Great post on the necessity of an “all of the above” approach to decarbonization. I find it very telling that in an academic context (where I currently spend most of my time) this is really a matter of settled science.
I’m absolutely guilty of having wanted to pick the technologies that fit my meet my political preferences (and deride those that fit the preferences of my political opponents) but truly we are not in a position to leave some of our tools in the shed. There is indeed a clear role for energy with high levelized costs and for energy with low levelized costs, for CCUS and DAC and nuclear, etc.
I think it’s also refreshing that regardless of the political debate, the triple threat of BIL, IRA, and the Manchin permitting reform bill clearly demonstrate that policymakers know this also.
Some policymakers. Unfortunately senators from wealthy states like Vermont have no interest in solving the problem (I like to think it's because Vermont will economically benefit from climate change as people move north and bid up land prices there, although that's probably too cynical).
True, although the electricity market extends far beyond state borders. It’s much less important what Vermont chooses for its electricity mix than, say, Texas or Pennsylvania or New York, etc -- both from a production perspective as well as a demand perspective. And not surprisingly, my limited experience is that policymakers in purple states are doing a better job at preparing for an “all of the above” transition than their blue neighbors.
To your point, Vermont doesn't get to choose its electricity mix because it's part of the New England ISO and it gets the mix of generation technologies that are chosen across the New England region. Saying Vermont has a generation mix is sort of like saying Burlington, VT has a generation mix. You can certainly draw the chart, but it's basically meaningless.
Individual states and even localities can provide support or erect barriers to help or impede build-out of specific technologies, but the economic and regulatory environment that drives the generation mix is mainly regional. Build-out that gets blocked in one state or locality will just move to a neighboring area.
Thank you for saying this more eloquently than I could!
Of course, there’s no guarantee that technologies blocked in one state will flourish just across state lines. But the fear of missing out from federal and private investment in emerging technologies to neighboring states is absolutely driving a lot of the state attention on H2, CCS, etc.
PECO (SE Pennsylvania), as far as I can tell, is about 55% nuclear and another 10% non-combustion from purchase contracts. Unsure whether that's NY and upstate PA hydro, wind, or PV.
We fumbled a plan to build another nuclear reactor (the european-american joint venture didn't pan out and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wouldn't let a European company do it solo), but we're expanding wind, solar, natural gas, and battery/storage stuff.
Worth noting that despite the attempts to add a second reactor to Calvert Cliffs, I think there's reason to believe even if the NRC/Federal regulation allowed more stuff Maryland wouldn't expand Nuclear. There's been lots of politicians who vaguely disapprove of nuclear and a lot of the big environmental groups pushed to make shutting down Calvert part of the recent climate bill (which did not happen). I worked in the state legislature when the bill passed which did nothing to support nuclear and working with Senator Pinsky's (lead climate guy in the senate) staff I got the impression that he mostly agreed with the advocacy groups about shutting down Calvert. Obviously that didn't happen, nor did he ever formally propose it, but still worrying nonetheless.
If its 'settled science' can you show me a single industrial grid in the world that has decarbonized with > 30% renewables share?
Also, India is building new nuclear plants at $2k/kw nameplate capacity. LCOE is a terrible metric, but use even that model with India costs and you will get some insane figures. After that, adjust LCOE assumptions of a 40 year lifespan to something more reasonable like 80 years for a modern plant, and the LCOE gets even more ridiculously cheap.
We need to think about a two-part strategy. First we need to to get activists and pundits to understand the logic of taxing the externality of CO2 emissions. Then comes getting the public and politicians to see the logic of the policy where it's more of the old fashioned political economy problem of concentrates, visible costs and diffuse, invisible benefits.
I mentioned this below but I don't see a realistic scenario that involves a carbon tax in the short-term. Especially at a time when energy prices are spiking, a carbon tax is a recipe for backlash.
What about the opposite? Renewables subsidy? Non-carbon-use deduction? Or even regulatory actions that act as breaks (unfortunately with distortionary effects like car efficiency standards?
Just to give people some hard numbers, energy generated per mole of carbon dioxide emitted for the full combustion of some fuels in oxygen: methane: 802.31kJ, n-octane: 634.32kJ, carbon: 393.52kJ.
Natural gas is mostly methane; gasoline averages out as roughly n-octane; coal is very close to being pure carbon.
This gets you a decent estimate at a 4:3:2 ratio of energy per emission for gas : oil : coal. In fact, gas and oil are marginally better than that (gas is about 3.9% better; the composition of oils varies too much to get a number at this level of precision), but both have more emissions in production and refining (gas leaks and emissions in refining), so that tends to balance out.
If you know a bit of chemistry, the explanation is that the enthalpy of formation for water (less the enthalpy of formation for the two carbon-hydrogen bonds you have to break) is almost exactly half the enthalpy of formation of carbon dioxide (-393kJ/mol for carbon dioxide, -241kJ/mol for water vapor and about -37kJ/mol for two carbon-hydrogen bonds, ie half the enthalpy of formation of methane) - which means that four hydrogens in a hydrocarbon will generate about the same energy as one carbon, so the key thing is the carbon:hydrogen ratio in the fuel, which is 1C:4H in methane, 1C:2H in long-chain hydrocarbons and 1C:0H in carbon, ie coal.
Just remember that coal is about twice as bad as gas and that oil is near-enough halfway between the two.
If you want to know why, it's because coal has no hydrogen in, gas has lots of hydrogen in, and oil has some hydrogen in. If you want to know more, then the words "enthalpy of formation" are in the explanation.
If you want to convert these from energy per mole to kg of CO2 per kWh, you divide them into 158.4.
CO2 emissions per kWh:
Methane (natural gas): 0.197kg
n-octane (gasoline): 0.249kg
carbon (coal): 0.402kg
Petroleum, ie crude oil, is higher emissions than gasoline, but different oils will get different numbers - somewhere a little over 0.26kg/kWh range is likely to be about right.
One kilogramme of carbon dioxide is 22.73 moles. A joule is a watt-second, so if you want kWh (the usual units for electricity), that's 3,600kJ. 3600/22.73 is 158.4.
Note that these are the simple heat energy from combustion - if you're converting that to electricity, then transmitting it, then using it, then the actual work you'll get will be much less because of inefficiencies and losses.
The EPA has 2.23 lb (1.01 kg) for coal and 0.91 lb (0.413 kg) for natural gas for electricity generation (in 2020), but note that is for electricity, not heat, ie after the energy loss from the actual process of converting the heat into electricity.
Very old and rusty ones! I got the numbers out by a factor of a thousand the first time (got my J and kJ mixed up). It's a long time since I did anything with enthalpies of formation, but the actual math is very straightforward - there's nothing more complicated than multiplication and division in there.
But it's really useful to be able to check these sorts of basic things yourself - you get reassured a lot that the stuff you can't check is correct.
That’s emitting methane directly into the air, for example if it escapes from an oil well. The conversation above is about burning it to make electricity, in which case the methane is (hopefully) completely consumed and what escapes to the air is CO2 and water vapor.
Makes sense. Quoting from last week's NY Times' Climate Forward newsletter:
> Gas is often called natural gas, because, like all fossil fuels, it’s derived from nature. But it would be more accurate to call it methane gas, because methane is its principal ingredient. When burned to produce heat or electricity, gas is cleaner than coal. When it escapes unburned, though, it heats up the atmosphere super fast. A lot of methane leaks from pipelines and tanks.
