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https://medium.com/@erofeev.yury/solar- … 711debf309
Solar photovoltaic energy is growing at a monstrous rate. For example, BloombergNEF expects that about 400 GW of solar energy capacity will be commissioned around the world this year.
One of the factors for rapid growth is the reduction in prices for equipment and solar panels.
Aside from a two-year bump between 2020 and 2022, when solar module prices rose more than 50%, the cost of photovoltaic systems has fallen steadily since the mid-2000s, averaging about 10 to 15 percent per year.
In 2023, module price declines resumed, reaching an all-time low of around $150/kW (15 cents/W) — a staggering 42% drop from the January 2020 price.
Rethink Energy predicts that wholesale solar module prices will halve again by 2040 in a new report.
The decline in silicon prices through 2030 will be driven by “a wide range of incremental technology upgrades that will continue at a slower pace through 2040.”
“By 2040, silicon-perovskite tandems — perhaps some will even be silicon-perovskite-perovskite — will account for 61% of the market share,” the authors say.
A report from Rethink Technology Research predicts that the price of PV systems, based on the current “off-the-line silicon solar module cost in China” of US$154/kW, will fall again to US$92.2/kW by 2030 year and 71.1 US dollars/kW by 2040 — a decrease of 53%.
Prices of renewables haven't been plummeting during the past 4 years. They've been going up. I published a link to an IEA report asserting that renewable prices will go down in 2024, whereas they've gone up for the past 4 years, from 2019 to 2023.
Just a little comment to end. Your own link also said that remain competitive.
What increased was transportation costs... by a lot, which make then more expensive outside of China. BUT it also happened the same for fossil fuels. Most countries also needs to transport fuels. So as expected, impacted more on fossil fuels than renewables, so they remain competitive.
Renewables are cheaper than having no energy at all, but they are not cheaper than coal, obviously, else China wouldn't still be using any coal to make them. The evidence backing that statement is the number of brand new coal fired power plants being constructed in India, China, and other countries in Asia and Africa.
The only reason why China don't replace coal for renewables, it's because they didn't produce enough renewables.
Scale factories takes time. They are scaling factories at an impressive speed but it's still not enough, and of course it continues to grow.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/06/08/ … w-by-2024/
The issue with cost, which you seem to be working overtime to ignore, is the cost of not having any energy. Renewables without storage are an absolute guarantee of having non-functional electric grids. After we do an LCOE on photovoltaics or wind turbines and batteries or any of the other storage solutions proposed by our green energy fans, you no longer have an argument to make about the cost of renewables being cheaper than the cost of hydrocarbon fuels.
They are two different markets. A market with a mix of non-dispatchable renewable (as solar and wind) with others that it can do it (like hydro or natural gas) and as the market move through more and more wind and solar, storage and other techniques needs to be added.
We are way below the level of require storage in most places of the world, so expect renewable to continue, while at the same time storage continue their advancements lowering the costs, waiting to reach the competitive goal of renewable+storage to beat natural gas.
What we can expect in coming years are a reduction in coal for electricity, replaced by renewables.
Spaniard,
The prices of metals is going up, not down. Green energy machines require metals. Now that input materials cost is 70% to 80% of the cost of these green energy machines
All of this projections are based on things you are assuming. There is no need to repeat, we already told our points before (change materials, quality, energy assumption, etc)
Lithium was already double before. Because price is a mix of variables, one compensate others. The reserves had increased because we found new lithium faster than we are currently using it.
There are a bunch of variables to play, and that costs are not as fixed as you said. Otherwise it wouldn't have a reason to coming down again.
Yes... there will be spikes in prices from time to time. Still, as the prices doesn't come as high from raw material as you said, and a lot of players in the market knows possible movements if there is a bottleneck, reacting investing in possible solutions like I mentioned before.
As speaking about the future is cheap, we could continue this loop forever, so as we aren't adding new information, I don't see the point about continue this.
Only we can do is to wait... and this is slow so... stay tuned.
Spaniard,
If the materials to produce something don't presently exist, and the green energy metals do not presently exist in the quantities required to do what you want done, then that material must be pulled out of the ground and processed into brand new green energy machines. Those processes require enormous amounts of energy, far above what was required with hydrocarbon fuels, so the energy cost of creating these new machines is a non-trivial matter.
You can claim whatever you want. Yes, renewable require a lot of new things. But also fossil fuels require a constant influx of fuel and infrastructure. Nothing new in our way to do things.
Renewable are cheaper, because the total numbers are better than fossil fuels. You can doubt and claim whatever you want. There is no magic involved.
Market does a thousand times better calculation than you can do with lots and lots of studies.
Studies are there (when they are well done) for doing forwards moves and investments. Market tells you CURRENT costs, not future costs, so studies are still important to help us to do future moves.
But things like the plummeting price of renewable in past years it's a FACT. It's already past. And claiming that EROEI hasn't change regardless that fact it's not backed up by reality. And if you search enough you will found more and more discrepancy. The reason is that EROEI is mostly pushed by the people that want to discourage the investment in renewables and the conclusion was decided from the start. That's the reason you can't expect that people to give you good numbers.
Industry and investors are focused on LCOE, because real world move using money, not complex energy formulas. LCOE convince investors, not EROEI.
Still, you will have to search more and more excuses why the supposedly embedded energy in renewables, that low EROEI proponents claim is enormous, has more monetary value than the infrastructure itself. It's like a godly miracle of multiply bread and fish, just with kwh.
Instead of searching excuses like massive subsides, all has a lot more sense when you assume that people that claim higher and growing EROEI on renewables are on the right.
Then, the lower cost has sense. Also continue to investment on renewables, as they will pay their own cost. Renewables moved by renewables. Just we are starting. You can't request to move on renewables TODAY when renewables are still growing and we are still waiting just to reach the point where renewables grow more than the current growth of energy consumption.
Although that moment maybe will be soon enough to the forum to see it. Another thing completely different is to REMOVE all fossil fuels from the mix. I doubt not only the forum, but us will live enough to reach the zero emissions moment.
In any case, invest in renewables is a lot better than do it on fossil fuels. And the people that claim that nuclear is a lot better, only have to invest on nuclear and demonstrate that they can reach better LCOE in real projects.
They won't lack investors if they can back up their claim with real proof.
The difficulty with EROEI calculations, is always where to set system boundaries. It is entirely reasonable to factor things like roads into EROEI calculations, if they were built specifically for the powerplant or if the presence of the powerplant increases maintenance burden in a way that can be quantified. It is also quite reasonable to factor labour into EROI calculations. Labour is a resource after all. People paid to do a job are giving up time to do it and are paid in money which is used to buy energy products.
First... you shouldn't compare values obtained through different methodologies. It's an apple to orange comparison.
Second... How do they know how the roads are using? Did they go one by one installation checking if the road was used exclusively to that renewable installation?
Of course not. They will just get some generation places as a template, get the costs of the project, doing "conservative" assumptions and extrapolate to the whole infrastructure.
These "refinements" are not that. They are just numbers adding to the input to obtain the EROEI that they want. That's the reason they change the methodology constantly and the reason they insist in almost fixed EROEI values with a clear pattern of lowering costs in the real world.
Labor costs weren't ever accounted in classic EROEI calculation. The reason is simple. People need very little input. The salary is unconnected with the human needs to make the work there.
Computing salaries has sense in a cost model like LCOE, and of course it's computed. Not only for renewable, but every source of energy.
But in terms of energy, what sense it has you said that in a poor country they uses X energy and in other a total different value just because they paid differently. How that change the energy involved in the installation?
The purpose of energy installations is to generate energy for the society. And workers are just part of that society. If you account the energy for the workers as energy used in the input, you should then remove that energy from the requirements of useful energy needed to generate in the output net energy of the source, that of course, they won't do.
Because of that, count salaries as energy input is double accounting.
We've become much more efficient at manufacturing photovoltaics, but to my knowledge there's a thermodynamic minimum energy to melt Silicon, or any other metal for that matter.
It's easy to miss important things when you aren't an insider, and an insider only knows in detail about the process he is involved.
