EDIT: I mean, you guys are downvoting these comments, and I'm sorry to tell you things you don't want to hear, but would prefer that you respond with contrary information rather than downvoting. Happy to alter my views and engage in information sharing.
You're simply wrong, and we will continue to tell you things YOU don't want to hear.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewables is altogether more practical and economical than doing so with a combination of new nuclear and renewables. This wasn't true even ten years ago, but the costs of renewables have fallen so fast that it's now the case. At the same time, the supposed "Nuclear Renaissance" was revealed to be an illusion. Nuclear is now a dead technology walking. And renewables (and associated technologies like batteries and electrolyzers) continue to show cost declines at a rate nuclear could only dream of.
BTW, summarize the argument in the video. I don't waste my time watching video links.
I'm not sure whether nuclear is better, and renewables definitely is a good thing to have in the mix. But comparing the carbon emissions of Germany and France, and the cost of electricity in both countries would suggest that at least currently, renewables without nuclear isn't as effective for supplying our power needs as renewables with nuclear.
If I've misunderstood this somewhere, I would love to learn more.
You're making an invalid argument there. The current generation mix in France and Germany reflects decisions made up to decades in the past, when relative prices were very different from what they are now. Back in the 20th century when France was building reactors, renewables were much more expensive. What was the low cost option then is not what it is now.
Going forward, even France is having a very hard time building reactors, and is finding renewables are cheaper. This is one reason why France's nuclear industry is in such trouble.
Germany deliberately pushed renewables in order to send them down their experience curves. This was spectacularly successful, but it has come at a high price to their consumers, who are still paying that down. The rest of us have reaped the benefit of far lower renewable costs.
Japan, one of the most technologically developed place in the world, cannot use renewables when they shut down nuclear. Instead they turn back to coal.
I'm not saying renewables are always inferior - e.g., California would be a perfect place for solar. But in every story I've heard of, when nuclear power is turned off fossil fuels pick up the slack.
First, 2011 is nine years ago. Utility scale solar has declined in cost by a factor of about 5 in the last decade. Decisions made even then do not say anything about how solar would compete today. Wind has also declined considerably in cost in that decade, although not as steeply.
Second, the argument I was making was that renewables beat new nuclear. I wasn't arguing that renewables beat fossil fuels unencumbered by CO2 charges, or even necessarily existing nuclear plants in which the construction and financing costs are sunk. So your observation is irrelevant to the claim I made.
I have to wonder why you guys never notice that the anti-renewables arguments you make are such non sequiturs. Myself, if I found defending my position required I resort to bogus logic, would reevaluate whether what I believed was actually true.
Continuing to operate their existing reactors would certainly have been cheaper for Japan. So the decision to replace them with fossil fuels (now LNG + CC, not the fossil fuels of decades ago) wasn't driven by economics.
After 2011, nuclear plants in Japan need to be audited that means plants must be stopped near the future. It causes massive power supply crisis so power companies built power plant as fast as possible. IIRC LNG power plant is said fastest plant to build and start operating.
Sure, so that partly explains why electricity costs so much more in Germany than France. But for a lay person (ie me), I can't help but compare the carbon emissions and air quality between the two countries, and attribute the difference to fossil-fuel vs nuclear power plants?
Also, I always assumed the lower renewable costs have come from economies of scale due mainly to China exploding it's energy production (which renewables makes a decent chunk of)
Germany jumped the gun. They started investing heavily in renewables when they were still very costly and storage technologies weren’t practical. Things have changed a lot in the last 30 years.
This is great. I think the summary understates his points regarding the burden on energy demand that will come into play over next several decades by developing regions. The numbers are astonishing.
Also underrepresented are his comments on just how unrealistic the assumptions are in the models calling for temperature reduction, specifically about the implications for reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. Reducing energy consumption (whether through bans or price hikes) has a known humanitarian impact in present terms. The idea that you can convince your poor neighbor that he doesn't really need to eat better or have access to more resources is a tricky problem.
pfdietz, I think the case is made quite plainly in his presentation that renewables cannot catch up to much less displace ("100%") fossil fuels anytime in the near future. If you don't see that in the sum of what he presents in the notes, I'd encourage you to watch the source material to hear him say it, sector by sector. It's full of real data from a guy that's been studying energy use in human civilization for many decades.
