook" once a year, here's the one from 2023: https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023 https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023 Haven't yet found the relevant chart, but since the one in the image ends with WEO 2018: They probably already have.
    - burkaman 3y ago
      At least as of 2022 they had not: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-evans-53091614_solar-activity-7032377193276043265-KvGm/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-evans-53091614_solar-ac... The followup post (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defence-international-energy-agency-iea-world-outlooks-simon-evans/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defence-international-energy-...) explains that this IEA outlook is not really supposed to be a forecast, it's an explanation of what would happen if all current government policies remained the same. It intentionally does not take into account proposed or predicted future policy changes.
      - zizee 3y ago
        Some of this is still driven by government policy (definitely required to kick start things), but at this stage economic drivers are the dominant force affecting adoption.
jncfhnb 3y ago
Accelerating. Unclear timelines but not soon. It is already cheaper than nuclear. Energy should be priced using the levelized cost of energy. Currently nuclear is way more expensive than utility solar ( but not rooftop solar). The need for nuclear is about base load and making use of space and existing assets and what not.
ben_w 3y ago
Acceleration; naively extrapolating the current growth rate gets us to 100% in 2034-ish; it's already cheaper than nuclear; we will probably want nuclear, but don't strictly need it, other base-load equivalents and load management options exist.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Cheaper as in it can fully replace nuclear and fully match for demand for also extended periods of no wind, low temperatures and high cloud cover? Without any use of fossil fuels?
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    How often is a region with an interconnected grid the size of the USA completely lacking in wind, uniformly cold, and overcast? (Among other things, clouds tend to cause wind. https://www.howitworksdaily.com/how-does-cloud-cover-create-wind/ https://www.howitworksdaily.com/how-does-cloud-cover-create-...)
    - natmaka 3y ago
      There are many encouraging published studies. Europe: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... US: https://www.cmu.edu/ceic/assets/docs/publications/published-papers/2017-and-2018/handschy-et-al-2017.pdf https://www.cmu.edu/ceic/assets/docs/publications/published-...
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Yes, using the current lifetime cost of batteries etc. to cover when solar is unavailable, is currently cheaper than nuclear. (We could also in principle do this with a global power grid, the maths says it's fine and surprisingly affordable even if that grid needs extremely frequent total replacement, but geopolitics will almost certainly kill such an idea).
    - 3y ago
Axsuul 3y ago
With manufacturing coming back to the US, our energy needs will likely be even greater even with accelerating adoption.
TomK32 3y ago
It's all down to politics. The German government practically killed (predominantely East-) Germany's solar industry by messing around with the Stromeinspeisungsgesetz and didn't protect the local producers against the the Chinese ones who still produce under questionable conditions... http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph240/rojas1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph240/rojas1/ Will the current restart of the german solar panel producers last? No one knows for sure.
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  Panel production doesn’t need to be tied to panel installation does it? The goal of increasing solar usage doesn’t care if they come from China or not.
  - TomK32 3y ago
    Still, we did have the industry in Germany and it produced quality panels without shady practices like Chinese manfuacturers.
jltsiren 3y ago
Different regions are in different parts of the sigmoid curve. In some places, the growth looks exponential. In other places, the market is already saturated and new renewable capacity is only built to meet increases in transmission/storage capacity and demand for intermittent energy.

aperson_hello 3y ago

Accelerating and who knows - everyone is extraordinarily terrible at making predictions about power generation. New solar/wind capacity is already significantly cheaper than new nuclear (and new plants of any sort other than natural gas), but more expensive than running existing nuclear plants. Nuclear is a great way to get stable base load capacity - while wind and solar require significant storage to be used as base load (because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine). We'll ultimately probably land on a mix of power sources.

epistasis 3y ago
The best predictions have come from people that know the "least" that make the simplest predictions just extrapolating current trends. To get bad predictions, you need to be "deeply knowledgeable" about energy and come up with all sort of ways to bias the predictions against renewable energy. Greenpeace (not known for being very numerate in the first place) and Ramez Naam did much better: https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/ https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...

vlovich123 3y ago

It’s been accelerating exponentially for a long time, but generally seems to have taken over secondary energy sources like biofuel more than displacing fossil fuels. Wind is roughly the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but solar is still expensive. Costs continue to drop & solar bulls contend that it will be cheaper in the long run although I’m skeptical that nuclear couldn’t compete (e.g. MSR or thorium reactors would be much safer & thus cheaper to build reducing nuclear costs too). Additionally, solar bulls conveniently ignore the costs of batteries which complicate the economics by a lot & even fission built today (where costs have been going up rather than down because we don’t build a lot of it) is much cheaper than solar (even without batteries & blows battery-based solutions out of the water). The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors which would require a major social shift to make people comfortable with it (& of course there are always risks but for some reason spilling radioactive material into the ocean scares people a lot but then they conveniently ignore how much fossil fuels we spill into the ocean which creates waaaay more ecological devastation). Finally, it’s the only tech we have right now that’s energy dense enough that we can divert excess capacity into efforts to sequester excess carbon - we’ve already unlocked runaway processes on Earth and sequestration, while insanely expensive, is likely the only mechanism we have to try to undo the runaway processes.

