It's even worse. By his own admission he's just a useful idiot, who's not even smart enough to get paid for his efforts. It should be obvious from the fact that no matter how smart or sensible a given course of action or policy might appear to be on the surface, if it's good for certain for-profit companies or industries it's bad for the rest of us. I might have to cancel my subscription because this kind of analysis that makes too much sense obviously isn't digging deep enough to find out what's really going on.
For a guy who understands economics at a very sophisticated level I often wonder why he doesn't get the difficulty of implementing what is really the logical argument that I accept and agree with. If you want to electrify everything then you need vast amounts, even excessive amounts of generating capacity of every sort. But individual projects have their own economics. These are predicated on producing power the maximum amount of time.
No one is going to produce a generating facility like a nuclear power plant or a natural gas powered plant that is not permitted to operate enough of the time to make them economically viable. This applies to wind and solar too. Both of which are running into the economic wall that makes them not worth building.
I thought this was very interesting, but this open-space argument seems pretty overblown to me. Didn't you write a book about how America is really large?
Also, offshore windfarms are a thing, and roof-like solar panels for crop fields that double-serve as protection against hail etc. already exist. Plus, natural gas also takes up a lot of space because you need to build pipelines.
Think of space as a proxy for backlash. There is already have push back, and we need 10-20x+as much to be built + a simular increase in transmission. My worry is that buildout of renewables will stall out far short of the amount actually needed, and we will have burnt through our collective will and resources to continue the transition with other forms of energy.
Yeah, but that would require that there is a correlation between "space used" and "backlash generated" right? Put another way: I'm unconvinced that renewables have a higher or even equal ratio of "backlash per square feet" than a nuclear power plant, for instance.
Backlash per square foot less than 100x as high favours nuclear... renewables are very dispersed and if we put nuclear at old coal plants arguments around natural beauty etc are not there.
Sure, America is large, but who owns the land? And how easy is it to create right-of-ways for transmission lines?
Just as one example in my own area, we have a local coal plant. The state and utility operators want to shut it down sooner than its planned life and replace it with renewables potentially backed up by gas. But the site of the plant is pretty small. Locating enough land to build enough solar to replace the plant's capacity isn't easy, cheap or simple and would probably require imminent domain. And that's before considering tying that solar into the existing grid and having sufficient backup and peaking capacity.
It doesn't have to be quite as correlated with the location of people as the car infrastructure does though - if it were possible to locate every Walmart parking lot 10 miles outside the farthest suburb, they would be a *lot* less disruptive.
As a separate point, we shouldn't disregard the amount of technological innovation that has happened around wind and solar over the last decade. They both are on a constant trajectory to become cheaper and more powerful. You can build solar panels and wind turbines in places that would've been unthinkable ten years ago. Sorta like fracking technology, where it has become profitable to even go for the smallest specks of oil and gas in the most remote places
Maybe you’re right about technological progress of renewables, but predicting the future is hard. In the present are you for or against addressing the intermittency issues in the ways Matt suggests? I think just saying renewables will work someday isn’t really addressing the points made in the article.
If we tax the net CO2 emission, we get private incentives to find the lowest cost solutions on all the margins. CO2 capture and sequestration may turn out to be the marginal use of much of the intermittently surplus capacity, depending on how it scales.
That article doesn't have anything regarding cost in it that I could see. I'm still pretty doubtful that battery storage is going to scale with any current technology. Maybe there is a significant break through that enables it, but I haven't seen it so far.
*I'm also confused by the end of the article saying
"a recent analysis suggests that the state needs 37GW of batteries over the next 20 years"
while it describes
"The 256 solar-plus-storage projects representing 72GW of solar and 64GW of batteries make up the vast majority of hybrid projects in the CAISO queue..."
Why is there nearly twice the battery production in queue than they estimate they will need - or is this simply another example of projects under discussion that will likely never come to fruition?
There's a bit of a wild-west aspect to storage deployment right now because in competitive generation markets, project owners can use energy arbitrage to make a ton of money very quickly when grid prices spike due to supply constraints. Early storage adopters can under bid gas and diesel peaker plants that only run for a hundred or two hours in a whole year but that generate huge revenues when they run due to price spikes. Storage developers know that as more and more storage is deployed, lucrative price spikes will become rarer and that may make the economics of these projects tougher. OTOH, costs seems to still be on a steeply declining trendline, so it'll probably all work out in the end.
I'm very familiar with the Lazards report. They continue to show that storage is VERY expensive - to the tune that SV and storage are equivalent to nuclear which is also very expensive but has a much longer life than current solar or storage.*
My argument was less about the future and more about the present. I feel like Matt underestimates the current capabilities of renewables. I do agree that natural gas is a good complementary fit for renewables though, as long as it's produced domestically and hydrogen is not yet an option.
I'm not persuaded that manufacturing H2 as a substitute for C oxidation will be cheaper than C oxidation + capture and sequestration. But who knows? It depends on how technology evolves.
