I have built a 30 kWp PV at home 2 years ago - you would think this is quite big, for a private plant. It is not enough. If I want to power a heat pump (with drilled holes), e.g. to cover the heating for the house from November - February, I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter).
Now I imagine all the people that buy tiny 5 kWp plants. The only way this would work is collaborative, with buffers at the medium-voltage level.
So the biggest problem is really energy transfer or relocation, between different time's and regions´ needs (winter, summer; night, day; or from different regions worldwide).
.. btw. here's a graphic for the calculation [1]. Blue is an imaginary heating pump electricity consumption over the year, red is the predicted pv production for a 60 kWp plant, where 30 kWp are at 60° angle - calculated with Europe's pvgis tool [2].
To my mind, it is seasonal load shifting that is Europe's long term energy problem. Winter energy demand has a bottom that needs to be met. We used to ensure this by stockpiling on seasonal scales. Without stockpiling, and with intermittent production, things will get hairy in winter.
Put differently, you can turn up a gas plant, but you can't turn up a windmill or a solar panel. That scares me.
Batteries and similar technologies are great for daily variation, but their cost per capacity does not allow for practical seasonal storage. For this I imagine we need cheap bulk storage, and can accept low efficiency because we can fill the stockpile with the cheapest excess power.
I know a person who has about 10kWp installed on a passivhaus here in latitude 59N and says that having a heat pump is overkill for them.
The parameters widely differ between country and city: In the country, you usually have space (but lack money), in the city, you lack space but can often work with a pretty good income (= build a new, energy optimized house).
Every house is different. If I build a new house today, of course this would look different.
better insulation is not cheap and therefore not everyone can afford to do it. Also the same people who want renewables are usually opposed to building new housing so there's that.
With all due respect these are the kinds of "tiny" details that renewable enthusiasts conveniently forget. Yes, this person's house needs better insulation. As does everybody else's.
You can't just wave this away with "your math is wrong". These numbers reflect reality, not wishful thinking.
But you will have overbuilt a great deal of cheap solar capacity, because anytime it generates more than you can use, you can synthesize your own ammonia. First you fill your tanks, and then sell the rest.
In winter, the overbuild means you burn less of it. In summer, the excess ammonia will find an unlimited market because ammonia is so useful. It is fuel, it is fertilizer, it is refrigerant, it is feedstock for myriad chemical processes.
Produce excess methane gas in summer, store with existing infrastructure, burn it for baseload/winter.
"Just as converting chemical energy in the form of fuel into electricity endures 45-75% thermodynamic losses, converting electricity back into chemical fuels loses 60-70% of the energy in the process. Converting solar power into natural gas only to burn it in a gas turbine power plant could help with long term seasonal energy storage but is so much less cost competitive than other ways to stabilize electricity supply that we should expect this usage modality in, at most, niche cases."
Of course we are not there now. 2030 maybe? 2040?
isn't real
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S26669552220002...
The summer peak drops but the winter rises to compensate. Daily peak is spread out too, which helps match heat pumps that like to run continuously and battery storage can cycle twice per day.
Figures for Germany, but Norwegian researchers suggest it has benefits at their latitude too.
- I need a very expensive battery (60kWh/~30k€ at least just to avoid big daily deep discharge cycles) who might or might not last 10 years with an expensive geothermal heat-pump 15k€ at least;
- I need a giant insulated, probably underground for mere easiness of design, pool and PV plant (I do not know how to estimate but surely few swimming pools of water and enough PV to heat it) to store enough heat for the night.
Both options are ridiculously expensive especially since they still NOT give autonomy since they can support day-to-day winter IF the Sun shine enough, witch might but also might not happen. Perhaps in a future H₂ from hydrolysis will be on sale to offer a fuel-cell third option, but I imagine it will be even more expensive.
So far it's still FAR, FAR, FAR, cheaper using the grid + an emergency wood based heating. Long story short I might accept investing (I'm actually in the planning stage) a 15kWp or so PV for an EV charging (WFH so without daily car usage) but trying more is just money gifted to some company pocket. Oh BTW that's JUST for private homes. We also have public buildings AND industry...
Also, solar panel efficiency is still increasing at a steady pace. A gain of 50% compared to the average efficiency of currently sold panels seems to be achievable in a couple of years. 20% vs. 30% could be all you need to improve your calculation.
I know there are sun-following installations but those need expensive mechanics and control systems. Aren't there middle-ground solutions that can be manually adjusted twice a year?
Have you considered a thermal battery? A cubic meter or ten of NaOH solution can store a surprising amount of energy, and can be charged during summer/spring/autumn with simple solar modules consisting of black pipes in glass.
Even if you only store half the energy needed for some of December and January, it halves the needed size of modules.
Hydrogen electrolysis is also shockingly cheap, if there were some safe, small scale storage this issue would be solved.
Utility level solar is much more effective too of course.
For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.
I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power.
The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable, or series of cables. It's a matter of the political will and budget to do it.
https://powertechresearch.com/the-worlds-longest-submarine-h...
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly vs weekly or monthly have very different cost vs benefits. You can minimize the risks of panels failing to recharge batteries by adding 0.1-4x more panels, or import from somewhere unlikely to have a shortfall when you need power.
A HVDC grid between 8 locations looks rather different than one between 2.
Edit: with 1200GW of renewables capacity, the US has produced 20% of its energy from renewables this year, more than nuclear. Based on the interconnect queue, extrapolate future generation mix accordingly.
https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do...
> There was a total of 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in interconnection queues across the country as of year-end 2021, of which 1,300 GW was solar, wind and energy storge capacity, according to the report, Queued Up: Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection. The installed capacity of the United States is 1,200 GW.
