[HN Gopher] Reducing CO2 emissions by targeting the world's hype...
___________________________________________________________________
Reducing CO2 emissions by targeting the world's hyper-polluting
power plants
Author : jbotz
Score : 256 points
Date : 2021-07-26 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (iopscience.iop.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (iopscience.iop.org)
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| It is easier said than done. While the discourse in the media is
| often skewed towards accusing the West, the elephant in the room
| is China with its 30% of global CO2 emissions.[0] Discussions
| with China aren't particularly easy, especially if you start from
| the position "you must stop doing what we've been doing for a
| couple of decades."
|
| [0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-
| emiss...
| space_rock wrote:
| China has great electric public transportation and are more
| aggressive than USA in adopting EVs. I don't think it'll be
| long before USA is left behind in terms of transforming their
| economy
| vimy wrote:
| To add to this: 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to
| domestic consumption.
| kingsloi wrote:
| Why do I get the feeling everything is too little or too late? I
| agree though, let's make them do better.
|
| I live in Gary Indiana, and while we have 2 smaller power plants
| near us (25-50 miles ish), there's about a million steel mills,
| oil refineries, and a bunch of other polluters thrown in for good
| measure, all either on or near Lake Michigan, which is our main
| source of drinking water.
|
| Can't we just target all mega polluters? I wish we could just
| force industry to spend a shit tonne of their profits on R&D to
| offset their damage, not improve their product, but improve their
| processes for something other than cost, efficiency, speed, and
| just did shit in the least destructive way possible.
|
| I've been tracking air pollution in Gary (and also cargo ships,
| flights, etc) on my lil community website:
| https://millerbeach.community for the past two years. I'm trying
| to fund a proper air quality sensor/monitoring system that does
| more than just PM2.5/10, but until then it's just PM.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| > Can't we just target all mega polluters?
|
| This is one of the reasons virtually all economists support a
| broad carbon price. If its broad, in the sense of encompassing
| a wide variety of economic activities, it gets all the
| different polluters you referred to as well as the ones that
| you and regulators haven't even thought of.
| kingsloi wrote:
| I agree! How can a commoner further support the idea? But,
| also a step further maybe?
|
| I was in FL last week and as I was travelling home I read a
| story about 1000s of fish, aquatic life dead in the water,
| including a Manatee, apparently caused by a phosphorus plant
| leak's red algae bloom.
|
| How can we target them, too?
| thinkcontext wrote:
| It requires a political solution. The plan which has the
| widest bipartisan buy-in is the Climate Leadership
| Council's plan for a tax and dividend approach. Its got
| supporters from Exxon to World Wildlife Fund.
|
| https://clcouncil.org/
|
| A leak at a plant likely violates its operating permit, so
| I would guess that regulators are looking at it. Of course,
| regulations and enforcement are very weak, that is also a
| political problem.
|
| Those are the big goals but the best thing a commoner can
| do is support or join a local environmental group. Groups
| like the Sierra Club have local chapters that could be
| interested in the air quality monitoring work you are
| doing. They also do things like testify at public hearings,
| sue polluters for local harm, advocate in policy
| discussions by officials and in local news and support
| candidates.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| thank you for your community service tracking air pollution in
| Gary, Indiana!
|
| that data you gather could be presented politically, socially,
| legally. By preparing a modern data environment with summary
| and random access, you are doing a LOT of prep ! it is needed
| now. best from California
| kingsloi wrote:
| Thank you, I'm trying!
|
| I actually have good reason to fight pollution too, my 8
| month old daughter passed away from her battle with heart
| disease and a very rare genetic condition called Kabuki
| syndrome a few months ago. Pollution is linked to both
| congenital heart disease, genetic conditions, and more. My
| wife and I are not carriers. Her specific conditions were
| very rare, the odds of all were 1 in 700 million to 1 in 2
| billion+. The year prior, Ben Watkins, a teen who lived a few
| blocks from me, died from an extremely rare cancer that only
| a few people in the world have/get.
| https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/18/us/ben-watkins-
| masterchef/ind...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Roughly what amount do you need in order to fund the air
| quality sensor fabric desired?
| kingsloi wrote:
| Good question! Most companies I've reached out to have
| products in the range of $3,000-$10,000 for the initial cost,
| and then a reoccurring/annual fee of around $500-2500
| (depending on what sensors are included)
|
| I reached out to a few, the two I'd heard back from, AQMesh
| and EarthSense, both gave me a rough quotes.
|
| https://millerbeach.community/files/01-09%20Research/02%20Ai.
| ..
|
| I cheekily asked if they had a community program (at a
| reduced cost), but understandable they don't, as their
| products are highly scientific lil things, both asked me to
| reach out to my local government, but most people who know of
| Gary, know it has no funds (or interest) in tracking air
| quality any more than they already do.
|
| I am in the process of starting a charity on behalf of my
| daughter, Sterling. We spent 7 months in the ICU, until she
| passed away at 8 months from complications relating to her
| complex heart disease. https://sterlingstrong.foundation
|
| I've been considering if renting/purchasing a complete air
| quality monitoring station would be a good thing to launch
| along with my daughter's charity. The way I see it, if I
| can't help solve the issue, I can at least bring further
| attention/awareness to it.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Can't we just target all mega polluters? I wish we could just
| force industry to spend a shit tonne of their profits on R&D to
| offset their damage, not improve their product, but improve
| their processes for something other than cost, efficiency,
| speed, and just did shit in the least destructive way possible.
|
| Some processes are hard to do without releasing CO2. That's why
| there's a focus on electricity generation since that can be
| done without emissions.
|
| It's the same thing with aviation: it'll be very hard to switch
| to alternate fuel because of the weight and energy density
| required. But for cars it's "only" a matter of scaling
| production of EVs.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| A pretty large portion of aviation (over 50% of miles
| traveled) is short-haul, which actually is amenable to
| battery-electric decarbonization. And much of the rest could
| be converted to a few short haul hops which can be
| electrified.
|
| For aviation, a lot of it is just the inertia of the industry
| (which is a duopoly) and regulators and the decades it takes
| to get any new large passenger aircraft designed and
| approved, let alone one using a new kind of powertrain.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > A pretty large portion of aviation (over 50% of miles
| traveled) is short-haul, which actually is amenable to
| battery-electric decarbonization.
|
| I'm shocked and happily surprised at the same time.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| At 1000-1500km range for short haul, it's not easy and
| can't be done just by drop-in replacement with existing
| airframes, but with clean sheet designs, it is feasible.
| Especially as lithium metal electrode and lithium sulfur
| becomes available. In fact, it may be feasible to do up
| to 4000km range eventually (big challenge, but feasible
| given state of the art aerodynamics and improved
| structure and battery... and definitely possible with out
| of the box thinking, as a crewed solar-electric aircraft
| has demonstrated a flight of nearly 9000km, ie from Japan
| to Hawaii).
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > At 1000-1500km range for short haul, it's not easy and
| can't be done just by drop-in replacement with existing
| airframes, but with clean sheet designs, it is feasible.
|
| If it can be made cheaper than the California High Speed
| Rail, I've got a market for you right here...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Indeed. The eFlyer 800 by Bye Aerospace, 925km range (at
| max payload) at over 320mph cruise, would be faster than
| the 200mph Cali HSR project that would've been at most
| 850km in phase 1 (and that would've been multiple hops
| most likely).
|
| https://byeaerospace.com/electric-airplane/
|
| (They hope to certify it by 2025, but it's going to be a
| tough road to get there.)
| thedrbrian wrote:
| So you're saying we replace 1 737 or A320 with 30 eflyer
| 800s?
| missedthecue wrote:
| A boeing 737 carries ~190 people and luggage. I don't see
| how that's going to be electrified. And I'm not talking in
| the sense of "technology isn't there yet", but more like
| "the laws of physics wouldn't appreciate that".
|
| In my mind, the carbon neutra solution seems to lie in
| adopting renewable biofuels and engineering those jet
| engines to be ever more efficient, both of which seem
| attainable.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| This is great. I would love to see this kind of reporting in the
| mainstream media. It is so frustrating to see media reports about
| climate change and "what you can do". This sort of thing puts
| zero responsibility in the hands of individuals and highlights
| the real culprits.
| shoto_io wrote:
| We need more analyses like that. As an ex-consultant I always
| amazed by how people try to optimize the smallest blocks. The
| Pareto principle is universally applicable. Let's tackle the
| biggest carbon blocks first.
| JPKab wrote:
| Excellent point. As I've commented elsewhere, there is a
| Puritanical, moralistic urge in many climate activists that
| focuses on as many individuals as possible changing their
| consumption habits for small gains over targeting the super-
| polluters like these power plants or the individual cargo ships
| which emit more CO2 than entire cities.
|
| My father is one of these. He used to be a religious
| fundamentalist in the 80's, and over time has replaced his need
| to be a part of a religion that polices people's
| sexual/linguistic habits with being a part of an ideology that
| polices people's consumption/linguistic habits instead. It
| clearly fills the same void. Whenever I mention things like
| this to him, it clearly bothers him that we can help the
| climate WITHOUT calling on individuals to sacrifice the way he
| already does.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I attribute it to the desire to _do something_ , and at the
| same a perception that an individual cannot affect the big
| fish. The only option left becomes individual action.
| Logically, people in this state will see indiviual action as
| a virtue in others regardless of their Puritanical views.
|
| I don't deny that it's moralistic though :)
| sitkack wrote:
| > moralistic urge in many climate activists
|
| I don't know how prevalent this attitude is, your proximity
| to your father could be affecting your perceptions.
| wiz21c wrote:
| nope... If you improve the efficiency of coal plants say by
| 25%, then you have a choice : either you keep those 25% as
| CO2 that's not produced anymore in the future, either you say
| that for the same amount of CO2 you can have 25% more
| appliances.
|
| In the first case, it means that the 25% kept for the future
| shall not be used : you cap consumption to 25% less than what
| it is today (great, but many people unhappy because you stop
| producing more electricty).
|
| In the second case, you accept to use those 25% but then you
| stay at today's CO2 production level, which is known to be
| too high.
|
| Whatever scenario, you'll have (you, me and other
| individuals) to use less electricity.
