Current Gasoline/Petrol Price$

kbd512 · 2021-06-13 19:44:44

Louis,

I think you fail to grasp the totality of the phrase "technological advancement". Those words are utterly meaningless without context. The mere fact that something is "new" means very little. A steel knife can be considered to be a considerable technological advancement over a flint knife in terms of durability, namely resistance to accidental or intentional impact with another solid object. Both types of knives will cut equally well if they're equally well made. However, a steel knife is not a technological advancement in its own right if you lack the raw materials, energy, machinery to make steel knives, and the knowledge to actually make one (all of which is rather complicated and time consuming), or if doing so is unattainably expensive in terms of materials / energy / technology / labor.

A plastic roadway would require extreme quantities of petrochemicals to actually produce, which is why roads are made from gravel and sand, with either a steel-reinforced concrete or asphalt load bearing surface on top. If all the plastic goes into making roadways, then there's not enough plastic for other uses. We still use wooden pallets, rather than plastic, specifically because of the energy and materials cost associated with making plastics. There's little doubt that a plastic pallet would be more durable than wood, but that's the reason why we don't typically use plastics for making pallets. If we truly required more durable pallets for bearing the weight of the cargo, then we'd use Aluminum or steel, and that's what we typically do when we need something more durable or considerably stronger than wood. Alternatively, we simply use thicker slabs of wood when fabricating the pallet.

From an energy expenditure perspective, it's nearly impossible for plastic to actually be cheaper than natural materials. If the only reason you believe otherwise is that you watched a YouTube video making such a claim without evidence, then you need more education about energy.

What may be "perfect" for electricity may be far from ideal in other respects. Since all plastic is very soft compared to concrete or gravel, it will almost certainly have much poorer resistance to abrasion. Beyond that, the very first fuel fire that liquefies the roadway will let everyone else know that it wasn't such a great idea. Anyway, this has been tried before, with poor results. We had steel and Aluminum "pre-fab" tarmac for landing aircraft on tiny islands in WWII. We tried sawdust mixed with ice in very cold places, and we've also tried plastic roads. None of that is "new". The technologies that proved most practical was steel-reinforced concrete and asphalt.

EV "engines" are definitely NOT "way simpler and cheaper to maintain than ICE engines", because they all cost substantially more to produce than combustion engines that reliably produce equivalent power. You even stated as much. The "fuel cost" is only lower if we utterly ignore every other aspect of actually using electric vehicle technology. Indeed, that is what we must do to rationalize the nonsense behind such statements. If I posted a random YouTube video that makes it seem as if diamond roads would practical to produce, would you believe that, too?

As far as Tesla Motors is concerned, what they have achieved is noteworthy, but they're a literal drop in the bucket compared to all the combustion engine powered vehicles.

SpaceNut · 2021-06-13 20:00:14

Not to mention we still make and use wooden bridges as well as the covered bridges....

If you mean cheap to maintain as you remove it and replace to send it out for refurbishment sure but the average person can not remove the EV drive train let alone trouble shot to what is wrong with it....

Have been looking at the use of a scooter as a possible for some of my driving use but for commute its not so possible.

kbd512 · 2021-06-14 07:58:59

SpaceNut,

The aftermarket support for Teslas remains near to zero, as compared to the aftermarket support for a GM vehicle equipped with a LS type engine. People who own Tesla vehicles treat them like appliances. Teslas are a social status symbol for them. If you asked the average Tesla owner to actually work on their own car, they could no more begin to do so than they could figure out how to clean their own toilet. The mere fact that so many of them are winding up in junkyards, long before the energy required to make them is offset by whatever energy they could potentially save through greater efficiency, frequently because either their owners or other motorists can't be bothered to actually drive their vehicles in a responsible manner, is gleefully ignored because the mere feeling of doing something useful overrides any consideration of whether or not they're actually doing something useful. There seems to be a chasm between objective reality and the idolization some people have over their own notions of "futurism" that makes the English Channel look like a river canal.

Incidentally, this is what Tesla recycling looks like:

Elemental Holding SA - Tesla Recycling

It's a mind-blowing smogasbord of different plastics, composites, and metals, all mixed together. Anyone who thinks this is what perpetual sustainability looks like is wildly delusional. All I see is another mess of inseparable waste that has no good recycling solutions. Separating CO2 from the atmosphere is a much simpler and technologically feasible proposition than batteries powering all vehicles or storing power at grid scale, but let's not allow physics and engineering to interfere with religious beliefs.

Calliban · 2021-06-14 14:41:02

Whilst official focus on the consumption of fossil fuels is strictly on CO2 emissions, another more pervasive threat is growing almost without notice: the inexorable rise in energy-cost of energy. This is now strangling the life out of prosperity in Western countries and has halted economic expansion even in developing ones.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence … 7344fab6be

https://victorcourt.files.wordpress.com … erois1.pdf

Economists first noticed secular stagnation in the 1980s, but were at a loss to explain its cause. Whenever energy is accessed for our use, a portion is always consumed in the access process. The problem is that that portion has been growing with time. What we call the economy is really a set of processes that use surplus energy to transform matter, thereby creating goods and services. It is a thermodynamic machine, that exports entropy in the form of low grade heat and degraded (amorphised) materials. With declining EROI and rising energy inputs, it becomes progressively more difficult to maintain (let alone grow) the yield of excess energy and each unit of excess energy comes at the expense of greater input of energy. The result has been that the average American has been getting poorer since about 2003. The average Briton started getting poorer about 1 year later.