They still suck from an engineering point of view. And if you did want to overbuild to get some predictability on output to make the power they produce dispatchible to demand then you need a few other very expensive things like a continent spanning agile grid and massive amounts of energy storage that make wind and solar very expensive indeed. Advocates of wind and solar like to ignore this or pretend it is someone else's problem but it isn't. It will still turn up on your power bill.
Matt never said we would run out of space, but the land required to replace the MWs of a five acre coal plant is like 500 acres or something like that, and I think he is pointing out that there is a non-trivial environmental impact from developing that much unused land. It's not impossible, but it should be taken into account.
America is large, but transmitting power long distances is expensive and inefficient. The panels need to be in the general area of where the power is going to be used, which is more constrained. There are also ecological consequences to shading large areas of ground, once you run out rooftops / parking lots / etc that you can safely shade.
For the amount of solar panels needed to run the country at peak production, this probably isn't an issue. But if you want a 100% solar grid, you're talking about a 5-10x overproduction. ~20,000 square miles could be layered on top of existing infrastructure. 200,000 square miles (5% of the country) is less doable. And that's without taking into account the tremendous battery facilities required.
You miss one important dynamic: methane, the major component of "natural gas," is itself a potent greenhouse gas, 80 times more so than CO2, molecule for molecule, and accounts for about 10% of warming. Compared to CO2, at least some of methane's human-generated sources are easily addressable: leaks in extraction infrastructure and pipelines (which can be fixed) and landfills (which can be managed better). (Ruminants, especially cows, also produce methane, which is one of many reasons you should stop eating beef.) Tackling methane can also pay off quickly, as it decays from the atmosphere whine about a decade. So...any expansion of methane production needs to be accompanied by better regulation of leaks. Thankfully, leak detection has never been easier due to advances in satellite imaging and ground sensors, and the new International Methane Emissions Observatory will soon start to provide frequently-updated, granular methane emissions data. If you're interested in learning more, I recommend Cut Super Climate Pollutants Now! by Miller, Zaelke, and Anderson.
I do think the methane leak aspect was underappreciated when doing the initial calculus of replacing coal with natural gas, but I'm pretty sure that even taking it into account we are still much better off with wind+gas than coal.
Yes to wind, and you can't peak coal plants effectively. I think it's at least debatable that gas is better than coal on a standalone GHG basis when you take methane leakage into account. But you can solve leakage. You can't solve coal burning, which also emits a lot more non-GHG pollutants...including methane, which coal seams release when exposed to air. But it's not like we have a choice between coal and methane/natural gas. We passed the either/or stage a few decades ago. All fossil fuels need to die.
Yes, but when? [And there will always be some niche uses where it makes more sense to oxidize C atoms in one place and reduce (de-oxidize) them in another.]
I hear you, but I worked for a natural gas power plant and the only reason we would concern ourselves much with leaks was from a safety standpoint, we didn't worry much about the cost. Every year when we shut down the plant for maintenance we would vent whatever was left in the pipes to atmosphere prior to performing work. Could we have saved some money by trying to capture that gas and put it back in the pipes when we were done? Yes, but getting the equipment to do that would have cost money and the time and effort it would have taken would cost more money so we would never do it unless someone forced us. Companies don't want to lose money on gas leaks but fixing leaks costs money too so they don't always have enough incentives.
No one anywhere is taxing carbon. Doesn't matter how liberal the state, no one can do it. Even Washington state has voted it down twice. It's just not going to happen.
I think it will; it just need time for progressives to get serious about climate change. The places where it has not succeeded, progressives were not solidly behind it.
Um...you think the problem is not that average voters won't pay more to fix climate change, it's that climate change activists aren't fighting hard enough? The average voter won't spend $100 a year to fight climate change. Have you read anything MY has written? The mobilization myth ring any bells?
Matt's knowledge of clean energy is like the deployment of renewables on the grid: awesome, growing rapidly, and ready for even more valuable growth.
1. "awesome": this is an excellent writeup that will net-educate 95% of its readers. Kudos!
2. "growing rapidly": see previous. Also, he is shifting from nuclear-is-the-answer (false) to nuclear-is-a-tool (true).
3. "ready for even more valuable growth": see below
Broadly, what was true in the last decade (natural gas was the only viable complement to variable renewables) will not be true in the next decade. EV batteries, collectively, will provide enormous load shifting potential. Offshore wind is being built out at city-scale right now. As Matt has written elsewhere but mysteriously omits here, transmission is a valuable complement to variable renewables, and a dozen key additions would enable space-shifting at city-scale. Some of them will get built. Enormous investments in electrolysis and alternate-chemistry electric storage happening now promise economy-scale impact.
