[HN Gopher] Solar and Wind to Top Coal Power in US for First Tim...
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Solar and Wind to Top Coal Power in US for First Time in 2024
Author : goplayoutside
Score : 100 points
Date : 2023-12-16 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| For those in the know: - Is the adoption of wind and solar
| accelerating, or is it linear? - When do you expect 90%+
| electricity generation from renewable sources (hydro, wind,
| solar)? - Will it be cheaper than nuclear? Will we still need
| nuclear?
|
| Thanks!
| aperson_hello wrote:
| Accelerating and who knows - everyone is extraordinarily
| terrible at making predictions about power generation. New
| solar/wind capacity is already significantly cheaper than new
| nuclear (and new plants of any sort other than natural gas),
| but more expensive than running existing nuclear plants.
| Nuclear is a great way to get stable base load capacity - while
| wind and solar require significant storage to be used as base
| load (because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't
| always shine). We'll ultimately probably land on a mix of power
| sources.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It's been accelerating exponentially for a long time, but
| generally seems to have taken over secondary energy sources
| like biofuel more than displacing fossil fuels. Wind is roughly
| the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but solar is still
| expensive. Costs continue to drop & solar bulls contend that it
| will be cheaper in the long run although I'm skeptical that
| nuclear couldn't compete (e.g. MSR or thorium reactors would be
| much safer & thus cheaper to build reducing nuclear costs too).
| Additionally, solar bulls conveniently ignore the costs of
| batteries which complicate the economics by a lot & even
| fission built today (where costs have been going up rather than
| down because we don't build a lot of it) is much cheaper than
| solar (even without batteries & blows battery-based solutions
| out of the water).
|
| The numbers just aren't positive for solar/wind helping us
| reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn't the only thing we
| need to fix. For example, you can't power a commercial shipping
| vessel off of solar / batteries. You'd need nuclear reactors
| which would require a major social shift to make people
| comfortable with it (& of course there are always risks but for
| some reason spilling radioactive material into the ocean scares
| people a lot but then they conveniently ignore how much fossil
| fuels we spill into the ocean which creates waaaay more
| ecological devastation).
|
| Finally, it's the only tech we have right now that's energy
| dense enough that we can divert excess capacity into efforts to
| sequester excess carbon - we've already unlocked runaway
| processes on Earth and sequestration, while insanely expensive,
| is likely the only mechanism we have to try to undo the runaway
| processes.
| hgomersall wrote:
| You make a lot of assertions here. Certainly your claims
| about the cost of solar are not supported by IRENA:
| https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-
| Power-...
| pydry wrote:
| >Wind is roughly the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but
| solar is still expensive.
|
| Its LCOE is roughly 5x lower than nuclear power:
|
| https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-
| sol...
|
| >The numbers just aren't positive for solar/wind helping us
| reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn't the only thing
| we need to fix. For example, you can't power a commercial
| shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You'd need nuclear
| reactors
|
| The cost of nuclear power as shown above is *enormous*. The
| only reason it gets built at all is because it provides
| economic support to the military for maintaining and building
| nuclear arms:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
| news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...
|
| Or, in non-nuclear powers (like Sweden or Iran), to provide
| the skills and industry to quickly _ramp up_ a fully fledged
| nuclear program while still adhering to the NPT.
|
| It's a shame because the money would be _far_ more
| efficiently spent on solar and wind capacity and also because
| nuclear weapons are, well, bad.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I'm not "in the know" but here is a fun chart showing 2023
| solar PV adoption compared to past IEA predictions. You can
| decide which function class you want to assign it to. (I did
| not make this, see subsequent post in that thread for credit
| and sources.)
| https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/111505497033606507
| burkaman wrote:
| That chart is so funny. What will it take for the IEA to
| consider changing their prediction model?
| sgift wrote:
| There's an "world energy outlook" once a year, here's the
| one from 2023: https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-
| outlook-2023
|
| Haven't yet found the relevant chart, but since the one in
| the image ends with WEO 2018: They probably already have.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Fun fact: we're deploying, on average, ~1.13GW of solar every
| day globally _and that rate is accelerating_. China installed
| more wind power this year than total UK generation capacity,
| and more solar than total US solar generation. If you're not
| paying attention, this transition will rocket past you.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Accelerating. Unclear timelines but not soon. It is already
| cheaper than nuclear. Energy should be priced using the
| levelized cost of energy. Currently nuclear is way more
| expensive than utility solar ( but not rooftop solar).
|
| The need for nuclear is about base load and making use of space
| and existing assets and what not.
