8 ms·

We still need to make the electricity.

by guappa 2y ago

rho138 2y ago
Here comes the sun!
0xfae 2y ago
And the grid is getting greener and greener every year. An electric car bought today that is powered by a coal plant today will be powered by solar/hydro/wind more and more each year. A gas car will always run on fossil fuels.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Not necessarily, synthetic fuel is being developed for air transport and could also be used in internal combustion car engines. Not sure anyone is seriously working on it, and I don't know how the economics compare. One advantage would be that we already have the distribution infrastructure in place for liquid motor vehicle fuel. Our electrical infrastructure is going to need significant upgrading at least in places to handle charging if all vehicles are EVs.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  An electric car is also more efficient and grid fossil fuels are better than a small ICE. Still, I’m not really seeing the evidence that the grid is getting all that much greener. There’s a lot of solar capacity installed and yet every year we use more fossil fuels than the year before. It dents the growth a bit but it doesn’t seem to be doing a good job at replacing fossil fuels. We need more gen iv fission, not more renewables, to meaningfully displace fossil fuels. And no, it’s not more expensive than solar even today if you add the cost of batteries which everyone seems to ignore when comparing solar/wind to fission. As for hydro, that resource is fully tapped; all the available capacity is fully in use at a significant environmental cost. Geothermal might be a good one but it requires a massive shift in where cities are located which limits its utility (HVDC remains extremely expensive).
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    Battery prices are going down. Solar prices are going down. Wind prices are going down. Nuclear mostly is going sideways. This is also reflected by deployment, where renewables are on an exponential (logistic) curve and nuclear isn’t. Even in China, where nuclear is growing fastest, the curves look like this: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-behind-photovoltaics-and-wind-in-china/95924 https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-... TL;DR if fast deployment of low carbon sources is what you want, nuclear definitely is not the answer.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      The point of fission is that all that installed capacity is available 24/7. That isn’t true of wind and solar. So for baseload, fission is the only solution and that’s why China is building them. China fission prices have gone down by the way and it’s likely the world will soon start using their reactors because we let the coal industry kill our nuclear industry.
    - suoduandao3 2y ago
      That discrepancy is not surprising, given iteration times and cost of failure. Nuclear has great potential in space exploration, but it's never going to be economical when there are other options. It's no wonder pronuclear activists clog up any discussion of renewable energy, hoping to get some of that public subsidy money for themselves - they know the reactors can't pay for themselves by selling electricity alone.
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        The cognitive dissonance involved to say that nuclear needs public subsidies to pay for themselves when wind and solar need the same is pretty wild. And again - wind and solar, with all those subsidies, continues to fail to displace fossil fuels in the grid because the costs continue to ignore the batteries required to supplant baseload (or argue that baseload is an archaic concept with the alternative being a completely different grid which would require a massive replacement). By comparison, France which went all nuclear in the 60s is completely off fossil fuels for their grid whereas companies that continue to go the renewables-only approach continue to see fossil fuel usage continue to grow even if the percentages remain flat.
- randerson 2y ago
  And even if an EV is powered by a coal plant, the air pollution is in industrial areas not the residential areas where people live, so there are health benefits regardless of the climate impact.
kalleboo 2y ago
The sun gives that to us for free. We need to figure out how to store and transport the electricity.
- suoduandao3 2y ago
  Batteries might work for storage, they have their own version of moore's law and will continue to get better and cheaper for a while. Now if only there were a way to bundle that energy storage with a means of transportation...
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    You realize the irony of replying on a thread about an article saying we’ve grossly underestimated by 3x the amount of battery materials we’ll need? And that’s just for EVs, not grid batteries. Yes, there’s the far out idea of maybe we can use car batteries to do that role but our grid is not designed for it and there’s all sorts of other problems of that. Fission is a much saner cost effective solution that requires much fewer ancillary changes than renewables would to fully move the grid.
    - suoduandao3 2y ago
      If Fission is so great, go build it. I'm not stopping you. But use your own money or get off the podium.
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        That’s such an uninteresting comment. Use your own money to get solar off the podium? Remember that solar received substantial subsidies to bootstrap via rooftop solar. And fission’s biggest problem isn’t necessarily funding but that there’s all sorts of regulations placed on it to stop it from being successful. So you can’t just go out and build your own nuclear plant.
        suoduandao3 2y ago
vel0city 2y ago
My EV is charging at the moment. The current energy mix in my state is 24.3% solar, 15.2% wind, 7.4% nuclear. 46.9% of the energy going into my car right now comes from non-carbon sources. What percentage of non-carbon/renewable energy sources are going into my ICE next time I go to the pump? https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix This is all massively up from a decade ago. I wonder what percentage of non-carbon sources I'll have for my EV next decade. Do you think the non-carbon energy sources in my ICE will go down in a decade?
- dingnuts 2y ago
  does your calculation include the carbon needed to lubricate the wind turbines? how about the carbon in the solar cells, and the carbon that will be needed to dispose of them when they fail? I'd argue the mix of non-carbon energy going into your car is a lot closer to 7.4% -- just the nuclear. Wind and solar both require industrial processes, materials, and maintenance involving not insignificant amounts of oil. also: why are you charging your EV in the middle of the day in Texas, in the summer? ERCOT asks people to conserve energy; this guy charges his car. Maybe save your grid strain for the evening?
  - vel0city 2y ago
    does your calculation include the carbon needed for all the concrete in the nuclear plants? does your calculation include the carbon needed for mining and refining the uranium in the reactor? does your calculation include the carbon needed for all the plant operators to drive their ICE vehicles to the plant every day? does your calculation include the mining needed for long term storage? Play enough games and throw no real numbers around and you can argue everything isn't renewable then. Are you really arguing that the lubrication needed for a turbine makes its overall carbon impact the same as natural gas or oil? Also, good job showing your ignorance of the Texas grid. ERCOT isn't asking people to conserve electricity at the moment buddy. Real-time spot prices are $24.65/MWh. We're nowhere near the committed capacity. There's lots of electricity available. Maybe save your comments for things you actually understand?
  - 2y ago
Workaccount2 2y ago
The amount of harvestable energy from sustainable resources is a few orders of magnitude more than what is/was available from all the oil and gas that ever existed on Earth. The amount of energy that hits the Earth from the sun in one week alone is more than all oil and gas reserves on Earth combined. Twice over. We'll be fine.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  Harvesting that efficiently is still a problem and requires comparatively large tracts of land. More importantly time shifting that daytime solar is a huge problem and you can’t handwave it away; this article is talking about how we’ve grossly underestimated the amount of resources needed for vehicle EV while grid batteries would shift that even more. We might get lucky with a totally new battery chemistry, but battery chemistry moves relatively slowly.