Since the 1990s, the crisis has been papered over with a mixture of debt, low interest rates and low cost Chinese goods. In many ways, the admission of China to the WTO in 2001 provided a brief hiatus for the Western world, by allowing energy intensive goods to be produced using very cheap coal based energy and shipped to the western world using energy efficient container ships. In fact, Chinese electricity rates were some of the lowest in the world until relatively recently. Unfortunately, Chinese coal production peaked a few years ago. Chinese steel and concrete production peaked around the same time. This marked the beginning of the end of China as the world's low cost manufacturing hub. Chinese Peak Coal coincides with Peak Coal for the world as a whole, given that China consumes one-half of all of the coal consumed on Earth. Global oil production appears to have peaked at the end of 2018, about 18 months before the coronavirus crisis.

This is relevant to Mars colonisation because all of our ambitions require that the Earth based economy continues to generate sufficient wealth to pay for it. This crisis cannot be waved away with green-tech hopium. Many of the solutions proposed by the green lobby, such as solar PV and battery electric vehicles, are worsening the surplus energy problem, because of the extremely high embodied energy that must be invested in these asset classes. This makes them unsustainable in a world where surplus energy is declining. If there is to be an electric future, I suspect it is more likely to involve electric trams and trains, than expensive BEVs.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-06-14 15:01:44)

tahanson43206 · 2021-06-14 15:17:23

For Calliban ... is there an insufficient supply of energy coming from the Sun to meet human needs?

(th)

Calliban · 2021-06-14 15:54:38

tahanson43206 wrote:

For Calliban ... is there an insufficient supply of energy coming from the Sun to meet human needs?
(th)

No. The problem with solar PV is low energy return on energy invested. Or to put it another way, very high required investment of energy and materials for each unit of harvested energy. This makes it problematic as a replacement for fossil fuels. Think of the situation like this. You have a diminishing supply of energy from fossil fuels each year. You must invest some of that energy in new energy producing infrastructure, to offset depletion and the wearing out of old infrastructure. The rest is consumed or used to build, operate and maintain other infrastructure. If the energy investment needed to replace energy infrastructure substantially increases, then you clearly have a big problem. You must either reduce energy investment in other infrastructure, or reduce consumption, neither of which may be possible beyond limits.

It was crises like this that led to the collapse of many historical civilisations. When the net energy return from agriculture suffered significant decline, it often became impossible to maintain necessary infrastructure, like roads, waterways and military classes needed for defence. The result was often collapse - a sudden and involuntary loss of complexity, combined with a rapid decline in population. Collapse can be catastrophic, but is more often partial. The Roman collapse was partial, with the Eastern empire continuing for several more centuries. The Mayan collapse was gradual, but ultimately complete. The Soviet collapse was partial, with the previously communist states recovering somewhat thanks to immersion in the wider global economy. The declining EROI of fossil fuels threatens the entire global economy with some sort of collapse. The extent of the collapse will depend upon the degree to which the systems that we have can reorganise at lower resource levels and the degree to which alternative energy can be brought online to arrest the fall.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-06-14 15:57:37)

louis · 2021-06-14 17:04:59

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
I think you fail to grasp the totality of the phrase "technological advancement". Those words are utterly meaningless without context. The mere fact that something is "new" means very little. A steel knife can be considered to be a considerable technological advancement over a flint knife in terms of durability, namely resistance to accidental or intentional impact with another solid object. Both types of knives will cut equally well if they're equally well made. However, a steel knife is not a technological advancement in its own right if you lack the raw materials, energy, machinery to make steel knives, and the knowledge to actually make one (all of which is rather complicated and time consuming), or if doing so is unattainably expensive in terms of materials / energy / technology / labor.

Well none of that is untrue but neither is it particularly relevant.

If we see the (real) price of PV going up, as opposed to continuing to full, you may have some

A plastic roadway would require extreme quantities of petrochemicals to actually produce, which is why roads are made from gravel and sand, with either a steel-reinforced concrete or asphalt load bearing surface on top. If all the plastic goes into making roadways, then there's not enough plastic for other uses. We still use wooden pallets, rather than plastic, specifically because of the energy and materials cost associated with making plastics. There's little doubt that a plastic pallet would be more durable than wood, but that's the reason why we don't typically use plastics for making pallets. If we truly required more durable pallets for bearing the weight of the cargo, then we'd use Aluminum or steel, and that's what we typically do when we need something more durable or considerably stronger than wood. Alternatively, we simply use thicker slabs of wood when fabricating the pallet.
From an energy expenditure perspective, it's nearly impossible for plastic to actually be cheaper than natural materials. If the only reason you believe otherwise is that you watched a YouTube video making such a claim without evidence, then you need more education about energy.