Shifting back to solar, wind, and lithium-ion storage: their exponential improvements in price/performance will continue. Exponential growth is hard to grasp, especially when two curves interact. As solar becomes "too cheap to meter", we'll find new ways to exploit it. As road transportation becomes a grid resource, it will soak up that cheap solar and displace some of the natural gas that is now turning on in the evening.
Resources for folks who would like to understand the next decade of clean energy growth:
1. @JesseJenkins, @TimMLatimer, and the rest of #energytwitter
I think these vastly overstate exponential cost reduction when we're talking about things out in the physical world. A solar panel and the battery system it connects to, at this point it's a much different point on the cost curve than at the early days people like to cite.
And demand is going to skyrocket for all of the minerals that are needed to build these things. On the one hand as prices rise, people will mine more of it, but the lags, mismatches, and volatility are really going to surprise a lot of people who just expect this nice, clean and continued reduction in price.
And if you make your entire plan contingent upon rapid continued price decreases, somebody ends up paying if you don't get it done... Whether it's the rate payer, the taxpayer, or the people suffering through reliability issues.
Thanks for the resources, I will have to take a look at those.
I don't understand your assumption that ev batteries will shift load but I can only assume that you think that we will eventually use people's cars to store energy and only charge them when the grid has excess power and then drain them or not charge them when the grid doesn't have enough. That just isn't going to happen. Range anxiety is already the number one obstacle to EV adoption, dictating when people can or can't charge their cars simply won't be acceptable to most people. Evs will change when electrical consumption happens, but most charging is going to happen when people get home from work, which is already one of the daily peaks in power consumption, making the problems of non-baseload power worse, not better.
"assumption ... eventually ... just isn't going to happen": we are doing this now. Dozens of efforts are under way, including my project and a second I know of at my Fortune-200 employer. You are correct to note the co-incidence of "peak plugin" with the evening peak, but that *incredible opportunity* is being exploited today and will scale to 10s of GW in the next few years; 100s soon thereafter.
I think these programs are a very good idea, since making consumers react to power prices to alter their consumption habits is good. But I'm a little skeptical of how much energy consumption can be altered this way and how many people will accept it. Very little of the energy I personally use can be scheduled for off-peak consumption, and the few things I could possibly change would be annoying enough that I wouldn't do it without a large financial incentive. My current energy bill wouldn't be high enough to change my consumption habits and if you try to tell a large group of people to change their consumption or face higher prices you will have the same pushback you get with a carbon tax. As far as charging goes, if I'm going to delay charging one of my vehicles I have to be pretty confident that I won't need it any time soon. I have a PHEV and the few times I have decided I didn't need to charge it right away when I got home I ended up forgetting I needed to run an errand later and always regret it.
Agree that many consumers won’t make many changes without significant incentives and the the fear of not having a charged car will limit uptake. A couple minor points though: 1) Peak pricing will be pushed by utilities, not the legislature like a carbon tax, so faces a much smaller implementation hurdle. 2) More and more devices will shift demand automatically, especially with thermostats and water heaters, as you can easily bank some of the temperature changes overnight.
No utility is going to change my thermostat temperature or decide when I get to take a shower. Pretty sure most people feel the same way. I would rather pay more for electricity than live in a cold house.
Alternatively, you use excess capacity from solar/wind to make hydrogen which you then run through fuel cells when capacity is needed. To make hydrogen, you need water and energy. No fossil fuel needed. Some storage issues, yes (hydrogen is highly explosive and difficult to store) but the technology exists already.
Methane synthesis is only modestly less efficient than hydrogen, and is much easier to store (liquifies at much higher temps, doesn't embrittle metals, etc.), so I think if you want to go that route, making synthetic natural gas from captured CO2 and then re-burning it in methane peaker plants is probably the smarter play.
I was wondering if aluminum refining might be the thing that uses all the summer daytime excess electricity, but hydrogen probably makes a lot more sense. But who knows, maybe it's superpowerful machine learning networks that need a huge amount of electricity to train, so that AI are only trained in the summer.
Aluminum would be worse than general grid use. These kinds of industrial process really do not like changing rates or worse turning off. Aluminum needs constant 24-7 power, so it pairs well with hydro, and would with nuclear, but there would be even more storage required for solar than for general grid.
It’s also why companies mined bauxite in various far-away places and shipped it to Iceland to take advantage of Iceland’s sweet, sweet geothermal capacity.
I think it's important to remember that making green hydrogen is an energy storage process, just like charging a battery. Battery storage is many magnitudes more efficient than turning electricity into hydrogen and then turning hydrogen back into electricity. But hydrogen is much easier and cheaper to store in enormous quantities. It is by no means certain at this point which side is going to make bigger technological advances in time to transform our energy grid.
Worth noting that while renewables are cheap GLOBALLY it is not really the case that they are cheap in the United States.
Solar still costs ~ double what it costs in Europe and nearly triple what it costs in China. Figures are comparable for wind, but not my area of expertise.
