Hi Noah. I have only one point of disagreement after reading this: Under your "Sustainability" section you state, "the supply of sunlight is not limited".
I must reluctantly disagree. Our supply of sunlight is most certainly limited ... to about 3 billion years of the Sun shining tops.
Of course, our problems are a lot bigger than sustainable energy supply long before the Sun becomes a red giant.
Respectfully,
Guy who won't be around by then and who is OK with that.
The last point about sustainability is a huge one. Everyone knows that contact with nature has a huge impact on wellbeing, you can tell that whenever a king parrot flies into your back yard and everyone smiles. I saw one study that said 10% increase in local bird life is as good as a 10% increase in income. We also know there’s an obvious connection between nature and mental health. But the whole topic is woefully understudied.
You also made the point elsewhere that by over building solar, say, you can start doing stuff with the otherwise "wasted" power, like mining bitcoins for profit, without trashing the environment. Obviously being frugal with baseline needs like heat and light is always a good thing. Actually, there are lots of more useful things to do with cheap excess power, like making hydrogen, maybe carbon capture. Others?
It would seem that, like a bubble, the end of a stagnation would be hard to see while you're in it. The work of the previous 2 decades are now leading to a more visible exit of stagnation today.
Must admit I haven't read the literature on "stagnation" but between what I have seen on Noah's blog here, and the divinity blog the examples of stagnation is not very wide ranging.
I mean, what is stagnation? What is technology? "Technology" is an incredibly wide subject. Improvement is also subject to absolute physical limits. Both of the examples dealt with at length, are probably close to their physical limits. (Human longevity, and Moore's Law).
My uninformed belief is that the the future of productivity growth will largely lie in systemic thinking and implementation, like the hydrogen valleys that are taking off in Europe and the rest of the world. Even developing countries like South Africa are joining in, with their platinum valley.
"The marginal benefit of each solar panel is dropping with each installation" <-- That's wrong, because of scaling effects. I linked to some posts explaining why this is wrong.
"All the progress made on emissions in the developed world is due to the switch from coal to natural gas" <-- Natural gas was a bridge fuel, but its time will sunset soon
"There is no feasible plan to get us down to zero net emission by 2050 that doesn't involve a lot of nuclear power" <-- Source??
"That's wrong, because of scaling effects. I linked to some posts explaining why this is wrong." <-- I don't see anything showing how the marginal benefits of solar installations are increasing. It would be amazing if they did as it would fly in the face of logic and basic reasoning as well as the law of diminishing marginal utility.
"Natural gas was a bridge fuel, but its time will sunset soon" <--Source?
"Source??" <-- you want me to provide evidence that something that has never been achieved ever anywhere on any scale is infeasible? What else should I prove wont work? I would have thought that the burden would be on you to demonstrate a feasible plan to get us down to net zero by 2050 without using (large amounts) of nuclear power.
The problem is not "how do we generate a sizeable portion of our total electricity with solar" - that is easy, just keep installing panels till you hit 10%. The problem is carbon emissions (something you don't mention once in your post) and how we reduce them. Solar Power is barely reducing emissions at all. It has limited capacity to reduce emissions because it isn't able to actually replace the energy we currently use which produce emissions.
It also actually grows less effective (from an already low base) at reducing emissions as we install more of it - just look at the wholesale price of electricity in Germany in mid summer - they are paying people to take solar electricity during the day because it is basically worthless. That generation is not displacing any emissions.
This is also the reason why the cost reduction of solar arent having any effect on productivity - it is because they are an added cost - they arent displacing the old costs of electricity generation. You're argument falls down as soon as you look at Germany which on the surface looks to get a huge amount of electricity from solar. By your logic they should be enjoying huge productivity boost from this cheap electricity. They arent because they are still paying for so much energy from the previous sources.
Noah agrees with your first point (solar isn't currently contributing much: I particularly liked his point that no matter how cheap a technology is, it doesn't have any macro effect until it's deployed at massive scale.), and I strongly agree with your last point.
Here in Tokyo, when the sun is out, it's out, but it goes away for (usually, during rainy season) for a month at a time (this varies between no rainy season and two months of rain). And the rainy season effect covers most of Japan, oops.
Here in Japan, if you buy an "electric" car, it's actually running on coal, since after the Fukushima disaster, Japan's been slow to bring it's nuclear sites back up, and since natural gas is expensive to ship to Japan, Japan burns a lot of coal. Sigh.