The plastic roadways being installed (this is a practical technology) includes a large part of recycled plastics. You would have to look at the whole cost to see whether it is economic. Road mending is clearly going to faster and save billions in terms of reduced traffic congestion. The ability to run services through the hollow space will also save billions every year. Even if the construction was 20% more expensive, I'm sure it would be economic overall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vPLxwmf2dY

If fossil fuel energy generation is phased out, there will be plenty of oil available for making plastics.

What may be "perfect" for electricity may be far from ideal in other respects. Since all plastic is very soft compared to concrete or gravel, it will almost certainly have much poorer resistance to abrasion. Beyond that, the very first fuel fire that liquefies the roadway will let everyone else know that it wasn't such a great idea. Anyway, this has been tried before, with poor results. We had steel and Aluminum "pre-fab" tarmac for landing aircraft on tiny islands in WWII. We tried sawdust mixed with ice in very cold places, and we've also tried plastic roads. None of that is "new". The technologies that proved most practical was steel-reinforced concrete and asphalt.
EV "engines" are definitely NOT "way simpler and cheaper to maintain than ICE engines", because they all cost substantially more to produce than combustion engines that reliably produce equivalent power. You even stated as much. The "fuel cost" is only lower if we utterly ignore every other aspect of actually using electric vehicle technology. Indeed, that is what we must do to rationalize the nonsense behind such statements. If I posted a random YouTube video that makes it seem as if diamond roads would practical to produce, would you believe that, too?
As far as Tesla Motors is concerned, what they have achieved is noteworthy, but they're a literal drop in the bucket compared to all the combustion engine powered vehicles.

I am sure the manufacturers are aware of all the issues you raise. I think it's important to support innovation that can potentially improve our lives.

louis · 2021-06-14 17:20:20

You're living in a dream world. This EROI idea is what enthused early atomic energy enthusiasts. It was genuinely believed it would be "too cheap to meter" - people would just pay a small standing charge was the thinking...

Well we know how that ended up. Even though in theory the EROI on nuclear energy was great, in practice the price wasn't.

Probably the most cost effective energy generation technology now is methane. But this is only because solar energy has yet to resolve the energy storage issue. In terms of energy production viewed in isolation PV energy costs have been falling dramatically. They dropped 89% in the decade up to 2020:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90583426/th … n-10-years

Analysts are looking to achieving 2 cents per KwHe for PV energy by 2030:

https://www.powerengineeringint.com/ren … h-by-2030/

That sort of figure has already been achieved in Portugal (1.47 cents per KwHe).

Certainly if such prices can be acheived on a grand scale then the opportunities for manufacturing hydrogen for energy storage become price-practical.

On an historical note, the decline and fall of the civilisations you reference had little or nothing to do with declining EROI. In the Roman Empire agriculture was flourishing when the Western Empire fell. It was the fact that the Goths and others occupied tax yielding lands and so deprived the state of revenues that did for the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire carried on in reasonably good health, not expiring for another 1000 years.

Calliban wrote:

tahanson43206 wrote:
For Calliban ... is there an insufficient supply of energy coming from the Sun to meet human needs?
(th)
No. The problem with solar PV is low energy return on energy invested. Or to put it another way, very high required investment of energy and materials for each unit of harvested energy. This makes it problematic as a replacement for fossil fuels. Think of the situation like this. You have a diminishing supply of energy from fossil fuels each year. You must invest some of that energy in new energy producing infrastructure, to offset depletion and the wearing out of old infrastructure. The rest is consumed or used to build, operate and maintain other infrastructure. If the energy investment needed to replace energy infrastructure substantially increases, then you clearly have a big problem. You must either reduce energy investment in other infrastructure, or reduce consumption, neither of which may be possible beyond limits.
It was crises like this that led to the collapse of many historical civilisations. When the net energy return from agriculture suffered significant decline, it often became impossible to maintain necessary infrastructure, like roads, waterways and military classes needed for defence. The result was often collapse - a sudden and involuntary loss of complexity, combined with a rapid decline in population. Collapse can be catastrophic, but is more often partial. The Roman collapse was partial, with the Eastern empire continuing for several more centuries. The Mayan collapse was gradual, but ultimately complete. The Soviet collapse was partial, with the previously communist states recovering somewhat thanks to immersion in the wider global economy. The declining EROI of fossil fuels threatens the entire global economy with some sort of collapse. The extent of the collapse will depend upon the degree to which the systems that we have can reorganise at lower resource levels and the degree to which alternative energy can be brought online to arrest the fall.

kbd512 · 2021-06-14 17:46:12

Louis,

louis wrote:

Well none of that is untrue but neither is it particularly relevant.

