Open thread on climate solutions. Please try and stay within a mile or two of the overall topic.
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378 Responses to "Forced responses: Jun 2020"
Piotrsays
Re: “Engineer Poet” (34)
Piogtr: You don’t provide sources for your numbers (“the best I’ve read about”, “I recall that”), but let’s assume that you are as good an engineer as you are a poet and take your numbers at face value, and discuss only the assumptions you are making to support your claim:
1. You assume no change in the efficiency of flexible power supply technologies, such as:
“Fast-reacting fossil technologies (FRF henceforth), which includes most gas-generation technologies, Combined Heat and Power and Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle to name a few, are characterized by mid-merit order, quick ramp-up times, lower capital costs and modularity (meaning that efficiency does not fall significantly with size). They are thus particularly suitable to meet peak demand and mitigate the variability of renewables,” according to the report.” https://www.power-eng.com/2016/08/17/study-says-renewable-power-still-reliant-on-backup-from-natural-gas/#gref
Is the efficiency of those limited to 40% (number you chose for your calculations) and there is no room for improvement there ? Even the one technology you mentioned, but not used in your calculations, had 44%.
2. Your calculation assume that renewables will stay at low values. To justify this you put some numbers like “ Typical capacity factors” but again – no source, you don’t define what you mean by that, nor explain how your numbers were calculated – is this the amount of harvestable energy? amount of energy that is technologically/economically viable when competing with fossil fuel alternatives in the economic system where that the fossil fuels are allowed pollute for free?
3. You assume that surplus power from one location (e.g. where the wind currently blows) cannot be sent over the transmission lines to another location (e.g. where the wind does not blow at the moment).
4. You assume that one renewable cannot be used for the backup, at least in part, any another renewable energy – say, using wind power when the sun does not shine, vice versa, or running the water over the turbines in a dam, when there is not enough of sun and wind, and storing the water for later when there is enough of them.
5. You calculations assume there won’t be any progress in energy hydrostorage and other storage technologies nor that that we can adjust the demand, by smart grid, to run the energy-demanding uses when there is surplus of energy or by moving energy- heavy users to the locations where you have unused renewable potential (see geothermal energy in Iceland).
A change in ANY of these 5 assumptions would change the result of your calculations – and render you conclusion: “You’ve actually gone backwards from what you could do with all-fossil” – more a poetic opinion rather than an engineeringly-proven fact.
Piotr (neither Poet nor Engineer)
David B. Bensonsays
Piotr @50 — Well, its done in the state of West Australia. A description is found buried in https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/524/state-solar-pv?page=3
but the more famous case is Germany which continues to operate lignite burners in eastern Germany, maybe even built another.
However, the situation regarding natural gas as backup is described by Engineer-Poet above, #32 I think.
Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions were down in 2019 by around 33 gigatonnes after two years of increases. The IEA says that this came from a sharp decline in CO2 emissions from the power sector in advanced economies and credits the role of renewable sources (wind and solar).
You don’t provide sources for your numbers (“the best I’ve read about”, “I recall that”), but let’s assume that you are as good an engineer as you are a poet and take your numbers at face value, and discuss only the assumptions you are making to support your claim
You’ll notice that I qualified my claims. This is a subject that I hadn’t gone over closely in a while, and it caused me to revisit it in detail last night:
Can I assume that your objections have been addressed there?
1. You assume no change in the efficiency of flexible power supply technologies
This is an issue at two levels.
A. If you don’t get significant improvement in net emissions with TODAY’S technology, then it makes no sense to build RE-plus-backup systems AT ALL until that’s been addressed. See my blog post above.
B. It scarcely matters HOW efficient you make them. We’ve got to get rid of fossil fuels, period. Building new fossil-reliant 50-year capital assets just plain isn’t consistent with urgent decarbonization.
2. Your calculation assume that renewables will stay at low values.
Now you’re doing it. You use “low values” without any hint of what units those values are in or what they mean.
The problem with RE isn’t the cost, it’s the unreliability (see blog post above). Unless you have a magic wand to make the sun shine, you’re not going to do ANYTHING about low PV capacity factors. You can use trackers or bi-facial panels to even out the daily output curve, but that’s tweaking at the margins; you can’t capture energy that isn’t there. You can get some improvement in wind capacity factor using taller towers and de-rated generators (spilling energy at higher wind speeds), but you are also tweaking at the margins unless you go offshore. By forcing a switch from CCGTs to SCGTs, the efficiency loss requires an almost 30% capacity factor from your “renewables” to achieve ANY BENEFIT AT ALL. In my state, the wind capacity factor is under 25% and PV about half that.
3. You assume that surplus power from one location cannot be sent over the transmission lines to another location
Sometimes almost the entire continent of Europe is becalmed. What “other location” would that be, and would they be willing to build out enough wind power AND transmission capacity to supply far-off neighbors?
Even if you COULD do it, are you willing to have such transmission lines all over the place? Because you’d need literally a thousand or two of them to carry the US energy supply, and that’s assuming 100% capacity factor. You’d be running far less than rated capacity most of the time, so your peak power handling requirement might be 10 TW or more. This means THOUSANDS of GW-scale HVDC lines, on the order of one per mile across the USA. You up for that?
4. You assume that one renewable cannot be used for the backup, at least in part, any another renewable energy – say, using wind power when the sun does not shine, vice versa, or running the water over the turbines in a dam
There’s nowhere near enough hydro capacity in N. America to make that work, and you can only impound so much water.
5. You calculations assume there won’t be any progress in energy hydrostorage and other storage technologies
The sulfur-ion-air flow battery looks really good for stationary service. At even 30 Wh/liter it packs the volumetric energy of a hydro reservoir 11 kilometers up in the air. It’s going to take advances like that to make unreliables pull anything like their own weight. BUT: the energy density of that battery is very, very low. A 1000 gallon tank of propane holds about 96 GJ of energy when full; 1000 gallons of flow battery tank at 145 Wh/liter holds under 2 GJ; at 30 Wh/liter it holds about 0.4 GJ. We use staggering volumes fossil fuels already; now imagine multiplying those volumes by 50 to 250 for energy storage.
5. You calculations assume there won’t be any progress in energy hydrostorage and other storage technologies
You haven’t defined your terms… again. And you’re flat wrong; it looks like the advance I noted in #49 is headed for commercialization. It’s just that it’s nowhere near enough to allow full replacement of fossil fuels.
Know what is? Actinides.
A change in ANY of these 5 assumptions would change the result of your calculations
So? If it makes NO sense to be building “renewables” today given our technological limitations, why build them today? Why SUBSIDIZE the construction of stuff that isn’t actually yielding any benefit yet—and may not for some time to come, if it ever does?
We should be encouraging and subsidizing the stuff that IS yielding benefits today. That means nuclear.
nigeljsays
Clever electronic solution being used to stop Raptors flying into wind turbines:
BPL: You heard it here first, folks. Environmentalists are COMMIES! Green on the outside, but RED on the inside! The only way to stop Stalin is to build 20,000 NUKES! NUKE ‘EM TILL THEY GLOW!
And then there’s the ultimate irony, which I’ve pointed out many times:
The only actual virtually all-nuclear conversion example, the endlessly cited darling of pro-nuclear trolls, is…. France, which is unequivocally, textbook… aaaahhhh… Socialism!!
Unfortunately: “The isolated, antiquated grid of West Australia is certainly not a lesson for the majority of the world.”
Author: “David B. Benson, Transuranic [8 Blue Stars]” from the link you just gave above.
Do as I tell you not as I do?
> However, the situation regarding natural gas as backup is described by Engineer-Poet above, #32 I think.
The same Engineer-Poet IN THE SAME LINK … liked (“engineerpoet likes this”) the post about … Australian coal you dismissed as “certainly not a lesson for the majority of the world.” ???
To sum it up: on a different forum (BNC) you utterly DISMISSED the argument about Australian coal, while your friend E.Poet liked it,
and a week later on RC forum you … rely on the very same argument you rejected on BNC, while the E.Poet defended you by ignoring the Australian coal argument you brought here and he liked so much a week earlier on BNC forum?
Engineering Poetry!
> The basic point is that one cannot use simplified, linear reasoning about powering the grid.
lectures the very same person who who opened this discussion (#18) with a such non-simplified and non-linear reasoning as:
“The increase in so-called renewables has done nothing to decrease consumption of petroleum products and natural gas. “If anything the weather dependence of wind and solar has led to an increase in the use of such fuels as ‘backup’.”
Ever heard about a straw in an eye of an opponent?
Al Bundysays
EP: By forcing a switch from CCGTs to SCGTs, the efficiency loss requires an almost 30% capacity factor from your “renewables” to achieve ANY BENEFIT AT ALL
AB: Past solutions are often the wrong way to react to a forcing. Piston engines get 60% even without a bottoming cycle (combined cycle). They get to mid 60s with a bottoming cycle. My engine’s goal is to kick single cycle piston engines above combined cycle turbines at a fraction of the cost.
with a more realistic figure for the future of single cycle being 66% (my design will crack the 2/3 barrier), which makes those combined cycle power plants nearly worthless.
And yeah, wood is amazing stuff. The original windmill material. I bet the folks involved have studied the Spruce Goose.
And piston engines are scalable. A hall filled with generators can track the load while always running any individual engine at its sweet spot. Keep turning them on and off so all are always warmed up and the load is followed precisely (add some smaller generators to tweak). Cheap, reliable, and only a fraction of peaking power is lost when a generator is taken offline.
Speaking of peaks, such a hall would function as it’s own peaker plant by ramping up from “sweet spot” to “full throttle”.
So, wind and solar at double density with excess going to methanol production (way oxygenated, which vastly increases an engine’s horsepower while essentially eliminating soot and knocking NOX hard).
The methanol can be stored indefinitely. It serves heavy and long haul while acting as a liquid long-duration battery. Vehicles can serve here, too. Plug in your methanol hybrid and get paid to feed the grid on cloudy calm cold days. As a bonus, your home is heated via a heat exchanger that feeds off your car’s engine.
During an extended deficiency such as EP describes EVs become curses and methanol hybrids become heros.
Al Bundysays
Nigel,
Hmm, Condors eat carrion. Nothing like your own personal bird-whacking machine that politely stops when your dinnertime arrives. My bet is that they start nesting on turbine towers. Head out for adventure each day and return home to feast
Piotrsays
Engineer Poet (5) >You’ll notice that I qualified my claims.
