First, LCOE is a scam. It doesn’t take into account either connection costs or backup costs. Second, solar has incredibly low energy density and has a supply chain dominated by China. Panels are rarely recycled so waste is an issue.
Batteries are still clocking in at around 150 dollars per MWh. They barely got down to 100 a couple years ago when there was very little demand for them and hydrocarbon inputs to mining were cheap.
Not to mention that borrowing money was essentially free. Projects that take 5 years or more to pay off aren’t so attractive at current rates.
Also, silver costs would be driven through the roof if solar continued it’s growth of the past decade.
It took trillions of dollars to get solar to 4.5 percent, and early growth is easy growth.
Overall, 5 trillion dollars have been spent on wind and solar in the last 20 years or so, and oil’s total share of primary energy went down like 2 percent while electricity costs skyrocketed.
Building enough batteries to store just a day or so of grid capacity nationwide would cost trillions as well. You can always expand the grid to need less storage, but that is also incredibly expensive. Plus permitting takes years.
The IEA is absolutely awful at their job, constantly underestimating third world demand, and largely being a propaganda machine.
I’d bet almost any amount of money solar doesn’t come close to gas in four years.
Don’t forget that the problem you’re try to solve is a small piece of the pie. Electricity is only 20 percent of the total energy produced worldwide.
We still need energy for aviation, shipping, steel, plastics, cement, etc.
The smart move is more nuclear, but we’re largely scared of the waste, which has never caused a single death.
Not trying to be a bummer, but I’ve been in energy for almost 30 years, and the picture is a lot more complicated than it’s being portrayed in the media.
There’s no energy transition, it’s an energy addition.
All that said, I wouldn’t be reading your stuff if it wasn’t good:)
4. China being in the supply chain doesn't matter. Solar panels are a commoditized product, we can produce as many as we want. We only use China right now because they're subsidizing production.
5. The IEA's forecasts of solar deployment have consistently UNDERshot the reality.
Nuclear is expensive because of the regulatory stranglehold. How are you just dismissing this? I’m looking forward to that post a decade from now when we are still at best in the mid-teens of global electricity production from solar and wind and when you realize what you are writing right now makes little sense. Also, your source for clean steel is a startup with the tech? Yeah China also built a battery powered cargo ship. Let me know when all these solutions actually become commercially viable at scale. Additionally, you are categorically wrong. If your claim is that electricity generated by solar can be converted to heat for industrial uses but electricity from nuclear cant then you are just wrong. Nuclear is also used in modern aircraft carriers and submarines...therefore, it is proven and much more viable for heavy transport uses.
Building onsite doesn’t prevent learning cost reductions. Look at high speed rail in Japan and China. It also works for nuclear power plants, in Korea new plants costs have steadily decreased.
"Getting Cheaper" isn't a learning curve. American nuclear could get a lot cheaper via various means, but the value in the LCOE listed in the article is the international cost. If there was some way to make this stuff really cheaply, France would have found out a generation ago.
That is clearly not the reason. Since you are clearly unaware of the history of how nuclear became so expensive, I direct you to this. It breaks down in great detail what happened from the emergence of nuclear, the competition with coal, the emergence of ALARA, the use of the LNT standard, etc. https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/gordian_wZ.pdf
Well, yes, nuclear is far better than coal, which used to be a major part of European power generation, but French nuclear power has underperformed lately, much for environmental reason (France has suffered heat waves/droughts last couple years, leading to nuclear power plants shutting down, and sharp reduction of hydroelectric power). https://twitter.com/jaxroam/status/1622675509707505664
Nice to have some nuclear in the mix, but it will not be the major workhorse in power generation, which in Europe will be a fairly even split of solar and wind.
Please look again at the graph: 40% of France's power is NOT fossil fuels and it could be far more absent anti-nuclear sentiment. France is the furthest along the path of decarbonizaton and they did it 30+ years ago! When you say Europe's future is solar and wind, what are you planning on doing exactly when it's overcast and the wind isn't blowing? You also need consistent sources of power, whether that's coal, natural gas, nuclear, or major advances in battery technology.
France is not furthest ahead in decarbonisation in Europe. Here in Sweden we are further ahead (and so are our Nordic neighbours). Still France does perform better by choosing nuclear over the coal-to-fossil gas route many of their neighbours opted for.
Europe is the most arctic continent in the world, so our share of solar will necessarily be lower long term. Crucially there is less sun in the winter. However we do have a wide variety of power sources, wind power performs particularly well autumn and winter in our neighbourhood, augmenting our hydro-electric power, and with EU/ENTSO-E building a wide and dense power grid.
The Russian fossil gas shock pushed us to further advances on the heating infrastructure and on demand-side power use. Soon we may have the most robust energy system on the planet.
When Right politics chose opposing action on emissions instead of supporting it that was a knife in the back for nuclear, not by environmentalists (only up to Environmentalists because mainstream politics handed the issue to them, in order to NOT fix it) by nuclear's political "friends" - no climate problem = no need. Sure, they waited for a hippie painted kombi bus before they pushed - with much shouting about irresponsible eco-crazies, but anti-nuclear activism could never have impeded nuclear so thoroughly as nuclear's advocates did by turning climate science denier.
All I can speak to is electricity prices in solar-happy enviro-obsessed so-cal, where our *cheapest* rate, $0.28/kwh, is so high it wouldn't even show up on the graph of "declining" electricity prices you posted on Twitter yesterday. We pay between $0.28 and $0.60(!!)/kwh here, somewhere between 2x and 4x the national average. Which average is pulled up by the 38 million people paying these outlier prices. In reality the disparity is even bigger. If this is what the green-solar-wind-renewable revolution looks like in practice, you're gonna have a hard time selling it outside any deep blue bubble.
*GASP* are you telling me that you live in a wealthy state where utility companies have high overheads??? Say it ain't so! But switching electricity sources with higher LCOE would not make your bill go down, lol.
How do they price electricity? More than half is not due to generation, but other costs. And about the price of generation, don’t they use marginal pricing? They do, so the price of generation is the most expensive power they have to turn on, and it’s usually gas turbines. If there is abundantly more solar, so that you don’t need to turn on the more expensive gas turbines, you get a lower marginal price for generation. More solar would mean cheaper generation, but only if you cross the threshold where most of the time, you don’t need to use intermittent electricity, and that’s where batteries come in.
On the contrary. More capacity at peak hours can provide ample extra electricity to charge batteries after air conditioning. That charge will last till dawn. Just check MKBHDs review of his Tesla system after running it for a year. And that is todays tech, and not even the cheapest system available. https://youtu.be/UJeSWbR6W04?si=kVtjf9eKLNMiEfR3
Battery storage to soak up any excess power and provide more flexibility to the grid operator on which resources to spin up at peak demand is great. SCE has I think almost 3GW of installed utility scale battery storage (~5% of the state's peak load), plus who knows how much privately owned storage. It definitely didn't prevent load shedding last summer. And it also hasn't seemed to lower costs any. The generation charges on my bill alone are $0.165, above the *total* national average for electricity. And all this is with significant installed solar plus gas is still available to us. Should be fun as CA insists on net zero. When do the benefits of solar get here, I guess is my question? Either for reliability or price? Because right now I'm getting the worst of both worlds.
Marques is great, and yes he has zero dollar monthly electric bills but a Tesla solar roof and home battery are over $200,000. Who is going to pay to have all homes in California have these? With interest and an expected life of 20 years, he’s paying over $1000 a month to have a zero dollar electric bill, but he pulls in lots more from ads and endorsement deals so I don’t worry about him.
So if I understand your comment, Solar is worth the most in California, since your grid is so expensive, right?
Are all your neighbors using solar? If so, you know you're paying them for electricity, right? They probably sell back to the grid on top of saving from not buying from the grid.
Solar PV accounts for 4.5% of total global electricity generation after trillions of investments. Unless you are living in a jar on Moon you will get affected by the emissions from the rest of the world. You want to talk about climate change then you need to address it globally.
> Electricity costs have not soared. In inflation-adjusted terms they have fallen since 2015.
I learned a lot from the article, but the part that needs more flushing out is the battery storage. Your response does not really address this aspect. We have an example of solar being cheap in Texas, but I at least don't have an example of battery storage being cost effective at scale. The graph clearly shows battery costs dropping 25% in a very short period, so maybe we are heading there, but without a large scale example it's hard to think the batteries are really economical today.
Another commenter shared this, which I found helpful p 15-17. Please investigate more the actual costs of batteries in practice in a situation like Texas: https://am.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/campaign/energy-paper-13/growing-pains-renewable-transition-in-adolescence.pdf: "Texas wind capacity factors averaged 32% in December 2022. But that doesn’t mean that wind provided steady power at 32% of installed capacity; as shown on the left, Texas wind generation varied from a low of 5% of capacity to a peak of 70% during the month. Why this matters: LCOE is so blissfully unaware of reality that it is calculated the exact same way whether Texas wind capacity factors are 32% for every hour of December, or if they average 32% but vary from 5%-70%. This is preposterous since in the latter scenario, backup thermal power/storage needs are much higher than in the former. LCOE is the cocktail napkin of energy math."
The California ISO already has 5.6 GW at around 17 GWh, a ten times increase from two or three years ago. Batteries are already cost effective and replacing natural gas for peaking duties.
This definitely did not lower anyone’s bill, CA continues to rob people blind on their utility bills. If you think this lowered prices, link to an article explaining how PG&Es profits have gone up because their marginal costs have gone down due to batteries, but they have not passed any of the savings on.
In regard to #2, it should be noted that presently nuclear is mostly used for electricity, but this is not a technological limitation. In addition to electricity, conventional nuclear can be used for district heating and low temperature process heat. Many cities in Russia use their nuclear plants for heating. With an absorption chiller, sources of heat can also be used for cooling.
The promise of advanced generation IV nuclear reactors brings the possibility of more useful higher temperature heat. For example, look at what Dow Chemical is doing with nuclear startup X-Energy.
Aside from all the naval propulsion, we also had the nuclear powered NS Savannah back in the 50s. We could have nuclear powered container ships in the future.
Any source of electricity can be used to make hydrogen which can then be used to make synthetic fuel via Fischer-Tropsch process. Liquid hydrocarbons can fit nearly every energy end use. The heat from a nuclear plant, for example, would aid in more efficient high temperature electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen.
Near the beginning of the Cold War, the US military experimented with building a nuclear powered bomber aircraft. While it’s probably a good thing that the project was halted, nuclear rockets remain a possibility. I hope to see one in my lifetime!
> Nuclear is great but it also only produces electricity. (It's also expensive, so we'll use it mainly as a backup to solar.)
Nuclear is entirely unsuitable as a backup for solar, due to its high fixed costs. The two sources simply do not work well together economically. Nuclear either runs all the time or it shouldn't be run at all. It goes big or it goes home.
What *is* suitable as backups for solar are various storage technologies, including short term storage (batteries, pumped hydro) and long term (e-fuels, like hydrogen, burned in combined cycle plants.) The latter provides the "firming" that nuclear advocates have claimed is needed.
I completely agree. People who defend renewables have to use LCOE because they know that if the true cost was ever captured, they could never defend their position. If Noah really is motivated to see the world transition to a clean energy source, he should be writing about getting rid of the regulatory stranglehold on nuclear power generation and pushing for rapid build out of next generation nuclear plants. At least then you could actually replace power generation capacity instead of just having it be a mirage.
And it's already been done! Look at what France and Sweden did in the 1970s. France with 80% nuclear now has some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, and some of the lowest carbon emissions in the EU. We don't have to reinvent the wheel here.
That's a good point, and the solutions to me are either using water more efficiently(conservation, reuse) or moving to reactors that don't require water as a coolant. You can cool a reactor with liquid sodium, or a gas like carbon dioxide or helium as well. There are other options out there.
That’s not how liquid sodium systems work. You still need a tertiary cooling system (a simple open heat sink) to cool the steam powering the turbines. What you can use is not river water, maybe build cooling towers instead. My point was that France built their nuclear capabilities a long time ago without concern for more frequent extreme heat waves.
In Hungary, our only nuclear plant is on the Danube which provides 40% of the country’s electricity, and we have the same problem, and now our government is trying to build a second set of reactors at the same site with the same river cooling when we have had consistent problems with river temperatures every summer.
I dont know enough about what the standards are for waste heat dispersal in Hungary, but the light water reactors are thermally quite inefficient, only about 33-35% conversion from heat energy to electricity. Cooling towers would work, or a bottoming cycle that could extract low-grade heat.
Excess heat could also be more efficiently extracted. It should also be possible to inject the wastewater underground and replace the river water with cool groundwater.
France’s weakened nuclear power output means the cost of its electricity for next winter is more than twice as expensive as Germany’s, as concerns over the health of the country’s reactors persist.
If you read that article all the way though, it says that Germany is still using large amounts of coal fired power to generate electricity. Germany can get away with that, because coal is incredibly inexpensive, relative to the harm it causes to society(air pollution, premature deaths, mercury pollution, Carbon Pollution). France's problems seem more related to being part of an EU-wide trading and transmission system, but I admittedly don't know enough about how electricity is traded in Europe or the pricing mechanisms. The overall cost of nuclear fuel is very cheap, and the big capital costs come from building the plant in the first place.
The biggest problem with nuclear energy was that its politics and its economics were mismatched: its political fans are mostly right-wing free-marketeers, but its economics (with very front-loaded costs, and less ability than renewables to be built incrementally) mean that it is best built by the state, as indeed was the French approach in the 1970s and '80s,
Margaret Thatcher was certainly no anti-nuclear eco-warrior, but of the 10 PWR nuclear plants she wanted, only one (Sizewell B) actually got built.
Will Noah as Mr techno-optimist ever be honest about the land use requirements for solar and wind? It's honestly tiring never hearing this addressed. I'd like to see more references from people like the late biologist E.O Wilson or James Hansen, James Lovelock, or Vaclav Smil. The only reason whales are still around, and weren't hunted to extinction is Oil. We moved to sources of energy that have higher energy density, which means less waste. To preserve biodiversity and still have adequate energy, we need higher quality sources of energy. Luckily, neutron star collisions from billions of years ago gave us an endowment of enough uranium and thorium to last billions of years on Earth, and provide all of our energy needs. In case you think I'm being hyperbolic, a 1,000 MW nuclear plant takes up about 1.5 sq miles. A solar farm of that size would take up about 45 to 75 sq miles. The District of Columbia is around 70 sq miles, and Manhattan is around 34 sq miles. 70 sq miles could be an awesome urban park, or nature reserve, and there's a lot of evidence that time spent in nature helps people's mood and well-being.
I’ll go one step further than saying oil prevented whale extinction.
The widespread use of hydrocarbons did more to end slavery than almost anything else.
The amount of work that can be done with hydrocarbons made the use of large amounts of human labor unnecessary.
People are generally only as ethical as they can afford to be. Once hydrocarbons became available, people could afford to be ethical enough to stop supporting forced labor.
I've thought this for a while, and I completely agree with you. Vaclav Smil(who i highly recommend) has this concept of energy slaves, your dishwasher, your dryer, your refrigerator, etc. All of these things would've been done by servants, or slaves prior to labor-saving devices, largely powered by fossil fuels, since deforestation and wood shortages were already occurring with early industrialization.
If you think of fossil fuels, which they are, as stored solar energy, what happens when you run out of the inheritance?? You either revert back to a lower energy society, powered by present day energy flows, or move to fossil fuels used much more efficiently, making it easier to capture CO2, reserve their use for essential applications(planes, making steel or cement), or use fission and fusion(if it ever works) to get the neccessary energy.
Vaclav doesn't seem to grasp that RE can provide for our power needs many times over. He largely developed his ideas 35 years ago when solar cost 200x more than it does today. Whole new ball game.
---
What Vaclav Smil and the disinformation echo chamber get wrong about the climate crisis
After reading the fawning coverage of Vaclav Smil’s 41st, and hopefully final, book How the World Really Works (2022) — the latest edition of an old white dude mansplaining to future generations why a just, sustainable society is impossible — I got riled up and started to write a detailed rebuttal. There are so many problems with Smil’s book.. and the man himself.
We could meet all our energy needs on a third of the land we use for ethanol. Nuclear has a small footprint which is nice but I do not understand why you are acting like Noah is anti-nuclear.
My argument isn't that Noah is anti -nuclear, but that the arguments sometimes don't pass muster once you bring in perspectives from other fields. E.O Wilson a few years before he passed wrote a book called Half Earth, arguing that humanity has to preserve half the Earth for wildlife to avoid a mass extinction. Now, maybe that's wrong or unfeasible, but if it's correct, then using sources of energy that take up more land and contribute to habitat destruction/fragmentation is not only dumb, but totally indefensible, since we can't bring these species back, and as far as we know, Earth is the only planet with life on it. That's just my perspective, that some degree of stewardship for Spaceship Earth is necessary.