For example, of course heat something has a minimum thermodynamic value. That's physics. Still, a manufacture process could need less than that quantity per unit of weight processed for example, when they use heat recovering.
It's a common process in the industry, although still has a margin of improvement. 50-60% energy recovery is not uncommon in high temperature process as energy in so much quantities has a significant impact in the final cost.
That's it, once the process at the high temperature has ended, and the final product is hot, that temperature is exchanged with new input raw material in a continuous process. So you don't need to input the 100% of the heat, but just the part lost in the exchange (it can't be 100% efficient).
While the raw material requires that heat to work, heat recovery lower the input of a continuous process by a significant fraction. The heat exists, just it's not new generated heat but recovered (at least a fraction of that).
--- EDITED ---
I checked multiple sources and I found clear discrepancies about the values. From 10-20% in another sources to 70% in others. It's complicated because they can referring to different things (like overall improvements vs process specific recovering) so take the numbers with a pinch of salt.
Anyway, waste heat recycling & recovery are active fields of energy reductions. Real numbers, as always, are more complex than you can.
Here there is a link that claims a very high value (80% estimated from their proposed method), for example
JoshNH4H,
I found a document on OSTI, dated back to 1977, about the embodied energy into different manufacturing processes to produce Silicon wafers for photovoltaic panels. I looked at one of the then-experimental processes and couldn't help but notice that the embodied energy figure looks remarkably similar to the figures quoted by Silicon wafer manufacturers today. We've improved mass manufacturing of semiconductors since then. The energy required to melt a kilo of ore hasn't changed one iota. The kerf rates are the same. The rejection has undoubtedly improved. The labor is cheaper because it's China. The energy is cheaper because it's coal.
China has used coal since the beggining. And labor costs has only increased there. But PV panels has been reducing their price constantly, with no relevant changes in the mix and increasing labor costs.
That excuse could hear well in people that only thinks that PV has become cheap because they have being outsourced to China, but anyone that could check Chinese numbers knows that it's not right, because that variables has been static or worsening there while costs had plummeted. Not a minor change, but a radical one.
You are getting wrong numbers in some place, because the conclusion doesn't meet the reality. For example, a way where they have optimized in silicon is reducing the weight of the material used for capture. Even if the weight/energy ratio wouldn't change (that I doubt it) if you use less weight because the wafers are a lot thinner, obviously the total energy get reduced by a lot.
Solar panels aren't getting cheaper because labor costs or because they are made from coal as you said. That hasn't changed in China for decades.
So you are accounting 212 kg per kw.
But 1 kw of PV are aprox. just 3 standard 60 cell panels of 18 kg per unit. A total of 54 kg.
Even if you argued that the panels aren't the total weight of a PV installation, to multiply that number by 4, a lot of inefficient things are being done to reach that values.No, not really. All you have to do is assume a capacity factor of 25%. Which for solar would be a really good capacity factor; in Britain it's more like 10% (but we're not exactly the sort of place you'd put solar if you were thinking straight).
I was comparing two different sources of data. The weight from current PV specifications and kbd512 data both for materials used in a certain power of PV.
So here it has no sense to speak about capacity factors. Unless you are suggesting that kbd512 data are not for 1 GW PV for real, but 1GW equivalence of 100% capacity factor.
That argument would turn in favor of my argument. But I don't think it's the reason of our discrepancy.
The most probable reason is that the numbers are not PV generic, but for installations on ground (otherwise they aren't concrete, or it's averaged the numbers would be lowered significantly), AND the numbers come from outdated technology. That would explain why the numbers of glass weight are higher than current standards.
PV panels hasn't become cheaper for nothing. The energy involved in the process has to become a lot less too.
In fact, I used your numbers and the result is even more extreme. Look.
Tons Mwh per ton Mwh Percentage
Glass 70000 9,7 679000 3,79%
Steel 56000 13,9 778400 4,34%
Concrete 47000 6,96 327120 1,83%
Aluminum 19000 64 1216000 6,79%
Silicon 7000 2100 14700000 82,05%
Copper 7000 16,2 113400 0,63%
Plastic 6000 17 102000 0,57%
Total= 17915920 * 320 = 5.733.094.400 Mwh
Using your numbers, I obtain 5.733.094 Gwh which is even more extreme than what I said.
Although if you see the numbers with care you will notice that mods energy come from silicon.
That was usually the thing in the past. Everybody that knows a little about the PV industry knows that the PV cells are the most expensive part of the whole infrastructure, and the piece that has become cheaper in these years.
---
I have edited to add the percentage.
Spaniard,
Spaniard wrote:216*24*365*0,2*20 = 7.568.640 twh
Total global annual electric power consumption is 25,000TWh.
7,568,640TWh / 25 years = 302,745.6TWh <- This is 12X total global annual demand for electricity over 25 years
Your math is wrong. Try again.
That unit is gwh, not twh. But it's just there where I put the wrong unit. As you can see later, when I divided by 4 using EROEI to calculate what it was supposed to be spent under that numbers, I write gwh.
I will edit the post now.
On other order of things, I must said that I knew personally met Pedro Prieto in my youth.
Remember when I told in the other thread about my past as former peakoiler?
Well... He was one of the most important voices of the peakoiler movement in Spain.
https://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/es/author/ppp/
Besides, the numbers are based on old data.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/S … fbc2dbef9a
Calculating the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI) for Spain's Solar Photovoltaic Energy in 2008
His numbers are always like that. He always took the worst possible numbers. And when even with that it wasn't enough to met the value he want, then he changed the methodology.
Instead of a classic EROEI as it was more common in oil, he did a "new concept" (I don't remember if he was the first, but the first time I met that was through his work), something that they named "EXTENDED EROEI".
That concept is non serious. It's based in add a lot of energy to the input under the excuse that "it's needed" with doubtful formulas to convert that concepts into energy.
I read forward "calculations" about this new EROI and it was coming more and more ridiculous. Adding costs like labor costs to energy (that energy is what we use with the output energy, it's never accounted as an input in other energy), stealing (if they steal the panels, the panels are working in another place. That's not an energy concept, but a business one), even roads! (man... the roads are not only used for installing PV, you can't account that energy as it was done exclusively for photovoltaics).
This is not the first time there is a fight among the numbers.
Here you have an example.
This is a response against a similar study that used the methodology that I was referring.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/67901.pdf
Inappropriate comparisons of results from their ‘extended’ system
boundary analysis to those of other differently bounded analyses of
conventional energy systems;
• Utilization of incorrect data (either because it is out-date or simply
wrong) for determination of PV system parameters (including
annual electricity yield)
• Several incidents of double-counting energy contributions (e.g.,
adding contributions that are already included in the embodied
energy of materials).
Our revised EROI and EROI EXT values for PV systems in
Switzerland, 3 calculated according to the formula adopted by Ferroni
and Hopkirk (i.e., as the ratio of the total electrical output to the
‘equivalent electrical energy’ investment), but based on the arguments
and numbers presented in this paper are, respectively, EROI≈9–10
(when adhering to widely adopted ‘conventional’ system boundaries as
recommended by the IEA (Raugei et al., 2016)) and EROI EXT≈7–8
(when instead adopting ‘extended’ system boundaries that also include
the energy investments for service inputs such as ‘project management’
and insurance). It is especially noteworthy that even the latter EROI EXT
range is one order of magnitude higher than 0.8 which was obtained by
Ferroni and Hopkirk.
This is a response to another work, here from "Ferroni and Hopkirk" that reached even lower EROEI.
I can't quote the original Prieto & Hall work, because it's paid. But I can say you that the original data it was quoted, 2008, the prices has already dropped by more than one order of magnitude since then.
There were a lot of critics about that 2008 bubble in Spain. But by then it wasn't rare that the government paid up to 300€ per Mwh on subsides. Now they are installing PV without any subsides with an estimated LCOE under 30 €/Mwh.
EROEI numbers become unusable long ago when different sources obtain so different numbers.
Tons of Materials per 1GW of installed photovoltaic generating capacity
70,000t of Glass
56,000t of Steel
47,000t of Concrete
19,000t of Aluminum
7,000t of Silicon
7,000t of Copper
6,000t of Plastic
So you are accounting 212 kg per kw.