Nowhere does he make the case that 100% renewables is impossible. It is, of course, a tall order, but maintaining and growing a global energy infrastructure OF ANY KIND is a tall order.
Smil has argued that energy transitions happen only slowly, but I think he's being misled because the current rate of cost decline in renewables is unprecedented in its speed, as is the willingness of increasing numbers of countries to impose CO2 taxes or the equivalent.
Second factor is historically new energy sources required rolling out different technologies to utilize it. And you often couldn't switch back and forth. Renewables are generally about electric power and electron is an electron and we already have fully built out distribution networks.
And you're right about regulatory pressure being a big motivator.
It's simply this: our DAILY growing (not declining, not stable) demand for hydrocarbons is so profoundly huge, that the improvements in renewables (even if taken at generous face value) do not dent it today nor will they in the future even with the most generous assumptions about efficiency and storage improvements. This is just data you can look up to see the trends for daily barrel of oil demand, and the improvement rate of solar/wind and storage efficiencies. The numbers are the truth, not hope.
Developing societies such as Africa, India and China are increasing their consumption for the next few decades at least, radically accelerating the demand for hydrocarbons. India expects a quintupling of coal use in the next 4 decades. Airline miles will quintuple in much shorter period of time (like ten-twenty years). There is no shortage of hydrocarbons to naturally limit these demands. Politically there is no way to restrain newly developing nations. Technologically there is no net-positive energy generation source that competes on a density basis with fossil fuels. Again, the numbers tell the story.
I sincerely appreciate your frustration and hope for something different/better, but you need to come up with contrary data to argue these points. A hope in technical improvements year-over-year is all you've pointed to, and the trendline of capacity and efficiency improvements doesn't back that up. Further cost paid for a solar panel is not a benchmark. Energy intensity of its emplacement to bring it online is what its output needs to be balanced against. Its output, limited by useful life and useful operating hours really hamstrings its total lifecycle cost after the fossil fuel intense journey it takes.
You seem to be saying that renewables require improvement just due to the scale of the problem. But once renewables are sufficiently cheap, or once CO2 taxes cause fossil fuels to reflect their true cost, all that's required is just building more of them. This is a matter of scaling up, not improving the product, although improvement will almost certainly also occur, due to experience effects if nothing else.
That renewables are still a fairly small percentage of global energy demand is a good thing. It means that these experience effects still have room to kick in. Extrapolating the demonstrated experience curve gives that resistive heat from PV will be cheaper than heat from burning any form of fossil fuel, by the time PV has expanded fully.
The investment required to go 100% renewable will be many trillions of dollars. But the world GDP is $87 trillion, and the world spends about 10% of that on energy each year. There is enormous capacity to invest in energy infrastructure -- which is good, because enormous investment will be needed, regardless of what that infrastructure is.
> seem to be saying that renewables require improvement due to the scale of the problem.
Certainly they must be competitive in terms of energy density otherwise how can they substantially displace another energy source? Today renewable tech is not energy dense enough.
> Once renewables are sufficiently cheap
..cheap in total lifecycle cost (not end user cost of panel), carbon negative and sufficiently energy dense (transportable at light weight/low volume relative to stored energy)
> it's just building more of them.
For all of this, please remember we're talking global scale for electricity generation (<30% of fossil fuel use today), plus transportation, and manufacturing, not just electric use at my house or even a small country.
Straight cost - you mention taxes and regulation. This implies regulatory disincentives to produce and consume fossil fuels. It's relevant to note that at no time in recorded human history have humans backed off the consumption of an energy source unless a better replacement (more dense) was found. We nearly deforested the US east coast and almost killed off a whale species until coal came along and saved both (true story). Now we couldn't go back if we wanted to because civilization assumes a certain amount of energy input. Reducing it would have huge humanitarian impacts. Stabilizing it would be good, but this unfairly puts a huge burden on developing regions who would likely not tolerate it anyway.
Technology improvement - Look in the graph below at where diesel is relative to a Li-Ion battery. That's the gap it needs to make up at 5% efficiency gain per year (many orders of magnitude). It's beyond optimistic to say that would be covered any time soon barring a miracle (the track record shows that Moore's law doesn't apply to solar cells and batteries).