If you're fired up about land use, solar is the least of your concerns. 88% of all corn production in the US goes to either livestock feed or ethanol, and combined covers an area more than double the size of the UK. You could double all the US's current electricity needs and the solar needed to supply it would fit on 1/3 of that land. I absolutely do think that nuclear is really valuable (particularly for island nations and northern climates) but I still think that solar is going to 'win' in the sense of being the main solution.
I didn't even address ethanol or conventional biofuels, because most people know they're incredibly wasteful, and are just a giveaway to constituencies like farmers in Iowa or Kansas, who benefit from US federal farm subsidies. A 1,000 MW nuclear plant takes about 1.5 sq miles. A solar farm of that size would take up 45-75 sq miles, with habitat fragmentation(access roads, routine maintenance, cleaning panels, etc). I live in the Northeastern US, so a solar farm is less efficient to begin with at higher latitudes(less sunlight, shorter days, longer nights) and you'd have to knock down trees and forested land the size of the District of Columbia in DC, all just to get electricity that can be generated in other ways. I'm not anti-solar, I think it's great for the right applications like solar hot water heating, passive solar houses that require very little heating or cooling, developing countries or rural communities without a electrical grid, or off the grid communities. It's all about appropriate technology.
My point is that we are going to get rid of ethanol production as a side effect of switching to EVs. MILLIONS of hectares of land are going to open up, and the agricultural land we have left can host agrivoltaics or wind farms. Offshore wind of course isn't competing with anything and is a net positive for local biomes in the medium-to-long term. There are still loads of places where solar/wind is less viable (transmission is good, but there are losses) and where nuclear is more viable, but when you start with solar being half the cost (even comparing to france, which is much better at building nuclear) the advantage needs to be considerable.
Ultimately my only desire is to make both easy to build and subsidize both and see who builds what.
1) Permian Basin Oil Fields: 58 thousand square miles
Alberta Tar Sands: 54 thousand square miles
USA land in ethanol corn crops: 58 thousand square miles
-
Any one of those is more than enough to power the lower 48 states 100% 24/7/365 with renewables. That is exclusive of rooftop solar or offshore wind which reduce land requirements. Furthermore, renewables monopolize less than 1% of the land they cover, leaving 99% available for dual use with crops, grazing, pollinator plants or other productive uses.
2) National Renewable Energy Laboratory finds it would take less than 1% of the land in the Lower 48— an area comparable or even smaller than the fossil fuel industry’s current footprint.
When we convert cars to electric, we can take all the farmland just currently growing corn for wasteful ethanol fuel additives convert it to solar and still gain about 20,000 square miles more in farmland.
You'd have to seriously explain why when you have a better option, you'd instead choose technology that takes up more land. I think it's ridiculous to use the comparison of tar sands or ethanol, because I know they're bad, and lots of other people think the same.
You're right that you can change the local environment, so it's more suitable, but it's certainly not natural. Natural to me just means in the absence of humans, what would the biome naturally evolve to? So, where I live in the Northeastern US, oak-hickory forests would be the natural forest cover. In the Southeastern US, longleaf pine would predominate. White oak, shagbark hickory, black cherry, lots of different species of trees, and smaller shrubs and herbs. Solar and wind aren't compatible with something like an old-growth oak-hickory forest, and certain animals need that biome to survive. Climate change is certainly bad for some animals, although some reptiles might benefit from warmer temperatures, benefiting from having an expanded range(Alligators in the Potomac??) but habitat destruction is universally bad.
Because the amount of land that solar takes up is not that much in the grand scheme of things.
And nuclear is a lot more expensive. Why is nuclear expensive. Well all the pipes need to be x-rayed to inspect the welds, which takes equipment and skill. Not that x-raying the pipes is the main cost. The cost of nuclear is having to do 100's of fiddly complicated and highly technical processes, which takes expensive equipment, and skilled workers, which is expensive.
You're talking 45-75 sq miles for a 1,000 MW solar plant, vs 1.5 sq miles for the equivalent nuclear plany. So, essentially if you wanted to found a new city, bedroom community, nature preserve, whatever, you've just lost that land for energy production. Manhattan is about 35 sq miles, the ENTIRE District of Columbia is about 75 sq miles. Think we couldn't use that land for other things?? I'll acknowledge that the US or even Canada are large countries with lots of open space, but other countries are going to have real constraints with trying the same thing.
Also, the question of expense is really a question of what time horizon you value. The best solar farms only last for about 20-25 years, which means they'll be replaced 3-4 times over with all the expenses, and uncertainties, when it comes to building. Once you build that nuclear plant, the only expenses are employees, routine maintenance, and the cost of the fuel. It's worth noting that the IPCCC and UNECE(latest study in 2022) found that the CO2 emissions were between 5-15 grams/kwh, which is 1/3 of solar, and the biggest emissions come from construction, whether for solar or nuclear.
The world in practice has millions of square miles of blank emptyness that no one is doing anything much with.
Humans tend to live in the busy occupied bits. So it's easy to forget that a huge section of the earth is basically not being used yet. Most of the earth isn't covered in new cities. Humans like living near other humans, that means small, valuable cities. The solar panels can be put on roofs. Or they can be put in some field with crops underneath. (given some plants like a bit of shade, this can even improve yield sometimes)
There are a few small city nations, like singapore, who will have to import their energy.
The moon rockets took less than a millionth of the compute than a modern smartphone. Going on a trip to the moon takes way less compute than playing angry birds. The cost of going to the moon is the total cost of all the pieces. The compute cost is totally negligable, at current prices. The cost of rocket fuel is large.
The land use of nuclear is negligable. (At least if you only count the footprint when it works, not the exclusion zone when it doesn't)
The cost of the nuclear engineers is large. It takes a lot of smart people to run a nuclear power plant. Those people could be making apps or something. Don't you think those people could be doing something else?
Old solar can be easily recycled. The old panels are safe. They can be scooped up and turned into new ones no problems. Nuclear plants tend to get shut down after 30 or 40 years, so the time horrizon isn't that much longer. And the nuclear plants have a huge decomissioning cost.
ONCE you build it. Building it is super expensive. And that staffing and maintanence requirement is a lot more than for solar. If solar breaks, all it can do is stop producing electricity. If nuclear breaks, it goes really bad. Solar has no moving parts, no radiation damage to components. No high temperatures. Basically nothing to go wrong. So you don't need much maintanence.
The CO2 mumbers are irrelevant. We are talking about getting off fossil fuels. Both solar and nuclear release hardly anything compared to fossil fuels. So the most environmental option is whatever you can get built first. Solar tomorrow is better than nuclear in 10 years. (And you can build a few percent more solar, and run a bit of CO2 scrubbing.)
Nuclear fails due to... cost to build, cost of electricity produced, time to build, risk to investment, return on investment, waste disposal, public acceptance, vulnerability to terrorism & war. And... 60 years of over promising and under delivering.
Stuff like this:
Rewarding Failure: Taxpayers on Hook for $12 Billion Nuclear Boondoggle
How Much Land Would it Require to Get Most of Our Electricity from Wind and Solar?
“A recent National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study shows that it would take less than 1 percent of the land in the Lower 48—that’s an area comparable to or even smaller than the fossil fuel industry’s current footprint. And when wind and solar projects are responsibly sited, the environmental and public health impacts would be far less harmful than those from extracting, producing and burning fossil fuels.”
There are, on earths surface at the moment, vast swathes of land that aren't really being used for anything much. Ie deserts. Also agriculture uses about 20% of the land area. Running our economy on solar could be done with 2%, so if agriculture can get 10% more land efficient, we don't need more land. (And with that amount of solar energy, we can make a lot of cheap fertilizer and desalinated water)
The whole idea that deserts are just biological wastelands isn't believed by anyone who studies ecology, that whole premise suffers from a focus on if it isn't valuable for people, it has no value at all. Just as a quick example, the Mojave or Sonoran desert has a bunch of species that aren't found anywhere else on Earth. A lot of the agricultural land is used for beef, and other livestock, but I'm fully in favor of most Americans moving to less meat intensive diets anyways, and it'd benefit their health as well. Even Meatless Mondays would help, and that's not a huge ask of people.
Alright. So sure, deserts aren't totally empty, they contain a few cactuses and things.
The disruption to native ecosystems is quite small compared to the disruption we currently do with farming. Or compared to what climate change will do.
Compared to the effects of a bunch of radioactive fallout, well that's more complicated.
But sure, I don't see a particular reason to care a huge amount about some random scorpions or whatever. If a few scorpians stand between humanity, and a prosperous future of abundant energy, tough for the scorpians. Besides, we don't need all the desert. 10% of the worlds desert would be enough. Or if we really want to preserve desert, we could put it in the more biologically rich temerate farmland. Make a bit less meat, thus needing 10% less farm per person.
The shade under the solar panels might help those desert critters.
Nuclear is slow to build. The extra 15 years of CO2 we get from building nuclear instead of solar is probably worse than a few solar panels.
I think the fundamental point most animal rights activists, ecologists, biologists, or conservationists make is that nature has an inherent value of it's own, that isn't contingent upon what human beings think about nature or what it's value is, or human conceptions of "value" or "worthiness".
The plants last for 60-80 years. If you read the link in my last post, two highly respected organizations(IPCC and UNECE) both found that the lifecycle emissions were between 5-15 grams CO2/kwh. They actually used a time horizon of 60 years for nuclear, but the newest plants are projected to last 80 years, so the numbers look even better if that's the case. The actual time of construction is irrelevant, if the plants last for 80 years. All of these reviews already take construction into account, to calculate lifecycle emissions. Solar will have to be rebuilt every 20 years. The emissions for either technology all come from construction, since neither emit any CO2 during operation. Purifying silicon for PV cells is highly carbon intensive, and China, where most panels are made, uses coal to do that .Solar already is around 30-35 gCO2/kwh and that dosen't even account for battery backup, with it's own carbon emissions from making the requisite number of batteries, or burning natural gas if you'd like storage, which only pushes those numbers higher. Over a 60 year period, you're looking at 105g CO2/kwh without storage, versus 5g CO2/kwh. Over 20 times more!
Also, it's worth noting that radiation isn't as dangerous at low doses as people think. Below 10 rem or 100 msv, there's no evidence of increase in cancer probability, or the effect is so small it can't be measured, which means it's statistically insignificant.
The construction time does make a difference. If solar takes 1 year and nuclear takes 20, and the electricity is currently coming from coal. Then if we start building now, building solar means 19 years of coal fumes less.
Purifying silicon does take a reasonable bit of energy. Around 5% of the energy the solar panel will capture. This can come from renewables. It just means building 5% more solar to cover the energy.
CO2 and energy are pretty fungible. Solar is a the cheap safe technique that requires you invest 5% of the future energy in building it. Nuclear is the expensive technique that requires less energy to get started.
In a future world where the electricity all came from solar or nuclear, the CO2 emmitted from either would be 0. All the energy used to build it would itself come from solar/ nuclear. The amount of fossil fuel needed to build the first generation of solar/nuclear is small compared to the amount needed to keep our civ running while they are built.
Also, some solar can last a lot more than 20 years. But if improvements in tech have made the solar much more efficient in 20 years, replacing it makes sense. The problem with tech that lasts a really long time is it gets really out of date.
Sure, I agree that radiation in low doses is probably not that bad.
Nuclear and geothermal should be part of the picture on general principle. I get the impression that the pro-nuclear contingent is growing rapidly. Fingers crossed.
Of course nuclear and geothermal should be a part of the picture! And they will. Geothermal has a ton of room to grow. Nuclear is expensive but we'll build it as a solar backup. Public opinion is shifting in favor of nuclear.
Would it be worth researching high-temperature nuclear reactors driving gas turbines, on the grounds that such plants would be far more flexible than today's steam-turbine nuclear plants in backing up solar and wind power?
I disagree with the notion of having nuclear energy as the backup source in the first place. Nuclear is the densest, cleanest form of energy that is much more stable and the build uses far less material (concrete, steel, etc). The focus should be on removing regulatory barriers around it which will dramatically drop the price per MwH and then push for government investment in the upfront cost. That makes way more sense than using solar and wind as the primary source and hoping that at some point you will maybe get to viable battery storage that isn’t ridiculously expensive.
Dear Noah. Using Nuclear as backup for solar is insane. Nuclear has high capital costs and low marginal costs, it only becomes affordable if it is running all the time. A good article on the subject: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-and-windsolar
Your subtitle implies something different, i.e., "Solar and batteries are going to win, and our thinking needs to adjust accordingly."
When I see statements like this I look to experts in the field, e.g. Dr. John Bistline. He had a good article in NYTimes last year basically saying that debates about what technology is going to win 30 years from now is a waste of time and distracts and confuses policymakers and their advisers about what to focus on in the near term.
"Rather than getting mired in these debates, we should focus on credible commitments to public policy, private investment and innovation."
Modern smartphones should use mostly transistors, but a few vacuum tubes and mechanical gears as well. Mostly SSD storage, but also a couple of punch cards and a piece of vinyl record to store the startup sound.
Sometimes one tech is just better, and all the other ways to do something should go to the museum.
Solar is good adjunct source, like this summer in Texas(!), but I agree that nuclear is our best direction. Plus I think solar farms are blights on the landscape (but not on roofs where we have ours).
Amen. My understanding is that those “cheap energy” graphs deliberately omit transmission and the true cost of storage at the capacity multipliers various quantitatively-gifted civilians have been forced to calculate on behalf of governments that simply publish glossy net zero slide decks—in which the cost, even at optimistic storage prices, is roughly the size of the entire economy in whichever jurisdiction it is estimated for.
Multiply that storage need again for “black swan” events in which there are extended periods of cold. It would be great to see a deeper dive to counter the “realist” pieces I’ve read elsewhere.
I have yet to see a realistic plan to keep us under 2C using nuclear power. Even China, with its massive subsidies and central planning, is only (optimistically) planning to have nuclear at 18% of all generation by 2060. And it's very unlikely that the US and Europe are going to match China's construction cadence for simple economic reasons, leaving aside the rest of the world.
And yet not really! What’s important about solar and wind and batteries is that you can massively scale the hard parts of production in factories, while installation requires relatively attainable skills and technologies. That’s why even construction-genius China is currently and in the foreseeable future going to be building vastly more renewables than nuclear.
There is a theoretical future version of nuclear that some folks talk about that might fit the bill for what we need. This involves factory-produced modular reactors that can benefit from manufacturing economies and quick installation. Unfortunately that technology isn’t anywhere near production. Even if we made a push to get that off the ground, we’d then have to deal with 10-20 years of R&D before the exponential curves begin to kick off — if it works at all. And non-proliferation and safety for a world with millions of tiny modular reactors is a huge gnarly problem nobody has yet solved.
At the end of the day you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you have. Timelines are short and the choices are limited.
To me it is amazing Noah, who fancies himself economically savvy, could have written such a poorly researched piece. The big picture is how do we get power to the 5 billion people who want to live like us economically and within the limits of natural resources for which the only answer is advanced nuclear.
The people who are hardest to reach are those in poor remote communities.
So a village of 100 Kenyans, miles from anywhere. Put a few solar panels in a truck, or strap them to the sides of mules if the road is that bad. Send a couple of people who can put tab A into slot B to set it up. Send some Li ion batteries too. Done. They now have electricity.
A nuclear reactor couldn't possibly be run in that village. That village has no one in it who knows what a neutron is.
A nuclear reactor could maybe be set up in the big town 100 miles away, but that would take a lot of power cable.
I completely agree with Shane. I live in an off grid cabin in the mountains. We just installed a $35,000 solar system. The solar panels are the cheapest part. We will be running a generator in December and January and in to February because mountains will block the limited sunshine.
The inverter charger, 8 guage wire and LFP batteries were expensive.
Everything will need replacing in 20 to 30 if not sooner.
It would take 6 days during the sunny days of summer to charge up a Ford Lightning half ton truck with our system.
Enough said. I wish more people understand the energy reality of modern existence.
Genuine question- how does nuclear provide energy for these other uses like aviation, shipping etc when solar cannot?
I agree with your comments on batteries and another issue not mentioned by Noah is the resources required for large scale battery use, and the potential environmental impact of obtaining these.
Nuclear is used in shipping already, have you never seen an aircraft carrier? For long range aircraft, electric propulsion will not be feasible, fuels created from electrolysed (by solar or more efficiently nuclear) hydrogen and captured carbon can be made, but there is no reason to stop using oil for this, since we will need to refine it for plastics, fertilizer, asphalt and many other things which have no practical alternatives.
Even if they weren't, putting all your eggs in the cheapest basket can make sense.
Solar produces a bit less energy on cloudy days. But if you have plenty of panels and batteries, you can have very low risk. Especially if your grid spans long distances. There are many ways of managing risk.
* Produces a liability stream that outlives any enterprise.
