I don't disagree with any of its descriptions of current trends or predictions. Nonetheless, it is bizarre to read the history presented in the energy section and not see a word about hydraulic fracturing or the natural gas revolution in the United States.
The history presented reads as if written from another universe, where the oil shock of the 1970's actually was an "energy stagnation" - and we only are beginning to overcome it today with the developments in renewables and batteries.
The 1970's were not yesterday, and we have not experienced an energy stagnation since then.
Most simply and recently, thanks to hydraulic fracturing "King Coal" was finally dethroned as our leading fuel in electricity generation. Concretely, coal accounted for approximately half of our electricity generation for decades. Thanks to fracking it began to decline in 2008/09 -- falling from 50% in 2005 and 48% in 2008 to less than 40% only five years later, and the low 30% a few years later.
This brought us cheaper electricity. It also brought us our first decrease in CO2 emissions in essentially forever.
Nobody - of either political persuasion or any background - was predicting these possibilities just a few years before. Most experts thought it was not possible, and certainly not likely until many years from now and then only at tremendous cost, to decrease our emissions while also decreasing electricity prices. But we did it.
In this context, the story that is the focus of this piece is one of continuity and continual change, not finally making an advance after stagnation in the 1970's. Coal had already been dethroned and our emissions were already declining when the innovations discussed here began to come online. Those new advances are what brought coal to its knees - to under 20% of our electricity generation, almost unthinkable very recently.
Again though, this was a next step in a process - it brought coal down to under 20% from 30 something percent, after the hydraulic fracturing revolution knocked it off its pedestal, bringing it down from ~50% to the 30's.
I remember the talk a decade ago being that some environmentalists gave what one might call "critical support" to natural gas. The term they used was "bridge fuel", in the sense that it was the bridge that would carry us from coal to renewables. Some of the more radical environmentalists who wanted to jump straight to renewables disputed this, saying that gas would become too entrenched in the economy and politics for renewables to disrupt it.
IMO, the fate of the coal and oil industries proved that these fears were unfounded. The fracking revolution dramatically reduced the mountaintop removal mining that was popular in the '00s by making coal so uneconomical that the companies engaged in that destructive practice were too busy clawing their way back from bankruptcy to keep doing it. In the '00s, it was often joked (and often only half-jokingly) that ExxonMobil, then the largest company in the world, was writing the Bush administration's foreign and energy policies, but nowadays, it's a (pardon the pun) shell of its former self.
If the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut that was Big Oil could fall from grace so rapidly and thoroughly, then gas could do the same, serving its use as a "bridge fuel" rather than remaining here to stay.
I agree. I think including it tells a slightly different story than the one presented, however. Picking up from the halting of nuclear in the 1970's, we see a period of scrambling and re-orientation as described, and then continual innovation and progress as we developed and improved upon the technological avenues that we were working on before nuclear -- pushing each further than we reasonably would have expected in that timeframe.
It's not critical obviously. However, I think it does complete and add a different texture to the story. It's interesting to highlight the continuity, in my view, especially in the context here.
This story of energy revolution is presented in a techo-optimist analysis of the future along with other prospects of excitement. Some are based on truly novel tech unlike anything we use or have available today, seemingly ripped from a sci-fi book of yore to improve our lives in ways we used to consider miraculous.
The energy tech story is not like that. Our advances in renewables have been amazing, but they're also advances in renewables - not nuclear or hydrogen cells - tech we had and were working on when the nuclear detour went south. Following that failure we refocused our efforts and successfully found the innovation we needed in those existing technologies - ultimately in renewable, but also and first, per my addition, in natural gas by developments mainly on the drilling side.
This completes the story and is worthwhile for that reason alone, and reframes the history as I indicate above - making it one of continual innovation and progress since our refocusing, rather than a detour dead-ending unexpectedly and then dark ages until today.
Also, and finally, I think it all tells an interesting and different story about innovation and progress than we usually hear and expect. These technologies are not new, and the advances we've made were not unpredictable when we started focusing on them. They're not the self-evidently revolutionary moonshot energy projects that drove so many hopes and dreams, and futurist magazine articles, for decades; none of that stuff has really come to fruition (depending on how you evaluate the battery tech -- that stuff really is incredible versus what we expected; for all the grief he takes and a caricature he can be, salute to Musk for his leadership on that).
Instead, we really are on the verge of a revolution, simply by improving our existing tech. We stopped pretending they were ready when they weren't and instead dedicated ourselves to them - to diagnosing the issues and reasons for non-adoption, and focusing on fixing and improving them to make them competitive, then superior, then a revolution.
It worked in natural gas, allowing us to displace king coal, put to rest fears of peak oil and shortages or running out of fuel, and achieve essentially U.S. energy independence - a dominant goal of U.S. foreign and domestic policy for decades, achieved recently in a few years. And it is working and will continue to work in renewables.
A futuristic energy portfolio is our future, no cold fusion or spacesuits required.
Look, I'm pretty optimistic about the next decade of technical progress.
But, in the interests of putting a contrary view on some of the specifics:
The thing with fusion is that unless you're just looking for process heat you've still got to turn it into electricity. With D-T fusion (the most plausible first cab off the rank for a fusion reactor) the only way to do that is let the neutrons slam into something, get it hot, and use that heat in some kind of heat engine. In other words, we're back to steam turbines.
My understanding is the vast majority of the cost of a coal-fired power plant is in the parts other than the parts that pulverise and burn the coal - it's in the steam turbine, generators and all the other parts that aren't dependent on the fuel source, As such, it's hard to see how a fusion power plant with a steam turbine could ever be cost-competitive with solar and wind given the maturity of steam turbine technology.
Furthermore, cheap electricity won't give us cheap longhaul or medium-haul air travel, or cheap bullet trains. Even the next generation of solid-state batteries aren't nearly energy-dense enough for airliners, making synfuel from cheap electricity won't be cheaper than fossil fuels for some time, and storing sufficient hydrogen to power an airliner is a real challenge. The vast majority of the cost of bullet trains is covering the ridiculously high fixed costs of building the track.
As for Starship - cheap space travel for scientific space probes is great. Starlink is great. Depending on the environmental impact, I can believe suborbital intercontinental travel might be a thing some day. And there is clearly a demand for space tourism if you can get the costs down low enough. And, transforming your own slice of Mars into your personal Garden of Eden sounds like a fun thing for our great-great-grandchildren to do if they're bored. I certainly wouldn't discount the idea of space Pilgrims at some point. But from any conventional economic perspective, none of the potential space industries suggested make any sense any time soon. Not mining, not manufacturing.
But, regardless, it'll be fun to find out what of these possibilities actually come to fruition!
Yes, I'm not convinced fusion will ever be competitive with other electricity sources. But if it were, it sure would be the icing on the cake, no? Anyway we know solar is going to work; it already works. So that's good. As for cheap electricity giving us cheap bullet trains, it will definitely reduce the cost a bit, since bullet trains do use a lot of juice. But you have to figure that construction costs will also be reduced if electric vehicles and other machines used to do the construction are also cheaper.
Most of the cost of both operation and construction is labor. What is needed is using that labor more efficiently (it is used very wastefully), and then the same fixed budgets could do several times as much - the budget sizes are set politically; there's no reason to believe we would spend less if it was cheaper, much more likely, we'd allocate the same billions to rail/road construction, and just build more rail and more roads for the same money.