But 1 kw of PV are aprox. just 3 standard 60 cell panels of 18 kg per unit. A total of 54 kg.
Even if you argued that the panels aren't the total weight of a PV installation, to multiply that number by 4, a lot of inefficient things are being done to reach that values.
That numbers are inflated. Glass is only used in panels, and you are accounting as glass more weight than the whole panel.
Not only that. Steel is rarely, mostly ever used in PV itself. The same for concrete. They are using in the side infrastructure to fix the panels in place and that depend a lot WHERE is that. There is no concrete in a roof.
Of course there is no need to use that materials explicitely. Still, they are commonly used in remote installations because they are cheap. The reason is that PV are light for the surface they cover, so if they aren't well fixed to something they have the risk of being blowing up by strong winds.
But here "Concrete" are just ballast. It's not common expensive concrete but materials done the cheapest (and less energy intensive) way possible.
It's the same for glass. There is a huge industry for making these elements for PV. Do you thing they are doing the things the same as average industry?
Remember than for renewable you expend energy TODAY to generate over the next 20 years. If real EROEI were as low as 4, the current consumption today would be 5 times the PV energy returned by year.
But here is the thing. China added 216 GW PV in 2023. Not only that but they almost produced a lot more exported.
216 GW will generate aprox 216*24*365*0,2*20 = 7.568.640 Gwh.
If you are assuming that EROEI is 4 you are saying that China used 7.568.640/4=1.892.160 Gwh aprox to generate that PV
You know what? China consumed a little less than 45.000 twh in total. You are saying that China used 4% of their TOTAL energy for their PV industry.
And I guess the numbers would be similar for Wind.
And not only that, but they are still scaling more and more production lines, so the numbers won't stop growing.
If you continue this line of numbers you will soon conclude that China will soon run out of energy because renewable industry suck almost all energy from China. China growth in 2023 was 5%, so adding PV and Wind, China should already lacking useful energy because all energy is redirected to the renewable industry.
OR... you conclude that the numbers are wrong, and the energy used in the industry are a lot lower that these numbers, that it's probably the real thing.
In fact, I still waiting for a reasonable explanation why the PV industry has being lowering prices in a logarithm curve (yeah... in the last 30 years prices has go down for more than 90%), and still the people that calculate EROEI still argued that these numbers aren't changing. Or what kind of miracle makes the renewables to reach a price lower than just the sum of the energy involved in EROEI calculations (while it's the opposite. A lot of non-energy things must be added to the price), like they weren't paying for the raw materials used instead of selling the materials to the market directly or just consume it in their countries.
The reason is simple. That numbers has being decreasing over time. You would need to be an insider to have real current values, so don't expect to obtain actual values using old obsolete references.
Still, price is a good indicator, and it's what people inside the industry are using, not EROEI. And they said a completely different thing.
It is easy to make sweeping statements like that if you ignore the material realities of what would be required to make it real. Unless there is some fundamental change to the way solar power actually works, it will be impossible to sustain that rate of growth for more than a little while longer. Here are the material requirements for a 1MWe solar PV powerplant.
https://solaredition.com/raw-materials- … lant-2017/Global electricity production is about 28,000TWh per year. Overall primary energy consumption is over 6x that. We would need to expand electricity production about 4x if all energy were to be supplied electrically, i.e. by solar. To do that using solar PV and some combination of storage and electrolysis:
I already explained why you are doing wrong reasoning.
You are multiplying the raw materials of CURRENT PV by the power need, obtaining that you will reach a limit.
But you are ignoring that the reason why the current PV are made like this it's because it's the most cost-effective model under our current variables. It's not because it's an intrinsic dependency.
From a different perspective. We can replace most of copper in current PV for aluminum because it's used mostly on wires. It's just it has other problems and under current copper price, copper it's the best solution (from economic perspective). It's the same for silver inside PV. Copper can be used in that place.
In that functionality, it's a minor quantity. You can replace silver by copper, and some copper conductors by aluminum, and you will reduce the total copper per kw and even remove silver dependency entirely.
Of course, it's expected that this technology can be a little worse than the same with better elements if the price is not relevant. But things change when it's become relevant.
Besides it's a same technology evolution comparison. A 2030 lower quality lower material PV vs 2030 premium better materials PV.
If you compare technologies of different generations, things could be different. In any case, it will be the most cost-effective and that's the most important factor to massive adoption.
You are assuming that PV is not the right technology because your material projections said that PV uses too many materials, but the thing is we use that, because it's the most effective TODAY.
You can't still compare low-material PV against other sources of energy because this kind of PV is not available as a mass production unit, but you are already assuming that PV will fail, while I expected that it still be the cheapest more available source of energy on Earth and the cost curve will continue to reduce or worst case maintain a average flat which current cost projected into the future.
As I said, I don't expected a ~30% growth up to the saturation point. In fact, this kind of deployments usually went through an S-curve. Besides, it's not an unique deployment but a lot at the same time, each one with a different S-curve, which makes the total curve a little more complex than expected.
Still... I don't expect any hard stopper to renewables. More from the demand side than the production side. There is no point in produce more and more solar if the demand can't use that energy in a profitable manner. So that depends in a lot of other sides advancements, like storage, better demand adaptation, better electric networks and change industry process from thermal to electricity.
Flat glass production would need to roughly quadruple.
Copper production would need to double.
Aluminium production would need to double.
Steel, concrete and plastics production would need to increase between 5-10%.Those last three sound achievable, until you realise that these materials will somehow have to be mined and processed using solar power.
This is only for the powerplants. It doesn't include the materials needed for energy storage plants, electrolysis plants, battery systems, transmission systems, etc. Electrical transmission will need to be extended significantly. It needs enough capacity to handle peak generation from the solar plants, which will be at least 4x average generation, if you are assuming a capacity factor of 25%. Incidentally, that is optimistic for solar capacity factor. Most of the locations that can achieve that are far from where people live.
You are just mixing variables to make it apparently difficult, but that all energy has already being accounted in calculations. Or did you expect that current mining is not paid in actual PV?
So the only possible argument is that the mining model uses more energy using electricity instead of fossil fuels. But I don't see any reasonable reason to think that.
In fact, I'm not even sure if they will be more mining if we replace fossil fuels for renewables. Yes, it will be (a lot) more mining of CERTAIN materials, but current coal also require a lot of mining for example. It will change from one elements to others.
But even if the total numbers where greater, if the problem is not exhaustion (that the argument it's the previous one), that mining is already accounted in the current production, so... what's the problem of scale the model?
If we need more materials, we open more mines. And yes... that mines could work on renewables... with extra technologies, of course (batteries, other energy vectors, in situ infrastructure adapted to use electricity, etc.). But it can be used.
There are are other technologies that are more scalable than PV systems. Solar thermal power is much hungrier for steel than PV. But it requires less copper and aluminium, because power is generated in a relatively large thermodynamic plant. Steel can be recycled efficiently and there are no near term constraints on iron ore resources. If we are to scale up solar to produce the TW power levels needed by humanity, solar thermal is how it will have to be done.
At present, almost all of the materials needed for the green transition are produced using fossil fuels. It will be very difficult and expensive to produce materials in the volumes needed using renewable energy. In many cases, we aren't even sure how it can be done.
I insist, your view on the problem is wrong. Market is not driven by the "less resource" concept but the most "cost effective", and you are judging against PV because under current cost-effective choice of materials it uses more than the others. You are assuming that PV can't work with less materials or than under that circumstances won't be competitive against that options of yours, and that's a wrong assumption.
Spaniard,
Coal-fired electricity generation was 8,295 terawatt hours (TWh) through October, up 1% from the same period in 2022 and the highest on record, according to environmental think tank Ember.
Yes. Even with the new data, renewables aren't YET enough to make fossil fuels peak.
Still, you don't need advanced mathematics to see that if the trends continue, with one source growing slowly and the others growing pretty fast, it won't take too much time to happen.
