6 ms·

The bit how about incredibly quickly PV has grown is a figurative slap in the face to Vaclav Smil. He had just ten years earlier said PV wasn't going to grow q

The bit how about incredibly quickly PV has grown is a figurative slap in the face to Vaclav Smil. He had just ten years earlier said PV wasn't going to grow quickly because historically energy replacements took a long time. https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/scientificamerican0114-521.pdf https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/scientific... This retrospective on Smil's predictions four years ago is notable: https://www.quora.com/Is-Vaclav-Smil-right-in-his-criticisms-of-solar-energy https://www.quora.com/Is-Vaclav-Smil-right-in-his-criticisms... "To get 1 PWh/year of electricity you need to install about 450 GW worth of solar panels. You need dozens of years to acomplish such task. Reality check: 3 years in current speed, in the future probably faster." Indeed, as the thread top link shows in 2024 the world installed 595 GW of PV. As John Kenneth Galbraith said, "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."

looofooo0 2y ago
What people tend to forget is, that coal, oil and gas are all restricted by mining or drilling as the old are consumed, and it gets harder to access new oil wells etc. For PV there is no such limit (only copper basically, but this is recyclable and aluminum can do many tasks.) For batteries, there is lithium (lifepo4) and even that is questionable (sodium batteries) and again there is the potential for recycling. Hence, I do not see anything stopping the exponential growth of PV and batteries.
- Ringz 2y ago
  You are right. But one misconception I often read is that everyone focuses on batteries. It would make more sense in general to talk about energy storage instead of just batteries. Like Kinetic, chemical, thermal and so on. Batteries cannot be solely responsible for back-up. You need different types of storage: short term, medium term and long term storage. There are different concepts for each application. Batteries, compressed air storage, pumped storage, kinetic, thermal storage as well as power-to-X systems are able to absorb the increasing summer power and provide the energy again in the medium term or seasonally shifted. https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000445597 https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000445597
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    There are only three energy storage forms that are relevant for the next decade. All the others looked promising, but the learning curve on batteries has rendered them irrelevant. Your link is from 2020, it is out of date. The best energy storage form is "final form". Some energy products can be stored. For example if you are using the energy to create heat, you can store heat for use in the future. Heat storage sucks as a way to store energy destined for electricity, but is a great way to store energy destined for use as heat. The utility of batteries for daily storage is obvious and well proven. Thirdly, the best annual storage is pumped hydro. It's the cheapest and it can be used pretty much everywhere -- all you need is water at one end of an elevation change and a way to build storage at the other end. All the other forms that you'd think would fit in between the two are being quickly subsumed by the rapid price drops in battery pricing. The cutover points are rapidly shifting -- batteries are now cheapest for biweekly-ish. And the primary sources are getting so cheap that overbuilding is an alternative to storage. Rather than storing for the reduced amount of daylight in the winter, just overbuild. More overbuilding and a few days of storage will let you handle a stretch of cloudy, windless days in January. No annual storage required.
    - Ringz 2y ago
      Don’t get me wrong—I’d be all for batteries ruling the world if they were both affordable and technically advanced enough to meet various demands. That means they shouldn’t degrade too quickly, for example, when capturing and releasing wind energy in milliseconds. Or they shouldn’t lose too much energy over time due to self-discharge. Or they should be able to supply large amounts of energy instantly. Overbuilding is also a valid approach, especially in connection with a smart grid spanning multiple countries. All of that is fine. However, the point of the study is different, and that makes it still relevant today: The barrier to expanding energy storage isn’t a technical one—it’s a political one. The study also shows that there is a great deal of variability, and the often-used argument that there’s not enough lithium or rare earth elements doesn’t hold up. More recent studies validate different storage technologies depending on their specific use case, showing that they can complement batteries in a meaningful way—also from a financial perspective. Another perspective is that we still have a long way to go before full electrification. Right now, batteries are used in suitable scenarios, but many other areas haven’t been electrified or optimized at all. Other storage technologies might still become relevant. Building a house around a 20,000-liter tank to store energy for heating in Alaska over six months might already be financially and technically viable. But whether the logistical challenges of such solutions will ever make them truly feasible—that’s something I neither want nor can predict.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  PV doesn't require much copper, either. Maybe for front contact wires, if silver gets too expensive? But if it can afford to use silver now, copper won't be a huge ask (basically just need to deposit a barrier layer to keep the copper from reacting with the silicon.) The cables connecting PV to the grid, as well as the grid itself, can all use aluminum conductors. Even large transformers can be designed with aluminum if copper gets too expensive.
Ringz 2y ago
The IPCC & IEA grossly underestimates PV (and Wind) by any metric for years. Many scenarios assumed costs for 2050 that are already outdated today. In the same time they overestimate Nuclear Energy and carbon capture by any metric (debatable). It’s getting so bad that there are numerous studies about that problem. https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-solar-keeps-being-underestimated/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-solar-keeps-being... https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/31/solar-still-largely-underestimated/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/31/solar-still-largely-u... https://www.theenergymix.com/leading-climate-models-underestimate-clean-energy-progress-overstate-cost-study-finds/ https://www.theenergymix.com/leading-climate-models-underest... https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/iea-historically-underestimates-renewables-overestimates-fossils/ https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/iea-historicall...