| JPKab wrote:
| I don't think that reducing CO2 emissions from a given
| electrical plant should be assumed to be something that
| made the plant more efficient and the electricity it
| produces to be cheaper, and therefore resulting in a
| proportionate increase in consumption.
|
| In my opinion, this is a false dichotomy.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I'm fairly sure this is the exact strategy used by basically
| everyone, yet everyone in this thread seems to think this is some
| new innovation and those damn hippies are finally doing something
| sensible.
|
| Obama's Clean Power plan for example, just says "we want you to
| come up with a plan to reduce Carbon, do whatever is easiest for
| you".
|
| Paris agreement, basically the same.
|
| Carbon prices, fees, taxes or caps? Same thing.
|
| Possibly this is even less sensible than those approaches as it
| seems to be talking about "powerplants" which naturally biases
| against large, efficient plants.
|
| If you had 10 small but inefficient coal plants it may make sense
| to shut them all and use one highly efficient plant.
|
| I believe the coal plants in China are generally of the super-
| critical variety and so much better in terms of carbon per MWh
| than your average American plant.
|
| In fact the more I think of it the more this stat seems custom
| designed to make China the bad guy for some reason.
|
| The focus on moving to gas and carbon capture in the abstract is
| also ringing alarm bells for me.
|
| Yep, I assumed they couldn't be so stupid because they were being
| vague about it but they specifically target powerplants rather
| than carbon intensity:
|
| > Figure 1 displays the locations of the world's operative
| fossil-fueled power plants, their primary fuels, and the tons of
| carbon dioxide they released in 2018. Some past studies have
| defined super polluting power plants using intensity metrics
| (pollutants per unit of output or capacity) (e.g., Tong et al.
| 2018a).
|
| Further, their explanation of why they do this makes absolutely
| no sense:
|
| > Although this provides a straightforward way to compare the
| performance of operators of different sizes, we focus instead on
| total emissions because to contain global warming there must be
| severe cuts in emission levels
|
| So to be clear they have applied machine learning to someone
| else's database of powerplants and instead of recommending to
| close the ones that pollute most per KWh, that are nearing the
| end of their life, that would need expensive upgrades, that can
| easily be replaced by renewables, the ones that the local
| population don't like, the most expensive to run or any other
| sensible approach for getting the most bang per buck, they have
| concluded _Close the ones that are biggest and are run the most
| as they produce more carbon than old inefficient plants that only
| run occasionally_
|
| I don't know if it possible to be that stupid without malicious
| intent, even by the standards of sociologists funded by the US
| Government.
|
| They seem to make some attempt to argue that it's easier to
| demonize a single big plant as a "bad guy", but surely that's a
| bad idea even if it actually worked in principle?
| shakezula wrote:
| There's simply no way we'll make a meaningful dent in GHG
| levels without targeting the top 1% of producers like this type
| of analysis suggests doing.
|
| > I believe the coal plants in China are generally of the
| super-critical variety and so much better in terms of carbon
| per MWh than your average American plant.
|
| Doesn't matter how efficient those Chinese plants are if
| they're still dumping out CO2 while we're actively trying to
| sequester it.
|
| > They seem to make some attempt to argue that it's easier to
| demonize a single big plant as a "bad guy", but surely that's a
| bad idea even if it actually worked in principle?
|
| If it works but it's stupid, it's not stupid.
| mrfusion wrote:
| IMO this makes so much more sense than asking consumers to drive
| less and eat less meat or whatever they're pushing.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Those are religious, not practical, movements.
| nicpottier wrote:
| It's not an either OR, it's an AND.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Have consumers ever come together to solve a global problem?
| thehappypm wrote:
| We phased out CFCs without a consumer rebellion.
| [deleted]
| tomtomistaken wrote:
| These power plants are also responsible for most of the local NO2
| in the air. NO2, on the other hand, can be measured well with
| satellites. This calls for a performance indicator as proof-of-
| decarbonization.
| Glench wrote:
| Yes, huge win! As we clean up the electric grids we as consumers
| also have to transition all our fossil-fuel things (cars,
| furnaces, driers, etc) to electric things (electric cars, heat
| pumps).
|
| Around 42% of energy-related carbon emissions are from decisions
| we make about the few big appliances in our homes that we replace
| every 10-15 years.
| andred14 wrote:
| The big climate LIE is that CO2 is a problem when in fact it is
| essential for life.
|
| Sure pollution is not cool and we can work on it but THERE IS NO
| EMERGENCY.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| One thing I realized recently is that we have "coal power plants"
| that produce zero electricity: coal seam fires. This gets very
| little attention given the importance. I think it's low-hanging
| fruit for climate mitigations. On the order of 1 Gigatonne of CO2
| per year is emitted from coal seam fires, versus ~14 Gigatonnes
| of CO2 from coal as useful fuel globally.
|
| This post on Effective Altruism had the same idea I had (ignore
| the right-leaning arguments contained therein and focus on the
| factual statements):
| https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2nrx8GdtobScoAZF8/...
|
| It shouldn't proportionally cost a whole lot to stop these coal
| seam fires (which are mostly human caused, although ALL
| contribute to climate change), and they are really terrible for
| other reasons as well (safety, local air pollution, literally
| wasting fossil resources, etc). The issue deserves more
| attention. It's incredibly low hanging fruit.
| lazyjones wrote:
| This focus on CO2 as a "pollutant" saddens me, since it's by far
| not the worst substance emitted by power plants. Can we ever go
| back to a sensible environmentalism that considers all harmful
| effects on the planet and its inhabitants?
| bttrfl wrote:
| even if it would be the worst one, optimisation based on just
| one metric is usually a bad idea.
| punnerud wrote:
| One ways to do this is by reducing the "Imbalance Settlement
| Period". Scandinavia and UK is changing from 60 to 15minutes.
| Scandinavia within summer/Q3 2022. Because the power plants using
| heat (coal and nuclear) is so slow to adapt, they have a
| disadvantage when the energy price is fluctuating.
|
| Before this is possible you have to change the electricity meters
| to support lower than 60minutes, or stipulate the energy (money
| incentive to change meter). This require a national coordination
| before the change take place. Norway was finished in 2019, Sweden
| is on their way.
| gambiting wrote:
| Speaking of worst polluting power plants in the world - where I'm
| from(Poland), the largest power plant in the country(Belchatow
| Power Plant) burns lignite for power - and I can't believe the
| emissions per kWh from that plant are estimated at slightly above
| 1kg of CO2 per kWh!!!!!
|
| Seeing as Tesla Model 3 uses around 150Wh per kilometer
| travelled, if you exclusively charged it using electricity from
| that power plant, it would be worse than many diesel or petrol
| vehicles on the road currently. And that's a stupidly efficient
| EV, there are many which everage 300-400Wh per km travelled,
| you'd need to buy a petrol Range Rover to even compete in terms
| of CO2/km emissions with that.
| trymas wrote:
| I often drive between Chestochowa and Lodz in winter. I have no
| direct proof that it's from this exact plant, but the smell and
| smog is horrendous there.
|
| What amazes me the most is how far it goes. From my anecdotal
| experience the smell goes 50-100km in radius depending on the
| weather.
|
| If weather is "right" you can smell burning coal out of
| Katowice, though maybe smell comes from residential buildings
| as well, I am not sure. Maybe a local could provide better
| info.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Given you talk about winter, I rather think this smell is
| from burning coal (...and other questionable materials) in
| residential buildings for heating.
| trymas wrote:
| Could be, though burning coal for heating in this century
| looks a bit bizarre. But I guess you could not beat how
| economical it is.
| gambiting wrote:
| I know, it's absolutely baffling to me, but I know loads
| of people in Poland who still have coal fired boilers for
| heating. When asked about this, they say that there is no
| natural gas pipeline anywhere near them(and local council
| isn't interested in putting one in), and not everyone has
| space for an LNG tank in their garden(or even a garden)
| and heating with electricy would literally make them
| bankrupt very quickly. So....coal is the only option that
| everyone can afford.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Coal dust is still very cheap, also old stoves have a
| wide opening, so trash can and is burned along with it.
|
| Poor insulation is a problem as well.
| Tade0 wrote:
| There's only enough lignite around Belchatow to last until the
| rest of this decade - given that it's generally uneconomical to
| transport the fuel over large distances, that will be the end
| of it.
|
| Overall lignite use in Poland has been decreasing for years
| now:
|
| https://wysokienapiecie.pl/34610-szczyt-zuzycia-wegla-na-swi...
|
| > there are many which everage 300-400Wh per km travelled,
|
| You'd be hard pressed to get such figures from an EV. The worst
| offender that's still a passenger car consumes 368Wh/km at
| highway speeds(120km/h) in cold weather (-10degC), but its
| economy is unusually bad. My pet theory is that it's mining BTC
| in the background, because those figures are outrageous.
|
| https://ev-database.org/car/1271/Audi-e-tron-S-55-quattro
| xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote:
| >it's generally uneconomical to transport the fuel over large
| distances, that will be the end of it.
|
| "Uneconomical" is an understatement, it's almost impossible.
| Belchatow burns ~1 ton of coal _per second_. This means that
| if it were supplied by train, it would need 1 coal wagon per
| minute, 24 /7.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| > [...] emissions per kWh from that plant are estimated at
| slightly above 1kg of CO2 per kWh!!!!!
|
| Wow, I knew it's bad, but I didn't realise quite how bad.
| Wikipedia quotes it at around 1.75kg / kWh:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w_Power_Stat...
| SilasX wrote:
| I have no point of reference to compare this to, so I looked
| up the average figures for the US. For anyone who wants to
| know, the EIA gives 0.92 lb (.42 kg) per kWh.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
| ojagodzinski wrote:
| Why when counting CO2 emissions for petrol cars people only
| count what comes out of exhaust pipe and not whole petrol
| industry? Because for electric cars you counted almost complete
| process for petrol you missed a lot.
| gambiting wrote:
| That's a very fair point - obviously, I was just going with
| official quoted CO2/km figures for comparison sake, to
| basically show that certain power plants are so
| astronomically bad, that even the most efficient EV powered
| by them ends up being worse than the (quoted) CO2/km figures
| for petrol/diesel cars. That's not a an attack on electric
| cars, nor a defense of ICEs - just an attack in the idioicy
| of burning lignite for power.