Just as a simple calculation. With 400 GW new of solar, that could generate as an average 100 GW more or less, that could be like a 0,5% of our energy consumption. You would need a x200 factor to generate as much solar as our current consumption.
2^8 = 256
If you duplicate the solar power eight times, you will generate more energy than consumed today.
At that growth speed, you duplicate solar energy each 3 year (in fact in less). So in 24 you could generate that level of solar.
I'm not saying that it will occur that speed. Of course, the speed will slow in the future because some bottlenecks and local market saturation. I'm just posting some numbers to expose how astonishing a 32% yearly growth is and why we shouldn't be surprised if fossil fuels peaks in coming years.
You could get really upset that you're not convincing me that your beliefs about this is correct, or you could come back to this idea in about 20 years after it's beyond obvious that wind and solar energy will only ever be part of the total energy mix, much like nuclear energy, unless they're implemented in radically different ways, as compared to what we're presently doing. By then you should be able to temper beliefs about the next big future with knowledge of how seemingly world-changing technologies of the past, didn't cause the world that existed prior to cease to exist.
Upset no. Disappointed maybe.
That's pretty much a declaration that you won't accept any proof besides the transition would completed , which it will occur far beyond the existence of this forum.
Because even reach the peak won't be enough to you to admit that renewables are replacing fossil fuels, because that moment could occur in the next decade timeframe, as I published before. But even then, you are pretty much admitting that you will maintain your position.
Nobody is arguing that the total energy migration could be completed in 20 years. 25 years is 2050, and even in the net zero projections instead of removing all fossil fuels, they expect to combine some fossil fuels with some negative emissions to achieve that.
And that scenario is considered that require a big political push that actually don't exists.
Still, the projection is about shifting from fossil fuels to renewable as the main energy source.
Last update data from IRENA
Website: https://www.irena.org/Publications/2024 … stics-2024
Document link:
https://mc-cd8320d4-36a1-40ac-83cc-3389 … s_2024.pdf
2023 growth for wind and solar
Wind: From 901.231 MW to 1.017.199 - 12,8% growth
Solar: From 1.073.136 MW to 1.418.969 - 32,2% growth
Last IEA projection about 2023 was a 2% year growth. We will soon get IEA updated data to confirm this.
Here it is again in absolute terms:
And again, using global data with a lot of years where renewables pretty much didn't exists, you hide the current phenomena.
You need to look the data more closely and in the countries were renewables has being adopted sooner to have a window to future events and possible projections. If you hide the data diluting in global data, when you will see the renewable crushing fossil fuels, that won't be a future trend but a confirmed past.
I see clearly that you don't want to focus in the current movements.
Note how we see that as energy demand went down, it went down for all sources, renewable or otherwise, and when it went up, it went up for all sources, renewable or otherwise.
That was the COVID. This kind of anomalies occurs from time to time. Real data is not a perfect curve.
You have cut certain part of the text. I'm gonna cut another.
However, there appears to have been a plateau towards the last quarter of the 20th century, with a tick up at the end. This raises the important question of whether demand for lighting is saturating, or whether there is still room for growth in the demand for lighting services. If demand for lighting services is saturating then producing the same service with much less electricity may lead to substantial savings in emissions from electricity generation. However if demand has not yet saturated, increases in efficiency through the wider deployment of new technologies, especially LEDs, could lead to lower than expected savings, as increased efficiency reduces price per lumen and so increases demand, a rebound effect.
There seem to be at least three good reasons for suggesting that demand for lighting services will continue to grow strongly in the coming decades. First, interior light levels are still well below the intensity of daylight, by as much as one or two orders of magnitude. There is no immediately apparent reason why people should have an intrinsic preference for lower light levels than found naturally, at least for much of the time, and especially in winter.
First, the text considers a peak by saturation (it's more or less the same that the concept of demand limit I said before).
Second, their consideration about what will happen in the future is just mere speculative.
And the main argument is that our current lightning is was behind than natural lightning.
I said this argument is flawed, because that's not how our sight works. From some very low level to a certain point, there is an appreciable difference.
Our eye cell cones has multiple types with different light sensibility. If the light is too low, we loose chromatic sensibility and focus precision, but it's still amazing how good our human eyesight is, specially compared among most other animals with few exceptions.
But reached certain point, the sensibility peak, and they it's the pupil which enter in action to suppress light, because it not the exposition would start to become excessive which is bad.
In other words, no matters how much you increase the light, the sensibility pretty much remain the same. There is no advantage in increasing the light, you see the same, so the argument is flawed.
Besides, if you check current lamps, you will see that most current bulb sockets have power limits pretty low compared to years before. If you force to use an old high powered incandescent bulb for hours, you risk the socket because it's not ready to dissipate so much heat.
In every house I met, there has being significant savings after removing the old incandescent bulbs. There wasn't a increasing in consumption but the opposite. Sure, someone could increase the light in some places where it was lacking before, but not near to increasing the consumption.
That's the difference between the past and the present. Light saturation. Demand limit. The reason why Jevon's paradox can't be taken for granted.
Now I will reference just a plan in my country.
https://www.idae.es/en/news/inventory-e … spain-2017
On the one hand, the applicants for this programme have presented reforms that will allow them to obtain minimum savings of 65%. On the other hand, the various projects undertaken with the participation of the IDAE, as well as others executed by third parties and publicised in the media, show savings of over 80% when combining LED with the scheduled regulation of flows. These figures, which would be extraordinary in the reform of other types of energy consumption installations, mean that this sector, which is currently immersed in a technological change, is rapidly moving towards energy consumption values that are difficult to determine at this moment.
In fact, the public movements went in the opposite direction. Fighting night light contamination. A peak demand.
Of course, if you start to account other light usages and add to this like it were the same, you can show the numbers you want. For example, start to account indoors plant cultivation, that it's a sector that it didn't exists before. Most of this sector is not even legal (drug cultivation). I don't consider that the same sector, even if it's involve to generate light. After all, the goal is not allow people to see, but cultivate plants that it's complete different.
And I again insist. Peak demand is a developed countries situation, not poorer ones. I'm pretty sure poor countries will raise their artificial lights and depending in their original situation, that will means increasing consumption. And that's a good thing because it's a huge leap in life quality for them.
Remember that the core of my argument is not other than "Jevon's paradox is not a thing that always occur". Peak demand is not a theoretical thing but a reality in some markets, and even the text you cited admitted the possibility even if it later argued in the opposite direction.
Man... To my already busy schedule now even more workload has been added to my work tasks queue.
Very fast answer
Spaniard,
...
I do believe you actually understand this, you simply don't like what it means. I don't like it, either.
We clearly show two different things. I didn't omit in my original comment the shift from coal to gas. But I show you now how coal+gas pretty much peaked while renewables is filling the gap of growing demand, and increasing the speed.
If you continue the trend you can show how not only coal will almost disappear but also gas will start to decrease and sooner you can expect.
That's said, after some NG/renewable ratio is reached, to add more renewables, storage will be needed, so once reached that point I expect to grow both again, until storage+renewables would be competitive with gas.
And that depends in new advancements, still in the future.
About the Jevon's paradox, I read most than enough in my former peakoiler times.
It's not written in stone. You must understand the internal dynamic to understand when we can expect to work and when will not.
It's an mixed technological/economic phenomena.
A quick summary.
Efficiency and other improvements reduce the cost.
People could buy more for the same money. So they can choose. Save/redirect money to another purpose or increasing consumption.
When there is an important gain in increasing consumption, this phenomena is the most probable.
That's pretty much the inner workings of Jevon's paradox although peakoilers doesn't explain like that and prefer to said it's like a expected(without really explain) process where efficiency just increase consumption. It's not so direct and that's not an explanation, besides they usually expose like that.
But here is the thing. There are circumstances/limits that make Jevon's paradox don't work.
First. Efficiency is linked to energy. Price is linked to a bunch of things. Energy is just a variable. For example, land has a price, but it has no monetary cost besides the cost we could generate over complicating things(ex. bureaucracy). They are cost not linked to energy but supply/demand.
So, a better efficiency not always turn into a better price or have a minor impact. If the price is similar before the efficiency increasing, Jevon's paradox won't work.