- epistasis 2y ago
  I think a lot this comes down to huge cultural biases. And the two cultures are "hard energy" and "soft energy" folks. Coal, gas, fission, fusion, etc. are all hard energy. Coupled GDP and energy consumption was a core assumption. Renewables, energy efficiency, technological advancement via learning curves all fall under "soft energy". Most of the energy industry was hard energy because that's what paid everyone's bills. Any estimates that did not cater at least a bit to those biases would just be completely ignored. But there's another effect too: solar just completely outperforms even the most optimistic assessments. There's one famous solar financial analyst, whose name I'm blanking on, who continues to underestimate even though she knows the effect.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    It was also underestimation of China. Outright chauvinism there.
  - Ringz 2y ago
    iCal them „simple“ and „complex“ power. For someone who isn’t truly informed, a „Simple Energy“ solution seems much simpler than one based on renewable energy. With „simple“ power, solving climate change appears straightforward: just build more nuclear plants, which conveniently replace coal and gas on a 1:1 basis since they are baseload power generators. Renewable energy, on the other hand, is (for now, the transition time) complex. It requires a better, smarter, and much larger interconnected grid, as well as intelligent management of supply, demand, and storage. It means considering and understanding multiple aspects at once. This complexity often leads people who are convinced that more simple power is the answer to dismiss the idea of renewables too quickly—because nuclear seems so much simpler. I understand the appeal of simple energy. The sad part is that many people likely believe this is the scientifically correct position. And they are often so convinced that, even when presented with current studies and reasonable arguments against new nuclear plants, they quickly assume that the other person is just an irrational, biased anti-nuclear activist. After all, the simplest solution must also be the right one, right? Being informed in this context doesn’t just mean knowing the pros and cons of nuclear, wind, or solar power. It requires a deep understanding of what is technically and financially feasible today—including energy forms, grid transformation, storage solutions (not just lithium-ion batteries), follow-up costs, sustainability (mining, waste disposal), as well as political, economic, military, and social implications. And how all of these factors interact. But none of that is necessary if you just want to build more simple power plants. The transition to 100% renewable energy is as complex as the development of the internet. If we were still relying on letters, telephones, fax machines, newspapers, radio, and TV, the idea of transitioning to a globally available, instant multimedia internet would have seemed just as utopian and impossible.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
There is a lot of stuff that people said about this solar that got overtaken by reality. And some of those people were proponents even. People have underestimated economics, learning effects, and the effects of increased scale. Mostly the exponentials were actually pretty clear to some investors as early as 15 years ago. And the success those investors have had, has driven more investment. The thing with exponential trends is that doubling a little bit results in a little bit more. It doesn't add up to something people notice until suddenly it jumps from fractions of a percent, to full percents, to double digit percentages in the space of a few years. That threshold got crossed a few years ago and people started to notice. And that's now leading to further price drops and more adoption. Of course, it's not a real exponential but an s-curve. But until the curve flattens, you won't be able to tell the difference. Back of the envelope calculations can be misleading because they tend over simplify and make silly assumptions. Like assuming we are going to move 100% of energy to solar all at once. In reality, what we're doing is a decades long transition where most of the decision making is cost driven and the energy supply is coming from mixed sources. We don't have just solar. We have existing nuclear. Existing deployments of coal and gas, which like them or not are not going to disappear overnight. And a lot of onshore and offshore wind. And a rapidly growing amount of batteries and cables which give us the ability to time shift supply and demand and move energy around over large distances. The world's electricity consumption is about 30 PWh per year and will probably grow to 35 or 40 soonish. Most of that growth (>90%) will be powered by renewables. It's outgrowing everything else by a large margin. And because they are cheaper, there is also pressure to replace existing generation with renewables. That basically happens based on cost and age of plants. This is another effect that people keep underestimating. The reason coal generation is rapidly disappearing from many markets (and is completely gone in some of them) is that replacing them with cheap renewables is cheaper than continuing to operate them. That same effect is going to affect gas generation. Anyone building gas plants with the expectation that they'll have a 60 year life span is dreaming at this point. These investments should be considered as under water at this point. By the 2050s, most currently new gas plants will have probably have been mothballed (maybe kept around as rarely used peaker plants) or demolished. They are simply too expensive to operate relative to renewables. Some places keep gas prices low via subsidies (the US for example). But even there gas plants are going to face a reality check. And for a lot of countries, gas imports are a drag on their economy. Germany is a good example. Worth observing what investors do here. They tend to have long term outlooks.
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
Smil was just bullshitting though, really poor quality arguments made for rhetorical effect with a side helping of smug fake reasonableness. He's a cranky old academic propelled to fame because he said what the establishment wanted to hear like an energy Jordan Peterson.