Another point: I wonder if solar can continue to decline in price? The panels are now so cheap that the cost of the supports (including installation costs), control systems, and connections to the grid are now a major component of the total cost, so making the panels even cheaper may not help much.
The US has lots of wind (in the center of the country and offshore) and is large enough that the sun will be out somewhere most of the day, so a renewable dream isn't hopeless for the US, but Japan is much harder. Japan really needs to get over its nuclear allergy. Sigh.
Yeah, cost breakdowns for installs are weird like that. I actually read a report not many years back that listed "customer acquisition" as one of the top costs.
It is weird to think of "advertising" as a drag on cost parity and clean energy. But if you're trying to sell an energy source to a million homeowners instead of just one municipality, it makes weird sense that would be a bottleneck.
Tbh we should stop focusing on incentives for boutique home installs on weird steep roofs and instead blanket them on all commercial rooftops through regs or subsidies. You've heard of "rails to trails?" How about "dead malls to solar farms?" Fill in their parking lots too, sure. Drop those install costs with big flat surfaces and scale per installation.
California (like Germany before it) reveals why the transition to renewables runs into difficulties of cost and reliability at system level unless our decarbonization plans include flexible and diverse energy resources: https://slate.com/technology/2020/08/california-blackouts-wind-solar-renewable-energy-grid.html and to go deeper, Jesse Jenkins and his colleagues at Princeton have been modeling and publishing about the systems cost/ reliability implications of various mixes of resources.
Wow you really are brilliant. Of course the country that produces the most solar panels and completely distorts prices. That's not going into these calculations at all. https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/cjas/article/view/4813
Which then has the cost going up exponentially. We are at least 20 years (if ever) away from batteries hitting that price point. I still am waiting to hear how we HEAT and Power Minneapolis during a week long windless 2 foot snow storm. That one city alone would require roughly double the capacity of all the batteries currently existing in the world. There is zero chance we get anywhere without a massive ramp up of nuclear.
In part, through heat pumps, which are stunningly efficient, even in cold air, like five times moreso than just burning the fuel onsite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto
You're never going to cover seasonal variation with storage. It's going to be some combination of long distance transmission from the south, wind (which tends to do better in winter), dispatchable stuff like hydro, and overbuilding so you're getting non-trivial output from solar in the winter.
Can you either write, or point to some report that actually incorporates battery costs/constraints into their solar energy analysis? It's all well and good to say that battery costs are decreasing, but I've looked and I can't find anyone that does an estimate of total costs of a solar-only system that would achieve, say, 99% uptime, in say, pheonix or boston. And then project that out using current trends, and optimistic/pessimistic scenarios 20-50 years in the future.
The issue isn't that solar-only can't be done, or won't be better in 50 years, but that we need to start shifting away from fossil fuels in a big way very quickly, and really eliminate fossil fuels, not just eliminate their use during the day. Which means it really matters if solar-only can work well within 20 years or 50 years, or 100 years.
If it's 50-100, then if we really should be doing nuclear, until either solar-only or fusion becomes tenable. The downside of that is that nuclear has much higher capital costs, and much lower fuel costs then fossil fuels, which means it won't coexist efficiently with day-only solar.
For seasonal and weather variation, yes, it's all overbuilding. Although I'd be curious to know by how much, it seems like 2x-4x would be enough even in say Boston, which is fine IMO.
But day/night variation, no, you really do need storage. So then you have to know what's difference between day and night usage, how much could it be shifted without serious problems, etc. Hence why I'd really hope to find some big report that actually tries to math this out.
Future energy needs and decarbonisation is not just about solar/wind, and batteries. Currently 95% of hydrogen is produced from fossilised carbon sources. That needs to be replaced with green hydrogen. And then at least ten times more hydrogen is needed to use in green manufacturing of steel and iron, and maybe other ore reduction, to use as heat source for manufacturing and home heating, to use in the manufacture of ammonia and methane, and also, incidentally as a store of energy: either to generate electricity, as fuel cells in FCEVs, or to combust directly.
See the Danish Hydrogen Valley and there implementation of "Smart Energy Systems" for an example of how hydrogen, hydrogen storage, biomass, geothermal energy and heat storage supplement each other for a sustainable, integrated and reliable energy grid. (Not electricity grid.)
The thing about hydrogen is that with current feasible catalysts there isn't a very efficient way to create it, without losing a lot of energy in the conversion. Of course, there's a bunch of people working on this, but there's a bunch of people working on all these issues, and no guarantee of success in a short time horizon.