> Although not all the projects are likely to reach fruition, the total still represents a milestone. “The sheer volume of clean energy capacity in the queues is remarkable,” Joseph Rand, a senior scientific engineering associate at LBNL, said in a statement. “It suggests that a huge transition is underway, with solar and storage taking a lead role.”
https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/queued_up_2021_04-13...
Or to use cheap mid day electric power when the sun is up to generate gigantic blocks of ice that can then be used with cooling loops to air condition buildings.
Using even higher voltages makes everything much easier, and the cables’ combined cross sections may need to be less (depending on how much lower the maximum demand at night is) or more (depending on future increases in daytime demand).
Downside is that’s still order-of a few trillion dollars, close to the same as the cost of 36 TWh of batteries (i.e. global overnight only), and we’re likely to make those batteries anyway for the electric cars and when their condition deteriorates enough to be taken out of the cars they're still good enough for grid storage.
Energy storage might not be an issue in a decade or so. There's no law of physics saying they can't make batteries without conflict metals. Eventually someone's going to invent a battery made of some cheap hydrocarbon you make by the tanker car, or that compressed Co2 turbine system will turn out to be the real deal, or they'll figure out magnesium air, etc.
I bet we'll eventually see more of that, with superconducting materials steadily becoming more pliable and affordable, and liquid nitrogen being pretty cheap. Maybe we'll see hundreds of miles of such lines. It looks to me more realistic than land in Western Europe becoming cheap enough to install a gigawatt of solar panels here and there.
[1]: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182278-the-worlds-first-...
[2]: https://energycentral.com/news/shanghai-opens-world-leading-...
You can go ahead and force every billionaire to sell off everything they own and hand it to the government and all you end up with is a one time boost to government tax receipts.
That's it. One time boost. Next year those billionaires will be gone. There won't be new ones.
And it won't create any more food. It won't solve shortages. It won't create more solar panels. It won't create 1 mile of copper lines.
Because when the government goes and says "I need 40 million acres of solar panels"... Who is going to do that? Where is that going to come from?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
The AAPowerLink is being developed by the Singaporean firm Sun Cable and is projected to begin construction in mid-2023
"""
Being developed
> "Terraform Industries’ synthetic natural gas process is not particularly complicated or difficult to achieve. We intended to make it easy to scale and deploy. If Europe had enough solar power deployed, even at current European solar prices, we could synthesize desperately needed natural gas at lower cost than transoceanic liquefied natural gas (LNG) importation, which is the next best option."
Also, low solar costs are in fact a reason to just build out where demand is, rather than do a lot of transporting. Actually, that's covered in the article. In the first few paragraphs.
> "On the chart above, the US south west receives around 5.2 kWh/kWp, while notoriously dreary England receives only 3.2 kWh/kWp. Does this mean that Britain should import solar power from north Africa? Not quite.
> "At 30% cost reduction and three years per doubling of production rate, Britain’s cost will match Los Angeles’ in less than six years. There are a few parts of the world, particularly at extreme northern latitudes, where solar power is truly painful, but they are few and their population is low, compared to the billions who live in generally sunny-enough locations. When their local cost of solar falls to the point where synthetic atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons are cheaper than importing it from (probably) the Middle East, demand will increase substantially. "
This also provides long-term grid-scale energy storage.
In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to build ten times as much solar panel capacity in the not-very-sunny place where the loads are as to build HVDC transmission lines or gas pipelines.
All these ideas about plastering the world with millions of tons of solar panels makes me worry about what happens in say 50 years from now. Recycling all of that stuff may prove to be pointless from economic perspective and we may end up with millions of tons of dead pannels in a small-country-sized landfill.
I listened to a podcast a while ago with a person involved with a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables. One of the interesting challenges is that the cable factories he needs to produce the cables currently only output around 1500 miles of cable per year. The distance he needs to cover is closer to 3000 miles. And the current plan calls for at least four such cables, so 12000 miles. More factories are needed. Those cables impact the cost proposition of course. Producing and laying cables is a capital intensive business. It's still worth doing but local production is just a lot cheaper. The actual plan is for this stuff to compete with nuclear power. Moroccan solar power is so reliable that it does not really drop much in the winter. And it's about half the price of nuclear. Local solar generation is a lot cheaper than that of course but in the UK that needs to be supplemented with other energy at least part of the year.
Casablanca is actually at the same latitude as San Francisco. Most of the US is further south than places like the UK, Germany, etc. where solar power is pretty effective despite being so far north. That means the US has longer winter days and less severe seasonal drops in solar generation. In short, people are overly pessimistic about solar in the US. Most of it is pretty well situated for decent solar generation around the year. It's just going to require a lot of solar panels to compensate for seasonal drops. Unthinkable if you think in terms of current prices and shortages. But the nature of exponential growth is that that is not going to stay that way for very long.
Siting panels in the desert is kind of stupid. The high temperatures make them less efficient, and degrade quicker. They would better be floated on reservoirs, constructed for the occasion if necessary. Nobody doesn't like more reservoirs, or shade for the reservoirs they have. The reservoirs could be kept full by desalinating water when power demand is lower.
I found a press release - the company is "Xlinks". The project doesn't pass the sniff test - they casually mention a 20GWh battery as part of the plan, which would be 10x bigger than the world's current biggest battery storage (2000MWh, at Moss Landing, California. Ironically it's only just come back online after a several month outage due to another fire)
Where I am there are ~5 peak solar equivalent hours in mid summer and ~0.5 hour on a rainy winter day. If I need 10kWh/day, then I need to install ~20kW at $500/kW, with 30kWh of battery for <$5k, and <$3k for dual 6.5kW inverters for 240V at 50A service. During the summer I charge my neighbors electric cars, but it's not worth paying the connection fee to hook up.
I think the grid tie solar fees are so high because the power companies would rather be getting the money for installing solar and batteries.