That sounds like a personal theory without evidence.

louis wrote:

If we see the (real) price of PV going up, as opposed to continuing to full, you may have some

The price of electricity keeps rising as more and more PV and wind energy power plants are created. That's either a wild cosmic coincidence or an object lesson in energy economics.

louis wrote:

The plastic roadways being installed (this is a practical technology) includes a large part of recycled plastics. You would have to look at the whole cost to see whether it is economic. Road mending is clearly going to faster and save billions in terms of reduced traffic congestion. The ability to run services through the hollow space will also save billions every year. Even if the construction was 20% more expensive, I'm sure it would be economic overall.

PVC pipe has been around since I've been a child, yet nobody who actually builds roadways at scale is talking about using recycled plastic to create roads, quite possibly because of the energy and thus cost required to actually do it. There isn't enough recycled plastic in the world to lay down 5 million miles of roadway, much less 64 million.

louis wrote:

If fossil fuel energy generation is phased out, there will be plenty of oil available for making plastics.

The infrastructure that produces fossil fuels is the exact same infrastructure that produces plastic, so that would be a neat trick.

louis wrote:

I am sure the manufacturers are aware of all the issues you raise. I think it's important to support innovation that can potentially improve our lives.

I'm quite certain that they are, which is why there are 64 million miles of roadways made from steel reinforced concrete and asphalt. Making roads out of plastic isn't an improvement if energy cost and durability matter at all. It's a pointless squandering of limited energy resources. Making plastic skyscrapers is equally pointless, which is why nobody does it.

SpaceNut · 2021-06-14 18:49:06

The sun light and wind might be free but the land that it sets on it being taxed and so is the income created by the devices that reside there in by the towns, cities and even the states with the federal government taxing the income even more. The hands are in the pockets of the creating so its being passed onto those that want the energy....

kbd512 · 2021-06-15 02:23:42

SpaceNut,

There seems to be a recurring theme of, "If only we had more of the thing that we don't have, then all of our problems would be solved."

I guess we need to ignore every other aspect of the proposed "solution" to understand the logic behind the ideology.

Things are going to get strange when there's not enough coal and gas or government subsidies to continually make the solar panels and wind turbines as artificially cheap as they are now, or if China decides to flip the bird to the rest of the world and keep the solar panels they make with all that coal and oil they're burning for themselves.

Solar power keeps getting cheaper while the electricity rates paid by consumers in places with greater amounts of solar power continue to increase. That makes perfect sense to me. And if it doesn't to anyone else, then there's always some other explanation apart from the really obvious fact that actually using solar power is inordinately more expensive than the anti-logic would suggest.

Pretty soon, solar power is going to become "so cheap" that nobody can actually afford to purchase electricity. At that point, our energy problems are "solved" by virtue of the fact that we can't afford to purchase all that cheap power being generated. You won't need a meter at that point because you won't be able to afford one of those, either. It's a remarkably good plan, assuming energy poverty is "the way of the future".

louis · 2021-06-15 07:34:12

380 million tons of plastic waste per annum. 3.8 billion tons of plastic waste per decade.

But yes have to agree having looked at the figures that couldn't provide a global solution though it might at least use up all the recycled plastic. It could give the waste plastic a value which in poorer countries might mean people would scavenge for it, and so it would not go into rivers and ultimately the sea.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
louis wrote:
Well none of that is untrue but neither is it particularly relevant.
That sounds like a personal theory without evidence.
louis wrote:
If we see the (real) price of PV going up, as opposed to continuing to full, you may have some
The price of electricity keeps rising as more and more PV and wind energy power plants are created. That's either a wild cosmic coincidence or an object lesson in energy economics.
louis wrote:
The plastic roadways being installed (this is a practical technology) includes a large part of recycled plastics. You would have to look at the whole cost to see whether it is economic. Road mending is clearly going to faster and save billions in terms of reduced traffic congestion. The ability to run services through the hollow space will also save billions every year. Even if the construction was 20% more expensive, I'm sure it would be economic overall.
PVC pipe has been around since I've been a child, yet nobody who actually builds roadways at scale is talking about using recycled plastic to create roads, quite possibly because of the energy and thus cost required to actually do it. There isn't enough recycled plastic in the world to lay down 5 million miles of roadway, much less 64 million.
louis wrote:
If fossil fuel energy generation is phased out, there will be plenty of oil available for making plastics.
The infrastructure that produces fossil fuels is the exact same infrastructure that produces plastic, so that would be a neat trick.
louis wrote:
I am sure the manufacturers are aware of all the issues you raise. I think it's important to support innovation that can potentially improve our lives.
I'm quite certain that they are, which is why there are 64 million miles of roadways made from steel reinforced concrete and asphalt. Making roads out of plastic isn't an improvement if energy cost and durability matter at all. It's a pointless squandering of limited energy resources. Making plastic skyscrapers is equally pointless, which is why nobody does it.

kbd512 · 2021-06-15 11:22:29

Louis,

I'm pleased to see that you broke out a calculator and figured out that this isn't feasible, which may explain why we haven't already done it.

I had another thought along this same idea, though:

What if we simply recycled the old plastic products into new plastic products that are traditionally made from plastic?

