[HN Gopher] Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Com...
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Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
Author : rufuspollock
Score : 139 points
Date : 2021-10-31 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (climate.lifeitself.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (climate.lifeitself.us)
| olau wrote:
| There was indeed a lot of hot air in sustainability thoughts in
| 2008, and probably still is, but Mackay's treatment is sometimes
| bordering the absurd.
|
| For instance, the chapter on wind power starts by comparing a
| back of the envelope calculation on wind power with energy usage
| by a fossil car.
|
| While there are occasional good points, I would not recommend
| reading this book unless you actually know something about the
| things the book is discussing. It's simply too misleading in
| important places.
|
| In case anyone is wondering about this, there are real studies on
| the feasibility of 100% renewables by organizations that actually
| know this stuff and have done the modelling work.
| rufuspollock wrote:
| Could you reference some of the "real studies" you mention -
| this would help update and amend MacKay's work.
| gnramires wrote:
| McKay's point is that you could get through the confusion
| relatively quickly, and showing in principle how to evaluate
| and fight the problem. I don't think it was meant as a final
| solution -- just that it was feasible, and approachable as a
| problem. Without getting into politics or ideology.
|
| I got a quite good intuitive sense of the scales involved, and
| at least for me Solar clearly reveals itself as an outstanding
| source of energy (at say 150W/m2).
| aborsy wrote:
| Before research into sustainable energy, David MacKay had
| rediscovered Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes in early 90s,
| perhaps the most common type of error correction codes used
| nowadays in commercial systems (alongside with Reed Solomon codes
| used for storage).
|
| He then worked on sustainable energy long before it became
| fashionable.
|
| His early death was a significant loss. He blogged cheerfully
| from hospital til few days before his death
|
| http://itila.blogspot.com/2016/04/perhaps-my-last-post-well-...
|
| Rest In Peace David MacKay.
| lr1970 wrote:
| Sir David Mackay [0] was a great mind who contributed major
| discoveries in Machine Learning, Information Theory, Coding
| Theory and Physics. His book "Information Theory, Inference, and
| Learning Algorithms" is a great resource for anyone learning ML
| and who wants to understand how ML, Information Theory and
| Statistics all fit together. The book is available for free
| download as a pdf [1] as well as for purchase.
|
| His untimely death from cancer in 2016 at the age of 48 is a big
| loss to Science. His book on Climate Change "Sustainable Energy
| without the Hot Air" (also available as pdf) [2] is a testament
| to breadth and versatility of his scientific interests.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay
|
| [1] http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html
|
| [2] http://www.withouthotair.com/
|
| EDIT: typos
| femto wrote:
| Here's the download link for the Without Hot Air book:
|
| http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html
|
| The parent's link was for his other book "Information Theory,
| Inference, and Learning Algorithms", which is a happy thing to
| stumble upon.
|
| Edit: Just realised that I misread the parent comment and the
| link to the Info Theory book was intentional.
| samch93 wrote:
| It's such a tragedy that he died so young. Prof Mackay was a role
| model who impacted our world in many positive ways (e.g. his work
| in information theory, Bayesian statistics, environmental
| science). I recommend his lecture on information theory which is
| available on youtube [1]. He also documented the progress of his
| cancer very detailed on his blog [2], which is a very interesting
| (and sad) read.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/BCiZc0n6COY
|
| [2] http://itila.blogspot.com/?m=1
| barathr wrote:
| I highly recommend Prof. Tom Murphy's new book "Energy and Human
| Ambitions" (freely available as well) that is sort of a deeper
| dive into some of the questions that Mackay explored:
|
| https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
| fghorow wrote:
| The original of this book is a wonderful resource. I am very
| happy to see a community bringing it up-to-date because MacKay
| had the foresight to license the work using CC.
| ycomb-uit-co-uk wrote:
| Have a look at http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk/
|
| (I was David's Editor for "Sustainable Energy - without the hot
| air". There's been quite a bit of interest in updating the book,
| but there are obvious difficulties. If have suggestions, let me
| know. Niall Mansfield sewtha-2.0@uit.co.uk )
| [deleted]
| lucb1e wrote:
| I wonder if this is correct. Setting the nuclear slider to max
| single-handedly reduces emissions by 30%, decreases energy
| costs rather than increases, does not require land use change,
| improves air quality, and also reduces electricity demand by
| using the waste heat for district heating.
|
| Now add: (1.) electrification of freight transport, (2.)
| tackling the (relatively) quick wins in industry
| electrification, and (3.) carbon capture, and one gets to 75%
| emissions reduction with _less than one percent_ of cost
| increase and zero behavioural changes (such as eating less meat
| or flying less often) are required.
|
| I can't find any other combination in this calculator that
| leaves nature so untouched, requires so little land use,
| requires no behaviour adjustment, or is so cheap while still
| reducing emissions meaningfully. (Well, geothermal is nearly as
| good but then its maximum potential is only a small percentage
| of energy demand and it's also a bit more expensive per Joule.)
|
| Probably the most unrealistic part is public support for the
| choice, but in a perfect world? Would it be this simple?!
| m4rtink wrote:
| Not a big surprise given the insanely high power density of
| nuclear reactors.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| See also, peak uranium :
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium
|
| 2017 known supply is enough for 130 years at current usage
| (supplying about 10% of global energy). Each doubling of
| production halves the peak timeline. Basically no one expects
| discovery to outpace usage.