However ... because the contractors know they are getting the same money regardless, they have almost no incentive to get more efficient.
Short-haul aviation is primed for electrification (and not having to deal with gas costs could open up interesting high-speed aircraft). Heart is building a 19 seater, for one.
Short-haul low density is workable on electric planes.
Short-haul high density is usually workable as high-speed rail (unless over water, and there isn't much short-haul high-density over water; pretty much just some Mediterranean islands, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan).
Long-haul might eventually work on hydrogen, or maybe on methane made from green hydrogen and carbon dioxide captured from the air. (or even polymerise that and make kerosene). That is definitely the hardest problem.
There are a few things that will be more expensive to make zero-carbon than just sucking the CO2 back out of the air - but the whole point of net zero is the "net" bit - the total amount of atmospheric capture will need to be enough to counter the things we can't make zero-emission. Long-haul flights is a small enough share of total emissions that this is a reasonable proposition.
Batteries store less energy per mass than fuel. This is balanced by the actual engines being smaller and lighter (and that's more true the lower power they are). The result is that battery-electric is more efficient in smaller vehicles than in larger ones relative to fossil fuel power [everything is more efficient in larger vehicles, but the hydrocarbon curve is steeper]
This is why there are prototypes being built of 19-seat electric aircraft, but no-one has even put 200-seat electric aircraft (B737, A320 class) on the drawing-board.
I should probably add that there is "medium haul" as well. LAX-JFK is not usually considered "long haul", but it is about five to six hours in the air. Rule of thumb is to treble the flight time for high-speed rail, and 15-18 hours is too long for a simple overnight train. If you could do it in 10-11 hours, there would be a significant sleeper market (sleeping on a train is far better than on a plane), but you'd need 500 km/h to do that, and that's beyond the capabilities of regular HSR.
Aside: this is why the serious proposals for HSR in the US are the ones that don't try to build transcontinental; you can build the Northeast Corridor, build a network around Chicago and join those together (and possibly links to Toronto and Montreal); you can build a Florida line going Miami-Orlando-Jacksonville, you can build the "Texas Triangle", you can build in California from SF/Sacramento down through LA to SD, and you can link from LA to Vegas and Phoenix; you can build Portland-Seattle-Vancouver. There is a decent case once they are built for connecting the Florida system to the Northeast Corridor at DC via Atlanta, and Texas to the Midwest/East Coast system is a bit short of being viable (big growth of Oklahoma City and Kansas City or of New Orleans and Birmingham AL would be needed to make it viable).
California to Portland would be sensible if it was flat, which it isn't, so it really should never happen - but if there was a line to Sacramento and one to Portland then it might end up being built anyway.
But connecting the east and west coasts? Forget it. There are no intermediate cities big enough to justify anything (apart from Denver), the Rockies make it really expensive, and the big-demand routes are too long for even overnight service.
The best route for a transcontinental railway would be LA-Chicago, and it's nowhere near big enough for the ticket sales to come anywhere near the costs.
Hydrogen/Boron fusion allows for direct conversion into electricity by de-accelerating the resulting ions against a magnetic field, and x-rays into electricity is also pretty well understood if you know which direction. It isn't fusion that has the 'conversion into electricity' problem, it's H-H fusion.
if you dont think that cheap access to space will not an economical impact you have a serious lack of imagination, just take the next advancement into account
space minning
right now there are several companies who are working on space minning technology right now and the technology required some of them who have been even working with nasa for the artemis program and will send their test probes along the rest of the equipment
of course this technology is initially going to be used for gathering scientific data, but if you cant imagine how a drill designed to work on the moon can be used for industrial and minning purposes again you have a severe lack of imagination, this is only one of many companies working on other projects such as asteroid minning and industry
Energy could be free and I don't think bullet trains would be cheap. The upfront capital costs associated with acquiring the right of way, leveling the ground, bridging and tunneling as necessary, laying track, etc., are what makes them prohibitively expensive, at least in the US. The energy costs to run them are comparatively a small piece of the puzzle.
I don't get complaining that the power comes from turbines. Natural gas also works by turbines.
Furthermore, once we actually have D-T fusion (something that I'll admit could be further away than I expect, but a given in your example), there will be a big growth of learning as the reactors doing it stop being done for research purposes and start being done for economic purposes, because it'll become self-funding at that point. It won't take long to get from D-T to D-He3. [1]
[1] Helion says they can get D-He3 first, and I'm skeptical, but I'll assign a small chance to them being right.
Natural gas plants use combustion turbines, which are actually much cheaper than the big steam turbine systems. But the majority of the cost of electricity from coal is the coal. If you could build a power plant with steam turbines that cost the same as a coal plant but had no need to buy fuel, the electricity would be far cheaper. This is how fission plants were supposed to give us electricity too cheap to meter. But it turned out they cost a lot more to build than coal plants, partly because of all the safety precautions needed. If fusion plants need way fewer precautions, they could have a big advantage over fossil fuels.
Helion is full of shit. Just look at reaction cross-sections vs temperature. Also, 3He does not grow on trees and we're not going to mine it on the moon, so the only way to get it is to breed tritium from lithium and let it decay into 3He. Tritium's half-life is 12 years. That's a lot of tritium to keep around.
On the front of ever more costly drug discovery, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has recently launched a new venture, Isomorphic Laboratories, an “AI-first approach” to drug discovery. [1] This builds off their revolutionary work in protein folding structure prediction using AI, AlphaFold. See Nature’s Nov 2020 article entitled, “‘It will change everything’: DeepMind’s AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures”. [2]
As someone with an academic background in computational chemistry, I’ve seen a lot of hype around the promise of computational drug discovery. While computational methods have played an increasingly larger role in drug discovery for at least three decades, these previous methods didn’t drastically change the economics of the process. Yet Alphabet’s DeepMind has shown that they can revolutionize computational biochemistry with their AlphaFold project and I’m tepidly optimistic that Isomorphic Laboratories and related ventures will play a role in massively decreasing the cost of discovering new drugs.
I love the optimism, Noah. We need more of it. I'd love to see a deep-dive on carbon capture and other climate change mitigation technologies, too. There's so much promise (and potential profit) in engineered climate change mitigation, but it always seems to be dismissed by well-meaning but overly conservative environmentalists. Also, drought mitigation/water storage is going to be huge in the west. The combination of cheap energy, more flexible energy storage and material science present really exciting opportunities to green arid land or make marginal land more viable. Thanks for an upbeat signal boost!
Good read. Noah talking about technology and the future always brings me back to the idea of wizards and prophets when thinking about solutions to growth in energy, water, food, etc. Noah is a great example of the Wizard mindset.
I'm sort of with you, but also not. All of these are amazing technological advances, which *should* be able to massively improve human well-being.
And yet, I'm cynical.
I can't help but think that most of these will lead to a sort of "futurama" type future, where there are amazing technologies but it's all used the stupidest, most banal purposes.
Energy. Great, who doesn't love energy? Except that lots of places will still be burning coal, oil, and gas. All the new solar and wind will be used to power things like crypto-currency and server farms for ML devoted to tracking people's shopping habits. Or just wasted all together.
