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Does this mean that we are closer to replacing fossil fuels? It seems as though for energy we could do it now if we wanted, yet we still obsess about fracking

Does this mean that we are closer to replacing fossil fuels? It seems as though for energy we could do it now if we wanted, yet we still obsess about fracking and to a lesser extent middle eastern oil? The cost difference is certainly not the reason we don't dive in and make these changes. Those in charge still seem to be of a 'secure the oil and the heroin' and you rule the world. Oh dear -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW3XeT7qavo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW3XeT7qavo

stouset 12y ago
Replacing fossil fuels is not as simple as having high-efficiency solar panels (which these may not be when converting sunlight to electricity instead of heat). Fossil fuels also have the advantage of having extremely high energy density. They can be transported cheaply and efficiently and they store well. Electricity suffers large losses when being transported long distances directly, and batteries are significantly heavier per kWh. Batteries also degrade over time, are expensive to replace, and often require substances that can be as (or more) destructive to mine than oil is to burn.
- andy_ppp 12y ago
  I think Tesla kind of prove that all of these problems can be overcome in cars. To address your point on storing intermittent energy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity It's about 80% efficient and would probably get more so. So you can solve the storage and intermittency problems of non fossil fuel storage pretty simply.
  - hueving 12y ago
    Tesla has not proved that at all. You are completely ignoring the fact that they have no cheap solution to the batteries going bad. That's why there is no pricing available on battery replacements and why they have to have the depreciation matching program with gas cars.
  - afarrell 12y ago
    Pumped storage is cool for daily cycles, but the real source of electricity storage is going to be bigass batteries that can respond to demand as quickly as a natural gas turbine: http://www.ambri.com/technology/ http://www.ambri.com/technology/
  - stouset 12y ago
    Pumped hydro has nowhere near the capacity necessary to consider it a complete solution to long-term energy storage[1]. Tesla has shown that batteries can be viable in some cases (e.g., passenger vehicles), but that is but a tiny fraction of the cases where the versatility, mobility, and energy density of fossil fuels are used. Virtually all other long-haul transport (passenger flight and cargo hauling for example) uses them exclusively for starters. Nothing about transitioning away from fossil fuels is "simple", and it's likely to involve a patchwork of partial solutions[2]. [1]: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor... [2]: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-...
  - baddox 12y ago
    Hardly all the problems are solved. The holiday road trip I just took, from Missouri to Virginia and back, would be effectively impossible on the current Supercharger network, and would take much longer on the 2015 planned Supercharger network. When there's a dense network of battery hot swap stations, then perhaps.
ajuc 12y ago
The problem with renewables lies in unpredictability of wind power and photovoltaics, and in transmission infrastructure designed for predictable (and controllable) power sources. We don't have good storage for electricity at the scale that is needed, not within few orders of magnitude, so at all times energy produced must be equal to energy used (the available storage is insignificant globaly, it is very expansive and is limited by geography - basicaly we can pump water upstream and let it flow back through turbines - this is only possible when you have a lot of water and some place much lower, where it can safely go, and it's still not cheap). Additionaly each transmission line has maximum capacity and it will destruct itself if you try to send more. With old-style energy sources we had baseload produced by water dams, coal, gas and nuclear plants, and peak load produced by plants that can be quickly (in less than 30 minutes) switched to produce more or less energy depending on demand - these are usually gas or coal powerplants. So with average demand for X, and peak deamd of Y you need X of stable powerplants and (Y-X) of controllable powerplants. Network is designed around that Y, using assumptions that power is divided into smaller and smaller lines from source to destination. Only thanks to that, and to accurate predicting of demand by each level of power distribution hierarchy (I know about details of Polish system, but I guess it's similar everywhere) - the system works. If you just swap 1000 MW of coal/gas/nuclear baseload plants with on-average 1000 MW of photovoltaics or wind turbines - you will literaly destroy your energy network. Half of the time it will produce too much energy (which results in blackouts and costly repairs), the rest of the time you will have blackouts because of not enough energy produced. You need to prepare infrastructure for that. You need to adjust the whole network to bigger load, and to change the network topology from "connected stars" to peer-to-peer (or at least orders of magnitude more stars, connected orders of mganitude more intimately), and you need to expand the transmission lines a lot, because the only way to provide baseload with renewables is to average out production from a lot of places with different weather. Right now electric networks aren't designed for that, and upgrading the whole infrastracture is going to be very expansive. Germany is trying to do that - props to them, but in the meantime they are kinda problematic to their neighbors, because when they cannot deal with excess energy produced by renewables - they dump in on Polish, Czech,etc networks. Germany needs to pay for that (too much power is exactly as bad as not enough power - Polish and Czech controllable powerplants need to adjust production because of that and it costs both ways, also routing the power through the lines need to change because some lines may exceed capacity with that additional energy, and that cascades through the whole network. Energy distribution is organised in such a way, that when somebody predicted demand or production wrong - they pay for the rebalancing of network caused by that. Sorry for wall of text...
venomsnake 12y ago
We could replace fossil fuels even today everywhere (with enough capital investment) ... except air travel - we are 3 or 4 major breakthroughs away from that.
danielweber 12y ago
With an energy source, you can manufacture fossil fuels from atmospheric carbon, giving you carbon-neutral fossil fuels. The goal is to substantially reduce the CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere, not to just talk about how People Like Us are better than Those Fossil Fuel People, right?