|
| So, at best, nuclear is a stop gap and part of a different
| long term solution. Which could be fine! But the extremely
| low LCOE and fast build time for modern renewables suggests
| that nuclear is simply losing the race for relevance.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| There's more to it than that. The long-term plan for
| nuclear fission always has been and remains to use breeder
| reactors after we have ~1000 GW-scale non-breeder reactors
| in place. This enables us to make 100% of the world's
| primary energy for about 4 billion years (e.g. roughly
| until the sun burns out) [1].
|
| [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-
| energy-is-...
|
| The same point was made in the Hot Air book as well [2]
|
| [2] https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_162.shtml
|
| Thus, there's a very strong argument to consider nuclear
| fission breeder reactors just as renewable as the solar-
| derived energies (wind, solar, hydro, biofuel)
| korantu wrote:
| Fuel is very small part in cost of nuclear generation; As
| fuel price start increasing, more sources become viable,
| including sea water. There is practically unlimited supply
| once it happens, and this is before accounting for
| reprocessing. (and reprocessing happens in France, for
| example)
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Right, but the fuel cost goes up over time as extraction
| gets harder (eventually requiring entire new types of
| facilities, which themselves take a decade to build),
| even as wind and solar continue their exponentially
| decreasing LCOE cost curve.
|
| The exponentially decreasing cost curve is the part that
| I think people haven't actually internalized. The
| arguments on the pro-nuclear side are pretty much the
| same as they were ten years ago. (right down to 'we'll
| have thorium in ten years!') But things are very
| different now: It's like arguing for large scale
| investment in punch-card sorting machines circe 1960.
| Yes, the punch-card sorting machines can be used to
| manage all your bank data, but the digital processing are
| getting exponentially better with time and have been
| actually better for a couple years. But the proponents of
| punch card sorting machines haven't internalized the
| message yet.
| cnlevy wrote:
| > Right, but the fuel cost goes up over time as
| extraction gets harder
|
| Uranium demand is declining, there has been almost no
| Uranium prosection in the last decades; Therefore it's no
| wonder reserves are diminishing. If demand picks up,
| prospecting will renew, and a lot more uranium will be
| discovered. This is not accounting for thorium reserves,
| which have never been seriously prospected.
| vkou wrote:
| > even as wind and solar continue their exponentially
| decreasing LCOE cost curve.
|
| What you think is an exponential curve is actually the
| left side of a sigmoid.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Your meme pertains to exponential /growth/, not
| exponential /decline/. Exponential growth in a population
| hits a limit as a population saturates, causing the
| sigmoid shape. Exponential decline hits a constant
| asymptote and bottoms out. For populations, that
| asymptote tends to be zero. For cost curves, as in the
| solar panel case, it will be something more like capital
| cost of production divided by panel lifetime, which can
| be a very small number indeed.
| bbojan wrote:
| Current reactors (light and heavy water reactors) all use
| solid fuel, which is very inefficient due to use of once-
| through fuel cycle.
|
| Because xenon is the most common fission product, and it's
| a gas, the reaction must be stopped before all fuel is
| used, as otherwise the solid fuel pellets would crack. If
| you assume 3% enriched uranium (U-235) and 97% depleted
| uranium (U-238) (a typical fuel load), the fuel pellets are
| unusable after about 1/3 of enriched uranium is spent. So
| the fuel is removed and "thrown away" while it still has 2%
| U-235 in it.
|
| Switching to liquid fuel reactors assuming no other changes
| would immediately increase supply 3 times (because xenon
| simply bubbles out). Switching to liquid fuel breeder
| reactors ~ 100 times. Switching to breeders based on
| thorium - around 1000 to 10000 times.
|
| Peak uranium is only a problem because we're using a very
| inefficient nuclear reactor technology - water reactors.
| Why? Because they were chosen by the military and the
| technology/know-how was already there. Efficiency was
| really low on the military's list of priorities.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Switching to solid fuel uranium breeders + fluid fuel
| thorium breeders gets you to around 4 billion years.
| johnny53169 wrote:
| > (3.) carbon capture, and one gets to 75% emissions
| reduction with less than one percent of cost increase
|
| Carbon capture and less than one percent cost increase looks
| suspect to me
| lucb1e wrote:
| Agreed. I didn't use it at first because I thought it would
| be cheaper to just reduce emissions than undo emissions, at
| least up until this 80% goal that the site poses.
|
| Without any carbon capture, you're still at 61% emissions
| reduction and the cost actually decreases by 0.8% from
| today rather than increasing by 0.6%. If you get to 61%
| with the only change being "build nuclear and make use of
| it" (no lifestyle changes, no cost changes, no landuse
| changes), that would be amazing.
|
| Hence my main question is about the nuclear aspect. The
| argument against nuclear is usually that it's super scary
| and dangerous (easy enough to disprove that with numbers,
| so long as you're not talking to someone from germany) and
| the fallback argument is that it's so expensive now that
| PV+wind became so much cheaper. This calculator seems to
| show the opposite of that latter argument (when looking
| purely at price).
| zbrozek wrote:
| Surely there are studies of LCOE for both when trying to
| produce baseload capacity. Personally, I suspect nuclear
| construction costs are dominant, but that should also be
| addressible through improvements in technology and
| policy.
| addicted wrote:
| This is strange considering nuclear continues to be the most
| expensive new form of fuel and has only been getting more
| expensive with every passing decade.
|
| There is new research in nuclear which if successful would
| bring costs down but it's hard to see how maxing out on
| nuclear reduces average costs.
|
| Edit: I see now. The original data is at least over 5 years
| old, at which point it's possible that wind/solar may still
| have been more expensive than nuclear.