Piotr: which would have been a valid defense if your claims were qualitative. But they are not – you “prove” your claim with a precisely-looking (3 significant digits) NUMBER: “you’re at 112% of the CCGT emissions figure. You’ve actually gone backwards from what you could do with all-fossil.” EP
I am not sure about Poets, but about among Engineers you don’t suggest high precision (here +/- 0.5%), when the accuracy is so poorly known (your random and systematic errors are likely to be orders of magnitude higher than +/- 0.5%).
EP: If you don’t get significant improvement in net emissions with TODAY’S technology, then it makes no sense to build RE-plus-backup systems AT ALL until that’s been addressed.
Piotr: Discussion is about the future, not about the transition time. And if want to limit the discussion to today –in many places there is a lot of UNUSED backup room, and much more MUCH GHG-effective than the “best” option you presented in your “calculation” (see the Canada’s hydro below)
EP: It scarcely matters HOW efficient you make them. We’ve got to get rid of fossil fuels, period.
Piotr: Aaa – that old deniers trope – “all or nothing” fallacy – either we give up the use of all fossil fuels, period, or do nothing. As somebody said – the perfect is an enemy of the good.
EP: Now you’re doing it. You use “low values” without any hint of what units those values are in or what they mean.
Piotr: Huh? “The units and meanings” are the same as those used by you in your calculations
EP: The problem with RE isn’t the cost, it’s the unreliability (see blog post above).
Piotr: What this has to do with my argument? I was showing that that your self-confident claims that renewables are a step “backwards” in terms of reducing GHG emissions, so you are barking the wrong tree. And from a high horse (EP: “Unless you have a magic wand”).
[Cont. in the next post]
Piotrsays
[continued from previous post re: Engineer Poet (5)]
EP: Sometimes almost the entire continent of Europe is becalmed.
Piotr: Again with that your “all or nothing” fallacy. If “the entire continent of Europe is becalmed” X% of the time, would mean for the 100-X% of the time I used wind in some locations as the backup for the other “becalmed” places, INSTEAD of burning-up gas in gas–backup installations, thus reducing my emissions correspondingly. Your calculations in (34) assume that NONE of that happens.
EP: There’s nowhere near enough hydro capacity in N. America to make [backing up one renewable with another] and you can only impound so much water.
Piotr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_Canada
Most of the Canadian hydro is used for a _base_ load, NOT as a backup. Newfoundland hasn’t developed a bigger part of its Lower Churchill because even the smaller part (Muskrat Falls) has problems with finding viable markets for its hydro-electricity – not because of its “unreliability”, but because of having to compete against natural gas, which according to the neo-liberal economic system internalizes profits and externalizes environmental costs.
EP “[quoting Piotr: 5. You calculations assume there won’t be any progress in energy hydrostorage and other storage technologies]”. Now I know that you didn’t read #49.
Piotr: What a … strange thing to say. _I_ didn’t have to read your (49) – MY comments were about your calculations in (34), where you implicitly assumed ZERO energy storage.
YOU, on the other hand, should have read your (49) – since the information in (49) blows your calculations in (34) out of the water – with reliable energy storage – WHY would you carry out your calculations assuming ZERO storage – thus requiring using gas-powered generation for back-up???
EP: You haven’t defined your terms… again. And you’re flat wrong; it looks like the advance I noted in #49 is headed for commercialization. It’s just that it’s nowhere near enough to allow full replacement of fossil fuels.
Piotr: Huh? i) Why would I need to define for YOU the terms YOU were using in YOUR calculations in (32)?
ii) How could I be “flat wrong” about things … I didn’t claim (I didn’t claim that energy storage was NOT viable – QUITE THE OPPOSITE – I argued that progress in the energy storage would REDUCE the need for the fossil-fuel backup and therefore render your “calculations” assuming ZERO storage, and cocnlusions based on that – wrong].
iii) Your “full replacement” is the … third “all or nothing” fallacy in your single post. If you like them apples, you like them a lot, eh? ;-)
I can see a “Poet” (licencia poetica galore), but are you sure about that “Engineer” part?
Another example of E-P’s amazing ability to get the math right but the logic so, so wrong.
Typical capacity factors for wind are 30-40%; PV is much lower. If you’re getting 30% of your juice from “renewables”, and you’re burning at least 38% more fuel per kWh to get the rest, you’re saving less than 3.3% from the CCGT emissions figure.
Though this statement does not make its underlying assumptions very clear, and is thus a little challenging to parse, it could pretty clearly *only* be true if you were expecting 100% RE and getting 30% due to ‘capacity factor’, because that’s the only case in which you’d have nothing else but RE and SCGTs. (You’d also be an idiot, because apparently you’d be operating a power grid without understanding the concept of ‘capacity factor’, but let that pass.)
In the real world, I don’t think any attempt to do this kind of BOTE calculation works, because fundamentally one must address the time element. Some considerations:
–Demand curve: PV output is relatively predictable on daily timescales, and lines up tolerably well, typically, with daily usage (the main issue typically being the ‘duck curve’ in the evening, though this varies regionally and seasonally.) Hence, you don’t need everything to ramp within 30 minutes or less.
–Forecasting: wind and sun are variable, but as I’ve pointed out before, they are also forecastable to a useful degree. That means that you don’t everything to ramp within 30 minutes or less. As in point #1 above, it also means that in anything like a real-world case, a lot of the time you won’t be using SCGTs.
–Interconnections: Many SOs have considerable ability to import (or export) power as needed. So, once again, this eliminates some of the need for fast-ramping SCGTs and the like.
–Storage: Although elsewhere in the same comment, the utility and increasing practicality of storage is acknowledged, suddenly it is nowhere to be found in this analysis. But it’s increasingly present in the real world, vastly outperforms SCGTs in load following, and is also increasingly displacing SCGTs on economic grounds in either stand-alone or ‘RE-plus’ developments. That’s a feature of reality now; it ought to be a larger feature of any future-oriented analysis.
I could go on, but the point is, I think, sufficiently demonstrated already. You need to get much more granular than simply misapplying CF to reach a predetermined conclusion via what is essentially cherry-picking one’s assumptions.
That’s on a route involving a 22-nautical mile round trip.
nigeljsays
This new research suggests most of the economic loss from Hurricane Harvey can be attributed to the effects of climate change, based on an attribution study of the hurricane. This is much higher than previous estimates using a top down approach:
@6nigelj it’s useful to give us more about the story, to help us properly evaluate it. Here’s the relevant quote that I found:
“The system Martin devised is based on two principles: Know if a bird is coming, and make sure blades aren’t spinning when it arrives.”
Thus further reducing the capacity factor of the turbines and making the power less predictable than it already is. And electronics and computers have been known to give false positives and false negatives. @piotr 1 please take note.
How many levels of bandages and bandaids are we willing to apply to make unreliable electricity generators stable instead of building stable nuclear fission plants?
It’s really funny when someone sputters about thoughtcrime and tries to use guilt-by-association, and succeeds only at making himself ridiculous. You realize that you CAN quote in detail here, and spell out logical errors and contradictions precisely?
FWIW, what I “liked” about that post was that it spelled out where the problems in the “renewable” paradigm were appearing. As I wrote just a short time ago, “Now, don’t let it be said that there aren’t ways around this. With enough excess RE capacity you can just brute-force the issue by dumping excess power to resistance heaters in a CCGT’s gas turbines, substituting electricity for fossil fuel and managing the rapid power swings on the demand side.” The problem is that nobody is willing to ACKNOWLEDGE that these things are problems and need solutions.
AB: Past solutions are often the wrong way to react to a forcing. Piston engines get 60% even without a bottoming cycle (combined cycle).
No they don’t. Best heat rate for a RICE generator is around 8100 BTU/kWh LHV; that’s about 42% (considerably lower for methane or hydrogen based on HHV). The Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C scrapes past 50% efficiency, but not by much. It does this in part by being so large (very low cylinder wall heat losses) and running so slow that combustion is close to constant-volume. Stationary RICE generators run much faster and are much smaller. They also have much higher capital cost than gas turbines.
A hall filled with generators can track the load while always running any individual engine at its sweet spot.
At 42% efficiency you’re burning almost 60% more fuel than a CCGT operating at 64%. You can go a LONG way off the CCGT’s sweet spot before you’re emitting as much as the RICE. Worse, the planet cannot even take the emissions of the CCGT; we need to go to negative net emissions to the tune of roughly a trillion tons of CO2 from the present day.
So, wind and solar at double density with excess going to methanol production
Made how, with carbon from where?
(way oxygenated, which vastly increases an engine’s horsepower while essentially eliminating soot and knocking NOX hard).
My time in automotive taught me that the way to slash NOx was to DE-oxygenate the combustion air. This was done with EGR and limited combustion temperatures by preventing hot spots; the diluted oxygen content could not burn at a high enough temperature to create much NOx.
I am personally a fan of methanol. It is a great energy storage medium and has a high flame speed which yields high efficiency in an ICE. You can also thermo-catalytically decompose it to CO+H2, which also has a high flame speed and reclaims thermal energy in exhaust gas to chemical energy.
Engineer Poet (5) >You’ll notice that I qualified my claims.
Piotr: which would have been a valid defense if your claims were qualitative. But they are not – you “prove” your claim with a precisely-looking (3 significant digits) NUMBER: “you’re at 112% of the CCGT emissions figure. You’ve actually gone backwards from what you could do with all-fossil.” EP
I am not sure about Poets, but about among Engineers you don’t suggest high precision (here +/- 0.5%), when the accuracy is so poorly known
Perhaps this is unclear to you. I stated assumptions, and went to conclusions based on those assuumptions. I then revised those assumptions based on current technology and confirmed that the conclusions were still correct, differing only in minor details.
I note that you have no specific objections to my conclusions; it’s all hand-waving.
Discussion is about the future, not about the transition time. And if want to limit the discussion to today –in many places there is a lot of UNUSED backup room, and much more MUCH GHG-effective than the “best” option you presented in your “calculation” (see the Canada’s hydro below)
Be specific. Quebec’s hydro is adequate for its 8.4 million, but grossly inadequate for N. America’s 350+ million. Ontario only gets by with 60+% from CANDUs compared to about 20% from “hydro”. I visited an Ontario campground when the electric power was announced as “hydro” as if it all came from that. Even then, it didn’t.
Aaa – that old deniers trope – “all or nothing” fallacy – either we give up the use of all fossil fuels, period, or do nothing. As somebody said – the perfect is an enemy of the good.
Wrong. We have to get to something like -100% of current FF emissions for some decades, or our environment is FUCKED. Exactly HOW we do this isn’t relevant, but we HAVE to do this or our world will be rendered unrecognizeable and substantially unliveable. But either you admit that this must be done, or accept the consequences of not doing it.