| trymas wrote:
| I am completely with you. IMHO, it is because of easy
| numbers. Here's CO2 per km and here's Wh per km.
|
| Also people (pushed by oil lobby??) not only forget whole
| pipeline (pun intended) of petrol industry, but are very
| concerned that couple hundred kg of batteries is worse than
| tens of thousands of liters of petrol burned over lifetime of
| a vehicle.
| petre wrote:
| It's moving the source of the issue elsewhere, just like with
| moving manufacturing to China.
| Retric wrote:
| EV's are a net reduction in normal usage patterns.
|
| First extradition, manufacturing, and transporting gasoline
| releases significant CO2. Most power plants are actually very
| efficient due with many in the 60% efficiency range, because
| unlike ICE they don't idle or need to be portable. On top of
| that a large fraction of EV electricity is coming from ultra
| low CO2 sources.
| edhelas wrote:
| > On top of that a large fraction of EV electricity is
| coming from clean sources.
|
| I'd need a source on that one.
| nawgz wrote:
| Well, "renewable energy in California" was at 52.7% in
| 2017, and California's 40mil people seem to own EVs at a
| world-high per-capita rate from my anecdata, therefore
| the most dense populous flock of EVs in the world is
| using ~52.7% renewables as their power source
| Retric wrote:
| Only 63.3% of global electricity came from fossil fuels.
| That means 36.7% are from ultra low CO2 sources.
| audunw wrote:
| Norway accounted for half of EVs sold in Europe at one
| point, and is 100% renewable.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1025497/distribution-
| of-...
|
| They're also popular in the Netherlands, but looks like
| renewables is a much smaller share there unfortunately
| (~15% it seems)
|
| Should be easy to check countries with highest share of
| EVs and their electricity sources on Wikipedia
|
| But renewables are growing everywhere and these EVs
| hopefully have a decade or two lifetime ahead of them
| eitland wrote:
| > Norway accounted for half of EVs sold in Europe at one
| point, and is 100% renewable.
|
| Depends on how one looks at it I think.
|
| AFAIK the green-ness of the Norwegian hydro power is sold
| in the form of "green certificates" to Germans who get to
| live happy innocent lives.
|
| Meanwhile all we Norwegians know that we mostly use hydro
| power so we don't care about the certificates.
|
| Summary: I think the green-ness of Norwegian hydro power
| is sold twice.
|
| Happy to be corrected.
| petre wrote:
| Actually the green-ness is produced along with the
| renewable energy and then sold to non renewable energy
| producers who then charge the consumers.
| dn3500 wrote:
| Worldwide, about a quarter of our electricity comes from
| renewables.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy
| petre wrote:
| That's nice, but:
|
| "Coal generates nearly 40% of the world's electricity,
| close to its highest share in decades. And there are now
| 80 countries using coal power, up from 66 in 2000."
|
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-coal-power-
| plants
| Retric wrote:
| Coal is 36% of global grid electricity production and
| falling from a peak of 41% in 2013, excluding home PV
| installations. Current industry projection is 22% of
| global grid electricity will come from coal in 2040 based
| on new power plant construction vs existing power plants
| decommissioned due to age. But even that is pessimistic
| as EV's represent new demand so it's the ratio of new
| plants being constructed that's important.
|
| All of which is largely irrelevant as average coal power
| plants powering EV's still favors EV's over gasoline
| powering average ICE's. At the refinery alone almost
| 3lb's of CO2 is produced per gallon of gas, distribution
| from refineries to gas stations again releases CO2 etc
| etc.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/are-electric-
| vehicles...
|
| and
|
| https://blog.ucsusa.org/elliott-negin/as-predicted-
| electric-...
|
| > Given where EVs have sold to date, their emissions--
| based on 2019 power plant emissions data--are equivalent
| to a gasoline car that gets 93 miles per gallon (mpg),
| which is dramatically better than even the most efficient
| gasoline hybrid. Last year, when we conducted the same
| analysis based on 2018 power plant data, EV emissions
| were equivalent to an 88-mpg gasoline car, so the
| "climate pollution gap" between gasoline and electric
| vehicles is continuing to widen.
| gdevenyi wrote:
| What a concept, targeting the places you can make the most impact
| first.
| jbotz wrote:
| According to this article just 5% of the world's power plants
| account for almost three-quarters of carbon emissions from
| electricity generation.
|
| I think this may be one of the most encouraging bits of news
| about AGW that I've seen in a long time. 5% of electric power
| plants (about 1500 plants) is a lot, but it's a manageable lot.
| This gives us a clearly defined area of attack with a very high
| ROI. It seems to say: if we're going to get serious about saving
| ourselves, start here and go all in. The paper lists the top 10
| polluting plants... unsurprisingly many of them are in China and
| India, but at least one is in Germany. If Germany wants to set an
| example, there's where to start.
| criddell wrote:
| > 5% of the world's power plants account for almost three-
| quarters of carbon emissions from electricity generation
|
| I don't have any idea for what that really means. I Any idea
| how big a part of the overall carbon emissions problem that is?
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Global electricity production is currently estimated to be
| about a quarter of human CO2 production
| (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-
| emiss...).
| missedthecue wrote:
| That's shockingly low given the amount I hear renewables
| pitched as a cure for climate change.
|
| Not that they don't help, but if we woke up tomorrow to a
| completely renewable global grid, looks like we'll have
| barely made headway into ending climate change.
| criddell wrote:
| Wow! Thanks for that.
| soperj wrote:
| If we were able to eliminate that 5% of plants, that would
| bring the world back to 1999-2000 levels without any other
| change.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Is this 5% by number of power plants or is this 5% of the
| generating capacity? E.g. maybe these most-polluting plants are
| just massive and make up 50% of energy generation?
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| It's 5% of power plants. These plants are massive.
|
| The paper does state (and shows data for the top 10)
| indicating that the largest emitters also happen to be
| generally more inefficient (in terms of CO2 per power) than
| their national average (for fossil fuel plans).
|
| EDIT: I just wanted to draw out the implications.
|
| Based on paper figures, we can ballpark then that those 5% of
| plants produce on the order of 30-40% of fossil fuel
| production energy. Shutting down those 5% of plants would be
| relatively efficient in terms of % CO2 reduction vs energy
| production size needed.
|
| That being said, since the goal long-term goal is basically 0
| fossil fuels before 2050, what would be important to have
| policies that ensure that replacement capacity is meant with
| major decrease in emissions. Like, we could for example get a
| ~33% reduction in emissions by replacing some of these plants
| 1 for 1 with more efficient gas plants. But ideally we want
| even more draw down - that means having policies in place to
| ensure a significant amount of capacity is replaced with
| renewable sources.
|
| That's really the challenge (and has been the challenge the
| entire time).
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Saying that the largest coal plants are more carbon
| intensive than the average of coal and gas plants in the
| same country is such an absurdly strange stat to use that I
| believe this paper was funded by natural gas interests.
| Nothing else makes any sense to me.
|
| For those unfamiliar, gas plants are much less carbon
| intensive than coal plants. It gets a bit murkier if you
| include methane leaks, though gas is less dirty in terms of
| non greenhouse pollutants but basically both should be
| phased out and coal should generally go first.
| ihuk wrote:
| 5% of the plants; shutting them down will not be easy. For
| example the one in Poland generates about 20% of Poland's
| electricity and was recently expanded.
| ihuk wrote:
| I am less optimistic. Those plants are *massive*. Shutting them
| down will not be easy. For example the one in Poland accounts
| for about 20% of the total power generation in Poland and was
| recently expanded[1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| You mean to link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82cha
| t%C3%B3w_Power_Stat...
| justicezyx wrote:
| Hmm, I read the paper, on page 12, showing the top 10 polluting
| power plants in 2018 and 2009, in 2018, the lists goes, there
| is only 1 from China and India, respectively, how is that
| translate to "The paper lists the top 10 polluting plants...
| unsurprisingly many of them are in China and India"
|
| 1 Belchatow Poland 37,600,000 Coal 27 5298 1.756
|
| 2 Vindhyachal India 33,877,953 Coal 14 4760 1.485
|
| 3 Dangjin South Korea 33,500,000 Coal 10 6115 1.473
|
| 4 Taean South Korea 31,400,000 Coal 12 6100 1.481
|
| 5 Taichung Taiwan 29,900,000 Coal 22 5834 1.282
|
| 6 Tuoketuo China 29,460,000 Coal 10 6720 1.450
|
| 7 Niederaussem Germany 27,200,000 Coal 38 3826 1.451
| futhey wrote:
| Coal is deeply unpopular in most areas where good
| alternatives exist.
|
| 5 & 7 already are now operating at reduced capacity, as
| alternative power plants have come online, and over a decade
| or so, the plan is to reduce operational capacity and
| possibly decommission. I suspect if you dig into some of the
| rest of these, you'll find similar situations.
| justicezyx wrote:
| Sure, but how that translate to the statement that among
| the top 10, "many are from China and India". China is the
| target everyone wants to beat. But for India, India's per
| capita emission is so small. That means Indian people are
| living a far lower standard than average. And put the label
| on such a nation, ask them to continuously living a bad
| life. Isn't that malicious?