Biotech. A few heartwarming stories of disabled people getting healed. But I'll bet it doesn't work for the vast majority of cases. Instead we'll get animated tattoos and obsessive parents gene-editing their babies to look like movie stars.
Space. Very neat! But wildly impractical for most people. We'll set up a theme park on the moon, and it'll be awesome, but there won't be much to do there once the thrill of bouncing around in low-gravity wears off. All the natural resources and nice living places are here on the Earth. Outer space doesn't provide much except better solar energy- which, as you mentioned, is quickly becoming plentiful here, too.
What we really need is something to lower the cost of housing, healthcare, and education. Otherwise, those three things are going to suck up any and all economic growth.
This cold water is anathema to Noah's techno-optimism, but it certainly is more consistent with our observed reality.
Techno-optimists focus on production and innovation but give too short shift to the limitations of commercialization and distribution. With unlimited cash, yes, you can buy gene therapy and space colonies. But most people can't. Ergo, the effect is niche, at best.
Techno-optimists (rightly) point out that even the most expensive innovations get cheaper and are (eventually) scaled out to everyone. But the end-user effect of this "trickle-down innovation" for the rest of us is mostly dystopian or frivolous, as you say. Are we using massive increases in computing power available in the palms of our hands for anything more than... doom-scrolling? Or, maybe that's best-case, and those magical mini-computers connected to the global sum of human knowledge actually affect our lives more as surveillance devices that allow advertisers and even worse bad-actors to manipulate our emotions and employers to manage every aspect of our lives 24/7. For us to disappear further into the infinite Feed of alienation and barely-chewed "content." Yay?
Meanwhile, in the world of material life, many things just get worse. And I can focus on the most mundane aspects of daily life. Is the new house you live in which cost you a hyper-inflated amount actually built well? Mine isn't. The (eye-wateringly expensive-to-install) cabinets are made of pressed wood under laminate and are vulnerable to moisture and friction and cannot be repaired. The appliances have a useful life of 5-7 years, in marked contrast to those more stoutly-built (if less energy-efficient) ones I grew up with. After that, they will be mostly landfilled, as it's inefficient or impossible to wholly repair or recycle them. My floors are thin strips of wood that is easily scratched and will never last a lifetime, unlike my grandmother's floor that could be indefinitely sanded and treated to last centuries. I cover these floors with plastic fiber carpets that release hormone-disrupting chemicals and micro-plastics into my lungs, whereas I might have spent the same money on a cotton or wool carpeting before. They last about as long as those appliances and then are landfilled or incinerated. Unlike natural fibers naturally dyed, they don't even look artfully worn or patina-ed with time. They just look shitty. And then I throw them away. Like everything else.
My car outside is also very efficient. So efficient that it's always breaking down. The hybrid electric drive saves some gasoline, but at the expense of brittle complexity. One of the three batteries is faulty, sending the system haywire. If I have to replace one of the silicon chips in it, best of luck to me then. A full-on EV would be simpler and more reliable, yes, but it, too, is designed as disposable and unrepairable, and will become uneconomical once the batteries reach the end of their lives. It's weight will also degrade the (disposable) roads faster, requiring more oil-based asphalt to re-pave them.
I write this on a very old Apple laptop. It's almost a decade old and going strong. My work computer, meanwhile, is only two years old and needs replacing. That's not unusual. Even Apple products don't last like they used to. Perhaps a victim of their own popularity and reductions in quality-control?
Oh, and did I mention that everything is also ugly now? My apartment is ugly. My appliances are ugly. My phone is ugly. My stupid floors and cabinets and everything on or in them is ugly. Is it because I have terrible taste? No, it's because everything that is produced now is ugly. Beauty and good design are afterthoughts. And its even worse when you're looking beyond your own little sphere into the public realm. Everything is REALLY ugly outside there. Nobody takes a look at your street, or your development, or your city, or the public and private buildings that fill up your field of view as you walk (jk... I mean drive) through it. Ugliness everywhere. We have to go on vacation somewhere remote or forgotten or preserved under glass to see anything actually beautiful.
At least all that poorly-made, disposable, ugly stuff above is affordable, even if it's semi-shitty. How about all the things (or rather services) I *actually* need? Which hyper-inflate every year. Whatever the energy prices are and however advanced the nano-tech is? Stuff like education, healthcare, eldercare, and real estate/housing? Stuff that isn't, hasn't been, and probably won't be subject to economies of scale. Or, really, anyone's earnest attention because making it better and more affordable doesn't serve a bottom-line.
So, when I hear all the whiz-bang stuff about the wonders of the future, I remind them that all of the above is going to be much like the frustrating stuff I interact with daily now. Technologies will be so complex that it is extremely vulnerable, not just to errors and break-downs, but also to our extremely brittle, global supply chains. Engineers will over-invest in up-front cost and scalability and under-invest in reliability, user-experience, or joy/aesthetics. The profit will still come in chasing stuff that's scalable rather than stuff that is useful. I still won't be able to afford my robotic-nano-mRNA healthcare. Or my spot in an elderly person isolation unit, catered to by banal interfaces and the poorly-paid precariat.
Is this 2020s going to be "amazing," really? Or are you... a little too easily impressed?
Energy use: The reason why US energy use plateaued is because all of the energy intensive manufacturing was offshored to China. And the consequence was the hollowing out of the American job base and its hinterland all at once.
Renewables: Europe, particularly Germany, has spent enormous amounts on renewables and also have done all they can to reduce energy usage via taxes - hence $12+/gallon gasoline costs.
The result of all this? Energy security at all time lows - with the entirety of Western Europe facing sky-high natural gas costs due to insufficient supply vs. demand. Doesn't look like a win to me.
Batteries: costs are lower, sure. But so what?
Storage of solar PV and wind generated renewable electricity is the only place batteries really matter; your iPhone - the battery cost is insignificant. Even if the cost is $0.15 per kwh - the cost is irrelevant when there is simply not enough lithium in the entire world to convert 10% of the existing car population in the US alone to EV.
I just read another article looking at the technotopian fantasies of yore - take those stories and replace "steam" with "lithium battery powered electricity" and the result is equally laughable.
“ there is simply not enough lithium in the entire world to convert 10% of the existing car population in the US alone to EV”. This is not even close to true, why do you think this?
He could have said economically-extractable proven-reserves of lithium. There's trace lithium in seawater, for example, but it's not economically extractable. That's key to actually being able to leverage it at the scales required for the energy transition.
I would say though that you pretty carefully avoid the impact of inequality on all this though, most specifically here:
"it’s not yet clear whether the most successful ventures will be capital-intensive projects like pharma or low-overhead synbio stuff that can be done in a basement."
Regardless of what is more 'sucessful', low-overhead stuff is going to be vastly more widespread. It's like how most people can't afford access to the legal system, so no one ever uses it for anything except the rich and the government.
Noah, how do you see any of these innovations impacting our built environment? In other words, what changes do you see in the way we live in our cities, suburbs and rural areas and how will they look different?