It really doesn't. I'm a huge fan of back-of-the-envelope maths, and this idea raises some very fun questions. How big would the power line be, if the UK (where I live) was powered entirely by solar panels in the African desert?
The UK's average instantaneous power consumption is around 100GW. Assuming a capacity factor of 5 (which is probably far too low), the power transmission system needs to handle at least 500GW. The current (and somewhat unproven) state of the art in power transmission operates at 1000kv, and can carry 5GW per pylon system. We would need 100 of those operating in parallel. As each of those has a minimum separation corridor of 100 meters, we would need to persuade all of the countries along the route to give us a 4000km x 10km strip of land, as well as the approx. 150sq km of land needed for the panels themselves.
This leads to another fun question - if you want to install 150sq. km of solar panels in the desert and still have enough useful life left in the panels when you're done, how wide does the road need to be to carry all of those, and how many trucks will you need working that several thousand km route?
A more realistic option for the UK might be a submarine HVDC link to Morocco, sort of a bigger version of Viking Link project, which connects the UK to Denmark. I'd like to know if the technology exists to imort, say, 5% of our electricity via that route.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/322874/electricity-consu...
Annualized, that's an average power of 33.5 GW.
On http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ you can see in the yearly demand view that peak demand for the year was under 40 GW.
This initial estimate of 150 km^2 of desert solar farms is too small and your later estimate of 13,000 km^2 is too large. A conservative rule of thumb would be 10 megawatts (real power, annualized) per km^2 of solar farm, which would mean 3,350 km^2 of solar farms for 33,500 average megawatts. Note that solar farm area is larger than solar panel area because solar farms need space between racks of panels.
The linked blog post explains that it doesn't have to be a power line. You could synthesize LNG and ferry that elsewhere (that is, assuming the techniques described do indeed scale, and you don't have salty water trouble, etc. etc. etc)
The sheer scale of this logistical problem dwarfs any other feat attempted.
Climate benefits aside, how in the heck is this an improvement over the current situation?
Long-term I really don't think it is prudent for Europe to rely on potentially unfriendly nations to provide them with energy.
if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough political will to require libya to do its bidding through threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst case, military force to set up a cooperative libyan puppet regime. the balance of the size of the economies and population of western europe as a whole vs libya is very different than western europe vs russia.
not exactly something that can be done with a nuclear armed state the size of russia.
One such project being built currently: https://www.mortenson.com/projects/edwards-sanborn-solar-plu...
More notable than the 950MW generation is the 2400MWh of batteries
The point of the article is to make synthetic hydrocarbons, so no, do not need HVDC so much.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-austral...
You can cherry pick any one of these alternatives to criticize. Of course every solution has its issues. But they can each be used as needed to suit the situation.
Since they want to use solar/electricity to produce hydrocarbon fuels, there is no need to transport electricity. Make the fuels where the sun shines. Maybe build a pipeline or two out of the desert.
I think it might be viable for aircraft even if ground transport eventually goes all electric.
Also, solar panels dont seem that difficult to recycle. There's already a decent & growing reclaimation market. Giant slabs of polysilicon, with perhaps some glass & metal casing, plus some bus-bars. Strip & toss into a chewer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic_basin
creating massive hydroelectric dam reservoirs also has ecological costs
in terms of toxic waste it would surely be preferable to the percentage of electricity right now that is generated using gas, heavy fuel oil and coal.
No, it doesn't. They will be far too busy handling coal ash dumps from coal-fired power stations, and remediating landscapes laid waste by mountain-top removal coal mining.
This will be orders of magnitude smaller as a problem. They will be grateful we finally stopped using coal.
Two points about that:
- existing energy sources already do a huge amount of damage to land (and in places like West Virginia, particularly environmentally sensitive land)
- that's land that can already be converted to solar without significant harm being done (the harm has already been done)
I thought we were trying to move away from being dependent on other countries for energy
We deliver everything else by road. We should deliver power by road. The roads are already there. Once most long-distance trucking is done by robot (~10 years me thinks), there will be plenty of bandwidth. We need "standard units of power" (Sups) that are interchangeable with and usable with everything that produces and consumes power. The interfaces should be standardized. The internals can be proprietary.
For some use cases where electricity doesn't work, trucks with e.g. methane could work. For everything else it's just way to inefficient to convert, store, transport and then convert it again.
Same issue with hydrogen - from source to force applied in a car, it's 22% efficient, compared to 79% for an EV.
"We just need the political will to destroy another nation" is what you just said. Look carefully.
We can't reliably move power on America' three grids, but you want the world wired up
Peaks aren't local. If Germany is peaking, so is all of Europe. There isn't a bunch of other stuff to draw from.
People start by assuming that the rest of the world can cope, but that is not how Europe works today. Look into why Germany keeps having to sell power for negative prices.
It's like believing that in a heavy rain storm, you can just give your excess water to your neighbors. But you can't: they have excess water too. During a drought, they have nothing to share.
Even ignoring whether the fuel-from-air thing will pan out, the idea posed here that solar will get so cheap that excess energy can be used for stuff like this is insane.
Not only did they explain the implications, but the author does a decent job at showing the math behind all of the insanely optimistic graphs. Thank you for sharing this OP! This is why I come to HN
Sounds grim, but I think we can still be optimistic because we have a solution that addresses pretty much all of that: cut back excessive consumption. I'm optimistic that we have so much more than we need that we could cut back to sustainable levels and still live really good lives compared to what humans have lived for most of history.
Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure.
We are locked into a forever growth runaway train and our solution to the earth dying is to make more, buy more and then buy even more of the same thing next year.
Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.
Creating a solar panel that never needed to be replaced and could be manufactured at the same price as less-durable alternatives would make you very rich. Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you?
> Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
It’s much less sinister than that. Many modern societies are structured under the assumption that there’s many more young people than old people, so the young people can share the load of caring for the elderly who are no longer able to work. When you have a sudden in fertility rates, the ratio of young:old goes down, and each young person has to contribute a larger percentage of their effort into caring for the elderly. That’s not necessarily a pleasant responsibility to put on young people, or a position I’d want to be put in as an older person
Uhh, there are plenty of examples of this not happening already. Monopolies and oligopolies prevent this type of competition. Consumers don't always prefer quality and sustainability because we have holes in our system which prevent the true cost of things from being born by the consumer.
It's incredibly common.
Why do people just love to hate on their own existence? How many extinction events have there been that just wiped out the vast majority of species far before humans even existed?
If earth is to flourish, grow and continue it's trend of supporting ever more complex forms of life - it will be humans that can make that happen. In the absence of humans, earth is just awaiting another mass extinction event (maybe even _with_ humans, but certainly no other species on earth has had the capacity to maybe stop one of these events from happening)
Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.
Spoiler: the next mass extinction event is already happening, and it's caused by humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
This cuts both ways. We're super special at both creating and destroying. I don't see OP as hating on humans in general. They are concerned that we are using our super amazing talents the wrong way and want us to be even better.
Those weren’t caused by the species themselves though
You are mixing up a few trends here. The world population is expected to peak at around 10 billion people end of this century. Some places will indeed have shrinking populations but that isn't true everywhere. Aside from genocide at a really monstrous scale, the reality of a population that big is that it will consume resources and energy whether we like it or not.
Given that, solar power is a cheap and clean solution that with price and production growth trends suggested in the article might be more than enough much sooner than some people seem to think. Exponentials are funny like that.
Energy generation is a dirty business today. This seems like it is the whole premise for your negativity. Here is a fix that seems on track to challenge that whole notion. The beauty with things like this is that they have a certain inevitability about them. Population growth creates the demand for energy. Meeting that demand improves the economics. And at some point the problem melts away. The wheels for that have been in motion for a while now. And all the article suggests is that we are going to be fine a bit sooner than some people thought. Extrapolate current trends and it adds up to synthetic fuel being cheaper than fossil fuel.
A good first step towards solving the overconsumption problem.
Either advertising is effective to some degree, in which case banning it would necessarily help curtail consumption.
Or it's ineffective, in which case it would necessarily save a ton of wasted resources and man hours.
I would happily defend the position that advertising does more harm to society than good, if anyone is willing to reply in good faith instead of just cowardly downvoting me into oblivion.
Just look at the cosmetics industry, the fashion industry, and the modelling industry. Industries that arguably provide next to no tangible worth to society, are run by sketchy people and wreak havok on the mental health of young people, girls especially. They're terrible for the climate, you got companies like HM using child labour, and generally inhumane working conditions, to create low quality clothes that break quickly, so they can sell even more. These industries are pretty much completely dependent on advertisement, and devoid of moral and ethical fibre.
Then look at IKEA, running ads bragging about their refurbished furniture, while their business model still relies on cheap, illegally sourced wood from the Balkans and planned obsolescence. Why are they allowed to so falsely represent themselves as "sustainable"?
Then you have the whole surveillance capitalist industrial complex of Facebook, Google, etc. Heavily ad based business models.
The ad industry is clearly out of control. It's a tumour on our society.
I probably wouldn't go as far an outright ban myself, but I would definitely welcome far, far more savage regulation of it.
Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria?
I think the optimistic view is fashion is cyclical and the contrary will become fashionable again.
Yes, see: every “invasive” species. Or bacterial infection.
It looks like the solution they have come up with for this is subscriptions - you never buy your car or your solar panel, you just subscribe to them.
Until we find evidence otherwise we are literally the only valuable thing in existence. So yes hyper-growth is the path forward. If it ruins the planet we'll fix it later or come up with enough of a stopgap to get us to the next milestone.
It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply and demand.
There is deeply entrenched ideological opposition to renewable energy at some (but not all) utilities, all the way to the leadership.
And just because an energy source is the cheapest, doesn't mean that it will be the one chosen by the entrenched monopolies that are our utilities. There are lots of bad incentives out there.
Edit: How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?
> Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas.
Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and power come together and how much inefficiency is there in the wires or pipes? Presumably some of this water is likely to be sea water.
Presumably the sea water that would be needed to feed the hydrocarbon production along with the sea water from desalination (also discussed later) will have their own problems. "desalination toxic brine" has 177,000 hits on google.
I don't agree with their plan to make synthetic hydrocarbons, but they are right about solar. In 50 years solar will be so ubiquitous and cheap that people will be horrified that we kept burning fossil fuels and building nuclear plants for so long.
As you said, this trend will keep on going.
I don't think we will entirely replace them, not unless there is some big innovation. Which could happen. I think it is going to be a combination of, mass uptake in renewables that come to about 1/2 or 1/4th of the total energy we use today, gains in efficiency from using electric rather than combustible heat engines, hydrocarbons in those few places it still makes sense - and most importantly - rational use of energy! Planned public transport instead of private vehicles for instance. Some stuff more in line with the sustainability and permaculture stuff that was being developed in the 1970's.
That’s my gut feeling as well. Perhaps the location of the consumer of the hydrocarbons would change that in some cases.
[0] https://www.marketplace.org/2022/07/18/drought-technology-po...
Yes, dumping concentrated brine in shallow waters causes issues for the local wild life. Simple solution: don't dump it there. For example, if you pump it out to deeper waters, you are not going to affect ppm counts of salt and other minerals in any meaningful or even measurable way. You couldn't even if you wanted to. It's just way too much water.
