Climate Change

[Percy Rideout]

Statements like this are not helpful. There are LOTS of very serious scientists and engineers who disagree with you and say wind, water, solar and storage can get us where we need to go.

The biggest problem with nuclear, in my mind, is we need to get to 80% clean electricity by 2030 and we won't be able to build much nuclear in that timeframe. Here in WY we are planning a new modular reactor that needs to be built by 2028 to get fed funds, but the technology isn't completely worked out yet and that timeline os very ambitious. Then according to the Wyoming Energy Authority this reactor needs to run for 3 years to prove it works and can generate electricity affordably before others even get approved. Then it will take another 6-10 years to permit and build them. Even if nuclear could help this timeline means we need other solutions.

Thing is, there has to be some mythical power source to provide the base load when wind doesn't blow, and the sun doesn't shine. Coal, natural gas, or nuclear are the only three that fit the bill right now. Pick your poison.

We can opt both individually and collectively to use less electricity......but recent trends would prove the opposite.

[SumJongGuy]

There are these imaginary things called batteries that an actually store and deliver power when the sun, wind, and hydro water turbines aren't spinning. Surprise some here haven't heard of batteries.. weird!

Before that though power "GRID"s are interconnected to send energy to parts if the country with low gain from other parts of the country with high yield at any given time. As long as they are properly maintained, things will be fine. Texas wasn't properly maintaining their equipment/grid so it failed under high stress.. That's what happens when we keep kicking the can down the road instead of continuously investing in the future needs..

[Percy Rideout]

There are these imaginary things called batteries that an actually store and deliver power when the sun, wind, and hydro water turbines aren't spinning. Surprise some here haven't heard of batteries.. weird!

Before that though power "GRID"s are interconnected to send energy to parts if the country with low gain from other parts of the country with high yield at any given time. As long as they are properly maintained, things will be fine. Texas wasn't properly maintaining their equipment/grid so it failed under high stress.. That's what happens when we keep kicking the can down the road instead of continuously investing in the future needs..

Condescending tones with uninformed opinions, my favorite!

Easy answers are.....easy! Unfortunately your rationale is not well thought out. I wish it were that easy!

If we go your route, we better start some more open pit lithium mines! Oh yeah, and figure out how to pay for the $ 2.5 trillion bill for lithium ion batteries with relatively short service lives.

The lynchpin that we haven't figured out yet is our battery technology...

https://www.technologyreview.com/201...n-up-the-grid/

[westoxified]

https://www.fastcompany.com/90603229...iant-batteries

it's called gravity aSSPEN

[SumJongGuy]

Condescending tones with uninformed opinions, my favorite!

Easy answers are.....easy! Unfortunately your rationale is not well thought out. I wish it were that easy!

If we go your route, we better start some more open pit lithium mines! Oh yeah, and figure out how to pay for the $ 2.5 trillion bill for lithium ion batteries with relatively short service lives.

The lynchpin that we haven't figured out yet is our battery technology...

https://www.technologyreview.com/201...n-up-the-grid/

Power walls on houses dipshit

And that's only needed when rerouting from other sources in the NATIONAL grid fail.. Maintain the grid and you won't have TexASS issues..

[Percy Rideout]

Power walls on houses dipshit

And that's only needed when rerouting from other sources in the NATIONAL grid fail.. Maintain the grid and you won't have TexASS issues..

Oh man I don't know where to start with your ilk. I guess lets start with the basics. Power walls on houses don't provide even HALF the energy an average house uses in a day, dipshit.

https://airplusair.com/2021/08/31/te...torage-system/

"Each Powerwall provides about 13.5 kWh of energy per day, while the average home uses an average of 30 kWh of energy. However, a single Powerwall can only run up to 5 kW of continuous power. This is enough to supply the startup power for about two large appliances, such as a heating system, refrigerator, or microwave oven."

Again we need a serious upgrade and/or breakthrough in battery technology to accomplish what you are proposing...