Scooters and e-bikes seem like the big ones. Already, on a weekend evening, 6th St through the west part of downtown Austin has more people traveling on scooter than in cars, which would have been unthinkable a decade ago. It still doesn't feel that much nicer, because even the smaller number of cars still take up a lot of space and are loud, dirty, and dangerous. The city has blocked cars from using the east part of 6th St through downtown ("Dirty Sixth") on weekend evenings, and while the resulting space isn't pleasant for everyone, it's definitely better for the drunk crowds that use the space. If growing scooter and e-bike use enables the city to do this sort of thing for more spaces in town, at more hours, that could be huge!
If batteries actually become "cost effective", and we can make enough of them, then problem solved.
Here in Australia, companies aren’t buying off that chart, they are paying much more.
The expansion of the SA “world's biggest battery" (as it was called when it was first installed):
"Neoen announced that it would increase the battery capacity by 50%. [20] The expansion cost €53 million ($A82 million.."
That’s a 65MWh expansion in 2020, costing, at market rates, US$ 62M, so about US$1000/kWh.
I found a couple more recent projects here, also similar costs.
Lots of spruikers. But where are the people buying grid scale batteries and paying sub US$200/kWh?
As a couple of datapoints:
1. The NEM (eastern half of Australia) uses about 500GWh per day. So at the apparent actual prices, one day's storage would cost $500bn, or $100bn per year with a 5 year life. That’s around the cost of the entire health system in Australia.
2. The "world's biggest battery", now expanded, installed in South Australia, has enough capacity for about 7 minutes of SA electricity. The grid operator (AEMO) describes it as for "fast frequency response". It takes the edge off the sharp transitions, to give it a simpler description.
I’d love to find that we’re just out of touch with commercial reality here and have just overpaid by a country mile. But I fear that reality is more likely to be high battery prices.
Hopefully Noah, or one of the commenters, can help to explain the disconnect. Appreciate any help.
These are lithium-ion batteries -- useful for storing power during the day to be used at night, but not useful for storing power during the summer to be used in winter. For the latter, we need other technologies. Iron-flow batteries might be able to do the trick, though they'll have to come down in cost a lot. Hydrogen storage and thermal storage are potential alternatives. Here is a good primer on the topic: https://www.volts.wtf/p/long-duration-storage-can-help-clean
I'm sorry to deflate your hopes on hydrogen storage, Noah, but it's not even remotely viable. The reason is that the hydrogen cycle is rather inefficient, and hydrogen storage is an absolute nightmare. Using electricity to electrolyze 2H2O into 2H2 + O2 is somewhat inefficient at room temperatures (it is much cheaper at high temperatures, something that 4th-gen fission reactors could provide in spades). And of course, since Electrolysis is a reversible process, combining H2 and O2 to produce electricity has pretty much the same losses as the opposite process. Since both processes are 70% to 80% efficient, the overall efficiency is going to be between 50-64%. This is terrible. As a vector for energy transfer, hydrogen isn't great.
Even worse, we haven't counted the transmission or storage losses. H2, because it is made of the lightest element, is a pretty small and nasty molecule. It has the habit of leaking through the joints of metal pipes and can even leak through the walls themselves. the joint thing cannot be really helped, only mitigated. One could make a monolithic containment vessel with very very very thick walls, or made of a very dense and expensive alloy or whatnot, but that would make your hydrogen tank too expensive, too heavy, and too small to be practical. Think about the typical domed gas containers that you see at ports. Now forget about those. Can't use them, too leaky.
It also has the nasty habit of reacting explosively with water (better double-check those seals), because Hydrogen is an alkaline "metal".
What H2 is great at is as fuel for industrial thermal processes (cement, iron smelting, fertilizer, etc.). As a fuel, H2 is incredibly energy-dense and it burns very very hot, but it shouldn't be used as a way to transfer or store energy, rather generated from electricity when and where it is needed, with the added advantage that H2 production also yields O2, which can be used for oxy-combustion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxy-fuel_combustion_process (you burn pure H2 with the pure O2, rather than with normal air that has 78% useless N2 that won't burn.)
Yes, lithium ion batteries. If storing one day of electricity costs more than the health service of the country they are quite pricey. We'd need 3 Tesla gigafactories running flat out supplying only to Australia just to provide one day of electricity storage.
My question isn’t about new stuff that might come along (flow batteries). It's about the Bloomberg price chart that you reproduced showing $200/kWh when Australian companies are paying $1000/kWh.
Trying to be even clearer, no country has batteries that store their grid electricity "overnight". Not even close. A few minutes, at best.
1. If you want to store one day of the eastern half of Australian electricity production you need 500GWh of storage. (The NEM produces about 170 TWh per year).
2. Lithium ion batteries last about 5 years if you use them (charge/discharge) every day.
3. So Australia needs to buy 100GWh of batteries every year to have one day of electrical storage continuously in service.
4. Cost, at current prices Australia has been paying, $100bn.
For a start, you’re not going to run the batteries on a 100% charge-discharge cycle every single day.
Australia has abundant wind power resources to go with its excellent solar resources, as well as some hydro (and it will get more pumped storage hydro with Snowy 2.0).
Restricting the maximum charge to 80% or so of nominal capacity, and only discharging to 20%, also radically improves lifespan at higher initial cost.
So your wear rates are grossly overestimated. For a start.
Do you have some calculations? I’m just someone trying to figure out reality - what will it actually cost to store grid scale electricity. Lots of people saying grid scale electricity overnight is cost-effective. The Australian grid operator doesn’t seem to think so.
So what do you think the cost of batteries actually is, per kWh?
What do you think their lifetime is, with what assumptions?
The cost of a grid level storage solution is obviously not the same as the cost for battery cells only. You need the associated infrastructure, from the physical buildings to inverters and grid connections.
How old is the system in Australia ? Cost for grid level storage is already at 300 $/kWh and is expected to fall to IIRC 200 $/kWh by the end of the decade.
I don't disagree with any of its descriptions of current trends or predictions. Nonetheless, it is bizarre to read the history presented in the energy section and not see a word about hydraulic fracturing or the natural gas revolution in the United States.
The history presented reads as if written from another universe, where the oil shock of the 1970's actually was an "energy stagnation" - and we only are beginning to overcome it today with the developments in renewables and batteries.
The 1970's were not yesterday, and we have not experienced an energy stagnation since then.
Most simply and recently, thanks to hydraulic fracturing "King Coal" was finally dethroned as our leading fuel in electricity generation. Concretely, coal accounted for approximately half of our electricity generation for decades. Thanks to fracking it began to decline in 2008/09 -- falling from 50% in 2005 and 48% in 2008 to less than 40% only five years later, and the low 30% a few years later.
This brought us cheaper electricity. It also brought us our first decrease in CO2 emissions in essentially forever.
Nobody - of either political persuasion or any background - was predicting these possibilities just a few years before. Most experts thought it was not possible, and certainly not likely until many years from now and then only at tremendous cost, to decrease our emissions while also decreasing electricity prices. But we did it.
In this context, the story that is the focus of this piece is one of continuity and continual change, not finally making an advance after stagnation in the 1970's. Coal had already been dethroned and our emissions were already declining when the innovations discussed here began to come online. Those new advances are what brought coal to its knees - to under 20% of our electricity generation, almost unthinkable very recently.
Again though, this was a next step in a process - it brought coal down to under 20% from 30 something percent, after the hydraulic fracturing revolution knocked it off its pedestal, bringing it down from ~50% to the 30's.