I was showing that that your self-confident claims that renewables are a step “backwards” in terms of reducing GHG emissions, so you are barking the wrong tree.
You address exactly none of the engineering issues. GFY.
Gonna address @14 after some sleep.
Piotrsays
Andrew Jaremko says: (19) “@piotr 1 please take note”
He saw a tree, he missed the forest? “Neither viewpoint captures the full picture, because the debate is complicated by a looming factor: If climate change continues apace, hundreds of North American bird species’ ranges will shrink by at least half by 2100”
P.S. Out of curiosity, which of my 5 points about the value of the calculations by @Eng.P. (34) is falsified by your entry?
Engineer Poet: “Piotr amuses me greatly @8”, “Piotr gets cranky @13:” Editorializing … the reference calls. How classy.
E-P: You realize that you CAN quote in detail here, and spell out logical errors and contradictions precisely?
You realize I DID? “Piotr amuses [Engineer Poet] greatly @8″ by writing to David Benson:
” To sum it up: on a different forum (BNC) you utterly DISMISSED the argument about Australian coal [“The isolated, antiquated grid of West Australia is certainly not a lesson for the majority of the world.”], while your friend E-P “liked” it. And a week later on RC forum, you … rely on the very same [W.A. coal] argument you rejected on BNC, while E-P defended you by … ignoring [your coal argument].”
Engineer Poet reads the above and concludes: “It’s really funny when someone sputters about thoughtcrime and tries to use guilt-by-association, and succeeds only at making himself ridiculous. You realize that you CAN quote in detail here, and spell out logical errors and contradictions precisely?” E-P
This new research suggests most of the economic loss from Hurricane Harvey can be attributed to the effects of climate change, based on an attribution study of the hurricane. This is much higher than previous estimates using a top down approach:
Heh. Ninja’d by Nigel! I’m surprised he didn’t mention the other peer-reviewed article by the same authors, about attribution of the costs of extreme weather in New Zealand. I learned about both articles from a guest post by the authors on The Carbon Brief. The authors’ “bottom up” approach contrasts with “top-down” integrated assessment models, which they claim consistently produce under-estimates. WRT Hurricane Harvey, the Carbon Brief guest post says:
The results are striking: we estimate that around US$67bn of the Hurricane’s overall US$90bn are associated with climate change.
Estimates of the financial cost of AGW underpin arguments for carbon pricing. The Carbon Brief post concludes
The main significance of our new work is less in the exact numbers and more in the ability to link, more forensically, human influence on the climate to the economic impacts of disasters.
I recommend the full post.
Piotrsays
Engineer Poet (23): “Piotr gets cranky @13 Perhaps this is unclear to you. I stated assumptions, and went to conclusions based on those assuumptions.”
You mean: ;-)
E-P:I note that you have no specific objections to my conclusions; it’s all hand-waving.
where by “no specific objections” and “hand-waving” you mean … listing 5 assumptions you didn’t state (see my posts: (1), (13) and (14)) and noting that even if one of them is not met – your calculation and conclusion built on them – become meaningless?
> Be specific. Quebec’s hydro is adequate for its 8.4 million, but grossly inadequate for N. America’s 350+ million.
Huh? This discussion is about the BACKUP for renewables NOT, not about providing BASE LOAD (to which giving population numbers apply to).
> Wrong. We have to get to something like -100% of current FF emissions for some decades, or our environment is FUCKED.
That’s the all or nothing fallacy I was talking about: for the sake of the perfect (“-100%” of current FF) – you are attacking the good (reduction of the emissions by the renewables). There is no magic wand that will bring you to your goal (“-100%” of current FF”) – the reductions would have to be done by a combination of various actions – decreasing power demand, getting rid of the most polluting technologies first, and increasing the non-FF sources. There is enough opposition to the reduction of the FF use even without the in-fighting within the non-FF camp.
E-P: Exactly HOW we do this isn’t relevant
and … that’s why you joined this discussion to defend David Benson’s attacks on wind?
E-P: You address exactly none of the engineering issues.
by “none” you mean my questioning of the 5 assumptions your calculations have implicitly made? With unfulfillment of even one of them rendering your calculation meaningless or in fact misleading since they pretend to be what they are not – of high accuracy (+/- 0.5%), when violating of even one of your implicit assumptions could change your results by an order of magnitude more than your implied accuracy.
E-P: GFY.
your “GFY” stands for “Go Fuck Yourself”? Cute. Nice talking to you too.
I visited an Ontario campground when the electric power was announced as “hydro” as if it all came from that. Even then, it didn’t.
Yes, that is the idiomatic name for electric power in Ontario, as I’ve discussed before on this forum. It exists because originally all the electric generation in Ontario *was* literally ‘hydro’–starting at Niagara Falls in 1882.
Yes, previously cited by BPL; unsuccessfully debunked by E-P; the attempted debunking rebutted by me; and then implicitly ignored by E-P in another context, thus inducing a re-citation by BPL.
Seems to be a pattern here. Will we repeat the cycle?
David B. Bensonsays
Barton Paul Levenson @25 — I know of 4 excellent pumped hydro sites in the greater Pacific Northwest region. None can find financing.
David B. Bensonsays
Piotr @8 — I simply observed two grids that continue to build coal and lignite, basically burnable dirt. I don’t approve, just notice. Further, you stated nothing about Germany.
If you wish to actually understand the grid some study is required. I’ve suggested some sources. As it is, you appear to merely be sputtering, sorry.
Again with that your “all or nothing” fallacy. If “the entire continent of Europe is becalmed” X% of the time, would mean for the 100-X% of the time I used wind in some locations as the backup for the other “becalmed” places, INSTEAD of burning-up gas in gas–backup installations, thus reducing my emissions correspondingly.
What part of “fossil fuels have to be left in the ground” don’t you understand? If you need ANY fossil fuels, you’ve failed. We not only need to get rid of them, we need to remove OTOO 1 trillion tons of atmospheric CO2 from past emissions.
Most of the Canadian hydro is used for a _base_ load, NOT as a backup. Newfoundland hasn’t developed a bigger part of its Lower Churchill because even the smaller part (Muskrat Falls) has problems with finding viable markets for its hydro-electricity
It’s enough to serve the locals, but Newfoundland and Labrador have a combined population of only 536,000. The total N. American population is almost 1000x that. Even if there was enough water, who’d tolerate a thousand HVDC lines fanning out from Newfoundland and Quebec all over the continent?
Electrofuels such as electromethane might be the way forwards for longer term energy storage (days to months) to deal with renewable intermittency issues, according to research by Lund et alia. This has dramatically lower costs than battery storage and pumped hydro.
Though this statement does not make its underlying assumptions very clear, and is thus a little challenging to parse, it could pretty clearly *only* be true if you were expecting 100% RE and getting 30% due to ‘capacity factor’
No, that’s not it at all, and if you’re still not grasping the concept it’s either because (a) you’re missing some key concept, (b) you’re somehow the victim of a misconception, or (c) you’re being disingenuous.
For those who might be truly unclear on the concept, I’ll start at the beginning. ALL our energy systems rely on stockpiled energy to make them reliable. Piles of coal, tanks of petroleum, underground stores of crude oil and natural gas, water held behind dams, and uranium rods in nuclear reactors are the biggest ones. Batteries currently hold an almost insignificant part of this stockpiled energy.
The main feature of the “renewables”, meaning wind and PV, is that they have NO stockpiled energy to draw on. When the flow of energy that feeds them stops due to calm or night, they also stop. They can only produce electricity with the energy that goes their way, so if it suddenly surges or fades so does their output. But our civilization requires reliable power, so the “renewables” require backup. Backup from something WITH a stockpile. And where the push for “renewables” has created issues like the “duck curve” as the sun sets while demand surges to the evening peak, that backup also has to be able to ramp very fast. On large grids the go-to sources for such ramping are hydro if available, then open-cycle gas turbines, and reciprocating engines at the margins. The steam sections of CCGTs get thermal shock if they try to follow such rapid swings, and of course nuclear doesn’t like to change power quickly at all, at least in thermal-spectrum reactors; you get phenomena like the “iodine pit” if you have to reduce power by a large degree and not power back up for a while.
Since “renewables” outsource their stockpiling to fossil plants, the requirement for less-efficient, faster-ramping gas plants is problematic. It defeats the alleged purpose of using renewables in the first place.
that’s the only case in which you’d have nothing else but RE and SCGTs.
Wrong. You could have a strong nuclear base-load component, but because it really works best at constant power it puts GREATER emphasis on the fossil-fired ramping capabilities. The only way to kill that problem is to have some substantial share of DSM, which we are notoriously slow in doing.
–Demand curve: PV output is relatively predictable on daily timescales, and lines up tolerably well, typically, with daily usage
Not even close. The SoCal evening demand peak falls at or after sunset.
in anything like a real-world case, a lot of the time you won’t be using SCGTs.
IIUC, California forced the shutdown of all its CCGT plants because they were located seaside and used seawater for their condensers. This was part and parcel of forcing the closure of Diablo Canyon. The people responsible are environmental criminals, of course.
–Storage: Although elsewhere in the same comment, the utility and increasing practicality of storage is acknowledged, suddenly it is nowhere to be found in this analysis. But it’s increasingly present in the real world
In truly piddling quantity. As I noted in the other thread, we have a potential game-changer on our hands. I’ve said before that week-long electric power storage requires cost OTOO $7/kWh, and here we have something where the active material costs about $1/kWh (Sadoway’s “batteries made from dirt” become real, considerably cheaper than solar-salt thermal storage). These could create some impressive energy stockpiles, but these are not commercial yet. But for wind and PV to be the mainstays of our economy, those stockpiles must be truly immense. As in, sized for winter seasonal deficits for solar.
The densest energy stockpiles we have are uranium fuel rods. One lousy ton of them can yield 35 gigawatt-days of heat before replacement. They don’t emit any GHGs or criteria air pollutants. And they don’t chop up endangered birds, take farmland out of production, or get impaired by mere bad weather.
Practically unusable at an acceptable ecological cost. Those are almost all oceanside locations. They would be forced to use saltwater, pumped up high onto land. If you think saline infiltration due to groundwater consumption is bad in Florida, just think what the devastation would be from the wholesale dieoff of vegetation where seawater replaced fresh groundwater on high ground and everywhere below.
Omega Centaurisays
One thing I see missing from this discussion. Recent proposals/studies of 100% renewable grid propose significant overcapacity of the renewables component. Given the declining cost curves especially for solar this makes sense. If a typical cloudy day cuts PV generation to 33%, and you have three times overbuild, you are completely covered. Grid operators and utilities are good at making tradeoffs, they will optimize the amounts of different generation technologies, and te locations of them to minimize overall costs and/or improve reliability.
