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"The study reviewed current literature on wind farms, as well as using real construction data to take into account everything from the manufacturing of individu

by dools 2y ago

"The study reviewed current literature on wind farms, as well as using real construction data to take into account everything from the manufacturing of individual turbine parts, to transporting them into place, to decommissioning the entire wind farm at Harapak" I wonder if they take into account the footprint of storage. It should be noted that if wind is used as a serious replacement for non-renewable energy or nuclear then it must have associated installed storage capacity which I would say should be considered an inextricable component of its carbon footprint.

stephen_g 2y ago
No, that’s totally irrelevant - on a large interconnected grid you can get past 75% renewables with basically no storage (South Australia does it as part of Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM)). No single generation type can cover 100% itself - even when things were largely coal, it was always required to have hydro or gas dispatchable generation for peaking, and this wasn’t counted in the cost or any other statistic of those plants… it’s just a reality of running a grid. In the same way, fugitive emissions are usually ignored for gas (even though the case is far stronger than yours for including them as part of the lifecycle analysis), and oil exploration, refinery, transport etc. emissions aren’t counted in car’s fuel economy. The study in question is trying to measure a particular thing, and it does it appropriately.
audunw 2y ago
In a world where we move towards 100% decarbonisation, energy storage isn’t going to be a significant factor. If you replace fossil fuel with electricity for industrial heat, which represents a huge amount of energy we use, you can use thermal batteries that will last practically forever. So the carbon emissions will be negligible in the long run. Even if you use li-ion or other electric batteries the materials can generally be recycled with near zero carbon emissions. So carbon emission price we pay now should be spread over the centuries that those materials will be used. Renewables will also be paired with electric vehicles that represent a huge flexible load. I have already set my car to automatically charge only when electricity is cheap. I would even feed energy back on the grid if I had the option. So you see, if you count energy storage for renewables, you also have to count the emissions from fossil industrial heat and ICE cars, and fertiliser production (green ammonia production will also be flexible load that can serve as energy storage, etc By some accounts, if we decarbonise everything, we really don’t need all that much dedicated energy storage at all. The minimum production on a well connected grid will be about enough for base load needs.

by dools 2y ago

stephen_g 2y ago

No, that’s totally irrelevant - on a large interconnected grid you can get past 75% renewables with basically no storage (South Australia does it as part of Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM)). No single generation type can cover 100% itself - even when things were largely coal, it was always required to have hydro or gas dispatchable generation for peaking, and this wasn’t counted in the cost or any other statistic of those plants… it’s just a reality of running a grid. In the same way, fugitive emissions are usually ignored for gas (even though the case is far stronger than yours for including them as part of the lifecycle analysis), and oil exploration, refinery, transport etc. emissions aren’t counted in car’s fuel economy. The study in question is trying to measure a particular thing, and it does it appropriately.

audunw 2y ago

In a world where we move towards 100% decarbonisation, energy storage isn’t going to be a significant factor. If you replace fossil fuel with electricity for industrial heat, which represents a huge amount of energy we use, you can use thermal batteries that will last practically forever. So the carbon emissions will be negligible in the long run. Even if you use li-ion or other electric batteries the materials can generally be recycled with near zero carbon emissions. So carbon emission price we pay now should be spread over the centuries that those materials will be used. Renewables will also be paired with electric vehicles that represent a huge flexible load. I have already set my car to automatically charge only when electricity is cheap. I would even feed energy back on the grid if I had the option. So you see, if you count energy storage for renewables, you also have to count the emissions from fossil industrial heat and ICE cars, and fertiliser production (green ammonia production will also be flexible load that can serve as energy storage, etc By some accounts, if we decarbonise everything, we really don’t need all that much dedicated energy storage at all. The minimum production on a well connected grid will be about enough for base load needs.