5416

One of the things I learned from the Sustainable Energy book is that energy discussions without using numbers are a pretty much a waste of time, as David McKay said arguing about adjectives is pointless.

Unlike, health care debates where I think most of the number have the accuracy of Soviet Era economic data, there are lots of good source for energy statistic Energy Information Admin (EIA), Darpa-E, lots of universities and think tanks.

This seemed like a pretty good source for storage… http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-factsheet.

Some highlights about 2.5% of electrical system in the US, are hooked up to a storage system Japan is the highest at 15%.

Virtually all energy storage (94%) is pumped hydro storage. (PHS) total battery storage in .the US .75 GigaWatts Hours (GWH). Now nothing is wrong with pumped storage, but if you think building a nuclear power plant create a NIMBY problem, building a dam anywhere in the US is worse. We actually have been tearing down dams in the country for at least a decade. Anything smaller than medium-size lake isn’t enough to a make a difference (10 liters of water pumped up 10 meters is only one kilowatt, so you need to increase both of those numbers by orders of magnitudes). So there are significant practical problems with dramatically increased PHS , the fact sheet shows only 7% of new energy storage is PHS in the US. Also pumped storage has limitations, the recent floods would have overwhelmed any pumped storage.

It is important to keep these numbers in perspective the US consumes about 4,000 Terra Watt hours per year (TWH) or about 11 TWH/day. The largest battery storage facilities have a capacity of ~100 MHH and cumulative only only a couple of gigawatt hours. Meaning that enough batteries to keep the grid up for seconds and even with pump storage only minutes. We need more than 125,000 (80 MHW) system like Tesla recently installed for Southern California to store a single days worth of electricity.

Renewable are far more vulnerable to weather than conventional power plants. Fog screws up both solar and wind generation, as do hurricanes and blizzards. Right now when natural disaster hits we know we have repair the transmission lines. I don’t think we have enough data to accurately predict how wind or solar farms will fair after major weather events.

So while it is true to say that in a grid the size of North America that’s always windy somewhere, it is also pretty much irrelevant. While you can use some of the wind energy generated in Texas to keep the lights on in NYC, you can’t use all. Since most utility system are design to import only 10-20% tops of the energy from outside the system. This why base load power is so important and why renewable can’t be 100% or even most of it.

5417

For such an intelligent nation, I still wonder what the bloody hell they were thinking. Not only were their nuke plants nothing like Japan’s, but they have practically no natural disaster risks when compared to Japan as well. Dumbest thing ever.

5418

That is some good data, but I was talking about here in Europe, as those things are more suitable to happen here (more compact population makes for a cheaper grid, and dam building due to the winning combination of european funds & pork - but we’re probably out of places for that now).
Still, those are some useful numbers that make me shift back a bit towards nuclear being inevitable, at least if we can ever get rid of TINA.

5419

Europe also tends to lack vast empty areas to plant wind and solar farms.

5420

I dont know about solar (although roof mounted solar is always an option), but there’s no real problem finding space for wind farms. Pumped storage is different, my understanding is that to do it at a reasonable cost you need some pretty specific geologic features.

The problem is not finding space, the problem is that as soon as your baseload nuclear + peak wind/solar production exceeds demand, the economics, and the emissions impact, of further renewables investment start to get worse and worse.

EDIT: Given that renewable energy is a capital intensive, long term investment, I would be astonished if this isn’t already having an impact in much of northern Europe, which isn’t at this point yet but is getting close.

EDIT2: And yes, storage and interconnects can help. But storage is expensive and I’m really not convinced that interconnects solve the whole problem - they definitely give you a few more percent and help us push out CO2 emitting power, so we should invest in them, but the wind levels across adjacent states are somewhat correlated.

5421

Let’s not forget that we have a Lysenkoist administration.

5422

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Although to be fair we are pretty much ideal geographically for pretty much every single renewable source. We are at 40% renewables in installed capacity, somewhat under 20% in real consumption (wind is the biggest contributor but I expect a huge solar push soon. The whole center-south is depopulated, flat and sunny while center-north is chock full of wind farms)

5423

Spain has a fairly low population density (about 1/3 of the UK), but then compare it to someplace like Montana or Russia which are less than a 10th of that density. And when you realize it’s not all that realistic for a place like Russia to do it for all their power needs… well the UK and Germany aren’t gonna pull it off.

Also keep in mind very few European nations are willing to turn all of their countryside into turbines and solar panel farms because NIMBY is a universal thing. Turning Iowa into endless windmills doesn’t bother Iowans because there is nothing to fucking look at anyway. It’s actually a nice change from fields of corn and soybeans as far as the horizon. Turning Normandy or Champagne into a wind farm isn’t going to fly as well.

5424

Also in Spain they have to factor in the expense of delusional knights-errant attacking their wind turbines.

Sorry, just happen to be reading Don Quixote at the moment.

5425

Normandy:

Champagne-Ardennes:

5426

Off the coast and people said it desecrated the memories of everyone on D-Day.

But my point is more that Iowa generates about half as much as France with 1/20th the population.
We’re basically at their goal (35% of Iowan power is renewable).
We don’t have big cities that draw a ton of power. They’re gonna need a shitload more, but they’re also planning on closing a bunch of nuclear plants, so I expect a lot of NIMYA before it’s all said and done.

Or they just wont hit their target.

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They’re going to lose about 25% of that blue. They expect the orange and light green to cover for it.
I’m guessing that wont happen.

Edit: Of course the irony is that if everyone generated like France does right now things would be a hell of a lot better.

5427

Would any area truly want that though? What would be the psychological effect of beautiful countrysides being turned into ugly solar farms and wind turbine forests? Sure, coal blackened skies are no better but the idea of inundating existing open spaces with ugly man made objects is not a true answer either. It’s why solar and wind as currently constructed will never take over full power production.

5428

sometimes I hate h sapiens

5429

I have to feel this is a vanishingly small concern next to the question of “how to power civilization without heating the planet to extinction levels.” If the answer is nuclear, fine, nuclear away, but it’s not like tons of toxic waste don’t have a downside too. The stakes are too high to sweat the aesthetics too much, IMO.

5430

Most countries could replicate all of their current energy production with solar farms which take up a tiny fraction of their current land surface area. [*]

If done globally rather than nationally, it could be limited to wasteland spaces. A projection for 2030 needs puts the land use requirements at something like 0.5 million square kilometers. That’s about 0.1% of the earth’s land surface. Applied to e.g. the US, that’s about 10k square kilometers, far smaller than the surface area of all existing roads and parking lots in the country.

https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

[*] Yes, base load and night time, I get it. I talking about land use, not actually replacing all energy needs with solar.

5431

The solar farms here are going into places that, for the most part, nobody cares about. Deserts and scrub cattle grazing land. Wind turbines here are a little different. You see them in mountain passes near Altomont or the Grapevine. Again though for the most part land with no other real use than to graze animals during the green season.

I am sure this info is available on the web someplace but I would be curious as to how much solar power is being produced now by all sources and if it is even keeping up with energy demand. Solar is everywhere here. It is on top of commercial buildings, every school has it’s own solar farm as parking lots are covered with panels and panels on residential housing probably is at a decent percentage. But I don’t think even California is keeping up with demand. And the cost to the user of said energy is exploding.

5432

Solar collector fields are just butt-ugly, and there’s little you can do to prevent that ugliness.

But I’ve always found that the wind turbines are kind of pretty, especially the great big ones.

5433
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I think this looks cool.

5435

Look, the area around Palm Springs is pretty blighted to begin with. Solar panels can’t help but improve it.