[SumJongGuy]

Oh man I don't know where to start with your ilk. I guess lets start with the basics. Power walls on houses don't provide even HALF the energy an average house uses in a day, dipshit.

https://airplusair.com/2021/08/31/te...torage-system/

"Each Powerwall provides about 13.5 kWh of energy per day, while the average home uses an average of 30 kWh of energy. However, a single Powerwall can only run up to 5 kW of continuous power. This is enough to supply the startup power for about two large appliances, such as a heating system, refrigerator, or microwave oven."

Again we need a serious upgrade and/or breakthrough in battery technology to accomplish what you are proposing...

Back at you.. My Google says it's three times that for a powerwall.. A day and a half.. and solar is never 100% out. Some come in through the clouds..

With a home battery alone, you would be able to power your basic amenities for about a day or two
https://www.solar.com/learn/how-long...ing-an-outage/

But back to the main point. It's a grid that can pull from other areas and sources when wind or solar or river stops flowing.. Only reason Texas failed is because they didn't maintain their grid and kicked the can too far down the road. So quit bitching about solutions to problems that don't exist in a well maintained world..

[Percy Rideout]

Back at you.. My Google says it's three times that for a powerwall.. A day and a half.. and solar is never 100% out. Some come in through the clouds..



But back to the main point. It's a grid that can pull from other areas and sources when wind or solar or river stops flowing.. Only reason Texas failed is because they didn't maintain their grid and kicked the can too far down the road. So quit bitching about solutions to problems that don't exist in a well maintained world..

Your solar.com article shows that the average homeowner will install a 10kWh battery. The same article (the video) states the average american home uses between 500-1,000 kWh/ month which translates into 16.6-33.3 kWh/day assuming every month is 30 days.

The data in the article you provided corroborates perfectly with the article i provided. Where the hell are you getting your numbers from because it isn't from the article you linked...

[SumJongGuy]

Your solar.com article shows that the average homeowner will install a 10kWh battery. The same article (the video) states the average american home uses between 500-1,000 kWh/ month which translates into 16.6-33.3 kWh/day assuming every month is 30 days.

The data in the article you provided corroborates perfectly with the article i provided. Where the hell are you getting your numbers from because it isn't from the article you linked...

Even with a poor power grid a whole home natural gas generator is an option to handle temporary blackouts.. Even running 10 days a year off the green grid and the other 355 on is a HUGE improvement over 100% fossil.

The quote is from the article I linked, Maybe learn to read or something..

[SumJongGuy]

Aspen is right.

You need some sort of baseline power source to even out the ebbs and flows of wind and solar.

This isn’t an argument against renewables however, it’s an argument to retool our power grid.

MIT says:

“For these reasons, adding much more renewable energy to our electric grid will require other changes, including more energy storage, backup generation, strategies to match electricity use with times of high power generation, and infrastructure for long-distance power transmission.”

Agreed. If Texas had been keeping up with the required upkeep and maintenance, shit wouldn't have crashed on them in that polar vortex. The whole point of a power grid is to have robust options to redirect from other sources when one fails.

And, I still say good renewable energy 95% of the year with a natty gas back up generator for the times (5%) the grid might fail in small areas, individual homes is better than everyone 100% of the year on "more efficient" large coal or gas plants..

Provide the back up natty gas option to reduce objections from laggards.. but make that natty gas SUPER expensive when the grid is sound so it's only used when the grid fails somewhere..

[Percy Rideout]

Agreed. If Texas had been keeping up with the required upkeep and maintenance, shit wouldn't have crashed on them in that polar vortex. The whole point of a power grid is to have robust options to redirect from other sources when one fails.

And, I still say good renewable energy 95% of the year with a natty gas back up generator for the times (5%) the grid might fail in small areas, individual homes is better than everyone 100% of the year on "more efficient" large coal or gas plants..

Provide the back up natty gas option to reduce objections from laggards.. but make that natty gas SUPER expensive when the grid is sound so it's only used when the grid fails somewhere..

This is fun! Again very wrong.

"maybe learn to read or something, durr." -SumJongGuy

Maybe just focus on your reading comprehension.