Oh! Yes, I left out fracking. Fracking was an impressive (and largely purposeful) technological achievement, but ultimately it led to gas replacing goal as coal declined, rather than to more abundant energy. (Here is a good graph: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c057ae772d523f3c753a42add0d801f31e49b233/0_0_960_499/master/960.png?width=700&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=68a10946571fd5c42dbfca02fc0b56cb)
But as you can see, fracking did not reduce electricity prices much. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2015.03.16/realnominal.png
In other words, gas, though an impressive achievement, was more of a stopgap than a game-changer.
I remember the talk a decade ago being that some environmentalists gave what one might call "critical support" to natural gas. The term they used was "bridge fuel", in the sense that it was the bridge that would carry us from coal to renewables. Some of the more radical environmentalists who wanted to jump straight to renewables disputed this, saying that gas would become too entrenched in the economy and politics for renewables to disrupt it.
IMO, the fate of the coal and oil industries proved that these fears were unfounded. The fracking revolution dramatically reduced the mountaintop removal mining that was popular in the '00s by making coal so uneconomical that the companies engaged in that destructive practice were too busy clawing their way back from bankruptcy to keep doing it. In the '00s, it was often joked (and often only half-jokingly) that ExxonMobil, then the largest company in the world, was writing the Bush administration's foreign and energy policies, but nowadays, it's a (pardon the pun) shell of its former self.
If the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut that was Big Oil could fall from grace so rapidly and thoroughly, then gas could do the same, serving its use as a "bridge fuel" rather than remaining here to stay.
I agree. I think including it tells a slightly different story than the one presented, however. Picking up from the halting of nuclear in the 1970's, we see a period of scrambling and re-orientation as described, and then continual innovation and progress as we developed and improved upon the technological avenues that we were working on before nuclear -- pushing each further than we reasonably would have expected in that timeframe.
It's not critical obviously. However, I think it does complete and add a different texture to the story. It's interesting to highlight the continuity, in my view, especially in the context here.
This story of energy revolution is presented in a techo-optimist analysis of the future along with other prospects of excitement. Some are based on truly novel tech unlike anything we use or have available today, seemingly ripped from a sci-fi book of yore to improve our lives in ways we used to consider miraculous.
The energy tech story is not like that. Our advances in renewables have been amazing, but they're also advances in renewables - not nuclear or hydrogen cells - tech we had and were working on when the nuclear detour went south. Following that failure we refocused our efforts and successfully found the innovation we needed in those existing technologies - ultimately in renewable, but also and first, per my addition, in natural gas by developments mainly on the drilling side.
This completes the story and is worthwhile for that reason alone, and reframes the history as I indicate above - making it one of continual innovation and progress since our refocusing, rather than a detour dead-ending unexpectedly and then dark ages until today.
Also, and finally, I think it all tells an interesting and different story about innovation and progress than we usually hear and expect. These technologies are not new, and the advances we've made were not unpredictable when we started focusing on them. They're not the self-evidently revolutionary moonshot energy projects that drove so many hopes and dreams, and futurist magazine articles, for decades; none of that stuff has really come to fruition (depending on how you evaluate the battery tech -- that stuff really is incredible versus what we expected; for all the grief he takes and a caricature he can be, salute to Musk for his leadership on that).
Instead, we really are on the verge of a revolution, simply by improving our existing tech. We stopped pretending they were ready when they weren't and instead dedicated ourselves to them - to diagnosing the issues and reasons for non-adoption, and focusing on fixing and improving them to make them competitive, then superior, then a revolution.
It worked in natural gas, allowing us to displace king coal, put to rest fears of peak oil and shortages or running out of fuel, and achieve essentially U.S. energy independence - a dominant goal of U.S. foreign and domestic policy for decades, achieved recently in a few years. And it is working and will continue to work in renewables.
A futuristic energy portfolio is our future, no cold fusion or spacesuits required.
Your comments seem to me to be well-informed and helpful. But, in my not-very- well-informed opinion, we need to stop using fossil fuels.
Yes. Not very well-informed. Hydrocarbons are embedded in virtually every aspect of your life.
We should stop burning them (unless there’s a way to synthesize them from air), which would leave us with more to make plastic and drugs out of.
"also brought us our first decrease in CO2 emissions in essentially forever"
however
the (almost entirely unmonitored) methane leakage probably makes this a net worsening of greenhouse gases
https://www.wired.com/story/the-ipcc-reports-silver-lining-we-can-tackle-methane-now/
is a good article but if we don't measure the fracking leakage then the percentages it ascribes to agriculture are way off.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2241347-fracking-wells-in-the-us-are-leaking-loads-of-planet-warming-methane/
As an early subscriber, who identifies as a techno optimist, I appreciate this return to your roots.
Look, I'm pretty optimistic about the next decade of technical progress.
But, in the interests of putting a contrary view on some of the specifics:
The thing with fusion is that unless you're just looking for process heat you've still got to turn it into electricity. With D-T fusion (the most plausible first cab off the rank for a fusion reactor) the only way to do that is let the neutrons slam into something, get it hot, and use that heat in some kind of heat engine. In other words, we're back to steam turbines.
My understanding is the vast majority of the cost of a coal-fired power plant is in the parts other than the parts that pulverise and burn the coal - it's in the steam turbine, generators and all the other parts that aren't dependent on the fuel source, As such, it's hard to see how a fusion power plant with a steam turbine could ever be cost-competitive with solar and wind given the maturity of steam turbine technology.
Furthermore, cheap electricity won't give us cheap longhaul or medium-haul air travel, or cheap bullet trains. Even the next generation of solid-state batteries aren't nearly energy-dense enough for airliners, making synfuel from cheap electricity won't be cheaper than fossil fuels for some time, and storing sufficient hydrogen to power an airliner is a real challenge. The vast majority of the cost of bullet trains is covering the ridiculously high fixed costs of building the track.
As for Starship - cheap space travel for scientific space probes is great. Starlink is great. Depending on the environmental impact, I can believe suborbital intercontinental travel might be a thing some day. And there is clearly a demand for space tourism if you can get the costs down low enough. And, transforming your own slice of Mars into your personal Garden of Eden sounds like a fun thing for our great-great-grandchildren to do if they're bored. I certainly wouldn't discount the idea of space Pilgrims at some point. But from any conventional economic perspective, none of the potential space industries suggested make any sense any time soon. Not mining, not manufacturing.
But, regardless, it'll be fun to find out what of these possibilities actually come to fruition!
Yes, I'm not convinced fusion will ever be competitive with other electricity sources. But if it were, it sure would be the icing on the cake, no? Anyway we know solar is going to work; it already works. So that's good. As for cheap electricity giving us cheap bullet trains, it will definitely reduce the cost a bit, since bullet trains do use a lot of juice. But you have to figure that construction costs will also be reduced if electric vehicles and other machines used to do the construction are also cheaper.
Most of the cost of both operation and construction is labor. What is needed is using that labor more efficiently (it is used very wastefully), and then the same fixed budgets could do several times as much - the budget sizes are set politically; there's no reason to believe we would spend less if it was cheaper, much more likely, we'd allocate the same billions to rail/road construction, and just build more rail and more roads for the same money.