I know that's a pretty crazy concept, but there it is.

louis · 2021-06-15 11:37:35

Well that requires a lot of capital investment and then maintenance funding - and you have to ensure against infection etc if making plastics for food packaging etc. Something like road building that isn't too choosy about the plastic it takes could offer a better solution.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
I'm pleased to see that you broke out a calculator and figured out that this isn't feasible, which may explain why we haven't already done it.
I had another thought along this same idea, though:
What if we simply recycled the old plastic products into new plastic products that are traditionally made from plastic?
I know that's a pretty crazy concept, but there it is.

kbd512 · 2021-06-15 11:50:38

Louis,

Is new PVC pipe to carry grey water all that choosy?

They've started lining all the concrete waste water pipes here in Houston with plastic to prevent them from leaking after they crack or become pitted, so they don't have to replace them after the ground shifts, so I thought I'd ask.

It seems as if there are bazillion (technical term there) other existing uses for recycled plastic that don't result in plastic fires or messes if, for example, a car (electric or otherwise) catches fire on the roadway and burns to the ground.

I just dunno. Plastic roadways for up north to prevent cracking or at least make repairs easier?

Maybe, but we're going to need a hell of a lot more plastic.

louis · 2021-06-15 14:27:31

I've no problem with finding all sorts of environmentally sound uses for recycled plastic. I am sure innovation will continue in many areas.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
Is new PVC pipe to carry grey water all that choosy?
They've started lining all the concrete waste water pipes here in Houston with plastic to prevent them from leaking after they crack or become pitted, so they don't have to replace them after the ground shifts, so I thought I'd ask.
It seems as if there are bazillion (technical term there) other existing uses for recycled plastic that don't result in plastic fires or messes if, for example, a car (electric or otherwise) catches fire on the roadway and burns to the ground.
I just dunno. Plastic roadways for up north to prevent cracking or at least make repairs easier?
Maybe, but we're going to need a hell of a lot more plastic.

Calliban · 2021-06-15 16:33:20

Why would anyone want to build roadways out of polymers? What functionality does a polymer road offer that a tarmac road does not? Tar is a bituminous waste product of oil refining. Polymers are manufactured chemicals, PE, PP and PVC, being derived from ethylene. These are the common thermo polymers that are produced in most abundance. Polymer road surfaces would also be a problem in cold climate because of glass transition temperature. So I'm not sure where this idea came from or what the point of it is.

I am surprised that Louis would have the humility to admit that one of his pet ideas isn't going to work. Kudos, I suppose. Usually his strategy is to stubbornly ignore all evidence presented and insist that other people must be wrong. He even went so far as to insist that EROI was an irrelevant consideration a few posts back. I see no evidence from past discussion that he understands anything about it or why it is important.

Producing synthetic fuels from solar electricity is a questionable idea. It means taking high grade electricity (from a low EROI source) and wasting a large part of it producing a lower grade energy source (chemical fuel) which ultimately gets burned back into electricity or mechanical power again, with even more energy losses in the process. Solar PV EROI is poor to begin with. The way to get the most utility out of it, is to avoid processes that waste energy.

The idea that 'storage' is going to keep getting cheaper, is wishful thinking. Storage is a powerplant. It requires capital equipment like everything else.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-06-15 16:34:10)

kbd512 · 2021-06-15 18:33:23

Calliban,

There's no need to be quite that snarky about it. Louis liked the idea because it was a way to get rid of waste plastic. Heck, I liked the premise of the idea, except that it won't work for a variety of reasons, one of them being what you just named off (Tg of common thermoplastics), but the primary reason being not nearly enough waste plastic. We'd also provide another excuse to produce an enormous quantity of new plastic if we did that, rather than incentivize recycling of what we've already produced, as if there's not already enough of it.

As the fossil fuels become more expensive to extract, at some point we're going to need some kind of alternative. Even if using PV is a poor choice, developing something is better than having nothing. I favor solar thermal and nuclear thermal using molten salt, because those power sources can generate power 24/7/365, with the primary resource inputs being low-embodied energy concrete and steel.

SpaceNut · 2021-06-15 18:49:59

The coal industry has plenty of bituminous to make use of and some of the plastics in particular #2 will revert back to a burnable petrol product that is liquid so crush and mix to make more road tar seems to make use of some of the plastics stream.
Use a chamber that burns the coal but send the gas exhaust back into the mix with some of the other plastics which as gaseous and we would get another liquid fuel out product to make use of more waste stream....