There's a reason why surfers in LA wear wet suits: the water there is cold because it has no chance to heat up by much. That's because the coast there isn't very shallow. About 1-2 miles from the coast, the bottom already drops to hundreds of feet. And there are some powerful currents that constantly mix things up. Ideal place to get rid of a relatively tiny amount of brine.
Brine disposal is a simple engineering problem. Probably you and I could come up with a dozen different ways to do it that would be perfectly acceptable. Of course there's a cost attached to those things. That's actually the main challenge. Pipes and pumps cost money.
For instance, "potatoes cause cancer" give us 14,900,000 results. Potatoes do not cause cancer.
In other words, once you make one, you have a permanent power increase. Your power can grow exponentially if you just focus on building and placing panels. That makes them the absolute best power source in the game. Not the most compact, though. But that doesn't matter since the map is infinite and there are no transmission losses.
Reality is not as forgiving. We'll need more panels. Way more :) Even more if we start doing things like fuel synthesis. But we should.
I has always bugged me that we use dirty power during summer to... power ACs! We have all this extra energy literally falling from the sky. Which is the whole reason why we want to get rid of it. Air conditioning doesn't actually require that much power to run with proper insulation. People have been able to power large RV air conditioning with solar alone.
Of course, you’d have to subsidize it because basic economics won’t make it work.
this might be mitigated if you tile something that can self expand, but even then you'll have to AFK or just have this going on for hours while you don't have access to the power you're trying to generated.
i end up scaling coal as far as i can and then rushing nuclear. nuclear is also a grind but at least you have to place them less frequently.
Really roughly speak we can think of solar as a step forward in human compatible photosynthesis.
Humanity went to another tier of energy when we started to harness fire with steam and later internal combustion engines.
Electrical transmission is definitely more convenient than moving bags of rice (stored photosynthesis), pipelines of oil and gas (also stored photosynthesis). This electrical grid can also store its energy through various "batteries"(used loosely) with various entropy.
But nuclear power really seems to be the paradigm shift. Instead of being many steps down the chain from solar nuclear to capturing a minuscule portion, we can capture far far more (the majority?) of it for our uses. I feel like we're just so new at it, we're like early mankind using fire burning ourselves, choking on smoke, and generally unsophisticated comparatively to the incredible control and harness of the power one sees in, say, a racing motorcycle -- firing 14k times per second with perfectly controlled, atomized gasoline and air mixture, compressed to exact ratios...
Such a good article, as someone else mentioned it really is an inspiring subject.
[1]: Chapter on solar: https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml
The costs of solar have reduced by 90% since 2008 so McKay's conclusions are horribly wrong.
OTOH Casey Handler is betting his company that the costs will improve from current values.
I keep reading the same "nuclear is the future", but not only it is not improving its costs, it's getting worse. EDF is just broke, and the french citizens are going to pay for it.
There was an article/discussion here recently about heat batteries using sand to store heat for months, to use for heating in winter. This tech seems fairly simple to implement at scale.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-07-19/sand-battery-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32006791
*This is a rhetorical question, I'm sure everyone can easily think of many benefits. But there is elegance in simplicity.
Concentrating atmospheric CO2 involves increasing the concentration from approx. 400 ppm, to a higher target concentration. That's 0.04%. There is no way around the energy input requirement within the basic, universally applicable and virtually undisputed laws of thermodynamics. You can make your process as efficient as possible, but there is a minimum energy requirement (theoretical limit) that you can calculate on a per unit basis for atmospheric CO2 capture that is very, very, very high.
For that reason, industry captures CO2 at point source (you start from a higher concentration). Unless you have zero access to point sources, point source capture will always be more "Environmentally Friendly" than atmospheric carbon capture.
In fact this theoretical minimum is not very high; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Environment... explains, it is only 250 kWh/tonne CO₂, or 900 kJ/kg in SI units. To remove the ≈60 Gt/year of anthropogenic CO₂ currently being emitted and get us to carbon-neutral with direct air capture would consequently require a theoretical minimum of 1.7 terawatts, which is only about 10% of current world marketed energy consumption, and presumably about 5% of world marketed energy consumption 10 years from now. Kicking climate change into reverse would require a bit more than that, maybe double. Depending on the sorbent system, this energy can be solar thermal; it does not have to be electrical.
Existing direct air capture systems like Climeworks's do not closely approach the theoretical minimum. Do you know how much energy they require?
Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it cannot get us to net negative CO₂ emissions.
Ideally we'll get to a point where every CO2 point source either stops being a point source, already has a mechanism for capturing the emissions, or can't economically accommodate carbon capture for some other reason (airplanes, probably).
At that point we might still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere. We'd have to figure out some way to get it out, whether that's by manufacturing hydrocarbons, planting trees, something else, or all of the above.
Aside: Sweet company website https://terraformindustries.com/
> CO2 concentration is performed using a closed lime/calcite calcination cycle, operating at ambient temperature and pressure.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-indu...
we should do this again with solar panels.
a vast overproduction of solar energy would even allow for less distribution need, doing away with wasting time&energy on hydrogen and batteries.
5 kW inverter price are about 700 EUR, if you assume you have to change them every 7 years and you're getting 6 MWh/year out of the inverter that's 0.017 EUR/kWh.
PV prices are around 0.5 EUR/Watt peak and where I live in France you get about 1000 hours of equivalent peak production per year so that's 0.02 EUR / kWh produced by the panels assuming 25 year life.
All in all you're at about 0.11-0.12 EUR/kWh if you manage to consume all produced/stored kWh, which is easy if you have one or two electric vehicule charging at home.
As mentionned here the hard part are 3-4 winter month where solar production is way lower than the rest of the year.
An additional data point for gaz form of energy storage: a standard "35kg" propane bottle has about 450 kWh of energy in it, if you need 1.4 MWh of heat in the winter to complete solar + heat pump output that's just three bottles. To my knowledge no way to produce/fill it from gaz produced from summer electricity with home sized equipment (yet).
