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But we are. The world is moving rapidly there. 66% of daily electricity in Germany is renewable. California is building batteries at neck breaking speeds: htt

by oezi 2y ago

But we are. The world is moving rapidly there. 66% of daily electricity in Germany is renewable. California is building batteries at neck breaking speeds: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-clean-energy-victory-10000-megawatts-of-battery-storage/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-...

Manuel_D 2y ago
The point is, removing the remaining 1/3rd of fossil fuel production becomes a lot harder. The issue is that renewables other than hydro and geothermal are all intermittent. Build as many solar panels as you want, you're not going to satisfy nighttime demand without massive storage facilities. 10 GWh of storage is peanuts. That's what one nuclear plant produces in about 5 hours. The USA uses 500 GWh of electricity per hour.
- oezi 2y ago
  The first step is just to build enough renewables and enough battery to last one average day. That gets you to 95% of reducing CO2. Then you can think about if it even makes sense to replace those cloudy yet/windless days. We just need to spend on the most economic places to save CO2.
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    World electricity consumption is 60,000 GWh per day. "Last one average day" is much greater than existing battery production can satisfy - it's around 40x annual battery production to achieve just 12 hours of storage. And that's ignoring the fact that electric vehicles are consuming the vast majority of battery production. Making any serious efforts towards grid-storage would set back EV adoption.
    - oezi 2y ago
      It doesn't have to be so bleak. - Every EV purchased can be part of the solution by supporting vehicle to grid charging. - Annual production capacity can increase. IEA estimates 6,000 GWh per year will be manufactured in 2030. I am sure it will grow further. - We need way less than 60,000 GWh to provide batteries for an average day, because solar, wind, hydro are covering part of this.
      - Manuel_D 2y ago
        Using EV as grid storage is not feasible. One, many vehicles are used for business, utilities, and public transit. So they'll be driven during the day, and charged at night. This is going to increase load during hours of non-production, the opposite of storage. Two, no san grid operator is going to accept a situation where much of their storage capacity will just drive away for vacation, or in anticipation of a disaster. The predicted exponential rise is still an order of magnitude less than the scale required, and the vast majority of it is not going to grid storage. Wind is subject to intermittency, too. It's not a magic bullet that eliminates storage. Unless you're overprovisioning wind by a factor of 10 (in which case it's not cheap anymore), you'll still have weeks-long stretches where there is insufficient energy. Hydro is really the only non-intermittent carbon-free energy source besides geothermal and nuclear power. The reality is that wind and solar are only cheap in the context of a non-intermittent source that can fill in for the intermittency of renewable production. Running a minority of your grid on solar and wind, supplementing gas plants is one thing. Running a grid mostly wind and solar is totally different beast.
        oezi 2y ago
        But you can't deny the reality that the electricity supply is rapidly changing and that the issues of non-intermittency are turn out as not so relevant than anticipated. We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to. Batteries are helping us rely less on them and since cost of batteries and PV/wind is trending so strongly down, it is already happening that many markets prefer batteries over using gas/coal plants. This will push down CO2 emittance. That all that matters really (at reasonable cost).
        Manuel_D 2y ago
        > We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to. Not if you want to solve climate change. Reducing emissions to 50% of present levels and then just keeping them there isn't going to prevent climate change. Overproduction during peak hours doesn't help unless you have a way to release that energy in non-peak hours. Again, growing battery production isn't actually resulting in grid storage. Even dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage isn't going to make significant changes in grid storage, but it will stop EV adoption.
lucidludic 2y ago
> But we are. The world is moving rapidly there. 66% of daily electricity in Germany is renewable. In 2023 renewables made up 52% of power production in Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... The remainder being almost entirely fossil fuels including 25.6% from burning coal, largely necessary because Germany chose to phase out nuclear energy. Electricity is not the whole story either. Renewables accounted for less than 20% of Germany's primary energy consumption in 2023.

by oezi 2y ago

Manuel_D 2y ago

The point is, removing the remaining 1/3rd of fossil fuel production becomes a lot harder. The issue is that renewables other than hydro and geothermal are all intermittent. Build as many solar panels as you want, you're not going to satisfy nighttime demand without massive storage facilities. 10 GWh of storage is peanuts. That's what one nuclear plant produces in about 5 hours. The USA uses 500 GWh of electricity per hour.

oezi 2y ago
The first step is just to build enough renewables and enough battery to last one average day. That gets you to 95% of reducing CO2. Then you can think about if it even makes sense to replace those cloudy yet/windless days. We just need to spend on the most economic places to save CO2.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  World electricity consumption is 60,000 GWh per day. "Last one average day" is much greater than existing battery production can satisfy - it's around 40x annual battery production to achieve just 12 hours of storage. And that's ignoring the fact that electric vehicles are consuming the vast majority of battery production. Making any serious efforts towards grid-storage would set back EV adoption.
  - oezi 2y ago
    It doesn't have to be so bleak. - Every EV purchased can be part of the solution by supporting vehicle to grid charging. - Annual production capacity can increase. IEA estimates 6,000 GWh per year will be manufactured in 2030. I am sure it will grow further. - We need way less than 60,000 GWh to provide batteries for an average day, because solar, wind, hydro are covering part of this.
    - Manuel_D 2y ago
      Using EV as grid storage is not feasible. One, many vehicles are used for business, utilities, and public transit. So they'll be driven during the day, and charged at night. This is going to increase load during hours of non-production, the opposite of storage. Two, no san grid operator is going to accept a situation where much of their storage capacity will just drive away for vacation, or in anticipation of a disaster. The predicted exponential rise is still an order of magnitude less than the scale required, and the vast majority of it is not going to grid storage. Wind is subject to intermittency, too. It's not a magic bullet that eliminates storage. Unless you're overprovisioning wind by a factor of 10 (in which case it's not cheap anymore), you'll still have weeks-long stretches where there is insufficient energy. Hydro is really the only non-intermittent carbon-free energy source besides geothermal and nuclear power. The reality is that wind and solar are only cheap in the context of a non-intermittent source that can fill in for the intermittency of renewable production. Running a minority of your grid on solar and wind, supplementing gas plants is one thing. Running a grid mostly wind and solar is totally different beast.
      - oezi 2y ago
        But you can't deny the reality that the electricity supply is rapidly changing and that the issues of non-intermittency are turn out as not so relevant than anticipated. We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to. Batteries are helping us rely less on them and since cost of batteries and PV/wind is trending so strongly down, it is already happening that many markets prefer batteries over using gas/coal plants. This will push down CO2 emittance. That all that matters really (at reasonable cost).
        Manuel_D 2y ago
        > We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to. Not if you want to solve climate change. Reducing emissions to 50% of present levels and then just keeping them there isn't going to prevent climate change. Overproduction during peak hours doesn't help unless you have a way to release that energy in non-peak hours. Again, growing battery production isn't actually resulting in grid storage. Even dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage isn't going to make significant changes in grid storage, but it will stop EV adoption.

lucidludic 2y ago

> But we are. The world is moving rapidly there. 66% of daily electricity in Germany is renewable. In 2023 renewables made up 52% of power production in Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... The remainder being almost entirely fossil fuels including 25.6% from burning coal, largely necessary because Germany chose to phase out nuclear energy. Electricity is not the whole story either. Renewables accounted for less than 20% of Germany's primary energy consumption in 2023.