* Has a demonstrated capacity to produce liabilities that outsize a single plant’s lifetime net profit.
Since contractors cheat when it’s profitable, nuclear requires oversight and regulation like no other industry.
As a counterpart to the friction of much-needed regulation, nuclear also gets a giant public subsidy: every U.S. nuclear plant was built under a federal promise to assume custody of its waste, in a national repository, which — in the 1970s — was “a decade away.” Fifty years later, the federal government has largely given up, because states don’t trust any entity — public or private — to service a multi-century liability.
So of course it’s regulated, and despite a massive subsidy, it’s *still* our most expensive option.
Spent fuel is not waste, it can be recycled by future breeder reactors and is very compact and stored on site, no federal repository needed. Where will all the waste deteriorated solar panels be stored (true waste, no theoretical recycling for panels exists)? I guess you can store it on site, putting new panels over the dead ones, but the land area is huge and will be contaminated when the panels finally break down.
Spent fuel is intensely radioactive. In principle it can be recycled. In practice this is really expensive and difficult to recycle something that is trying to kill you like that.
Hit a waste solar panel with a hammer and it turns into basically sand. And solar panels aren't difficult to recycle.
You think we are going to be able to electrify at scale energy use for cement production, steel production, heating, cargo ships, planes, heavy industrial equipment for construction and agriculture, etc (many other use cases I’m missing) any time in the next 15-20 years? No offense but please pass the kool aid.
There are basically three paths for the human race.
1. We keep burning hydrocarbons at our current rate, in which case we blow past 2 and 3 degrees C, and quite possibly hit tipping points that take us past 4-5 degrees C. In this case nobody needs to worry about cement and steel production, because these temperatures are "incompatible with global organization" to use the IPCC's euphemism for massive industrial collapse.
2. We get our act together and tackle this the same we've tackled other existential threats in the past -- basically, pouring huge government resources into it, perhaps constructing expensive nuclear plants one at a time and taking advantage of slight economies of scale and raising taxes by 50%. I would obviously prefer this vs. the above alternative, but I recognize that politically it's a non-starter. Perhaps as things get obviously more dire the political will might materialize, but by then it will probably be too late.
3. We hope that industrial policy drives down the price of renewables and storage along an exponential cost curve, based on huge manufacturing economies of scale, to the point where alternative types of power generation don't make any financial sense. This collapses the demand for hydrocarbons (for power generation) because they don't make any damned financial sense anymore and a new industry takes over at an exponential rate (with some gentle industrial policy headwinds.) Then, using this abundant cheap energy we figure out how to solve the remaining industrial problems like steel production and cement production, and use the rest of this cheap (intermittent) power for CO2 reduction. Perhaps we buy a little bit of time with geoengineering solutions, since the rapid changes in ocean temperature and ahead-of-schedule arctic/antarctic collapse makes our predictions look too rosy.
Obviously all three of these paths solve the problem to various extents. It goes without saying that with (1) being the death of most people you know, and (2) being politically non-viable in the time frame we have left, there isn't much of a choice. The good news is that (3) appears to be happening, at least so far, so there is some reason to be optimistic. But pessimism is fine too, as long as you understand what that entails.
No offense but I don’t take the IPCC’s projections as gospel. I don’t view climate change as an existential crisis. However, I do believe abundant energy is a necessity for our modern way of life, both to grow and to counteract the upcoming impacts of climate change. Therefore, if we are going to transition away from fossil fuels to a certain extent then we should at least use a proven source of power that does not have massive cost issues at scale and substantial intermittency issues that require a lot of back up infrastructure.
I don't take the IPCC's projections as gospel either, I think they are much too optimistic. We weren't supposed to see ice-free summers in Arctic until the 2050s and now they're expected in the 2030s. Maybe sooner, based on the record ocean temperatures we're experiencing. We're also seeing the start of a possible methane feedback loop not based on human emissions, but on temperatures driving wetlands emissions, which in turn drive higher temperatures.
My general view is that if you don't think climate change is happening or a serious threat to civilization, there's not much of a discussion to be had. Nuclear isn't going to be economically viable as a major solution when many people also share your lack of concern. So that in turn reinforces (3) as our only option.
Well you and I are on opposite sides then. Even if we were to have ice free summers in the Arctic by 2030s (which I have my doubts on) can anyone credibly tell me what the actual impact would be on sea levels and is it enough of an impact that we would not be able to handle it?
You have a weird three way false choice here. Nuclear requires raising taxes by 50% but massive build out of solar and storage does not? The IPCC RCP8.5 scenario which is the only one to reach 4°C warming assumes all renewable energy is replaced by new coal, which is ridiculous. Currrate consumption of fossil fuels will not destroy global organization. Carbon capture, alternative steel and cement does not depend on the electricity generation source, and research in this area doesn’t depend on solar at all. Scenario 4: allow technology to grow naturally and the most cost effective ones will win out.
RPC8.5 is "under extremely optimistic assumptions, almost everyone you know dies." Patting ourselves on the back that we've avoided certain death isn't an accomplishment. We are now deciding between scenarios that the IPCC (in footnotes only, but not with actual probability ranges) defines as having some reasonable probability of having potential civilization-ending effects. And this is an organization that has repeatedly proven too optimistic.
The LCOE chart includes the cost of batteries in the "Solar PV + Storage" and "Wind + Storage" rows. The fact that those are right in line with the "Combined Cycle Gas" line is the point. We're also early in the learning curve for batteries, with multiple lower-cost technologies (e.g. LFP, sodium ion) yet to be deployed at scale for grid storage. So grid storage costs are definitely coming down.
Plus, as the article notes, decreasing solar/wind costs means that you can overbuild on solar/wind and spend less on batteries. So the non-storage rows in the chart are relevant to the overall system cost when you take that overbuilding into account.
You talk a big game for someone with a default PFP and zero citations. Cost actually matters a lot - the fact that it isn't the only thing that matters is irrelevant.
Worse, I don't even know what a default PFP is, or how you get a citation here. But I do have some experience with building out national-scale electrical grids. Which is why I talk small game, not frothing about a chart being the most important since ever.
For PV to make more significant contributions to a grid, storage is required. Storage costs dwarf PV costs. And now that PV cost has dropped, the total cost is fairly insensitive to further PV price changes.
And no matter how cheap it is, even free, PV should not replace everything, because a mix of sources is needed to manage risk, among other reasons.
> For PV to make more significant contributions to a grid, storage is required. Storage costs dwarf PV costs. And now that PV cost has dropped, the total cost is fairly insensitive to further PV price changes.
This would be a relevant point if storage costs weren't ALSO dropping like a rock, something Noah stressed in his article. Iron air batteries, with efficiency gains we already know about, can have cost-per-capacity of 1 tenth that of lithium ion, and the costs should be expected to go down from there.
> And no matter how cheap it is, even free, PV should not replace everything, because a mix of sources is needed to manage risk, among other reasons.
Of course. This has always been true. But wind, PV, and hydro electric already constitute a diverse range, and a world in which 60% of ALL energy production comes from these sources is both very possible and absolutely a situation in which renewables have "won."
"A definition of insanity is posting the same misleading charts repeatedly and arguing that it somehow makes them less misleading."
I think constantly repeating the idea that solar, batteries, wind, or [insert favorite tech you are dunking on here] will be the first industries in the history of mankind where economies of scale never kick in is closer to the definition of insanity.
Nice article. However, I work in the PV industry, and I find that some key things are often omitted from discussions about the energy transition and its costs.
1) Costs are derived in a highly dynamic and non-linear fashion. The rate for kWHs and kWs that rate-payers pay in any fifteen minute interval are a function of many decisions made about investments and operations over monthly, yearly and multi-decade time spans. These decisions are mostly made by utilities, investors and regulators in the furtherance of their own interests -- not consumers. While metrics like LCOE are helpful, the economics are far harder to model than is allowed, I think, in the popular imagination. This doesn't mean that reactionary opinions about renewables are correct -- usually these voices are WAY too certain that such mere complexity proves their point to be trusted (contra several respondents here: there's no scenario in which new nuclear plants are going to produce "cheap" energy in the next decade-plus).
2) The solution to the intermittency problem with captured energy sources has a few prongs: more transmission, more storage, excess capacity buildout and better signaling. That last prong, signaling, may actually be the most important new capability of the four, and it's the one that gets the least attention yet will require the most innovation. Load and generation assets at the grid edge need to be able to respond reliably to signals that help balance electricity supply & demand; and these instructions must be calculated and determined to deploy resources efficiently close to real time. The trick is that we're going from a centralized systems with relatively few devices requiring direct control, to a decentralized system with millions of devices requiring direct control. Very few people commenting publicly on the energy transition fully appreciate the difficulties and opportunities of this change.
3. Noah talks a lot about environmental laws like NEPA and CEQA posing permitting problems. But just pulling a building permit or dealing with standard conservation or zoning requirements can be far more complicated than is usually discussed. Design standards imposed by the NEC, fire codes, building codes and listing processes also have an impact on how quickly/cheaply systems can be installed. I'm a proponent, generally, of higher construction standards, but the industry has created roadblocks for itself on a number of issues. For example, in my view, the rollout, in 2019, of required rapid shutdown devices for PV systems on rooftops has been a costly and unsafe policy pushed by the NEC. I don't think people in the media talk enough to the engineers and construction workers building these systems about their most difficult challenges.
I agree that nuclear, wind, solar, etc. make the economy vs climate debate a mute point. There is even still a great deal of coal generation that could be economically be replaced with gas with some climate benefit (depending on how bad you think methane leakage is). I also agree that our clean energy potential means we should oppose degrowth, which never seemed politically possible anyway.
But I would be careful about getting caught up in solar and battery hype. While technological factors have played a role in bringing down the price, they are still incredibly materially intensive from a minerals and metals perspective. China has majority market share in nearly all of the raw materials mining and processing for batteries and solar panels. Silicon PV especially is cheap thanks to China’s coal fired electricity, lack of water and air pollution regulation, and lack of labor regulation which comes close to forced labor. Making this type of clean energy equipment is dirty.
Further there are some intricacies with the energy grid that, when ignored, make it easy to make solar look cheap.
The most obvious, which you’ve addressed, is intermittency. With natural gas as the majority fuel source for the US grid, adding more solar displaces the amount of fuel burned at these power plants when solar is producing. Apart from some short term (hours) peaking capabilities, natural gas will remain the predominant source of firming. Lazard recently did a report on “firming costs,” which gets into this.
You presented a classic graph for hyping solar. Electricity demand is not growing as rapidly as it once did, so new capacity additions are small making solar proportionally look bigger. Additionally, listing capacity artificially inflated solar’s contribution. The capacity factor must be taken into account. This is the amount of time the source is generating at full capacity, typically 15-30% in the US depending on location. Other sources are higher meaning less capacity can produce the same amount of generation (kw vs kwh).
Finally, grid costs and time value of electricity do not favor solar. As solar is added to a region, it decreases the price of electricity during sunny hours of the day. At these times selling electricity becomes less valuable for any other producer. When more solar is added, it produces the most electricity at the times when existing solar has already decrease the time specific value of electricity. Basically, adding solar gets less and less useful as more is added. Besides storage (which adds great cost), the problem can be somewhat alleviated by having more capacity and coverage of continental scale grid interconnections. When the sun sets on the east coast it’s still sunny in the west. Building such power lines are expensive, land intensive, and of course opposed by NIMBYs.
Land use, especially, is one reason why I think nuclear is much better than solar. It requires over 60x less land through the entire supply chain. This means far less environmental impact and local opposition.
Just want to add a quick point. Solar has about a 40% capacity factor. When gas is burned to pick up the slack for solar, companies use peaker plants that are only about 40% efficient. Dedicated gas plants use combined cycle that's about 60-65% efficient in converting heat energy to electricity, so natural gas is used more inefficiently than in a dedicated gas plant, which has implications for carbon pollution and air pollution.
Yes, the on/off operation of gas plants is bad for efficiency and air pollution... like driving a car in stop and go traffic. And, the rankine cycle steam turbines added to ccs plant are not as responsive as the initial brayton cycle turbine, which act as a gas pedal to match grid demand.
Where are you getting 40% cap factor for solar? Is this a theoretical max in a certain location? I’m looking at some US EIA data and seeing roughly 16% in Massachusetts and 28% in California for example.
Even crazier is the capacity factor in early solar adopter Germany, just 10%!
You're actually right about that, I was thinking of wind which averages 25% to 40%. I know concentrated solar power can use storage which boosts capacity factor, with things like molten salts but it's really only suitable for desert regions, or countries with very high solar insolation like Spain.
I expect that electrolytic Hydrogen will become a likely output from solar. If you expand solar electic production beyond local market needs, you can make Hydrogen. Now while Hydrogen can be stored and shipped, doing so is not efficient. I rather expect that for long distance or long term storage Hydrogen will be converted to Ammonia (easy to store and ship - and easy to regenerate Hydrogen) and as some form of syn fuel by reacting with CO2 (either via engineered cells or standard chemical engineering processes). The syn fuels can be used for aircraft due to their high specific energy.
Hydrogen is terrible. An absolutely insane propensity to leak combined with a wide flammability range and near invisible flames make it a safety hazard everywhere it's used.
I would suggest that a better and safer plan would be to use surplus solar electricity to fix atmospheric CO2 into CH4, which is (much!) easier to store and transport, and is already used both as a chemical feedstock and as the fuel of choice for electrical peaker plants. There's really interesting work going on in this field (see https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-terraformer-mark-one/) and it looks like a dramatically easier transition path.
My understanding is that, as DonH has already said, hydrogen is completely impractical for personal vehicles because of how prone to leaking it is. I've heard scientists refer to it as 'devilishly clever' in its ability to escape. To be fair, I think it may be mildly more practical for large-scale fixed infrastructure needs. But cars? Never
liquid anhydrous Ammonia had 50% higher volumetric Hydrogen density than Liquid H2 and is an eminently practical transport medium for ground and sea based vehicles. It is not weight efficient so is unsuitable for aircraft, where hydrocarbon syn fuels are more appropriate. While Ammonia is toxic, it is water soluble and plants love to absorb it - fertilizer. I would much rather deal with an Ammonia leak mitigation issue than a gasoline leak mitigation.
Plants do not absorb ammonia at all. Plants need nitrates to grow and ammonium nitrate is a common way of distributing water soluble nitrates. Calcium nitrate and NPK are other ways of distributing nitrates (fertilizer) for plants. The ammonia half dissolves into the soil where it may eventually end up broken down (partially into nitrates) by microbes. It is not, however, itself a fertilizer.
I expect Hydrogen storage as a gas to be used for only short term periods - days. It has a very low density and compressing it or liquifying it is very energy intensive. If I remember correctly, making Ammonia takes ~ 10% of the available energy, liquifying it is much worse. It may well be that some engineered bugs can make bio fuels for less than a 10% penalty - but with Ammonia I can crack the Ammonia to get back Hrdrogen and then use fuel cells.
Hydrogen electrolyzers are expensive machines that require high value metals. Imagine buying one at great capital cost and then using it only the fraction of time that solar is producing and in excess to grid demand. Even if the solar electricity is cheap, the asset utilization of the electrolyzer would be low, making the hydrogen it produces expensive.
There’s been a fair bit of analysis of the capital and operating costs of hydrogen electrolysers. The short version is that while obviously higher utilisation is better, running them intermittently of very cheap energy is likely to be cost competitive. There is also a tradeoff between electrolyser cost and efficiency, so if energy is really cheap you optimise for capital cost.
I see a couple of problems. First I don't agree with the environmental impact of mining for lithium being less than mining for carbohydrates. Just DuckDuckGo lithium mines and look at the pictures. If you like NIMBY, you are going to love lithium mining. Second problem is technology. If we get the same progress as the one we enjoyed with computers, this could really hinder the spread of solar + battery. If you can change your laptop or iPhone every other year without big damage, upgrading a solar power station will cost much more. So, a wait and see attitude may develop. Living in SoCal, I'd like to install solar panels and batteries, plus an e-car. I'd be off the grid and that's nice. My wife is not ok to bear the costs for the moment and it effectively would be a luxury. I drive 2.5K a year and my car is fully paid. Our electricity bill is $ 200/month. But I really like the concept. By the way, I asked an electrical engineer neighbor about solar panel ca 6 years ago and he told me; it's not worth it. Last year he installed them on his roof. I'm long a lithium miner (ALB) and several oil stocks because oil is here to stay ; the US is only 4.5% of the world population. Many in the world have other problems than global warming. In short, "they" will let the market rule. A dogmatic approach, this is bad, this is good, will not work.
Not true! There are lots of them. They will just never be mined due to American environmental laws. Northern Maine has an enormous deposit, for instance
"They will just never be mined due to American environmental laws."