My suggestion was setting up a 3GW nuclear plant in the middle of the Nevada Test site (an area that would not suffer in the extremely unlikely event there was any leakage of radioactive material in the even more rare event of an accident) And have that plant produce methane 24/7. It can ship the methane by pipeline to anywhere and provide heating or electricity using existing gas infrastructure.
If you made it a more complex breeder reactor (or had a breeder reactor on site and a fuel reclamation facility) it could do that essentially forever. (caveat lifetime of materials and maintenance etc).
Solar works for this too, but you have to build a lot of panels (this is the article lede of course).
This is also how fusion would change everything as well, with excess power you could spend it on making carbon neutral burnable fuels and desalinating water for mitigating droughts.
I very much doubt you can get higher efficiency by going
electricity -> fuel -> pipeline -> generator
electricity -> wires ->
In particular big turbines are about 60% efficient, ICEs are about 30% efficient and electricity -> fuel conversion is even worse.
A nuclear powered carrier has no use for fuel itself, it only stores fuel for aircraft operations. Having the ability to make fuel on site with all the excess cheap electricity seems to be a game changer.
Wondering what happened to it. That is the latest I can find: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/us-navy-aircraft-carriers...
300k grant? That's peanuts for something that has incredible potential.
Obviously, I'm looking at future civilian applications for the tech.
A better technology is currently being scaled up at Prometheus Fuels: https://www.science.org/content/article/former-playwright-ai...
But of course, if you're going to just use your solar field to make hydrocarbon when the sun shines you don't have to care about any of that.
So very local photovoltaic and storage is more or less the solution in my opinion.
Because solar panels keep getting cheaper and oil doesn't, they think they can out-compete the cost of oil in some markets (sunny with expensive oil) in the near future, and more places over time if solar power keeps getting cheaper.
The author hopes to encourage a huge investment in solar power, which would be good for the planet and people in general (and unstated, also Terraform's bottom line).
Let me know if you're interested and PM be because, gosh, do I have the investment opportunity of a lifetime for you. /s :)
Also.. if you have excess residential electrical supplies, I'd think a good goal would be to get electricity to the people that don't have it first, rather than imagining new industrial processes that rely on continued excesses to function.
It all smacks of thinking that the Earth is a giant inconvenient ledger that just needs to be balanced, at any cost, apparently.
And if trees don't do it "good enough", should we really replace the trees with technological mini-chemical-plants that will starve all of the CO2?
I don't get it.
Why do humans think their crazy ideas are better for nature, while at the same time it is obvious they are going to exterminate whole species when implemented.
Our time would be better spent investing in making these conversion processes more reliable and efficient. Alcohol from fermentation of sugars, methane from anaerobic digestion, syngas/biogas/woodgas from gasification of woody biomass, and charcoal from the remaining carbon. All of these are fuel sources available from plants that pull in CO2 naturally from the environment, completing a cycle of energy production that doesn't alter our current CO2 levels upwards. They can be done on waste biomass left over from current agricultural processes or plants used for landscaping needs (hedges, shade trees, etc.). In fact, if you store away the carbon left over after gasification as biochar you can lower CO2 levels over time.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-indu...
Ctrl-f "Tree" to find the FAQ.
1. Is Solar economic viable?
Not sure “ Crude oil prices are between $60 and $100/barrel, indicating cost parity at between $10 and $17/MWh. There are already solar farms installed in some places that sell power at these prices, and between now and 2030 solar costs should come down at least another 60%.”. But $60 is high. Obviously not now but just months ago we talked about selling oil for loss.
Freaking is $40 somewhat I remember
2. The artificial Russian invasion of Ukraine
The tyranny of Russia need 10 years to resolve. And solar might work in this decade abd hope his learning curve continue.
3. Local game to play like river
The play like conversion of solar back to ch4 (methane) or sea to river etc only make sense in a few place. It is local.
In fact one wonder why Australia and Sahara desert is not more solar.
4. Transportation might be hard
1/3 lost to cable. Still as a guy demo you need a hugh solar plant farm to do one house. Still need solar farm and storage via many means.
On their Twitter profile they talk about "Gigascale atmospheric hydrocarbon synthesis". Which is an interesting wording for a company that doesn't even have a proper homepage.
Feel free to poke holes in my math:
From the article, the proposed technology is about 30% energy efficient. Let's round that up to 33.3%, so I can multiply by three below.
They propose using this for natural gas production for home heating. They're competing with hybrid heat pump water heaters and air-to-air heat pumps that work throughout Europe. Those have coefficients of power above four, in practice.
So, it will take 12x more electricity to heat homes with legacy boilers and synthetic LNG than with heat pumps, assuming no transmission loss. PG&E in California is notoriously inefficient; they somehow triple the cost of electricity when they deliver it. Assuming that is pessimal, and that natural gas distribution is free, it will cost more than 4x as much. At current energy prices, that means the heat pumps pay for themselves quickly.
With the Ukraine crisis, leaders should find N houses on electric heat, and roughly 3N on natural gas. Upgrade them all to heat pumps. This would have zero net effect on the energy grid, but remove three houses worth of natural gas heating demand! Manufacturing and installation for this already ramped, so it could start happening tomorrow. (Well, Monday, since it is the weekend.)
On to replacing LNG at all costs, because we have to, and replacing infrastructure won't work for some applications:
There are carbon capture technologies that use less energy than burning the equivalent fossil fuel created. Say one is "just" break even. For the same solar panel consumption as the technology in the article, you could extract and burn 1 carbon unit of fossil fuel, and capture three units of carbon! That's much better than net zero.
As I said, I wish them well, but I hope a more efficient approach wins. As the article says, they will need 10 extra years of solar panel ramp up for their math to work. By then, we'd better have already ramped carbon capture!