looofooo0 2y ago

What people tend to forget is, that coal, oil and gas are all restricted by mining or drilling as the old are consumed, and it gets harder to access new oil wells etc. For PV there is no such limit (only copper basically, but this is recyclable and aluminum can do many tasks.) For batteries, there is lithium (lifepo4) and even that is questionable (sodium batteries) and again there is the potential for recycling. Hence, I do not see anything stopping the exponential growth of PV and batteries.

Ringz 2y ago
You are right. But one misconception I often read is that everyone focuses on batteries. It would make more sense in general to talk about energy storage instead of just batteries. Like Kinetic, chemical, thermal and so on. Batteries cannot be solely responsible for back-up. You need different types of storage: short term, medium term and long term storage. There are different concepts for each application. Batteries, compressed air storage, pumped storage, kinetic, thermal storage as well as power-to-X systems are able to absorb the increasing summer power and provide the energy again in the medium term or seasonally shifted. https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000445597 https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000445597
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  There are only three energy storage forms that are relevant for the next decade. All the others looked promising, but the learning curve on batteries has rendered them irrelevant. Your link is from 2020, it is out of date. The best energy storage form is "final form". Some energy products can be stored. For example if you are using the energy to create heat, you can store heat for use in the future. Heat storage sucks as a way to store energy destined for electricity, but is a great way to store energy destined for use as heat. The utility of batteries for daily storage is obvious and well proven. Thirdly, the best annual storage is pumped hydro. It's the cheapest and it can be used pretty much everywhere -- all you need is water at one end of an elevation change and a way to build storage at the other end. All the other forms that you'd think would fit in between the two are being quickly subsumed by the rapid price drops in battery pricing. The cutover points are rapidly shifting -- batteries are now cheapest for biweekly-ish. And the primary sources are getting so cheap that overbuilding is an alternative to storage. Rather than storing for the reduced amount of daylight in the winter, just overbuild. More overbuilding and a few days of storage will let you handle a stretch of cloudy, windless days in January. No annual storage required.
  - Ringz 2y ago
    Don’t get me wrong—I’d be all for batteries ruling the world if they were both affordable and technically advanced enough to meet various demands. That means they shouldn’t degrade too quickly, for example, when capturing and releasing wind energy in milliseconds. Or they shouldn’t lose too much energy over time due to self-discharge. Or they should be able to supply large amounts of energy instantly. Overbuilding is also a valid approach, especially in connection with a smart grid spanning multiple countries. All of that is fine. However, the point of the study is different, and that makes it still relevant today: The barrier to expanding energy storage isn’t a technical one—it’s a political one. The study also shows that there is a great deal of variability, and the often-used argument that there’s not enough lithium or rare earth elements doesn’t hold up. More recent studies validate different storage technologies depending on their specific use case, showing that they can complement batteries in a meaningful way—also from a financial perspective. Another perspective is that we still have a long way to go before full electrification. Right now, batteries are used in suitable scenarios, but many other areas haven’t been electrified or optimized at all. Other storage technologies might still become relevant. Building a house around a 20,000-liter tank to store energy for heating in Alaska over six months might already be financially and technically viable. But whether the logistical challenges of such solutions will ever make them truly feasible—that’s something I neither want nor can predict.
pfdietz 2y ago
PV doesn't require much copper, either. Maybe for front contact wires, if silver gets too expensive? But if it can afford to use silver now, copper won't be a huge ask (basically just need to deposit a barrier layer to keep the copper from reacting with the silicon.) The cables connecting PV to the grid, as well as the grid itself, can all use aluminum conductors. Even large transformers can be designed with aluminum if copper gets too expensive.