Current, utility scale plants are already being built with overcapacity, a plant designed to output a hundred MW, is being outfitted with enough panels to generate 150MW during ideal conditions, with the excess being either curtailed or stored. So output during non-ideal gen times is considerably more robust than it would have been without the excess.
It is becoming common for PV plants to be economical with four hours storage of Lithium-Ion batteries. As battery prices drop, the sweetpoint is expected to reach 8hours. And then we have other gravitational storage schemes which are now being tested at scale. Overbuilding plus storage advances changes the game.
David B. Bensonsays
Omega Centauri @39 — Approximately and I suppose depending on the grid, about 70% of the maximum load is omnipresent, called baseload. For this portion it used to be economic to use thermal and steady generators; nuclear power plants are the lo-carbon variety.
But because solar PV is now so inexpensive, https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/524/state-solar-pv
the solar farms outcompete other forms of generation in the mid-part of sunny days, forming the famous ‘California duck curve’. This is hard for nuclear power plants, which need to run flat out.
While you’re smirking, a mountain of proof is accumulating that everything I’ve been saying for years is true. It’s coming true right now, before your very eyes:
This discussion is about the BACKUP for renewables NOT, not about providing BASE LOAD
Your wind and PV are capable of providing maybe 50% coverage, without massive storage. If your base load is not hydro or nuclear, it must be fossil.
That’s the all or nothing fallacy I was talking about: for the sake of the perfect (“-100%” of current FF) – you are attacking the good (reduction of the emissions by the renewables).
The second climate error we make is mathematical in nature. Who here believes that if we were to eliminate all new emissions across every sector that that would fix climate change? It won’t even slow it down. You heard me correctly. Zero emissions globally in every single sector: electricity, transportation, agriculture, industry, heat, and you would not even notice a difference.
Watch the whole thing.
There is no magic wand that will bring you to your goal (“-100%” of current FF”) – the reductions would have to be done by a combination of various actions – decreasing power demand, getting rid of the most polluting technologies first, and increasing the non-FF sources. There is enough opposition to the reduction of the FF use even without the in-fighting within the non-FF camp.
FF use has continued to grow on an exponential curve despite all “reductions” through adoption of “renewables”. It has especially gone up in the “developing” world. I’m not the least bit averse to lifeboat ethics, to declaring the third world un-salvageable and cutting it off to deal with its own fate. Cutting off industrial exports would disable anything relying on heavy industry and the FF emissions there would collapse. So would so much else, including the population—but they failed to adopt family planning when it mattered, and they’re going to suffer the consequences with or without us. I prefer without.
that’s why you joined this discussion to defend David Benson’s attacks on wind?
I attack wind because, absent some major changes in technology and policy, wind not only won’t do the job, it won’t help at all. It’s a total waste of time, money and effort that could have gone to things that DO work.
by “none” you mean my questioning of the 5 assumptions your calculations have implicitly made?
So spell out the implications (rather, assumptions you believe I made) and show how they’re wrong. Stop hand-waving.
Electrofuels such as electromethane might be the way forwards for longer term energy storage (days to months) to deal with renewable intermittency issues
Methane has some serious downsides. First, it is an extraordinarily stable molecule; its heat of formation is quite high, so the losses in its synthesis are high. This means that the round-trip losses in systems using synthetic methane will be quite high. Second, it’s a strong greenhouse gas. Leaks are going to defeat the purpose of going to carbon-neutral fuels.
Methanol has its own drawbacks, but none of those of methane.
Piotrsays
David Benson (34): “ I simply observed two grids that continue to build coal and lignite, basically burnable dirt. I don’t approve, just notice.”
No, that’s not not what you have done. Let me help you:
1. You began by dismissing the “so-called renewables” IN GENERAL:
“The increase in so-called renewables has done nothing to decrease consumption of petroleum products and natural gas. If anything the weather dependence of wind and solar has led to an increase in the use of such fuels as ‘backup’.” David B. Benson (May thread)
2. When I challenged it – you answered by … shifting your own argument from “petroleum products and natural gas” to … “coal”, and as an example, you chose West Australia: “Well, its done in the state of West Australia. David B. Benson (2)
3. Yes, the same West Australia about which in your OWN link you say:
“The isolated, antiquated grid of West Australia is certainly not a lesson for the majority of the world.”
In other words – you made a GENERAL dismissal of the “so-called renewables”,
and then to save your face – you changed the discussion to coal and chose the one example you are on records as saying that it is not applicable “to the majority of the world’.
4. And after ALL THAT you lecture me: “you appear to merely be sputtering, sorry” David B. Benson (34)
By their arguments you shall know them. Ladies and Gentlemen: David B. Benson.
===
Piotr
One thing I see missing from this discussion. Recent proposals/studies of 100% renewable grid propose significant overcapacity of the renewables component. Given the declining cost curves especially for solar this makes sense. If a typical cloudy day cuts PV generation to 33%, and you have three times overbuild, you are completely covered.
So instead of covering 5 km² with PV at 20% best-day CF to average 1 GW, you propose to cover 15 km² instead? Where are you going to get this 15 km² to put so much PV? It’s not like there isn’t already stuff there unless you’re only covering roofs, you’re taking it away from something else. Zen aphorism: “You cannot do just one thing.”
Current, utility scale plants are already being built with overcapacity, a plant designed to output a hundred MW, is being outfitted with enough panels to generate 150MW during ideal conditions, with the excess being either curtailed or stored.
An option I’ve never heard of anyone implementing yet: useful dump loads. Produce stuff with both feedstocks and products that store cheaply. So far, nothing has popped up on my radar.
It is becoming common for PV plants to be economical with four hours storage of Lithium-Ion batteries. As battery prices drop, the sweetpoint is expected to reach 8hours.
IMO we’d be better off putting those batteries into vehicles and dumping excess electricity to them to displace petroleum. There are better solutions for stationary storage.
And then we have other gravitational storage schemes which are now being tested at scale. Overbuilding plus storage advances changes the game.
Gravity is the weakest of the 4 fundamental forces. It requires too much material to scale to the required degree.
Storage advances change all kinds of games. Among other things, cheap/compact enough storage turns nuclear’s “inability to follow RE” into “can follow RE and also charge max price during peak hours, and be there with far better reliability”.
This is where I see the $1/kWh aqueous sulfur-air flow battery going. It requires a small fraction of the area/volume of pumped hydro (gravity) storage, and is not dependent on geography or rainfall. If it’s relatively efficient it looks like it will become the go-to solution for medium-term (10 to 150 hours) electric storage. Given the ability to exchange spent liquids for fresh ones quickly, it might even become a factor in both rail and road surface transport. The thing is, you’ve got to have a reliable source of energy to guarantee that your storage (stockpile) is filled when you need it. Nuclear can guarantee that. Are you really willing to devote 15 km² or more to PV to achieve what you can get with a fraction of a km² of nuclear plant?
You have obviously made a significant change to the buffering system. It has long been that the static page took way long to update even after comments were approved, but if you were a participant you could bypass that delay by saving the moderation hash URL to load the latest.
That doesn’t work anymore. The latest exchange took THREE DAYS for new comments to be visible, however distributed between moderators taking their time and lags in the system (I can’t tell which, obviously). Can you PLEASE back out the changes until you can de-bottleneck the software bottlenecks?
nigeljsays
EP @38 says “Practically unusable (pumped hydro sites) at an acceptable ecological cost. Those are almost all oceanside locations. They would be forced to use saltwater….”
Hmmm EP might need new glasses, because the map in the link shows the majority or the potential pumped hydro sites being inland, sited in what looks like hilly and mountainous areas, and the text mentions they were “off river sites”.
However I have nothing against nuclear power as such. We have a lot of different energy options and costs are not ridiculous as various people have noted. The real problems are how to get a rapid change from existing fossil fuel generation to zero carbon alternatives, and that looks like it’s more of a motivational and political headache.
Killiansays
Years and years of yapping on these pages and still you can’t seem to grasp that FIRST you must understand what “regenerative” means, and is, and accept those limits.
It is *only* within that context that any of this matters.
You are collectively spitting in the wind.
It *is* OK to discuss secondary and tertiary (and beyond) issues, but only from the understanding of what, with no caveats, “regenerative” means.
Yapping is a waste of precious time, children. Stop it. We don’t have the time you think we have. We barely have the time *I* think we have.
Stop wasting these pages. Get back to the First Law, as it were, of regenerative fka sustainable systems: What are regenerative systems? Trust me, not one of you has a clue, though a few have a partial clue. If you did, you would be starting from First Principles not tertiary and beyond issues.
On risks:
…professor Will Steffen (pictured) told Voice of Action that there was already a chance we have triggered a “global tipping cascade” that would take us to a less habitable “Hothouse Earth” climate, regardless of whether we reduced emissions.
Steffen says it would take 30 years at best (more likely 40-60 years) to transition to net zero emissions…
“Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse,” said Steffen.
…“The evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute.”
…
Johan Rockström, the head of one of Europe’s leading research institutes, warned in 2019 that in a 4°C-warmer world it would be “difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that…
Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading authorities on climate change, said that if we continue down the present path “there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up… over the last two thousand years.”
Schellnhuber said… stay[ing] below 1.5°C of warming was “slightly dishonest” because it relies on immense negative emissions (pulling CO2 out of the air) which was not viable… but it was still possible to stay under 2°C with massive changes to society. [Emphasis mine.]
If we don’t bend the emissions curve down substantially before 2030 then keeping temperatures under 2°C becomes unavoidable. …to hold warming below 2°C, emissions would need to be cut in half between 2020 and 2030.
EP (35): “What part of “fossil fuels have to be left in the ground” don’t you understand. If you need ANY fossil fuels, you’ve failed.”
Piotr: “f you need ANY fossil fuels, you’ve failed” is a DIFFERENT example of your “all or nothing fallacy”. In the post you comment (14), I talked about your *either wind blows 100% of time or nothing” fallacy (see (14))
EP (35): “Piotr(14): “Most of the Canadian hydro is used for a _base_ load, NOT as a backup.” It’s enough to serve the locals, but Newfoundland and Labrador have a combined population of only 536,000.”
Sheesh – which part of distinction between provided BASELOAD and providing BACK-UP for wind and solar you don’t understand? Serving “536,000 locals”: that’s BASE LOAD, not BACKUP.