| ben_w wrote:
| Acceleration; naively extrapolating the current growth rate
| gets us to 100% in 2034-ish; it's already cheaper than nuclear;
| we will probably _want_ nuclear, but don 't strictly _need_ it,
| other base-load equivalents and load management options exist.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Cheaper as in it can fully replace nuclear and fully match
| for demand for also extended periods of no wind, low
| temperatures and high cloud cover? Without any use of fossil
| fuels?
| ben_w wrote:
| Yes, using the current lifetime cost of batteries etc. to
| cover when solar is unavailable, is currently cheaper than
| nuclear.
|
| (We could also in principle do this with a global power
| grid, the maths says it's fine and surprisingly affordable
| even if that grid needs extremely frequent total
| replacement, but geopolitics will almost certainly kill
| such an idea).
| Ekaros wrote:
| So why isn't production of new gas plants immediately
| banned and all effort put to replacing them fully with
| batteries? As it is cheaper and you won't need those gas
| plants anymore.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Because the system is managed by practical people with
| multi-decade plans, not people trying to score a point in
| an Internet argument.
| ben_w wrote:
| "Don't need" != "Don't want"; lots of marketing/lobbying
| by companies/countries who do want (e.g. OPEC); also the
| question was originally focussed on nuclear rather than
| of gas -- nuclear is really expensive, gas isn't anything
| like so expensive, you can _also_ do renewables + gas if
| you like (and many do), or promise to get around to
| shifting the gas in "gas" to hydrogen which could come
| from PV (something which other people are selling; while
| I'm not sold on it, I'm not in a position to matter, only
| one person is targeting me personally with the sales
| pitch for hydrogen and I'm sure they'll pop up in this
| thread soon enough...); also it's good to have a diverse
| supply even when one of the options looks really
| expensive, just so failures aren't correlated.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| How often is a region with an interconnected grid the size
| of the USA completely lacking in wind, uniformly cold, and
| overcast? (Among other things, clouds tend to _cause_ wind.
| https://www.howitworksdaily.com/how-does-cloud-cover-
| create-...)
| sgift wrote:
| We still need something which can make sure we have enough
| energy for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute, but
| at least looking at all of Europe that seems to be manageable
| with existing energy storage techniques (individual countries
| have longer Dunkelflaute, but if e.g. there's one only in
| Germany we can just import from Italy and vice versa)
|
| (German wiki has more numbers)
| oezi wrote:
| We don't have to make sure we get to 0% all the time. We
| need to reduce putting CO2 in the air. If we burn some Gas
| in the winter it isn't the end of the world.
|
| The focus must be on maximum climate impact per dollar.
| Axsuul wrote:
| With manufacturing coming back to the US, our energy needs will
| likely be even greater even with accelerating adoption.
| TomK32 wrote:
| It's all down to politics. The German government practically
| killed (predominantely East-) Germany's solar industry by
| messing around with the Stromeinspeisungsgesetz and didn't
| protect the local producers against the the Chinese ones who
| still produce under questionable conditions...
| http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph240/rojas1/
|
| Will the current restart of the german solar panel producers
| last? No one knows for sure.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Different regions are in different parts of the sigmoid curve.
| In some places, the growth looks exponential. In other places,
| the market is already saturated and new renewable capacity is
| only built to meet increases in transmission/storage capacity
| and demand for intermittent energy.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That's all fine and good but I have not found any data supporting
| this good news for net 0 efforts. We've been transitioning away
| from coal power for a while but while the headline implies solar
| & wind are the beneficiaries, natural gas has benefited much
| more. While natural gas emits less CO2 than coal, it emits more
| methane which if I recall correctly means that they're roughly
| comparable (natural gas is better for local air quality).
| aperson_hello wrote:
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55719
|
| Most new capacity is renewable (and it's been that way for
| years). It's just that there was a whole bunch of natural gas
| capacity built out over the 90s and 2000s that it'll take a
| while before we see any significant reduction in natural gas
| generation
| jaidhyani wrote:
| https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy
|
| Quick stats for the US:
|
| In 2022, 11.3% of energy was generated by renewables
| (hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal, bioenergy, wave, and
| tidal). It's been growing at just under 0.5pp/year since 2007,
| when it was at 4.4%.