I'm actually fairly well aware of the state of the scientific research (I do physics/chemistry for a living), but what I've been trying to find is people who really put numbers on what can currently be done industrially, and not what you can do with a small company or in the lab.
Unlike the production side, where there's been clear evidence that solar/wind is going to surpass fossil fuels fairly quickly, all the stuff I've seen on storage has been pretty hand-wavy. And it shouldn't be all that difficult to put meaningful numbers on it.
The "magic number" for hydrogen is $2 per kg, currently it is not far above that. In Germany specifically, green hydrogen is already cheaper than grey hydrogen produced in small and medium scale installations. It is only large industrial scale grey hydrogen production that is cheaper.
The Danish valley I mentioned above, includes a green hydrogen facility, that over and above the normal supply of hydrogen to industry, doubles as an electricity store. It is fast enough to switch supply/uptake to/from the electricity grid in less than 10 seconds.
The proof of concept (1.4MW) was finished late 2020. The design is now used as a base for a 20MW installation in Canada.
OK so you lose 2/3 of the energy through the hydrogen electrolysis, storage and redox process. That means it only makes sense if the power price is very low, say under $10/MWh. Well, the amount of such power is greater every day as we switch to renewables, and the price is often even negative. So we build electrolysers. And we know from BNEF that the cost of electrolysers can be incredibly cheap (already is in China) so we don’t mind if our electrolyser doesn’t run most of the time. Ditto tanks and fuel cells. I don’t think it’s hand wavy, I think it’s quite scalable. Look at Enapter. It just hasn’t had the economic incentive to break out of cottage industry mode until now.
A better way to look at hydrogen, decarbonisation and energy storage is holistically. As I pointed out above, hydrogen has MANY uses in the hydrogen economy. There is no need to stop and start hydrogen production, it can be always produced for industrial purposes.
Produce some excess inventory, and you already have gone a some way to overcome intra day needs. Put a lot into a salt cavern, another proven technology, and you have solved your intra seasonal storage problem as well.
Denmark has salt caverns that can store 25% of their ANNUAL requirement.
Christopher Null at WIRED has been trying to write about total cost of ownership of a new solar system. It's not pure solar or 99% uptime. His bottom line is that it's currently not performing as efficiently as advertised.
That doesn't mean these things aren't getting better, but there's always buzz that you can make a home more efficient with the latest technology, and it's hard to trust that people selling the systems aren't rounding the breakeven points a bit.
Projects that are financed and paid off through your future utility bill reductions are probably the best way to keep these honest.
I don’t think anyone has modeled a solar and battery only system as that would as you say he very expensive. Most zero carbon models assume a mix of PV, wind, biogas, battery, pumped hydro, geo, demand response, HVDC, hydro and old nuclear. Hydrogen storage tends to be left out but I expect that will look much more economically rational after the green stimulus works it’s way through.
OK, well at least we're talking the same language here.
I'll admit that hydrogen storage had completely fallen off my radar, I remember it being a big deal ~10-20 years ago when it seemed like hydrogen fuel batteries would be the way to go for vehicles. Advances in batteries, and the fact that hydrogen is explosive have pretty much ended that line of research, but you're right that that doesn't mean it's not doable as storage.
The thing is, this 70-80% efficiency number is just the energy loss during electrolysis, you have to add the combustion, as well as storage (you'd probably have to liquify or pressurize it, even overnight) to get the final number. And at least in my 20 mins of google sleuthing I couldn't find any hard numbers on that, probably because all the old stuff assumes it'll be used as a gas substitute in vehicles.
Still, those losses probably won't bring it down below something like 40-50% loss, and I'll admit that's pretty much on the order where it could work, so long as you're right about the infrastructure itself being very low cost.
I still don't see how it's going to beat nuclear, but it'll be close enough to not be too much of a disaster if the politics of nuclear can't be worked out. I would love to see a paper where people really do math this out though.
What helped for me is to read some of Australia’s CSIRO research on hydrogen techno economics. You can see their assumptions re cost of electrolysers (say $1k per kw or more). If you then look at real world cost of electrolysers and the annual rate of decline, you can make you own guess about cost of hydrogen. BNEF has done some guesses, but not in public domain.
Noah, what do you think about modern nuclear fission reactors? They seem to be more efficient, more compact than solar or wind. Solar and wind damage the ecosystems where they're placed. NPPs built with modern techniques in design and engineering are mechanically safe. Off by default. The cost of making them seems to me to be in the regulatory process and the overabundance of criteria they have to meet. Geothermal seems to be in a stage of growth too and for it the argument of permanent pollution is out the door. What's your view of nuclear & geothermal in comparison to wind & solar?