I wonder if the objections/misunderstanding against natural gas, that aren't just mood affiliation, is this -- that the impact from the total leaked methane is greater than direct carbon emissions. It would be in the economic interest of the fuel operators to minimize leaks, so my guess is that the comparison is bad. But I don't know for sure.
"Gas is often called natural gas, because, like all fossil fuels, it’s derived from nature."
Sigh, no, it's called that to contrast with the (now-banned) coal gas, which was manufactured from coal and had a large amount of toxic carbon monoxide in. If you've ever heard someone comment about sticking their head in an oven, it's because that was a suicide method back in the coal gas days (turn on gas, do not ignite it, stick head in gas oven).
Methane is about 25 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2, so leaks of 4% of gas would make it as bad as coal in the immediate term. A quick google suggests that 1.5% leakage is a typical value for the US.
However, that would still be better than coal: methane in the upper atmosphere combines with oxygen to form CO2, so has a typical lifespan of about 20 years; CO2 persists for hundreds of years (depends on the exact amount of net-negative emissions, but the natural carbon cycle would take several hundred years to lower CO2 levels to pre-industrial levels). So methane emitted now will not be a problem in the 2050s, while CO2 emitted now will be a problem in the 2150s.
Renewables becoming such a political battlefront has made being pro or anti nuclear also another dumb culture war.
Like, progs hate nuclear because they want 100% renewables. Cons love nuclear because it's an own-the-libs form of clean energy that isn't renewable. It's so exhausting.
Can Desantis own the libs by building some nuclear power plants? Get Fox to interview some (young, attractive) hypocritical protesters. Get Desantis in a hard hat on a podium behind a banner that says “In Florida we BUILD”. “Traditional values and traditional power” (atomic, since tradition=baby boomer’s childhood).
South Florida already gets a bunch of power from nuclear.
From Wikipedia:
“Turkey Point was directly hit by Hurricane Andrew on August 24, 1992, destroying two raw water tanks and portions of the fire protection systems, draining another raw water tank, partially disabling the fire protection systems, causing severe damage to various non-nuclear structures, and cracking the smokestack for fossil-fueled Unit 1. The smokestack later had to be demolished and rebuilt. It also suffered a total loss of offsite power, requiring the use of the onsite emergency diesel generators for several days. No significant damage was done to the plant's nuclear containment buildings. The plant was built to withstand winds of up to 235 mph (380 km/h), greatly exceeding the maximum winds recorded by most category 5 hurricanes.”
Georgia and South Carolina tried this approach and have not done terribly well with it (no thanks to the NRC, imo), those poor South Carolinians are going to be paying for a nuclear plant they don't have for generations.
"Cons love nuclear because it's an own-the-libs form of clean energy that isn't renewable."
How true is this, outside of comment sections? I don't see GOP state governments investing heavily in nuclear or adding new plants or prioritizing safety reform.
As I remember it, in Georgia, the 2020 Democratic candidate for public service commissioner was much more skeptical of and antagonistic toward the Plant Vogtle nuclear project than the Republican candidate was. But yeah I think overall this is still a pretty niche issue.
In fairness, that was *after* 10 years of massive cost overruns that were going to be passed onto ratepayers instead of penalizing the utility which (helped to) botch the project in the first place, if the utility commission allowed it.
But in defense of nuclear, building new nuclear plants face cost overruns because there is an extremely well-funded anti-nuclear movement that fights every plant tooth and nail
I have beaten this drum until it was a shattered wreck: that is completely untrue.
I’m not going to elaborate any further, lol, but you’re free to go find any of the exchanges surrounding the Jamaica nuclear pilot article a year or so ago. Same username back then. Probably 8 other exchanges on the topic since then as well.
And I'm right. Indian point is getting closed because of these nuts. New plants face never ending regulatory battles because of this coalition.
Denying that there is a powerful group of environmentalists who hate nuclear is similar to denying the Republican Party wants to restrict abortion access.
It’s not really recyclable. All you can do is blend the nuclear waste with a bunch of empty, shredded 2-liter soda bottles and use the product to make cool-looking running shoes that’ll wear out before you’ve got 300 miles on them.
Farhad Manjoo was not going to write a column that said "actually yes nuclear is good and a fully renewable approach may not be optimal" -- he was always going to land on the progressive side of the argument.
IMO, it's a pretty complicated topic to interrogate with a question like the one in that poll.
My problem with nuclear power is that it's too expensive and too inflexible to economically follow load to complement renewables. OTOH, I'm very supportive of research on advanced designs and also of targeting subsidy money at existing plants to keep them running depending on the circumstances.
If you look at it from a policy angle, democrats have a solid history of supporting nuclear power when it matters. The only two nuclear power plants the US has broken ground on in the last 40 years were funded by loans that Obama approved. Biden and the dem congress approved huge funding for nuclear research and for giving nuclear power access to production and investment tax credits.
Finally, funding for marginal existing nuclear plants that was contained in the IRA is what saved diablo canyon and will likely save other economically marginal existing nuclear plants (there's also talk of restarting a closed plant in Michigan thanks to IRA).
Democrats do not have a good record on this front. Indian Point was killed.
Building new nuclear plants may not make sense but Democratic anti-nuclear activists aggressively work to close existing plants, which is pure ideology
I agree to a point, but in the end, these decisions are all about plant economics.
Sure, with Indian Point, the environmentalists made a lot of noise, but they would have lost the battle had it not been for the sustained low wholesales prices the plant was getting for its output because of competition from nearby gas plants.
Diablo Canyon is an even better demonstration of this. The environmentalists were winning the day and shutdown was a done deal. Then higher natural gas prices and the IRA subsidies for existing nuclear showed up and completely reversed the economics of keeping the plant open. All of a sudden, Newsom forgets all his anti-nuke friends and decides to support keeping the plant open.
I think there's definitely a strain of environmental purism on the left that really hates nuclear, often an older strain that retains bad memories of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and may also be scarred by the Cold War in having disdain for anything with a nuclear connotation.
Yes, they have been fighting to close Diablo Canyon here in California for example. It is squishy centrist Dems that have been coming around on nuclear, which is why the IRA and the bipartisan energy bill both contained support for advanced nuclear.
Investing in these long shot technologies is my day job. I agree you just have to try a bunch of stuff and you won’t really know for decades what works. But at least the money and the talent is there now and things are happening. FWIW I’m more bullish on hydrogen than nuclear but hey I might be wrong. I can see the appeal in cold cloudy countries, but even they have the option of running transmission to the nearest sunny country.
Very easy to be bullish on H2 with all the federal investment! I think your analysis is correct in the mid-term, though obviously nuclear has distinct advantages of its own. Only time will tell if the market will value those advantages appropriately!
Coming from a cold cloudy country north of yours (I presume) why should we trust that power would be sent our way if the power is tight for your own use? (See conditions that led to Texas blackouts, it was very cold all the way northeast well)
I assume the power would go to whatever ISO is willing to pay the marginal cost which, if broad swaths of the country were pushing max capacity at the same time would go very high.
I'll be honest, I have no idea who the intended target audience for this piece is. Basically noone serious in the field of renewables disputes that you need gas as a backup for the next five to ten years! You might be able to switch to hydrogen afterwards or massively invest in biomass or something, but the necessity for a backup is absolutely not disputed. This very much seems like "making up a guy to get mad at".