We still need to make the electricity.

by guappa 2y ago

We still need to make the electricity.

rho138 2y ago

Here comes the sun!

0xfae 2y ago

And the grid is getting greener and greener every year. An electric car bought today that is powered by a coal plant today will be powered by solar/hydro/wind more and more each year. A gas car will always run on fossil fuels.

SoftTalker 2y ago
Not necessarily, synthetic fuel is being developed for air transport and could also be used in internal combustion car engines. Not sure anyone is seriously working on it, and I don't know how the economics compare. One advantage would be that we already have the distribution infrastructure in place for liquid motor vehicle fuel. Our electrical infrastructure is going to need significant upgrading at least in places to handle charging if all vehicles are EVs.
vlovich123 2y ago
An electric car is also more efficient and grid fossil fuels are better than a small ICE. Still, I’m not really seeing the evidence that the grid is getting all that much greener. There’s a lot of solar capacity installed and yet every year we use more fossil fuels than the year before. It dents the growth a bit but it doesn’t seem to be doing a good job at replacing fossil fuels. We need more gen iv fission, not more renewables, to meaningfully displace fossil fuels. And no, it’s not more expensive than solar even today if you add the cost of batteries which everyone seems to ignore when comparing solar/wind to fission. As for hydro, that resource is fully tapped; all the available capacity is fully in use at a significant environmental cost. Geothermal might be a good one but it requires a massive shift in where cities are located which limits its utility (HVDC remains extremely expensive).
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  Battery prices are going down. Solar prices are going down. Wind prices are going down. Nuclear mostly is going sideways. This is also reflected by deployment, where renewables are on an exponential (logistic) curve and nuclear isn’t. Even in China, where nuclear is growing fastest, the curves look like this: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-behind-photovoltaics-and-wind-in-china/95924 https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-... TL;DR if fast deployment of low carbon sources is what you want, nuclear definitely is not the answer.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    The point of fission is that all that installed capacity is available 24/7. That isn’t true of wind and solar. So for baseload, fission is the only solution and that’s why China is building them. China fission prices have gone down by the way and it’s likely the world will soon start using their reactors because we let the coal industry kill our nuclear industry.
  - suoduandao3 2y ago
    That discrepancy is not surprising, given iteration times and cost of failure. Nuclear has great potential in space exploration, but it's never going to be economical when there are other options. It's no wonder pronuclear activists clog up any discussion of renewable energy, hoping to get some of that public subsidy money for themselves - they know the reactors can't pay for themselves by selling electricity alone.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      The cognitive dissonance involved to say that nuclear needs public subsidies to pay for themselves when wind and solar need the same is pretty wild. And again - wind and solar, with all those subsidies, continues to fail to displace fossil fuels in the grid because the costs continue to ignore the batteries required to supplant baseload (or argue that baseload is an archaic concept with the alternative being a completely different grid which would require a massive replacement). By comparison, France which went all nuclear in the 60s is completely off fossil fuels for their grid whereas companies that continue to go the renewables-only approach continue to see fossil fuel usage continue to grow even if the percentages remain flat.
randerson 2y ago
And even if an EV is powered by a coal plant, the air pollution is in industrial areas not the residential areas where people live, so there are health benefits regardless of the climate impact.