"maintenance and upkeep" was not the cause of the Texas outage. ERCOT instead took the lowest bids for install of natural gas lines that had no thermal protection. It saved them millions upfront, but they pay for it every cold snap with frozen natural gas lines, just like they did in 1989 and 2011. No amount of "maintenance and upkeep" will prevent the problem of the system being constructed improperly from the start.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2...RoC3tAQAvD_BwE

[Greenstateofmind]

There are LOTS of very serious scientists and engineers who disagree with you and say wind, water, solar and storage can get us where we need to go.

When I was studying resources in '17, the consensus seemed to be that renewables alone would not meet energy requirements - not by a long shot. Yes, we have NGO's saying it's possible with a world wide grid and something like 70% storage capacity for energy production - that's sci-fi levels of wishing.

We're currently trying to fit a square peg in the proverbial round hole if we think current levels of energy consumption are sustainable. And, we're slated to see increased energy use over the next three decades. Every solar/wind farm helps but these have their own set of environmental impacts too.

[WMD]

[QUOTE=Greenstateofmind;6464652]When I was studying resources in '17, the consensus seemed to be that renewables alone would not meet energy requirements - not by a long shot. Yes, we have NGO's saying it's possible with a world wide grid and something like 70% storage capacity for energy production - that's sci-fi levels of wishing.

We're currently trying to fit a square peg in the proverbial round hole if we think current levels of energy consumption are sustainable. And, we're slated to see increased energy use over the next three decades. Every solar/wind farm helps but these have their own set of environmental impacts too.

Technology and prices are changing fast, but there certainly are challenges to 100% clean energy. And yes, there are impacts with everything. We really need to cut energy use but I don't have much hope of that anytime soon.

The fairly conservative Breakthrough Institute just compared three new plans/ models in getting to 100% clean energy or net zero by 2050.

Here is the first half of this article.

What New Net-Zero Studies Tell Us About Electricity Decarbonization
FEB 22, 2021

There is a view among some in the environmental community that “any solution that doesn’t show up in the next 10–20 years is essentially no solution at all.” They suggest that we have all the technologies we need to decarbonize today, and that all we lack is the political will to do so. Clean energy technologies like wind and solar have fallen dramatically in price in recent years, and will likely provide the bulk of new clean energy for the US over the next decade or two.

At the same time, however, these technologies cannot effectively decarbonize the entire economy — or even the power sector — alone. New state-of-the-art energy system models suggest that the current decade is a critical time in which we need to both accelerate the deployment of existing clean energy technologies and heavily invest in RD&D for maturing and improving a range of technologies that will be needed longer-term — such as advanced nuclear, gas with carbon capture and storage, enhanced geothermal, blue/green hydrogen, and direct air capture.

A slew of new net-zero studies have been published in recent months, including Princeton's Net Zero America (NZA) project, the Vibrant Clean Energy Zero By Fifty scenario, and by a team of researchers led by Jim Williams at USF. All three of these take a deep-dive into how the US could reach net-zero emissions by 2050, down to the level of where each new generating facility might be located, where new transmission lines would be built, and how electricity generation sources can meet hourly grid demand in different regions of the country. Each study contains multiple scenarios looking at the sensitivity to future technology prices, land use constraints, and other factors. But for simplicity, we focus in this comparison on their marker scenarios: E+ for NZA, the default Zero By Fifty scenario from Vibrant, and the central scenario from Williams et al. Both NZA and Williams et al. use a combination of the EnergyPATHWAYS (EP) and RIO models to generate their scenarios, while Vibrant uses their WIS:dom model.

While the models differ in important ways, they all paint a broadly similar picture. Wind and solar expand rapidly in the next three decades. US coal use falls off a cliff, reaching zero by 2030 or 2035. At the same time, natural gas use stays rather flat — or even increases modestly — between 2020 and 2030, as it serves a key role in filling in the gaps in variable renewable generation. Gas capacity actually increases in two of the three decarbonization models through 2050, though capacity factors — how often the gas plants are run — fall rapidly, and gas increasingly becomes a blend of hydrogen and methane closer to 2050.