The problem with CCS, on the other hand, is more of a political one. We absolutely do need CCS to work in the future, because our progress has been much too slow the last few decades and we can't reach our climate goals without sucking like five percent of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Even the IPCC acknowledges that. The problem is that as of right now, CCS is a VERY unproven technology that is 20 years away at least. (Sort of like those small nuclear reactors everyone is talking about.) So it's hard to rely on it, because we don't know when we can actually deploy it on scale.
But lazy politicans love to use the prospect of CCS in the future as a pretext for taking not enough action in the present. This happens all the time in Europe. "I know that our ten-year plan doesn't actually reduce nearly enough emissions, but that's okay, we'll just do carbon capture in the future." That's why a lot of climate and energy experts are actually rather sceptical about carbon capture, because right now, all it achieves is climate action delay.
But that doesn't mean that he is against using gas per se right? Isn't Ireland building new gas power plants? As far as I understand it, the argument goes that Ireland doesn't need an LNG terminal given the supply routes from the UK and its own domestic production. (Which sounds risky to me)
You seem to be missing a very important factor related to carbon sequestration. We don’t need new technology or fancy methods to do carbon sequestration. We already have a way to do so that is easily scalable and cost effective.
We need to replace conventional farming methods with regenerative farming methods. With regenerative farming the excess C02 is pulled from the air via plants and then used to build topsoil. This is doubly important because conventional farming methods have been destroying topsoil at an alarming rate, and without topsoil we can’t grow food.
Regenerative farming practices do this by restoring the natural liquid carbon pathway that plants and soil microbes have. Basically plants take sunlight and carbon and then trade it to soil microbes and fungi who in turn help the plants by providing nutrients and other services (like pest and disease fighting).
Regenerative farming does this through a combination of methods. Primarily through combining no till, cover crops, rotational grazing along with reducing or eliminating synthetic fertilizer, herbicies, pesticides etc.
For example, we’ve caused lots of environmental damage by removing animals from farms and off to feed lots. Instead bring those animals back to the farm. Use rotational grazing methods were the animals are densely packed but only on the section of land for a brief time (the same way herds of bison would have moved on the plains.
Likewise you should never leave soil bare. You need to put cover crops in to protect the soil and feed the microbes and store carbon by building the topsoil.
Tillage breaks up the soil structure and the fungi networks that are so crucial for building soil. Likewise synthetic fertilizers disrupt the natural liquid carbon cycle because plants get their nutrients from the synthetic fertilizer instead of working together with natural soil microbes to build the soil. And of course pesticides and herbicides also destroy soil microbes.
It’s been estimated that if the entire world switched to regenerative farming practices we could absorb all the excess carbon created since the start of the industrial revolution. Plus you would be creating healthier nutrient rich foods (nutrient density drops greatly under conventional agriculture practices).
Those are great, and we should do them, but they are not permanent sequestration. Reversion to poor soil management practices or climate changes could push it back out again.
Given this, are there specific things that we're not doing/funding from a policy standpoint? The devil is in the details of course, but It seems like there's been a decent amount of policy and funding support for CCS in recent legislation. What's missing?
Cost is a problem, but at least in the US there are considerable regulatory hurdles. Every state has a different interpretation about who owns pore space (or they don't have an interpretation at all and that needs to be decided). The type of well that needs to be constructed to inject CO2 for sequestration requires special permitting, and the EPA office that manages permitting is understaffed and underfunded. And of course, there are questions about long-term liability -- who is responsible for maintaining the site in 15 years and what happens if an operator goes under.
My organization just put out a report on the regulatory hurdles facing the state of Pennsylvania, actually!
The EU and the US have invested billions in CCS research over the last twenty years, so I'm not sure the problem is really a political one. All the researchers I've spoken to agree that doing Carbon capture is just really freaking complicated.
- The technology is just way too expensive currently to do it at scale.
- Retrofitting power plants with CCS technology is doable, but (again) expensive, and diminishes their efficiency. Also, it's kinda dumb because the hope is to get rid of big fossil-fueled plants anyway. So CCS might also lead to lock-in effects, which is dangerous.
- Direct carbon removal from the atmosphere is extremely interesting, but even more complicated and thus even more in its infancy.
- Storage is also complicated. If you're doing carbon capture on an industrial scale, you need a loooooot of storage space to put it in. But that space has to be secure for thousands of years, and someone has to watch after those storage spaces. Which brings a lot of logistical (where to find that space?), legal (who is to blame if a seaquake destroys a storage space 200 years later?) and financial (who pays for the upkeep?) problems with it. Think of all the problems that nuclear waste storage has, but on steroids.
So putting all your hopes into CCS is kinda dangerous right now. It makes total sense to do research on the topic, because again, it's pretty certain we'll need it a few decades down the road. But you can't spend your money twice. Every dollar you put into CCS is a dollar less put into solar and offshore wind, which is a proven, economically sound technology that can be rapidly built on scale. So you really need to think hard about how much resources to invest.
Thousands of years? If we indeed went zero carbon and maintained that over time, then who cares if some GHG escapes 200 years from now? It's hard to imagine that would cause catastrophic warming. It's not like long-term safeguarding of nuclear waste.
Absolutely fair to say as a matter of moral behavior, maybe people should consume less. But policy questions need to consider public opinion and frankly a lot of American's will turn against reducing emissions if it means they can't drive an SUV. That's why policy should aim to reduce emissions in a way that's popular. The reaction to new electric Hummer's creating more emissions than a sedan shouldn't be stop people from buying them, but should be increase the renewables % in the grid and throw money at people to buy electric hummers (or any other electric vehicles). Optimal in terms of reducing emissions in theory? No. Optimal in terms of reducing emissions in practice? Yes.
Matt said it well on the "political will" line: it's a weasel phrase that masks what's really being asked, and that's the will to sacrifice. They really need to be forced to say upfront that we're being asked to do things like give up cars, give up meat, and give up consumption in general. If they were regularly confronted with the heavy backlash that would come with it, they should then be more willing to admit that expanding clean* technologies dramatically is the better and more feasible way forward.
*As an aside, I really despise the term "renewable" as it's often used. We don't necessarily want energy sources that repopulate themselves, what we want are energy sources that don't use fossil fuels. Renewable is an ugly four syllables and nine letters, while clean is a (heh) clean five letters and one syllable.
Couldn't agree more with your asterisk! I hate the term, not least because I feel like its 50% used to just exclude nuclear. I remember learning about energy sources in like 10th grade and thinking it was weird that in a world of climate change nuclear gets lumped in with the other "dirty" fuels while wind, hydroelectric, and solar get their wonderful "renewable" pedestal. Seems odd that the distinction made is weather (intentional misspell) the source of the energy is found in endless supply on earth, especially when you could just say the materials for creating solar panels are finite. Not to mention things like hydrogen, geothermal, CCS, etc. don't fit very neatly into the framework.
Yeah, and conversely, biomass can be described as renewable, since the fuel can reproduce itself, but that's not what the people that use the term want to say. And what I think they want to say is "shorthand" for solar and wind. (I scare quote that because it's still four syllables, but now twelve letters and two spaces! Though using an ampersand or a slash could reduce that!) With hydroelectricity often getting omitted due to the harms it can do to salmon.
I agree and one of my problems with that sacrifice mentally is that in general, activists tend to expect people who are not like them to make big sacrifices.
Yup and lay people notice this. Take the obvious example: travel. Environmentalism is positively correlated with liking to travel.
Environmentalists talk a lot about how we need to reduce car usage. They almost never talk about eliminating or dramatically reducing the # of cross-continent flights.