stouset 12y ago

Replacing fossil fuels is not as simple as having high-efficiency solar panels (which these may not be when converting sunlight to electricity instead of heat). Fossil fuels also have the advantage of having extremely high energy density. They can be transported cheaply and efficiently and they store well. Electricity suffers large losses when being transported long distances directly, and batteries are significantly heavier per kWh. Batteries also degrade over time, are expensive to replace, and often require substances that can be as (or more) destructive to mine than oil is to burn.

andy_ppp 12y ago
I think Tesla kind of prove that all of these problems can be overcome in cars. To address your point on storing intermittent energy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity It's about 80% efficient and would probably get more so. So you can solve the storage and intermittency problems of non fossil fuel storage pretty simply.
- hueving 12y ago
  Tesla has not proved that at all. You are completely ignoring the fact that they have no cheap solution to the batteries going bad. That's why there is no pricing available on battery replacements and why they have to have the depreciation matching program with gas cars.
- afarrell 12y ago
  Pumped storage is cool for daily cycles, but the real source of electricity storage is going to be bigass batteries that can respond to demand as quickly as a natural gas turbine: http://www.ambri.com/technology/ http://www.ambri.com/technology/
- stouset 12y ago
  Pumped hydro has nowhere near the capacity necessary to consider it a complete solution to long-term energy storage[1]. Tesla has shown that batteries can be viable in some cases (e.g., passenger vehicles), but that is but a tiny fraction of the cases where the versatility, mobility, and energy density of fossil fuels are used. Virtually all other long-haul transport (passenger flight and cargo hauling for example) uses them exclusively for starters. Nothing about transitioning away from fossil fuels is "simple", and it's likely to involve a patchwork of partial solutions[2]. [1]: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor... [2]: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-...
- baddox 12y ago
  Hardly all the problems are solved. The holiday road trip I just took, from Missouri to Virginia and back, would be effectively impossible on the current Supercharger network, and would take much longer on the 2015 planned Supercharger network. When there's a dense network of battery hot swap stations, then perhaps.

ajuc 12y ago

The problem with renewables lies in unpredictability of wind power and photovoltaics, and in transmission infrastructure designed for predictable (and controllable) power sources. We don't have good storage for electricity at the scale that is needed, not within few orders of magnitude, so at all times energy produced must be equal to energy used (the available storage is insignificant globaly, it is very expansive and is limited by geography - basicaly we can pump water upstream and let it flow back through turbines - this is only possible when you have a lot of water and some place much lower, where it can safely go, and it's still not cheap). Additionaly each transmission line has maximum capacity and it will destruct itself if you try to send more. With old-style energy sources we had baseload produced by water dams, coal, gas and nuclear plants, and peak load produced by plants that can be quickly (in less than 30 minutes) switched to produce more or less energy depending on demand - these are usually gas or coal powerplants. So with average demand for X, and peak deamd of Y you need X of stable powerplants and (Y-X) of controllable powerplants. Network is designed around that Y, using assumptions that power is divided into smaller and smaller lines from source to destination. Only thanks to that, and to accurate predicting of demand by each level of power distribution hierarchy (I know about details of Polish system, but I guess it's similar everywhere) - the system works. If you just swap 1000 MW of coal/gas/nuclear baseload plants with on-average 1000 MW of photovoltaics or wind turbines - you will literaly destroy your energy network. Half of the time it will produce too much energy (which results in blackouts and costly repairs), the rest of the time you will have blackouts because of not enough energy produced. You need to prepare infrastructure for that. You need to adjust the whole network to bigger load, and to change the network topology from "connected stars" to peer-to-peer (or at least orders of magnitude more stars, connected orders of mganitude more intimately), and you need to expand the transmission lines a lot, because the only way to provide baseload with renewables is to average out production from a lot of places with different weather. Right now electric networks aren't designed for that, and upgrading the whole infrastracture is going to be very expansive. Germany is trying to do that - props to them, but in the meantime they are kinda problematic to their neighbors, because when they cannot deal with excess energy produced by renewables - they dump in on Polish, Czech,etc networks. Germany needs to pay for that (too much power is exactly as bad as not enough power - Polish and Czech controllable powerplants need to adjust production because of that and it costs both ways, also routing the power through the lines need to change because some lines may exceed capacity with that additional energy, and that cascades through the whole network. Energy distribution is organised in such a way, that when somebody predicted demand or production wrong - they pay for the rebalancing of network caused by that. Sorry for wall of text...

venomsnake 12y ago

We could replace fossil fuels even today everywhere (with enough capital investment) ... except air travel - we are 3 or 4 major breakthroughs away from that.

danielweber 12y ago

With an energy source, you can manufacture fossil fuels from atmospheric carbon, giving you carbon-neutral fossil fuels. The goal is to substantially reduce the CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere, not to just talk about how People Like Us are better than Those Fossil Fuel People, right?