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I wouldn't say that "unsurprisingly many of [the top 10
| polluting plants] are in China and India", when there is one in
| China (at rank 6, below a Polish plant, two South Korean plants
| and only slightly above the German one) and India has two.
| Especially when each of those countries has over one billion
| people, more than an order of magnitude more than Poland,
| Germany or South Korea.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| It's unsurprising because China burns a LOT of coal and has a
| _per capita_ emissions about the same as the UK, _even taking
| into account exports vs imports_ (!) in spite of the much
| lower per capita income. China burns ~51% of the world 's
| coal, in spite of not having even close to 51% of the world's
| population. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-coal-
| consumption-...
|
| (I think China's coal plants tend to be smaller and so don't
| show up on these lists.)
|
| If everyone else drops their emissions to zero (which needs
| to happen) and goes autarkic, cutting off all trade with
| China, assuming China maintains its stability and current
| energy mix, we'll still be screwed from a climate
| perspective.
|
| We need everyone to reduce emissions, including China and the
| West both.
| rocknor wrote:
| > has a per capita emissions about the same as the UK, even
| taking into account exports vs imports
|
| Wrong!
|
| https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$f
| i...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Your data only goes to 2016. In just 4-5 years, the UK's
| per capita emissions have continued to fall (thanks to
| retiring coal very quickly!) while China's has risen to
| above that of the OECD average for the first time:
| https://rhg.com/research/chinas-emissions-surpass-
| developed-...
| wrycoder wrote:
| Germany was setting an example, until they shut down their
| nuclear and went back to coal.
| defaultname wrote:
| Fossil fuel's use in German power production is falling
| faster than their nuclear mix is. They never "went back to
| coal". In reality renewables now account for almost double
| nuclear's output at its peak.
|
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g.
| ..
|
| Germany is absolutely a great example, even if it somehow
| became the target for the weird cadre of nuclear boosters.
| clemensley wrote:
| Germany's phasing out of nuclear after Fukushima costs $12
| Billions and 1,100 lives every year. https://www.nber.org/s
| ystem/files/working_papers/w26598/w265...
|
| For comparison, 1 person died from radiation exposure after
| Fukushima. https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-
| toll-from-cher...
|
| A small group of well meaning "activists" have cost many
| lives bc they did not look at the data.
| ellyagg wrote:
| the weird cadre of nuclear boosters
|
| Inappropriate. If we are free to insult people we disagree
| with on here now, than I might as well say "the weird cadre
| of nuclear detractors".
| edhelas wrote:
| They can thanks Sweden, Finland, France and a few other
| neighboors to provide them with plenty of electricity and
| hydraulic backup when they need it (no wind at night).
|
| France is sending around 2 to 4 GW of electricity (so
| mostly nuclear) to Germany all the time, "except" when
| there is plenty of wind, then France is buying for a really
| cheap price (sometimes negative) what Germany can't use.
| See https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-
| commerciaux-...
|
| 2 to 4 GW is roughly 2 to 4 nuclear reactors at 100%, so
| one/two nuclear powerplants "on an average usage".
|
| You can't say that you exited nuclear (or any other kind of
| energy) when you're massively, and really often, importing
| electricity from this source from across the borders.
|
| And your graph is pretty clear. Germany didn't "removed
| fossil fuel", they replaced around 100GW of coal with 50GW
| of natural gas + renewable. To me natural gas is still a
| fossil fuel (with a lighter co2 impact than coal indeed).
|
| And in the end the result is
| https://www.electricitymap.org/map 5 to 10x more CO2 impact
| than France per kwh, even with 2x the nuclear plants setup
| in France (60GW of nuclear in France against 60GW of wind
| turbines and 60GW of solar panels in Germany).
| bildung wrote:
| Of course the CO2 impact per kwh is higher in Germany.
| The country started two world wars and the winning
| factions understandably weren't overly eager to see
| Germany building nuclear proliferation capabilities. For
| the first 10 years after WW2 any kind of nuclear research
| was forbidden. For the same reason Germany was also
| forbidden to have an army in the first years after 1945.
| That's why nuclear never played a big role in Germany and
| critical parts of nuclear infrastructure (like fuel rod
| recycling) are still done in other countries (mostly
| France).
| petre wrote:
| Worse, the gas comes from Russia, so they are now
| dependent on Russian gas imports.
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy/blo
| c-2...
| cinntaile wrote:
| Cross-border electricity is what the future will look
| like though, it's not like it matters if the energy was
| generated in Germany or Finland when I turn on the lights
| at home.
| lazide wrote:
| It definitely does if your neighbor decides they need
| extra money and jacks up the rates and/or doesn't like
| you anymore and shuts it off. Then it is whoever has the
| most self contained power wins.
| ben_w wrote:
| While true, that feels about as likely as Bavarian
| independence.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I don't think the scenario you describe is a realistic
| scenario within the European energy market. Prices are
| decided by supply and demand and the market is getting
| more interconnected so single points of failure become
| less likely.
|
| I do wonder what happens in case there is no wind and no
| sun all over Europe and the demand is higher than the
| supply. It's probably very unlikely to happen but then
| countries will prioritize their own citizens (as we saw
| now during the covid crisis) and then we could have
| blackouts. I assume scenario's like these have been
| researched but I don't follow this subject, maybe someone
| else here knows?
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| > no wind at night
|
| Wind speeds are actually greatest around sunrise and
| sunset, which corresponds more or less with peak energy
| demand.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| >(no wind at night)
|
| No, wind at night!
| pydry wrote:
| The data shows natural gas usage has been pretty much
| static for a decade: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/site
| s/default/files/styles/g...
|
| Germany is also a net exporter of electricity and
| exported 13.7Twh more than it imported from France.
| edhelas wrote:
| Yes, on the open european electricity market, electricity
| coming from renewable have the priority "on injection" on
| the grid above all the other sources of electricity.
|
| So when you have spikes of renewable productions (a lot
| of wind and a lot of sun) Germany sells it to "everyone
| around" at a really cheap price. Which means that on a
| yearly average Germany indeed exported a lot of cheap
| renewable electricity to everyone.
|
| Now try to guess what is happening when everyone starts
| to do what Germany is doing for close to 20 years now ?
| hannob wrote:
| > Now try to guess what is happening when everyone starts
| to do what Germany is doing for close to 20 years now ?
|
| What will happen is that people will learn to build an
| energy system that works well with this situation.
|
| Which will likely mean things like industrial plants that
| shut down when electricity is scarce and get payed for
| that by the grid operator, because that's cheaper than
| having a lot of storage. It will mean new industries will
| be built by using excess renewables (likely hydrogen will
| be such an industry). I'm excited to see that happen.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Pretty easy to solve. We know that electricity can go
| around the Earth 7 times in a second. Now, if Germany has
| excess electricity during the day, they can simply
| pospone that electricity by wrapping a long cable 302 400
| times around the globe (12h * 3600s/h * 7/s = 302 400).
| During the day they feed the excess electricity into one
| end of the cable, and then 12 hours later at night,
| electricity comes out the other end at just the right
| time, when they need it!
| ben_w wrote:
| IIRC, antopodal HVDC would have resistive losses of
| either 70% or 30% -- I'd have to recalculate from scratch
| to find out which, but it doesn't matter much either way:
| the real issues are "How much does the line cost?" and
| "what are the political implications of that size power
| line in all the places it has to pass through?"
|
| Batteries and HVDC to your nearest major desert are what
| I _expect_ to be the solutions.
| nicoburns wrote:
| 70%, seriously? That's actually really low. What kind of
| voltage would that require?
| ben_w wrote:
| The following claims HVDC transmission losses of 3.5% per
| 1,000 km @ 800kV, therefore 20,000 km is 100% - ((100% -
| 3.5%)^20) ~= 51% loss; I guess my previous calculations
| were a different voltage, but as I'm asserting that even
| the difference between 30% and 70% doesn't matter,
| neither does this :)
|
| https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstrea
| m/J...
| iSnow wrote:
| >Now try to guess what is happening when everyone starts
| to do what Germany is doing for close to 20 years now ?
|
| I am not a huge fan of Germany's energy policy myself, I
| see it as misguided giving up nuclear first and coal
| second.
|
| BUT, if everyone built out renewables like crazy, it
| would create a huge market for storage or electrolysis
| systems.
| [deleted]
| pydry wrote:
| Well, they're cheaper than all other forms of
| electricity. The cost of renewables is mostly capital
| expenditure. If you have spare you might as well export
| it and you can probably underbid any other form of power.
|
| France is also leaning rather heavily on the capital
| expenditures it made on nuclear power in the 80s.
| Unfortunately its gonna be in for a _whopping_ bill when
| its plants start aging out in 2025:
| https://www.france24.com/en/20170710-france-hulot-could-
| clos...
|
| Germany, OTOH, will be able to coast on what it's already
| built in the next 10 years while the rest of Europe plays
| catch up.
| edhelas wrote:
| The current Germany infrastructure total cost is around
| 500BEUR in 20 years. That's for sure a few brand new
| nuclear power plants, or a few big investment plans in
| power efficiency (heat pumps, isolation...).
|
| Wind turbines lifespan is around 25 years (some 30
| years), mostly limited by structural and physical issues.
| You can't reinstall a new wind turbine on top of an old
| one (the concrete base is also fragilized and new
| turbines are often way bigger than old ones).
|
| Solar panels indeed have a way better lifespan and recent
| ones stay efficient even after decades of use.
|
| So one question now: why is Germany building and
| importing so much natural gaz (~400g of CO2/kwh, it's
| around 10 for renewable/nuclear) if their renewable plan
| is working so well ?
| pydry wrote:
| They're using about the same amount of natgas they did 10
| years ago.
|
| I presume they will start scaling down natural gas plants
| at some point, but they're clearly aiming to shut down
| nuclear and lignite plants first.
|
| Coping with increased electricity demand and switching
| off two forms of power generation entirely wasn't going
| to be quick but it is inevitable.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| >Well, they're cheaper than all other forms of
| electricity. The cost of renewables is mostly capital
| expenditure
|
| There is a cost to renewables that most advocates don't
| factor in - balancing. Most studies use the prevailing
| market rates for energy to prove that renewables are
| cheaper than coal or gas however, when renewables aren't
| providing power, something is and that something has a
| cost.
|
| This is a cost paid for by consumers though it isn't
| attributed to the source of the problem - the variable
| renewable generators.
|
| Similar argument for energy storage. You need storage
| precisely because renewables are variable and that cost
| should be factored in to the cost of renewable energy. At
| the moment, it isn't.
| pydry wrote:
| >however, when renewables aren't providing power,
| something is and that something has a cost.
|
| Hence all that electricity imported from, e.g. France in
| winter. Some people might be under the illusion that this
| was free but I can assure you I am not.
|
| There's a reason Europe is super keen on country
| interconnectors. It really helps smooth out production.
|
| Intermittency of renewables really has become the next
| Y2k. I suppose we can thank a decade of carbon and
| nuclear lobby fearmongering for that :/
|
| Like Y2K as a problem it receives relatively _too much_
| attention relative to the problems it causes. The rolling
| blackouts germany was promised ~10 years ago never
| materialized, for instance:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/23/germa
| ny-...
| eldaisfish wrote:
| This has no connection to the point i was making. Perhaps
| you replied to the wrong comment?