|
| Editx2: The original book on which the original site is based
| was published in 2008/2009.
|
| It's not clear how much of the data on this new site has been
| updated.
| tito wrote:
| Rufus, terrific work here!
|
| Niall - great to see you here. My mind goes towards helping
| others with "powers of 10 math" about climate. SWITHA for me
| embodied this concept of "how to think about the climate" more
| than anything.
|
| That type of thinking is needed more now than ever. Even that
| line "2 billion years of energy reserves", so powerful.
| rufuspollock wrote:
| Thanks Niall - updating the book is exactly what we are hoping
| to do and still thinking the best form for that. Re that tool
| i've been in correspondence with one of the other creators re
| trying to understand the source code etc - see
| https://github.com/life-itself/climate/issues/2
| mcot2 wrote:
| It sounds like this should have a date attached to it as the
| numbers are quite outdated for todays world. This did have some
| good data for back when it was written of course.
|
| * An efficient EV will do less than 12kWh/100km these days.
|
| * Utility scale solar pv cost declines have been dramatic. It is
| now the cheapest form of new energy to deploy.
|
| * Developments in deep water off-shore wind have led to much
| larger turbines which are capturing more wind energy for longer
| periods of time.
|
| * Large scale batteries are now viable as a storage mechanism for
| renewables and are going to rapidly replace things like peaker
| plants.
|
| * Lots of new research is happening with Nuclear like
| thorium/molten-salt reactors which will still be important for
| baseload generation.
| credit_guy wrote:
| > Utility scale solar PV [...] is now the cheapest form of new
| energy to deploy.
|
| I've been hearing this claim for a few years now, and I took it
| at face value, until a few days ago. I was having a discussion
| with a friend and told him that PV's share of electricity
| generation must by quite high, and then I checked the EIA
| website [1], and it turns out only 2.3% of the electricity
| comes from PV, while about 40% come from gas and 20% from coal.
|
| Something does not add up. If PV is so cheap, why don't we see
| more electricity being produced by PV?
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
| baybal2 wrote:
| _> Something does not add up. If PV is so cheap, why don 't
| we see more electricity being produced by PV?_
|
| > Utility scale solar PV [...] is now the cheapest form of
| new energy to deploy
|
| For China... The West has very few semiconductor grade
| silicon smelters, and no industrial scale ones for PV ingots.
|
| I think all of PV cell makers in the West just dice Chinese
| boules
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Correct, EXCEPT for thin film cells by First Solar (who
| make the whole module). Although hopefully this is
| changing.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Cheapest to _deploy_ , meaning _adding_ new energy sources.
|
| For instance, even since the year or two that EIA has last
| updated their numbers to the numbers that just came out that
| include August 2021... the amount of total solar (far right
| column) generated (154TWh) vs total electricity generated
| (4087TWh) gives about 3.8% solar electricity for the last 12
| months rolling. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_t
| able_grapher.ph...
| akamaka wrote:
| Have a look at what new capacity was installed last year:
|
| https://ihsmarkit.com/research-
| analysis/over-80-of-2020-glob...
| ghouse wrote:
| Only recently did PV becomes the least-cost source of new
| electric generation.[0] And new utility-scale projects take
| 2-7 years to develop. For example, TX is anticipated to add
| 10 GW of new solar generation in 2022.[1] As I write this
| (while the sun is up, noon in TX), the current demand in TX
| is 38 GW.[2]
|
| Source: Have been developing solar power plants since 2008.
|
| [0] The tipping point for solar is different in different
| regions based on many factors, but primarily the amount of
| annual sunlight and the cost of fuel on the margin, and
| regulatory policy.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/texas-track-
| add...
|
| [2] http://www.ercot.com/
| Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote:
| It takes many decades for old generation to phase out, so
| even with a significant fraction of new capacity being solar,
| the total proportion will remain low.
|
| https://cleantechnica.com/files/2020/09/Cumulative-Total-
| US-...
|
| Solar capacity is increasing dramatically, but it does have
| limits.
|
| Namely, solar + storage bids are only competitive in some
| markets. PV generation is often the cheapest source, but
| without storage it is not practical for many applications.
| wcoenen wrote:
| Wind was cheaper. The levellized cost of electricity from
| solar has only recently dropped below that of wind.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
| epistasis wrote:
| There are several reasons:
|
| 1) lifetimes of utility assets are measured in decades, not
| years
|
| 2) the utility industry is not used to needing to pay
| attention to new technology and new information, and has a
| huge bias against renewables that goes back to the hard
| energy /soft energy split of the 1970s and 1980s
|
| 3) Utility planning models (IRPs, often for five years out)
| often use outdated info that is 3-5 years old when planning
| deployments for the next five years. So even if utilities
| used up to date info, it would take 5 years for them to shift
| strategy.
|
| 4) many utilities are not incentivized to install least cost
| generation, and their incentives and profit rates are
| different for things like installing transmission,
| distribution, etc
|
| 5) regulators of utilities are often even further behind the
| times than utility executives or completely captured (see for
| example Arizona)
| credit_guy wrote:
| > 1) lifetimes of utility assets are measured in decades,
| not years
|
| Fair enough, but here's [1] how the picture looked just 4
| years ago. Coal was at 33%, natgas at 33% an solar at 0.6%,
| wind at 4.7%. So a lot of coal was replaced by natgas, and
| a bit of wind. For some reason solar went up only by 1.7%
|
| [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20170322133856/https://www.e
| ia.go...
| epistasis wrote:
| The reasons further down explain why utilities are very
| slow to react and why even after a better choice is
| available.