> At current rates of production growth, the supply/demand mismatch will see a 10 year backlog between the time when local solar powered synthetic fuel production reaches cost parity with fossil sources, and when solar supply will be available to meet that demand.
I hate this use of "at current rates", it's basically a lie if you don't follow up with some kind of lower bound to go with that upper bound and people believing this is not possible, or too costly, or too late is one of the main problems.
He called out the hairy back prediction graph further up and then did basically the same thing with words.
But overall a good summary.
That's a pretty artificial form of natural gas.
Tell me if this sounds familiar. How about we store that natural gas underground in the same areas we’ve been taking it out? Sounds kinda like a natural for energy storage and a little carbon sequestration.
(Can’t be sure with myself whether I’m serious or sarcastic in this one. But I definitely want carbon out of the air…)
Given the scale of the problem, something like that will (should?) be done. If we take it seriously and figure out a political solution, eventually every current natural gas well will be converted to CCS and run in "reverse", as it were.
However, the energetics are such that most carbon capture, barring nanotech magic, will be done via enhanced weathering or tree burial.
With this base energy supply in hand, our options are far more flexible for extracting carbon from the air, and either making fuels, or petrochemical feed stock from it.
Reprocessing that can entirely get rid of the waste needs a scientific breakthrough that certainly might happen, but trying to make it happen will require research centers with highly qualified staff, very expensive machinery and will take a long time to set up.
Meanwhile just about anyone can put solar panels on their roof making it possible for the state to save fuels in central power plants for use during the night. This benefit is immediate, and because anyone can do it it's currently being deployed faster than even non-reprocessing nuclear power plants can be built.
So instead of aiming for new classes of reactors I think we should build already known classes of solar panel factories and hydrogen electrolysers. Hydrogen electrolysers are insanely simple, you can build one using stuff you are likely to have in your home already.
The main argument against it at grid-scale is the efficiency, but with enough solar panels efficiency becomes basically meaningless. When you are filling your "water bottle" from the Niagara you can spill a lot and it won't matter.
If you're thinking in "panels" you don't envision the future.
Is industry going to learn to make cheaper land? How much can labor realistically be reduced?
"U.S. Solar Photovoltaic System and Energy Storage Cost Benchmark: Q1 2020"
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/77324.pdf
For a 100 megawatt utility-scale solar farm with one-axis sun tracking hardware built in the US, total costs come to $1.01 per watt-peak of direct current generating capacity. Solar modules account for $0.41 of that. Other hardware (inverters, electrical balance of system, and structural balance of system) accounts for $0.24. Installation labor and equipment is $0.11. The cost of land is tiny, too small to actually see in the stacked bar chart, but below $0.02.
Solar module costs can fall by another 70% before labor costs start to become an equally relevant cost element. There are already companies working on automating additional elements of solar farm construction. You can see a brief video of AES's Atlas robot for solar farm module installation here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRFDhHa3eKY
AES claims that with this robot, a crew of only 3 people can install a megawatt of panels in a week:
https://www.aes.com/reimagining-solar
You could install all the panels for a 100 megawatt solar farm like that analyzed above with 6 months and 12 people.
Excess manufactured methane could also be injected underground, presumably.
https://www.upstreamonline.com/energy-transition/is-liquid-m...
I must admit, I only skimmed through the apparently meaningless technobabble, but if someone could let me know succinctly, we still don't have anything more effective at carbon sequestration that trees, right? And how well are trees doing?
They want to convert CO2 and water to natural gas and have roughly 30% energy efficiency. A gallon of gas contains 33kWh, so (handwave gasoline == natural gas), it costs 100kWh per gallon equivalent. A kilowatt hour is at least $0.10, so > $10 per gallon-captured-ish.
If the carbon intensity of natural gas is similar to gasoline, so the computation is close enough and the technology in the article is about 10x off state of the art.
On the bright side, the article’s technology would “only” require 5% of the earth’s surface be covered in solar panels, so state of the art would need 0.5%, which is feasible, in terms of land use, at least.
Carbon intensity table: https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/fthr/b...
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...
Observed abiotic hydrocarbons on Titan
https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/system/downloadable_items/402_20...
I know I'm missing the point of the article so looking for helpful guidance.
We have tremendous infrastructure already dedicated to using natural gas (cooking, heating, transport, industrial equipment) and it won’t be electrified overnight.
First get to carbon neutral, then worry about carbon negative.
Additionally, we have little hope of scaling nuclear construction capacity to meet the necessary demand. Whereas solar/wind/storage is way ahead and scaling at ridiculously high rates.
Spend 5 years building a reactor, and you get a some number of GW. Spend that same construction capacity building mines and factories, and you get some GW/year additional production capacity.
Construction capacity is fixed, really bad, and productivity has not increased in years. Applying that construction capacity to nuclear is a linear attack to energy production. Applying that construction capacity to solar/wind/storage is an exponential attack on energy production.
Maybe not the best idea then.
The computation demands for a computer to beat humans at chess were astronomical, and then suddenly they were manageable (and it happened, quite publicly), and now Deep Blue loses to a Raspberry Pi
Tibet's insolation is really good, though.
https://newatlas.com/energy/solar-jet-fuel-tower/
The plant created 5191 liters (1371 gallons) of syngas in 9 days, whereas a Boeing 787 Dreamliner carries 126,372 liters (36,384 gallons). The conversions are not linear, but that is something like a refueled plane every 219 days, give or take an order of magnitude. Looks like the conversion efficiency is 4% but 20% is expected after recycling heat and catalyst improvements.
I find stuff like this simultaneously inspiring and devastating. The technology has arrived to easily create our own electricity and fuel without having to deal with supply chain issues around centralized photovoltaic manufacturers, yet the size of the challenge is insurmountable. There is simply no way to scale this big enough to save the natural world before global warming destroys it at the end of the century.