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| Total CO2 emissions drop even further, and we get
| incrementally closer to a world where anthropogenic
| climate change is a global catastrophe as opposed to a
| global extinction event?
| defaultname wrote:
| > France is sending around 2 to 4 GW of electricity (so
| mostly nuclear) to Germany all the time
|
| False. In reality Germany often has a trade surplus with
| France. See, every country has multiple interconnects,
| and various areas send and receive power. On the _whole_
| , Germany sends more power to France than France sends to
| Germany. Which makes sense -- France's total power
| production is far below its peak power demand, and as is
| the nature of nuclear power, plants are _very_ often
| offline. But sure, one area of Germany imports from
| France while another area exports to France...that isn 't
| notable.
|
| You're regurgitating ridiculous pro-nuclear propaganda.
| Telling that your argument has _completely_ shifted
| between posts.
|
| "Germany didn't "removed fossil fuel""
|
| Who are you quoting? Further, Germany started their
| nuclear decommissioning in 2011. Natural gas + coal +
| lignite is *WAY* below that level now.
|
| >And in the end the result is
| https://www.electricitymap.org/map 5 to 10x more CO2
| impact than France per kwh, even with 2x the nuclear
| plants setup in France (60GW of nuclear in France against
| 60GW of wind turbines and 60GW of solar panels in
| Germany).
|
| Germany had a _much_ dirtier power profile before they
| started decommissioning nuclear reactors. They have a
| much, much cleaner profile now, even if it still isn 't
| as clean as France's. The "went back to coal" nonsense is
| ridiculous noise.
|
| EDIT: I would love to know what's going on in the minds
| of people who downvote comments like this. Just upset
| with fact and reality?
| eldaisfish wrote:
| >and as is the nature of nuclear power, plants are very
| often offline
|
| Did you perhaps confuse wind and solar with nuclear? The
| design of a nuclear plant is precisely the opposite of
| what you describe.
| defaultname wrote:
| No, I didn't confuse them. How, exactly, does a nuclear
| power plant design prevent being offline?
|
| You understand they have to take the plant offline to do
| major maintenance, even refuelling, right? In April, 75%
| of New England's nuclear power plants were offline, for
| instance, most _unplanned_.
|
| When a single plant costs billions of dollars and becomes
| a significant or overwhelming contributor to an area's
| power mix, it can be a problem.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| The tone of your replies is needlessly aggressive.
|
| A typical nuclear plant isn't designed to be cycled
| regularly. What you are suggesting is that most nuclear
| plants are not generating power for more than 50% of the
| time.
|
| A cursory search of capacity factors will show that this
| is the opposite of reality. A typical wind or solar
| installation on average, generates zero power for more
| than half the time.
| edhelas wrote:
| And that's exactly why you have several nuclear reactors
| in a plant and several turbines, and several power
| lines...
|
| Please be a bit serious about what you're saying, you
| don't have to actually turn of a plant when you need to
| refuel. If any kind of plant (including hydro) need to be
| completely turned off for maintenance its really because
| you had a major design flaw.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Most of the nuclear power plants that Germany built were
| single-reactor plants and would shut down for refueling.
| Multi-reactor plants will stagger shutdowns so that the
| plant continues to generate at reduced power. It is the
| same in the US. Only a few reactor designs like CANDU are
| capable of online refueling without interruption. Planned
| shutdowns for refueling are scheduled for low-demand
| times of the year.
|
| Here's a nuclear industry blog post explaining the
| practice:
| http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-happens-
| dur...
| edhelas wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for the link :) !
| edhelas wrote:
| > as is the nature of nuclear power, plants are very
| often offline
|
| Source ?
|
| Nuclear is around 90% of Capacity factor in the USA, 75%
| in Canada, around 70% in France and UK. See https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto...
|
| So close to 2 to 3x more than wind turbines and solar
| panels. And roughly the same numbers are other kind of
| plants (gaz, coal...).
| defaultname wrote:
| >So close to 2 to 3x more than wind turbines and solar
| panels
|
| This is a pretty facetious comparison. You install solar
| knowing that the sun won't shine all the time, and
| turbines that the wind won't blow. No one installs it
| expecting 100%. The cost to install is low.
|
| Nuclear, on the other hand, is a _massive_ capital
| expenditure. When nuclear is down, that is a major
| problem because you don 't overbuild. An unplanned outage
| can be a disaster.
|
| This whole conversation is a bit rich given that many of
| France's reactors are nearing EoL and France has no plans
| on replacing them.
|
| Regardless, I soundly and overwhelmingly debunked the
| nonsense that Germany "went back to coal" so now it's on
| with strawmen and shifting goal posts. Such is always the
| nature of any discussion involving the magical panacea of
| nuclear.
| edhelas wrote:
| France has no plan on replacing them is mostly caused by
| political "no-decision". And indeed now we are reaching
| the point where we don't have the knowledge and
| industrial level to "jump back" into the flow.
|
| Germany is not going back to coal, I never said that ;)
| Germany is indeed planning to phase out coal "by 2035"
| (lets see how this goes, there is an election going on).
| Germany is currently building natural gas plants on the
| other hand. Gaz that is mostly (around 45%) imported from
| Russia, a nice diplomatic thing they're getting into.
| defaultname wrote:
| "France has no plan on replacing them is mostly caused by
| political "no-decision"."
|
| Bullshit. Nuclear died outside of China because it was
| oversold and an economic calamity. You can't even install
| nuclear without massive government subsidies (not least a
| huge liability waiver where the state basically takes on
| all liability, not done for any other energy source). The
| cost to build, operate, retrofit and decommission is
| always massively over the expected, and it has only
| gotten worse.
|
| There are places where nuclear is by far the best option,
| and its extreme costs and safety needs are acceptable.
| There are many others where it just never yielded the
| promise.
|
| "Germany is not going back to coal, I never said that ;)"
|
| That is the root of this thread that you jumped into,
| making several seriously wrong claims that you either
| just shifted goal posts or edited out along the way.
| merpnderp wrote:
| "This is a pretty facetious comparison." Is it? A few
| weeks ago I noticed that the wind in my state was below
| 5mph over the entire state, for the entire day, with
| temperatures in upper 90's. You literally can't overbuild
| wind enough to account for this.
|
| Add in that the latest nat-gas installation in my state
| from start to finish cost 1/4th the price of our last
| wind turbine installation, if you compare _actual_ power
| produced over the year instead of simply comparing max
| rated production.
|
| That's when I realized that you literally can't have
| enough wind to replace CO2 producing power and nuclear is
| the only reasonable answer.
| defaultname wrote:
| The economics of wind, solar, gas, and nuclear are very
| well documented and known. Making a robust grid is well
| known.
|
| "That's when I realized"
|
| You understand how utterly ridiculous this sounds, right?
|
| "That's when I realized that spacecraft should be made
| out of aluminum foil"
| merpnderp wrote:
| Who am I to believe? The published costs of installations
| coupled with power company records or studies which don't
| look anything like real world data, but always unerringly
| tell me wind is cheaper.
|
| I based my opinion on real world data, and only real
| world data could change it. Maybe that sounds ridiculous
| where you're standing, but I'll never know.
|
| And like my man Richard Feynman would say if he were
| alive today, p-hacking, cargo culting, and outright fraud
| are alive and well - endemic in the life or death
| sciences - and super-saturating the more politicized
| sciences. Takes 5 minutes to get a rough estimate of
| something to see if a study is even close to being
| accurate. Try it. Pick a small wind market in ideal
| conditions, pick an established utility with public
| records, and do the work yourself.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > with temperatures in upper 90's
|
| The implication here being that air conditioning will be
| using lots of power? Surely using solar PV for air
| conditioning is the most obvious pairing out there. It's
| rarely hot and not sunny.
| wazoox wrote:
| North Stream 2 anyone? Why do you think Germany needs to
| increase enormously its gas imports from Russia? Gas is
| cleaner than coal, but still much worse than nuclear. That
| will be a serious problem to meet net 0-emission targets in
| 2050 as planned.
| xvilka wrote:
| They will just ask China to build modern nuclear
| plants[1].
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/04/23/china-
| wil...
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| It really really doesn't. This is a political thing with
| Russia, Gazprom and our former chancellor Schroder. The
| aim (mostly for Russia) is to circumvent Ukraine and
| thereby remove their opportunity to ... acquire ... some
| of what is moved through their territory. As far as I
| remember Nordstream I isn't even at capacity.
|
| Sure from a Ukrainian point of view NSII sucks. But it
| isn't even close to an existential thing for Germany. The
| gas dependency is temporary (<15 years) and could also be
| filled by US LNG. Which is why the US is against NSII
|
| So yeah from a geopolitical point of view this is all
| very interesting. From an ecological point of view the
| net impact is close to zero
| edhelas wrote:
| I expect Germany to actually lower their CO2 emissions by
| switching from coal to gas in the upcoming decade. It
| will be a way to show that "plenty of renewable + no
| nuclear is the way to 0 CO2 emission".
|
| Until they reach the lower limit with all the gas plants
| deployed, then they'll really have to think again about
| how they will definitely remove those plants.
|
| Gas is really the best backup for renewable. It's cheap
| (for now), really adjustable (perfect for the renewable
| intermittence, on the contrary of nuclear), easy to
| deploy (not that easy with nuclear plants). The only
| issue is that it still emits a lot of CO2... and that you
| strongly depend on other countries for your energy (gas
| cannot be store as easily as uranium for example).
| opo wrote:
| >Germany is absolutely a great example, ...
|
| Coal mining is dangerous/destructive, burning coal is
| poisoning the oceans and has killed many, many people. For
| example, an estimate is that over 20,000 deaths are caused
| per year due to burning coal in Europe. I am not sure how
| many of these deaths Germany is exporting every year to
| countries downwind, but it isn't zero:
| https://news.mongabay.com/2013/06/burning-coal-
| responsible-f...
|
| A NASA estimate is that the use of nuclear power has saved
| approximately 1.8 million lives in the years 1971-2009:
|
| https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-
| more-...
|
| Of course the above is just the immediate damage from coal
| - future generations will have to live with the effects of
| all that CO2 being added to the atmosphere from Germany
| burning lignite and hard coal to produce ~130 TWh of power.
| How many deaths will come from that? (Burning natural gas
| produces less CO2 than burning coal, but the production and
| distribution of natural gas leads to enough losses to the
| atmosphere, it is estimated the climate impact might be
| similar to coal.)