hgomersall 3y ago
You make a lot of assertions here. Certainly your claims about the cost of solar are not supported by IRENA: https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-Power-Generation-Costs-in-2022 https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-Power-...
pydry 3y ago
>Wind is roughly the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but solar is still expensive. Its LCOE is roughly 5x lower than nuclear power: https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-solar-and-wind-power-drives-the-energy-transition/94355 https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-sol... >The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors The cost of nuclear power as shown above is *enormous*. The only reason it gets built at all is because it provides economic support to the military for maintaining and building nuclear arms: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-consumers-to-fund-nuclear-weapons-through-hinkley-point-c https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-... Or, in non-nuclear powers (like Sweden or Iran), to provide the skills and industry to quickly ramp up a fully fledged nuclear program while still adhering to the NPT. It's a shame because the money would be far more efficiently spent on solar and wind capacity and also because nuclear weapons are, well, bad.
- hedora 3y ago
  Safe and affordable nuclear reactors have been available for 40+ years. France has been operating an existence proof with “obsolete” reactor designs for a long time. The cost overruns are a political problem. Having said that, the cost of nuclear is lower-bounded by the cost of the turbines and generators. Those exceeded the cost of solar 5-10 years ago. (i.e., if I give you a perpetual motion machine that ~turns a crank~ (edit: generates heat; turning a crank would eliminate the turbine) at a wattage of your choosing, you still can’t use it to provide cheaper power than solar). However, off peak generation still isn’t cheaper than everything else. Once you plan for “a cloudy weather front parks over our region”, the cost of energy storage is still prohibitive-ish. In the long term, I think we’ll move to nuclear plants that can rapidly respond to demand (this is a solved problem), since that’s cheaper and cleaner than batteries, and much safer and cleaner than coal. Edit: Nuclear is probably cheaper than provisioning region-scale batteries for a week of supply during depressed generation and higher than average demand.

matthewdgreen 3y ago

I’m not “in the know” but here is a fun chart showing 2023 solar PV adoption compared to past IEA predictions. You can decide which function class you want to assign it to. (I did not make this, see subsequent post in that thread for credit and sources.) https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/111505497033606507 https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/111505497033606507

burkaman 3y ago
That chart is so funny. What will it take for the IEA to consider changing their prediction model?
- sgift 3y ago
  There's an "world energy outlook" once a year, here's the one from 2023: https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023 https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023 Haven't yet found the relevant chart, but since the one in the image ends with WEO 2018: They probably already have.
  - burkaman 3y ago
    At least as of 2022 they had not: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-evans-53091614_solar-activity-7032377193276043265-KvGm/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-evans-53091614_solar-ac... The followup post (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defence-international-energy-agency-iea-world-outlooks-simon-evans/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defence-international-energy-...) explains that this IEA outlook is not really supposed to be a forecast, it's an explanation of what would happen if all current government policies remained the same. It intentionally does not take into account proposed or predicted future policy changes.
    - zizee 3y ago
      Some of this is still driven by government policy (definitely required to kick start things), but at this stage economic drivers are the dominant force affecting adoption.

jncfhnb 3y ago

Accelerating. Unclear timelines but not soon. It is already cheaper than nuclear. Energy should be priced using the levelized cost of energy. Currently nuclear is way more expensive than utility solar ( but not rooftop solar). The need for nuclear is about base load and making use of space and existing assets and what not.

ben_w 3y ago

Acceleration; naively extrapolating the current growth rate gets us to 100% in 2034-ish; it's already cheaper than nuclear; we will probably want nuclear, but don't strictly need it, other base-load equivalents and load management options exist.

Ekaros 3y ago
Cheaper as in it can fully replace nuclear and fully match for demand for also extended periods of no wind, low temperatures and high cloud cover? Without any use of fossil fuels?
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  How often is a region with an interconnected grid the size of the USA completely lacking in wind, uniformly cold, and overcast? (Among other things, clouds tend to cause wind. https://www.howitworksdaily.com/how-does-cloud-cover-create-wind/ https://www.howitworksdaily.com/how-does-cloud-cover-create-...)
  - natmaka 3y ago
    There are many encouraging published studies. Europe: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... US: https://www.cmu.edu/ceic/assets/docs/publications/published-papers/2017-and-2018/handschy-et-al-2017.pdf https://www.cmu.edu/ceic/assets/docs/publications/published-...
- ben_w 3y ago
  Yes, using the current lifetime cost of batteries etc. to cover when solar is unavailable, is currently cheaper than nuclear. (We could also in principle do this with a global power grid, the maths says it's fine and surprisingly affordable even if that grid needs extremely frequent total replacement, but geopolitics will almost certainly kill such an idea).
  - 3y ago

Axsuul 3y ago

With manufacturing coming back to the US, our energy needs will likely be even greater even with accelerating adoption.

TomK32 3y ago

It's all down to politics. The German government practically killed (predominantely East-) Germany's solar industry by messing around with the Stromeinspeisungsgesetz and didn't protect the local producers against the the Chinese ones who still produce under questionable conditions... http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph240/rojas1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph240/rojas1/ Will the current restart of the german solar panel producers last? No one knows for sure.

therealdrag0 3y ago
Panel production doesn’t need to be tied to panel installation does it? The goal of increasing solar usage doesn’t care if they come from China or not.
- TomK32 3y ago
  Still, we did have the industry in Germany and it produced quality panels without shady practices like Chinese manfuacturers.

jltsiren 3y ago

Different regions are in different parts of the sigmoid curve. In some places, the growth looks exponential. In other places, the market is already saturated and new renewable capacity is only built to meet increases in transmission/storage capacity and demand for intermittent energy.