They've gotten too expensive, partly due (I think) to the need to build giant well-guarded security perimeters around them to protect them from terrorist attack.
Nuclear is very expensive, despite benefiting from generous support from the DOE. Also, 24/7 power is not particularly valuable relative to dispatchable power.
Oh, and one techno-pessimist argument about green tech that you didn't really adress is the argument about extractivism/"green" resource wars(basically: that wars for fossil fuel will be replaced by wars for minerals or the emergence of states that use their mastery over renewables for leverage). I'd counter:
Being good at making solar panels doesn't really give any country the kind of leverage that current control over fossil fuels gets you. If your acces to fossil fuels gets cut off today then you potentially can't feed your people, warm your houses or keep the lights running . If your supply of solar panels or lithium gets cut off....nothing happens, really, it just becomes more difficult to switch from fossil fuels to renewables. Renewables don't need a constant fuel supply, they last a long time and the raw material they contain can be recycled. So there really isn't an ever increasing need to get access to more minerals in the same way as there was with fossil fuels.
I don't know if the applied divinity blogger was necessarily arguing for the techno-pessimistic side. I think they were arguing more that recent commentators' pessimism or optimism has not had much to do with the measurable indicators of technological progress.
I'm sure that cheaper energy will cause more productivity because it is an input to all economic processes, but the tone of the post almost seems to presume that productivity will go up linearly with energy cost declines. But the Nordhaus paper saying that productivity growth stagnated in response to a sudden rise in energy prices doesn't necessarily mean that. And the CBO paper about TFP growth seems to attribute the significant TFP growth in the early and mid 20th century to the qualitatively new appliances, lighting and forms of communication that came with first-time electrification, which isn't necessarily the same as the effect of a reduction in electricity prices decades later.
The CBO paper also seems like it might disagree with the Nordhaus paper: "Whatever the case, the widespread view that the decline stemmed from the dramatic rise in energy prices after 1973 fails to account for the lack of a similarly strong slowdown in other countries or for the failure of TFP growth to recover after energy prices declined in the 1980s. "
One thing solar installers here in Washington point out is that lower temperatures actually make for far more efficient solar generation in summer than in the stereotypical southwest deserts that you'd think of as the ideal solar locations.
he is not saying they dont exist but that it does not explain everything
research/progress independant from learning by doing could happen in paralells that could explain the dropping in cost
I would have liked your opinion on this post
The question is: are you sure we measure the causality correctly? Do sales lead to cost reductions through learning effects? Or does learning take place anyway, leading to cost reductions and thus to more sales?
Remember, even if learning curves were completely causal (i.e. scale causes cost drops and not vice versa), they would not necessarily be predictive. Opportunities for learning can run out at any time. The trend is your friend til the bend at the end.
Hi Noah. I have only one point of disagreement after reading this: Under your "Sustainability" section you state, "the supply of sunlight is not limited".
I must reluctantly disagree. Our supply of sunlight is most certainly limited ... to about 3 billion years of the Sun shining tops.
Of course, our problems are a lot bigger than sustainable energy supply long before the Sun becomes a red giant.
Respectfully,
Guy who won't be around by then and who is OK with that.
Not a fan of the Infinite Inflation theory I see
In the long run, we're all sublimated into oblivion by the Great Rip
Not to point attention to horrid comments, but Substack should have a word filter on comments, right? Probably should enable that feature 😬
The last point about sustainability is a huge one. Everyone knows that contact with nature has a huge impact on wellbeing, you can tell that whenever a king parrot flies into your back yard and everyone smiles. I saw one study that said 10% increase in local bird life is as good as a 10% increase in income. We also know there’s an obvious connection between nature and mental health. But the whole topic is woefully understudied.
yep
You also made the point elsewhere that by over building solar, say, you can start doing stuff with the otherwise "wasted" power, like mining bitcoins for profit, without trashing the environment. Obviously being frugal with baseline needs like heat and light is always a good thing. Actually, there are lots of more useful things to do with cheap excess power, like making hydrogen, maybe carbon capture. Others?
In some locations, water desalination. Possibly making ammonia, which is far easier to store than hydrogen but has some obstacles too: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fuel-made-sun-air-and-water-could-power-globe-without-carbon
It would seem that, like a bubble, the end of a stagnation would be hard to see while you're in it. The work of the previous 2 decades are now leading to a more visible exit of stagnation today.