And a déjà vu, because I made _the same point_ (28), when you were mixing baseload with backup not for NL, but for Quebec, I quote:
E-P “Quebec’s hydro is adequate for its 8.4 million, but grossly inadequate for N. America’s 350+ million”.
Piotr (28): Huh? This discussion is about the BACKUP for renewables NOT, not about providing BASE LOAD (to which giving population numbers apply to).
Or in a symbolic notation:
—-
Piotr: A
E-P: But B is small.
Piotr: We are talking about A, and NOT about B!
E-P But B is too small! And I have done calculations to prove it!
—
E-P: I do preliminary analyses all the time, while you haven’t shown one calculation yet.
Piotr: I don’t have to – to falsify your claims – it is enough to show flaws in yours. And I have done it again and again:
– I have shown that in your calculations you have made at least 5 unspoken assumptions and violating even one of them – would change your “results”
– I have shown that you don’t understand the posts you comment – in the discussion about using hydro as the BACKUP energy to fill in when other renewables are not enough, you keep talking how hydro is not enough to provide … BASELOAD for N. America
– to your patronizing: “You realize that you CAN quote in detail here, and spell out logical errors and contradictions precisely?” I have shown you that I quoted , and spelled out logical errors and contradictions – in very same post in which were lecturring me] see Piotr (26)]
etc. etc. etc.
E-P: Then there’s the little matter of my sheepskin.
“Little” is the operative word here. The value of a diploma is shown in the quality of the arguments of the graduate. See your posts above, or the value of of the doctorate of “Dr Robert Bradley” from the parallel thread (the guy makes up a number for a rhetorical effect and makes logical errors even a child from an elementary school shouldn’t do? (see: (15) in (https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/06/2040/#comments)
By their posts, not their sheepskins, you should know them.
David B. Bensonsays
Regarding synthetic methane, from #42: natural gas is simply slightly impure methane. There is plenty of experience with piping and storing it. Nonetheless, what I observe is simply https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/718/hydrogen-fuel
in which many are seriously supporting hydrogen as a natural gas replacement, including just using the existing pipelines. If this works there’s no need for the water shift reaction.
Piotrsays
E-P (45): “The latest exchange took THREE DAYS for new comments to be visible.”
The lady doth protest too much. After all – you ended your argument before the hiatus on the high note:
“You address exactly none of the engineering issues. GFY.”
Engineer Poet
Re: “Engineer Poet” (34)
Piogtr: You don’t provide sources for your numbers (“the best I’ve read about”, “I recall that”), but let’s assume that you are as good an engineer as you are a poet and take your numbers at face value, and discuss only the assumptions you are making to support your claim:
1. You assume no change in the efficiency of flexible power supply technologies, such as:
“Fast-reacting fossil technologies (FRF henceforth), which includes most gas-generation technologies, Combined Heat and Power and Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle to name a few, are characterized by mid-merit order, quick ramp-up times, lower capital costs and modularity (meaning that efficiency does not fall significantly with size). They are thus particularly suitable to meet peak demand and mitigate the variability of renewables,” according to the report.”
https://www.power-eng.com/2016/08/17/study-says-renewable-power-still-reliant-on-backup-from-natural-gas/#gref
Is the efficiency of those limited to 40% (number you chose for your calculations) and there is no room for improvement there ? Even the one technology you mentioned, but not used in your calculations, had 44%.
2. Your calculation assume that renewables will stay at low values. To justify this you put some numbers like “ Typical capacity factors” but again – no source, you don’t define what you mean by that, nor explain how your numbers were calculated – is this the amount of harvestable energy? amount of energy that is technologically/economically viable when competing with fossil fuel alternatives in the economic system where that the fossil fuels are allowed pollute for free?
3. You assume that surplus power from one location (e.g. where the wind currently blows) cannot be sent over the transmission lines to another location (e.g. where the wind does not blow at the moment).
4. You assume that one renewable cannot be used for the backup, at least in part, any another renewable energy – say, using wind power when the sun does not shine, vice versa, or running the water over the turbines in a dam, when there is not enough of sun and wind, and storing the water for later when there is enough of them.
5. You calculations assume there won’t be any progress in energy hydrostorage and other storage technologies nor that that we can adjust the demand, by smart grid, to run the energy-demanding uses when there is surplus of energy or by moving energy- heavy users to the locations where you have unused renewable potential (see geothermal energy in Iceland).
A change in ANY of these 5 assumptions would change the result of your calculations – and render you conclusion: “You’ve actually gone backwards from what you could do with all-fossil” – more a poetic opinion rather than an engineeringly-proven fact.
Piotr (neither Poet nor Engineer)
Piotr @50 — Well, its done in the state of West Australia. A description is found buried in
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/524/state-solar-pv?page=3
but the more famous case is Germany which continues to operate lignite burners in eastern Germany, maybe even built another.
However, the situation regarding natural gas as backup is described by Engineer-Poet above, #32 I think.
The basic point is that one cannot use simplified, linear reasoning about powering the grid. See
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/714/pjm-style-electricity-markets
for a short course reading.
Pending the new FR thread, here’s some welcome news about 2019:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/17/good-news-usa-has-largest-co2-reduction-in-the-world/
And on the electrification of transport front, the Tesla Semi is about to enter production:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/06/10/volume-production-of-tesla-semi-about-to-start-leaked-email-from-elon-musk-confirmed/
Given the dependence of American supply chains on diesel trucks and the carbon footprint thereof, this is a big deal.
Wrote Piotr @52:
You’ll notice that I qualified my claims. This is a subject that I hadn’t gone over closely in a while, and it caused me to revisit it in detail last night:
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2020/06/why-renewables-arent-solution-to-our.html
Can I assume that your objections have been addressed there?
This is an issue at two levels.
A. If you don’t get significant improvement in net emissions with TODAY’S technology, then it makes no sense to build RE-plus-backup systems AT ALL until that’s been addressed. See my blog post above.
B. It scarcely matters HOW efficient you make them. We’ve got to get rid of fossil fuels, period. Building new fossil-reliant 50-year capital assets just plain isn’t consistent with urgent decarbonization.
Now you’re doing it. You use “low values” without any hint of what units those values are in or what they mean.
The problem with RE isn’t the cost, it’s the unreliability (see blog post above). Unless you have a magic wand to make the sun shine, you’re not going to do ANYTHING about low PV capacity factors. You can use trackers or bi-facial panels to even out the daily output curve, but that’s tweaking at the margins; you can’t capture energy that isn’t there. You can get some improvement in wind capacity factor using taller towers and de-rated generators (spilling energy at higher wind speeds), but you are also tweaking at the margins unless you go offshore. By forcing a switch from CCGTs to SCGTs, the efficiency loss requires an almost 30% capacity factor from your “renewables” to achieve ANY BENEFIT AT ALL. In my state, the wind capacity factor is under 25% and PV about half that.
Sometimes almost the entire continent of Europe is becalmed. What “other location” would that be, and would they be willing to build out enough wind power AND transmission capacity to supply far-off neighbors?
Even if you COULD do it, are you willing to have such transmission lines all over the place? Because you’d need literally a thousand or two of them to carry the US energy supply, and that’s assuming 100% capacity factor. You’d be running far less than rated capacity most of the time, so your peak power handling requirement might be 10 TW or more. This means THOUSANDS of GW-scale HVDC lines, on the order of one per mile across the USA. You up for that?
There’s nowhere near enough hydro capacity in N. America to make that work, and you can only impound so much water.
Now I know that you didn’t read #49.
The sulfur-ion-air flow battery looks really good for stationary service. At even 30 Wh/liter it packs the volumetric energy of a hydro reservoir 11 kilometers up in the air. It’s going to take advances like that to make unreliables pull anything like their own weight. BUT: the energy density of that battery is very, very low. A 1000 gallon tank of propane holds about 96 GJ of energy when full; 1000 gallons of flow battery tank at 145 Wh/liter holds under 2 GJ; at 30 Wh/liter it holds about 0.4 GJ. We use staggering volumes fossil fuels already; now imagine multiplying those volumes by 50 to 250 for energy storage.
You haven’t defined your terms… again. And you’re flat wrong; it looks like the advance I noted in #49 is headed for commercialization. It’s just that it’s nowhere near enough to allow full replacement of fossil fuels.
Know what is? Actinides.
So? If it makes NO sense to be building “renewables” today given our technological limitations, why build them today? Why SUBSIDIZE the construction of stuff that isn’t actually yielding any benefit yet—and may not for some time to come, if it ever does?
We should be encouraging and subsidizing the stuff that IS yielding benefits today. That means nuclear.
Clever electronic solution being used to stop Raptors flying into wind turbines:
https://www.audubon.org/magazine/spring-2018/how-new-technology-making-wind-farms-safer-birds
BPL #53 From UV, on topic here
And then there’s the ultimate irony, which I’ve pointed out many times:
The only actual virtually all-nuclear conversion example, the endlessly cited darling of pro-nuclear trolls, is…. France, which is unequivocally, textbook… aaaahhhh… Socialism!!
Go figure, as they say…
David B. Benson (2) “Well, its done in the state of West Australia. A description is found buried in https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/524/state-solar-pv?page=3
Unfortunately: “The isolated, antiquated grid of West Australia is certainly not a lesson for the majority of the world.”
Author: “David B. Benson, Transuranic [8 Blue Stars]” from the link you just gave above.
Do as I tell you not as I do?
> However, the situation regarding natural gas as backup is described by Engineer-Poet above, #32 I think.
The same Engineer-Poet IN THE SAME LINK … liked (“engineerpoet likes this”) the post about … Australian coal you dismissed as “certainly not a lesson for the majority of the world.” ???
To sum it up: on a different forum (BNC) you utterly DISMISSED the argument about Australian coal, while your friend E.Poet liked it,
and a week later on RC forum you … rely on the very same argument you rejected on BNC, while the E.Poet defended you by ignoring the Australian coal argument you brought here and he liked so much a week earlier on BNC forum?
Engineering Poetry!
> The basic point is that one cannot use simplified, linear reasoning about powering the grid.
lectures the very same person who who opened this discussion (#18) with a such non-simplified and non-linear reasoning as:
“The increase in so-called renewables has done nothing to decrease consumption of petroleum products and natural gas. “If anything the weather dependence of wind and solar has led to an increase in the use of such fuels as ‘backup’.”
Ever heard about a straw in an eye of an opponent?
EP: By forcing a switch from CCGTs to SCGTs, the efficiency loss requires an almost 30% capacity factor from your “renewables” to achieve ANY BENEFIT AT ALL
AB: Past solutions are often the wrong way to react to a forcing. Piston engines get 60% even without a bottoming cycle (combined cycle). They get to mid 60s with a bottoming cycle. My engine’s goal is to kick single cycle piston engines above combined cycle turbines at a fraction of the cost.