Why? Because many environmentalists don't have kids and live in big cities, cars are a waste. But saying you can't visit other continents is a real imposition.
The sacrifice that appeals to them is one they won't have to pay. Left-Nimbyism is the other example. NYC, SF and LA fight development tooth and nail. But allowing development in these cities would help the climate. It would involve a sacrifice for them so they say no.
The resistance to NPIs for COVID from a large portion of America should dissuade any notion that people here will go along with any major, long-term sacrifices to their material well-being and standard of living.
I think some basic axioms we have to accept for fighting climate change are:
1) People will not pay higher direct taxes (e.g., carbon tax)
2) People will not accept a degradation in living standards to fight climate change but will probably accept most *changes* in technology (e.g., EVs, induction stoves, heat pumps)
3) People in less developed countries desire increasing living standards and we have a moral obligation to assist that within the context of dealing with climate change
One point to make on the need for direct air capture is that while it's a task for later this century, it's pretty clear we'll need to go beyond Net Zero and go Net Negative for some time to bring the climate back to something closer to pre-industrial normal.
As far as seasonality goes, we haven't even considered how we could reshape demand to take advantage of the peaks and troughs of very cheap but seasonally variable renewable generation. Would it be economically viable to run aluminium smelters 9 or 10 months of the year if the electricity was super-cheap for those months? Or bake bricks? Could California desalinate seawater when their energy is at its cheapest?
Yes, all of those cost money, but so does nuclear, and SMRs will be similarly expensive for decades to come (anybody who thinks otherwise is more than welcome to take a long bet with me on the topic).
Another speculation is that the *free* energy could be used for electrolyzers (to make some hydrogren). They're cheap to make, but energy intensive to run, and tanks of hydrogen can be stored.
I think you'll see time-of-use pricing change everything dramatically. There will be demand management on EVERYTHING. On an individual level, you'll see more smart-home power management. (i.e. your car charges when electricity is cheap, your washer runs when electricity is cheap, your thermostat does temperature management in a range based on when el...)
And more importantly, you'll see huge changes at businesses. Google will balance more workloads between data centers based on where in the world electricity is free right now. Are you willing to be a flexible on when you run your "once every 24 hours" cloud compute jobs for a 50% savings? I sure am.
I was leaving out hydrogen as “unproven new technology”, though it seems like we’re going to have quite a few large-scale electrolyzers running off VRE well before we have any SMRs operating in the USA, Europe, Japan or South Korea.
"Because massively overbuilding renewables would not only cost a lot of money but wastefully consume vast tracts of land, it seems like a better idea would be to use long-term batteries. If you had really big batteries that stored electricity for a long time, you could simply store surplus power in the high season and unleash it in the low season."
In the spirit of focusing the energy debate on numbers, not adjectives (https://bit.ly/3LJLFUZ), Iet's look at some of the literature we have on this trade-off.
Perez et. al, 2020 find that "while unconstrained, intermittent renewable generation will achieve very low [cost] targets-they are already below grid parity-transforming PV into the firm, effectively dispatchable resource needed by world economies will be very costly if done with storage alone, even when considering the most aggressive future cost projections for storage. Overbuilding renewables can reduce the storage requirements to the point where true below parity firm generation will be attainable." (https://bit.ly/3SE0YRq)
Concretely: in Minnesota, 0% overbuilding of panel requires so much storage to deal with seasonal intermittency that cost of power shoots up to 28 cents/KWh, compared to 5 cents/KWh today. By contrast, 50% overbuilding (implying you'd throw away a third of the summer surplus) drives the cost down below grid parity, 5 cents/KWh. (The mix assumed here is 55% solar / 40% wind / 5% natural gas). (https://bit.ly/3SE0YRq) They've observed the relationship between overbuilding and cost across other geographies (https://bit.ly/3ULxov9).
The reason this happens is that 1.5x overbuilding of panels allows you to use 10x less storage (https://bit.ly/3SDZ3fG). That's the tradeoff.
This is just one study. I'm it has limitations (it's not clear whether the growing marginal cost for summer-surplus panels is factored into the cost figures above), and I'd love for folks to chime in with other evidence. The key claim here that solving seasonal intermittency via storage requires such profound amounts of storage that it will never be cost-effective.
Topics this important should get a multiple post treatment. Matt’s article is basically an articulate restatement of the obvious. It avoids the interesting questions that would deepen my understanding of climate:
1). How much solar and wind must one overbuild to achieve a given reduction in fossil fuel peak generation?
2). How expensive is this overbuilding?
3). How many degrees would the planet warm if we just deployed existing technologies at scale and still used fossil fuels for shipping and aviation? How effectively could seawalls and air conditioning mitigate this?
4). How much carbon can we remove from the atmosphere by planting trees?
There are probably consensus answers to these questions. I understand it’s commercially important that Matt publish every weekday. Matt has the chops to write an excellent Atlantic style feature every week or four intriguing blog posts on different topics. I would prefer the former, especially because Matt is running out of topics and doesn’t have much new to say about housing.
There 3 PhD thesis in there at least. For 4), in practice a trivial amount, as mature forests are in equilibrium and possible CH4 generators for decomposing biomass. Many other reasons to reforest though.
I don't think Matt needs to do this. A division of labor is fine. Matt can write a generalist overview post and for readers who want to dig deeper he can refer them to David Roberts' Volts posts and podcasts.
The only two name writers I trust to think sensibly are Matt and Nate Silver. Douthat is interesting for conservative provocations, but ultramontane Catholicism is not my thing.
Great post on the necessity of an “all of the above” approach to decarbonization. I find it very telling that in an academic context (where I currently spend most of my time) this is really a matter of settled science.
I’m absolutely guilty of having wanted to pick the technologies that fit my meet my political preferences (and deride those that fit the preferences of my political opponents) but truly we are not in a position to leave some of our tools in the shed. There is indeed a clear role for energy with high levelized costs and for energy with low levelized costs, for CCUS and DAC and nuclear, etc.
I think it’s also refreshing that regardless of the political debate, the triple threat of BIL, IRA, and the Manchin permitting reform bill clearly demonstrate that policymakers know this also.
Some policymakers. Unfortunately senators from wealthy states like Vermont have no interest in solving the problem (I like to think it's because Vermont will economically benefit from climate change as people move north and bid up land prices there, although that's probably too cynical).
True, although the electricity market extends far beyond state borders. It’s much less important what Vermont chooses for its electricity mix than, say, Texas or Pennsylvania or New York, etc -- both from a production perspective as well as a demand perspective. And not surprisingly, my limited experience is that policymakers in purple states are doing a better job at preparing for an “all of the above” transition than their blue neighbors.
To your point, Vermont doesn't get to choose its electricity mix because it's part of the New England ISO and it gets the mix of generation technologies that are chosen across the New England region. Saying Vermont has a generation mix is sort of like saying Burlington, VT has a generation mix. You can certainly draw the chart, but it's basically meaningless.
Individual states and even localities can provide support or erect barriers to help or impede build-out of specific technologies, but the economic and regulatory environment that drives the generation mix is mainly regional. Build-out that gets blocked in one state or locality will just move to a neighboring area.
“is sort of like saying Burlington, VT has a generation mix”
Fun fact Burlington has a municipal power company with its own power plant.
Thank you for saying this more eloquently than I could!
Of course, there’s no guarantee that technologies blocked in one state will flourish just across state lines. But the fear of missing out from federal and private investment in emerging technologies to neighboring states is absolutely driving a lot of the state attention on H2, CCS, etc.