Second. Demand has sometimes limits. Think on food for example. No matter how cheap food can become, you aren't gonna eat more than a certain quantity. Yes, you can increase the quality of food, but there is a natural limit to that.
You have mentioned illumination. I'm pretty sure that depends when and where are you accounting, the energy spent on that has decrease significantly. In western homes has pretty much occurred. The reason of that is that we already have more than enough light for most usages, so no matter how efficient could become, how low the cost could become, there is no need to increase the quantity of light there.
Of course culture also have effects in that limits. Europeans for example are a lot more prone to limit light contamination (environmental issue). In the streets, if you ignore this kind of waste, there is margin to increase far beyond current levels.
You shouldn't mix different markets that are driven by different variables or you will point to a wrong conclusion.
In the past, and in poor countries, there is a significant lack of light, so there is margin for a huge increase on consumption there. In other cultures, there isn't more push than population growing.
Third. Any number multiplied by zero is zero. If we reach zero emissions per energy unit, there has no sense to claim Jevon's to ensure than the emissions will never go down.
In fact, this argument is almost the same than the first. Zero emissions will never mean zero cost, so it's not possible a very high demand (towards infinity) consumption that it's the only factor that can compensate very close to zero emissions. As costs become more and more related to different factors than emissions, you can expect that phenomena to disappear.
That's the reasons because Jevon's paradox are not written on stone, and other things can change the result, including culture changes to push for reduction in consumption specially if it reduce your quality of life (even if you don't know).
In the end, it's understand that increasing efficiency is not the problem, but that nothing can avoid problems if you don't limit your consumption. Unlimited consumption is impossible to provide.
That's said, our consumption per capita at least from the energy aspect has stabilized in the western countries years ago. This doesn't seem like a severe problem compared with other related to the transition.
Hi.
I'm sorry I couldn't reply anything. As I though, a sudden influx of workload and family matters joined to make me unable to answer.
So I will make the quickest reply possible at least for one post.
Spaniard,
That's not an indicator that "renewables are working". It's an indicator that we're consuming 2X as much energy as we were previously, and our CO2 emissions from natural gas are rapidly rising to the same level as coal.
As graphs are sometimes lacking on detail, I made my one capture. I just brought the data from the CSV of electricity mix and just removed all columns except coal, gas, solar and wind. Later I added coal+gas and solar+wind.
As you can see, coal+gas remained more or less flat. The maximum was reached on 2008 when coal pretty much peaked (in USA), which was also the year with more coal, with a clear trend of decline.
Still, while the total production grows, coal+gas remain pretty much around 2400-2600 twh, while solar+wind steady grows each year, now for a total account of 25% of coal+gas, with an accelerating trend.
In relative terms, coal+gas has lost share. In total terms, they have plateau (although there is a trend of changing coal for gas), while the growing of renewables push for a total reduction next years.
In term of emissions per twh, CO2 reductions are clear. To reduce total emissions, more renewable are needed, so solar+wind will grow faster than demand.
With the current trend, that milestone is imminent.
I don't see a future for large amounts of grid battery storage. If we build in two days worth of compressed air, why would we not use that to buffer hourly fluctuations too? Why spend money on a more expensive system thats redundant?
Different energy roundtrips. The difference between you put on charge and you get on discharge.
Batteries has the highest energy return. The most efficient, so if the cost is low enough, I expect to be the most preferred form of storage, until their scale problems arise.
The big problem of batteries is that because it has a energy/power fixed ratio, if you have too many batteries, you can't do a cycle per day, which means that they get lower cycles per year.
No matters which price you obtain per cycle, you want to amortize that battery in a reasonable time. If that time are 10 years, that's 3650 cycles which are more or less on similar values to the lifespan of the battery. But if that value drops, you will need a greater number of cycles to amortize OR a lower prices to make a sooner amortization.
That doesn't happen with other forms of storage where energy and power are decoupled, like liquid-air.
Liquid-air has lower round-trip than batteries but still better than hydrogen (at least under current values). But that efficiency is tricky as it depends of the cold and heat recovery storage, which has a discharge ratio that depends on the scale of the installation.
Instead, I don't think that the right values for batteries are cover the whole day storage, because that would reduce the hours usage per installation in liquid-air too much.
Still, if the total energy stored grow too much, a cost that raises is the storage itself. In this case, fuel storage has the lower storage cost, while it's the most inefficient in terms of roundtrip of all solutions.
I don't say that EVERY storage method needs to cover ALL the energy needs.
I expect the emergency power to use some tricks to reduce the infrastructure power costs.
For example, generation will probably running most of the time only in one way mode (electricity to fuel) to send the generated fuel to other industries, not the electricity network. That raises the hours of operation regardless the low need as emergency generation.
That's the reasoning behind of that. Depends on the time of operation, cost of storage, cost of generation, cost of production or efficiency gains weight in one way or another.
It also depends on the energy, cost and scale. If we can produce a lot of energy very cheap, roundtrip efficiency are not so important.
The difference should pay the extra cost of extra generation power. The cheaper is the energy compare with the storage cost, the less important is the roundtrip efficiency.
So there is a lot of "ifs" in this calculation.
That implies a massive increase in battery energy storage, a massive increase in battery metals consumption, and a massive increase in the input energy to make all those batteries. Here in Houston, they recently touted that Houston was powered by 100% renewable wind energy. That was an outright lie, though. Leftists have no reservations about outright lying when it suits their agenda or talking points.
Based in what I said before.
Sodium-ion. Pretty much no copper or lithium.
Liquid air. Also nothing special. The big storage are the big tanks.
The same for fuel reserves. Except perhaps the fuel cells. Burning is also possible but here are needed more numbers to see if it's really worth it.
The gas turbines located downtown have never been shut off at any point in time, and they do in fact supply power to the City of Houston. I've walked by them numerous times, which is how I know that they're running. You can hear and smell them running. The reason they're always running is that whenever electric power generation falls off a cliff, as it is wont to do with wind, the grid would crash if the gas turbines weren't supplying energy.
That's another reason because batteries helps a lot. They can going up and down near instantaneously.
Even before we try to replace natural gas for helping in fill the holes, batteries will be added sooner to be a better services in this fast response to grid.
4. The poor energy density of batteries is a very real problem, because it drives all related forms of consumption, especially energy consumption. If your battery pack is 1kWh/kg, as opposed to 200kWh/kg, then 5X less material and likely (not an absolute, but highly probable) 5X less energy input is required to manufacture equivalent storage. This is where Hydrogen shines. It's over 5kWh/kg at 700 bar. That's 26X greater than 200Wh/kg Lithium-ion battery packs. Actual Tesla battery packs are only 160Wh/kg, so 33X more energy dense. Even at 70% efficiency, I get 3,191Wh/kg. My storage device does not "self-discharge", nor does it lose capacity over time. The tank itself can survive 25,000+ charge/discharge cycles. The CNTRP tanks are tenatively rated at 50,000 cycles, but after 1,000,000 fully reversing stress cycles, NASA gave up on breaking CNT. There are no batteries that can do that. A Telsa battery to store 24MWh of energy weighs 150,000kg. The H2 plus H2 storage tank mass is 7,521kg. That means I can store 480MWh of power for the same 150t of material mass as Lithium-ion batteries.
The reason why I don't consider hydrogen as a primary storage system is because their low roundtrip efficiency.
Yeah... I know your claim about that ultraefficient generation. Let's wait for confirmation in a real environment (at least a pilot plant).
The cost of the infrastructure is also important. It doesn't matter if it's 95% efficient if the amortization cost is 1000$ per mwh cycled.
That's include the infrastructure to generate (hydrolyzer) and to consume (fuel cell). I project improvements, but nothing radical as a reasonable projection.
If you can get a lot better values, of course the numbers change, and there is no reason to put hydrogen in the last position with that cost. Still, big claims require big proof. Battery costs is based in curve projections into the future using current data and past experience. I don't have the same for hydrogen to be so positive about this medium of storage.
The reason I don't put all on batteries are because battery has a fixed ratio energy:power. That has implications that limit the scale to usage with a daily cycle.