Even if you doubled the rate of efficiency improvements to 10% annualized, it's still an unrealistically wide gap to make up in my lifetime at least.
Fundamentally, for your position to be true you have to assume a miraculous leap forward in technology. And/or you have to assume some global-scale rational decision making (or force) to reduce consumption voluntarily (or involuntarily :/), in contrast with the whole of historic human behavior regarding energy consumption. Seems like there's a lot of hope involved there.
> This implies regulatory disincentives to produce and consume fossil fuels. It's relevant to note that at no time in recorded human history have humans backed off the consumption of an energy source unless a better replacement (more dense) was found.
We have plenty of examples of humans forgoing technologies that turned out to have downsides. And it's a near universal truth that dire warnings were given about these restrictions, warnings that turned out to be vastly overblown. Technology does step up to the plate when market incentives are in place.
> Look in the graph below at where diesel is relative to a Li-Ion battery.
Li-ion batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel for fossil fuels to be displaced. Some applications don't require that energy density. We are already seeing battery electric buses, for example. In other cases something other than batteries can be used, for example hydrogen. In the worst case, net zero CO2 diesel can be made synthetically, using energy from renewables (and carbon from either CO2 capture or biomass; use of biomass would be limited to these edge cases.)
We are already at the point technically where a great deal of fossil fuel for transportation would be displaced if transport paid the true cost of CO2 emission.
> Fundamentally, for your position to be true you have to assume a miraculous leap forward in technology.
No, the roadblock is not technology, it's proper carbon pricing. That is the biggest obstacle.
> batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel
We need a storage mechanism that allows the energy gained from renewable sources to power things without interruption.
Two examples illustrate the problem today - for renewables to power a cargo ship the battery load-out required to move that loaded container ship would materially reduce its cargo capacity because it's wasting so much space and mass on literally tons of batteries. Compare the capacity, speed, and installed power of MV Yara Birkeland (electric container ship) to the OOCL Hong Kong (diesel powered cargo ship) for an idea. Another example is Tokyo suffering a predictable 3-day cyclone every year, where 27 million people need 22 gigawatts of electricity. Imagine the battery array needed for that (with its inherent cost, maintenance, limited lifespan and acres of space in a space-constrained land). So these are two easy examples of why storage density needs to increase by orders of magnitude to meet the bar you set of 100% replacement.
It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet and the track record of an annualized 5% efficiency improvement for storage tech (which is generous but imagine even doubling it to 10%) per year won't catch up in our lifetimes. The math speaks for itself.
> roadblock is not technology, it's proper carbon pricing
If it were just pricing, it presumes that I have equivalent systems to implement and I just need to pay a premium for one vs the other. But that's not the case as illustrated in the examples above (and there are many, many more - airplanes, continuous smelting) where the existing energy storage tech doesn't work. So technology is an enormous roadblock.
As to carbon pricing - carbon pricing regimes require world-wide cooperation. IF you can get that, it effectively means limiting fossil fuel usage, right? Otherwise why are we doing it?
So limiting fossil fuel usage in a situation where there is no suitable replacement as described above, ultimately means you need to tell some guy in India that he can't have an air conditioner and some family in Africa that their agriculture development programs need to take a hit for lack of synthesized ammonia. This is a very unequal proposition. Alternatively, you can preserve that growth rate in the developing world and tell people in the developed world that they need to rewind their lifestyles in all ways (housing, vehicle mass, etc) to the early 1960's, which is when the US last had a consumption rate at the level needed to impact global warming. This is probably the preferable solution, but how tenable do you think either of these propositions really are?
There are undeniable humanitarian costs - not just monetary costs - to reducing fossil fuel use today when there are no (at scale) suitable replacements.
> I didn't say technologies, I said energy sources.
There have only been a handful of energy sources, so this argument is lame. I'll also note that it's an example of "nothing can happen for the first time".
> It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet
Hydrogen. Ammonia. Synthetic hydrocarbons (which I explicitly listed). These are demonstrated technologies.
It's a common canard that anti-renewable polemics make to represent batteries as the only storage option. And you've continued to make this argument even after I listed alternatives earlier.