|
| This is primarily driven by wind and solar. Wind power took off
| around 2000, and in the years since has grown from 5.6TWh to
| 434.3TWh in 2022. Solar power took off around 2011 and has
| since grown from 1.82TWh to 205.1TWh. Hydropower remains the #2
| renewable in the US, with a noisy-but-nondirectional generation
| between 200TWh and 350TWh going back to the 60's, but solar
| appears poised to overtake it by 2024. All other renewables
| combined are holding steady or slightly dropping at ~75TWh
| (though anecdotally there may be some large geothermal capacity
| coming online in the medium-term future that would change
| this).
|
| Narrowing the focus from all-energy-generation (e.g. including
| fuel) to specifically electricity, the US is currently
| generating 22.3% of its electricity from renewables, a number
| that has been steadily increasing at about 1pp/year since it
| was 8.4% in 2007.
|
| Naive extrapolation suggests we're about 75 years out from 100%
| renewables for electricity, but of course there are reasons to
| doubt that. For one, we've recently passed the tipping point
| where renewables are just straightforwardly cheaper than other
| sources of energy in many circumstances, and improvements in
| technology and infrastructure will just continue to make this
| true in more and more cases.
| richardw wrote:
| I think the first and second derivative, and causes thereof,
| are crucial.
|
| There are continuous improvements and price reductions to
| renewables and storage, brought about by scale and innovation.
| Those affect demand - the speed at which the flywheel ramps up.
| Natural gas doesn't have anything like the same rate of change.
| It's a relatively fixed technology with no ability to improve.
| One graph is a curve pointing upwards, the other is a straight
| line. The current state is not as important as the delta, and
| sooner or later the curve beats the straight line.
|
| At some point it becomes economically irrational to adopt
| anything but the cheapest, easiest to deploy technology. The
| only question is how long it takes to get there, and if it's
| soon enough.
|
| Sama, 2016:
|
| "What's you number one piece of hiring advice?"
|
| "Hire for slope, not Y-intercept. This is actually my number
| one piece of life advice."
|
| https://twitter.com/sama/status/792823320441786368?lang=en
| riffraff wrote:
| I think this has more to do with replacing coal with gas than
| about the growth of renewables: coal production has been dropping
| father than renewables have come online.
|
| Still, good news anyway.
| aperson_hello wrote:
| Renewables have replaced roughly half of the coal production
| decrease (and the other half is gas). Gas just had its growth
| moment before renewables did.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960
| melling wrote:
| This is because coal is dropping to 15%.
|
| Here's a direct link to the EIA document:
|
| https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/pdf/steo_full.pdf
|
| It says renewables already passed coal. Maybe I'm looking at the
| wrong page?
| defrost wrote:
| We've very probably hit _global_ "peak coal" and looking at
| future declining world use:
|
| _International Energy Agency Global Coal Report_ December 2023
| (released Friday 15th December 2023) Global
| coal production is forecast to have risen by 1.8% in 2023, with
| continued growth in India, China and Indonesia more than
| offsetting declines in the United States and the European Union.
| Thus, 2023 marks another all-time high in global coal production,
| totalling 8 741 Mt. [...] For the forecast period,
| we expect a net reduction in global coal production starting in
| 2024, which would mean global coal production peaking in 2023 in
| line with global coal demand. Ongoing declines in
| the United States and the European Union are likely to be
| complemented by reduced production volumes in Indonesia, as
| Chinese demand for seaborne thermal coal is likely to decrease.
| The last bastion of remarkable growth in production is India,
| serving the growing demand from its power sector.
| Our model suggests that declines in other countries will more
| than offset this growth, resulting in global production of 8 394
| Mt in 2026.
|
| https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023/supply
|
| _Global coal use to reach record high in 2023, energy agency
| says_
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/15/global-coal-use-to...
| But the IEA noted that overall coal use is not expected to drop
| until 2026, when the major expansion of renewable capacity in the
| next three years should help lower usage by 2.3 percent compared
| with 2023 levels, even with the absence of stronger clean energy
| policies.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652273
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| People underestimate the RAPID pace wind and solar are making
| on phasing out fossil fuels.
|
| Carbon emissions have barely been growing while energy
| consumption has been growing enormously over the last 10 years.
|
| By 2030, carbon emissions could be substantially power. By 2050
| it looks like it'll basically be a Brave New World in terms of
| energy.
| defrost wrote:
| "barely been growing" is still growing - and a reversal of
| the much needed drop that occurred during the pandemic years.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-
| co2-emissi...
|
| There's still a lot of FUD about the need for change coming
| from the major fossil fuel players who are _knowingly_
| responsible for the current situation: Best
| estimates show a total of 1,499 gigatons of global-warming-
| exacerbating CO2 have been added to the Earth's atmosphere by
| the actions of us humans since 1751, only 342 gigatons of
| those were emitted up to 1964 -- 23 percent of the total
| emissions during those 213 years, which was 80 percent per
| cent of that full time frame. On the other hand,
| 1,157 gigatons were emitted between 1965 and 2015 -- that's
| 77 percent of total emissions emitted during only the
| remaining 20 percent of the period in question.
|
| Again: 77 percent of total emissions have taken place since
| fossil fuel companies became aware of what the dangers of
| burning their products would be. "Instead
| of using that knowledge to change their business practices,
| or to alert the public or policymakers about what the dangers
| of burning fossil fuels would be, they've doubled down on
| their business models. They have funded climate obstruction
| on every level from global to local."