There is basically no market for “merchant” solar - selling into the market at market rates. New solar construction needs significant revenue subsidy (in addition to the 26% cost subsidy) to be built.
Activists need to reconcile themselves with the fact that consumer energy prices will have to rise significantly as part of a successful energy transition.
The implicit carbon savings of renewables more than makes up for any subsidies. If ratepayers were carrying the cost of their pollution, gas and coal would be much more expensive.
Sure, but people don't want to pay much higher electricity for carbon savings. Rising electricity costs in California aren't popular and they're only at 20% solar penetration.
Interesting omission of hydrogen. You can use electricity to create hydrogen, which can be stored and then used to create either heat or electricity in fuel cells. Getting to "cheap hydrogen" isn't easy, but it would seem to help you escape the problem with storing renewables.
He mentions energy storage in the article, but thankfully doesn't waste much time talking about it. Currently energy storage is so expensive and inefficient that you are probably better off building an oversupply of renewables than investing much in energy storage. Lots of companies are trying to tackle this problem so I'm confident that we will get there eventually, but it depends on some pretty major technological advancements to make the cost come down and then it will take a decade or more to build the facilities and infrastructure to store even a small percentage of our grids power. So if you want to wait decades to replace coal that's fine, but all the progress we have made so far and most of the progress we make in the next decade will still depend on natural gas.
As we ramp up solar production we might not be able to cover all of our needs when there is a shortfall of production but at the same time we'll have more electricity than we know what to do with when the sun is shining brightest. I wonder if it would make sense to use that extra electricity doing carbon capture from the air and synthesizing more natural gas from that and water.
Since it comes from atmospheric CO2 it would be carbon neutral on net and we could keep using all of our existing natural gas infrastructure instead of just abandoning it. Also, while electric flight might make sense for very short range flights I don't see anybody taking an electric plane across the pacific any time soon baring things like beamed microwave power from satellites. Designing planes that can use compresses methane seems doable, though, and it's a lot easier to work with than hydrogen.
We could also synthesize more complex fuels, but that's sort of complicated and I'd imagine that minimizing capital intensity would be a big factor in enabling this.
I think more likely we'd take already-existing electricity-hungry industries that don't need to run 24-7 and run them preferentially during the sunny times. I'm thinking aluminum smelting, but some have mentioned hydrogen generation, or perhaps certain kinds of cloud computing.
Most energy intensive industries don't change rates nicely. Hydrogen would work for some kinds of electolysers, but the utilization would be low so CAPEX high per produced quantity. There will be a utilization where even free power is not cheap enough to make it cost effective.
Low capital utilization means that your capital expenses will be higher than they would otherwise be. That doesn't necessarily imply that the savings from lower input costs won't overcome the loses from higher capital costs. And especially as electricity costs can get very low at certain times there's a lot of incentive to find ways to produce cheaper but less efficient plants. I couldn't find any numbers from a full Sabatier plant but this paper on hydrogen costs suggests that electricity price savings can cover a large decrease in duty cycle and have it come out a wash. https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/20004-cost-electrolytic-hydrogen-production.pdf
Based on the numbers they use, if you have free power and a $1000/kw electrolyzer you have $6/kg H2 at ~20% capacity factor. A big portion of the ‘excess’ power will be available less often than this.
> As a broader strategy, though, almost all of the really promising dams have already been built. But even if they hadn’t been, the ecological cost of damming rivers is non-trivial. And that’s the real issue here. There’s no such thing as a way to make electricity that doesn’t have some kind of ecological footprint, and that includes the renewables themselves. After all, the escalating cost of renewables once you run out of gas complementarities really just amounts to the fact that you need to build more stuff.
This is an extremely important point, and I think it should be made louder, more broadly, more generally. Hydro has environmental costs just like solar requires mining some somewhat rare elements and just like we're not really sure what to do with gigantic composite wind turbine blades when we decommission worn-out units. And just like "zero-emission" cars do not exist because lithium mining isn't cheap and because tire wear is (for circa-2020 vehicles) a major source of particulate emissions, no matter whether you have a tailpipe attached to your car or not.
This isn't meant as a bad-faith whataboutism, although unfortunately you'll read whataboutist arguments that look similar. I fully expect my next car to be at least a plug-in hybrid. It's instead an earnest plea that individuals make personal decisions, and policymakers make policy, based on real actual fact patterns rather than well-meaning slogans that sound nice but aren't true.
Good post but Matt neglects discussing the role of housing which consumes lots of energy. We moved into a condo this January from a detached house and our utility bills for both electricity and gas dropped by 70%. Our living space decreased by only 20%. In our building all heating/cooling is done by individual heat pumps up on the roof. We get abundant sun during the day and the heating system hardly runs during the winter. Kitchen is all electric and the induction range uses less energy than our old gas cook top in the house. Town houses use less energy that a detached house of the same square footage as the exposure to the elements is on averaged reduced (end units would have more; middle units less). Moderate/high rise units have even less environmental exposure.