Hey, Blue Maryland gets ~40% of our power from a nuclear plant so we're doing our part.
PECO (SE Pennsylvania), as far as I can tell, is about 55% nuclear and another 10% non-combustion from purchase contracts. Unsure whether that's NY and upstate PA hydro, wind, or PV.
Most of the rest is gas.
So my EV is doing its bit.
Is Maryland expanding nuclear generation or expanding renewables or expanding gas?
We fumbled a plan to build another nuclear reactor (the european-american joint venture didn't pan out and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wouldn't let a European company do it solo), but we're expanding wind, solar, natural gas, and battery/storage stuff.
It was more like the law specifically excludes non US companies from owning and operating US nuclear plants and Congress refused to change the law.
Worth noting that despite the attempts to add a second reactor to Calvert Cliffs, I think there's reason to believe even if the NRC/Federal regulation allowed more stuff Maryland wouldn't expand Nuclear. There's been lots of politicians who vaguely disapprove of nuclear and a lot of the big environmental groups pushed to make shutting down Calvert part of the recent climate bill (which did not happen). I worked in the state legislature when the bill passed which did nothing to support nuclear and working with Senator Pinsky's (lead climate guy in the senate) staff I got the impression that he mostly agreed with the advocacy groups about shutting down Calvert. Obviously that didn't happen, nor did he ever formally propose it, but still worrying nonetheless.
If its 'settled science' can you show me a single industrial grid in the world that has decarbonized with > 30% renewables share?
Also, India is building new nuclear plants at $2k/kw nameplate capacity. LCOE is a terrible metric, but use even that model with India costs and you will get some insane figures. After that, adjust LCOE assumptions of a 40 year lifespan to something more reasonable like 80 years for a modern plant, and the LCOE gets even more ridiculously cheap.
We need to think about a two-part strategy. First we need to to get activists and pundits to understand the logic of taxing the externality of CO2 emissions. Then comes getting the public and politicians to see the logic of the policy where it's more of the old fashioned political economy problem of concentrates, visible costs and diffuse, invisible benefits.
I mentioned this below but I don't see a realistic scenario that involves a carbon tax in the short-term. Especially at a time when energy prices are spiking, a carbon tax is a recipe for backlash.
What about the opposite? Renewables subsidy? Non-carbon-use deduction? Or even regulatory actions that act as breaks (unfortunately with distortionary effects like car efficiency standards?
What you're describing is pretty close to the present policy landscape!
Just to give people some hard numbers, energy generated per mole of carbon dioxide emitted for the full combustion of some fuels in oxygen: methane: 802.31kJ, n-octane: 634.32kJ, carbon: 393.52kJ.
Natural gas is mostly methane; gasoline averages out as roughly n-octane; coal is very close to being pure carbon.
This gets you a decent estimate at a 4:3:2 ratio of energy per emission for gas : oil : coal. In fact, gas and oil are marginally better than that (gas is about 3.9% better; the composition of oils varies too much to get a number at this level of precision), but both have more emissions in production and refining (gas leaks and emissions in refining), so that tends to balance out.
If you know a bit of chemistry, the explanation is that the enthalpy of formation for water (less the enthalpy of formation for the two carbon-hydrogen bonds you have to break) is almost exactly half the enthalpy of formation of carbon dioxide (-393kJ/mol for carbon dioxide, -241kJ/mol for water vapor and about -37kJ/mol for two carbon-hydrogen bonds, ie half the enthalpy of formation of methane) - which means that four hydrogens in a hydrocarbon will generate about the same energy as one carbon, so the key thing is the carbon:hydrogen ratio in the fuel, which is 1C:4H in methane, 1C:2H in long-chain hydrocarbons and 1C:0H in carbon, ie coal.
It was my understanding that there would be no math...
Just remember that coal is about twice as bad as gas and that oil is near-enough halfway between the two.
If you want to know why, it's because coal has no hydrogen in, gas has lots of hydrogen in, and oil has some hydrogen in. If you want to know more, then the words "enthalpy of formation" are in the explanation.
Ha, it all made sense to me and I'm totally onboard with ya. But, like, we need more jokes...
If you want to convert these from energy per mole to kg of CO2 per kWh, you divide them into 158.4.
CO2 emissions per kWh:
Methane (natural gas): 0.197kg
n-octane (gasoline): 0.249kg
carbon (coal): 0.402kg
Petroleum, ie crude oil, is higher emissions than gasoline, but different oils will get different numbers - somewhere a little over 0.26kg/kWh range is likely to be about right.
One kilogramme of carbon dioxide is 22.73 moles. A joule is a watt-second, so if you want kWh (the usual units for electricity), that's 3,600kJ. 3600/22.73 is 158.4.
Note that these are the simple heat energy from combustion - if you're converting that to electricity, then transmitting it, then using it, then the actual work you'll get will be much less because of inefficiencies and losses.
The EPA has 2.23 lb (1.01 kg) for coal and 0.91 lb (0.413 kg) for natural gas for electricity generation (in 2020), but note that is for electricity, not heat, ie after the energy loss from the actual process of converting the heat into electricity.
Having a regular commenter with technical chops rocks
Very old and rusty ones! I got the numbers out by a factor of a thousand the first time (got my J and kJ mixed up). It's a long time since I did anything with enthalpies of formation, but the actual math is very straightforward - there's nothing more complicated than multiplication and division in there.
But it's really useful to be able to check these sorts of basic things yourself - you get reassured a lot that the stuff you can't check is correct.
Thank you!
Is emitting methane better than the equivalent amount of n-octane/carbon?
I remember reading in various places that methane is worse, and reading in https://climateer.substack.com/p/climate-science a mantra like "Zero emissions. Pretty darn soon. Methane first."
Am I misunderstanding this?
That’s emitting methane directly into the air, for example if it escapes from an oil well. The conversation above is about burning it to make electricity, in which case the methane is (hopefully) completely consumed and what escapes to the air is CO2 and water vapor.
Makes sense. Quoting from last week's NY Times' Climate Forward newsletter:
> Gas is often called natural gas, because, like all fossil fuels, it’s derived from nature. But it would be more accurate to call it methane gas, because methane is its principal ingredient. When burned to produce heat or electricity, gas is cleaner than coal. When it escapes unburned, though, it heats up the atmosphere super fast. A lot of methane leaks from pipelines and tanks.
I wonder if the objections/misunderstanding against natural gas, that aren't just mood affiliation, is this -- that the impact from the total leaked methane is greater than direct carbon emissions. It would be in the economic interest of the fuel operators to minimize leaks, so my guess is that the comparison is bad. But I don't know for sure.
"Gas is often called natural gas, because, like all fossil fuels, it’s derived from nature."
Sigh, no, it's called that to contrast with the (now-banned) coal gas, which was manufactured from coal and had a large amount of toxic carbon monoxide in. If you've ever heard someone comment about sticking their head in an oven, it's because that was a suicide method back in the coal gas days (turn on gas, do not ignite it, stick head in gas oven).
Methane is about 25 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2, so leaks of 4% of gas would make it as bad as coal in the immediate term. A quick google suggests that 1.5% leakage is a typical value for the US.
However, that would still be better than coal: methane in the upper atmosphere combines with oxygen to form CO2, so has a typical lifespan of about 20 years; CO2 persists for hundreds of years (depends on the exact amount of net-negative emissions, but the natural carbon cycle would take several hundred years to lower CO2 levels to pre-industrial levels). So methane emitted now will not be a problem in the 2050s, while CO2 emitted now will be a problem in the 2150s.