|
| But even with your further comparison, you are falling
| prey to the same bad logic: solar can't be cheaper
| because we aren't already using it. You are looking at
| the decisions from 2010 to 2015 to evaluate the situation
| from 2021.
|
| For changing technology, that's a really bad assumption.
| If nearly all the market for CPUs is Intel, then AMD
| comes out with a far better deal than Intel, do you
| evaluate how much better AMD is by the installed base
| across all computer? Of course not.
|
| Check out what is being planned for the future. Some of
| the decisions are not great, because utilities don't yet
| know that storage is super cheap. But you'll find that in
| price responsive markets, nearly all new planned
| generation is wind, solar, and storage. Along with a few
| new gas plants proposed by people hedging against the
| dominant tech, or just through inertia.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Most of a terawatt of green energy projects are stuck in a
| regulatory backlog.
|
| https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-
| renewabl...
| [deleted]
| mattlondon wrote:
| It didn't seem to mention hybrids much either. It mentioned a
| polo bluemotion as the lowest co2 emitting vehicle at 99g/km,
| but even my 10+ year old hybrid clunker (Toyota auris)
| officially gets 82g/km - modern hybrids must be way better by
| now, and they are super common now rather than just Toyota's
| selling point.
|
| A recent report I read on the BBC suggests that public bus
| transportation is 90g/km/passenger so my ancient old hybrid is
| better than taking the bus it seems?
| bluGill wrote:
| Depends on how many people are on the bus. Many buses have
| terrible load averages, good buses can do a lot better.
|
| IMO most bus operators do a terrible job at serving people
| and so it is no surprise that people don't ride.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Most of the buses I see around here (Sunnyvale through San
| Mateo is my typical stomping ground) are either "not in
| service" or very nearly empty. I haven't taken a bay area
| bus in fifteen years. I routinely outpace them on a
| bicycle.
|
| I could imagine 8-15 passenger vans with on-demand routing
| would see much better utilization.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yup. They should be easier to electrify, too. Mass
| produced electric passenger vans should be a thing.
| Considering transit vans are only like $50,000 apiece for
| 12 seats, they should be pretty dang cheap to acquire,
| too, compared to the $1 million 30 seat e-buses. Charging
| infrastructure should be the same as regular electric
| cars, too, which makes it cheaper and more flexible to
| deploy.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| What year, specifically?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I wonder if he'd be happy that his legacy seems to have just
| fueled fossil fuel funded conspiracies by adding some aura of
| credibility to their lies.
|
| I can't imagine he would.
| algo_trader wrote:
| Alas, this is probably pointless.
|
| Some technologies (PV, batteries, wind) have improved by an order
| of magnitude - and swamp out all other considerations.
|
| EDIT: to be clear, i loved the original book, and have re-read it
| several times over the years.
| DennisP wrote:
| They've gotten cheaper by an order of magnitude, but their
| basic physical characteristics haven't changed that much. A big
| point of the book is to show what it looks like to really
| deploy this stuff at the necessary scale.
| derriz wrote:
| The issue is that we now have real experience of deploying
| this stuff at scale and integrating intermittent sources into
| grids. Many countries in Europe have 30% or more of their
| electricity supplied by intermittent but it turns out that
| the integration problem isn't as difficult as envisaged. The
| consensus amongst engineers is that up to about 70% is
| manageable without any big tech breakthroughs.
|
| Network reliability has actually increased in many European
| countries despite the increasing reliance on intermittent
| sources.
|
| The current approach certainly depends on having back-up
| deployable generation capacity (natural gas) but that was
| always required for demand following even with thermal
| sources so most grids already have the infrastructure to
| incorporate more intermittent generation.
| DennisP wrote:
| Fossil backup isn't tenable past 2050 at the latest.
| derriz wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| But assuming no technology advances in this area for 30
| years time seems implausible. What has happened with
| price/efficiency of solar, wind and grid-scale batteries
| in the last 10 years provides a lesson. None of these
| were practical even 10 years ago and now they represent
| 90% of newly installed capacity globally (2020). And this
| is happening all-over whether with or without government
| support.
|
| For example, new-build, grid-scale battery storage is now
| cheaper on an LCOE basis than new build open-cycle
| ("peaker") natural gas plants. This has only happened
| recently - about a year ago. I was completely skeptical
| that this could happen a few years ago.
|
| I urge any/all hackernews readers to read more about
| _recent_ developments in de-carbonizing energy. It's
| fascinating and it has become clear to me that we're
| living through one of the great technology revolutions of
| human history. It genuinely is a Kodak/smartphone type
| moment with even bigger implications for human wellbeing.
|
| It's amazing that by being cheap enough, all the
| disadvantages of a new technology become less relevant. A
| bit like how the PC displaced "real computers" (i.e.
| mainframes) even though at the time they were little more
| than microcontrollers integrated with a terminal.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Many countries in Europe have 30% or more of their
| electricity supplied by intermittent but it turns out that
| the integration problem isn't as difficult as envisaged.
|
| True. It's very easy when you can tap your neighbour's
| power plants when you need. The problem is a bit different
| when all the neighbours have the same problems at the same
| time.
| derriz wrote:
| Of course interconnection is a big help, but transmission
| isn't "free" or unlimited, the flows between individual
| European countries is typically a small fraction (less
| than 10%) of the national consumption and generation.
|
| And there are cases like Ireland which has its own grid -
| with very limited external interconnection - and yet
| achieved 42% renewable share last year.