However ... because the contractors know they are getting the same money regardless, they have almost no incentive to get more efficient.
Short-haul aviation is primed for electrification (and not having to deal with gas costs could open up interesting high-speed aircraft). Heart is building a 19 seater, for one.
https://heartaerospace.com
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-michael-liebreich/ <- Hydrogen ladder (where long-haul aviation may benefit)
Short-haul low density is workable on electric planes.
Short-haul high density is usually workable as high-speed rail (unless over water, and there isn't much short-haul high-density over water; pretty much just some Mediterranean islands, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan).
Long-haul might eventually work on hydrogen, or maybe on methane made from green hydrogen and carbon dioxide captured from the air. (or even polymerise that and make kerosene). That is definitely the hardest problem.
There are a few things that will be more expensive to make zero-carbon than just sucking the CO2 back out of the air - but the whole point of net zero is the "net" bit - the total amount of atmospheric capture will need to be enough to counter the things we can't make zero-emission. Long-haul flights is a small enough share of total emissions that this is a reasonable proposition.
> Short-haul low density is workable on electric planes.
Does low density here mean low density airports/markets? Would love to hear more on why electric aircraft only works for low density airports.
Low density routes.
Batteries store less energy per mass than fuel. This is balanced by the actual engines being smaller and lighter (and that's more true the lower power they are). The result is that battery-electric is more efficient in smaller vehicles than in larger ones relative to fossil fuel power [everything is more efficient in larger vehicles, but the hydrocarbon curve is steeper]
This is why there are prototypes being built of 19-seat electric aircraft, but no-one has even put 200-seat electric aircraft (B737, A320 class) on the drawing-board.
I should probably add that there is "medium haul" as well. LAX-JFK is not usually considered "long haul", but it is about five to six hours in the air. Rule of thumb is to treble the flight time for high-speed rail, and 15-18 hours is too long for a simple overnight train. If you could do it in 10-11 hours, there would be a significant sleeper market (sleeping on a train is far better than on a plane), but you'd need 500 km/h to do that, and that's beyond the capabilities of regular HSR.
Aside: this is why the serious proposals for HSR in the US are the ones that don't try to build transcontinental; you can build the Northeast Corridor, build a network around Chicago and join those together (and possibly links to Toronto and Montreal); you can build a Florida line going Miami-Orlando-Jacksonville, you can build the "Texas Triangle", you can build in California from SF/Sacramento down through LA to SD, and you can link from LA to Vegas and Phoenix; you can build Portland-Seattle-Vancouver. There is a decent case once they are built for connecting the Florida system to the Northeast Corridor at DC via Atlanta, and Texas to the Midwest/East Coast system is a bit short of being viable (big growth of Oklahoma City and Kansas City or of New Orleans and Birmingham AL would be needed to make it viable).
California to Portland would be sensible if it was flat, which it isn't, so it really should never happen - but if there was a line to Sacramento and one to Portland then it might end up being built anyway.
But connecting the east and west coasts? Forget it. There are no intermediate cities big enough to justify anything (apart from Denver), the Rockies make it really expensive, and the big-demand routes are too long for even overnight service.
The best route for a transcontinental railway would be LA-Chicago, and it's nowhere near big enough for the ticket sales to come anywhere near the costs.
Hydrogen/Boron fusion allows for direct conversion into electricity by de-accelerating the resulting ions against a magnetic field, and x-rays into electricity is also pretty well understood if you know which direction. It isn't fusion that has the 'conversion into electricity' problem, it's H-H fusion.
if you dont think that cheap access to space will not an economical impact you have a serious lack of imagination, just take the next advancement into account
space minning
right now there are several companies who are working on space minning technology right now and the technology required some of them who have been even working with nasa for the artemis program and will send their test probes along the rest of the equipment
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/apollo-to-artemis-drilling-on-the-moon/
of course this technology is initially going to be used for gathering scientific data, but if you cant imagine how a drill designed to work on the moon can be used for industrial and minning purposes again you have a severe lack of imagination, this is only one of many companies working on other projects such as asteroid minning and industry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je6nVap7ka0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_In_Space,_Inc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP4_Q7iIlb0
just this two idustries could disrupt everything here in the ground, and again its only two potential things thaat you can do in space
Energy could be free and I don't think bullet trains would be cheap. The upfront capital costs associated with acquiring the right of way, leveling the ground, bridging and tunneling as necessary, laying track, etc., are what makes them prohibitively expensive, at least in the US. The energy costs to run them are comparatively a small piece of the puzzle.
I don't get complaining that the power comes from turbines. Natural gas also works by turbines.
Furthermore, once we actually have D-T fusion (something that I'll admit could be further away than I expect, but a given in your example), there will be a big growth of learning as the reactors doing it stop being done for research purposes and start being done for economic purposes, because it'll become self-funding at that point. It won't take long to get from D-T to D-He3. [1]
[1] Helion says they can get D-He3 first, and I'm skeptical, but I'll assign a small chance to them being right.
Natural gas plants use combustion turbines, which are actually much cheaper than the big steam turbine systems. But the majority of the cost of electricity from coal is the coal. If you could build a power plant with steam turbines that cost the same as a coal plant but had no need to buy fuel, the electricity would be far cheaper. This is how fission plants were supposed to give us electricity too cheap to meter. But it turned out they cost a lot more to build than coal plants, partly because of all the safety precautions needed. If fusion plants need way fewer precautions, they could have a big advantage over fossil fuels.
Helion is full of shit. Just look at reaction cross-sections vs temperature. Also, 3He does not grow on trees and we're not going to mine it on the moon, so the only way to get it is to breed tritium from lithium and let it decay into 3He. Tritium's half-life is 12 years. That's a lot of tritium to keep around.
In the second chart, who's the genius who made solar black, hydro grey, nuclear blue, wind green and coal and gas orange and yellow?
On the front of ever more costly drug discovery, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has recently launched a new venture, Isomorphic Laboratories, an “AI-first approach” to drug discovery. [1] This builds off their revolutionary work in protein folding structure prediction using AI, AlphaFold. See Nature’s Nov 2020 article entitled, “‘It will change everything’: DeepMind’s AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures”. [2]
As someone with an academic background in computational chemistry, I’ve seen a lot of hype around the promise of computational drug discovery. While computational methods have played an increasingly larger role in drug discovery for at least three decades, these previous methods didn’t drastically change the economics of the process. Yet Alphabet’s DeepMind has shown that they can revolutionize computational biochemistry with their AlphaFold project and I’m tepidly optimistic that Isomorphic Laboratories and related ventures will play a role in massively decreasing the cost of discovering new drugs.
[1] https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/blog
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4
I love the optimism, Noah. We need more of it. I'd love to see a deep-dive on carbon capture and other climate change mitigation technologies, too. There's so much promise (and potential profit) in engineered climate change mitigation, but it always seems to be dismissed by well-meaning but overly conservative environmentalists. Also, drought mitigation/water storage is going to be huge in the west. The combination of cheap energy, more flexible energy storage and material science present really exciting opportunities to green arid land or make marginal land more viable. Thanks for an upbeat signal boost!
Indeed! Would love a direct air capture primer as well as write ups on decarbonizing air travel, high-temp industrial heat, trucking, ocean shipping.