|
| Choosing to eliminate nuclear power when you are still
| burning fossil fuels is truly a horrible decision.
| [deleted]
| bildung wrote:
| _> Germany was setting an example, until they shut down their
| nuclear and went back to coal._
|
| No idea why this gets repeated here so often, but this
| statement is simply wrong.
|
| From 2013 to 2020 nuclear as share of Germany's energy mix
| went from 17% to 13%. https://energy-
| charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...
|
| During the same time, coal went from 45% to 23%.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
|
| So yes, nuclear is 4% lower, but coal is 22% lower.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Coal: per Wikipedia: _Germany has been opening new coal
| power plants until recently, following a 2007 plan to build
| 26 new coal plants. This has been controversial in light of
| Germany 's commitment to curbing carbon emissions._
|
| But they changed direction - I didn't know that: _On 26
| January 2019, [a decision was made] to close all 84 coal
| plants in the country by 2038...Coal was used to generate
| almost 40% of the country 's electricity in 2018 and is
| expected to be replaced by renewable energy and natural
| gas. 24 coal plants are planned to be closed by 2022 with
| all but 8 closed by 2030._
|
| Nuclear: per Wikipedia: _A coalition government of Gerhard
| Schroeder took the decision in 2002 to phaseout all nuclear
| power by 2022...Within days of the March 2011 Fukushima
| Daiichi nuclear disaster, large anti-nuclear protests
| occurred in Germany...Merkel 's government announced that
| it would close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022.
| Eight of the seventeen operating reactors in Germany were
| permanently shut down following Fukushima in 2011. German
| coal consumption has risen during 2011, 2012 and 2013._
| (but is now decreasing)
|
| Germany nuclear is 13%, but most of that is imported from
| France at this point, I think. So, no coal, no nuclear,
| hate natural gas - depend on renewables.
| fsflover wrote:
| > nuclear as share of Germany's energy mix went from 17% to
| 13%
|
| > During the same time, coal went from 45% to 23%
|
| Although it's true, it could go like this:
|
| _Nuclear as share went from 17% to 20%; coal from 45% to
| 20%._
| ben_w wrote:
| Sure it could be better, but it's neither shutting down
| all the nuclear nor failing to set a good example about
| reducing coal-based electricity.
| fsflover wrote:
| Germany actually is going to shut down all the nuclear:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27961243
| cogman10 wrote:
| That was such a terrible move. It made no sense.
| edhelas wrote:
| Don't worry, they are planning to turn off coal completely
| around 2035... and replace them with natural gas plants
| imported from Russia.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream
| glogla wrote:
| Yeah, improving nothing as natural gas has similar OC2e
| to coal (with much smaller CO2 - but the methane makes up
| for it, to it comes up the same), while giving money to
| Europe's enemies. Perfect.
| merpnderp wrote:
| It's not like Russia has a long history of having
| "pipeline malfunctions" during periods of intense
| international disagreements. What could go wrong with
| Germans being firmly under the thumb of Putin or his
| successor?
| zeristor wrote:
| On the flipside didn't Germany really jump start solar
| power?
| wishawa wrote:
| > unsurprisingly many of them are in China and India Of the ten
| plants just one is in China and two are in India.
|
| South Korea, having three, might be a better target here.
|
| I agree that Germany should set an example. The German plant is
| 40 years old already anyway.
|
| Other countries with newer plants would be more reluctant.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Prairie State Energy Station [1] in Southern Illinois is one of
| these plants. Roughly 200 municipalities bought into it ~10-12
| years ago with the promise of locking in cheap electricity for
| decades. Now, those who own shares of it (both municipalities
| and electric co ops [2]) are kicking and screaming that they're
| entitled to continue to operate the plant because it would
| raise electrical rates for their citizens to retire it early.
|
| "Illinois lawmakers are still debating a statewide energy
| proposal that would shutter the state's coal-fired power plants
| by 2035. A local utility cooperative is asking its members to
| lobby lawmakers to keep it open.
|
| Illinois Electric Cooperative has issued letters to their
| members asking to keep the plants open because they say it will
| cost utility rate payers more money and provide an unreliable
| electric grid of power.
|
| IEC's general manager Randy Long says it will also saddle the
| state with significant outstanding debt: "We believe it is
| probably going to reduce grid reliability and it's going to
| cause good energy jobs to leave the State of Illinois along
| with the tax base to neighboring states and it's going to
| increase our [utility] rates also. In 2035, the Prairie State
| plant will still have about $188 million worth of debt, and
| that is still going to have to be paid off. We'll no longer be
| getting energy from that plant either, so we'll have to replace
| that energy from another source. We are just very concerned
| about that - the increased costs to our members and also the
| reliability on the grid, which is really in the forefront after
| the blackouts we have just heard about in Texas and California
| recently.""
|
| (my note: it has been proven that the blackouts in California
| and Texas were not caused by renewables, but by grid
| mismanagement; solar and wind backed by storage is also cheaper
| than coal, so this is clearly not about cost but maintaining
| the status quo)
|
| "PSEC started delivering electricity in 2012 at prices well
| above market rates. Some of its investors resell the energy at
| a loss, some raise consumer rates, and two backed out of the
| project. PSEC's original $2 billion estimated cost attracted
| municipal electric utilities to invest and to sign 28 year
| contracts. However, as of early 2010 the estimated cost had
| increased to $4.4 billion, requiring investors to borrow more
| money and raising the projected cost of electricity to
| undesirable levels. Peabody in response capped construction
| costs at "approximately $4 billion" excluding some costs such
| as coal development and transmission lines. In January 2013,
| with many municipalities adversely impacted by the high prices,
| the SEC subpoenaed information from Peabody. In a bid to exit
| its share of the Prairie State project, the City of Hermann, MO
| filed a lawsuit in March, 2015 against the Missouri Joint
| Municipal Electric Utility Commission and the Missouri Public
| Energy Pool, claiming that its share of $1.5 billion in debt
| issued to support Prairie State imposed an unconstitutionally
| high level of debt on the city.
|
| Peabody divested its 5.06% stake in the project in 2016,
| accepting $57 million for its original investment of nearly
| $250 million. The buyer was Wabash Valley Power Association, a
| Midwest cooperative."
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_State_Energy_Campus
|
| [2] https://wlds.com/rural-electric-coops-face-uncertainty-
| with-...
| JPKab wrote:
| Unfortunately, American politicians that claim to care about
| CO2 are tremendously hypocritical the minute prices come into
| play. They are happy to do things like halt the construction
| of pipelines or put a halt on new oil/gas leases on Federal
| land (it's just hurting a few thousand blue-collar workers,
| after all) while simultaneously lobbying OPEC to increase
| production to keep oil prices lower. (This is exactly what
| has happened with the Biden administration.). Even better has
| been the approval of the new German/Russian gas pipeline
| months after halting a massive pipeline in the USA. (Yes, I
| understand that the US pipeline was going to transmit very
| high carbon tar sands oil vs. the natural gas transported on
| the Russian pipeline)
|
| Carbon emitted in another country isn't any better than
| carbon emitted in your own country, but the religious-like
| attitude taken by certain politicians and climate activists
| ignores this. They seem to believe the supposed moral
| superiority of pushing carbon intensive activities outside of
| a nation's borders is worth something.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| There's something to what you said, but I also don't think
| a totally nihilistic perspective is justified. No
| Administration is going to be perfect WRT climate change,
| and there are real political constraints on oil prices in
| the near term.
|
| What we need is to make electric vehicles (including PHEVs)
| like 80-100% of our vehicle mix, not ~1% for current cars
| on the road or 2-4% of new vehicles. Then oil prices
| wouldn't matter so much politically (it'll still affect
| industry, but that's much less impactful politically
| compared to motor gasoline prices).
|
| As far as Germany approving a pipeline with Russia, well...
| I agree it's pretty dumb. Germany needs to just end their
| coal entirely, which in the very near term means more gas,
| but they should also try to reverse the closure of nuclear
| power plants.
| JPKab wrote:
| I own a Tesla, so I'm into electric cars and doing what's
| necessary to minimize vehicular carbon emissions. That
| being said, oil is a globally fungible commodity, and the
| less we use here in industrialized countries, the cheaper
| it gets for use in developing nations. Historically,
| developing nations have always chosen to maximize energy
| consumption by using the cheapest sources available. How
| is this going to be mitigated? I'm not aware of any
| discussions on this topic, but hope they exist.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| The US is actually a net exporter of oil (and oil
| products), gas, and coal. So if we eliminated current
| consumption and production in the US, it would actually
| increase prices slightly overseas.
|
| But to really answer your question:
|
| 1) We invest in tech and scale up to make renewable
| energy cheaper than fossil fuel. Other countries will
| benefit from our scale and tech improvements, reducing
| the relative competitiveness of fossil fuels.
|
| 2) ban production and exports of fossil fuels. Instead,
| actually export clean energy in the form of
| ammonia/nitrate fertilizer (from green hydrogen), liquid
| hydrogen, perhaps synthesized LNG, synth fuels, clean
| electricity.
|
| 3) border adjustments and a CO2-based import tarrif.
|
| 4) cultural imperialism making clean energy good (fast
| electric cars are an excellent example) and fossil fuels
| unpalatable.
|
| 5) International agreements and treaties.
|
| 6) tied to that, maybe targeted aid contingent on climate
| action.
| selectodude wrote:
| The amount of "cheap" oil has fallen dramatically. Only a
| handful of sources can drill for less than $20/bbl and
| make a profit.
| hedora wrote:
| > _No Administration is going to be perfect WRT climate
| change_
|
| The problem is that we need them to be, or we're all
| going to die (of fire, pollution, flooding, food
| shortages, etc.)
|
| To see what I mean, try to buy a 6" diameter PVC sewer
| pipe. A large percentage of global PVC is still offline
| due to the Texas freeze last winter. This is causing road
| work and repairs to ground to a halt.
|
| At the current rate of industrial collapse, how long
| until water treatment and other life-critical industries
| go offline?
| ec109685 wrote:
| This is where the federal government should step in and
| provide subsidies to help close this plant. Even though
| Illinois chose poorly, bygones should be bygones and the
| global impact too great to let a small set of individuals
| make this decision.