My impression was that the bigger problem was actually leaks from oil wells where it wasn’t economical for the operator to pay to recover it, but I’d be curious to see some numbers. They did put a price on methane emission in the IRA so hopefully that will help. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-secretive-methane-leaks-are-driving-climate-change
Renewables becoming such a political battlefront has made being pro or anti nuclear also another dumb culture war.
Like, progs hate nuclear because they want 100% renewables. Cons love nuclear because it's an own-the-libs form of clean energy that isn't renewable. It's so exhausting.
Can Desantis own the libs by building some nuclear power plants? Get Fox to interview some (young, attractive) hypocritical protesters. Get Desantis in a hard hat on a podium behind a banner that says “In Florida we BUILD”. “Traditional values and traditional power” (atomic, since tradition=baby boomer’s childhood).
I realize that, to most folks in this discussion forum, DeSantis is nothing more than a typical, MAGA, reactionary troglodyte. But,
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/local/2022/05/04/solar-advocates-cheer-ron-desantis-veto-florida-net-metering-bill/9569445002/
I'm definitely pro nuclear, but I'll admit I'm a little reticent about putting nuclear plants on the Hurricane Highway.
South Florida already gets a bunch of power from nuclear.
From Wikipedia:
“Turkey Point was directly hit by Hurricane Andrew on August 24, 1992, destroying two raw water tanks and portions of the fire protection systems, draining another raw water tank, partially disabling the fire protection systems, causing severe damage to various non-nuclear structures, and cracking the smokestack for fossil-fueled Unit 1. The smokestack later had to be demolished and rebuilt. It also suffered a total loss of offsite power, requiring the use of the onsite emergency diesel generators for several days. No significant damage was done to the plant's nuclear containment buildings. The plant was built to withstand winds of up to 235 mph (380 km/h), greatly exceeding the maximum winds recorded by most category 5 hurricanes.”
It’s just an engineering problem.
Georgia and South Carolina tried this approach and have not done terribly well with it (no thanks to the NRC, imo), those poor South Carolinians are going to be paying for a nuclear plant they don't have for generations.
"Cons love nuclear because it's an own-the-libs form of clean energy that isn't renewable."
How true is this, outside of comment sections? I don't see GOP state governments investing heavily in nuclear or adding new plants or prioritizing safety reform.
As I remember it, in Georgia, the 2020 Democratic candidate for public service commissioner was much more skeptical of and antagonistic toward the Plant Vogtle nuclear project than the Republican candidate was. But yeah I think overall this is still a pretty niche issue.
In fairness, that was *after* 10 years of massive cost overruns that were going to be passed onto ratepayers instead of penalizing the utility which (helped to) botch the project in the first place, if the utility commission allowed it.
But in defense of nuclear, building new nuclear plants face cost overruns because there is an extremely well-funded anti-nuclear movement that fights every plant tooth and nail
I have beaten this drum until it was a shattered wreck: that is completely untrue.
I’m not going to elaborate any further, lol, but you’re free to go find any of the exchanges surrounding the Jamaica nuclear pilot article a year or so ago. Same username back then. Probably 8 other exchanges on the topic since then as well.
And I'm right. Indian point is getting closed because of these nuts. New plants face never ending regulatory battles because of this coalition.
Denying that there is a powerful group of environmentalists who hate nuclear is similar to denying the Republican Party wants to restrict abortion access.
You are denying the existence of the mollusks?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clamshell_Alliance#Activities
The only two new nuclear plants permitted and built in like the last 40 years are in Georgia and South Carolina, if that means anything.
Your definition of "built" and mine do not mean the same thing, lol.
There is a system of local utilities in Utah working to build six modular reactors.
https://www.bondbuyer.com/news/a-utah-power-agency-bets-on-first-of-its-kind-nuclear-project
What do you mean it’s not renewable?
It’s not really recyclable. All you can do is blend the nuclear waste with a bunch of empty, shredded 2-liter soda bottles and use the product to make cool-looking running shoes that’ll wear out before you’ve got 300 miles on them.
No I mean nuclear fuel can be reprocessed - I think it involves a fast breeder reactor. It’s what the French do.
https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nuclear-fuel-the-french-do-it-why-cant-oui
Well, if you read my comment again, and squint a bit, you might see the barest outlines of a joke.
Or maybe not.
I think the dominant "own the libs" strain from the cons is to simply not care about AGW at all since the libs really do.
Do progressives really hate nuclear? Are there any numbers on it?
Farhad Manjoo was not going to write a column that said "actually yes nuclear is good and a fully renewable approach may not be optimal" -- he was always going to land on the progressive side of the argument.
Yes, and 40 seconds of googling yielded this: https://news.gallup.com/poll/392831/americans-divided-nuclear-energy.aspx
As a progressive who is concerned about climate change I am disappointed!
IMO, it's a pretty complicated topic to interrogate with a question like the one in that poll.
My problem with nuclear power is that it's too expensive and too inflexible to economically follow load to complement renewables. OTOH, I'm very supportive of research on advanced designs and also of targeting subsidy money at existing plants to keep them running depending on the circumstances.
If you look at it from a policy angle, democrats have a solid history of supporting nuclear power when it matters. The only two nuclear power plants the US has broken ground on in the last 40 years were funded by loans that Obama approved. Biden and the dem congress approved huge funding for nuclear research and for giving nuclear power access to production and investment tax credits.
Finally, funding for marginal existing nuclear plants that was contained in the IRA is what saved diablo canyon and will likely save other economically marginal existing nuclear plants (there's also talk of restarting a closed plant in Michigan thanks to IRA).
Democrats do not have a good record on this front. Indian Point was killed.
Building new nuclear plants may not make sense but Democratic anti-nuclear activists aggressively work to close existing plants, which is pure ideology
I agree to a point, but in the end, these decisions are all about plant economics.
Sure, with Indian Point, the environmentalists made a lot of noise, but they would have lost the battle had it not been for the sustained low wholesales prices the plant was getting for its output because of competition from nearby gas plants.
Diablo Canyon is an even better demonstration of this. The environmentalists were winning the day and shutdown was a done deal. Then higher natural gas prices and the IRA subsidies for existing nuclear showed up and completely reversed the economics of keeping the plant open. All of a sudden, Newsom forgets all his anti-nuke friends and decides to support keeping the plant open.
I think there's definitely a strain of environmental purism on the left that really hates nuclear, often an older strain that retains bad memories of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and may also be scarred by the Cold War in having disdain for anything with a nuclear connotation.
Yes, they have been fighting to close Diablo Canyon here in California for example. It is squishy centrist Dems that have been coming around on nuclear, which is why the IRA and the bipartisan energy bill both contained support for advanced nuclear.
Investing in these long shot technologies is my day job. I agree you just have to try a bunch of stuff and you won’t really know for decades what works. But at least the money and the talent is there now and things are happening. FWIW I’m more bullish on hydrogen than nuclear but hey I might be wrong. I can see the appeal in cold cloudy countries, but even they have the option of running transmission to the nearest sunny country.
Very easy to be bullish on H2 with all the federal investment! I think your analysis is correct in the mid-term, though obviously nuclear has distinct advantages of its own. Only time will tell if the market will value those advantages appropriately!