You don't actually believe this, I hope. Money will eventually talk. Unless, of course, the tech evolves enough that lithium is no longer powering most of the batteries, which is a distinct possibility.
I do think it is kind of funny that the same group of poeple who decry how the oil industry lobbies so much to get the rights to ruin large swathes of land somehow believe that we'll never mine enough Lithium because of regulations, as if oil men are the only lobbyists, and congressmen/senators wouldn't take money from lithium miners.
The world’s richest known lithium deposit lies deep in the woods of western Maine, in a yawning, sparkling mouth of white and brown rocks that looks like a landslide carved into the side of Plumbago Mountain.
Australia is the largest lithium miner in the world. It’s so far down the list of environmental concerns it’s not only not on the first page, it’s relegated to an appendix somewhere .
Unless you fly the lithium out of Mongolia, it has to be transported through Russia or China. Since the population and armed forces of Mongolia are dwarfed by those of China, China could make that impossible anytime they wanted to.
I see. I hadn't realized you were thinking of a blockade. A blockade imposed for a political purpose is typically an extreme measure with diplomatic consequences. China and Russia together could, of course, do this to Mongolia, but it would be the a hostile encroachment on national sovereignty and prompt international responses, since Mongolia maintains neutrality with regard to US-PRC tensions and has a policy of broadening its political and economic relations. I don't know of an example, outside declared war, of a selective blockade on a neutral country's exports.
I believe Lithium could certainly be flown out, since the quantities are small relative to mass metals and minerals like iron or coal, though I presume it would be somewhat more expensive than land/sea transport. China and Russia could shoot down the planes over their air space, but this would be an act of war. If the planes belonged to a purchasing country, the act of war would be taken against that country.
My concern, which grows smaller as the learning curve cost of PV drop, is this. There is dust, dirt, and electrical degradation over time. The PV output per solar input falls. Maybe 50% at year 10. I'm going from a bit older thinking.
What does it matter if at all, that output drops are significant?
My answer is, cost of new overcomes and replacement is the answer. Except labor to install never drops.
I put together the proposal for 1MW of rooftop solar at a factory. The panels, installed in 2021, have a 2% capacity drop in the first year, and 0.6% drop for each year after that. It works out to 85% capacity after 25 years.
You are a big proponent of the idea that “decoupling with China is just going to happen.” How do you square that position with embracing inexpensive solar panels and batteries? Costs for these technologies have been driven down by massive state subsidies and investment from China. As a result, Chinese solar panels are now very cheap, but the PRC controls at least 80% of each stage of solar panel production. Even panels “made” in other countries are frequently just Chinese inputs assembled in another place.
Before someone mentions the IRA — the made in America mandates in the IRA will increase costs for end users, or will increase the debt burden for the state (due to subsidies to make all-American batteries and solar panels cost competitive w Chinese products), or increase the tax burden for American citizens and businesses.
This is an area where I think some level of cooperation with China, especially in the short term, makes a lot of sense if people are serious about substantially increasing the scale of renewable energy in America to address concerns about climate change.
Also, it seems that pumped storage hydro is a better large-scale storage solution than batteries.
Pumped hydro needs even more space than the solar panels at two significantly different altitudes so isn’t much more practical than lithium batteries. Iron air batteries or sequestered hydrogen are probably more reasonable.
The challenge then becomes building ultra high voltage transmission lines from storage sites to urban centres on the coasts. PSH is a proven, cost effective, and scalable energy storage solution. There are no technical breakthroughs necessary to make it work with large scale renewable buildout — the only hurdle is NIMBYism!
The one caveat I’d put in here is that on the macro scale this simplistic analysis is basically right, Northern Europe, parts of the USA, Canada, and parts of China have a seasonality problem.
In a nutshell, peak energy demands for heating occur precisely when solar production is at its lowest.
The upshot of that is that firmed , year-round energy will be much cheaper in places closer to the equator.
There’s quite a few things you might be able to do with very cheap seasonally available energy, of which capturing carbon is only one. Making hydrogen or desalinating seawater are another two that come to mind.
Sure. One of my friends, one of the world's leading environmental entrepreneurs, Mike Biddle and EVOL are into some potentially global scale carbon capture
If problems of transmission could be addressed, Europe is just north of the Sahara, which has close to unlimited year-round sunshine. The tourist slogan for Ethiopia, used to be, “13 months of sunshine." That did not make me want to visit.
Realistically, from a geopolitical standpoint, why would Europe want to be at the mercy of North Africa when it comes to energy? These ideas were brought up 15-20 years ago, and I always thought that was a fatal flaw.
There's a problem there, but it could be written into the contracts/treaties that Europe would have a right of military intervention If problems arose. But there could be a problem of nightly sabotage.
But the normies of North Africa would probably like the income from the solar farms and society might be able to police the saboteurs. Just like East Africa likes its wildlife tourists And Egypt likes its pyramid tourists. These sources of income are held to be off limits to terrorists. Europe could try it, and see if the locals support it before investing big.
I just think that countries having control of their own energy supply is a much more attractive prospect, and I used to hear that argument much more in the US before the fracking and shale revolution changed the game for the US. "If we invest in solar, wind and biofuels, we won't be dependent on OPEC and the Arab countries". That's still a potent argument for countries that don't have large fossil fuel reserves like Japan or France.
You definitely have a point there about energy security. I have read that France depends mostly on nuclear energy, I don't know what percentage. However, I once heard that a nuclear reactor would make a wonderful target in time of war, perhaps creating a Chernobyl-like incident. So, as usual, not much is easy.
France gets about 70-80% of it's electricity from nuclear. After the oil crisis and embargo in the 1970s, they decided they didn't want to be reliant anymore upon OPEC for their energy, and started building nuclear plants to prevent that. The risk of bombing is true theoretically, but we also run large chemical plants or oil refineries or hydroelectric dams that could be very dangerous to the public if they were damaged, so I think that's just a trade-off with big tech. Nuclear isn't unique in that regard imo.
HVDC lines are very expensive to build and maintain. Whilst they are great for connecting grids, it's so far been much cheaper and quicker to build more - less efficient - renewables closer to the end consumer than transmitting power across long distances. The economics are unlikely to change in favour of long distance transmission any time soon, and until they do the other considerations don't matter anyway.
Oh China is definitely building a lot of coal. It's the biggest climate problem in the world.
Doesn't mean their solar buildout is "cherry-picked". The fact they're building so much solar shows how cheap solar is. They're building coal because A) a lot of their factories are dependent on it as a feedstock, and B) they can use it to create synthetic fuel in case of an oil blockade.
Isn't Chinese solar only cheap due to it being part of the planned economy? China's governments wants them to be cheap, so they are cheap, doesn't mean they actually _are_ cheap.
Or see the link at bottom for a $250 estimate by 2030
Cost = $250/kwH
Then ignore grid upgrade costs
Now, assume you need multiple days of storage for extended periods of cold, no sun or calm air. (I’ve seen 24-30 days referenced in separate studies based on real world weather models). All at rated capacity which has its own issue as effective capacity declines 1-2% a year. This is just to have a resilient system.
Let’s use ten days to cover us for a bad spell once every few years, somewhere. That may be too little storage but we’ll go with it.
Now figure out how much a state or country needs to spend to go net zero on electricity consumption only.
Average demand is something like 30 GW. In a disaster people buckle down and use less. But let’s say that net zero is intended to supply electricity for rather typical stretches of weather.
10 days x 24 hours x 30,000 kw x $250 kw-hr = $1.8 Trillion
You’re grossly overestimating the amount of storage required, and the technology that will be used for it.
Most of the required storage in a decarbonised system will be short duration. Only a relatively small amount of long duration storage will be required, and it will come from some combination of pumped hydro, demand management, biogas, hydrogen, compressed air, geothermal energy storage, iron flow batteries, and I’m sure other things.
It’s also worth pointing out here that you can get to maybe 90% decarbonised grids without the long duration stuff.
Whilst the storage most used will be of short duration, to avoid shortages historical data seems to suggest a requirement for 2-4 weeks of electricity in low wind, winter conditions in countries like the UK, unless renewable generation capacity is around 10x average demand. This would suggest that most of the storage will be of long duration but only used very rarely. For larger blocks such as the US or Europe, energy can be moved around to reduce this somewhat, but this requires significant overcapacity and very expensive transmission infrastructure. You can pderhaps get to a 90% decarbonised grid by falling back on gas generation (for example), with the other 10% being those low renewable periods, but I guess this would require gas generation capacity of at least 50% of peak demand, which is hardly ideal given the infrastructure required. A proven solution to this would be nice.
Pumped hydro has been around for many decades but has seen a revival of interest. Among others. there’s a very large pumped hydro project under construction in Australia called Snowy 2.0. The project has been a bit of an omnishambles but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the tech itself.
Biogas has similarly been around forever; storing it and burning it in gas turbines is well established.
There are a number of commercial-scale compressed air energy storage plants in operation in various places around the world. The Wikipedia article on the topic lists some.
The last two are a bit more speculative. There are a number of companies working on various types of redox flow batteries. Most seem to be aiming at the 4 to 8 hour storage market but a startup called Flow energy is claiming to have a “100 hour battery” in the pilot stage.
Geothermal energy storage is a concept that some of the enhanced geothermal companies are working on - basically, you pump water at high pressure into the wells when energy is cheap, giving you extra power output when you open the taps later.
For completeness, demand management is another way the seasonality of energy supply and demand can be dealt with. Things like hydrogen production and desalination don’t have to be done all year round.
What you missed is that the sky doesn't go black for 10 days. It just gets less bright. Accordingly, you end up with a 30%-70% (varying) reduction in solar output power over that time(10 days). Even in winter, solar output only drops by 40%-60%. This of course, means you can over-build solar to further reduce battery requirements (even to zero). The other thing that you missed is that batteries are already below $250 and will continue to fall. And you overlooked that nobody (sensible) thinks we can get to 100% solar by 2030 (so battery prices will have more time to fall).
So, perhaps you are arguing against some imaginary person who thinks that we can go to 100% solar by 2030. He is wrong. On the other hand, your argument has a few holes as well.
Lol ok. He’s definitely not an expert, that guy. I’d argue with your points (I just read yet another report from this January that put turnkey storage costs—not cell costs—at $300). I think while “everyone knows” it’s not happening by 2030, what I’m interested in is how governments present reality to its citizens. One way is draconian legislation and catastrophizing. Another way is embracing reality while pushing forward without the frequent stupidity and unintended consequences of top-down mandates.
But you seem knowledgeable. Maybe I will revisit my premises and with more research write my own piece. Now if only there was a place I could post such a thing.
I don't believe that a "turnkey solution" cost is representative of the costs associated with an entire state buying storage. It is more in line with the cost for you to put a nicely anodized box in your garage for you to show off to your neighbors.
Ok. I’m just reading things like “Utility-Scale Battery Storage: 2023 Update”. We’re at an impasse. You may be right. I don’t see the data, yet. But I appreciate your points.
I’m curious and want to see a simple model, which doesn’t exist from the people who are shutting off gas and bankrupting North America. Im 100% in favour of renewables, but I’m pragmatic about it. We shouldn’t impoverish people and weaken our societies.
I don’t know if there are problems with this paper (below) other than the hand-waving that storage can come from hydrogen which is not a technology that exists at scale - but this type of analysis is more readily available than sane analyses from the IEP, et al, looking at useful information like, say: average demand versus scenarios for amount of storage required during low-renewable periods and assuming that dispatchable supply has been allowed to decline (eg in BC, natural gas is becoming banned in new construction at a municipal level, which will surely lead, as intended, to declines in supply and infrastructure investments).
TL;DR 2 weeks of storage to 9 weeks and maybe longer for a net zero grid.
In conclusion, it’s not as rosy as all that, the trends are good but orders of magnitudes off, and political leaders will likely have to choose between easing off net zero policies or authoritarian measures that will lead to unrest, IMHO. Viz, Netherlands and increasingly UK.
To say solar is cheap based on grid scale power plants and then switch to say it’s reliable because in a hurricane rooftop household solar works when transmission lines are blown down is a contradiction.
First, LCOE is a scam. It doesn’t take into account either connection costs or backup costs. Second, solar has incredibly low energy density and has a supply chain dominated by China. Panels are rarely recycled so waste is an issue.
Batteries are still clocking in at around 150 dollars per MWh. They barely got down to 100 a couple years ago when there was very little demand for them and hydrocarbon inputs to mining were cheap.
Not to mention that borrowing money was essentially free. Projects that take 5 years or more to pay off aren’t so attractive at current rates.
Also, silver costs would be driven through the roof if solar continued it’s growth of the past decade.
It took trillions of dollars to get solar to 4.5 percent, and early growth is easy growth.
Overall, 5 trillion dollars have been spent on wind and solar in the last 20 years or so, and oil’s total share of primary energy went down like 2 percent while electricity costs skyrocketed.
Building enough batteries to store just a day or so of grid capacity nationwide would cost trillions as well. You can always expand the grid to need less storage, but that is also incredibly expensive. Plus permitting takes years.
The IEA is absolutely awful at their job, constantly underestimating third world demand, and largely being a propaganda machine.
I’d bet almost any amount of money solar doesn’t come close to gas in four years.
Don’t forget that the problem you’re try to solve is a small piece of the pie. Electricity is only 20 percent of the total energy produced worldwide.
We still need energy for aviation, shipping, steel, plastics, cement, etc.
The smart move is more nuclear, but we’re largely scared of the waste, which has never caused a single death.
Not trying to be a bummer, but I’ve been in energy for almost 30 years, and the picture is a lot more complicated than it’s being portrayed in the media.
There’s no energy transition, it’s an energy addition.
All that said, I wouldn’t be reading your stuff if it wasn’t good:)
Somehow my earlier comment got deleted, so let's try again! In brief:
1. Electricity costs have not soared. In inflation-adjusted terms they have fallen since 2015.
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1700010965163737488
If you work in the energy industry you ought to know that!
2. Nuclear is great but it also only produces electricity. (It's also expensive, so we'll use it mainly as a backup to solar.)
3. Most non-electrified stuff can be electrified.
https://www.vox.com/2016/9/19/12938086/electrify-everything
This is happening with steel now.
https://twitter.com/JesseJenkins/status/1699433934986076281
4. China being in the supply chain doesn't matter. Solar panels are a commoditized product, we can produce as many as we want. We only use China right now because they're subsidizing production.
5. The IEA's forecasts of solar deployment have consistently UNDERshot the reality.
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9510879/iea-underestimate-renewables
A lot of these other points are addressed in my post already!
Like I said, solar is for real, it's happening now, and those who don't recognize that fact will just watch the world go by. ;-)
Cheers!
- N
Nuclear is expensive because of the regulatory stranglehold. How are you just dismissing this? I’m looking forward to that post a decade from now when we are still at best in the mid-teens of global electricity production from solar and wind and when you realize what you are writing right now makes little sense. Also, your source for clean steel is a startup with the tech? Yeah China also built a battery powered cargo ship. Let me know when all these solutions actually become commercially viable at scale. Additionally, you are categorically wrong. If your claim is that electricity generated by solar can be converted to heat for industrial uses but electricity from nuclear cant then you are just wrong. Nuclear is also used in modern aircraft carriers and submarines...therefore, it is proven and much more viable for heavy transport uses.
Nuclear is expensive because things that are built on-site instead of in factories don't have learning curves.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512200410X
Building onsite doesn’t prevent learning cost reductions. Look at high speed rail in Japan and China. It also works for nuclear power plants, in Korea new plants costs have steadily decreased.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/Ｓ０３０１４２１５１６３００１０６
"Getting Cheaper" isn't a learning curve. American nuclear could get a lot cheaper via various means, but the value in the LCOE listed in the article is the international cost. If there was some way to make this stuff really cheaply, France would have found out a generation ago.
That is clearly not the reason. Since you are clearly unaware of the history of how nuclear became so expensive, I direct you to this. It breaks down in great detail what happened from the emergence of nuclear, the competition with coal, the emergence of ALARA, the use of the LNT standard, etc. https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/gordian_wZ.pdf
Nuclear reactors can be built in factories.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-reactors-smrs
France is clearly doing something right: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels-share-energy
Well, yes, nuclear is far better than coal, which used to be a major part of European power generation, but French nuclear power has underperformed lately, much for environmental reason (France has suffered heat waves/droughts last couple years, leading to nuclear power plants shutting down, and sharp reduction of hydroelectric power). https://twitter.com/jaxroam/status/1622675509707505664
Nice to have some nuclear in the mix, but it will not be the major workhorse in power generation, which in Europe will be a fairly even split of solar and wind.
Please look again at the graph: 40% of France's power is NOT fossil fuels and it could be far more absent anti-nuclear sentiment. France is the furthest along the path of decarbonizaton and they did it 30+ years ago! When you say Europe's future is solar and wind, what are you planning on doing exactly when it's overcast and the wind isn't blowing? You also need consistent sources of power, whether that's coal, natural gas, nuclear, or major advances in battery technology.