| hedora wrote:
| Not needed. This is what bankruptcy is for. Just don't pay
| back the debt.
|
| If it's held by investors, well, all investments can go
| down in value. If it's held by companies that build carbon
| emitting plants, even better.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Municipalities and non profit co ops will not voluntarily
| pursue bankruptcy to re-negotiate or default on these
| debts (which will also impact their credit rating in the
| debt market for future issuances). They'll have to be
| forced into it if outside support isn't provided.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The market has a financial tool for this, called "Solar for
| coal" swaps, where the existing debt is refinanced into new
| debt (at competitive financing rates) issued for building
| utility scale solar generators. Agree that the US gov or
| the central bank should step in otherwise to subsidize the
| closure of these plants. It's going to happen one way or
| another.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > This gives us a clearly defined area of attack with a very
| high ROI
|
| I object to this language, and war generally
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| > if we're going to get serious about saving ourselves
|
| If we were serious about saving ourselves we would have started
| controlled scaling down of economic activity 30-40 years ago.
|
| If we were serious about saving ourselves we would immediately
| start scaling down fossil fuel usage, but we currently are
| using more of every fossil fuel on Earth than we were 5 years
| ago.
|
| As I pointed out in another comment, if we take aggressive
| action and make the most optimistic estimates regarding this
| path we'll see us reset our emissions back to 2010. Which is
| nice but not anywhere near enough in a short enough time span
| to make a difference.
|
| If this is the "most encouraging bits of news" then we are in
| extreme danger.
|
| edit: the irrational downvotes comments like this gets would
| crack me up if it wasn't so sad. We've tried to solve climate
| change through "more production" for decades now and have only
| see things get worse. If you disagree with me, please show me
| some basic estimates about how you have a solution that scales
| up to working.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > The paper lists the top 10 polluting plants... unsurprisingly
| many of them are in China and India
|
| And China isn't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when
| there's no carbon tax or emission standards. One of the many
| reasons it's cheaper to manufacture in China and why North
| Americans and Europeans can't compete.
|
| Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made the
| decision of going all-in on polluting power generation, and
| potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of these
| countries.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yep with the worst offenders being in countries that don't
| care, not a lot that can be done unless you feel it's worth
| going to war over (I don't think it is).
| joecool1029 wrote:
| We should look at countries like Australia, they are among
| the worst with no reason to be. China has a still growing
| economy and while they continue to bring coal online they are
| the world's leading solar producer and have heavy investment
| into bringing more nuclear online.
|
| Contrast this with Australia that is a fully developed
| economy, has the easiest location to install and generate
| solar, has tons of uranium in the ground that it doesn't have
| a single reactor to use, and still burns and ships coal to
| act as an enabler to other coal burning nations.
| likeabbas wrote:
| It would be more beneficial to the world to reign in the
| heaviest polluters first and then go after the remaining
| polluters.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > they are the world's leading solar producer and have
| heavy investment into bringing more nuclear online.
|
| And yet their emissions are growing at an out of control
| pace [0].
|
| [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-
| gas-emis...
| justicezyx wrote:
| It's leveling off.
|
| And it's still well below Japan in per capita emission.
| Japan is quite an advanced green economy.
|
| I don't think any reason to put China front and center in
| this discussion "who should start closing coal power
| plant".
|
| Edit:
|
| > Focusing on per-capita data inevitably leads to
| whataboutism
|
| Well, energy usage is a key indicator of human wellbeing.
| I see no reason this leads to whataboutism. It's a key
| part of the discussion. Without this, humans are not
| going to unit in full strength.
|
| > that's exactly the narrative the CCP wants to push!
|
| CCP lifted 600MM+ people out of poverty. I guess they can
| make a few correct statement, right?
|
| > But when looking at emissions over time, it becomes
| pretty obvious that some countries are working hard doing
| their parts while some others are simply polluting at an
| accelerating pace.
|
| Yes, we can clearly see that China committed to carbon
| neutral at the critical juncture of economy development
| [1], and the only large developing country. And we are
| waiting India [2]. Meanwhile, despite enjoying the most
| from the carbon emission industry in 20 century, the
| advanced & developed country continuously insist on equal
| responsibility for all nations. It's like I eat most of
| the lunch, and grow so big, now I say that everyone on
| the table should cut their food consumption by certain
| percentage... Not fair.
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2021/03
| /08/chi...
|
| [2] https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/climate-
| change/is-india-...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > And it's still well below Japan in per capita emission
|
| For how long?
|
| > I don't think any reason to put China front and center
| in this discussion "who should start closing coal power
| plant".
|
| Focusing on per-capita data inevitably leads to
| whataboutism, and that's exactly the narrative the CCP
| wants to push! But when looking at emissions over time,
| it becomes pretty obvious that some countries are working
| hard doing their parts while some others are simply
| polluting at an accelerating pace.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Sure, but China doesn't appear to be short-sighted.
|
| In 10 years will this be the case? Nuclear takes a long
| time to bring online, they've at least got the process in
| motion and reasons to be polluting right now. Polluters
| like Australia don't and that's my point.
|
| Or maybe it'd be better that China stops producing
| renewable technologies for the rest of the world? One big
| area I see them improving is with use of electric
| vehicles. Can't do EV's if your grid can't supply the
| energy. Should they push gas and diesel vehicles instead
| for the next decade or two?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Or maybe it'd be better that China stops producing
| renewable technologies for the rest of the world?
|
| I don't understand the dichotomy here. Is the argument
| that China's production of solar panels is a primary
| driver of China's pollution and thus cutting pollution in
| China would significantly hamper their ability to produce
| PV for the world? That seems dubious to me if I
| understand it correctly?
| albatross13 wrote:
| > China has a still growing economy
|
| No matter how many UN councils vote to agree on this, we
| both know it's not true.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > And China isn't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when
| there's no carbon tax or emission standards. One of the many
| reasons it's cheaper to manufacture in China and why North
| Americans and Europeans can't compete.
|
| I thought that Trump was all about building more coal? Didn't
| it work out?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It didn't.
|
| It maybe slowed down decommission of existing power plants,
| but nobody would build a coal power plant today from
| scratch in the west. These things last for a generation,
| while an administration 8 years at most.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made
| the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation
|
| This is why I think a carbon tax with border adjustment would
| be pretty awesome. The border adjustment is the bit that
| levels the economic playing field between polluting and clean
| countries.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made
| the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation,
|
| Seems like it might make sense to me.
|
| > and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of
| these countries.
|
| Um, what does this have to do with solving the problem at
| hand?
| danenania wrote:
| I understand the case for tariffs or even sanctions (though
| western nations should obviously get their own houses in
| order first), but how would immigration quotas make any
| difference? Do governments care at all where their citizens
| are allowed to emigrate to? I don't see why they would.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Rich Chinese are obsessed with acquiring western passports.
| Making it harder will incentivize them to work harder at
| home to fix their country's horrible environmental record.
| bagacrap wrote:
| quotas seen much more likely to affect the non rich
| danenania wrote:
| The CCP might see that as a favor to them if it prevents
| brain drain?
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| > Time to add tariffs
|
| If you do that then the price of Solar PV will skyrocket back
| up. The key reason we've seen Solar PV prices plummet is
| because we've seen an increasing amount of manufacturing move
| to China, now 80% of solar PV are manufactured their.
|
| It takes a tremendous amount of resources and energy to make
| solar pv and the only way to do it cheaply is to do it
| someplace that doesn't mind burning lots of coal to extract
| and process the necessary resources to build them.
|
| Though to be fair, high tariffs that reduced Chinese
| production would hurt the global economy, which is the only
| demonstrated method we've seen to reduce emissions. This
| could be the best path way to improving emissions, but I
| suspect many people would be unhappy with consequences.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| A lot of the talk of China seems just to be racism, but as
| long as we're talking about carbon-based tariffs then
| they're good for everyone, including China to be subject to
| them. They can introduce carbon pricing internally and use
| the solar they make to decarbonize the solar production,
| win-win-win.
| vkou wrote:
| > Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made
| the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation,
| and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of these
| countries.
|
| Sure, let's have a tariff on goods made in a country, that
| scales proportionately to the per-capita CO2 emissions in it.
|
| The United States would be one of the most heavily tariffed
| countries in the world, if we go down that road. China would
| be... Middle of the pack.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Sure, let's have a tariff on goods made in a country,
| that scales proportionately to the per-capita CO2 emissions
| in it.
|
| Again the obsession over per capita data, which totally
| obscure the fact that the US per capita emissions have been
| in a constant decline over the last 20 years while China's
| have been growing at an uncontrolled pace.
|
| Which behavior should we incentivize, unrestrained
| pollution because they "aren't THE worst yet" or hard work
| curbing emissions?
| vkou wrote:
| A constant decline when they started at an incredibly
| high starting point still puts it at much worse than
| other countries.
|
| I don't care about 'trying' or 'trends'. I care about
| current results. That's the behaviour we should
| incentivize. Results. Not 'projected results maybe 20
| years from now.'
|
| Oh, and by the way, China's per-capita emissions peaked
| in ~2013, and have been ~slowly declining since then. [1]
| If current trends continue without any change, it's going
| to take another 24 years for the US to hit their level of
| emissions. [2]
|
| It's odd that whenever people grouse about China's
| emissions, they never make note of either of those two
| facts...