Coming from a cold cloudy country north of yours (I presume) why should we trust that power would be sent our way if the power is tight for your own use? (See conditions that led to Texas blackouts, it was very cold all the way northeast well)
I assume the power would go to whatever ISO is willing to pay the marginal cost which, if broad swaths of the country were pushing max capacity at the same time would go very high.
I'll be honest, I have no idea who the intended target audience for this piece is. Basically noone serious in the field of renewables disputes that you need gas as a backup for the next five to ten years! You might be able to switch to hydrogen afterwards or massively invest in biomass or something, but the necessity for a backup is absolutely not disputed. This very much seems like "making up a guy to get mad at".
The problem with CCS, on the other hand, is more of a political one. We absolutely do need CCS to work in the future, because our progress has been much too slow the last few decades and we can't reach our climate goals without sucking like five percent of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Even the IPCC acknowledges that. The problem is that as of right now, CCS is a VERY unproven technology that is 20 years away at least. (Sort of like those small nuclear reactors everyone is talking about.) So it's hard to rely on it, because we don't know when we can actually deploy it on scale.
But lazy politicans love to use the prospect of CCS in the future as a pretext for taking not enough action in the present. This happens all the time in Europe. "I know that our ten-year plan doesn't actually reduce nearly enough emissions, but that's okay, we'll just do carbon capture in the future." That's why a lot of climate and energy experts are actually rather sceptical about carbon capture, because right now, all it achieves is climate action delay.
Pretty common view in Ireland. This is the Minister for the Environment in Ireland saying we should use more wind instead of an LNG terminal: https://m.independent.ie/news/environment/leo-varadkar-defends-meeting-lng-developers-as-eamon-ryan-insists-the-gas-terminal-should-not-proceed-41716141.html
But that doesn't mean that he is against using gas per se right? Isn't Ireland building new gas power plants? As far as I understand it, the argument goes that Ireland doesn't need an LNG terminal given the supply routes from the UK and its own domestic production. (Which sounds risky to me)
Well he said wind as the alternative rather than other gas. His Green Party is against fossil fuels in general.
5-10 years. Try 20-40 years minimum.
You seem to be missing a very important factor related to carbon sequestration. We don’t need new technology or fancy methods to do carbon sequestration. We already have a way to do so that is easily scalable and cost effective.
We need to replace conventional farming methods with regenerative farming methods. With regenerative farming the excess C02 is pulled from the air via plants and then used to build topsoil. This is doubly important because conventional farming methods have been destroying topsoil at an alarming rate, and without topsoil we can’t grow food.
Regenerative farming practices do this by restoring the natural liquid carbon pathway that plants and soil microbes have. Basically plants take sunlight and carbon and then trade it to soil microbes and fungi who in turn help the plants by providing nutrients and other services (like pest and disease fighting).
Regenerative farming does this through a combination of methods. Primarily through combining no till, cover crops, rotational grazing along with reducing or eliminating synthetic fertilizer, herbicies, pesticides etc.
For example, we’ve caused lots of environmental damage by removing animals from farms and off to feed lots. Instead bring those animals back to the farm. Use rotational grazing methods were the animals are densely packed but only on the section of land for a brief time (the same way herds of bison would have moved on the plains.
Likewise you should never leave soil bare. You need to put cover crops in to protect the soil and feed the microbes and store carbon by building the topsoil.
Tillage breaks up the soil structure and the fungi networks that are so crucial for building soil. Likewise synthetic fertilizers disrupt the natural liquid carbon cycle because plants get their nutrients from the synthetic fertilizer instead of working together with natural soil microbes to build the soil. And of course pesticides and herbicides also destroy soil microbes.
It’s been estimated that if the entire world switched to regenerative farming practices we could absorb all the excess carbon created since the start of the industrial revolution. Plus you would be creating healthier nutrient rich foods (nutrient density drops greatly under conventional agriculture practices).
Those are great, and we should do them, but they are not permanent sequestration. Reversion to poor soil management practices or climate changes could push it back out again.
That's with anything right? Basically any good practice can be reversed later If people act irresponsible
Yes, so the true permanent removals don't depend on good practices. Like geological sequestration where the CO2 mineralizes. By default it stays put.
Without other technology NG backup will be forever as the economics fall off a cliff as VRE penetration gets very high.
CCS on backup power won't be viable even if it is on mainline power. Too much CAPEX for not enough use.
Given this, are there specific things that we're not doing/funding from a policy standpoint? The devil is in the details of course, but It seems like there's been a decent amount of policy and funding support for CCS in recent legislation. What's missing?
Cost is a problem, but at least in the US there are considerable regulatory hurdles. Every state has a different interpretation about who owns pore space (or they don't have an interpretation at all and that needs to be decided). The type of well that needs to be constructed to inject CO2 for sequestration requires special permitting, and the EPA office that manages permitting is understaffed and underfunded. And of course, there are questions about long-term liability -- who is responsible for maintaining the site in 15 years and what happens if an operator goes under.
My organization just put out a report on the regulatory hurdles facing the state of Pennsylvania, actually!
https://teampa.com/2022/09/team-pennsylvania-foundation-releases-road-map-on-carbon-management-and-hydrogen-development-in-pennsylvania/
The EU and the US have invested billions in CCS research over the last twenty years, so I'm not sure the problem is really a political one. All the researchers I've spoken to agree that doing Carbon capture is just really freaking complicated.
- The technology is just way too expensive currently to do it at scale.
- Retrofitting power plants with CCS technology is doable, but (again) expensive, and diminishes their efficiency. Also, it's kinda dumb because the hope is to get rid of big fossil-fueled plants anyway. So CCS might also lead to lock-in effects, which is dangerous.
- Direct carbon removal from the atmosphere is extremely interesting, but even more complicated and thus even more in its infancy.
- Storage is also complicated. If you're doing carbon capture on an industrial scale, you need a loooooot of storage space to put it in. But that space has to be secure for thousands of years, and someone has to watch after those storage spaces. Which brings a lot of logistical (where to find that space?), legal (who is to blame if a seaquake destroys a storage space 200 years later?) and financial (who pays for the upkeep?) problems with it. Think of all the problems that nuclear waste storage has, but on steroids.
So putting all your hopes into CCS is kinda dangerous right now. It makes total sense to do research on the topic, because again, it's pretty certain we'll need it a few decades down the road. But you can't spend your money twice. Every dollar you put into CCS is a dollar less put into solar and offshore wind, which is a proven, economically sound technology that can be rapidly built on scale. So you really need to think hard about how much resources to invest.
Thousands of years? If we indeed went zero carbon and maintained that over time, then who cares if some GHG escapes 200 years from now? It's hard to imagine that would cause catastrophic warming. It's not like long-term safeguarding of nuclear waste.
“…ideally such tax should also be applied retroactively to historical emissions to be used for aid to the poorest countries in hot areas…”
No, that’s a bad idea. The point of a Pigouvian tax is to change market behavior, and that cannot be done retroactively.
Absolutely fair to say as a matter of moral behavior, maybe people should consume less. But policy questions need to consider public opinion and frankly a lot of American's will turn against reducing emissions if it means they can't drive an SUV. That's why policy should aim to reduce emissions in a way that's popular. The reaction to new electric Hummer's creating more emissions than a sedan shouldn't be stop people from buying them, but should be increase the renewables % in the grid and throw money at people to buy electric hummers (or any other electric vehicles). Optimal in terms of reducing emissions in theory? No. Optimal in terms of reducing emissions in practice? Yes.