So, 60% is the current number you should be using, as per christopher.edwards@stanford.edu (five years ago):
https://youtu.be/n1M3agbkyqg
with a more realistic figure for the future of single cycle being 66% (my design will crack the 2/3 barrier), which makes those combined cycle power plants nearly worthless.
And yeah, wood is amazing stuff. The original windmill material. I bet the folks involved have studied the Spruce Goose.
#6, nigel–
Good article, thanks.
EP,
And piston engines are scalable. A hall filled with generators can track the load while always running any individual engine at its sweet spot. Keep turning them on and off so all are always warmed up and the load is followed precisely (add some smaller generators to tweak). Cheap, reliable, and only a fraction of peaking power is lost when a generator is taken offline.
Speaking of peaks, such a hall would function as it’s own peaker plant by ramping up from “sweet spot” to “full throttle”.
So, wind and solar at double density with excess going to methanol production (way oxygenated, which vastly increases an engine’s horsepower while essentially eliminating soot and knocking NOX hard).
The methanol can be stored indefinitely. It serves heavy and long haul while acting as a liquid long-duration battery. Vehicles can serve here, too. Plug in your methanol hybrid and get paid to feed the grid on cloudy calm cold days. As a bonus, your home is heated via a heat exchanger that feeds off your car’s engine.
During an extended deficiency such as EP describes EVs become curses and methanol hybrids become heros.
Nigel,
Hmm, Condors eat carrion. Nothing like your own personal bird-whacking machine that politely stops when your dinnertime arrives. My bet is that they start nesting on turbine towers. Head out for adventure each day and return home to feast
Engineer Poet (5) >You’ll notice that I qualified my claims.
Piotr: which would have been a valid defense if your claims were qualitative. But they are not – you “prove” your claim with a precisely-looking (3 significant digits) NUMBER: “you’re at 112% of the CCGT emissions figure. You’ve actually gone backwards from what you could do with all-fossil.” EP
I am not sure about Poets, but about among Engineers you don’t suggest high precision (here +/- 0.5%), when the accuracy is so poorly known (your random and systematic errors are likely to be orders of magnitude higher than +/- 0.5%).
EP: If you don’t get significant improvement in net emissions with TODAY’S technology, then it makes no sense to build RE-plus-backup systems AT ALL until that’s been addressed.
Piotr: Discussion is about the future, not about the transition time. And if want to limit the discussion to today –in many places there is a lot of UNUSED backup room, and much more MUCH GHG-effective than the “best” option you presented in your “calculation” (see the Canada’s hydro below)
EP: It scarcely matters HOW efficient you make them. We’ve got to get rid of fossil fuels, period.
Piotr: Aaa – that old deniers trope – “all or nothing” fallacy – either we give up the use of all fossil fuels, period, or do nothing. As somebody said – the perfect is an enemy of the good.
EP: Now you’re doing it. You use “low values” without any hint of what units those values are in or what they mean.
Piotr: Huh? “The units and meanings” are the same as those used by you in your calculations
EP: The problem with RE isn’t the cost, it’s the unreliability (see blog post above).
Piotr: What this has to do with my argument? I was showing that that your self-confident claims that renewables are a step “backwards” in terms of reducing GHG emissions, so you are barking the wrong tree. And from a high horse (EP: “Unless you have a magic wand”).
[Cont. in the next post]
[continued from previous post re: Engineer Poet (5)]
EP: Sometimes almost the entire continent of Europe is becalmed.
Piotr: Again with that your “all or nothing” fallacy. If “the entire continent of Europe is becalmed” X% of the time, would mean for the 100-X% of the time I used wind in some locations as the backup for the other “becalmed” places, INSTEAD of burning-up gas in gas–backup installations, thus reducing my emissions correspondingly. Your calculations in (34) assume that NONE of that happens.
EP: There’s nowhere near enough hydro capacity in N. America to make [backing up one renewable with another] and you can only impound so much water.
Piotr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_Canada
Most of the Canadian hydro is used for a _base_ load, NOT as a backup. Newfoundland hasn’t developed a bigger part of its Lower Churchill because even the smaller part (Muskrat Falls) has problems with finding viable markets for its hydro-electricity – not because of its “unreliability”, but because of having to compete against natural gas, which according to the neo-liberal economic system internalizes profits and externalizes environmental costs.
EP “[quoting Piotr: 5. You calculations assume there won’t be any progress in energy hydrostorage and other storage technologies]”. Now I know that you didn’t read #49.
Piotr: What a … strange thing to say. _I_ didn’t have to read your (49) – MY comments were about your calculations in (34), where you implicitly assumed ZERO energy storage.
YOU, on the other hand, should have read your (49) – since the information in (49) blows your calculations in (34) out of the water – with reliable energy storage – WHY would you carry out your calculations assuming ZERO storage – thus requiring using gas-powered generation for back-up???
EP: You haven’t defined your terms… again. And you’re flat wrong; it looks like the advance I noted in #49 is headed for commercialization. It’s just that it’s nowhere near enough to allow full replacement of fossil fuels.
Piotr: Huh? i) Why would I need to define for YOU the terms YOU were using in YOUR calculations in (32)?
ii) How could I be “flat wrong” about things … I didn’t claim (I didn’t claim that energy storage was NOT viable – QUITE THE OPPOSITE – I argued that progress in the energy storage would REDUCE the need for the fossil-fuel backup and therefore render your “calculations” assuming ZERO storage, and cocnlusions based on that – wrong].
iii) Your “full replacement” is the … third “all or nothing” fallacy in your single post. If you like them apples, you like them a lot, eh? ;-)
I can see a “Poet” (licencia poetica galore), but are you sure about that “Engineer” part?
Piotr
#5, E-P–
Another example of E-P’s amazing ability to get the math right but the logic so, so wrong.
Though this statement does not make its underlying assumptions very clear, and is thus a little challenging to parse, it could pretty clearly *only* be true if you were expecting 100% RE and getting 30% due to ‘capacity factor’, because that’s the only case in which you’d have nothing else but RE and SCGTs. (You’d also be an idiot, because apparently you’d be operating a power grid without understanding the concept of ‘capacity factor’, but let that pass.)
In the real world, I don’t think any attempt to do this kind of BOTE calculation works, because fundamentally one must address the time element. Some considerations:
–Demand curve: PV output is relatively predictable on daily timescales, and lines up tolerably well, typically, with daily usage (the main issue typically being the ‘duck curve’ in the evening, though this varies regionally and seasonally.) Hence, you don’t need everything to ramp within 30 minutes or less.
–Forecasting: wind and sun are variable, but as I’ve pointed out before, they are also forecastable to a useful degree. That means that you don’t everything to ramp within 30 minutes or less. As in point #1 above, it also means that in anything like a real-world case, a lot of the time you won’t be using SCGTs.
–Interconnections: Many SOs have considerable ability to import (or export) power as needed. So, once again, this eliminates some of the need for fast-ramping SCGTs and the like.
–Storage: Although elsewhere in the same comment, the utility and increasing practicality of storage is acknowledged, suddenly it is nowhere to be found in this analysis. But it’s increasingly present in the real world, vastly outperforms SCGTs in load following, and is also increasingly displacing SCGTs on economic grounds in either stand-alone or ‘RE-plus’ developments. That’s a feature of reality now; it ought to be a larger feature of any future-oriented analysis.
I could go on, but the point is, I think, sufficiently demonstrated already. You need to get much more granular than simply misapplying CF to reach a predetermined conclusion via what is essentially cherry-picking one’s assumptions.
And the electric ferry wins on economics:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/06/12/ellen-denmarks-first-electric-ferry-passes-all-tests-with-flying-colors/
That’s on a route involving a 22-nautical mile round trip.
This new research suggests most of the economic loss from Hurricane Harvey can be attributed to the effects of climate change, based on an attribution study of the hurricane. This is much higher than previous estimates using a top down approach:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-020-02692-8
KDM wrote @631:
Vietnam had been considering nuclear plants, you know. They went with gas and coal instead.
@6nigelj it’s useful to give us more about the story, to help us properly evaluate it. Here’s the relevant quote that I found:
“The system Martin devised is based on two principles: Know if a bird is coming, and make sure blades aren’t spinning when it arrives.”
Thus further reducing the capacity factor of the turbines and making the power less predictable than it already is. And electronics and computers have been known to give false positives and false negatives. @piotr 1 please take note.
How many levels of bandages and bandaids are we willing to apply to make unreliable electricity generators stable instead of building stable nuclear fission plants?
Piotr amuses me greatly @8:
It’s really funny when someone sputters about thoughtcrime and tries to use guilt-by-association, and succeeds only at making himself ridiculous. You realize that you CAN quote in detail here, and spell out logical errors and contradictions precisely?
FWIW, what I “liked” about that post was that it spelled out where the problems in the “renewable” paradigm were appearing. As I wrote just a short time ago, “Now, don’t let it be said that there aren’t ways around this. With enough excess RE capacity you can just brute-force the issue by dumping excess power to resistance heaters in a CCGT’s gas turbines, substituting electricity for fossil fuel and managing the rapid power swings on the demand side.” The problem is that nobody is willing to ACKNOWLEDGE that these things are problems and need solutions.
Wrote Al Bundy @9:
No they don’t. Best heat rate for a RICE generator is around 8100 BTU/kWh LHV; that’s about 42% (considerably lower for methane or hydrogen based on HHV). The Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C scrapes past 50% efficiency, but not by much. It does this in part by being so large (very low cylinder wall heat losses) and running so slow that combustion is close to constant-volume. Stationary RICE generators run much faster and are much smaller. They also have much higher capital cost than gas turbines.
Wrote Al Bundy @11:
At 42% efficiency you’re burning almost 60% more fuel than a CCGT operating at 64%. You can go a LONG way off the CCGT’s sweet spot before you’re emitting as much as the RICE. Worse, the planet cannot even take the emissions of the CCGT; we need to go to negative net emissions to the tune of roughly a trillion tons of CO2 from the present day.
Made how, with carbon from where?
My time in automotive taught me that the way to slash NOx was to DE-oxygenate the combustion air. This was done with EGR and limited combustion temperatures by preventing hot spots; the diluted oxygen content could not burn at a high enough temperature to create much NOx.
I am personally a fan of methanol. It is a great energy storage medium and has a high flame speed which yields high efficiency in an ICE. You can also thermo-catalytically decompose it to CO+H2, which also has a high flame speed and reclaims thermal energy in exhaust gas to chemical energy.