The figure below shows the current 2020 US electricity generation mix, as well as the projected generation mix in 2030, 2040, and 2050 across each of the three models.

https://thebreakthrough.imgix.net/Net-zero-fig-1.png

Annual US electricity generation (in TWh) in the initial year of each decade. 2020 values from the February 2021 EIA Short Term Energy Outlook. 2030, 2040, and 2050 values from the respective Vibrant, NZA, and Williams et al. scenarios examined.

A few things immediately stand out:

First, there are fairly sizable differences in future electricity demand; in all cases, it is well above 2020 levels, with 2050 generation roughly twice current levels in Vibrant’s model, 2.5x current levels in NZA, and more than three times current levels in Williams et al. These differences in overall demand presumably arise from differing assumptions around economy-wide electrification rates, demand, and future energy efficiency. The degree to which other sectors of the economy can be effectively electrified will also impact the shape of demand curves and the types of generation that are best-suited to meet demand; both NZA (E-) and Williams et al. (Delayed Electrification) examine scenarios where electrification is more difficult to achieve.

Second, future generation looks quite different between the Vibrant WIS:dom model and the EP/RIO-based results from NZA and Williams et al. While variable renewables — wind and solar — supply the majority of generation in all three, Vibrant’s model sees a big expansion of nuclear — in the form of small and modular reactors and molten salt reactors — starting in the mid-2030s. Both NZA and Williams et al. expect offshore wind to play a major role in the 2040s, while the Vibrant model has relatively modest offshore wind generation.

Finally, while NZA and Williams et al. have some remaining gas generation in 2050 (some with CCS, some blended with H2 and offset by direct air capture), Vibrant has only a small amount of gas with CCS. As mentioned earlier, both NZA and Williams et al. have variations of their model with different assumptions around future technology prices, constraints, and land availability. In some scenarios, nuclear and CCS play a relatively larger role, while other scenarios have an even larger role for variable renewables.

Variable renewable energy provides between 51% and 91% of total electricity generation by 2050 across the three models — though in all cases a sizable chunk of clean firm generation remains needed (as well a massive expansion of transmission capacity, battery storage, and other complementary technologies). The figure below shows how the three models expect generation from firm and variable sources to evolve over time.

https://thebreakthrough.imgix.net/Net-zero-fig-2.png

[bean]

Even with a poor power grid a whole home natural gas generator is an option to handle temporary blackouts.. Even running 10 days a year off the green grid and the other 355 on is a HUGE improvement over 100% fossil.

The quote is from the article I linked, Maybe learn to read or something..

6kWh/day is 250w average power consumption. A refrigerator will take about 1/3 of that. Hope you don't want to use a computer, turn on a tv, or have too many lights on. Making coffee or cooking is definitely out.

I checked my electric bill in August when the AC was running a lot and we went through about 60kWh/day. Four or five powerwalls.

[BCMtnHound]

6kWh/day is 250w average power consumption. A refrigerator will take about 1/3 of that. Hope you don't want to use a computer, turn on a tv, or have too many lights on. Making coffee or cooking is definitely out.

I checked my electric bill in August when the AC was running a lot and we went through about 60kWh/day. Four or five powerwalls.

In summer, with a window AC unit, we run between 15 and 20kWh/day. But in the coldest of winter, with electric forced air furnace, we average about 120kWh/day. Wood would be a bit cheaper, but messy and I don't want to contribute to the poor air in the subdivision when we experience the valley inversion from now until spring. Thankful for the hydroelectric the province is relatively rich with.

[neufox47]

We use 60-90 kWh per day in the summer but with 10kw of solar and a 18kwh battery that eliminates most of our grid pull. The problem is eliminating that last bit of sporadic grid pull. One option that looks pretty darn appealing is to use vehicles as backup. That would potentially give EV homes 50-150 kWh of backup from a fully charged car.


Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

[neufox47]

This is fun! Again very wrong.

"maybe learn to read or something, durr." -SumJongGuy

Maybe just focus on your reading comprehension.