What does that mean to a "circular economy"?
It means you aren't consuming what you are suggesting, but only the small fraction that we won't recycle, that I hope we will raise as close as 100% as possible.
As the raw consumption is the biggest claim against current renewable development, pretty much destroy the argument about we are doing something wrong.
That means people who use circular reasoning will be stuck in their circle, while those of us who recognize the futility of their endeavor, will pass on our H2 tanks to our children. Your batteries might last 8.2 years with 1 complete charge / discharge cycle per day. CFRP tanks will last 68.5 years. CNTRP tanks will last 137 years.
That's the difference between my "linear thinking" and your "circular thinking". Over the next 137 years, you have to completely rebuild your storage system 16 times if you insist on using batteries. I only have to build an energy storage solution once. I can only shrug when I think about how much time and energy will be sunk into recycling batteries 16 times. Linear thinkers like to solve problems and then move on to solving the next most pressing problem, which is why we use straightforward math and workable solutions. We don't demand more performance, energy, and/or materials than are reasonably available. We don't stubbornly insist something is working when the prima facie evidence (CO2 emissions in this case) shows that it's not. We don't search for exceptions to the rule to assert that something is working the way we think it should. We use generalizations, we use context, and we use quantifiable analyses to evaluate assertions, rather than vague generalities about future improvements to technology solving present problems, because we know that all the major gains tend to be very front-loaded for any new technology, and then smaller incremental gains in efficiency or cost reductions are gradually made over time.
There is no amount of electrical efficiency that can overcome a mass advantage that great. When you start scaling up to global scale, mass / weight of materials, and the kinds of material required, actually matter. H2 storage is mostly plastic and Carbon Fiber.
5. The reason we don't recycle more metal than we presently do, is because it's not terribly profitable when compared to new production. It makes a lot of sense for other reasons, though, such as not running out or chasing after very low-grade ores. Aluminum, Copper, and Iron (steel) are the most recycled metals on the planet. Everything else is a very distant second. 50% of all mining energy consumption and all mining tailing waste is from Copper production. All other metals account for the rest, even though Iron is the most produced metal, accounting for a much greater tonnage of metal than all other metals combined. We've already discussed why Aluminum is a poor substitute for Copper, and it ties back to energy input. If our energy generating and consuming systems require 10X to 1,000X more metal, then our energy consumption will be dominated by mining. Energy available for all other uses will then have to compete with mining, because only through a massive increase in production can we supply the quantities of metals being demanded by renewables.
I don't want to turn large swaths of Earth into a Copper mine or Aluminum smelter to pursue an ideological goal. People who think this is acceptable really should visit these sites.
Anyway, basic physics will eventually win. It always does.
You claim to have the numbers on your side, but you are not.
Who cares how many times the batteries will need to be rebuild if it matches the projected cost? Besides, how do you know how much cycles will able to support a 2040 battery? Or if it's just sodium-ion based with the similar storage characteristics or even better than current LFP, how much critical material they will have?
All of this is about save time to make things better whatever path we take.
Instead to spend so much time explaining why the renewables are a bad idea, if you are sure that hydrogen is the solution, you should spend your time searching for solutions for hydrogen overcosts.
The number of Toyota Mirai sold are pretty low, because people don't have hydrogen stations... because they are expensive. And hydrogen is a lot more expensive too than current electricity.
Solve that, selling cheap hydrogen. The market will adopt the technology instead of today where the distance between hydrogen and batteries only grows. Then claim that hydrogen will fill the long transportation sector by less cost than batteries.
It's not like I oppose hydrogen. It's that battery numbers are a lot better under current technology and future projections based on current data.
If some breakthroughs occur on hydrogen and efficiency gets a leap and numbers start to gain over batteries I will cheer that.
So... REDUCE THE PRICE.
We need to end the fossil fuel era and develop a circular economy as soon as possible. I don't care if it's with batteries, hydrogen, e-fuels, or whatever.
Spaniard,
No, we're not "moving the argument". Wind turbines, photovoltaics, and batteries are being artificially propped-up by government "wealth redistribution" to wealthy people who don't need subsidies, in order for them to buy battery operated vehicles, home solar systems, and the like. If this form of your argument applies to fuel cells, then it also applies to batteries. The CO2 taxes are a circuitous attempt to pay for batteries.
If renewables reduced CO2 emissions, then at some point those emissions would go down, or at least wouldn't go up at a faster rate. Newsflash. They're not going down at all. The year-over-year rate of increase is not even slowing down. We have more renewables deployed today than we ever did in the past, but CO2 emissions keep going up.
Global CO2 emissions over time:
https://ourworldindata.org/images/publi … -image.pngWhen reality doesn't suit the narrative, change the argument or claim that reality isn't real. We have more green energy now than at any point in time since the Industrial Revolution, especially in industrialized countries that previously polluted more, but CO2 emissions keep going up. Nothing to see here, folks.
You are blinding yourself showing so much data.
How do you expect to see the effect clearly in a phenomenon that happens pretty much the last years in a image that have data from 1750?
Let's me show you WITH THE SAME SOURCE AND THE SAME TOOL, two different images.
Window with the data from 1960-1980
Window with the data from 2002-2022 (2022 is the last year the web have data)
I don't know you, but I see there the growth of the emissions are slowing.
And if you go through deep in the data, the emissions in the firsts years of 200x the data are mainly drive by shift from coal to gas. The renewable were too small there to make any impact that days.
But because the renewables are growing exponentially, if you project the data to the future, you will see that emissions will peak soon.
Of course depends on more variables. The global growth is an important one. If suddenly the world started to grow very quickly, renewables would need more time to reach a point where they add more than the growing needs of energy, so emissions would continue to grow until reach that point.
It's so important that if economy regresses, it also drops emissions like it happened with the COVID, where a anomaly bump in the data happened. Not that I want that, of course.
The researchers estimate that the world's emissions of carbon dioxide will exceed 40 billion tons in 2023, including nearly 37 billion tons from fossil fuels. Overall emissions are up 1.1% compared to 2022 levels and 1.5% compared to pre-pandemic levels, continuing a 10-year plateau.
Duh. We're now burning stuff like it's going out of style to make these green energy machines. Solar actually provides power 11% to 13$ of the time. Wind generated power is 25% to 33%. There's no increase in storage to speak of, but when that inevitably has to happen to achieve anything, that is when metals shortages will become unavoidable reality, or this plan will fail.
Man. Reread the own text you have quoted
"continuing a 10-year plateau"
Why do you thing the emissions will plateau (and that's a conservative projection), instead of increase, if we continue to increase the global economy?
Because two things. One... we will go, step by step, from thermal to electricity, and some things are just done with less energy than before.
Two. More and more electricity will come to renewables.
Even that text accepts that we will add energy without growing emissions (per year).
And as I said before... that's depends on the global growth. And of course, the speed of renewable deployment. But there is no reason to be pessimistic in this last one condition at least in short term, if no serious economic war USA+Europe vs China arises.
It's also curious you don't show the images your own post
I see a clear down trend on coal usage and emissions.
Yep. USA, not worldwide, as not every country invest the same in renewables. Richer countries with more developed electricity networks have less problems integrating a certain percentage of renewables without further upgradings in network or storage.
Partially also because coal to gas transition. That's also true. A mix of variables.
But if the prices in renewable and upcoming storage continues going down as expected, we will see even easier integration in the future, making a lot easier to spread to other places.
The reason CO2 emissions are growing is that we keep finding more and more ways to expend more and more energy. Batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars that weigh twice as much as gasoline powered cars, computer data centers in every city in the world, every has a smart phone.
Please, check again the previous images.
While it's still a minor part, I think USA is not bad a bad reference in adopting EV and very recently renewables, even if they are behind Europe.
And as you can check in the data, the emissions already peaked.
When we're forced to do short term, medium term, and long term energy storage in a big way, for that other 60% to 70% of the time when renewables produce nothing, energy use of all kinds will skyrocket.
We haven't speaking about storage yet. But a full deployment of a 100% renewable network it will use a mix of strategies that reduces the cost a lot.