No doubt -- that's Matt's bid for the neo-lib shill prize -- but he has also talked in many places about the ecological advantages of greater density in housing, whether by urbanization or by building up.
Solar and A/C in southern climates pair well. Renewables and heating in Northern climates do not. Peak demand would be start of work but before the sun is up so no help from solar at all, and some days wind is very low. At the same time heat pumps are less efficient so peak demand is even higher.
I don't really understand the enthusiasm for heat pumps. They don't work well in really cold weather, so they can't be that efficient in northern states during the winter.
(1) Heat pump technology is continuing to improve and get more efficient in very cold weather (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v8vizQXwss -- sponsored by the vendor, FYI).
(2) Lots of people live where it's cold enough to need heating, but not super cold very often, and it's easy to integrate a gas or electric heat strip for those unusually cold days..
(3) Because they function as AC units too, it can be an all-in-one solution.
Your experience must have been with very old tech. Nowadays temps of 15-20 degrees are fine for most heat pumps and more expensive hyper-heat units can put out heat down to -13 degrees.
"Leading products are now capable of performing well below -10°F and operating at more than double the efficiency of resistance or gas systems below zero. These aren’t just manufacturer claims: heat pumps have been successfully field tested in Minnesota (which has some of the coldest winters in the Continental United States) and as far north as the Arctic Circle!"
For a good cost comparisons between heating sources in a relatively cold climate, check out the second table here:
This is outdated. Modern heat pumps can work well down to 0F and below. Pair it with electric heat strips if you’re worried. We’ve loved getting off gas, despite being in the Rockies.
There are also geothermal heat pumps that are good for really cold climates. They are more expensive and not suited for a retrofit in, for example, a NYC apartment.
I have a heat pump at my 900 sq ft apartment in NYC. In the coldest month each winter, my electricity bill is anywhere from $650-$800. Hard to believe this technology is the Green utopia. On the other hand, I fill the gas tank of my car about four times/year, so a cost of about one week of heating my apartment. Don't have any idea how this all translates into my personal carbon footprint, but based on what I pay, the heat pump is a prime offender.
Do you happen to know what the temperature is at which a gas-powered furnace and an electric-powered heat pump use the same amount of energy per degree of heating delivered? I was trying to figure this out in mid-February 2021 when my heat pump here in Texas was struggling against the deep freeze to keep our house in the upper 50s. I assume that in a place where houses are designed to stay warm, and with slightly newer heat pumps and ones selected for a colder climate, there could be somewhat better performance. But it wasn't clear to me whether the technology had reached Minnesota winter needs yet. (It seems very likely to be able to meet Boston/New York needs, particularly in apartment buildings where you just have fewer exposed surfaces to lose heat through.)
Speaking of advanced geothermal and nuclear, i wonder if we could build enough of those to render hydro dams pointless. A free flowing Columbia river would be an amazing feat.
The four pink areas (the ones with the highest heat flow), which are Yellowstone, Clear Lake north of SF, the Imperial Valley in SoCal, and Valles in NM, are all volcanoes. They have an active magma body creating a large amount of heat. In fact, the geothermal field at Clear Lake is the largest in the US. The problem with geothermal in most of the rest of the US is that there is no active magma body, even in the redder parts of the map. You can drill and get some heat for a while, but you will eventually drain all the heat and the site will no longer produce any.
Drawing heat from Yellowstone won't make much a difference either way. The eruption depends on the amount of water in the magma and the amount of rock above putting downward pressure on the magma. Think of when you shake a pop bottle and then open the cap. Same concept.
In what ways? The basic calculations on watts per square meter from renewables seem pretty solid up to today. People mention that solar is more efficient than his expectations, but when I talk to people it seems to still be in the right ballpark.
Nuclear sucks as a complement to intermittent renewable energy.
Very high fixed costs, slow ramping, and low variable costs? That sounds like something you're going to want to run as much as it can.
But in a grid dominated by cheap intermittent renewables, you need two things to complement it - short-term dispatchable power (and/or demand maangement), and seasonal storage of some kind. Neither of these use cases are a good match for what nuclear can do.
At this point, somebody's going to say something silly like "oh, we could use the surplus energy to recharge <energy storage technology of choice>". Well, guess what, if you're going to use energy storage tech, you may as well use the cheapest source of energy available to fill the storage, and it ain't nuclear.
I agree totally that anybody prematurely shutting down a safely operating nuclear plant is nuts. But the track record of nuclear is so unpromising, and it's such a poor match with the rest of the energy landscape, that wasting political effort trying to streamline the NRC and establish an effective construction pipeline for the things seems like misdirected effort.
To repeat myself, the payoff from matching Australia's rooftop solar installation costs is a far juicier, and far more politically viable, than trying to get nuke plants built.
My concern is that this is both true and fully decarbonising with this approach is prohibitively expensive. Is building out this approach locking us into an incomplete path or stranded assets?