France is not furthest ahead in decarbonisation in Europe. Here in Sweden we are further ahead (and so are our Nordic neighbours). Still France does perform better by choosing nuclear over the coal-to-fossil gas route many of their neighbours opted for.
Europe is the most arctic continent in the world, so our share of solar will necessarily be lower long term. Crucially there is less sun in the winter. However we do have a wide variety of power sources, wind power performs particularly well autumn and winter in our neighbourhood, augmenting our hydro-electric power, and with EU/ENTSO-E building a wide and dense power grid.
The Russian fossil gas shock pushed us to further advances on the heating infrastructure and on demand-side power use. Soon we may have the most robust energy system on the planet.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-fossil-nuclear-renewables?time=latest&country=OWID_WRL~USA~GBR~FRA~SWE~DNK~NOR~ESP~POL~DEU~OWID_EU27
When Right politics chose opposing action on emissions instead of supporting it that was a knife in the back for nuclear, not by environmentalists (only up to Environmentalists because mainstream politics handed the issue to them, in order to NOT fix it) by nuclear's political "friends" - no climate problem = no need. Sure, they waited for a hippie painted kombi bus before they pushed - with much shouting about irresponsible eco-crazies, but anti-nuclear activism could never have impeded nuclear so thoroughly as nuclear's advocates did by turning climate science denier.
Metaculus has your scenario at under 2%: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3593/renewables-25-of-global-electricity-in-2030/
If you are really that certain, you should find someone to bet.
All I can speak to is electricity prices in solar-happy enviro-obsessed so-cal, where our *cheapest* rate, $0.28/kwh, is so high it wouldn't even show up on the graph of "declining" electricity prices you posted on Twitter yesterday. We pay between $0.28 and $0.60(!!)/kwh here, somewhere between 2x and 4x the national average. Which average is pulled up by the 38 million people paying these outlier prices. In reality the disparity is even bigger. If this is what the green-solar-wind-renewable revolution looks like in practice, you're gonna have a hard time selling it outside any deep blue bubble.
It’s ironic that the demonstration state for solar is Texas rather than California!
That’s NIMBYs for you.
CA does not have an abundance of land that can be devoted to utility scale solar without controversy. TX has plenty.
*GASP* are you telling me that you live in a wealthy state where utility companies have high overheads??? Say it ain't so! But switching electricity sources with higher LCOE would not make your bill go down, lol.
How do they price electricity? More than half is not due to generation, but other costs. And about the price of generation, don’t they use marginal pricing? They do, so the price of generation is the most expensive power they have to turn on, and it’s usually gas turbines. If there is abundantly more solar, so that you don’t need to turn on the more expensive gas turbines, you get a lower marginal price for generation. More solar would mean cheaper generation, but only if you cross the threshold where most of the time, you don’t need to use intermittent electricity, and that’s where batteries come in.
The gas peaked plants kick in every summer afternoon when demand is high and the sun is low, adding more solar won’t help that at all.
On the contrary. More capacity at peak hours can provide ample extra electricity to charge batteries after air conditioning. That charge will last till dawn. Just check MKBHDs review of his Tesla system after running it for a year. And that is todays tech, and not even the cheapest system available. https://youtu.be/UJeSWbR6W04?si=kVtjf9eKLNMiEfR3
Battery storage to soak up any excess power and provide more flexibility to the grid operator on which resources to spin up at peak demand is great. SCE has I think almost 3GW of installed utility scale battery storage (~5% of the state's peak load), plus who knows how much privately owned storage. It definitely didn't prevent load shedding last summer. And it also hasn't seemed to lower costs any. The generation charges on my bill alone are $0.165, above the *total* national average for electricity. And all this is with significant installed solar plus gas is still available to us. Should be fun as CA insists on net zero. When do the benefits of solar get here, I guess is my question? Either for reliability or price? Because right now I'm getting the worst of both worlds.
Marques is great, and yes he has zero dollar monthly electric bills but a Tesla solar roof and home battery are over $200,000. Who is going to pay to have all homes in California have these? With interest and an expected life of 20 years, he’s paying over $1000 a month to have a zero dollar electric bill, but he pulls in lots more from ads and endorsement deals so I don’t worry about him.
So if I understand your comment, Solar is worth the most in California, since your grid is so expensive, right?
Are all your neighbors using solar? If so, you know you're paying them for electricity, right? They probably sell back to the grid on top of saving from not buying from the grid.
Solar PV accounts for 4.5% of total global electricity generation after trillions of investments. Unless you are living in a jar on Moon you will get affected by the emissions from the rest of the world. You want to talk about climate change then you need to address it globally.
> Electricity costs have not soared. In inflation-adjusted terms they have fallen since 2015.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/252795/weighted-price-index-of-energy/
> This is happening with steel now.
Nothing is happening until it gets into production and deployed on global scale and cheaply.
I learned a lot from the article, but the part that needs more flushing out is the battery storage. Your response does not really address this aspect. We have an example of solar being cheap in Texas, but I at least don't have an example of battery storage being cost effective at scale. The graph clearly shows battery costs dropping 25% in a very short period, so maybe we are heading there, but without a large scale example it's hard to think the batteries are really economical today.
Another commenter shared this, which I found helpful p 15-17. Please investigate more the actual costs of batteries in practice in a situation like Texas: https://am.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/campaign/energy-paper-13/growing-pains-renewable-transition-in-adolescence.pdf: "Texas wind capacity factors averaged 32% in December 2022. But that doesn’t mean that wind provided steady power at 32% of installed capacity; as shown on the left, Texas wind generation varied from a low of 5% of capacity to a peak of 70% during the month. Why this matters: LCOE is so blissfully unaware of reality that it is calculated the exact same way whether Texas wind capacity factors are 32% for every hour of December, or if they average 32% but vary from 5%-70%. This is preposterous since in the latter scenario, backup thermal power/storage needs are much higher than in the former. LCOE is the cocktail napkin of energy math."
The California ISO already has 5.6 GW at around 17 GWh, a ten times increase from two or three years ago. Batteries are already cost effective and replacing natural gas for peaking duties.
This definitely did not lower anyone’s bill, CA continues to rob people blind on their utility bills. If you think this lowered prices, link to an article explaining how PG&Es profits have gone up because their marginal costs have gone down due to batteries, but they have not passed any of the savings on.
This is what I could find “ With one megawatt of electricity providing roughly enough power to meet the demand of 750 homes, 5,600 MW of battery capacity can provide enough electricity to power 4.2 million homes for up to four hours before the batteries need to be recharged.” https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/07/12/icymi-california-grid-reaches-5600-mw-of-battery-storage-capacity-a-1020-increase-since-2020/
So they have increased capacity, but the government press release does not discuss the cost effectiveness of the batteries.
In regard to #2, it should be noted that presently nuclear is mostly used for electricity, but this is not a technological limitation. In addition to electricity, conventional nuclear can be used for district heating and low temperature process heat. Many cities in Russia use their nuclear plants for heating. With an absorption chiller, sources of heat can also be used for cooling.
The promise of advanced generation IV nuclear reactors brings the possibility of more useful higher temperature heat. For example, look at what Dow Chemical is doing with nuclear startup X-Energy.
Aside from all the naval propulsion, we also had the nuclear powered NS Savannah back in the 50s. We could have nuclear powered container ships in the future.
Any source of electricity can be used to make hydrogen which can then be used to make synthetic fuel via Fischer-Tropsch process. Liquid hydrocarbons can fit nearly every energy end use. The heat from a nuclear plant, for example, would aid in more efficient high temperature electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen.
Near the beginning of the Cold War, the US military experimented with building a nuclear powered bomber aircraft. While it’s probably a good thing that the project was halted, nuclear rockets remain a possibility. I hope to see one in my lifetime!
> Nuclear is great but it also only produces electricity. (It's also expensive, so we'll use it mainly as a backup to solar.)
Nuclear is entirely unsuitable as a backup for solar, due to its high fixed costs. The two sources simply do not work well together economically. Nuclear either runs all the time or it shouldn't be run at all. It goes big or it goes home.
What *is* suitable as backups for solar are various storage technologies, including short term storage (batteries, pumped hydro) and long term (e-fuels, like hydrogen, burned in combined cycle plants.) The latter provides the "firming" that nuclear advocates have claimed is needed.
I completely agree. People who defend renewables have to use LCOE because they know that if the true cost was ever captured, they could never defend their position. If Noah really is motivated to see the world transition to a clean energy source, he should be writing about getting rid of the regulatory stranglehold on nuclear power generation and pushing for rapid build out of next generation nuclear plants. At least then you could actually replace power generation capacity instead of just having it be a mirage.
And it's already been done! Look at what France and Sweden did in the 1970s. France with 80% nuclear now has some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, and some of the lowest carbon emissions in the EU. We don't have to reinvent the wheel here.
Except they cool most of their reactors with rivers, and it’s becoming a big problem. There are regulations about the temperature of the river and how much heat waste you are allowed to dump back, and it’s becoming a problem every year now. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/high-river-temperatures-limit-french-nuclear-power-production-2023-07-12/
That's a good point, and the solutions to me are either using water more efficiently(conservation, reuse) or moving to reactors that don't require water as a coolant. You can cool a reactor with liquid sodium, or a gas like carbon dioxide or helium as well. There are other options out there.
That’s not how liquid sodium systems work. You still need a tertiary cooling system (a simple open heat sink) to cool the steam powering the turbines. What you can use is not river water, maybe build cooling towers instead. My point was that France built their nuclear capabilities a long time ago without concern for more frequent extreme heat waves.
In Hungary, our only nuclear plant is on the Danube which provides 40% of the country’s electricity, and we have the same problem, and now our government is trying to build a second set of reactors at the same site with the same river cooling when we have had consistent problems with river temperatures every summer.
I dont know enough about what the standards are for waste heat dispersal in Hungary, but the light water reactors are thermally quite inefficient, only about 33-35% conversion from heat energy to electricity. Cooling towers would work, or a bottoming cycle that could extract low-grade heat.
Excess heat could also be more efficiently extracted. It should also be possible to inject the wastewater underground and replace the river water with cool groundwater.
Yes, some sort of cycle to extract lower grade heat would work as well.
After the completion of Germany's nuclear phase-out...
“France is once again the European country where electricity is the most expensive”
https://www.lesechos.fr/industrie-services/energie-environnement/la-france-redevient-le-pays-europeen-ou-lelectricite-est-la-plus-chere-1936558
France’s weakened nuclear power output means the cost of its electricity for next winter is more than twice as expensive as Germany’s, as concerns over the health of the country’s reactors persist.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-19/french-winter-power-twice-as-pricey-as-germany-s-on-nuclear-woes
Nothing cheap about French nuclear, and they haven't prepared for the great wave of decommissioning bills coming.
If you read that article all the way though, it says that Germany is still using large amounts of coal fired power to generate electricity. Germany can get away with that, because coal is incredibly inexpensive, relative to the harm it causes to society(air pollution, premature deaths, mercury pollution, Carbon Pollution). France's problems seem more related to being part of an EU-wide trading and transmission system, but I admittedly don't know enough about how electricity is traded in Europe or the pricing mechanisms. The overall cost of nuclear fuel is very cheap, and the big capital costs come from building the plant in the first place.
The biggest problem with nuclear energy was that its politics and its economics were mismatched: its political fans are mostly right-wing free-marketeers, but its economics (with very front-loaded costs, and less ability than renewables to be built incrementally) mean that it is best built by the state, as indeed was the French approach in the 1970s and '80s,
Margaret Thatcher was certainly no anti-nuclear eco-warrior, but of the 10 PWR nuclear plants she wanted, only one (Sizewell B) actually got built.
Agree 100%, especially generation IV nuclear which allows for multiple cycles of reuse of waste, making the storage problem less of a problem.
Will Noah as Mr techno-optimist ever be honest about the land use requirements for solar and wind? It's honestly tiring never hearing this addressed. I'd like to see more references from people like the late biologist E.O Wilson or James Hansen, James Lovelock, or Vaclav Smil. The only reason whales are still around, and weren't hunted to extinction is Oil. We moved to sources of energy that have higher energy density, which means less waste. To preserve biodiversity and still have adequate energy, we need higher quality sources of energy. Luckily, neutron star collisions from billions of years ago gave us an endowment of enough uranium and thorium to last billions of years on Earth, and provide all of our energy needs. In case you think I'm being hyperbolic, a 1,000 MW nuclear plant takes up about 1.5 sq miles. A solar farm of that size would take up about 45 to 75 sq miles. The District of Columbia is around 70 sq miles, and Manhattan is around 34 sq miles. 70 sq miles could be an awesome urban park, or nature reserve, and there's a lot of evidence that time spent in nature helps people's mood and well-being.
https://www.nei.org/news/2015/land-needs-for-wind-solar-dwarf-nuclear-plants
I’ll go one step further than saying oil prevented whale extinction.
The widespread use of hydrocarbons did more to end slavery than almost anything else.
The amount of work that can be done with hydrocarbons made the use of large amounts of human labor unnecessary.
People are generally only as ethical as they can afford to be. Once hydrocarbons became available, people could afford to be ethical enough to stop supporting forced labor.
I've thought this for a while, and I completely agree with you. Vaclav Smil(who i highly recommend) has this concept of energy slaves, your dishwasher, your dryer, your refrigerator, etc. All of these things would've been done by servants, or slaves prior to labor-saving devices, largely powered by fossil fuels, since deforestation and wood shortages were already occurring with early industrialization.
If you think of fossil fuels, which they are, as stored solar energy, what happens when you run out of the inheritance?? You either revert back to a lower energy society, powered by present day energy flows, or move to fossil fuels used much more efficiently, making it easier to capture CO2, reserve their use for essential applications(planes, making steel or cement), or use fission and fusion(if it ever works) to get the neccessary energy.
thank you for the reference to Vaclav Smil. I have his "how the world works" on its way.
Vaclav doesn't seem to grasp that RE can provide for our power needs many times over. He largely developed his ideas 35 years ago when solar cost 200x more than it does today. Whole new ball game.
---
What Vaclav Smil and the disinformation echo chamber get wrong about the climate crisis
After reading the fawning coverage of Vaclav Smil’s 41st, and hopefully final, book How the World Really Works (2022) — the latest edition of an old white dude mansplaining to future generations why a just, sustainable society is impossible — I got riled up and started to write a detailed rebuttal. There are so many problems with Smil’s book.. and the man himself.
https://medium.com/oneearth/ok-doomer-what-vaclav-smil-and-the-disinformation-echo-chamber-get-wrong-about-the-climate-crisis-33a8ff5251f3
That’s a great book, which Noah obviously hasn’t read.
We could meet all our energy needs on a third of the land we use for ethanol. Nuclear has a small footprint which is nice but I do not understand why you are acting like Noah is anti-nuclear.
My argument isn't that Noah is anti -nuclear, but that the arguments sometimes don't pass muster once you bring in perspectives from other fields. E.O Wilson a few years before he passed wrote a book called Half Earth, arguing that humanity has to preserve half the Earth for wildlife to avoid a mass extinction. Now, maybe that's wrong or unfeasible, but if it's correct, then using sources of energy that take up more land and contribute to habitat destruction/fragmentation is not only dumb, but totally indefensible, since we can't bring these species back, and as far as we know, Earth is the only planet with life on it. That's just my perspective, that some degree of stewardship for Spaceship Earth is necessary.
If you're fired up about land use, solar is the least of your concerns. 88% of all corn production in the US goes to either livestock feed or ethanol, and combined covers an area more than double the size of the UK. You could double all the US's current electricity needs and the solar needed to supply it would fit on 1/3 of that land. I absolutely do think that nuclear is really valuable (particularly for island nations and northern climates) but I still think that solar is going to 'win' in the sense of being the main solution.
I didn't even address ethanol or conventional biofuels, because most people know they're incredibly wasteful, and are just a giveaway to constituencies like farmers in Iowa or Kansas, who benefit from US federal farm subsidies. A 1,000 MW nuclear plant takes about 1.5 sq miles. A solar farm of that size would take up 45-75 sq miles, with habitat fragmentation(access roads, routine maintenance, cleaning panels, etc). I live in the Northeastern US, so a solar farm is less efficient to begin with at higher latitudes(less sunlight, shorter days, longer nights) and you'd have to knock down trees and forested land the size of the District of Columbia in DC, all just to get electricity that can be generated in other ways. I'm not anti-solar, I think it's great for the right applications like solar hot water heating, passive solar houses that require very little heating or cooling, developing countries or rural communities without a electrical grid, or off the grid communities. It's all about appropriate technology.