Matt said it well on the "political will" line: it's a weasel phrase that masks what's really being asked, and that's the will to sacrifice. They really need to be forced to say upfront that we're being asked to do things like give up cars, give up meat, and give up consumption in general. If they were regularly confronted with the heavy backlash that would come with it, they should then be more willing to admit that expanding clean* technologies dramatically is the better and more feasible way forward.
*As an aside, I really despise the term "renewable" as it's often used. We don't necessarily want energy sources that repopulate themselves, what we want are energy sources that don't use fossil fuels. Renewable is an ugly four syllables and nine letters, while clean is a (heh) clean five letters and one syllable.
Couldn't agree more with your asterisk! I hate the term, not least because I feel like its 50% used to just exclude nuclear. I remember learning about energy sources in like 10th grade and thinking it was weird that in a world of climate change nuclear gets lumped in with the other "dirty" fuels while wind, hydroelectric, and solar get their wonderful "renewable" pedestal. Seems odd that the distinction made is weather (intentional misspell) the source of the energy is found in endless supply on earth, especially when you could just say the materials for creating solar panels are finite. Not to mention things like hydrogen, geothermal, CCS, etc. don't fit very neatly into the framework.
Yeah, and conversely, biomass can be described as renewable, since the fuel can reproduce itself, but that's not what the people that use the term want to say. And what I think they want to say is "shorthand" for solar and wind. (I scare quote that because it's still four syllables, but now twelve letters and two spaces! Though using an ampersand or a slash could reduce that!) With hydroelectricity often getting omitted due to the harms it can do to salmon.
I agree and one of my problems with that sacrifice mentally is that in general, activists tend to expect people who are not like them to make big sacrifices.
Yup and lay people notice this. Take the obvious example: travel. Environmentalism is positively correlated with liking to travel.
Environmentalists talk a lot about how we need to reduce car usage. They almost never talk about eliminating or dramatically reducing the # of cross-continent flights.
Why? Because many environmentalists don't have kids and live in big cities, cars are a waste. But saying you can't visit other continents is a real imposition.
The sacrifice that appeals to them is one they won't have to pay. Left-Nimbyism is the other example. NYC, SF and LA fight development tooth and nail. But allowing development in these cities would help the climate. It would involve a sacrifice for them so they say no.
The resistance to NPIs for COVID from a large portion of America should dissuade any notion that people here will go along with any major, long-term sacrifices to their material well-being and standard of living.
I think some basic axioms we have to accept for fighting climate change are:
1) People will not pay higher direct taxes (e.g., carbon tax)
2) People will not accept a degradation in living standards to fight climate change but will probably accept most *changes* in technology (e.g., EVs, induction stoves, heat pumps)
3) People in less developed countries desire increasing living standards and we have a moral obligation to assist that within the context of dealing with climate change
One point to make on the need for direct air capture is that while it's a task for later this century, it's pretty clear we'll need to go beyond Net Zero and go Net Negative for some time to bring the climate back to something closer to pre-industrial normal.
As far as seasonality goes, we haven't even considered how we could reshape demand to take advantage of the peaks and troughs of very cheap but seasonally variable renewable generation. Would it be economically viable to run aluminium smelters 9 or 10 months of the year if the electricity was super-cheap for those months? Or bake bricks? Could California desalinate seawater when their energy is at its cheapest?
Yes, all of those cost money, but so does nuclear, and SMRs will be similarly expensive for decades to come (anybody who thinks otherwise is more than welcome to take a long bet with me on the topic).
Another speculation is that the *free* energy could be used for electrolyzers (to make some hydrogren). They're cheap to make, but energy intensive to run, and tanks of hydrogen can be stored.
I think you'll see time-of-use pricing change everything dramatically. There will be demand management on EVERYTHING. On an individual level, you'll see more smart-home power management. (i.e. your car charges when electricity is cheap, your washer runs when electricity is cheap, your thermostat does temperature management in a range based on when el...)
And more importantly, you'll see huge changes at businesses. Google will balance more workloads between data centers based on where in the world electricity is free right now. Are you willing to be a flexible on when you run your "once every 24 hours" cloud compute jobs for a 50% savings? I sure am.
I was leaving out hydrogen as “unproven new technology”, though it seems like we’re going to have quite a few large-scale electrolyzers running off VRE well before we have any SMRs operating in the USA, Europe, Japan or South Korea.
"Because massively overbuilding renewables would not only cost a lot of money but wastefully consume vast tracts of land, it seems like a better idea would be to use long-term batteries. If you had really big batteries that stored electricity for a long time, you could simply store surplus power in the high season and unleash it in the low season."
In the spirit of focusing the energy debate on numbers, not adjectives (https://bit.ly/3LJLFUZ), Iet's look at some of the literature we have on this trade-off.
Perez et. al, 2020 find that "while unconstrained, intermittent renewable generation will achieve very low [cost] targets-they are already below grid parity-transforming PV into the firm, effectively dispatchable resource needed by world economies will be very costly if done with storage alone, even when considering the most aggressive future cost projections for storage. Overbuilding renewables can reduce the storage requirements to the point where true below parity firm generation will be attainable." (https://bit.ly/3SE0YRq)
Concretely: in Minnesota, 0% overbuilding of panel requires so much storage to deal with seasonal intermittency that cost of power shoots up to 28 cents/KWh, compared to 5 cents/KWh today. By contrast, 50% overbuilding (implying you'd throw away a third of the summer surplus) drives the cost down below grid parity, 5 cents/KWh. (The mix assumed here is 55% solar / 40% wind / 5% natural gas). (https://bit.ly/3SE0YRq) They've observed the relationship between overbuilding and cost across other geographies (https://bit.ly/3ULxov9).
The reason this happens is that 1.5x overbuilding of panels allows you to use 10x less storage (https://bit.ly/3SDZ3fG). That's the tradeoff.
This is just one study. I'm it has limitations (it's not clear whether the growing marginal cost for summer-surplus panels is factored into the cost figures above), and I'd love for folks to chime in with other evidence. The key claim here that solving seasonal intermittency via storage requires such profound amounts of storage that it will never be cost-effective.
But I do think it's worth a response!
Topics this important should get a multiple post treatment. Matt’s article is basically an articulate restatement of the obvious. It avoids the interesting questions that would deepen my understanding of climate:
1). How much solar and wind must one overbuild to achieve a given reduction in fossil fuel peak generation?
2). How expensive is this overbuilding?
3). How many degrees would the planet warm if we just deployed existing technologies at scale and still used fossil fuels for shipping and aviation? How effectively could seawalls and air conditioning mitigate this?
4). How much carbon can we remove from the atmosphere by planting trees?
There are probably consensus answers to these questions. I understand it’s commercially important that Matt publish every weekday. Matt has the chops to write an excellent Atlantic style feature every week or four intriguing blog posts on different topics. I would prefer the former, especially because Matt is running out of topics and doesn’t have much new to say about housing.
There 3 PhD thesis in there at least. For 4), in practice a trivial amount, as mature forests are in equilibrium and possible CH4 generators for decomposing biomass. Many other reasons to reforest though.
I don't think Matt needs to do this. A division of labor is fine. Matt can write a generalist overview post and for readers who want to dig deeper he can refer them to David Roberts' Volts posts and podcasts.
The only two name writers I trust to think sensibly are Matt and Nate Silver. Douthat is interesting for conservative provocations, but ultramontane Catholicism is not my thing.