"maintenance and upkeep" was not the cause of the Texas outage. ERCOT instead took the lowest bids for install of natural gas lines that had no thermal protection. It saved them millions upfront, but they pay for it every cold snap with frozen natural gas lines, just like they did in 1989 and 2011. No amount of "maintenance and upkeep" will prevent the problem of the system being constructed improperly from the start.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2...RoC3tAQAvD_BwE

According to an attorney who is litigating against the utilities, two significant causes of the outage were that natural gas sellers just saw the spot markets go up so much and the opportunity to make so much money was there that they stopped providing natural gas to the electric generators who bought at prearranged prices. To him this amounts to breech of contract and he thinks there is good recourse to collect on damages from those decisions. Secondly, a number of the natural gas suppliers did not submit a 1 page form that would list them as critical infrastructure during a brown out. Therefore the gas lines froze because they didn’t have power and couldn’t operate because they didn’t fill out this form…

[abraham]

[QUOTE=WMD;6465251]

When I was studying resources in '17, the consensus seemed to be that renewables alone would not meet energy requirements - not by a long shot. Yes, we have NGO's saying it's possible with a world wide grid and something like 70% storage capacity for energy production - that's sci-fi levels of wishing.

We're currently trying to fit a square peg in the proverbial round hole if we think current levels of energy consumption are sustainable. And, we're slated to see increased energy use over the next three decades. Every solar/wind farm helps but these have their own set of environmental impacts too.

Technology and prices are changing fast, but there certainly are challenges to 100% clean energy. And yes, there are impacts with everything. We really need to cut energy use but I don't have much hope of that anytime soon.

The fairly conservative Breakthrough Institute just compared three new plans/ models in getting to 100% clean energy or net zero by 2050.

Here is the first half of this article.

Just curious, do you listen to any of the Decouple podcasts? Of you don't, I think you might find them interesting, since this is clearly something you care about. I do and find it interesting but I don't know if I think what they say is possible or too technology focused. Generally I don't know where I stand with respect to useful steps, I think nuclear in some form is pretty important and it's not great to dismiss it out of hand while hand waving away the radiation coming from coal plants just because it's not directly connected in the public's mind.

[westoxified]

This is fun! Again very wrong.

this version of burns writes like an ass

[Greenstateofmind]

Here is the first half of this article.

Thanks for this. Clearly there is a lot of current research in net-zero emission goals. Also, I was a bit hasty to say a reduction in consumption is the cure all/end all. That's just not super feasible given society's need for energy.

One thing in your article prompted a thought: That is, to me, we can celebrate steps to carbon pollution reduction. A move to phase out coal is a huge step in the right direction.

[Squirreljam]

Worth reading. Not new science but talks about effect on ski industry
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/t...smid=url-share

[shafty85]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/mega...mate-1.6352052

[NakedShorts]

Leftists be like Batteries duh.

Those with brains are like “Um we do not have enough of the raw materials to make those with our current technology”

Even the IEA says if everyone hits the 2030 goals that fossil fuels will account for 70%. Of global energy in 2040 instead of the 82% that it is today.

We will need another source, different tech, new tech, or maybe just less people to solve this problem.

[Buzzworthy]

Leftists be like Batteries duh.

Those with brains are like “Um we do not have enough of the raw materials to make those with our current technology”

Even the IEA says if everyone hits the 2030 goals that fossil fuels will account for 70%. Of global energy in 2040 instead of the 82% that it is today.

We will need another source, different tech, new tech, or maybe just less people to solve this problem.

Hilariously short sighted. Y’all get to a point in your thoughts that your brain shuts off yet you still keep babbling. Thanks for the laugh!

[shafty85]

Leftists be like Batteries duh.

Those with brains are like “Um we do not have enough of the raw materials to make those with our current technology”

Even the IEA says if everyone hits the 2030 goals that fossil fuels will account for 70%. Of global energy in 2040 instead of the 82% that it is today.

We will need another source, different tech, new tech, or maybe just less people to solve this problem.

This is such a tired argument. The people who are developing these policies, and most people who support the policies, aren't counting on one single tech to solve the problem but rather to contribute toward the solution.

The parallel to your argument would be to stop enforcing the law because despite the police and prosecution, laws continue to be broken and not all crimes are solved.