Must admit I haven't read the literature on "stagnation" but between what I have seen on Noah's blog here, and the divinity blog the examples of stagnation is not very wide ranging.
I mean, what is stagnation? What is technology? "Technology" is an incredibly wide subject. Improvement is also subject to absolute physical limits. Both of the examples dealt with at length, are probably close to their physical limits. (Human longevity, and Moore's Law).
My uninformed belief is that the the future of productivity growth will largely lie in systemic thinking and implementation, like the hydrogen valleys that are taking off in Europe and the rest of the world. Even developing countries like South Africa are joining in, with their platinum valley.
Just so everyone is on the same page:
-You could switch off every solar panel in the USA and it would have approx zero effect on the total emissions of the country.
-The marginal benefit of each solar panel is dropping with each installation.
-All the progress made on emissions in the developed world is due to the switch from coal to natural gas.
-There is no feasible plan to get us down to zero net emission by 2050 that doesn't involve a lot of nuclear power.
"The marginal benefit of each solar panel is dropping with each installation" <-- That's wrong, because of scaling effects. I linked to some posts explaining why this is wrong.
"All the progress made on emissions in the developed world is due to the switch from coal to natural gas" <-- Natural gas was a bridge fuel, but its time will sunset soon
"There is no feasible plan to get us down to zero net emission by 2050 that doesn't involve a lot of nuclear power" <-- Source??
"That's wrong, because of scaling effects. I linked to some posts explaining why this is wrong." <-- I don't see anything showing how the marginal benefits of solar installations are increasing. It would be amazing if they did as it would fly in the face of logic and basic reasoning as well as the law of diminishing marginal utility.
"Natural gas was a bridge fuel, but its time will sunset soon" <--Source?
"Source??" <-- you want me to provide evidence that something that has never been achieved ever anywhere on any scale is infeasible? What else should I prove wont work? I would have thought that the burden would be on you to demonstrate a feasible plan to get us down to net zero by 2050 without using (large amounts) of nuclear power.
The problem is not "how do we generate a sizeable portion of our total electricity with solar" - that is easy, just keep installing panels till you hit 10%. The problem is carbon emissions (something you don't mention once in your post) and how we reduce them. Solar Power is barely reducing emissions at all. It has limited capacity to reduce emissions because it isn't able to actually replace the energy we currently use which produce emissions.
It also actually grows less effective (from an already low base) at reducing emissions as we install more of it - just look at the wholesale price of electricity in Germany in mid summer - they are paying people to take solar electricity during the day because it is basically worthless. That generation is not displacing any emissions.
This is also the reason why the cost reduction of solar arent having any effect on productivity - it is because they are an added cost - they arent displacing the old costs of electricity generation. You're argument falls down as soon as you look at Germany which on the surface looks to get a huge amount of electricity from solar. By your logic they should be enjoying huge productivity boost from this cheap electricity. They arent because they are still paying for so much energy from the previous sources.
Noah agrees with your first point (solar isn't currently contributing much: I particularly liked his point that no matter how cheap a technology is, it doesn't have any macro effect until it's deployed at massive scale.), and I strongly agree with your last point.
Here in Tokyo, when the sun is out, it's out, but it goes away for (usually, during rainy season) for a month at a time (this varies between no rainy season and two months of rain). And the rainy season effect covers most of Japan, oops.
Here in Japan, if you buy an "electric" car, it's actually running on coal, since after the Fukushima disaster, Japan's been slow to bring it's nuclear sites back up, and since natural gas is expensive to ship to Japan, Japan burns a lot of coal. Sigh.
Another point: I wonder if solar can continue to decline in price? The panels are now so cheap that the cost of the supports (including installation costs), control systems, and connections to the grid are now a major component of the total cost, so making the panels even cheaper may not help much.
The US has lots of wind (in the center of the country and offshore) and is large enough that the sun will be out somewhere most of the day, so a renewable dream isn't hopeless for the US, but Japan is much harder. Japan really needs to get over its nuclear allergy. Sigh.
"major component of the total cost"
Yeah, cost breakdowns for installs are weird like that. I actually read a report not many years back that listed "customer acquisition" as one of the top costs.
It is weird to think of "advertising" as a drag on cost parity and clean energy. But if you're trying to sell an energy source to a million homeowners instead of just one municipality, it makes weird sense that would be a bottleneck.