My point is that we are going to get rid of ethanol production as a side effect of switching to EVs. MILLIONS of hectares of land are going to open up, and the agricultural land we have left can host agrivoltaics or wind farms. Offshore wind of course isn't competing with anything and is a net positive for local biomes in the medium-to-long term. There are still loads of places where solar/wind is less viable (transmission is good, but there are losses) and where nuclear is more viable, but when you start with solar being half the cost (even comparing to france, which is much better at building nuclear) the advantage needs to be considerable.
Ultimately my only desire is to make both easy to build and subsidize both and see who builds what.
Good news, we're not running out of space.
1) Permian Basin Oil Fields: 58 thousand square miles
Alberta Tar Sands: 54 thousand square miles
USA land in ethanol corn crops: 58 thousand square miles
-
Any one of those is more than enough to power the lower 48 states 100% 24/7/365 with renewables. That is exclusive of rooftop solar or offshore wind which reduce land requirements. Furthermore, renewables monopolize less than 1% of the land they cover, leaving 99% available for dual use with crops, grazing, pollinator plants or other productive uses.
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1885591
2) National Renewable Energy Laboratory finds it would take less than 1% of the land in the Lower 48— an area comparable or even smaller than the fossil fuel industry’s current footprint.
https://energypost.eu/fulfilling-u-s-wind-and-solar-ambitions-will-use-under-1-of-its-land-thats-less-than-the-fossil-fuel-footprint/
When we convert cars to electric, we can take all the farmland just currently growing corn for wasteful ethanol fuel additives convert it to solar and still gain about 20,000 square miles more in farmland.
You'd have to seriously explain why when you have a better option, you'd instead choose technology that takes up more land. I think it's ridiculous to use the comparison of tar sands or ethanol, because I know they're bad, and lots of other people think the same.
You're right that you can change the local environment, so it's more suitable, but it's certainly not natural. Natural to me just means in the absence of humans, what would the biome naturally evolve to? So, where I live in the Northeastern US, oak-hickory forests would be the natural forest cover. In the Southeastern US, longleaf pine would predominate. White oak, shagbark hickory, black cherry, lots of different species of trees, and smaller shrubs and herbs. Solar and wind aren't compatible with something like an old-growth oak-hickory forest, and certain animals need that biome to survive. Climate change is certainly bad for some animals, although some reptiles might benefit from warmer temperatures, benefiting from having an expanded range(Alligators in the Potomac??) but habitat destruction is universally bad.
Because the amount of land that solar takes up is not that much in the grand scheme of things.
And nuclear is a lot more expensive. Why is nuclear expensive. Well all the pipes need to be x-rayed to inspect the welds, which takes equipment and skill. Not that x-raying the pipes is the main cost. The cost of nuclear is having to do 100's of fiddly complicated and highly technical processes, which takes expensive equipment, and skilled workers, which is expensive.
You're talking 45-75 sq miles for a 1,000 MW solar plant, vs 1.5 sq miles for the equivalent nuclear plany. So, essentially if you wanted to found a new city, bedroom community, nature preserve, whatever, you've just lost that land for energy production. Manhattan is about 35 sq miles, the ENTIRE District of Columbia is about 75 sq miles. Think we couldn't use that land for other things?? I'll acknowledge that the US or even Canada are large countries with lots of open space, but other countries are going to have real constraints with trying the same thing.
Also, the question of expense is really a question of what time horizon you value. The best solar farms only last for about 20-25 years, which means they'll be replaced 3-4 times over with all the expenses, and uncertainties, when it comes to building. Once you build that nuclear plant, the only expenses are employees, routine maintenance, and the cost of the fuel. It's worth noting that the IPCCC and UNECE(latest study in 2022) found that the CO2 emissions were between 5-15 grams/kwh, which is 1/3 of solar, and the biggest emissions come from construction, whether for solar or nuclear.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-electricity.aspx
The world in practice has millions of square miles of blank emptyness that no one is doing anything much with.
Humans tend to live in the busy occupied bits. So it's easy to forget that a huge section of the earth is basically not being used yet. Most of the earth isn't covered in new cities. Humans like living near other humans, that means small, valuable cities. The solar panels can be put on roofs. Or they can be put in some field with crops underneath. (given some plants like a bit of shade, this can even improve yield sometimes)
There are a few small city nations, like singapore, who will have to import their energy.
The moon rockets took less than a millionth of the compute than a modern smartphone. Going on a trip to the moon takes way less compute than playing angry birds. The cost of going to the moon is the total cost of all the pieces. The compute cost is totally negligable, at current prices. The cost of rocket fuel is large.
The land use of nuclear is negligable. (At least if you only count the footprint when it works, not the exclusion zone when it doesn't)
The cost of the nuclear engineers is large. It takes a lot of smart people to run a nuclear power plant. Those people could be making apps or something. Don't you think those people could be doing something else?
Old solar can be easily recycled. The old panels are safe. They can be scooped up and turned into new ones no problems. Nuclear plants tend to get shut down after 30 or 40 years, so the time horrizon isn't that much longer. And the nuclear plants have a huge decomissioning cost.
ONCE you build it. Building it is super expensive. And that staffing and maintanence requirement is a lot more than for solar. If solar breaks, all it can do is stop producing electricity. If nuclear breaks, it goes really bad. Solar has no moving parts, no radiation damage to components. No high temperatures. Basically nothing to go wrong. So you don't need much maintanence.
The CO2 mumbers are irrelevant. We are talking about getting off fossil fuels. Both solar and nuclear release hardly anything compared to fossil fuels. So the most environmental option is whatever you can get built first. Solar tomorrow is better than nuclear in 10 years. (And you can build a few percent more solar, and run a bit of CO2 scrubbing.)
We need to plant solar panels and turbines more than we need to plant trees.
A solar panel makes about 20,000 kWh during its lifespan. A tracker in a good location will do almost 2x that, but let’s go with this lower number.
It takes 44,000lbs of coal to make that much electricity. 22 tons.
That's also 96,000 pounds of Co2 NOT added to the atmosphere.
Because of just one solar panel.
Each solar panel displaces, the carbon equivalent of planting 4 trees per year. For about 33 years.
That’s the carbon equivalent of planting 132 trees.
In about 12 square feet of space. From one solar panel.
A large 14MW turbine now can power 20,000 homes and avoid burning a million tons of coal.
The sequestering ability (old carbon avoided) of millions of trees.
One turbine.
Trees only store carbon temporarily. We have to avoid the ancient stuff. Renewables accomplish that.
Nuclear fails due to... cost to build, cost of electricity produced, time to build, risk to investment, return on investment, waste disposal, public acceptance, vulnerability to terrorism & war. And... 60 years of over promising and under delivering.
Stuff like this:
Rewarding Failure: Taxpayers on Hook for $12 Billion Nuclear Boondoggle
https://cleanenergy.org/blog/rewarding-failure-taxpayers-on-hook-for-12-billion-nuclear-boondoggle/
Rooftops alone could do 1/3 of the job.
“Homeowners installing their own solar panels on rooftops could make up to about 34% of the nation’s electricity need.”
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf
---
How Much Land Would it Require to Get Most of Our Electricity from Wind and Solar?
“A recent National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study shows that it would take less than 1 percent of the land in the Lower 48—that’s an area comparable to or even smaller than the fossil fuel industry’s current footprint. And when wind and solar projects are responsibly sited, the environmental and public health impacts would be far less harmful than those from extracting, producing and burning fossil fuels.”
https://blog.ucsusa.org/steve-clemmer/how-much-land-would-it-require-to-get-most-of-our-electricity-from-wind-and-solar/
There are, on earths surface at the moment, vast swathes of land that aren't really being used for anything much. Ie deserts. Also agriculture uses about 20% of the land area. Running our economy on solar could be done with 2%, so if agriculture can get 10% more land efficient, we don't need more land. (And with that amount of solar energy, we can make a lot of cheap fertilizer and desalinated water)
The whole idea that deserts are just biological wastelands isn't believed by anyone who studies ecology, that whole premise suffers from a focus on if it isn't valuable for people, it has no value at all. Just as a quick example, the Mojave or Sonoran desert has a bunch of species that aren't found anywhere else on Earth. A lot of the agricultural land is used for beef, and other livestock, but I'm fully in favor of most Americans moving to less meat intensive diets anyways, and it'd benefit their health as well. Even Meatless Mondays would help, and that's not a huge ask of people.
Alright. So sure, deserts aren't totally empty, they contain a few cactuses and things.
The disruption to native ecosystems is quite small compared to the disruption we currently do with farming. Or compared to what climate change will do.
Compared to the effects of a bunch of radioactive fallout, well that's more complicated.
But sure, I don't see a particular reason to care a huge amount about some random scorpions or whatever. If a few scorpians stand between humanity, and a prosperous future of abundant energy, tough for the scorpians. Besides, we don't need all the desert. 10% of the worlds desert would be enough. Or if we really want to preserve desert, we could put it in the more biologically rich temerate farmland. Make a bit less meat, thus needing 10% less farm per person.
The shade under the solar panels might help those desert critters.
Nuclear is slow to build. The extra 15 years of CO2 we get from building nuclear instead of solar is probably worse than a few solar panels.
I think the fundamental point most animal rights activists, ecologists, biologists, or conservationists make is that nature has an inherent value of it's own, that isn't contingent upon what human beings think about nature or what it's value is, or human conceptions of "value" or "worthiness".
The plants last for 60-80 years. If you read the link in my last post, two highly respected organizations(IPCC and UNECE) both found that the lifecycle emissions were between 5-15 grams CO2/kwh. They actually used a time horizon of 60 years for nuclear, but the newest plants are projected to last 80 years, so the numbers look even better if that's the case. The actual time of construction is irrelevant, if the plants last for 80 years. All of these reviews already take construction into account, to calculate lifecycle emissions. Solar will have to be rebuilt every 20 years. The emissions for either technology all come from construction, since neither emit any CO2 during operation. Purifying silicon for PV cells is highly carbon intensive, and China, where most panels are made, uses coal to do that .Solar already is around 30-35 gCO2/kwh and that dosen't even account for battery backup, with it's own carbon emissions from making the requisite number of batteries, or burning natural gas if you'd like storage, which only pushes those numbers higher. Over a 60 year period, you're looking at 105g CO2/kwh without storage, versus 5g CO2/kwh. Over 20 times more!
Also, it's worth noting that radiation isn't as dangerous at low doses as people think. Below 10 rem or 100 msv, there's no evidence of increase in cancer probability, or the effect is so small it can't be measured, which means it's statistically insignificant.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/06/24/radiation-poses-little-risk-to-the-world/
The construction time does make a difference. If solar takes 1 year and nuclear takes 20, and the electricity is currently coming from coal. Then if we start building now, building solar means 19 years of coal fumes less.
Purifying silicon does take a reasonable bit of energy. Around 5% of the energy the solar panel will capture. This can come from renewables. It just means building 5% more solar to cover the energy.
CO2 and energy are pretty fungible. Solar is a the cheap safe technique that requires you invest 5% of the future energy in building it. Nuclear is the expensive technique that requires less energy to get started.
In a future world where the electricity all came from solar or nuclear, the CO2 emmitted from either would be 0. All the energy used to build it would itself come from solar/ nuclear. The amount of fossil fuel needed to build the first generation of solar/nuclear is small compared to the amount needed to keep our civ running while they are built.
Also, some solar can last a lot more than 20 years. But if improvements in tech have made the solar much more efficient in 20 years, replacing it makes sense. The problem with tech that lasts a really long time is it gets really out of date.
Sure, I agree that radiation in low doses is probably not that bad.
Nuclear and geothermal should be part of the picture on general principle. I get the impression that the pro-nuclear contingent is growing rapidly. Fingers crossed.
I work in geothermal, so I hope you’re right:)
Of course nuclear and geothermal should be a part of the picture! And they will. Geothermal has a ton of room to grow. Nuclear is expensive but we'll build it as a solar backup. Public opinion is shifting in favor of nuclear.
The point of having nuclear is not to be a backup to solar...it’s to be a primary source of base load power.
Would it be worth researching high-temperature nuclear reactors driving gas turbines, on the grounds that such plants would be far more flexible than today's steam-turbine nuclear plants in backing up solar and wind power?
I disagree with the notion of having nuclear energy as the backup source in the first place. Nuclear is the densest, cleanest form of energy that is much more stable and the build uses far less material (concrete, steel, etc). The focus should be on removing regulatory barriers around it which will dramatically drop the price per MwH and then push for government investment in the upfront cost. That makes way more sense than using solar and wind as the primary source and hoping that at some point you will maybe get to viable battery storage that isn’t ridiculously expensive.
Dear Noah. Using Nuclear as backup for solar is insane. Nuclear has high capital costs and low marginal costs, it only becomes affordable if it is running all the time. A good article on the subject: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-and-windsolar
Your subtitle implies something different, i.e., "Solar and batteries are going to win, and our thinking needs to adjust accordingly."
When I see statements like this I look to experts in the field, e.g. Dr. John Bistline. He had a good article in NYTimes last year basically saying that debates about what technology is going to win 30 years from now is a waste of time and distracts and confuses policymakers and their advisers about what to focus on in the near term.
"Rather than getting mired in these debates, we should focus on credible commitments to public policy, private investment and innovation."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/opinion/environment/ipcc-report-climate-change-debates.html
"backup" that's like playing your second string QB and let Rodgers sit on the bench and win the game at the end.
Modern smartphones should use mostly transistors, but a few vacuum tubes and mechanical gears as well. Mostly SSD storage, but also a couple of punch cards and a piece of vinyl record to store the startup sound.
Sometimes one tech is just better, and all the other ways to do something should go to the museum.
I see your point, and also the grid isn’t a smartphone. Some diversification still makes sense.
Solar is good adjunct source, like this summer in Texas(!), but I agree that nuclear is our best direction. Plus I think solar farms are blights on the landscape (but not on roofs where we have ours).
Amen. My understanding is that those “cheap energy” graphs deliberately omit transmission and the true cost of storage at the capacity multipliers various quantitatively-gifted civilians have been forced to calculate on behalf of governments that simply publish glossy net zero slide decks—in which the cost, even at optimistic storage prices, is roughly the size of the entire economy in whichever jurisdiction it is estimated for.
Multiply that storage need again for “black swan” events in which there are extended periods of cold. It would be great to see a deeper dive to counter the “realist” pieces I’ve read elsewhere.
I have yet to see a realistic plan to keep us under 2C using nuclear power. Even China, with its massive subsidies and central planning, is only (optimistically) planning to have nuclear at 18% of all generation by 2060. And it's very unlikely that the US and Europe are going to match China's construction cadence for simple economic reasons, leaving aside the rest of the world.
More likely with nuclear than with solar.
And yet not really! What’s important about solar and wind and batteries is that you can massively scale the hard parts of production in factories, while installation requires relatively attainable skills and technologies. That’s why even construction-genius China is currently and in the foreseeable future going to be building vastly more renewables than nuclear.
There is a theoretical future version of nuclear that some folks talk about that might fit the bill for what we need. This involves factory-produced modular reactors that can benefit from manufacturing economies and quick installation. Unfortunately that technology isn’t anywhere near production. Even if we made a push to get that off the ground, we’d then have to deal with 10-20 years of R&D before the exponential curves begin to kick off — if it works at all. And non-proliferation and safety for a world with millions of tiny modular reactors is a huge gnarly problem nobody has yet solved.
At the end of the day you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you have. Timelines are short and the choices are limited.
To me it is amazing Noah, who fancies himself economically savvy, could have written such a poorly researched piece. The big picture is how do we get power to the 5 billion people who want to live like us economically and within the limits of natural resources for which the only answer is advanced nuclear.
The people who are hardest to reach are those in poor remote communities.
So a village of 100 Kenyans, miles from anywhere. Put a few solar panels in a truck, or strap them to the sides of mules if the road is that bad. Send a couple of people who can put tab A into slot B to set it up. Send some Li ion batteries too. Done. They now have electricity.
A nuclear reactor couldn't possibly be run in that village. That village has no one in it who knows what a neutron is.
A nuclear reactor could maybe be set up in the big town 100 miles away, but that would take a lot of power cable.
I completely agree with Shane. I live in an off grid cabin in the mountains. We just installed a $35,000 solar system. The solar panels are the cheapest part. We will be running a generator in December and January and in to February because mountains will block the limited sunshine.
The inverter charger, 8 guage wire and LFP batteries were expensive.
Everything will need replacing in 20 to 30 if not sooner.
It would take 6 days during the sunny days of summer to charge up a Ford Lightning half ton truck with our system.
Enough said. I wish more people understand the energy reality of modern existence.
Genuine question- how does nuclear provide energy for these other uses like aviation, shipping etc when solar cannot?
I agree with your comments on batteries and another issue not mentioned by Noah is the resources required for large scale battery use, and the potential environmental impact of obtaining these.