kalleboo 2y ago

The sun gives that to us for free. We need to figure out how to store and transport the electricity.

suoduandao3 2y ago
Batteries might work for storage, they have their own version of moore's law and will continue to get better and cheaper for a while. Now if only there were a way to bundle that energy storage with a means of transportation...
- vlovich123 2y ago
  You realize the irony of replying on a thread about an article saying we’ve grossly underestimated by 3x the amount of battery materials we’ll need? And that’s just for EVs, not grid batteries. Yes, there’s the far out idea of maybe we can use car batteries to do that role but our grid is not designed for it and there’s all sorts of other problems of that. Fission is a much saner cost effective solution that requires much fewer ancillary changes than renewables would to fully move the grid.
  - suoduandao3 2y ago
    If Fission is so great, go build it. I'm not stopping you. But use your own money or get off the podium.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      That’s such an uninteresting comment. Use your own money to get solar off the podium? Remember that solar received substantial subsidies to bootstrap via rooftop solar. And fission’s biggest problem isn’t necessarily funding but that there’s all sorts of regulations placed on it to stop it from being successful. So you can’t just go out and build your own nuclear plant.
      - suoduandao3 2y ago

vel0city 2y ago

My EV is charging at the moment. The current energy mix in my state is 24.3% solar, 15.2% wind, 7.4% nuclear. 46.9% of the energy going into my car right now comes from non-carbon sources. What percentage of non-carbon/renewable energy sources are going into my ICE next time I go to the pump? https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix This is all massively up from a decade ago. I wonder what percentage of non-carbon sources I'll have for my EV next decade. Do you think the non-carbon energy sources in my ICE will go down in a decade?

dingnuts 2y ago
does your calculation include the carbon needed to lubricate the wind turbines? how about the carbon in the solar cells, and the carbon that will be needed to dispose of them when they fail? I'd argue the mix of non-carbon energy going into your car is a lot closer to 7.4% -- just the nuclear. Wind and solar both require industrial processes, materials, and maintenance involving not insignificant amounts of oil. also: why are you charging your EV in the middle of the day in Texas, in the summer? ERCOT asks people to conserve energy; this guy charges his car. Maybe save your grid strain for the evening?
- vel0city 2y ago
  does your calculation include the carbon needed for all the concrete in the nuclear plants? does your calculation include the carbon needed for mining and refining the uranium in the reactor? does your calculation include the carbon needed for all the plant operators to drive their ICE vehicles to the plant every day? does your calculation include the mining needed for long term storage? Play enough games and throw no real numbers around and you can argue everything isn't renewable then. Are you really arguing that the lubrication needed for a turbine makes its overall carbon impact the same as natural gas or oil? Also, good job showing your ignorance of the Texas grid. ERCOT isn't asking people to conserve electricity at the moment buddy. Real-time spot prices are $24.65/MWh. We're nowhere near the committed capacity. There's lots of electricity available. Maybe save your comments for things you actually understand?
- 2y ago

Workaccount2 2y ago

The amount of harvestable energy from sustainable resources is a few orders of magnitude more than what is/was available from all the oil and gas that ever existed on Earth. The amount of energy that hits the Earth from the sun in one week alone is more than all oil and gas reserves on Earth combined. Twice over. We'll be fine.

vlovich123 2y ago
Harvesting that efficiently is still a problem and requires comparatively large tracts of land. More importantly time shifting that daytime solar is a huge problem and you can’t handwave it away; this article is talking about how we’ve grossly underestimated the amount of resources needed for vehicle EV while grid batteries would shift that even more. We might get lucky with a totally new battery chemistry, but battery chemistry moves relatively slowly.