Tbh we should stop focusing on incentives for boutique home installs on weird steep roofs and instead blanket them on all commercial rooftops through regs or subsidies. You've heard of "rails to trails?" How about "dead malls to solar farms?" Fill in their parking lots too, sure. Drop those install costs with big flat surfaces and scale per installation.
California (like Germany before it) reveals why the transition to renewables runs into difficulties of cost and reliability at system level unless our decarbonization plans include flexible and diverse energy resources: https://slate.com/technology/2020/08/california-blackouts-wind-solar-renewable-energy-grid.html and to go deeper, Jesse Jenkins and his colleagues at Princeton have been modeling and publishing about the systems cost/ reliability implications of various mixes of resources.
I searched this article for the fragments "Chin" and "Subsid" and didn't find either so I'm sure it's extremely misleading.
It's because the thing you were searching for doesn't actually matter
Wow you really are brilliant. Of course the country that produces the most solar panels and completely distorts prices. That's not going into these calculations at all. https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/cjas/article/view/4813
You do realize it's not overbuild or storage, right? It's overbuild AND storage. So you have enough capacity to charge and store batteries in the winter. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/06/californias-solar-energy-problem.html
Which then has the cost going up exponentially. We are at least 20 years (if ever) away from batteries hitting that price point. I still am waiting to hear how we HEAT and Power Minneapolis during a week long windless 2 foot snow storm. That one city alone would require roughly double the capacity of all the batteries currently existing in the world. There is zero chance we get anywhere without a massive ramp up of nuclear.
Yes, overbuild and storage. I wrote exactly this in the post! Plz read
In part, through heat pumps, which are stunningly efficient, even in cold air, like five times moreso than just burning the fuel onsite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto
You're never going to cover seasonal variation with storage. It's going to be some combination of long distance transmission from the south, wind (which tends to do better in winter), dispatchable stuff like hydro, and overbuilding so you're getting non-trivial output from solar in the winter.
Seasonal variation is covered by overbuilding.
Yeah my point was just you can't cover winter needs with stored energy from summer.
Can you either write, or point to some report that actually incorporates battery costs/constraints into their solar energy analysis? It's all well and good to say that battery costs are decreasing, but I've looked and I can't find anyone that does an estimate of total costs of a solar-only system that would achieve, say, 99% uptime, in say, pheonix or boston. And then project that out using current trends, and optimistic/pessimistic scenarios 20-50 years in the future.
The issue isn't that solar-only can't be done, or won't be better in 50 years, but that we need to start shifting away from fossil fuels in a big way very quickly, and really eliminate fossil fuels, not just eliminate their use during the day. Which means it really matters if solar-only can work well within 20 years or 50 years, or 100 years.
If it's 50-100, then if we really should be doing nuclear, until either solar-only or fusion becomes tenable. The downside of that is that nuclear has much higher capital costs, and much lower fuel costs then fossil fuels, which means it won't coexist efficiently with day-only solar.
I will find that and write about it, yeah. But keep in mind, much of "storage" is actually just overbuilding.
For seasonal and weather variation, yes, it's all overbuilding. Although I'd be curious to know by how much, it seems like 2x-4x would be enough even in say Boston, which is fine IMO.
But day/night variation, no, you really do need storage. So then you have to know what's difference between day and night usage, how much could it be shifted without serious problems, etc. Hence why I'd really hope to find some big report that actually tries to math this out.
Future energy needs and decarbonisation is not just about solar/wind, and batteries. Currently 95% of hydrogen is produced from fossilised carbon sources. That needs to be replaced with green hydrogen. And then at least ten times more hydrogen is needed to use in green manufacturing of steel and iron, and maybe other ore reduction, to use as heat source for manufacturing and home heating, to use in the manufacture of ammonia and methane, and also, incidentally as a store of energy: either to generate electricity, as fuel cells in FCEVs, or to combust directly.
See the Danish Hydrogen Valley and there implementation of "Smart Energy Systems" for an example of how hydrogen, hydrogen storage, biomass, geothermal energy and heat storage supplement each other for a sustainable, integrated and reliable energy grid. (Not electricity grid.)
The thing about hydrogen is that with current feasible catalysts there isn't a very efficient way to create it, without losing a lot of energy in the conversion. Of course, there's a bunch of people working on this, but there's a bunch of people working on all these issues, and no guarantee of success in a short time horizon.