So I believe Matt's central contention -that electricity costs are going to spiral out of control once renewable penetration reaches levels a lot lower than what's required to get emissions down to ~0 - is wrong, at least for the US and Australia.
I think this article could be improved by adding a discussion about demand response. This is an important mechanism for enabling higher RE integration to the electric grid. With smart meters, utilities can send real time price signals to consumers, and equipment can be programmed to automatically adjust demand (e.g., EV charging or hot water storage tank setpoints) based on renewable supply, weather, & aggregate grid demand.
The real question:
Is Matt in the pay of Big Gas? Big Solar? Big Wind? Big Nuke?
Or is it....
[jarring chord]
All of the above?
It's even worse. By his own admission he's just a useful idiot, who's not even smart enough to get paid for his efforts. It should be obvious from the fact that no matter how smart or sensible a given course of action or policy might appear to be on the surface, if it's good for certain for-profit companies or industries it's bad for the rest of us. I might have to cancel my subscription because this kind of analysis that makes too much sense obviously isn't digging deep enough to find out what's really going on.
"...who's not even smart enough to get paid for his efforts."
Exactly. How can you even trust someone who isn't on the take?
It just screams naivete.... What does he expect us to do, evaluate the arguments on their merits? I thought we'd all outgrown that!
For a guy who understands economics at a very sophisticated level I often wonder why he doesn't get the difficulty of implementing what is really the logical argument that I accept and agree with. If you want to electrify everything then you need vast amounts, even excessive amounts of generating capacity of every sort. But individual projects have their own economics. These are predicated on producing power the maximum amount of time.
No one is going to produce a generating facility like a nuclear power plant or a natural gas powered plant that is not permitted to operate enough of the time to make them economically viable. This applies to wind and solar too. Both of which are running into the economic wall that makes them not worth building.
I thought this was very interesting, but this open-space argument seems pretty overblown to me. Didn't you write a book about how America is really large?
Also, offshore windfarms are a thing, and roof-like solar panels for crop fields that double-serve as protection against hail etc. already exist. Plus, natural gas also takes up a lot of space because you need to build pipelines.
Think of space as a proxy for backlash. There is already have push back, and we need 10-20x+as much to be built + a simular increase in transmission. My worry is that buildout of renewables will stall out far short of the amount actually needed, and we will have burnt through our collective will and resources to continue the transition with other forms of energy.
Yeah, but that would require that there is a correlation between "space used" and "backlash generated" right? Put another way: I'm unconvinced that renewables have a higher or even equal ratio of "backlash per square feet" than a nuclear power plant, for instance.
Backlash per square foot less than 100x as high favours nuclear... renewables are very dispersed and if we put nuclear at old coal plants arguments around natural beauty etc are not there.
Sure, America is large, but who owns the land? And how easy is it to create right-of-ways for transmission lines?
Just as one example in my own area, we have a local coal plant. The state and utility operators want to shut it down sooner than its planned life and replace it with renewables potentially backed up by gas. But the site of the plant is pretty small. Locating enough land to build enough solar to replace the plant's capacity isn't easy, cheap or simple and would probably require imminent domain. And that's before considering tying that solar into the existing grid and having sufficient backup and peaking capacity.
The amount of solar we're talking about for an all renewables grid is the built environment footprint of cars. Doable, but really really significant
It doesn't have to be quite as correlated with the location of people as the car infrastructure does though - if it were possible to locate every Walmart parking lot 10 miles outside the farthest suburb, they would be a *lot* less disruptive.
As a separate point, we shouldn't disregard the amount of technological innovation that has happened around wind and solar over the last decade. They both are on a constant trajectory to become cheaper and more powerful. You can build solar panels and wind turbines in places that would've been unthinkable ten years ago. Sorta like fracking technology, where it has become profitable to even go for the smallest specks of oil and gas in the most remote places
Maybe you’re right about technological progress of renewables, but predicting the future is hard. In the present are you for or against addressing the intermittency issues in the ways Matt suggests? I think just saying renewables will work someday isn’t really addressing the points made in the article.
If we tax the net CO2 emission, we get private incentives to find the lowest cost solutions on all the margins. CO2 capture and sequestration may turn out to be the marginal use of much of the intermittently surplus capacity, depending on how it scales.
The issues caused by the intermittency of renewables are basically solved thanks to steeply declining costs for utility scale battery storage.
Today, battery storage is being cost-effectively paired with renewables to provide flexible/dispatchable power.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/03/14/californias-solar-market-is-now-a-battery-market/
That article doesn't have anything regarding cost in it that I could see. I'm still pretty doubtful that battery storage is going to scale with any current technology. Maybe there is a significant break through that enables it, but I haven't seen it so far.