Calliban · 2021-06-16 05:44:40

An interesting article providing some background on why supposedly cheap wind and solar power are resulting in such high electricity prices.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshe … expensive/

In a nutshell, the problem of intermittent power from these devices means that a lot of extra engineering is needed to allow grid integration. If you generate power from a thermal power station, burning coal, gas or fission of uranium, then you pay for the capital, operating and fuel costs of the powerplant. But with wind or solar power, you pay for the capital and operating costs of these power plants and the what ever powerplant is being used to provide backup, usually natural gas. On top of that, there are other costs as well. In the UK, we learned the hard way that when spinning reserve is reduced to zero, wind farms need to be equipped with battery banks, as they can fall off load very quickly and even CCGTs cannot run up quickly enough to pick up load. The same with solar, a cloud bank can advance from the Atlantic in minutes. On top of that, there are additional costs relating to transmission. So really, all that wind and solar plant can do is reduce the consumption of fuel in fossil fuel power plants. You cannot get rid of those plants and their capital and operating costs need to be maintained. So overall, wind and solar power plants would need to be close to free in order to reach grid parity with fossil fuels. Their total lifetime costs would need be comparable to the cost of the fuel that they save. Given the high embodied energy of all of the steel, concrete, glass and other materials needed to construct them, this is a virtual impossibility.

The usual answer to this problem is "well storage is going to get cheaper and cheaper due to technological development". But what would storage look like, in a real system? Building pumped storage systems capable of storing weeks worth of power that would be needed to cover things like winter lulls, in which persistent low pressure weather systems reduce wind speed to almost zero for weeks, would be impossibly expensive. Batteries are only practical for relatively short duration grid imbalances, like the hour or so between wind farms falling offload and boilers and gas turbines coming on line. Holland and Germany are investing in hydrogen based energy storage, using CCGTs. It is a neat system, in which hydrogen stores enough energy to cover lulls lasting hours and longer term, but rarer outages, are covered using LNG, with total consumption of LNG being a modest proportion of the total energy consumption, year to year. It is a neat system, but what are the technologies involved? We are really describing a CCGT powerplant, with an industrial scale electrolysis plant next door to it, coupled to a large gas storage tank, which stores hydrogen at slightly above atmospheric. CCGT plants have relatively low capital costs per MWe, thanks to their modular construction, which allows mass production, ease of transportation and rapid assembly at site. They also benefit from high power density. But why would anyone expect them to get continuously cheaper? These technologies have cost curves, yes, but these plants have already exploited much of their potential in terms of efficiency (a function of combustion temperature and pressure ratio for a GT) and rapid modular construction. And the electrolysis cell? Quite an old technology now. It has a high capital cost, which is dealt with in industry by running at high capacity factor. That is a bit of a problem if the design function of the stack is to absorb intermittent electricity from sources that only provide excess power occasionally.

A few summary facts that should tell us that 'storage' will not be any cheaper than fossil fuel back up, as it is applied now. (1) Storage will likely involve using CCGT plants, burning hydrogen. From the CCGTs point of view, its internal costs are the same, but capacity factor is going to be more limited. There is the extra cost of the electrolysis system and storage tank. Finally, in storage, we are buying electricity, running an electrolysis system that captures about two-thirds on energy in hydrogen and then burns it back to electricity in the gas turbines. The round trip efficiency of doing this, is about 40% (50-70% electrolysis); (50-60% recovery in CCGTs). So a lot more primary electricity is needed when storage is used, to displace the energy that was being supplied by natural gas and to cover the energy losses in storage. In a renewable dominated system, electric power is going to be expensive. That means high energy intensity activities (including making RE infrastructure) are going to be a lot less affordable.

Up to this point, it has been possible to ignore a lot of the hard realities of energy economics in Western countries. For a start, wind and solar energy are still a tiny fraction of total energy consumption, essentially all of it being electricity, which is about 15-30% of delivered energy in industrial economies. Secondly, most of our heavy industry has been outsourced to China, where (until recently) cheap coal electricity and industrial heat, have allowed low cost production of all sorts of things to continue. It was even possible for Western politicians to delude themselves into thinking that they had decoupled economic growth from rising energy consumption. Yet this delusion was built on borrowed time. It involved using debt to allow Western countries to continue consuming, whilst most real manufacturing was outsourced to the third world, which burned coal to do the things that we couldn't do with cleaner but more expensive energy. A lot of the observed GDP growth was in low wage service industries and due to asset price accumulation, which is the simple spending of borrowed money.

In the future, presumably, in which fossil fuels are either expensive or forbidden, there is no avoiding reality when it comes to unbreakable link between per capita energy consumption and per capita prosperity. Renewable energy sources exploit low power density resources. This is the reason behind the enormous physical resource requirements per MWe. The effect has been hidden for now, because most of the world's industrial materials are now produced in China, using cheap, coal based electricity, heat and gas and most of our transport and heat requirements are still met by low-cost oil and natural gas. The Chinese themselves have subsidised steel production and certain key industries like PV module production, which in addition to the cheap energy already available from coal, makes these materials far cheaper than is really possible in the longer term. But what happens when that is no longer true? How cheap will wind farms be, when the mega-tonnes of steel and concrete have to be produced using solar or wind based electricity and hydrogen? And what will happen to individual incomes, when energy costs inevitably rise much higher than they are now? Per capita incomes in western economies have already stopped growing due to rising energy cost of energy. Will these economic structures survive at all, in the very high inherent cost environment that will exist when our whole energy supply is dominated by renewable energy? If the calculated ERoEI figures are to be believed, there is good reason to doubt it. And in tge much poorer world that would result, just how affordable is space colonisation going to be? Would the US be able to contemplate manned missions to Mars, if its per capita income was around the level of India, say?