I'm actually fairly well aware of the state of the scientific research (I do physics/chemistry for a living), but what I've been trying to find is people who really put numbers on what can currently be done industrially, and not what you can do with a small company or in the lab.
Unlike the production side, where there's been clear evidence that solar/wind is going to surpass fossil fuels fairly quickly, all the stuff I've seen on storage has been pretty hand-wavy. And it shouldn't be all that difficult to put meaningful numbers on it.
The "magic number" for hydrogen is $2 per kg, currently it is not far above that. In Germany specifically, green hydrogen is already cheaper than grey hydrogen produced in small and medium scale installations. It is only large industrial scale grey hydrogen production that is cheaper.
The Danish valley I mentioned above, includes a green hydrogen facility, that over and above the normal supply of hydrogen to industry, doubles as an electricity store. It is fast enough to switch supply/uptake to/from the electricity grid in less than 10 seconds.
The proof of concept (1.4MW) was finished late 2020. The design is now used as a base for a 20MW installation in Canada.
OK so you lose 2/3 of the energy through the hydrogen electrolysis, storage and redox process. That means it only makes sense if the power price is very low, say under $10/MWh. Well, the amount of such power is greater every day as we switch to renewables, and the price is often even negative. So we build electrolysers. And we know from BNEF that the cost of electrolysers can be incredibly cheap (already is in China) so we don’t mind if our electrolyser doesn’t run most of the time. Ditto tanks and fuel cells. I don’t think it’s hand wavy, I think it’s quite scalable. Look at Enapter. It just hasn’t had the economic incentive to break out of cottage industry mode until now.
A better way to look at hydrogen, decarbonisation and energy storage is holistically. As I pointed out above, hydrogen has MANY uses in the hydrogen economy. There is no need to stop and start hydrogen production, it can be always produced for industrial purposes.
Produce some excess inventory, and you already have gone a some way to overcome intra day needs. Put a lot into a salt cavern, another proven technology, and you have solved your intra seasonal storage problem as well.
Denmark has salt caverns that can store 25% of their ANNUAL requirement.
Christopher Null at WIRED has been trying to write about total cost of ownership of a new solar system. It's not pure solar or 99% uptime. His bottom line is that it's currently not performing as efficiently as advertised.
https://www.wired.com/review/span-smart-electrical-panel/
That doesn't mean these things aren't getting better, but there's always buzz that you can make a home more efficient with the latest technology, and it's hard to trust that people selling the systems aren't rounding the breakeven points a bit.
Projects that are financed and paid off through your future utility bill reductions are probably the best way to keep these honest.
I don’t think anyone has modeled a solar and battery only system as that would as you say he very expensive. Most zero carbon models assume a mix of PV, wind, biogas, battery, pumped hydro, geo, demand response, HVDC, hydro and old nuclear. Hydrogen storage tends to be left out but I expect that will look much more economically rational after the green stimulus works it’s way through.
OK, well at least we're talking the same language here.
I'll admit that hydrogen storage had completely fallen off my radar, I remember it being a big deal ~10-20 years ago when it seemed like hydrogen fuel batteries would be the way to go for vehicles. Advances in batteries, and the fact that hydrogen is explosive have pretty much ended that line of research, but you're right that that doesn't mean it's not doable as storage.
The thing is, this 70-80% efficiency number is just the energy loss during electrolysis, you have to add the combustion, as well as storage (you'd probably have to liquify or pressurize it, even overnight) to get the final number. And at least in my 20 mins of google sleuthing I couldn't find any hard numbers on that, probably because all the old stuff assumes it'll be used as a gas substitute in vehicles.
Still, those losses probably won't bring it down below something like 40-50% loss, and I'll admit that's pretty much on the order where it could work, so long as you're right about the infrastructure itself being very low cost.
I still don't see how it's going to beat nuclear, but it'll be close enough to not be too much of a disaster if the politics of nuclear can't be worked out. I would love to see a paper where people really do math this out though.
What helped for me is to read some of Australia’s CSIRO research on hydrogen techno economics. You can see their assumptions re cost of electrolysers (say $1k per kw or more). If you then look at real world cost of electrolysers and the annual rate of decline, you can make you own guess about cost of hydrogen. BNEF has done some guesses, but not in public domain.
It would also look a lot more rational, of carbon was fully priced for externalities, AND it's subsidies stopped.