*I'm also confused by the end of the article saying
"a recent analysis suggests that the state needs 37GW of batteries over the next 20 years"
while it describes
"The 256 solar-plus-storage projects representing 72GW of solar and 64GW of batteries make up the vast majority of hybrid projects in the CAISO queue..."
Why is there nearly twice the battery production in queue than they estimate they will need - or is this simply another example of projects under discussion that will likely never come to fruition?
Here's a link to a utility dive article that has some cost figures and also mentions that about 25% of the projects in the queue end up getting built.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/developers-increasingly-pair-batteries-with-utility-scale-solar-to-combat-d/608117/
Also, here's a link to a widely respected summary of cost info from an investment banking firm that tracks this stuff from the finance side of things.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/
There's a bit of a wild-west aspect to storage deployment right now because in competitive generation markets, project owners can use energy arbitrage to make a ton of money very quickly when grid prices spike due to supply constraints. Early storage adopters can under bid gas and diesel peaker plants that only run for a hundred or two hours in a whole year but that generate huge revenues when they run due to price spikes. Storage developers know that as more and more storage is deployed, lucrative price spikes will become rarer and that may make the economics of these projects tougher. OTOH, costs seems to still be on a steeply declining trendline, so it'll probably all work out in the end.
I'm very familiar with the Lazards report. They continue to show that storage is VERY expensive - to the tune that SV and storage are equivalent to nuclear which is also very expensive but has a much longer life than current solar or storage.*
My argument was less about the future and more about the present. I feel like Matt underestimates the current capabilities of renewables. I do agree that natural gas is a good complementary fit for renewables though, as long as it's produced domestically and hydrogen is not yet an option.
I'm not persuaded that manufacturing H2 as a substitute for C oxidation will be cheaper than C oxidation + capture and sequestration. But who knows? It depends on how technology evolves.
They still suck from an engineering point of view. And if you did want to overbuild to get some predictability on output to make the power they produce dispatchible to demand then you need a few other very expensive things like a continent spanning agile grid and massive amounts of energy storage that make wind and solar very expensive indeed. Advocates of wind and solar like to ignore this or pretend it is someone else's problem but it isn't. It will still turn up on your power bill.
Matt never said we would run out of space, but the land required to replace the MWs of a five acre coal plant is like 500 acres or something like that, and I think he is pointing out that there is a non-trivial environmental impact from developing that much unused land. It's not impossible, but it should be taken into account.
America is large, but transmitting power long distances is expensive and inefficient. The panels need to be in the general area of where the power is going to be used, which is more constrained. There are also ecological consequences to shading large areas of ground, once you run out rooftops / parking lots / etc that you can safely shade.
For the amount of solar panels needed to run the country at peak production, this probably isn't an issue. But if you want a 100% solar grid, you're talking about a 5-10x overproduction. ~20,000 square miles could be layered on top of existing infrastructure. 200,000 square miles (5% of the country) is less doable. And that's without taking into account the tremendous battery facilities required.
You miss one important dynamic: methane, the major component of "natural gas," is itself a potent greenhouse gas, 80 times more so than CO2, molecule for molecule, and accounts for about 10% of warming. Compared to CO2, at least some of methane's human-generated sources are easily addressable: leaks in extraction infrastructure and pipelines (which can be fixed) and landfills (which can be managed better). (Ruminants, especially cows, also produce methane, which is one of many reasons you should stop eating beef.) Tackling methane can also pay off quickly, as it decays from the atmosphere whine about a decade. So...any expansion of methane production needs to be accompanied by better regulation of leaks. Thankfully, leak detection has never been easier due to advances in satellite imaging and ground sensors, and the new International Methane Emissions Observatory will soon start to provide frequently-updated, granular methane emissions data. If you're interested in learning more, I recommend Cut Super Climate Pollutants Now! by Miller, Zaelke, and Anderson.
I do think the methane leak aspect was underappreciated when doing the initial calculus of replacing coal with natural gas, but I'm pretty sure that even taking it into account we are still much better off with wind+gas than coal.
Yes to wind, and you can't peak coal plants effectively. I think it's at least debatable that gas is better than coal on a standalone GHG basis when you take methane leakage into account. But you can solve leakage. You can't solve coal burning, which also emits a lot more non-GHG pollutants...including methane, which coal seams release when exposed to air. But it's not like we have a choice between coal and methane/natural gas. We passed the either/or stage a few decades ago. All fossil fuels need to die.
Yes, but when? [And there will always be some niche uses where it makes more sense to oxidize C atoms in one place and reduce (de-oxidize) them in another.]
As soon as flipping possible.
* "whine" = "within"
I hear you, but I worked for a natural gas power plant and the only reason we would concern ourselves much with leaks was from a safety standpoint, we didn't worry much about the cost. Every year when we shut down the plant for maintenance we would vent whatever was left in the pipes to atmosphere prior to performing work. Could we have saved some money by trying to capture that gas and put it back in the pipes when we were done? Yes, but getting the equipment to do that would have cost money and the time and effort it would have taken would cost more money so we would never do it unless someone forced us. Companies don't want to lose money on gas leaks but fixing leaks costs money too so they don't always have enough incentives.