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
|
| [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| The link you shared shows:
|
| - Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in
| 1973 (-27%)
|
| - A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007
| (-13%)
|
| Meanwhile for the same period China has had
|
| - a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
|
| - 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
|
| Clearly one is not like the other! One of them achieved
| significant results.
| vkou wrote:
| The climate doesn't care which datapoint you cherry-
| picked your starting and ending ratios from. It cares
| about the current rate of emissions.
|
| I really should not have to explain on this forum that
| when you multiply two numbers together, the values of
| _both_ multipliers matter. Seven times nearly-nothing is
| not very much. Point-seven times a lot is... Still a lot.
| It 's basic arithmetic.
| wang_li wrote:
| The climate doesn't care about per capita. It's strictly
| the emissions. If you want to care about per capita
| numbers you should also care about human development
| index numbers. It's not the same thing to put 20 gigatons
| of CO2 into the atmosphere while doing nothing the
| quality of life of the global population as compared to
| putting 20 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere while
| raising the standard of living the global population. We
| should be striving for lowering CO2, but let's not
| pretend that all emissions are the same.
| magicsmoke wrote:
| The climate doesn't care about per capita, but people do.
| And solving climate change involves a global effort, but
| if you insist on shoving most of the burden to the global
| south who never had a chance at a first world lifestyle,
| they'll just tell you to screw yourself. You want to
| insist on bringing your accumulated centuries of carbon
| emissions onto the lifeboat, while telling everyone else
| to impose quotas on their luggage, then they'll be happy
| to drag you to the bottom together.
| vkou wrote:
| > The climate doesn't care about per capita.
|
| If you don't want to take per-capita emissions into
| account, and want to look at absolute numbers, then the
| US has an even smaller carbon budget to work with - and
| its way exceeding it.
|
| But okay, let's look at per-capita development times
| quality of life, instead. (China is ~15% behind the US on
| the latter - does that mean that its per-capita budget
| should be dropped by a comparative 15%? It's still doing
| well by that metric.)
|
| You must realize that development is only possible
| _because_ of access to energy, services, and material
| goods. Cut the energy, transportation, and services
| available to the average American by a factor of 3, as a
| proxy for bringing it 's emissions profile down to
| China's, and tell me - what will happen to its quality of
| life?
|
| (My prediction is - a sharp decline, followed by a bloody
| revolution.)
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| These are the kind of places to put effort into eliminating/
| changing. Its can be managed from a more 'top-down' regulatory
| mechanism. It represents a significant chunk of the emissions. It
| doesn't require individual buy-in (not to the extent promoting
| vegetarianism would). People effected would/ could see no
| appreciable difference in their quality of life (maybe a slight
| uptick in power costs, but even that could be mitigated/
| subsidized).
|
| These are the right kinds of solutions to focus our efforts on
| for reducing carbon consumption.
| tomtomistaken wrote:
| Progress in this respect can also be bottom-up -> sabotage.
| [deleted]
| hannob wrote:
| Just by reading the abstract this seems a bit strange.
|
| Ok, they identify some of the worst CO2 emitters and propose to
| start tackling those. But then their proposal is that these
| "lowered their emission intensities, switched to gas fuels, and
| incorporated carbon capture and storage systems."
|
| Like they propose three things that still depend on fossil fuels,
| from which one is vague, one is something that hasn't worked
| anywhere although it's been proposed as a solution for more than
| a decade (CCS) and one that at best provides minor emisison
| reductions if looking at full lifecycle emissions (gas).
| lvs wrote:
| I found this bizarre as well, but I didn't delve deeper than
| the abstract. The senior author is a sociologist.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| Let's look at some optimistic back of the envelop estimates:
|
| > We also find that 17% to 49% of the world's CO2 emissions from
| electricity generation
|
| Let's go with a whole 50% reduction. It's important to recognize
| that electricity generation is only 25% of US energy GHG
| emissions (and less globally but it's hard to find a source so
| let's stick with that)[0]
|
| We're then looking at 12.5% reduction in global emissions if
| these plans where implemented. If you assume that there's a
| pretty strong correlation between energy production and emissions
| (there is because renewables don't account for much global energy
| production), then that is roughly equivalent of rewinding our
| emissions to ... 2010 [1]
|
| Add in that energy consumption globally continues to rise, and it
| would take a least a few years to complete these projects, even a
| massive effort like this doesn't amount to all that much of a
| difference. Even waving magic wand and completely replacing our
| grid power to 0 emissions sources would only push us back to
| 2003.
|
| The only viable pathway to radically reducing GHG emissions is to
| aggressively descale our economies (we can see emissions drop in
| 2008 and 2020), but since no one will even remotely consider that
| at this point we've chosen our path.
|
| [0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-
| emis...
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Targeting the worst CO2/kWh power plants makes a pretty big
| difference because our best chance at decarbonizing most of the
| rest of that 75% of global emissions is to electrify them.
| (Biofuels, etc, are not better than electrification.)
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| That's a nice idea, but can you do some similar back of the
| envelope estimation for how much we'd have to grow the
| renewable/low-emissions energy grid to meet those other
| demands?
|
| For example we'll need hydrogen fuel cells for any serious
| replacement of current oil since light trucks and beyond
| cannot run on lithium batteries (batteries become the cargo).
| But 95% of hydrogen production is currently based on fossil
| fuels[0]. So to come anywhere close to meeting the transport
| needs we would have to not only radically ramp up hydrogen
| production, but would need to even more extremely ramp up
| electrolysis.
|
| I'd really like an insight into how we're going to achieve
| carbon free concrete production as well...
|
| It's insane that HN downvotes aggressively any basic math of
| how dire the situation is, and always responds with hand wavy
| solutions that won't hold up to even the most basic back of
| the envelope estimates.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
| Robotbeat wrote:
| It's blatantly false that light trucks and up can't use
| lithium ion batteries. In fact, the business case is
| actually better than for electric commuter cars due to the
| much greater efficiency. Longer range trucks are a bit of a
| challenge due to total weight, but doable. (And battery
| electric freight trains make WAY more sense than hydrogen
| freight trains and are actually super easy to electrify due
| to ability to just use overhead lines for charging and the
| greater efficiency of rail.)
|
| Also, hydrogen fuel cell trucks (and cars) are worse
| (compared to battery) than you might think. (On the car
| side, the Model 3LR has more range, costs less to buy,
| costs far less to fuel, has a huge fast charging network,
| can be charged anywhere with an outlet, is much faster and
| actually weighs less than the hydrogen Mirai.) Hydrogen
| fuel cell trucks require a huge heat exchanger (with a
| fan), really heavy and bulky compressed hydrogen tanks, and
| the cost of motor hydrogen (ie distributed for dispensing
| to vehicles) is much, MUCH greater than that of electricity
| and the conversion efficiency is lower than batteries plus
| the fuel cells themselves have a limited lifetime and
| aren't cheap, plus you need a lithium ion battery _anyway_
| and the cost of the dispensing stations is very large (even
| adjusted for fueling speed) due to need to cryogenically
| cool hydrogen before dispensing, the presence of big
| compressors, safety mitigations, etc.
|
| Electric trucks are pretty straightforward compared to fuel
| cell hydrogen trucks.
|
| You're right that hydrogen production is generally from
| steam reforming of fossil fuels nowadays, but until the
| 1940s when steam reforming became available on an
| industrial scale, electrolysis was actually the most common
| industrial hydrogen source using (for instance) abundant
| hydroelectric power. This was used for making ammonia
| fertilizer, etc. (New iron plants in the US actually use a
| syngas mix of hydrogen and CO, although the mix can be
| adjusted to virtually all hydrogen without too much
| trouble.) So we absolutely CAN produce hydrogen using
| electricity, and there's a long history of doing so,
| although battery electric vehicles are far more efficient
| than hydrogen vehicles. That, combined with heat pumps,
| should enable us to limit the amount of more electricity
| we'll need.
|
| Our current electricity usage in the US is ~475GW average,
| and by efficient decarbonization of almost all energy
| usage, I calculate we'd need about 1000GW total average
| electricity, so just a bit more than double we have now...
| although about 40% of current electrical energy production
| in the US is already decarbonized, about half of it
| nuclear, so we already have a leg up). that means we need
| ~715 GW average of more clean electricity than we have now.
| The US produces over 5 billion bushels of corn per year for
| ethanol. At 170 bushels per acre yield, that's about 30
| million acres. At typical solar farm output of about 40000
| Watts average per acre (ie multiplying nameplate times
| capacity factor divided by footprint), that's 1200GW
| average, so even if all we did was use the existing
| footprint of biofuels and converted it to solar, we'd have
| more than enough clean electricity to decarbonize
| everything. (Not even counting biodiesel, etc.)
|
| So again, you claim that "won't hold up to back of the
| envelope estimates" isn't true. If you like, we can discuss
| this one on one and I'll explain the calculations.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| You didn't do any back of the envelope estimate. "so just
| about double we have now" would require what?
|
| Let's look at this chart of US electricity production.
| [0]
|
| It took us about 30 years to double our electricity
| generation in the US from 1975 to 2005, but since then it
| has largely remain flat. So how quickly do you estimate
| that can happen?
|
| Then you have to look at renewable production separately
| since that's what you have to scale. What rate of
| renewable production is that going to take?
|
| 0. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electr
| icity-...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| From the 50s to the 70s, we doubled our electricity about
| once per decade, so it's not even greater than historical
| capabilities to do it in one or two decades.
|
| As I showed above (sorry, I edited the post after you
| commented...), we'd need less land for solar than we
| currently use just for ethanol (which we don't need).
|
| The calculations take longer than just a quick HN post,
| but it's not hard if you just add up steel, fertilizer,
| plastics, gasoline (only takes about 10kWh of electricity
| to displace a gallon of gasoline), diesel, heating with
| 3COP heat pumps (higher is feasible, and northern
| climates should use ground source), etc.
| hedora wrote:
| We'll need to add carbon capture to the mix. Many promising
| atmospheric carbon capture technologies exist in the $17-70
| per ton range.
|
| A gallon of gasoline emits 20 pounds of CO2, which is
| conveniently 1% of a ton. So, if we added a $1/gallon gas
| tax, and spent 100% of the proceeds on carbon capture, the
| vehicle fleet would be strongly carbon negative in 5-10
| years (when some of the carbon capture technologies
| successfully ramped).
|
| We could add a similar tax to concrete, electricity
| production, etc. The trick is to make it proportional to
| actual carbon emissions so that incentives align.
|
| Once gross emissions fall off significantly, the tax would
| have to be increased, and/or levied against carbon neutral
| industries, since we've already completely screwed over
| future generations.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| > Many promising atmospheric carbon capture technologies
| exist
|
| Do we have any at that scale? I mean self-driving cars
| were a promising technology a decade ago and that's a
| much easier problem to solve than large scale ccs and we
| still might never see that.
| 41b696ef1113 wrote:
| Why did they not release their collected raw data, R code, and
| the table of predicted data? Would be so much more useful if we
| could all quickly glance at where our local power plants rank on
| the scale.
| thangalin wrote:
| Did you ask? Here's a template to get you started:
| Hi Don, Would you be willing to release the raw
| data you used for the environmental research article?
| Thank you, 41b696ef1113
| [deleted]
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