Last edited by Calliban (2021-06-16 05:54:05)

tahanson43206 · 2021-06-16 05:58:36

For Calliban re #270

Thanks for another thoughtful analysis!

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(th)

kbd512 · 2021-06-16 13:09:56

What that really means is that all backup electric power generating systems, Hydrogen-electrolysis, CCGT, etc, along with all supporting infrastructure, need to be added to the total cost of using wind and solar power, because that equipment must be purchased to provide a complete generating solution. I'm guessing that that is what causes these "too cheap to meter" wind and solar arrays to always increase the electricity rates paid by their customers, since two or even three complete power plants are always going to cost more to own and operate than a single reliable power plant that they purportedly "replaced". So, if solar is 2 cents per kWh and its CCGT backup is 6 cents per kWh, now you're paying 8 to 10 cents per kWh, or over 30 cents per kWh in places like Germany that attempt to use PV in places that aren't sunny.

If nobody else knew how to count, then I guess this isn't a problem. Unfortunately for the propagandists and various green religion groups, some of us know how to count. The religious converts can be relied upon to reiterate their dogma, but I'm not religious, so I reiterate the only number that ultimately can't be obfuscated by any amount of propaganda or religious dogma, namely the cost of electricity to the rate payer. Someone ultimately has to pay for all of this "new stuff". It won't be the equipment manufacturer or the power company because they can't afford to eat the cost of the equipment and remain solvent, nor will it be the wealthy (because that's not how rich people stay rich), and the governments eventually run out of "other people's money", since they get all of that money from the people they tax (the rate payers, the ordinary run-of-the-mill consumer).

Wind and solar power schemes have thus far been more sophisticated variants of the shell games played on the streets, albeit with far money on the line, where the name of the game is, "Hide the true cost from the public, because the rate payer will still pay if they want power, and if they don't we still don't care, because they didn't have any money for us to take to begin with." I don't know how they get so many people to fall for this crap, but they do, and all of us end up paying for unreliable power as a result. I'm unopposed to fools being separated from their money, but I draw the line where they use my government to point a gun at me and force me to give up my money over their foolishness.

louis · 2021-06-16 14:32:21

No one I think is denying there is a problem with wind and solar, namely lack of effective storage, which means conventional back-up is required. That's uncontroversial, even among green energy supporters. But there's no evidence that, going forward, a new nuclear solution or an old coal solution would be cheaper than green energy plus gas. But currently natural methane remains the cheapest solution.

Battery cost reduced about 85% in the last decade so, it's not simply a case of wishful thinking that green energy plus storage could become a viable solution.

I don't think the expectation is that CCGT plants become cheaper. The expectation is that green energy generation keeps falling in price, so that eventually you get down to some floor price like 1.5 cents per KwHe. That then allows you to fund the significant costs of chemical battery and hydrogen or manufactured methane storage. Something like 1.5 cents is not absurd. We already have some contracts going under 2 cents. More technological advances and volume production can deliver such low prices.

Calliban wrote:

An interesting article providing some background on why supposedly cheap wind and solar power are resulting in such high electricity prices.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshe … expensive/
In a nutshell, the problem of intermittent power from these devices means that a lot of extra engineering is needed to allow grid integration. If you generate power from a thermal power station, burning coal, gas or fission of uranium, then you pay for the capital, operating and fuel costs of the powerplant. But with wind or solar power, you pay for the capital and operating costs of these power plants and the what ever powerplant is being used to provide backup, usually natural gas. On top of that, there are other costs as well. In the UK, we learned the hard way that when spinning reserve is reduced to zero, wind farms need to be equipped with battery banks, as they can fall off load very quickly and even CCGTs cannot run up quickly enough to pick up load. The same with solar, a cloud bank can advance from the Atlantic in minutes. On top of that, there are additional costs relating to transmission. So really, all that wind and solar plant can do is reduce the consumption of fuel in fossil fuel power plants. You cannot get rid of those plants and their capital and operating costs need to be maintained. So overall, wind and solar power plants would need to be close to free in order to reach grid parity with fossil fuels. Their total lifetime costs would need be comparable to the cost of the fuel that they save. Given the high embodied energy of all of the steel, concrete, glass and other materials needed to construct them, this is a virtual impossibility.
The usual answer to this problem is "well storage is going to get cheaper and cheaper due to technological development". But what would storage look like, in a real system? Building pumped storage systems capable of storing weeks worth of power that would be needed to cover things like winter lulls, in which persistent low pressure weather systems reduce wind speed to almost zero for weeks, would be impossibly expensive. Batteries are only practical for relatively short duration grid imbalances, like the hour or so between wind farms falling offload and boilers and gas turbines coming on line. Holland and Germany are investing in hydrogen based energy storage, using CCGTs. It is a neat system, in which hydrogen stores enough energy to cover lulls lasting hours and longer term, but rarer outages, are covered using LNG, with total consumption of LNG being a modest proportion of the total energy consumption, year to year. It is a neat system, but what are the technologies involved? We are really describing a CCGT powerplant, with an industrial scale electrolysis plant next door to it, coupled to a large gas storage tank, which stores hydrogen at slightly above atmospheric. CCGT plants have relatively low capital costs per MWe, thanks to their modular construction, which allows mass production, ease of transportation and rapid assembly at site. They also benefit from high power density. But why would anyone expect them to get continuously cheaper? These technologies have cost curves, yes, but these plants have already exploited much of their potential in terms of efficiency (a function of combustion temperature and pressure ratio for a GT) and rapid modular construction. And the electrolysis cell? Quite an old technology now. It has a high capital cost, which is dealt with in industry by running at high capacity factor. That is a bit of a problem if the design function of the stack is to absorb intermittent electricity from sources that only provide excess power occasionally.
A few summary facts that should tell us that 'storage' will not be any cheaper than fossil fuel back up, as it is applied now. (1) Storage will likely involve using CCGT plants, burning hydrogen. From the CCGTs point of view, its internal costs are the same, but capacity factor is going to be more limited. There is the extra cost of the electrolysis system and storage tank. Finally, in storage, we are buying electricity, running an electrolysis system that captures about two-thirds on energy in hydrogen and then burns it back to electricity in the gas turbines. The round trip efficiency of doing this, is about 40% (50-70% electrolysis); (50-60% recovery in CCGTs). So a lot more primary electricity is needed when storage is used, to displace the energy that was being supplied by natural gas and to cover the energy losses in storage. In a renewable dominated system, electric power is going to be expensive. That means high energy intensity activities (including making RE infrastructure) are going to be a lot less affordable.
Up to this point, it has been possible to ignore a lot of the hard realities of energy economics in Western countries. For a start, wind and solar energy are still a tiny fraction of total energy consumption, essentially all of it being electricity, which is about 15-30% of delivered energy in industrial economies. Secondly, most of our heavy industry has been outsourced to China, where (until recently) cheap coal electricity and industrial heat, have allowed low cost production of all sorts of things to continue. It was even possible for Western politicians to delude themselves into thinking that they had decoupled economic growth from rising energy consumption. Yet this delusion was built on borrowed time. It involved using debt to allow Western countries to continue consuming, whilst most real manufacturing was outsourced to the third world, which burned coal to do the things that we couldn't do with cleaner but more expensive energy. A lot of the observed GDP growth was in low wage service industries and due to asset price accumulation, which is the simple spending of borrowed money.
In the future, presumably, in which fossil fuels are either expensive or forbidden, there is no avoiding reality when it comes to unbreakable link between per capita energy consumption and per capita prosperity. Renewable energy sources exploit low power density resources. This is the reason behind the enormous physical resource requirements per MWe. The effect has been hidden for now, because most of the world's industrial materials are now produced in China, using cheap, coal based electricity, heat and gas and most of our transport and heat requirements are still met by low-cost oil and natural gas. The Chinese themselves have subsidised steel production and certain key industries like PV module production, which in addition to the cheap energy already available from coal, makes these materials far cheaper than is really possible in the longer term. But what happens when that is no longer true? How cheap will wind farms be, when the mega-tonnes of steel and concrete have to be produced using solar or wind based electricity and hydrogen? And what will happen to individual incomes, when energy costs inevitably rise much higher than they are now? Per capita incomes in western economies have already stopped growing due to rising energy cost of energy. Will these economic structures survive at all, in the very high inherent cost environment that will exist when our whole energy supply is dominated by renewable energy? If the calculated ERoEI figures are to be believed, there is good reason to doubt it. And in tge much poorer world that would result, just how affordable is space colonisation going to be? Would the US be able to contemplate manned missions to Mars, if its per capita income was around the level of India, say?

Calliban · 2021-06-16 15:25:31

The latest article from Tim Watkins (a UK based economist and policy researcher) on the economic prospects of a post COVID world. Written from a UK perspective, but a valid analysis for the US as well.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2021 … th-spiral/

It makes sobering reading. It will also give me pause for thought next time I complain about my wages. His articles summarise the growing problems that we face more succinctly than I could hope to. We face a return to Feudalism, as a tiny, but wealthy, mobile, global super-rich; determine the politics and values of an increasingly impoverished underclass, that own nothing and have no rights.

kbd512 · 2021-06-16 16:59:57

Louis,

Lithium-ion batteries are not going to become substantially cheaper than Lead-acid batteries. Since grid operators don't store energy in less costly Lead-acid batteries, they won't be storing them in more expensive Lithium-ion batteries, either. There are no batteries capable of storing 12 hours worth of power, which is why nobody does it. Maybe one day in the far distant future there will be, but it's highly improbable that you or I will live to see it.

Lead: $2,000 per ton
Lithium: $13,000 per ton
Lead: 0.0014% of the Earth's crust
Lithium: 0.002% of the Earth's crust

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