Intelligent demand (can go down and go up depending on the cost), continental integration, overproduction (cheap renewables allows certain levels of curtailment by less price that insist in enormous storage), mix of storage oriented to efficiency (like batteries, but with a fixed power/energy ration with less efficient more cheaper storage cost like power to fuel solutions, including hydrogen, oriented to create reserves for worst case scenarios), etc.
The integration of all this things at the same time (and some others), allows to develop a model with a reasonable cost.
If you multiply the energy needed under a fixed place just by some storage technology alone you will reach unreasonable values.
Wind turbines and solar panels are monuments to government subsidy and hydrocarbon fuel energy.
Until it doesn't.
You are asking a baby to do the work of an adult. We are living in a world were most of the energy come from fossil fuels, so of course, the energy used to build the renewables comes mostly from fossil fuel.
If the machines used to install the renewables uses gasoil, the transport energy will come from fossil fuels. If it were use batteries (or green hydrogen as you like it more), then it will come from electricity, which it will be a mix.
If the electricity is run mainly on coal and or gas, they it will still come from fossil fuels (although not oil, which could be important for accessibility), but if it comes from renewables, then it doesn't.
It's a chicken-egg problem, that it's solved with a progressive shift towards renewable energy. The more renewable percentage we have, more false is the argument.
The CEO of Berkshire Hathaway disagrees with you. He's one of the richest men on the planet. I'm guessing you're probably not.
I'm not. But Elon Musk is.
And?
Of course a CEO is just the voice of his business.
Tell me where a business put their money and I will say you what we will hear from its CEO.
Of course, you could subside ALL hydrogen and make it work... until you run out of money. Not the case with renewables and EVs because THEY ARE WORKING, you liked or not.
MY DEFINITION OF "WORKING", IS CO2 EMISSIONS GO DOWN, NOT UP. COSTS GO DOWN, NOT UP. SHOW ME ON THE CO2 EMISSIONS GRAPH ILLUSTRATED ABOVE WHERE THAT IS HAPPENING.
Well... You post a link with the previous image from USA with emissions going down before, so...
From our conversation thus far, you seem to think EVs and renewables are "working", by your own definition of "working", that clearly does not consider CO2 emissions, materials availability, hydrocarbon fuel energy consumption to obtain the materials required, nor total cost.
My definition of "working" is, "I can buy it and the price is good for me". The projections I do myself, it's already posted. I don't think the materials used are a fixed thing neither the reserves are also something so fixed, so my position is that the projections you do are wrong.
You claim renewables and EVs are reducing CO2 emissions. The graph shown above plainly illustrates the exact opposite.
We clearly are seeing different things, because I see a slow down in emissions, and besides that the impact of renewables are in the projected future, not now. Not when renewable only accounts for a minor percentage.
But you can see all kind of projections, and the conclusion is always the same. More renewables, less emissions.
https://totalenergies.com/sites/g/files … 023_EN.pdf
Note that in this report, coal peak before 2030 in every scenario (like I said), while total emissions depends a lot in each scenario.
While the first, with more emissions is projected as "Current Course and Speed", my opinion is that we are gonna accelerate, and the real scenario will more more similar to something between "Momentum" and "Rupture" scenarios, based on price still going down for renewable and EVs.
Copper recycling is not going to provide enough material when energy storage becomes mandatory.
Do you understand the difference between repurposing something that already exists, and having a demand so high that all the Copper metal presently available in the world is insufficient?
The recycling argument is not used against the need per unit, but against the "we are wasting our reserves" and, also push the argument "we need a fixed amount to do the transition".
Still, it has a significant impact in consumption with mixed with the other argument.
Under price pressure, technology and market will push for substitution. Notice that raising price (long term) require bad projections in the extraction market. But let's assume is the case.
So the price rise, and over a pain threshold, manufactures quickly push for changes. (It can come before, but in worse case scenario they will react later).
For example, replace copper wiring with aluminum wiring and solve and mitigate the problems that came with the change.
Let's say that this allow the EV to use half of the amount.
Well... When you scrap the old cars, you can build almost two cars for each old car scraped.
For example, if you need to triple the amount of electricity distributed to the residents in your city, do you think recycling the electric power transformers is going to provide enough metal to make the new power transformers capable of supplying three times as much electricity, or are you going to need more metal- metal that is not currently part of your existing power transformers which were "recycled" from your electric grid?
That's depend on the power per resource ratio which you believed constant and I don't.
Recycling the metals from the old EVs is a great start. They claim they can recycle the batteries from about 70,000 BEVs per year. The US sends 12 to 15 million cars to the junkyard every year. They're going to have to expand capacity by 214 times if all or most cars on the road in the US are BEVs, or build 214 new facilities of the same capacity.
A mix of both, I guess. Pretty sure we are already in the way, because like I said before, as the resources are valuable, that's a clear business.
The cars takes time to be retired, so while they are more than 2 millions EVs in USA but deployed on a exponential curve, as most are recent, so I guess current number of batteries retired still remains around a hundred thousand at most, although growing quickly.
Nobody does. That's the problem. I don't think it's impossible, I'm just mortified by how much more metals consumption and energy is required to make this scheme work, because well over 90% of the energy to make metal comes from burning hydrocarbon fuels, regardless of what you attempt to claim to the contrary. That's why CO2 emissions keep rising.
You are insisting in that argument where we clearly disagree.
CO2 emissions are growing because the world still grows (using still fossil fuels), and renewables are still too small. But because they grow faster than the world growth, the distance is narrowing.
If BEVs never existed, but we came up with some use case for the metal, that required a similar amount of metal, I would question it for the same reasons. It's consuming 10X more materials, because batteries have such absurdly low energy densities
Again "consuming". But no.
If you use an energy source that's 1,000X more dilute than hydrocarbon fuels, and batteries 50X less energy dense than hydrocarbon fuels, then you're going to need a lot more material to convert and use that energy. That's why you can stand out in the Sun all day, bathed in solar radiation, and survive. If you're exposed to 1 second of radiation from the core of an operating nuclear reactor, you'll be dead shortly thereafter.
When you use highly concentrated energy, regardless of what form that takes, converting and consuming it requires a lot less input materials and therefore energy. That is not an assumption on my part, it's an engineering fact, every bit as ironclad as the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
If energy density where the most critical factor in every scenario, we would use nuclear cars, not ICE or electric cars.
They reason why use batteries on cars is a good idea, it's because it's very efficient from source to the actual movement. Current hydrogen model has a lot more loses, and e-fuels even greater.
That's the reason because refueling a ICE car is a lot more expensive that recharge a electric car in a garage.
And that's the reason because hydrogen is SO expensive. If you don't change that, then they will never be competitive in this sector.
For example, check if it's real that renewables save energy. We will see soon, when coal will peak. A new argument will be created to dismiss that, of course, although it will be more difficult to believe.
Yes, unfortunately when there are no more hydrocarbon fuels available to convert into mass-inefficient energy generating and storage machines, we will see very quickly that growth drops to zero and the ability to merely sustain a population's present quality of life is greatly diminished, even if we now have fantastically more energy efficient machines.
Oh! The "cannibalization" argument!
Here it is! So soon! X-D
Emissions goes up -> renewables don't work!
Emissions goes down -> renewables eat our fossil fuels!
Whatever it happens, you will criticize renewables.
But the thing is that fossil fuel will peak still having reserves at prices we could pay. Just... higher than the alternative.
All historical data disagrees with you on this point. No amount of energy efficiency can make up for a problem related to power laws, unless the energy generating or consuming machines in question are over 100% efficient.
Historical data is based in high growth and slow efficiency gains.
I'm talking about going from thermal to electricity in a possible slow growth scenario. It's not ensured but it's possible.
Although the graphs will depend a lot if they adjust the data to account the difference between both sources or not. With the right weight the reduction won't be shown.
But if you account twh of the thermal energy of the burning fuel vs twh electricity produced by renewable, it can host a significant reduction. After all, you need 2 to 3 thermal units of coal to generate 1 twh electricity that accounts as that in the renewable side (if you account it as that).