|
| Techniques/engineering/theory for integrating
| intermittent sources has advanced considerably in the
| last ten years.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Of course interconnection is a big help, but
| transmission isn't "free" or unlimited, the flows between
| individual European countries is typically a small
| fraction (less than 10%) of the national consumption and
| generation.
|
| It's more than a little help. Just imagine how a blackout
| involving 10% of the population or Germany would look
| like, never mind the EU.
|
| > And there are cases like Ireland which has its own grid
| - with very limited external interconnection - and yet
| achieved 42% renewable share last year.
|
| You cannot really compare Ireland with many of the other
| EU countries, either in term of population or industry,
| though.
|
| > Techniques/engineering/theory for integrating
| intermittent sources has advanced considerably in the
| last ten years.
|
| They have. And it is a good thing, because it really
| should not be a competition between nuclear and
| renewables. They still have several issues, which are
| very difficult to solve without either a massive
| reduction in consumption, or a massive increase in price.
|
| I really struggle to understand how almost all mainstream
| "green" parties see fossil fuels as a lesser menace than
| nuclear. The truth is, if you read their manifesto, that
| they don't care about particle pollution beyond "cars are
| bad" (which is true, but insufficient) or climate change.
|
| It is _not_ a competition, it is a struggle to get rid of
| fossil fuels, which are an existential threat to our
| societies. We can sort that out and talk about fusion
| once we've done it. In the meantime, getting rid of
| fossil fuels is a massive undertaking, and we would be
| stupid not to use _every_ card in our hand.
| derriz wrote:
| In what way is it not a competition?
|
| We live in a world of finite resources. When considering
| the significant task of decarbonizing energy, there are
| lots of technologies potentially available. But some
| deliver more value than others.
|
| Unfortunately nuclear is not _currently_ one of the
| options which delivers value in this regard.
|
| Flamenville 3 - the newest French reactor will cost $22B
| to build 1.6GW of capacity and will have taken nearly 20
| years from the start of construction to deliver a watt.
| The same amount of money could deliver over 20GW of wind
| capacity which could be deployed almost instantly as it's
| an easily parallelizable low-risk, relatively low-tech
| engineering task relying on mass-production for most of
| the installation. None of these benefits are available to
| nuclear reactor construction. Even with a capacity factor
| of 40% for on-shore wind vs 90%+ for nuclear, nuclear
| just isn't close.
|
| I'm not against nuclear. If the nuclear industry can step
| up and deliver reactors on time and on budget which can
| provide power at competitive prices, then I'd be all in
| favour. It would be wonderful to have an alternative in
| the race to decarbonize energy. But all I see is a long
| trail of massively delayed or abandoned projects with
| incredible cost-overruns (Flamanville, Olkiluoto, V.C.
| Summer, Vogtle, etc). These failures are hard-engineering
| failures, nothing to do with politics.
|
| With such a litany of recent failures, the incredible
| capital expense, the extra security required, the
| slowness of delivery, it's clear why resources have been
| directed away from nuclear toward other technologies
| which are quick and easy to roll-out and have already
| significantly contributed to reducing the the CO2
| intensity of Europe's electricity (which is now less than
| half of what it was 30 years ago).
|
| Btw, it isn't just nuclear that loses in this regard;
| bio-fuels, domestic-solar PV, green hydrogen, etc. all
| fail to compete in the new world of ultra-cheap solar PV
| and wind.
| cbmuser wrote:
| Germany has a large share (50%) of renewables and their
| specific CO2 emissions per kWh are up to ten times higher
| as compared to France with 70% nuclear.
|
| Volatile renewables don't effectively help to reduce
| greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-
| sector?t...
| derriz wrote:
| "Volatile" renewables absolutely do help reduce
| greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| As the renewables share of generation has been
| increasing, the CO2 intensity of electricity generation
| in Germany has dropped from 542gCO2/kWh in 2000 to
| 296gCO2/kWh in 2020[1].
|
| Btw, your link brings me to a table on agricultural CO2
| emissions?
|
| [1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-
| statistics/charts/development-o...
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| David MacKay's work was for me very important. It showed how
| one should do a systems analysis for a country to understand
| how one can achieve the change required. I was astonished when
| I talked to several of the leading people responsible for
| energy policy in several political parties in my country, to
| find they really had no clue about what they where doing on a
| systems level.
|
| I think that updating this book is not pointless, but more
| importantly doing the same for more countries is really
| important.
| rufuspollock wrote:
| > It showed how one should do a systems analysis for a
| country to understand how one can achieve the change
| required. I was astonished when I talked to several of the
| leading people responsible for energy policy in several
| political parties in my country, to find they really had no
| clue about what they where doing on a systems level.
|
| Massive +1. And i agree that perhaps "reusing" the book would
| be useful. E.g. take the key factual approach and update
| analyses for particular technologies and then plug those
| together - which to some extent is what the pathway
| calculator did which is why it is worth trying to get the
| source for that https://github.com/life-
| itself/climate/issues/2
| phreeza wrote:
| It would be fantastic to turn the chapters into Templates
| where one has to plug in the relevant parameters for a
| country and see the calculations for that country.
| algo_trader wrote:
| And multiple PhD students have done so!
|
| For example, the Stanford/Jacobson study on powering the
| world with wind/solar/water.
|
| Some results were famously silly, such as filing Finland
| with solar panels, or adding the cost of nuclear war to
| nuclear reactors. Jacobson sued other academics then backed
| down.
|
| The point is, 5-10 years on, these models turned out to be
| over pessimistic! Australia doesn't need fancy modelling -
| simple roof top solar there is on target to meet full day
| time demand in 2-3 years.