Piotr gets cranky @13:
Perhaps this is unclear to you. I stated assumptions, and went to conclusions based on those assuumptions. I then revised those assumptions based on current technology and confirmed that the conclusions were still correct, differing only in minor details.
I note that you have no specific objections to my conclusions; it’s all hand-waving.
Be specific. Quebec’s hydro is adequate for its 8.4 million, but grossly inadequate for N. America’s 350+ million. Ontario only gets by with 60+% from CANDUs compared to about 20% from “hydro”. I visited an Ontario campground when the electric power was announced as “hydro” as if it all came from that. Even then, it didn’t.
Wrong. We have to get to something like -100% of current FF emissions for some decades, or our environment is FUCKED. Exactly HOW we do this isn’t relevant, but we HAVE to do this or our world will be rendered unrecognizeable and substantially unliveable. But either you admit that this must be done, or accept the consequences of not doing it.
You address exactly none of the engineering issues. GFY.
Gonna address @14 after some sleep.
Andrew Jaremko says: (19) “@piotr 1 please take note”
He saw a tree, he missed the forest? “Neither viewpoint captures the full picture, because the debate is complicated by a looming factor: If climate change continues apace, hundreds of North American bird species’ ranges will shrink by at least half by 2100”
P.S. Out of curiosity, which of my 5 points about the value of the calculations by @Eng.P. (34) is falsified by your entry?
E-P 5: There’s nowhere near enough hydro capacity in N. America to make that work, and you can only impound so much water.
BPL: https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-worldwide
Engineer Poet: “Piotr amuses me greatly @8”, “Piotr gets cranky @13:” Editorializing … the reference calls. How classy.
E-P: You realize that you CAN quote in detail here, and spell out logical errors and contradictions precisely?
You realize I DID? “Piotr amuses [Engineer Poet] greatly @8″ by writing to David Benson:
” To sum it up: on a different forum (BNC) you utterly DISMISSED the argument about Australian coal [“The isolated, antiquated grid of West Australia is certainly not a lesson for the majority of the world.”], while your friend E-P “liked” it. And a week later on RC forum, you … rely on the very same [W.A. coal] argument you rejected on BNC, while E-P defended you by … ignoring [your coal argument].”
Engineer Poet reads the above and concludes: “It’s really funny when someone sputters about thoughtcrime and tries to use guilt-by-association, and succeeds only at making himself ridiculous. You realize that you CAN quote in detail here, and spell out logical errors and contradictions precisely?” E-P
Yeah, ;-)
–
Piotr
nigelj:
Heh. Ninja’d by Nigel! I’m surprised he didn’t mention the other peer-reviewed article by the same authors, about attribution of the costs of extreme weather in New Zealand. I learned about both articles from a guest post by the authors on The Carbon Brief. The authors’ “bottom up” approach contrasts with “top-down” integrated assessment models, which they claim consistently produce under-estimates. WRT Hurricane Harvey, the Carbon Brief guest post says:
Estimates of the financial cost of AGW underpin arguments for carbon pricing. The Carbon Brief post concludes
I recommend the full post.
Engineer Poet (23): “Piotr gets cranky @13 Perhaps this is unclear to you. I stated assumptions, and went to conclusions based on those assuumptions.”
You mean: ;-)
E-P:I note that you have no specific objections to my conclusions; it’s all hand-waving.
where by “no specific objections” and “hand-waving” you mean … listing 5 assumptions you didn’t state (see my posts: (1), (13) and (14)) and noting that even if one of them is not met – your calculation and conclusion built on them – become meaningless?
> Be specific. Quebec’s hydro is adequate for its 8.4 million, but grossly inadequate for N. America’s 350+ million.
Huh? This discussion is about the BACKUP for renewables NOT, not about providing BASE LOAD (to which giving population numbers apply to).
> Wrong. We have to get to something like -100% of current FF emissions for some decades, or our environment is FUCKED.
That’s the all or nothing fallacy I was talking about: for the sake of the perfect (“-100%” of current FF) – you are attacking the good (reduction of the emissions by the renewables). There is no magic wand that will bring you to your goal (“-100%” of current FF”) – the reductions would have to be done by a combination of various actions – decreasing power demand, getting rid of the most polluting technologies first, and increasing the non-FF sources. There is enough opposition to the reduction of the FF use even without the in-fighting within the non-FF camp.
E-P: Exactly HOW we do this isn’t relevant
and … that’s why you joined this discussion to defend David Benson’s attacks on wind?
E-P: You address exactly none of the engineering issues.
by “none” you mean my questioning of the 5 assumptions your calculations have implicitly made? With unfulfillment of even one of them rendering your calculation meaningless or in fact misleading since they pretend to be what they are not – of high accuracy (+/- 0.5%), when violating of even one of your implicit assumptions could change your results by an order of magnitude more than your implied accuracy.
E-P: GFY.
your “GFY” stands for “Go Fuck Yourself”? Cute. Nice talking to you too.
Piotr
#20, AJ–
Handwaving, till the effect is shown to be significant. I’m guessing it gets lost in the ‘noise’.
#18, E-P–
Yes, there’s been an awful lot of that. Wonder why?
Oh, right. “Greenie propaganda.”
How could I possibly forget?
#23, E-P:
Yes, that is the idiomatic name for electric power in Ontario, as I’ve discussed before on this forum. It exists because originally all the electric generation in Ontario *was* literally ‘hydro’–starting at Niagara Falls in 1882.
#25–
Yes, previously cited by BPL; unsuccessfully debunked by E-P; the attempted debunking rebutted by me; and then implicitly ignored by E-P in another context, thus inducing a re-citation by BPL.
Seems to be a pattern here. Will we repeat the cycle?
Barton Paul Levenson @25 — I know of 4 excellent pumped hydro sites in the greater Pacific Northwest region. None can find financing.
Piotr @8 — I simply observed two grids that continue to build coal and lignite, basically burnable dirt. I don’t approve, just notice. Further, you stated nothing about Germany.
If you wish to actually understand the grid some study is required. I’ve suggested some sources. As it is, you appear to merely be sputtering, sorry.
Wrote Piotr @14:
What part of “fossil fuels have to be left in the ground” don’t you understand? If you need ANY fossil fuels, you’ve failed. We not only need to get rid of them, we need to remove OTOO 1 trillion tons of atmospheric CO2 from past emissions.
It’s enough to serve the locals, but Newfoundland and Labrador have a combined population of only 536,000. The total N. American population is almost 1000x that. Even if there was enough water, who’d tolerate a thousand HVDC lines fanning out from Newfoundland and Quebec all over the continent?
I do preliminary analyses all the time, while you haven’t shown one calculation yet. Then there’s the little matter of my sheepskin.
Electrofuels such as electromethane might be the way forwards for longer term energy storage (days to months) to deal with renewable intermittency issues, according to research by Lund et alia. This has dramatically lower costs than battery storage and pumped hydro.
https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/sepm/article/view/1574/1314
Wrote Kevin McKinney @15:
No, that’s not it at all, and if you’re still not grasping the concept it’s either because (a) you’re missing some key concept, (b) you’re somehow the victim of a misconception, or (c) you’re being disingenuous.
For those who might be truly unclear on the concept, I’ll start at the beginning. ALL our energy systems rely on stockpiled energy to make them reliable. Piles of coal, tanks of petroleum, underground stores of crude oil and natural gas, water held behind dams, and uranium rods in nuclear reactors are the biggest ones. Batteries currently hold an almost insignificant part of this stockpiled energy.
The main feature of the “renewables”, meaning wind and PV, is that they have NO stockpiled energy to draw on. When the flow of energy that feeds them stops due to calm or night, they also stop. They can only produce electricity with the energy that goes their way, so if it suddenly surges or fades so does their output. But our civilization requires reliable power, so the “renewables” require backup. Backup from something WITH a stockpile. And where the push for “renewables” has created issues like the “duck curve” as the sun sets while demand surges to the evening peak, that backup also has to be able to ramp very fast. On large grids the go-to sources for such ramping are hydro if available, then open-cycle gas turbines, and reciprocating engines at the margins. The steam sections of CCGTs get thermal shock if they try to follow such rapid swings, and of course nuclear doesn’t like to change power quickly at all, at least in thermal-spectrum reactors; you get phenomena like the “iodine pit” if you have to reduce power by a large degree and not power back up for a while.
Since “renewables” outsource their stockpiling to fossil plants, the requirement for less-efficient, faster-ramping gas plants is problematic. It defeats the alleged purpose of using renewables in the first place.
Wrong. You could have a strong nuclear base-load component, but because it really works best at constant power it puts GREATER emphasis on the fossil-fired ramping capabilities. The only way to kill that problem is to have some substantial share of DSM, which we are notoriously slow in doing.
Not even close. The SoCal evening demand peak falls at or after sunset.
IIUC, California forced the shutdown of all its CCGT plants because they were located seaside and used seawater for their condensers. This was part and parcel of forcing the closure of Diablo Canyon. The people responsible are environmental criminals, of course.
In truly piddling quantity. As I noted in the other thread, we have a potential game-changer on our hands. I’ve said before that week-long electric power storage requires cost OTOO $7/kWh, and here we have something where the active material costs about $1/kWh (Sadoway’s “batteries made from dirt” become real, considerably cheaper than solar-salt thermal storage). These could create some impressive energy stockpiles, but these are not commercial yet. But for wind and PV to be the mainstays of our economy, those stockpiles must be truly immense. As in, sized for winter seasonal deficits for solar.
The densest energy stockpiles we have are uranium fuel rods. One lousy ton of them can yield 35 gigawatt-days of heat before replacement. They don’t emit any GHGs or criteria air pollutants. And they don’t chop up endangered birds, take farmland out of production, or get impaired by mere bad weather.
BPL misses the point @25:
Practically unusable at an acceptable ecological cost. Those are almost all oceanside locations. They would be forced to use saltwater, pumped up high onto land. If you think saline infiltration due to groundwater consumption is bad in Florida, just think what the devastation would be from the wholesale dieoff of vegetation where seawater replaced fresh groundwater on high ground and everywhere below.
One thing I see missing from this discussion. Recent proposals/studies of 100% renewable grid propose significant overcapacity of the renewables component. Given the declining cost curves especially for solar this makes sense. If a typical cloudy day cuts PV generation to 33%, and you have three times overbuild, you are completely covered. Grid operators and utilities are good at making tradeoffs, they will optimize the amounts of different generation technologies, and te locations of them to minimize overall costs and/or improve reliability.