So, that leaves us with nuclear power (fission). I appreciate that a lot of people have worked very hard on it and have humanity's best interests at heart. But they don't understand human psychology. We all know that we've been lied to about the safety of nuclear power, but they pretend that it can be made safe. While simultaneously avoiding discussion about the externalities like nuclear waste storage, nuclear proliferation, even the inherent security issues around large centralized power generation or what will happen after wars or other emergencies force workers to abandon nuclear facilities. So I don't trust them, and that's why I don't consider nuclear to be a viable alternative, and I have an unlimited list of evidence against it so I don't bother debating it anymore.
Which leaves us with what I feel is the actual solution. Yet again, as in most things, we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. I think that we'll solve it through cultural evolution. Each of us has to get to sustainability on an individual level, then lift at least one other person (preferably someone we don't know) out of dependence. Which is still a big problem, but it's smaller than paying off a mortgage.
So everyone's gotta wake up, forget they got hoodwinked, stop listening to the wealthy and powerful people talking us out of this, and just start doing it. Be a real conservative, lead by example. Be a real liberal, pay it forward. Mourn the breakdown of our institutions that set this back 40 years. Then do something about it by evangelizing sustainability and stop voting for people who pass the buck. Help people who don't get it find their way out of cognitive dissonance.
Solarpunk is a great place to start.
In the EU and elsewhere there's a healthy market in used panels; when a large scale installation upgrades to newer/better panels, the used panels go on the market and end up in places where people don't care about the efficiency per area.
To have enough solar energy, you would need huge fields of panels where the sun shines bright. Panels block the sunlight beneath, so you can't plant anything where the panels are. On the other hand, you need space for agriculture. So, you see where the problem is.
Large wind turbines also need a lot of space to be efficient. And you can't just place those anywhere, either. Wind turbines need strong wind to work.
Hydro power plants need water flow to generate energy. So you can't have those anywhere, of course.
The only reliable and eco-firendly way to generate power are nuclear power plants. You can build them anywhere, they produce small waste per output and they require about the same space as any coal-based plant.
Sadly, you need good experts and no bad luck to operate them safely. Otherwise, we saw what happens.
"researchers are showing how panels can increase yields and reduce water use on a warming planet."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_wind_power
"As of 2020, the total worldwide offshore wind power nameplate capacity was 35.3 gigawatt"
Many areas need large amounts of cheap clean electric, but don't need them 24/7. If your CO2 sequestran or hydrogen generator or desalination only runs during the day, or when the wind is blowing, meh.
You need energy storage as well, people have realized this and it's being built in most countries. Hydro however is enough on it's own, and is in fact also one of the best forms of energy storage. If you have enough hydro to cover half your needs, adding "half your needs" from wind and solar lets you save hydro for the other half (This is a huge simplification but essentially true)
>Panels block the sunlight beneath, so you can't plant anything where the panels are. On the other hand, you need space for agriculture. So, you see where the problem is.
I don't see where the problem is. You seem to postulate that a solar power plant needs to be built like a nuclear power plant and take up a huge area of new land. It doesn't. You can put solar where you are already doing other things.
In fact, we could just build solar roofs on existing parking lots! Shade is very nice for parked cars and the area currently used by parking lots is enough in most countries.
Also, parking lots are not used for agriculture.
I think the real thing people don't realize is just how great a solution solar power really is, because it's new and has enormous implications. So far most of the development has been done on a basically amateur level.
Distributed energy generation and decimated price of electricity will disrupt a lot of powerful incumbents, so there's bound to be some propaganda against it from many sources.
If the claims in the story are true, anyone using IEA as a source would be lead to believe that solar has no future, for example. But the actual solar developments have surpassed IEAs 20-year estimates within 1 year, 13 years in a row.
[1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p...
We don't realize it because it's not true.
When I hear people talk about building solar panels to convert water and CO2 into methane gas for its explosive energy potential to meet our needs, mining pits in the ground all over the world, razing landscapes to steal their sunlight, as if they're going to ever come close to the methane that's already there, and that without doing more environmental damage than our current state of affairs comes close to, I wonder how delusional or dishonest you have to be to pitch an investor. And I'm fearful of the mentality and the utter destruction of the environment this absurdity will lead us to. They would have us pave the earth to save it.
If you're worried about climate change, the only way stop it is to reduce the amount of energy consumed, the amount of plastic produced, the amount of ammonia made through the Haber Bosch process. This necessarily means killing, at a minimum, three quarters of the world's human population, along with the livestock that are alive currently that will feed them. And then you've got to get past the unbelievably massive spike in carbon dioxide as all these carcasses decay, carbon dioxide that was once locked up in oil as well, since all these living organisms are made possible only by way of the fertilizer they were fed that was made from oil.
It's not pretty, but that's the only way to do it. Do you think we should do it?
You could cull three billion people of the lowest emitters and it would have as much of an effect as halving the CO2 emissions of the top 1% of emitters.[1] And considering that to avoid the worst of the climate crisis we need action immediately or as close to it as possible, waiting for people to die away will not help us. If the entire planet stopped having babies today we would wait 65 years to get to half the current population, and half the emissions.
At best, and I would argue even that is a stretch, population control is one small part of a long term strategy. But it is by no means a solution, so throwing it out there every time people talk about sustainability does nothing but derail the conversation.
What we really need is to to make consumption as sustainable as possible and reduce it where possible, especially for the top consumers. That is not only more feasible in the short term, it is probably more ethical as well.
(Pasted this comment from [2])
[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...
You'd need to update your reasoning to take into account all the efficiencies lost in the fossil fuel creation and consumption in order to generate electricity.