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/16/fossil_fuels_wildfire.
| ..
| bigtunacan wrote:
| Honestly I'm starting to feel a bit alarmed by the growth of
| solar energy. I live in Midwest farm country and solar farms are
| just being built in place of food farms at a scary rate.
|
| While I believe in the idea of cleaner renewable energy I'm
| concerned if it comes at the price of a reduced food supply.
| hgomersall wrote:
| There's plenty of land for food and energy, we just have to eat
| less meat.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And really we should optimize the land use in general. Single
| family housing is also huge waste of energy. A few square
| meters per person in massive shared places is enough to
| survive. We could bulldoze all single family homes and then
| fill the now vacant office spaces with bunk beds for more
| sustainable living...
| hgomersall wrote:
| Who's advocating that? My point was in response to
| unspecified concerns that I took to be that we wouldn't be
| able to support the population if we have too much solar,
| which is emphatically not true.
| Ekaros wrote:
| You were advocating for absolutely massive lowering of
| living standards. As clearly eating less meat is making
| live lot worse. I just took on myself to present next
| logical and less bad step.
|
| We do not need more than handful of square meters to
| live. So as quality of life does not matter in this
| conversation. We should explore next steps we can take to
| save the planet. By getting rid of anything that is not
| absolutely needed for survival.
| hgomersall wrote:
| I'm not advocating anything. I'm simply pointing out that
| there's plenty of land for both solar and food, and
| frankly that includes a decent quantity of meat. I expect
| the consequences would be the price of meat might go up.
|
| Moreover, why does eating less meat make living worse? I
| daresay your view is not universally held.
| Ekaros wrote:
| So are you suggesting moving everyone to shared living
| spaces is making living worse? I daresay your view is not
| universally held either.
|
| I expect the consequences be massive reduction in cost of
| housing.
|
| I'm simply pointing as valid alternative solution.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| We've got so much extra food we turn corn into ethanol for
| fuel, and subsidize that whole process to win votes in the
| Midwest. We'll be fine.
|
| Sometimes we even pay people _not_ to farm.
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2006/07/02/f...
| RobinL wrote:
| I don't think that's much to worry about. The total energy
| needs of the US could be met by putting solar panels on only a
| small percentage of land, far smaller than what's needed for
| agriculture. Furthermore in some cases the land can be dual use
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah people tend to overestimate the needs of solar power and
| underestimate the extent of America. Take for example
| California. It could very easily be powered by a PV
| installation about the size of Edwards Air Force Base, which
| is << 1% the extent of the state. Not every state is so
| lucky, but there are grids.
|
| If you sacrificed 10% of Nevada, which history shows we are
| more than ready to do, that alone would quite easily power
| America.
| philips wrote:
| A lot of productive cropland isn't used for food,
| unfortunately. For example:
|
| Approximately 45% of U.S. corn croplands are used for ethanol
| production
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-gr...
| TomK32 wrote:
| Just think of it as crop rotation on a 30-year span.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| We spent 3 weeks this year driving all over Florida ('the
| sunshine state') and solar panels and wind turbines were pretty
| much non-existent, as far as we could see. So where does this US
| solar and wind power come from?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Places where hurricanes won't wipe them out every few years.
|
| Florida's grid is connected to sources as far west as Nebraska
| and as far north as Canada.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Interconnection
| abtinf wrote:
| How about in terms of power consumed?
|
| When I was a kid, it was cheapest to use electricity at night,
| because that's when industrial demand was reduced. Now, my rates
| for electricity at night are significantly higher than during the
| day, because power output collapses from solar.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Where is that? In California the highest cost hours are 4pm-9pm
| in the summer.
| lokar wrote:
| in CA, that is when demand spikes (people come home and start
| AC) and supply falls off from solar.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| https://archive.is/9p3xZ
| tomohawk wrote:
| This is not a base load comparison, so not terribly meaningful.
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