Current, utility scale plants are already being built with overcapacity, a plant designed to output a hundred MW, is being outfitted with enough panels to generate 150MW during ideal conditions, with the excess being either curtailed or stored. So output during non-ideal gen times is considerably more robust than it would have been without the excess.
It is becoming common for PV plants to be economical with four hours storage of Lithium-Ion batteries. As battery prices drop, the sweetpoint is expected to reach 8hours. And then we have other gravitational storage schemes which are now being tested at scale. Overbuilding plus storage advances changes the game.
Omega Centauri @39 — Approximately and I suppose depending on the grid, about 70% of the maximum load is omnipresent, called baseload. For this portion it used to be economic to use thermal and steady generators; nuclear power plants are the lo-carbon variety.
Then for the 30% which ramps up in the morning and dies away about 11pm solar plus
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/386/utility-scale-batteries
is now the most economic choice.
But because solar PV is now so inexpensive,
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/524/state-solar-pv
the solar farms outcompete other forms of generation in the mid-part of sunny days, forming the famous ‘California duck curve’. This is hard for nuclear power plants, which need to run flat out.
So something needs to be done with the excess electricity, in excess of grid load and battery charging. One choice being worked on is
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/718/hydrogen-fuel
Wrote Piotr @28:
While you’re smirking, a mountain of proof is accumulating that everything I’ve been saying for years is true. It’s coming true right now, before your very eyes:
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-collapse-of-energiewende-and.html
Your wind and PV are capable of providing maybe 50% coverage, without massive storage. If your base load is not hydro or nuclear, it must be fossil.
Mere reduction gets us to the same catastrophe just a wee bit slower. Bret Kugelmass said it better than I could:
Watch the whole thing.
FF use has continued to grow on an exponential curve despite all “reductions” through adoption of “renewables”. It has especially gone up in the “developing” world. I’m not the least bit averse to lifeboat ethics, to declaring the third world un-salvageable and cutting it off to deal with its own fate. Cutting off industrial exports would disable anything relying on heavy industry and the FF emissions there would collapse. So would so much else, including the population—but they failed to adopt family planning when it mattered, and they’re going to suffer the consequences with or without us. I prefer without.
I attack wind because, absent some major changes in technology and policy, wind not only won’t do the job, it won’t help at all. It’s a total waste of time, money and effort that could have gone to things that DO work.
So spell out the implications (rather, assumptions you believe I made) and show how they’re wrong. Stop hand-waving.
Wrote nigelj @36:
Methane has some serious downsides. First, it is an extraordinarily stable molecule; its heat of formation is quite high, so the losses in its synthesis are high. This means that the round-trip losses in systems using synthetic methane will be quite high. Second, it’s a strong greenhouse gas. Leaks are going to defeat the purpose of going to carbon-neutral fuels.
Methanol has its own drawbacks, but none of those of methane.
David Benson (34): “ I simply observed two grids that continue to build coal and lignite, basically burnable dirt. I don’t approve, just notice.”
No, that’s not not what you have done. Let me help you:
1. You began by dismissing the “so-called renewables” IN GENERAL:
“The increase in so-called renewables has done nothing to decrease consumption of petroleum products and natural gas. If anything the weather dependence of wind and solar has led to an increase in the use of such fuels as ‘backup’.” David B. Benson (May thread)
2. When I challenged it – you answered by … shifting your own argument from “petroleum products and natural gas” to … “coal”, and as an example, you chose West Australia: “Well, its done in the state of West Australia. David B. Benson (2)
3. Yes, the same West Australia about which in your OWN link you say:
“The isolated, antiquated grid of West Australia is certainly not a lesson for the majority of the world.”
In other words – you made a GENERAL dismissal of the “so-called renewables”,
and then to save your face – you changed the discussion to coal and chose the one example you are on records as saying that it is not applicable “to the majority of the world’.
4. And after ALL THAT you lecture me: “you appear to merely be sputtering, sorry” David B. Benson (34)
By their arguments you shall know them. Ladies and Gentlemen: David B. Benson.
===
Piotr
Writes Omega Centauri @39:
So instead of covering 5 km² with PV at 20% best-day CF to average 1 GW, you propose to cover 15 km² instead? Where are you going to get this 15 km² to put so much PV? It’s not like there isn’t already stuff there unless you’re only covering roofs, you’re taking it away from something else. Zen aphorism: “You cannot do just one thing.”
An option I’ve never heard of anyone implementing yet: useful dump loads. Produce stuff with both feedstocks and products that store cheaply. So far, nothing has popped up on my radar.
IMO we’d be better off putting those batteries into vehicles and dumping excess electricity to them to displace petroleum. There are better solutions for stationary storage.
Gravity is the weakest of the 4 fundamental forces. It requires too much material to scale to the required degree.
Storage advances change all kinds of games. Among other things, cheap/compact enough storage turns nuclear’s “inability to follow RE” into “can follow RE and also charge max price during peak hours, and be there with far better reliability”.
This is where I see the $1/kWh aqueous sulfur-air flow battery going. It requires a small fraction of the area/volume of pumped hydro (gravity) storage, and is not dependent on geography or rainfall. If it’s relatively efficient it looks like it will become the go-to solution for medium-term (10 to 150 hours) electric storage. Given the ability to exchange spent liquids for fresh ones quickly, it might even become a factor in both rail and road surface transport. The thing is, you’ve got to have a reliable source of energy to guarantee that your storage (stockpile) is filled when you need it. Nuclear can guarantee that. Are you really willing to devote 15 km² or more to PV to achieve what you can get with a fraction of a km² of nuclear plant?
And a note to the moderation/systems team:
You have obviously made a significant change to the buffering system. It has long been that the static page took way long to update even after comments were approved, but if you were a participant you could bypass that delay by saving the moderation hash URL to load the latest.
That doesn’t work anymore. The latest exchange took THREE DAYS for new comments to be visible, however distributed between moderators taking their time and lags in the system (I can’t tell which, obviously). Can you PLEASE back out the changes until you can de-bottleneck the software bottlenecks?
EP @38 says “Practically unusable (pumped hydro sites) at an acceptable ecological cost. Those are almost all oceanside locations. They would be forced to use saltwater….”
Hmmm EP might need new glasses, because the map in the link shows the majority or the potential pumped hydro sites being inland, sited in what looks like hilly and mountainous areas, and the text mentions they were “off river sites”.
However I have nothing against nuclear power as such. We have a lot of different energy options and costs are not ridiculous as various people have noted. The real problems are how to get a rapid change from existing fossil fuel generation to zero carbon alternatives, and that looks like it’s more of a motivational and political headache.
Years and years of yapping on these pages and still you can’t seem to grasp that FIRST you must understand what “regenerative” means, and is, and accept those limits.
It is *only* within that context that any of this matters.
You are collectively spitting in the wind.
It *is* OK to discuss secondary and tertiary (and beyond) issues, but only from the understanding of what, with no caveats, “regenerative” means.
Yapping is a waste of precious time, children. Stop it. We don’t have the time you think we have. We barely have the time *I* think we have.
Stop wasting these pages. Get back to the First Law, as it were, of regenerative fka sustainable systems: What are regenerative systems? Trust me, not one of you has a clue, though a few have a partial clue. If you did, you would be starting from First Principles not tertiary and beyond issues.
On risks:
And so on.
https://voiceofaction.org/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/
And the oceans…
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/07/11/mit-professor-renews-warning-about-possibility-mass-extinction-event-ocean/SOyWhYw4V9eITRppYBidgL/story.html
EP (35): “What part of “fossil fuels have to be left in the ground” don’t you understand. If you need ANY fossil fuels, you’ve failed.”
Piotr: “f you need ANY fossil fuels, you’ve failed” is a DIFFERENT example of your “all or nothing fallacy”. In the post you comment (14), I talked about your *either wind blows 100% of time or nothing” fallacy (see (14))
EP (35): “Piotr(14): “Most of the Canadian hydro is used for a _base_ load, NOT as a backup.” It’s enough to serve the locals, but Newfoundland and Labrador have a combined population of only 536,000.”
Sheesh – which part of distinction between provided BASELOAD and providing BACK-UP for wind and solar you don’t understand? Serving “536,000 locals”: that’s BASE LOAD, not BACKUP.
And a déjà vu, because I made _the same point_ (28), when you were mixing baseload with backup not for NL, but for Quebec, I quote:
E-P “Quebec’s hydro is adequate for its 8.4 million, but grossly inadequate for N. America’s 350+ million”.
Piotr (28): Huh? This discussion is about the BACKUP for renewables NOT, not about providing BASE LOAD (to which giving population numbers apply to).
Or in a symbolic notation:
—-
Piotr: A
E-P: But B is small.
Piotr: We are talking about A, and NOT about B!
E-P But B is too small! And I have done calculations to prove it!
—
E-P: I do preliminary analyses all the time, while you haven’t shown one calculation yet.
Piotr: I don’t have to – to falsify your claims – it is enough to show flaws in yours. And I have done it again and again:
– I have shown that in your calculations you have made at least 5 unspoken assumptions and violating even one of them – would change your “results”
– I have shown that you don’t understand the posts you comment – in the discussion about using hydro as the BACKUP energy to fill in when other renewables are not enough, you keep talking how hydro is not enough to provide … BASELOAD for N. America
– to your patronizing: “You realize that you CAN quote in detail here, and spell out logical errors and contradictions precisely?” I have shown you that I quoted , and spelled out logical errors and contradictions – in very same post in which were lecturring me] see Piotr (26)]
etc. etc. etc.
E-P: Then there’s the little matter of my sheepskin.
“Little” is the operative word here. The value of a diploma is shown in the quality of the arguments of the graduate. See your posts above, or the value of of the doctorate of “Dr Robert Bradley” from the parallel thread (the guy makes up a number for a rhetorical effect and makes logical errors even a child from an elementary school shouldn’t do? (see: (15) in (https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/06/2040/#comments)
By their posts, not their sheepskins, you should know them.
Regarding synthetic methane, from #42: natural gas is simply slightly impure methane. There is plenty of experience with piping and storing it. Nonetheless, what I observe is simply
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/718/hydrogen-fuel
in which many are seriously supporting hydrogen as a natural gas replacement, including just using the existing pipelines. If this works there’s no need for the water shift reaction.
E-P (45): “The latest exchange took THREE DAYS for new comments to be visible.”
The lady doth protest too much. After all – you ended your argument before the hiatus on the high note:
“You address exactly none of the engineering issues. GFY.”
Engineer Poet
“GFY”. Can’t beat that.
====
Piotr