Of course that affects on sectors where fossil fuels are used to generate electricity or transportation where EVs has a higher efficiency chain, or when it's low heat, where heat pumps are used. That's where we will start the electrification because it's easier and more efficient. High temperature is just 1:1, so there I don't expect big gains. The only gains could come from side changes (some materials instead another), so when we reach that stage, I don't expect reduce energy, but I expect transition (electricity instead of fuel) because by then, renewable electricity could be cheaper than fossil fuels used as a thermal source. We need lower prices of renewable for that, of course.
Tell you what, though. Let's see what happens over the next 10 years, and then revisit this topic at that time, if we're still here. If what you thought should happen, doesn't actually happen, then maybe it's because your assumptions are wrong.
I don't know if I could remember a appointment for so long X-D, but... Sure!
My bet is... If the growth is slow (5% or less) and there is no big disruption of renewable installation (USA+Europa vs China) coal will peak. Oil probably too. Gas it will depend of the storage evolution. Probably we will need more time to start a significant deployment of cheap storage. Next years I expect evolution in pilot plant and some installations heavy subsidized in experimental phase. The reduction cost will push the next decade exponential growth into significant reductions of natural gas.
Total emissions will probably peak some years after the coal & oil peak (3-5 years). That's when natural gas growth won't be enough to emit more than coal and oil reductions.
1. Unless population goes down, then energy use inevitably goes up, unless everyone gets poorer or all technological progress stagnates, because poor people cannot afford to pay for expensive energy sources. This is empirically true, regardless of what anyone thinks about
I disagree about being "empirically true". But also depends on the scenario or accounting method, so it's easy to claim victory. I though the worries were about emissions, not about the total energy.
I can bet for emissions. I won't do for total energy.
it. Taxes and inflation work the same way. Prices never go down over time, only relative to some point in time. If they ever truly go down or "reset", it's because something important was lost, such as the entire industrialized economy, which typically implies mass poverty and mass death, neither of which are desirable outcomes.
Pretty negative, but also a tricky bet, as you can blame renewables for a thing that could came from fossil fuels.
Still... I think negative scenarios could came more easily from geopolitical conflicts than lack of resources.
Of course, if a nuclear war arises, all our projections are trash.
But even just economic cold wars can create a huge disruption in the positive projections. Unavoidable, but unpredictable.
2. If there's a point to BEVs, then it's only when the electricity doesn't come from burning something to keep the grid from crashing when the Sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. That implies an explosion in dispatchable storage, because if 1% of the cars in the US were BEVs and they all plugged into superchargers at the same time, they'd exceed the grid capacity of the entire US. That means more energy generation, more power distribution, more metal, and a lot more money.
I expected different prices that it will push more people to change their habits. I think in USA there is plenty of people with the possibility to adopt home charging or in community garages.
I accept that the other model cost more. I never say anything against that. But because that kind of adoption, in case of happening, it will be later in time, we will have more possibilities.
The "extra" dispatchable battery is pretty much a second battery of almost the same size, when there is no free charge. I expect the network to have more storage than that because the high volumes of renewable energy generation.
I'm thinking in some days of energy storage. Not that you need that from start, when you still have a mix of technologies. With just a few hours of storage the reduction of natural gas consumption will be large. For remove natural gas completely, we will need forms of storage that decouples power and energy (batteries only have a good amortization under the profile of hours of storage).
Others like air to liquid or similar are fine for multiple days, while power to gas including hydrogen to generate a reserve for emergencies.
3. If we're not going to do short / mid / long term electrical or thermal energy storage in a big way, then we're going to burn something, so CO2 emissions won't go down, because even gas turbines don't instantly start supplying power the way batteries do. A grid dominated by wind and solar is a very intermittent and "peaky" grid that does not cooperate or play nice with all the electronics connected to that grid.
Ok. I already post my bet.
Cheap batteries for some hours. 30$/Mwh per cycle (not current cost, but future costs over cheap batteries like sodium-ion)
Air-liquid and similar for some days. 50-70$ mwh per cycle
Synthetic fuel/hydrogen. 120$/Mwh (include energy)
Take something like you store cheap energy (future costs, slightly cheaper than today) 20$/Mwh
So direct consumption is 25-40$ depending on solar & wind mix (includes minor curtailment)
Stored energy: Batteries+energy 30+35 -> 60 Mwh
Stored energy: Air+energy 50-70+35 -> 85-105 Mwh
Fuel reserves: 120 Mwh (no need to add)
I expect something like that. Of course, inflation adjusted.
The needs doesn't go further because I consider that intelligent demand also exists, so not all is provided by the supply side. Also integrated storage in the demand. For example, a industry that have their own heat storage to demand some energy when it's more cheap (that it's when the supply is direct).
40% of the time direct consumption+ 30% battery (daily balance) + 25% secondary storage (weather balance) + 5% reserves (peaks demand - little production for too long . Out of average)
Too precise, so I expect a significant margin of error, but that's how I imagined.
If you ask me explain this data, I don't think this is the best thread for that, but I can do it (it's not so long)
--- IT SEEMS THE SITE DOESN'T ALLOW BIGGER POSTS ---
Edit: It seems it's not that. For some reason I get Internal error with that part. I swear there is no offensive words or something like that. I don't know what's the problem, but I get a "Internal error" posting the second part.
I cracked open my copy of the CATO Institute book today, more or less at random, and found this:
This is from the opening of Chapter 7:...
The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is the difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today. Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions(1)
It seems to me the points of view you have taken recently are somewhat sympathetic to Mr. Sowell's sentiment.
(th)
I don't know Mr. Sowell ideas, but I can agree without problems with that sentence.
Specially when I hear someone "We are doomed because we lack resources".
When I'm a little sarcastic I said something like
"Man... You are over a planet with septillions kilograms of mass, under the sunlight that provides more than a hundred petawatts of energy. Maybe we are using the wrong elements, or the wrong technology. Maybe we are too dumb to use the resources right. BUT WE DEFINITELY DON'T LACK RESOURCES".
About CATO Institute, I know they are pretty much a liberal lobby.
Personally I'm not a market fanatic, the kind about "any market intervention will ALWAYS things worse".
I think the market (besides have significant flaws in certain circumstances) it's a lot more reactive (when the problems arises) than proactive (before the problems arises). Private investment exists, of course, but there are a lot of ideas that generate more benefit to society than to the investors, so that kind of work is very difficult to be funded by the market.
In that sense, I think the state policies can have a significant impact pushing the market in the right or wrong direction, forcing proactive politics. Also punish business against transfer costs to others (like waste).
But on other side, market does a wonderful job finding the real cost of real implementation of a working process.
In that sense, I think the state shouldn't try to replace the market. No matter how much we try to predict the future, the risk of error is high, and paper projections could be shattered easily against the reality.
I think it's a lot better just general pushing here and there, through incentives and taxation, with a constant inspecting over the data and projections and leave the market to solve the internal details of the problems, with gradual and constantly revised plans.
So... I guess I'm very afar from CATO ideas.
Hi!
I have an RSS "Livemarks" add-on for firefox (to replace the old scrapped functionality), to see the last forum posts titles in my browser. But it's just a few one. Like fifteen, and I checked it from time to time, so it's easy I miss interesting posts.
In any case, as you will see, I was in "sleep mode" (mostly only read from time to time) for a long time, with very few posts here and there.
The only reason of my recent high activity is because the thread about energy. I hope it isn't going too far.
It's just... it's a matter where I have debated for years, and because it has so important implications, I think it's very important to say it multiple times for people to get some ideas and spread them.
In fact, if you read my old posts, you will find the ideas about massive IRSU. The idea of the need of more and more resources, or fuel, as the colony is farther from Earth, or more physical things like the rocket equation, its very close to the idea than a energy source that feeds from itself uses more and more energy. The concept of EROEI becoming close to 1.
That's the reason I saw IRSU will be a must to make it a viable and massive space program. Similar reasoning behind.
Speaking about that, we should check soon about the idea of a mainly robotic-only colony on the Moon, if the recent advancements on AI make it cheaper.
Anyway. Thanks for the greeting, although I guess I will return to my "sleep mode" soon.