This is why I subscribe and read! Great article!
Good read. Noah talking about technology and the future always brings me back to the idea of wizards and prophets when thinking about solutions to growth in energy, water, food, etc. Noah is a great example of the Wizard mindset.
Another item for the space section is the (hopefully) successful launch of the James Webb telescope later this month and its resulting discoveries.
I'm sort of with you, but also not. All of these are amazing technological advances, which *should* be able to massively improve human well-being.
And yet, I'm cynical.
I can't help but think that most of these will lead to a sort of "futurama" type future, where there are amazing technologies but it's all used the stupidest, most banal purposes.
Energy. Great, who doesn't love energy? Except that lots of places will still be burning coal, oil, and gas. All the new solar and wind will be used to power things like crypto-currency and server farms for ML devoted to tracking people's shopping habits. Or just wasted all together.
Biotech. A few heartwarming stories of disabled people getting healed. But I'll bet it doesn't work for the vast majority of cases. Instead we'll get animated tattoos and obsessive parents gene-editing their babies to look like movie stars.
Space. Very neat! But wildly impractical for most people. We'll set up a theme park on the moon, and it'll be awesome, but there won't be much to do there once the thrill of bouncing around in low-gravity wears off. All the natural resources and nice living places are here on the Earth. Outer space doesn't provide much except better solar energy- which, as you mentioned, is quickly becoming plentiful here, too.
What we really need is something to lower the cost of housing, healthcare, and education. Otherwise, those three things are going to suck up any and all economic growth.
This cold water is anathema to Noah's techno-optimism, but it certainly is more consistent with our observed reality.
Techno-optimists focus on production and innovation but give too short shift to the limitations of commercialization and distribution. With unlimited cash, yes, you can buy gene therapy and space colonies. But most people can't. Ergo, the effect is niche, at best.
Techno-optimists (rightly) point out that even the most expensive innovations get cheaper and are (eventually) scaled out to everyone. But the end-user effect of this "trickle-down innovation" for the rest of us is mostly dystopian or frivolous, as you say. Are we using massive increases in computing power available in the palms of our hands for anything more than... doom-scrolling? Or, maybe that's best-case, and those magical mini-computers connected to the global sum of human knowledge actually affect our lives more as surveillance devices that allow advertisers and even worse bad-actors to manipulate our emotions and employers to manage every aspect of our lives 24/7. For us to disappear further into the infinite Feed of alienation and barely-chewed "content." Yay?
Meanwhile, in the world of material life, many things just get worse. And I can focus on the most mundane aspects of daily life. Is the new house you live in which cost you a hyper-inflated amount actually built well? Mine isn't. The (eye-wateringly expensive-to-install) cabinets are made of pressed wood under laminate and are vulnerable to moisture and friction and cannot be repaired. The appliances have a useful life of 5-7 years, in marked contrast to those more stoutly-built (if less energy-efficient) ones I grew up with. After that, they will be mostly landfilled, as it's inefficient or impossible to wholly repair or recycle them. My floors are thin strips of wood that is easily scratched and will never last a lifetime, unlike my grandmother's floor that could be indefinitely sanded and treated to last centuries. I cover these floors with plastic fiber carpets that release hormone-disrupting chemicals and micro-plastics into my lungs, whereas I might have spent the same money on a cotton or wool carpeting before. They last about as long as those appliances and then are landfilled or incinerated. Unlike natural fibers naturally dyed, they don't even look artfully worn or patina-ed with time. They just look shitty. And then I throw them away. Like everything else.
My car outside is also very efficient. So efficient that it's always breaking down. The hybrid electric drive saves some gasoline, but at the expense of brittle complexity. One of the three batteries is faulty, sending the system haywire. If I have to replace one of the silicon chips in it, best of luck to me then. A full-on EV would be simpler and more reliable, yes, but it, too, is designed as disposable and unrepairable, and will become uneconomical once the batteries reach the end of their lives. It's weight will also degrade the (disposable) roads faster, requiring more oil-based asphalt to re-pave them.
I write this on a very old Apple laptop. It's almost a decade old and going strong. My work computer, meanwhile, is only two years old and needs replacing. That's not unusual. Even Apple products don't last like they used to. Perhaps a victim of their own popularity and reductions in quality-control?
Oh, and did I mention that everything is also ugly now? My apartment is ugly. My appliances are ugly. My phone is ugly. My stupid floors and cabinets and everything on or in them is ugly. Is it because I have terrible taste? No, it's because everything that is produced now is ugly. Beauty and good design are afterthoughts. And its even worse when you're looking beyond your own little sphere into the public realm. Everything is REALLY ugly outside there. Nobody takes a look at your street, or your development, or your city, or the public and private buildings that fill up your field of view as you walk (jk... I mean drive) through it. Ugliness everywhere. We have to go on vacation somewhere remote or forgotten or preserved under glass to see anything actually beautiful.
At least all that poorly-made, disposable, ugly stuff above is affordable, even if it's semi-shitty. How about all the things (or rather services) I *actually* need? Which hyper-inflate every year. Whatever the energy prices are and however advanced the nano-tech is? Stuff like education, healthcare, eldercare, and real estate/housing? Stuff that isn't, hasn't been, and probably won't be subject to economies of scale. Or, really, anyone's earnest attention because making it better and more affordable doesn't serve a bottom-line.
So, when I hear all the whiz-bang stuff about the wonders of the future, I remind them that all of the above is going to be much like the frustrating stuff I interact with daily now. Technologies will be so complex that it is extremely vulnerable, not just to errors and break-downs, but also to our extremely brittle, global supply chains. Engineers will over-invest in up-front cost and scalability and under-invest in reliability, user-experience, or joy/aesthetics. The profit will still come in chasing stuff that's scalable rather than stuff that is useful. I still won't be able to afford my robotic-nano-mRNA healthcare. Or my spot in an elderly person isolation unit, catered to by banal interfaces and the poorly-paid precariat.
Is this 2020s going to be "amazing," really? Or are you... a little too easily impressed?
Technotopian nonsense.
Energy use: The reason why US energy use plateaued is because all of the energy intensive manufacturing was offshored to China. And the consequence was the hollowing out of the American job base and its hinterland all at once.
Renewables: Europe, particularly Germany, has spent enormous amounts on renewables and also have done all they can to reduce energy usage via taxes - hence $12+/gallon gasoline costs.
The result of all this? Energy security at all time lows - with the entirety of Western Europe facing sky-high natural gas costs due to insufficient supply vs. demand. Doesn't look like a win to me.
Batteries: costs are lower, sure. But so what?
Storage of solar PV and wind generated renewable electricity is the only place batteries really matter; your iPhone - the battery cost is insignificant. Even if the cost is $0.15 per kwh - the cost is irrelevant when there is simply not enough lithium in the entire world to convert 10% of the existing car population in the US alone to EV.
I just read another article looking at the technotopian fantasies of yore - take those stories and replace "steam" with "lithium battery powered electricity" and the result is equally laughable.
“ there is simply not enough lithium in the entire world to convert 10% of the existing car population in the US alone to EV”. This is not even close to true, why do you think this?
and its not like lithium is the only source of energy, we have been working on on sodium batteries that use salt
He could have said economically-extractable proven-reserves of lithium. There's trace lithium in seawater, for example, but it's not economically extractable. That's key to actually being able to leverage it at the scales required for the energy transition.