|
| Conversely we still dont really know how to meet the last
| 5% of outlier energy demand scenarios.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Some results were famously silly, such as ... adding
| the cost of nuclear war to nuclear reactors.
|
| Is that really silly? The incremental increase in the
| risk of nuclear war for each gigawatt of civilian nuclear
| power generation might be small, but the costs of a
| nuclear war could be quadrillions of dollars (for example
| if it set the world back by 100 years).
|
| Obviously measuring that risk is difficult, but to give
| an example, imagine that civilian nuclear power were
| limited to just the countries which currently have
| nuclear weapons. That would greatly reduce the
| proliferation risk and the chance of nuclear breakout in
| countries like Iran.
|
| The urgency of addressing climate change may take
| precedence over these concerns in the short term, but if
| we do manage to reach net zero with a mixture of
| renewables and nuclear energy, then it's not
| inconceivable that over-provisioning renewables might
| allow us to phase out nuclear energy later on.
|
| Suppose it would take 50 years to build up that renewable
| energy capacity, and 10 years to build a new nuclear
| power station. That would mean the nuclear power station
| would only be useful for 40 years, which limits the
| amount of time they'd have to recoup their costs over.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Has Jacobson stopped suing people though
| epistasis wrote:
| > I think that updating this book is not pointless, but more
| importantly doing the same for more countries is really
| important.
|
| While MacKay's work is excellent for a general lay audience
| to understand general scales of the issue, there are now far
| more advanced models for this that do things like replay
| historical weather and demand, down to 15 minute scales, to
| more least cost systems for zero carbon grids.
|
| They are also so advanced as to take into current grid
| structure and generation resources, and the cheapest way to
| transition to zero carbon from our current resources.
|
| Christopher Clack's models are probably the most advanced.
| The latest iteration has the very surprising finding that
| deploying lots of grid-edge solar and storage right now will
| save us a ton of money because it will use current
| transmission and distribution assets more effectively and
| reduce the need for future investment in these assets (T&D is
| the majority of our electricity bills, not generation!)
| redisman wrote:
| Are there any books or journals you'd recommend that are
| more up to date? I'm trying to find something more
| worthwhile to read during downtime
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Maybe something like this.
|
| https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/56/1/jamc
| -d-...
|
| But it isn't particularly helpful when trying to explain
| policy imho.
| derriz wrote:
| I think this fact is under-appreciated. It has undermined most
| of the quantitative analysis done in the past. So most of the
| analysis available is stale.
|
| It has also undermined a lot of business plans - even those
| based on renewables. For example the Xlink project in the UK -
| this involved building a huge solar PV plant (with
| complimentary wind and battery storage) in Morocco where panels
| are twice as efficient and an underwater HVDC cable to the UK.
| The problem is that panel prices have dropped so much, that
| it's now cheaper, easier and quicker to just buy twice as much
| PV panels and site them in the UK - compensating for the
| relative lack of efficiency in northern Europe by volume of
| panels.
|
| This is why there's huge growth in utility solar PV in northern
| and western Europe in the last year or two despite the less-
| than-ideal conditions there - the panels are just so cheap that
| the lack of optimal efficiency becomes a non-issue.
|
| My prediction is that wind, solar and batteries will dominate
| because they're riding on the benefits of mass-production - the
| capital cost for these is dominated by off-the-shelf component
| costs - installation is relatively trivial. This has delivered
| continuous and steep price declines while the prices for other
| forms of generation are stagnant (coal) or rising (nuclear).
| And there's no sign that the fall in prices is stopping at the
| moment so their price/value advantage will only grow in future.
| wiz21c wrote:
| FTBook:
|
| > Wind turbines are getting bigger all the time. Do bigger wind
| turbines change this chapter's answer?
|
| > Chapter B explains. Bigger wind turbines deliver financial
| economies of scale, but they don't greatly increase the total
| power per unit land area, because bigger windmills have to be
| spaced further apart. A wind farm that's twice as tall will
| deliver roughly 30% more power.
|
| So, did wind turbine production actually increased by an order
| of magnitudes since the book ?
| 7952 wrote:
| But the constraint on growth may not be land (or sea)
| availability. So why worry? Optimise the thing that is
| holding you back.
| [deleted]
| algo_trader wrote:
| Amazingly, yes!
|
| Turbines have gone from 1-2MW to 10-16MW
|
| Capacity factors have gone from 20% to 50%-60%
|
| Annual additions gave gone from sub-GW to 70GW last year
|
| And with turbine spacing of 1km you can actually do stuff
| with the land in between.
|
| On the other hand, transmission projects still take 10-20
| years, and new transmission projects are often over booked by
| 300%-400% before they are even started.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > Turbines have gone from 1-2MW to 10-16MW
|
| Okay, but GP's point was that these bigger turbines need to
| be spaced further apart instead, so we can place fewer of
| them. That we could build bigger turbines was not in
| question I think. Do you happen to know whether the MW per
| km2 increased more than the 30% expected amount that GP
| cited?
|
| And regarding doing things between the turbines, I wasn't
| "awake" yet in 2006 so I don't remember how it was then,
| but were they ever placed so close together that you
| couldn't have farmland in between turbines? The problem
| seems to be that people don't want to live near them and
| find nature filled with wind turbines ugly, not so much
| that you can't do anything else in between.
|
| (Just to note, I don't find them that ugly (even if, of
| course, nature would be prettier without them... but that's
| not an option) and I also didn't find them to be very loud
| when I visited some nearby wind turbines. Perhaps it's
| different at night when it's all quiet, but personally I
| don't think I'd mind living next to one. The blades are a
| bit scary though, I can't help but imagine the consequences
| if one of them lets loose... but that's like being afraid
| of air travel I guess.)