Ringz 2y ago

The IPCC & IEA grossly underestimates PV (and Wind) by any metric for years. Many scenarios assumed costs for 2050 that are already outdated today. In the same time they overestimate Nuclear Energy and carbon capture by any metric (debatable). It’s getting so bad that there are numerous studies about that problem. https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-solar-keeps-being-underestimated/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-solar-keeps-being... https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/31/solar-still-largely-underestimated/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/31/solar-still-largely-u... https://www.theenergymix.com/leading-climate-models-underestimate-clean-energy-progress-overstate-cost-study-finds/ https://www.theenergymix.com/leading-climate-models-underest... https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/iea-historically-underestimates-renewables-overestimates-fossils/ https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/iea-historicall...

epistasis 2y ago
I think a lot this comes down to huge cultural biases. And the two cultures are "hard energy" and "soft energy" folks. Coal, gas, fission, fusion, etc. are all hard energy. Coupled GDP and energy consumption was a core assumption. Renewables, energy efficiency, technological advancement via learning curves all fall under "soft energy". Most of the energy industry was hard energy because that's what paid everyone's bills. Any estimates that did not cater at least a bit to those biases would just be completely ignored. But there's another effect too: solar just completely outperforms even the most optimistic assessments. There's one famous solar financial analyst, whose name I'm blanking on, who continues to underestimate even though she knows the effect.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  It was also underestimation of China. Outright chauvinism there.
- Ringz 2y ago
  iCal them „simple“ and „complex“ power. For someone who isn’t truly informed, a „Simple Energy“ solution seems much simpler than one based on renewable energy. With „simple“ power, solving climate change appears straightforward: just build more nuclear plants, which conveniently replace coal and gas on a 1:1 basis since they are baseload power generators. Renewable energy, on the other hand, is (for now, the transition time) complex. It requires a better, smarter, and much larger interconnected grid, as well as intelligent management of supply, demand, and storage. It means considering and understanding multiple aspects at once. This complexity often leads people who are convinced that more simple power is the answer to dismiss the idea of renewables too quickly—because nuclear seems so much simpler. I understand the appeal of simple energy. The sad part is that many people likely believe this is the scientifically correct position. And they are often so convinced that, even when presented with current studies and reasonable arguments against new nuclear plants, they quickly assume that the other person is just an irrational, biased anti-nuclear activist. After all, the simplest solution must also be the right one, right? Being informed in this context doesn’t just mean knowing the pros and cons of nuclear, wind, or solar power. It requires a deep understanding of what is technically and financially feasible today—including energy forms, grid transformation, storage solutions (not just lithium-ion batteries), follow-up costs, sustainability (mining, waste disposal), as well as political, economic, military, and social implications. And how all of these factors interact. But none of that is necessary if you just want to build more simple power plants. The transition to 100% renewable energy is as complex as the development of the internet. If we were still relying on letters, telephones, fax machines, newspapers, radio, and TV, the idea of transitioning to a globally available, instant multimedia internet would have seemed just as utopian and impossible.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

There is a lot of stuff that people said about this solar that got overtaken by reality. And some of those people were proponents even. People have underestimated economics, learning effects, and the effects of increased scale. Mostly the exponentials were actually pretty clear to some investors as early as 15 years ago. And the success those investors have had, has driven more investment. The thing with exponential trends is that doubling a little bit results in a little bit more. It doesn't add up to something people notice until suddenly it jumps from fractions of a percent, to full percents, to double digit percentages in the space of a few years. That threshold got crossed a few years ago and people started to notice. And that's now leading to further price drops and more adoption. Of course, it's not a real exponential but an s-curve. But until the curve flattens, you won't be able to tell the difference. Back of the envelope calculations can be misleading because they tend over simplify and make silly assumptions. Like assuming we are going to move 100% of energy to solar all at once. In reality, what we're doing is a decades long transition where most of the decision making is cost driven and the energy supply is coming from mixed sources. We don't have just solar. We have existing nuclear. Existing deployments of coal and gas, which like them or not are not going to disappear overnight. And a lot of onshore and offshore wind. And a rapidly growing amount of batteries and cables which give us the ability to time shift supply and demand and move energy around over large distances. The world's electricity consumption is about 30 PWh per year and will probably grow to 35 or 40 soonish. Most of that growth (>90%) will be powered by renewables. It's outgrowing everything else by a large margin. And because they are cheaper, there is also pressure to replace existing generation with renewables. That basically happens based on cost and age of plants. This is another effect that people keep underestimating. The reason coal generation is rapidly disappearing from many markets (and is completely gone in some of them) is that replacing them with cheap renewables is cheaper than continuing to operate them. That same effect is going to affect gas generation. Anyone building gas plants with the expectation that they'll have a 60 year life span is dreaming at this point. These investments should be considered as under water at this point. By the 2050s, most currently new gas plants will have probably have been mothballed (maybe kept around as rarely used peaker plants) or demolished. They are simply too expensive to operate relative to renewables. Some places keep gas prices low via subsidies (the US for example). But even there gas plants are going to face a reality check. And for a lot of countries, gas imports are a drag on their economy. Germany is a good example. Worth observing what investors do here. They tend to have long term outlooks.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

Smil was just bullshitting though, really poor quality arguments made for rhetorical effect with a side helping of smug fake reasonableness. He's a cranky old academic propelled to fame because he said what the establishment wanted to hear like an energy Jordan Peterson.