Love this - nice work! Even though some of these may flop, I appreciate the breadth and speculation of could be game-changers.
I love techno-optimism. :)
I would say though that you pretty carefully avoid the impact of inequality on all this though, most specifically here:
"it’s not yet clear whether the most successful ventures will be capital-intensive projects like pharma or low-overhead synbio stuff that can be done in a basement."
Regardless of what is more 'sucessful', low-overhead stuff is going to be vastly more widespread. It's like how most people can't afford access to the legal system, so no one ever uses it for anything except the rich and the government.
to the landlords go the savings!
Noah, how do you see any of these innovations impacting our built environment? In other words, what changes do you see in the way we live in our cities, suburbs and rural areas and how will they look different?
Scooters and e-bikes seem like the big ones. Already, on a weekend evening, 6th St through the west part of downtown Austin has more people traveling on scooter than in cars, which would have been unthinkable a decade ago. It still doesn't feel that much nicer, because even the smaller number of cars still take up a lot of space and are loud, dirty, and dangerous. The city has blocked cars from using the east part of 6th St through downtown ("Dirty Sixth") on weekend evenings, and while the resulting space isn't pleasant for everyone, it's definitely better for the drunk crowds that use the space. If growing scooter and e-bike use enables the city to do this sort of thing for more spaces in town, at more hours, that could be huge!
If batteries actually become "cost effective", and we can make enough of them, then problem solved.
Here in Australia, companies aren’t buying off that chart, they are paying much more.
The expansion of the SA “world's biggest battery" (as it was called when it was first installed):
"Neoen announced that it would increase the battery capacity by 50%. [20] The expansion cost €53 million ($A82 million.."
That’s a 65MWh expansion in 2020, costing, at market rates, US$ 62M, so about US$1000/kWh.
I found a couple more recent projects here, also similar costs.
Lots of spruikers. But where are the people buying grid scale batteries and paying sub US$200/kWh?
As a couple of datapoints:
1. The NEM (eastern half of Australia) uses about 500GWh per day. So at the apparent actual prices, one day's storage would cost $500bn, or $100bn per year with a 5 year life. That’s around the cost of the entire health system in Australia.
2. The "world's biggest battery", now expanded, installed in South Australia, has enough capacity for about 7 minutes of SA electricity. The grid operator (AEMO) describes it as for "fast frequency response". It takes the edge off the sharp transitions, to give it a simpler description.
I’d love to find that we’re just out of touch with commercial reality here and have just overpaid by a country mile. But I fear that reality is more likely to be high battery prices.
Hopefully Noah, or one of the commenters, can help to explain the disconnect. Appreciate any help.
These are lithium-ion batteries -- useful for storing power during the day to be used at night, but not useful for storing power during the summer to be used in winter. For the latter, we need other technologies. Iron-flow batteries might be able to do the trick, though they'll have to come down in cost a lot. Hydrogen storage and thermal storage are potential alternatives. Here is a good primer on the topic: https://www.volts.wtf/p/long-duration-storage-can-help-clean
I'm sorry to deflate your hopes on hydrogen storage, Noah, but it's not even remotely viable. The reason is that the hydrogen cycle is rather inefficient, and hydrogen storage is an absolute nightmare. Using electricity to electrolyze 2H2O into 2H2 + O2 is somewhat inefficient at room temperatures (it is much cheaper at high temperatures, something that 4th-gen fission reactors could provide in spades). And of course, since Electrolysis is a reversible process, combining H2 and O2 to produce electricity has pretty much the same losses as the opposite process. Since both processes are 70% to 80% efficient, the overall efficiency is going to be between 50-64%. This is terrible. As a vector for energy transfer, hydrogen isn't great.
Even worse, we haven't counted the transmission or storage losses. H2, because it is made of the lightest element, is a pretty small and nasty molecule. It has the habit of leaking through the joints of metal pipes and can even leak through the walls themselves. the joint thing cannot be really helped, only mitigated. One could make a monolithic containment vessel with very very very thick walls, or made of a very dense and expensive alloy or whatnot, but that would make your hydrogen tank too expensive, too heavy, and too small to be practical. Think about the typical domed gas containers that you see at ports. Now forget about those. Can't use them, too leaky.
It also has the nasty habit of reacting explosively with water (better double-check those seals), because Hydrogen is an alkaline "metal".
What H2 is great at is as fuel for industrial thermal processes (cement, iron smelting, fertilizer, etc.). As a fuel, H2 is incredibly energy-dense and it burns very very hot, but it shouldn't be used as a way to transfer or store energy, rather generated from electricity when and where it is needed, with the added advantage that H2 production also yields O2, which can be used for oxy-combustion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxy-fuel_combustion_process (you burn pure H2 with the pure O2, rather than with normal air that has 78% useless N2 that won't burn.)
Yes, lithium ion batteries. If storing one day of electricity costs more than the health service of the country they are quite pricey. We'd need 3 Tesla gigafactories running flat out supplying only to Australia just to provide one day of electricity storage.
My question isn’t about new stuff that might come along (flow batteries). It's about the Bloomberg price chart that you reproduced showing $200/kWh when Australian companies are paying $1000/kWh.
Trying to be even clearer, no country has batteries that store their grid electricity "overnight". Not even close. A few minutes, at best.
The cost of a battery isn't the cost of a single cycle of that battery!
And the Bloomberg chart was for car batteries. I was talking about energy portability there, for which car battery prices are appropriate.
Noah, I don’t think you’ve understood the basics.
1. If you want to store one day of the eastern half of Australian electricity production you need 500GWh of storage. (The NEM produces about 170 TWh per year).
2. Lithium ion batteries last about 5 years if you use them (charge/discharge) every day.
3. So Australia needs to buy 100GWh of batteries every year to have one day of electrical storage continuously in service.
4. Cost, at current prices Australia has been paying, $100bn.
Which part of this do you think is wrong?
Australia doesn’t need its own ~day worth of its own electricity to get nearly off carbon, right?
Wind power and long distance transmission across Australia and with SE Asia would help meet most peaks. Perhaps 3-4 hrs of batteries is all.
For a start, you’re not going to run the batteries on a 100% charge-discharge cycle every single day.
Australia has abundant wind power resources to go with its excellent solar resources, as well as some hydro (and it will get more pumped storage hydro with Snowy 2.0).
Restricting the maximum charge to 80% or so of nominal capacity, and only discharging to 20%, also radically improves lifespan at higher initial cost.
So your wear rates are grossly overestimated. For a start.
Do you have some calculations? I’m just someone trying to figure out reality - what will it actually cost to store grid scale electricity. Lots of people saying grid scale electricity overnight is cost-effective. The Australian grid operator doesn’t seem to think so.
So what do you think the cost of batteries actually is, per kWh?
What do you think their lifetime is, with what assumptions?
The cost of a grid level storage solution is obviously not the same as the cost for battery cells only. You need the associated infrastructure, from the physical buildings to inverters and grid connections.
How old is the system in Australia ? Cost for grid level storage is already at 300 $/kWh and is expected to fall to IIRC 200 $/kWh by the end of the decade.