| 7952 wrote:
| But why is it important to optimise MW per km2? Seems
| like premature optimization of something that is not the
| bottleneck.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Because we have trouble finding spots where people don't
| already live and file complaints to prevent them being
| built near them? At least on-shore; off-shore is more
| expensive. If we can get more MW per km2 then we can have
| more power with less trouble.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Okay, but GP's point was that these bigger turbines
| need to be spaced further apart instead, so we can place
| fewer of them.
|
| What will be a problem if our energy consumption
| increases by an order of magnitude or two, and we take
| all of it from the wind. Currently, the entire question
| is about financial ROI.
|
| > but were they ever placed so close together that you
| couldn't have farmland in between turbines?
|
| Not since the modern turbines were invented. The first
| ones were placed in somewhat compact lines, with enough
| spacing between the turbine lines that you could raise a
| few lines of any crop. (The lines can't be too close
| anyway, as that would reduce the turbine efficiency and
| harm financial ROI.)
| oezi wrote:
| And did the general conclusion change that wind wouldn't be
| able to provide more than even half the energy we need for
| transport?
| algo_trader wrote:
| Yes. The conclusion has changed!
|
| Electric cars are ridiculously efficient. A 100kwh tesla
| drives approx 500km. So 50km/day/car needs just 10kwh.
| The UK also has 2 persons per car (plus additional cats
| and dogs..)
|
| So just the on-shore book projection is already enough
| AND only requires a tenth of the turbines.
|
| Lets keep nuclear as well. Invest in efficiency. Lots of
| hard work ahead.
|
| But we are probably closer to "problem solved" than to
| "civilization collapse". Cheers.
| rufuspollock wrote:
| Just to flag that MacKay already estimated (in 2008) a
| Tesla at 15kwh per 100km (actually better than you have
| here). See Fig 20.22 on
| https://climate.lifeitself.us/without-hot-air/chap20/
| oezi wrote:
| I am less concerned about the consumption, but the issue
| how much available wind energy we can harness in a best
| case scenario. Only half of transportation seems so low.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > 50km/day/car
|
| For what it's worth "In 2019, the average car in the UK
| drove 7,400 miles"[0] which works out to 33 km/day/car.
| It's probably much less now due to working from home (and
| fuel shortages, and the collapse of the supply chain...)
|
| [0] https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-
| insurance/average-car...
| mcot2 wrote:
| Yes, very good point. Renewable enegry generation really
| isn't the struggle these days, it is transmission from
| areas with high solar and wind potential to areas with less
| viable solar and wind production.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean. Just because it's cheap, how
| is it suddenly not a consideration anymore whether we want to
| fill a large share of nature or farmland with PV, batteries,
| wind? There are more considerations than cost.
|
| Also because one needs to keep in mind that renewable
| electricity is only about 10% of the energy demand. I sometimes
| see headlines like "61% of electricity in Germany came from
| wind last month!" which kind of miss the point, as that means
| we have only 94% to go. We really need a huge amount of surface
| area if we want to go for a monoculture of wind and solar power
| with battery storage.
|
| Edit to be clear: I'm not against wind or solar or batteries.
| We will most definitely need it and must invest in both
| building them and innovating them further (in that order of
| priorities). But I also think we cannot just rely on them
| solving the whole problem. (Sometimes it is also assumed that
| this plummeting price curve will continue at the same rate for
| at least another decade, which I suspect is also not going to
| materialize.)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Supplying the US using solely solar power would only require
| 20,000 square miles of land. We have more land in parking
| lots.
|
| The battery land requirements are approximately 1 square
| mile.
|
| And wind requirements are effectively 0 since wind can very
| easily co-exist with other land usages.
| kergonath wrote:
| Getting rid of parking lots (and the energy- and
| ressources-hungry individual cars sitting on them) would
| certainly be a big step forward to a sustainable future.
| jetbooster wrote:
| I don't think they were suggesting getting rid of the the
| car parks, but rather putting solar over the top of them.
| Which would also reduce the amount of petrol used to AC
| the car when you get back in it too (though this effect
| is probably negligible)
| kergonath wrote:
| I don't think they did, either. Nevertheless, cars are a
| huge waste of ressources and energy and there is no
| realistic path to net zero in the next half century
| without a significant reduction in consumption. Electric
| cars or not.
| kaashif wrote:
| Saying there is no realistic path to net zero without a
| reduction in consumption is somewhat funny to me. I don't
| think it is realistic at all to think that people will
| accept a reduction in living standards, which is what a
| reduction in consumption would result in.
|
| I think switching consumption to forms that don't cause
| climate change is more realistic. Failing that, mass
| carbon capture is _still_ more realistic than getting
| people to consume less, as far as I can tell.
|
| Has anyone, anywhere ever had political success saying
| that everyone's living standards must decrease?
| glogla wrote:
| That depends on the form of consumption. For example, one
| large form of consumption is commuting from suburbs to
| the offices on gridlocked roads in SUVs with one person
| in it.