Noah, what do you think about modern nuclear fission reactors? They seem to be more efficient, more compact than solar or wind. Solar and wind damage the ecosystems where they're placed. NPPs built with modern techniques in design and engineering are mechanically safe. Off by default. The cost of making them seems to me to be in the regulatory process and the overabundance of criteria they have to meet. Geothermal seems to be in a stage of growth too and for it the argument of permanent pollution is out the door. What's your view of nuclear & geothermal in comparison to wind & solar?
They've gotten too expensive, partly due (I think) to the need to build giant well-guarded security perimeters around them to protect them from terrorist attack.
Nuclear is very expensive, despite benefiting from generous support from the DOE. Also, 24/7 power is not particularly valuable relative to dispatchable power.
If you to read what I wrote you would have known that I'm aware of the costs. The cost is in regulation and engineering. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story
Thanks for the link. I wish small modular reactor folk well, but they have a hard job ahead.
Apparently a lot of the reduction in costs for solar panels is due to Chinese use of forced labor - especially Uyghurs :-/
https://todayuknews.com/economy/is-solar-manufacturing-a-highly-automated-business/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/05/19/china-made-solar-cheap-through-coal-subsidies--forced-labor-not-efficiency/?sh=6ce46b9b71ec
I don't think Lithium-ion batteries make sense for solar. Hybrid redox batteries for much greater periods of time. Luckily the cost for that type of battery is also going down(https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210122112306.html)
Oh, and one techno-pessimist argument about green tech that you didn't really adress is the argument about extractivism/"green" resource wars(basically: that wars for fossil fuel will be replaced by wars for minerals or the emergence of states that use their mastery over renewables for leverage). I'd counter:
Being good at making solar panels doesn't really give any country the kind of leverage that current control over fossil fuels gets you. If your acces to fossil fuels gets cut off today then you potentially can't feed your people, warm your houses or keep the lights running . If your supply of solar panels or lithium gets cut off....nothing happens, really, it just becomes more difficult to switch from fossil fuels to renewables. Renewables don't need a constant fuel supply, they last a long time and the raw material they contain can be recycled. So there really isn't an ever increasing need to get access to more minerals in the same way as there was with fossil fuels.
I don't know if the applied divinity blogger was necessarily arguing for the techno-pessimistic side. I think they were arguing more that recent commentators' pessimism or optimism has not had much to do with the measurable indicators of technological progress.
I'm sure that cheaper energy will cause more productivity because it is an input to all economic processes, but the tone of the post almost seems to presume that productivity will go up linearly with energy cost declines. But the Nordhaus paper saying that productivity growth stagnated in response to a sudden rise in energy prices doesn't necessarily mean that. And the CBO paper about TFP growth seems to attribute the significant TFP growth in the early and mid 20th century to the qualitatively new appliances, lighting and forms of communication that came with first-time electrification, which isn't necessarily the same as the effect of a reduction in electricity prices decades later.
The CBO paper also seems like it might disagree with the Nordhaus paper: "Whatever the case, the widespread view that the decline stemmed from the dramatic rise in energy prices after 1973 fails to account for the lack of a similarly strong slowdown in other countries or for the failure of TFP growth to recover after energy prices declined in the 1980s. "
"the tone of the post almost seems to presume that productivity will go up linearly with energy cost declines" <-- Linearly?
Bad wording. "Presumes that the primary determinant of productivity growth is energy prices," if that makes more sense.
Solar YES !! (in most of the USA, Canada not so much)
Wind YES !! (in most of the USA, Southeast not so much)
Batteries NO 🥺 Not for time shifting renewable generation to demand
Pumped Storage YES !! (and they last 100+ years without degradation instead of @ 15 years of declining capacity).
Batteries are great for night. For clouds and stuff you just overbuild.
One thing solar installers here in Washington point out is that lower temperatures actually make for far more efficient solar generation in summer than in the stereotypical southwest deserts that you'd think of as the ideal solar locations.
Hi Noah
Learning curves hypothesis has been challenged
for instance look at this blog post
https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/how-useful-are-learning-curves-really
summarized in this thread
https://twitter.com/mattsclancy/status/1351561190426746882
he is not saying they dont exist but that it does not explain everything
research/progress independant from learning by doing could happen in paralells that could explain the dropping in cost
I would have liked your opinion on this post
The question is: are you sure we measure the causality correctly? Do sales lead to cost reductions through learning effects? Or does learning take place anyway, leading to cost reductions and thus to more sales?
Remember, even if learning curves were completely causal (i.e. scale causes cost drops and not vice versa), they would not necessarily be predictive. Opportunities for learning can run out at any time. The trend is your friend til the bend at the end.