Nuclear is used in shipping already, have you never seen an aircraft carrier? For long range aircraft, electric propulsion will not be feasible, fuels created from electrolysed (by solar or more efficiently nuclear) hydrogen and captured carbon can be made, but there is no reason to stop using oil for this, since we will need to refine it for plastics, fertilizer, asphalt and many other things which have no practical alternatives.
Solar electricity is cheaper than nuclear electricity. So why would using solar to run an electrolyser be less efficient?
Oh and if you have cheap methane from solar hydrogen plus CO2. Then you can turn that into asphalt or plastic or whatever as well.
Amen. The 'energy addition' concept, and managing risk through diverse energy sources, is hard for the cheerleaders to understand.
Economics of scale are a thing.
Even if they weren't, putting all your eggs in the cheapest basket can make sense.
Solar produces a bit less energy on cloudy days. But if you have plenty of panels and batteries, you can have very low risk. Especially if your grid spans long distances. There are many ways of managing risk.
Since Noah thinks the solution to all our energy problems is Solar + battery storage (both electric and non-electric) and it is something that he believes can be done very seamlessly, I will counter what he has stated with this deck (pg. 15-17 for examples of why LCOE is nonsensical). https://am.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/campaign/energy-paper-13/growing-pains-renewable-transition-in-adolescence.pdf
Unlike any other form of energy, nuclear:
* Produces a liability stream that outlives any enterprise.
* Has a demonstrated capacity to produce liabilities that outsize a single plant’s lifetime net profit.
Since contractors cheat when it’s profitable, nuclear requires oversight and regulation like no other industry.
As a counterpart to the friction of much-needed regulation, nuclear also gets a giant public subsidy: every U.S. nuclear plant was built under a federal promise to assume custody of its waste, in a national repository, which — in the 1970s — was “a decade away.” Fifty years later, the federal government has largely given up, because states don’t trust any entity — public or private — to service a multi-century liability.
So of course it’s regulated, and despite a massive subsidy, it’s *still* our most expensive option.
Spent fuel is not waste, it can be recycled by future breeder reactors and is very compact and stored on site, no federal repository needed. Where will all the waste deteriorated solar panels be stored (true waste, no theoretical recycling for panels exists)? I guess you can store it on site, putting new panels over the dead ones, but the land area is huge and will be contaminated when the panels finally break down.
Spent fuel is intensely radioactive. In principle it can be recycled. In practice this is really expensive and difficult to recycle something that is trying to kill you like that.
Hit a waste solar panel with a hammer and it turns into basically sand. And solar panels aren't difficult to recycle.
You think we are going to be able to electrify at scale energy use for cement production, steel production, heating, cargo ships, planes, heavy industrial equipment for construction and agriculture, etc (many other use cases I’m missing) any time in the next 15-20 years? No offense but please pass the kool aid.
There are basically three paths for the human race.
1. We keep burning hydrocarbons at our current rate, in which case we blow past 2 and 3 degrees C, and quite possibly hit tipping points that take us past 4-5 degrees C. In this case nobody needs to worry about cement and steel production, because these temperatures are "incompatible with global organization" to use the IPCC's euphemism for massive industrial collapse.
2. We get our act together and tackle this the same we've tackled other existential threats in the past -- basically, pouring huge government resources into it, perhaps constructing expensive nuclear plants one at a time and taking advantage of slight economies of scale and raising taxes by 50%. I would obviously prefer this vs. the above alternative, but I recognize that politically it's a non-starter. Perhaps as things get obviously more dire the political will might materialize, but by then it will probably be too late.
3. We hope that industrial policy drives down the price of renewables and storage along an exponential cost curve, based on huge manufacturing economies of scale, to the point where alternative types of power generation don't make any financial sense. This collapses the demand for hydrocarbons (for power generation) because they don't make any damned financial sense anymore and a new industry takes over at an exponential rate (with some gentle industrial policy headwinds.) Then, using this abundant cheap energy we figure out how to solve the remaining industrial problems like steel production and cement production, and use the rest of this cheap (intermittent) power for CO2 reduction. Perhaps we buy a little bit of time with geoengineering solutions, since the rapid changes in ocean temperature and ahead-of-schedule arctic/antarctic collapse makes our predictions look too rosy.
Obviously all three of these paths solve the problem to various extents. It goes without saying that with (1) being the death of most people you know, and (2) being politically non-viable in the time frame we have left, there isn't much of a choice. The good news is that (3) appears to be happening, at least so far, so there is some reason to be optimistic. But pessimism is fine too, as long as you understand what that entails.
No offense but I don’t take the IPCC’s projections as gospel. I don’t view climate change as an existential crisis. However, I do believe abundant energy is a necessity for our modern way of life, both to grow and to counteract the upcoming impacts of climate change. Therefore, if we are going to transition away from fossil fuels to a certain extent then we should at least use a proven source of power that does not have massive cost issues at scale and substantial intermittency issues that require a lot of back up infrastructure.
I don't take the IPCC's projections as gospel either, I think they are much too optimistic. We weren't supposed to see ice-free summers in Arctic until the 2050s and now they're expected in the 2030s. Maybe sooner, based on the record ocean temperatures we're experiencing. We're also seeing the start of a possible methane feedback loop not based on human emissions, but on temperatures driving wetlands emissions, which in turn drive higher temperatures.
My general view is that if you don't think climate change is happening or a serious threat to civilization, there's not much of a discussion to be had. Nuclear isn't going to be economically viable as a major solution when many people also share your lack of concern. So that in turn reinforces (3) as our only option.
Well you and I are on opposite sides then. Even if we were to have ice free summers in the Arctic by 2030s (which I have my doubts on) can anyone credibly tell me what the actual impact would be on sea levels and is it enough of an impact that we would not be able to handle it?
Ok we can stop faking data and switch region by region to nuclear.
You have a weird three way false choice here. Nuclear requires raising taxes by 50% but massive build out of solar and storage does not? The IPCC RCP8.5 scenario which is the only one to reach 4°C warming assumes all renewable energy is replaced by new coal, which is ridiculous. Currrate consumption of fossil fuels will not destroy global organization. Carbon capture, alternative steel and cement does not depend on the electricity generation source, and research in this area doesn’t depend on solar at all. Scenario 4: allow technology to grow naturally and the most cost effective ones will win out.
RPC8.5 is "under extremely optimistic assumptions, almost everyone you know dies." Patting ourselves on the back that we've avoided certain death isn't an accomplishment. We are now deciding between scenarios that the IPCC (in footnotes only, but not with actual probability ranges) defines as having some reasonable probability of having potential civilization-ending effects. And this is an organization that has repeatedly proven too optimistic.
And all of this assumes that we don't hit tipping points. But hello: here are current global methane levels, which appear to be entering a self-sustaining feedback loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#/media/File:Mlo_ch4_ts_obs_03437.png
A definition of insanity is posting the same misleading charts repeatedly and arguing that it somehow makes them less misleading.
LCOE is not the most important chart in the world (hyperbole much?). For example, a more important chart - the cost of batteries - follows it.
If you want to keep technocrats who know their stuff as subscribers, you can't be a cheerleader, you need to know more about these domains.
Otherwise, I have to start assuming that you are as glib about the other topics you discuss, about which I know less.
You should see this guy on politics.
The LCOE chart includes the cost of batteries in the "Solar PV + Storage" and "Wind + Storage" rows. The fact that those are right in line with the "Combined Cycle Gas" line is the point. We're also early in the learning curve for batteries, with multiple lower-cost technologies (e.g. LFP, sodium ion) yet to be deployed at scale for grid storage. So grid storage costs are definitely coming down.
Plus, as the article notes, decreasing solar/wind costs means that you can overbuild on solar/wind and spend less on batteries. So the non-storage rows in the chart are relevant to the overall system cost when you take that overbuilding into account.
You talk a big game for someone with a default PFP and zero citations. Cost actually matters a lot - the fact that it isn't the only thing that matters is irrelevant.
Worse, I don't even know what a default PFP is, or how you get a citation here. But I do have some experience with building out national-scale electrical grids. Which is why I talk small game, not frothing about a chart being the most important since ever.
For PV to make more significant contributions to a grid, storage is required. Storage costs dwarf PV costs. And now that PV cost has dropped, the total cost is fairly insensitive to further PV price changes.
And no matter how cheap it is, even free, PV should not replace everything, because a mix of sources is needed to manage risk, among other reasons.
> For PV to make more significant contributions to a grid, storage is required. Storage costs dwarf PV costs. And now that PV cost has dropped, the total cost is fairly insensitive to further PV price changes.
This would be a relevant point if storage costs weren't ALSO dropping like a rock, something Noah stressed in his article. Iron air batteries, with efficiency gains we already know about, can have cost-per-capacity of 1 tenth that of lithium ion, and the costs should be expected to go down from there.
> And no matter how cheap it is, even free, PV should not replace everything, because a mix of sources is needed to manage risk, among other reasons.
Of course. This has always been true. But wind, PV, and hydro electric already constitute a diverse range, and a world in which 60% of ALL energy production comes from these sources is both very possible and absolutely a situation in which renewables have "won."
"A definition of insanity is posting the same misleading charts repeatedly and arguing that it somehow makes them less misleading."
I think constantly repeating the idea that solar, batteries, wind, or [insert favorite tech you are dunking on here] will be the first industries in the history of mankind where economies of scale never kick in is closer to the definition of insanity.
Nice article. However, I work in the PV industry, and I find that some key things are often omitted from discussions about the energy transition and its costs.
1) Costs are derived in a highly dynamic and non-linear fashion. The rate for kWHs and kWs that rate-payers pay in any fifteen minute interval are a function of many decisions made about investments and operations over monthly, yearly and multi-decade time spans. These decisions are mostly made by utilities, investors and regulators in the furtherance of their own interests -- not consumers. While metrics like LCOE are helpful, the economics are far harder to model than is allowed, I think, in the popular imagination. This doesn't mean that reactionary opinions about renewables are correct -- usually these voices are WAY too certain that such mere complexity proves their point to be trusted (contra several respondents here: there's no scenario in which new nuclear plants are going to produce "cheap" energy in the next decade-plus).
2) The solution to the intermittency problem with captured energy sources has a few prongs: more transmission, more storage, excess capacity buildout and better signaling. That last prong, signaling, may actually be the most important new capability of the four, and it's the one that gets the least attention yet will require the most innovation. Load and generation assets at the grid edge need to be able to respond reliably to signals that help balance electricity supply & demand; and these instructions must be calculated and determined to deploy resources efficiently close to real time. The trick is that we're going from a centralized systems with relatively few devices requiring direct control, to a decentralized system with millions of devices requiring direct control. Very few people commenting publicly on the energy transition fully appreciate the difficulties and opportunities of this change.
3. Noah talks a lot about environmental laws like NEPA and CEQA posing permitting problems. But just pulling a building permit or dealing with standard conservation or zoning requirements can be far more complicated than is usually discussed. Design standards imposed by the NEC, fire codes, building codes and listing processes also have an impact on how quickly/cheaply systems can be installed. I'm a proponent, generally, of higher construction standards, but the industry has created roadblocks for itself on a number of issues. For example, in my view, the rollout, in 2019, of required rapid shutdown devices for PV systems on rooftops has been a costly and unsafe policy pushed by the NEC. I don't think people in the media talk enough to the engineers and construction workers building these systems about their most difficult challenges.
I agree that nuclear, wind, solar, etc. make the economy vs climate debate a mute point. There is even still a great deal of coal generation that could be economically be replaced with gas with some climate benefit (depending on how bad you think methane leakage is). I also agree that our clean energy potential means we should oppose degrowth, which never seemed politically possible anyway.
But I would be careful about getting caught up in solar and battery hype. While technological factors have played a role in bringing down the price, they are still incredibly materially intensive from a minerals and metals perspective. China has majority market share in nearly all of the raw materials mining and processing for batteries and solar panels. Silicon PV especially is cheap thanks to China’s coal fired electricity, lack of water and air pollution regulation, and lack of labor regulation which comes close to forced labor. Making this type of clean energy equipment is dirty.
Further there are some intricacies with the energy grid that, when ignored, make it easy to make solar look cheap.
The most obvious, which you’ve addressed, is intermittency. With natural gas as the majority fuel source for the US grid, adding more solar displaces the amount of fuel burned at these power plants when solar is producing. Apart from some short term (hours) peaking capabilities, natural gas will remain the predominant source of firming. Lazard recently did a report on “firming costs,” which gets into this.
You presented a classic graph for hyping solar. Electricity demand is not growing as rapidly as it once did, so new capacity additions are small making solar proportionally look bigger. Additionally, listing capacity artificially inflated solar’s contribution. The capacity factor must be taken into account. This is the amount of time the source is generating at full capacity, typically 15-30% in the US depending on location. Other sources are higher meaning less capacity can produce the same amount of generation (kw vs kwh).
Finally, grid costs and time value of electricity do not favor solar. As solar is added to a region, it decreases the price of electricity during sunny hours of the day. At these times selling electricity becomes less valuable for any other producer. When more solar is added, it produces the most electricity at the times when existing solar has already decrease the time specific value of electricity. Basically, adding solar gets less and less useful as more is added. Besides storage (which adds great cost), the problem can be somewhat alleviated by having more capacity and coverage of continental scale grid interconnections. When the sun sets on the east coast it’s still sunny in the west. Building such power lines are expensive, land intensive, and of course opposed by NIMBYs.
Land use, especially, is one reason why I think nuclear is much better than solar. It requires over 60x less land through the entire supply chain. This means far less environmental impact and local opposition.
Just want to add a quick point. Solar has about a 40% capacity factor. When gas is burned to pick up the slack for solar, companies use peaker plants that are only about 40% efficient. Dedicated gas plants use combined cycle that's about 60-65% efficient in converting heat energy to electricity, so natural gas is used more inefficiently than in a dedicated gas plant, which has implications for carbon pollution and air pollution.
Yes, the on/off operation of gas plants is bad for efficiency and air pollution... like driving a car in stop and go traffic. And, the rankine cycle steam turbines added to ccs plant are not as responsive as the initial brayton cycle turbine, which act as a gas pedal to match grid demand.
Where are you getting 40% cap factor for solar? Is this a theoretical max in a certain location? I’m looking at some US EIA data and seeing roughly 16% in Massachusetts and 28% in California for example.
Even crazier is the capacity factor in early solar adopter Germany, just 10%!
You're actually right about that, I was thinking of wind which averages 25% to 40%. I know concentrated solar power can use storage which boosts capacity factor, with things like molten salts but it's really only suitable for desert regions, or countries with very high solar insolation like Spain.
Moot point or Moo point or mute point? Now I'm confused!
I'm pretty sure he meant moot point, which means the question no longer needs to be asked.
I expect that electrolytic Hydrogen will become a likely output from solar. If you expand solar electic production beyond local market needs, you can make Hydrogen. Now while Hydrogen can be stored and shipped, doing so is not efficient. I rather expect that for long distance or long term storage Hydrogen will be converted to Ammonia (easy to store and ship - and easy to regenerate Hydrogen) and as some form of syn fuel by reacting with CO2 (either via engineered cells or standard chemical engineering processes). The syn fuels can be used for aircraft due to their high specific energy.
Hydrogen is terrible. An absolutely insane propensity to leak combined with a wide flammability range and near invisible flames make it a safety hazard everywhere it's used.
I would suggest that a better and safer plan would be to use surplus solar electricity to fix atmospheric CO2 into CH4, which is (much!) easier to store and transport, and is already used both as a chemical feedstock and as the fuel of choice for electrical peaker plants. There's really interesting work going on in this field (see https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-terraformer-mark-one/) and it looks like a dramatically easier transition path.
My understanding is that, as DonH has already said, hydrogen is completely impractical for personal vehicles because of how prone to leaking it is. I've heard scientists refer to it as 'devilishly clever' in its ability to escape. To be fair, I think it may be mildly more practical for large-scale fixed infrastructure needs. But cars? Never
liquid anhydrous Ammonia had 50% higher volumetric Hydrogen density than Liquid H2 and is an eminently practical transport medium for ground and sea based vehicles. It is not weight efficient so is unsuitable for aircraft, where hydrocarbon syn fuels are more appropriate. While Ammonia is toxic, it is water soluble and plants love to absorb it - fertilizer. I would much rather deal with an Ammonia leak mitigation issue than a gasoline leak mitigation.
Plants do not absorb ammonia at all. Plants need nitrates to grow and ammonium nitrate is a common way of distributing water soluble nitrates. Calcium nitrate and NPK are other ways of distributing nitrates (fertilizer) for plants. The ammonia half dissolves into the soil where it may eventually end up broken down (partially into nitrates) by microbes. It is not, however, itself a fertilizer.