|
| Everyone universally hates that, and working from home
| for office workers would greatly reduce consumption (of
| oil) while increasing living standards.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I don't think you're completely wrong, but it might be
| more nuanced than that. A decrease in consumption can
| come from less consumption, but also from more efficient
| consumption. Better second-hand markets for products that
| are fine to use a second time, longer-lasting products,
| less raw material needed perhaps, etc. But yeah I do
| expect the gains of that to be somewhat limited. Just
| look at how many people (especially in the USA, but also
| some Asian ones iirc) have an Apple device as a status
| symbol. They're probably going to put up with second-hand
| products as much as they are with Huawei phones. But
| that's a minority in most countries, i.e. far from
| everyone.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Saying there is no realistic path to net zero without a
| reduction in consumption is somewhat funny to me. I don't
| think it is realistic at all to think that people will
| accept a reduction in living standards, which is what a
| reduction in consumption would result in.
|
| I think you're right. But I think Physics is going to
| show us the bill at some point and we won't have a
| choice. When blackouts will be the norm, people will
| probably be very angry, but there won't be much to do.
|
| It is interesting to think about the perspective of e.g.
| a farmer during the fall of the western Roman Empire. I
| am certain that none of them wanted it, and it was
| actually quite violent at times, but there wasn't
| anything they could do to stop it.
|
| > Has anyone, anywhere ever had political success saying
| that everyone's living standards must decrease?
|
| None (that I know of). It is already happening, though.
| Energy production in Europe is plateauing. Standards of
| living are already stagnating. Just like politicians
| cannot will away systemic technical problems in the
| economy or industry, they cannot change the laws of
| physics.
|
| Our best bet is to use _everything_ we can. Nuclear base
| production, as much wind and solar as we can, batteries
| and hydro to smooth out the peaks. We need to go all out.
| Even then, it would probably take a global industrial
| effort of the magnitude of the war efforts during WWI and
| WWII, just to get everything up and running. Let's not
| kid ourselves: the world is burning, a mass extinction is
| under way, and there is already no way we meet our own
| bar of 1.5degC, and even 2degC requires immediate action.
| lucb1e wrote:
| That's fair; I'm mainly looking at this from a western
| European perspective. If you're from a more southernly
| country with large unused deserts... that tends to help.
| RobinL wrote:
| Pointless in what sense?
|
| The very reason I'd like to see it updated is to see whether
| the conclusions change materially when we take into account
| technological progress.
|
| As far as I understand it, whilst costs may be substantially
| lower that he envisaged, MacKay argued there are fundamental
| physical constraints on solar and wind that mean they still are
| unlikely to be able to provide all our energy needs (in the UK
| at least, without piping in energy from e.g. the Moroccan
| desert a la Xlinks).
|
| (Yes, I realise solar can do an awful lot if you're willing to
| 'go big' and have huge batteries.
| https://www.robinlinacre.com/fill_country_solar/)
| 542458 wrote:
| One thing that feels a bit strange to me is that he uses
| timelines of 1000 years when calculating nuclear reserves. I
| don't believe we need a plan for the next 1000 years - think of
| what our understanding of power generation and transmission was a
| millennium ago. Assuming that we will still be using the same
| technologies in 1000 years seems a bit pessimistic to me.
| kergonath wrote:
| > One thing that feels a bit strange to me is that he uses
| timelines of 1000 years when calculating nuclear reserves.
|
| Not really. Uranium and thorium are _insanely_ energy dense and
| whilst it's obviously impossible to predict energy use a
| millenium from now, it could handle more than a couple of
| centuries of exponential growth of energy consumption. Then
| there are things like fuels made of natural isotopes (so no
| enrichment needed) and breeder reactors that can run off
| fission products (aka "waste"), which are not used much today,
| but are closer to readiness than things like carbon capture.
| ben_w wrote:
| > it could handle more than a couple of centuries of
| exponential growth of energy consumption.
|
| That rather depends on the exponent and the time period. The
| minimum for "a couple of centuries" is 200 years: 1%/year for
| 200 years? Sure; 1%/year for 1000 years _or_ 5% /year for 200
| years? 2-2.5 times global solar irradiance. I think that's
| enough to raise the temperature to boiling, and I don't think
| there's enough nuclear fuel to do that (but I could be wrong
| about both).
| cbmuser wrote:
| Physics won't change in a thousand years and it's very unlikely
| we'll find anything more powerful and energy-dense beyond
| nuclear fission and fusion.
| ben_w wrote:
| On that timescale I expect us to engineer antimatter-based
| energy storage. Or do something literally incomprehensible --
| a thousand years _ago_ we didn't have the language to
| describe the language to describe relativity.
| gnramires wrote:
| It doesn't quite work like that. 1000 years ago Europeans
| (you may say) only traveled routinely within 1 continent.
| Today, they travel routinely to all 7 continents. You can't
| say in another 1000 years anyone will travel to 14
| continents -- there's only so much Earth to discover :)
|
| We can know Earth in better detail, but it's inherently
| limited. In the same vein, there's no guarantee we will
| continue to discover revolutionary engineering strategies,
| and certainly no guarantee of discovering (or not
| discovering) new physics. In fact, physics has seen a
| slower pace of discoveries since mid-20th century. This
| kind of (not necessarily justifiable) optimism is in fact
| quite a risk when evaluating some technologies on
| sustainability.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Antimatter might conceivably be viable as a form of energy
| _storage_. But as with hydrogen or other synfuels, it would
| never be a primary energy _source_ , and the losses in
| production of antimatter are likely to remain large.
|
| Ultimately, antimatter is a battery or fuel, not an energy
| source. And if it ever were a viable energy source ...
| well, we'd likely have bigger problems.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Nearly 100% effective power generation from matter via
| hawking radiation from a nano-sized black hole that was grown
| from one formed in the upper atmosphere via ultra-energetic
| cosmic rays.
| [deleted]
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