When you make an argument that no solution is possible, it puts the responsibility ON YOU to rule out not just batteries, but every conceivable solution and combination of solutions. You can't just adopt a lazy attitude of lousy engineering to make your case.
> As to carbon pricing - carbon pricing regimes require world-wide cooperation. IF you can get that, it effectively means limiting fossil fuel usage, right? Otherwise why are we doing it?
It will likely involve carbon tariffs. If some country refuses to control CO2 emission, trade with that country will be blocked. This will coerce the holdouts.
Your attitude there also smacks of fatal defeatism. What is your alternative, burning fossil fuels until we have a replay of the end-Triassic greenhouse mass extinction?
A matter of fact isn't an argument, it just is. It's usefulness here is that IF your solution depends on humans doing something for the first time ever in not just recorded history but also in the entire archeological record, it's a big assumption to be weaving into a proposal and weakens (but granted does not make impossible) the idea that you may be on the right track in assuming it will happen now. It's like the famous "How to draw an owl" meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl
Are miracles possible? Sure. Should you bet on it in your planning? No.
> Hydrogen, ammonia
Both of these require fossil fuels to synthesize in quantities to meet today's needs, let alone new at-scale quantities. Hydrogen certainly may be better than burning coal or even natural gas, but it still would require fossil fuels. The amount of organically sourced ammonia we have on the planet _in total_ is only sufficient to support crops for ~4 bln people globally. There is no solution right now to synthesize enough ammonia at scale without hydrocarbons.
> [embargoes] will coerce the holdouts
We'll not get a chance to test this, but as a thought exercise let's consider how well embargoes work today. Then consider who the embargoes will be placed on from a justice perspective or from an effectiveness perspective. You are either advocating a form of colonialism in the developing world or telling your French neighbor to pay way more for heating, cooking, driving, etc. Both these things have taken place in isolation, and both had bad outcomes. Scaling it up doesn't make a good outcome any more likely.
> What's your alternative?
Rational thinking isn't defeatism - it's application _is_ the solution.
I would gently ask - very gently and politely as I would a friend - that you to re-read your initial response to my statement. You said it was "utter nonsense" and equated it to saying the earth was flat. I'm sure you can appreciate now with more data how the critique is actually the reverse. Your response to my points assumes a miraculous technological development at an indeterminant future date whose likelihood is not supported by existing efficiency improvement data. It disregards the voraciousness with which the planet is consuming fossil fuels today, the future burden forecasted by developing economies, and the insufficiency of current technologies to scale.
I empathize with your sense of hope and am similarly shocked at the risk we face as a species, but people typically do two things in the face of this shock that are equally irrational: deny global warming or believe the solution for energy transition is easy.
Bill Gates said in a talk at Stanford a few months ago that the "easy" people are a bigger barrier to decarb progress than the deniers. I don't know if I would agree in the ranking (or care), but agree that neither are helpful. The problem is enormously difficult (as befitting a planetary emergency). My view of solutions is informed the same way as my assessment of current energy use is. Seek knowledge, be rational, be very skeptical, watch out for the hucksters, support what's left over.
It does feel like Tokamak will never arrive. An acquaintance did their doctorate last year on modelling some aspect of the containment; they didn't seem hopeful.
Nuclear might have been an answer ten years ago, but one cannot make the case today that it is the answer. The raw economics have pushed nuclear out of the picture now.
Renewables + storage. For long term storage and covering rare extended dark windless periods, the key is hydrogen, for which the cost per kWh for underground storage can be far lower than for batteries (efficiency is lower, but that's ok.)
If you go to https://model.energy/ and optimize such systems in various places, using real weather data, you find nuclear (called "Dispatchable 2" in the advanced options) get optimized to 0%. It's just too expensive. That site uses plausible cost numbers, except electrolysers are already cheaper than their target cost for 2030.
They will eventually - at the moment Sun is radiating the was majority of it's energy into basically empty space. There is no reason not to put all that energy to good use by a Dyson swarm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&list=WL&index=5&...
EDIT: I mean, you guys are downvoting these comments, and I'm sorry to tell you things you don't want to hear, but would prefer that you respond with contrary information rather than downvoting. Happy to alter my views and engage in information sharing.