Yes! Wrote about this a while back
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/i-come-bringing-good-news-about-hydrogen
I expect Hydrogen storage as a gas to be used for only short term periods - days. It has a very low density and compressing it or liquifying it is very energy intensive. If I remember correctly, making Ammonia takes ~ 10% of the available energy, liquifying it is much worse. It may well be that some engineered bugs can make bio fuels for less than a 10% penalty - but with Ammonia I can crack the Ammonia to get back Hrdrogen and then use fuel cells.
Hydrogen electrolyzers are expensive machines that require high value metals. Imagine buying one at great capital cost and then using it only the fraction of time that solar is producing and in excess to grid demand. Even if the solar electricity is cheap, the asset utilization of the electrolyzer would be low, making the hydrogen it produces expensive.
There’s been a fair bit of analysis of the capital and operating costs of hydrogen electrolysers. The short version is that while obviously higher utilisation is better, running them intermittently of very cheap energy is likely to be cost competitive. There is also a tradeoff between electrolyser cost and efficiency, so if energy is really cheap you optimise for capital cost.
I see a couple of problems. First I don't agree with the environmental impact of mining for lithium being less than mining for carbohydrates. Just DuckDuckGo lithium mines and look at the pictures. If you like NIMBY, you are going to love lithium mining. Second problem is technology. If we get the same progress as the one we enjoyed with computers, this could really hinder the spread of solar + battery. If you can change your laptop or iPhone every other year without big damage, upgrading a solar power station will cost much more. So, a wait and see attitude may develop. Living in SoCal, I'd like to install solar panels and batteries, plus an e-car. I'd be off the grid and that's nice. My wife is not ok to bear the costs for the moment and it effectively would be a luxury. I drive 2.5K a year and my car is fully paid. Our electricity bill is $ 200/month. But I really like the concept. By the way, I asked an electrical engineer neighbor about solar panel ca 6 years ago and he told me; it's not worth it. Last year he installed them on his roof. I'm long a lithium miner (ALB) and several oil stocks because oil is here to stay ; the US is only 4.5% of the world population. Many in the world have other problems than global warming. In short, "they" will let the market rule. A dogmatic approach, this is bad, this is good, will not work.
Sadly, there aren't any lithium deposits in the United States to have a fight about whether we mine them or not.
Not true! There are lots of them. They will just never be mined due to American environmental laws. Northern Maine has an enormous deposit, for instance
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/maine-lithium/
"They will just never be mined due to American environmental laws."
You don't actually believe this, I hope. Money will eventually talk. Unless, of course, the tech evolves enough that lithium is no longer powering most of the batteries, which is a distinct possibility.
I do think it is kind of funny that the same group of poeple who decry how the oil industry lobbies so much to get the rights to ruin large swathes of land somehow believe that we'll never mine enough Lithium because of regulations, as if oil men are the only lobbyists, and congressmen/senators wouldn't take money from lithium miners.
The world’s richest known lithium deposit lies deep in the woods of western Maine, in a yawning, sparkling mouth of white and brown rocks that looks like a landslide carved into the side of Plumbago Mountain.
Australia is the largest lithium miner in the world. It’s so far down the list of environmental concerns it’s not only not on the first page, it’s relegated to an appendix somewhere .
Such a big, sparsely populated country, Australia is. Mongolia also has lithium reserves, but I wonder if China will allow them to be exploited.
Mongolia isn't under Chinese control, although some Mongolian lithium resources are extracted by Chinese companies. Did you mean Inner Mongolia?
Unless you fly the lithium out of Mongolia, it has to be transported through Russia or China. Since the population and armed forces of Mongolia are dwarfed by those of China, China could make that impossible anytime they wanted to.
I see. I hadn't realized you were thinking of a blockade. A blockade imposed for a political purpose is typically an extreme measure with diplomatic consequences. China and Russia together could, of course, do this to Mongolia, but it would be the a hostile encroachment on national sovereignty and prompt international responses, since Mongolia maintains neutrality with regard to US-PRC tensions and has a policy of broadening its political and economic relations. I don't know of an example, outside declared war, of a selective blockade on a neutral country's exports.
I believe Lithium could certainly be flown out, since the quantities are small relative to mass metals and minerals like iron or coal, though I presume it would be somewhat more expensive than land/sea transport. China and Russia could shoot down the planes over their air space, but this would be an act of war. If the planes belonged to a purchasing country, the act of war would be taken against that country.
Awesomeness and informative ..again!
My concern, which grows smaller as the learning curve cost of PV drop, is this. There is dust, dirt, and electrical degradation over time. The PV output per solar input falls. Maybe 50% at year 10. I'm going from a bit older thinking.
What does it matter if at all, that output drops are significant?
My answer is, cost of new overcomes and replacement is the answer. Except labor to install never drops.
I put together the proposal for 1MW of rooftop solar at a factory. The panels, installed in 2021, have a 2% capacity drop in the first year, and 0.6% drop for each year after that. It works out to 85% capacity after 25 years.
Thank-you Bill
According to NREL, degradation rates for solar panels are in the order of 0.5% of rated performance per year.
As for dust and dirt, most large scale solar arrays are periodically cleaned. In at least some cases this is automated.
Thanks.
You are a big proponent of the idea that “decoupling with China is just going to happen.” How do you square that position with embracing inexpensive solar panels and batteries? Costs for these technologies have been driven down by massive state subsidies and investment from China. As a result, Chinese solar panels are now very cheap, but the PRC controls at least 80% of each stage of solar panel production. Even panels “made” in other countries are frequently just Chinese inputs assembled in another place.
Before someone mentions the IRA — the made in America mandates in the IRA will increase costs for end users, or will increase the debt burden for the state (due to subsidies to make all-American batteries and solar panels cost competitive w Chinese products), or increase the tax burden for American citizens and businesses.
This is an area where I think some level of cooperation with China, especially in the short term, makes a lot of sense if people are serious about substantially increasing the scale of renewable energy in America to address concerns about climate change.
Also, it seems that pumped storage hydro is a better large-scale storage solution than batteries.
https://chinapologist.substack.com/p/the-solution-to-the-green-transition
Pumped hydro needs even more space than the solar panels at two significantly different altitudes so isn’t much more practical than lithium batteries. Iron air batteries or sequestered hydrogen are probably more reasonable.
This 2022 report from the Department of Energy found there’s more than enough storage capacity in the western US:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81277.pdf
The challenge then becomes building ultra high voltage transmission lines from storage sites to urban centres on the coasts. PSH is a proven, cost effective, and scalable energy storage solution. There are no technical breakthroughs necessary to make it work with large scale renewable buildout — the only hurdle is NIMBYism!
The one caveat I’d put in here is that on the macro scale this simplistic analysis is basically right, Northern Europe, parts of the USA, Canada, and parts of China have a seasonality problem.
In a nutshell, peak energy demands for heating occur precisely when solar production is at its lowest.
The upshot of that is that firmed , year-round energy will be much cheaper in places closer to the equator.
As PV costs drop, and storage drops, I'd expect under peak solar output to be overmatched by excess capacity. Say 2x steady state demand
Does the excess capacity also mean that in the summer we can just run say 50% of solar for things like carbon capture?
There’s quite a few things you might be able to do with very cheap seasonally available energy, of which capturing carbon is only one. Making hydrogen or desalinating seawater are another two that come to mind.
Sure. One of my friends, one of the world's leading environmental entrepreneurs, Mike Biddle and EVOL are into some potentially global scale carbon capture
If problems of transmission could be addressed, Europe is just north of the Sahara, which has close to unlimited year-round sunshine. The tourist slogan for Ethiopia, used to be, “13 months of sunshine." That did not make me want to visit.
Realistically, from a geopolitical standpoint, why would Europe want to be at the mercy of North Africa when it comes to energy? These ideas were brought up 15-20 years ago, and I always thought that was a fatal flaw.
There's a problem there, but it could be written into the contracts/treaties that Europe would have a right of military intervention If problems arose. But there could be a problem of nightly sabotage.
But the normies of North Africa would probably like the income from the solar farms and society might be able to police the saboteurs. Just like East Africa likes its wildlife tourists And Egypt likes its pyramid tourists. These sources of income are held to be off limits to terrorists. Europe could try it, and see if the locals support it before investing big.
I just think that countries having control of their own energy supply is a much more attractive prospect, and I used to hear that argument much more in the US before the fracking and shale revolution changed the game for the US. "If we invest in solar, wind and biofuels, we won't be dependent on OPEC and the Arab countries". That's still a potent argument for countries that don't have large fossil fuel reserves like Japan or France.
You definitely have a point there about energy security. I have read that France depends mostly on nuclear energy, I don't know what percentage. However, I once heard that a nuclear reactor would make a wonderful target in time of war, perhaps creating a Chernobyl-like incident. So, as usual, not much is easy.
France gets about 70-80% of it's electricity from nuclear. After the oil crisis and embargo in the 1970s, they decided they didn't want to be reliant anymore upon OPEC for their energy, and started building nuclear plants to prevent that. The risk of bombing is true theoretically, but we also run large chemical plants or oil refineries or hydroelectric dams that could be very dangerous to the public if they were damaged, so I think that's just a trade-off with big tech. Nuclear isn't unique in that regard imo.
True, but transmission isn’t free.
Transmission will never be free, but the cost may go down with innovation. That's why I said if transmission problems are addressed.
HVDC lines are very expensive to build and maintain. Whilst they are great for connecting grids, it's so far been much cheaper and quicker to build more - less efficient - renewables closer to the end consumer than transmitting power across long distances. The economics are unlikely to change in favour of long distance transmission any time soon, and until they do the other considerations don't matter anyway.
well done.. good article
Thanks for writing this! Also - Sam Harris had a good podcast with Chris Field recently.
Generally really like your pieces, but I fear you are just cherry-picking. You cite China's solar, I raise you coal. https://www.mattball.org/2023/08/net-zero-in-practice-is-war-on-poor.html
Oh China is definitely building a lot of coal. It's the biggest climate problem in the world.
Doesn't mean their solar buildout is "cherry-picked". The fact they're building so much solar shows how cheap solar is. They're building coal because A) a lot of their factories are dependent on it as a feedstock, and B) they can use it to create synthetic fuel in case of an oil blockade.
I will bet that over the next 20 years China develops far more coal capacity than solar capacity.
I’ll take that bet :)
I'll fade that.
How much? Who will escrow for us?
Isn't Chinese solar only cheap due to it being part of the planned economy? China's governments wants them to be cheap, so they are cheap, doesn't mean they actually _are_ cheap.
Thanks
Waow. The energy "debate" in the U.S. has become another identity politics. Solar panels are the new masks.
Exactly.
Here’s some terrible napkin math. I’m tired and I’m poking at my phone but bear with me.
Choose the best case battery storage cost from here, for example: https://www.energy-storage.news/li-ion-bess-costs-could-fall-47-by-2030-nrel-says-in-long-term-forecast-update/
Or see the link at bottom for a $250 estimate by 2030
Cost = $250/kwH
Then ignore grid upgrade costs
Now, assume you need multiple days of storage for extended periods of cold, no sun or calm air. (I’ve seen 24-30 days referenced in separate studies based on real world weather models). All at rated capacity which has its own issue as effective capacity declines 1-2% a year. This is just to have a resilient system.
Let’s use ten days to cover us for a bad spell once every few years, somewhere. That may be too little storage but we’ll go with it.
Now figure out how much a state or country needs to spend to go net zero on electricity consumption only.
Take California: used 247 TW-hr in 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/560913/us-retail-electricity-consumption-by-major-state/).
Average demand is something like 30 GW. In a disaster people buckle down and use less. But let’s say that net zero is intended to supply electricity for rather typical stretches of weather.
10 days x 24 hours x 30,000 kw x $250 kw-hr = $1.8 Trillion
Check my math. Here is this optimistic scenario, projecting 500 GW-hr in the US by 2030, or about 16 hours of California’s usage at a cost of $125B: https://www.esource.com/white-paper/437221l3ux/250-kwh-battery-price-will-herald-terawatt-hour-age
For less than a tenth of California’s needs.
This is electricity demand only.
What did I miss?
You’re grossly overestimating the amount of storage required, and the technology that will be used for it.
Most of the required storage in a decarbonised system will be short duration. Only a relatively small amount of long duration storage will be required, and it will come from some combination of pumped hydro, demand management, biogas, hydrogen, compressed air, geothermal energy storage, iron flow batteries, and I’m sure other things.
It’s also worth pointing out here that you can get to maybe 90% decarbonised grids without the long duration stuff.
Whilst the storage most used will be of short duration, to avoid shortages historical data seems to suggest a requirement for 2-4 weeks of electricity in low wind, winter conditions in countries like the UK, unless renewable generation capacity is around 10x average demand. This would suggest that most of the storage will be of long duration but only used very rarely. For larger blocks such as the US or Europe, energy can be moved around to reduce this somewhat, but this requires significant overcapacity and very expensive transmission infrastructure. You can pderhaps get to a 90% decarbonised grid by falling back on gas generation (for example), with the other 10% being those low renewable periods, but I guess this would require gas generation capacity of at least 50% of peak demand, which is hardly ideal given the infrastructure required. A proven solution to this would be nice.
Do you have any sources for that? I’m not aware that there is any long duration storage commercially available.
Pumped hydro has been around for many decades but has seen a revival of interest. Among others. there’s a very large pumped hydro project under construction in Australia called Snowy 2.0. The project has been a bit of an omnishambles but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the tech itself.
Biogas has similarly been around forever; storing it and burning it in gas turbines is well established.
There are a number of commercial-scale compressed air energy storage plants in operation in various places around the world. The Wikipedia article on the topic lists some.
The last two are a bit more speculative. There are a number of companies working on various types of redox flow batteries. Most seem to be aiming at the 4 to 8 hour storage market but a startup called Flow energy is claiming to have a “100 hour battery” in the pilot stage.
Geothermal energy storage is a concept that some of the enhanced geothermal companies are working on - basically, you pump water at high pressure into the wells when energy is cheap, giving you extra power output when you open the taps later.
For completeness, demand management is another way the seasonality of energy supply and demand can be dealt with. Things like hydrogen production and desalination don’t have to be done all year round.
Whoops, sorry, the startup doing the 100 hour flow battery is called Form Energy.
What you missed is that the sky doesn't go black for 10 days. It just gets less bright. Accordingly, you end up with a 30%-70% (varying) reduction in solar output power over that time(10 days). Even in winter, solar output only drops by 40%-60%. This of course, means you can over-build solar to further reduce battery requirements (even to zero). The other thing that you missed is that batteries are already below $250 and will continue to fall. And you overlooked that nobody (sensible) thinks we can get to 100% solar by 2030 (so battery prices will have more time to fall).
So, perhaps you are arguing against some imaginary person who thinks that we can go to 100% solar by 2030. He is wrong. On the other hand, your argument has a few holes as well.
Lol ok. He’s definitely not an expert, that guy. I’d argue with your points (I just read yet another report from this January that put turnkey storage costs—not cell costs—at $300). I think while “everyone knows” it’s not happening by 2030, what I’m interested in is how governments present reality to its citizens. One way is draconian legislation and catastrophizing. Another way is embracing reality while pushing forward without the frequent stupidity and unintended consequences of top-down mandates.
But you seem knowledgeable. Maybe I will revisit my premises and with more research write my own piece. Now if only there was a place I could post such a thing.
deleted for being unreasonably harsh...
I don't believe that a "turnkey solution" cost is representative of the costs associated with an entire state buying storage. It is more in line with the cost for you to put a nicely anodized box in your garage for you to show off to your neighbors.
Ok. I’m just reading things like “Utility-Scale Battery Storage: 2023 Update”. We’re at an impasse. You may be right. I don’t see the data, yet. But I appreciate your points.
I’m curious and want to see a simple model, which doesn’t exist from the people who are shutting off gas and bankrupting North America. Im 100% in favour of renewables, but I’m pragmatic about it. We shouldn’t impoverish people and weaken our societies.
I don’t know if there are problems with this paper (below) other than the hand-waving that storage can come from hydrogen which is not a technology that exists at scale - but this type of analysis is more readily available than sane analyses from the IEP, et al, looking at useful information like, say: average demand versus scenarios for amount of storage required during low-renewable periods and assuming that dispatchable supply has been allowed to decline (eg in BC, natural gas is becoming banned in new construction at a municipal level, which will surely lead, as intended, to declines in supply and infrastructure investments).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4dc8
TL;DR 2 weeks of storage to 9 weeks and maybe longer for a net zero grid.
In conclusion, it’s not as rosy as all that, the trends are good but orders of magnitudes off, and political leaders will likely have to choose between easing off net zero policies or authoritarian measures that will lead to unrest, IMHO. Viz, Netherlands and increasingly UK.
To say solar is cheap based on grid scale power plants and then switch to say it’s reliable because in a hurricane rooftop household solar works when transmission lines are blown down is a contradiction.
Rooftop solar is artificially expensive in the USA. Look at the Australian rooftop solar industry to see what can be done.