That's the point of taxing methane emissions just like net CO2 emissions except at higher rates.
No one anywhere is taxing carbon. Doesn't matter how liberal the state, no one can do it. Even Washington state has voted it down twice. It's just not going to happen.
I think it will; it just need time for progressives to get serious about climate change. The places where it has not succeeded, progressives were not solidly behind it.
Um...you think the problem is not that average voters won't pay more to fix climate change, it's that climate change activists aren't fighting hard enough? The average voter won't spend $100 a year to fight climate change. Have you read anything MY has written? The mobilization myth ring any bells?
Matt's knowledge of clean energy is like the deployment of renewables on the grid: awesome, growing rapidly, and ready for even more valuable growth.
1. "awesome": this is an excellent writeup that will net-educate 95% of its readers. Kudos!
2. "growing rapidly": see previous. Also, he is shifting from nuclear-is-the-answer (false) to nuclear-is-a-tool (true).
3. "ready for even more valuable growth": see below
Broadly, what was true in the last decade (natural gas was the only viable complement to variable renewables) will not be true in the next decade. EV batteries, collectively, will provide enormous load shifting potential. Offshore wind is being built out at city-scale right now. As Matt has written elsewhere but mysteriously omits here, transmission is a valuable complement to variable renewables, and a dozen key additions would enable space-shifting at city-scale. Some of them will get built. Enormous investments in electrolysis and alternate-chemistry electric storage happening now promise economy-scale impact.
Shifting back to solar, wind, and lithium-ion storage: their exponential improvements in price/performance will continue. Exponential growth is hard to grasp, especially when two curves interact. As solar becomes "too cheap to meter", we'll find new ways to exploit it. As road transportation becomes a grid resource, it will soak up that cheap solar and displace some of the natural gas that is now turning on in the evening.
Resources for folks who would like to understand the next decade of clean energy growth:
1. @JesseJenkins, @TimMLatimer, and the rest of #energytwitter
2. Chris Goodall's weekly roundups: https://www.carboncommentary.com/newsletter-archive
3. https://www.canarymedia.com
4. California generally: our grid is at solar-saturation now, and we're pushing the GW-scale alternatives to gas as fast as we can. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/california-lowers-electric-sector-ghg-target-directs-procurement-of-more-t/618733/
5. China: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/02/25/state-grid-of-china-unveils-plans-for-100gw-battery-fleet/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-aims-build-450-gw-solar-wind-power-gobi-desert-2022-03-05/ @EnergyIceberg
6. 100% clean islanded grids via solar overbuild , li-ion, and electrolysis: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/02/21/barbados-to-host-50mw-128-mwh-solar-hydrogen-battery-facility/
For resources, reddit.com/r/energy can be useful as well.
There are some shilling posts there, but also several good commenters and the discussions can be pretty interesting.
I think these vastly overstate exponential cost reduction when we're talking about things out in the physical world. A solar panel and the battery system it connects to, at this point it's a much different point on the cost curve than at the early days people like to cite.
And demand is going to skyrocket for all of the minerals that are needed to build these things. On the one hand as prices rise, people will mine more of it, but the lags, mismatches, and volatility are really going to surprise a lot of people who just expect this nice, clean and continued reduction in price.
And if you make your entire plan contingent upon rapid continued price decreases, somebody ends up paying if you don't get it done... Whether it's the rate payer, the taxpayer, or the people suffering through reliability issues.
Thanks for the resources, I will have to take a look at those.
I don't understand your assumption that ev batteries will shift load but I can only assume that you think that we will eventually use people's cars to store energy and only charge them when the grid has excess power and then drain them or not charge them when the grid doesn't have enough. That just isn't going to happen. Range anxiety is already the number one obstacle to EV adoption, dictating when people can or can't charge their cars simply won't be acceptable to most people. Evs will change when electrical consumption happens, but most charging is going to happen when people get home from work, which is already one of the daily peaks in power consumption, making the problems of non-baseload power worse, not better.
When people charge will also depend on the cost of charging as different times of day.
Maybe this is how your power bill works, but my utility does not differentiate cost based on time of day.
So write whoever regulates your electric utility [or whatever form of political praxis you prax] and demand that they goad the utility to do so. :)
Yeah...no thanks. I'd rather just ask them to increase power from carbon neutral base-load sources.
Agreed but you have to be sure the carbon neutral base-load is lowest cost. That why you need at least a "shadow" carbon tax.
"assumption ... eventually ... just isn't going to happen": we are doing this now. Dozens of efforts are under way, including my project and a second I know of at my Fortune-200 employer. You are correct to note the co-incidence of "peak plugin" with the evening peak, but that *incredible opportunity* is being exploited today and will scale to 10s of GW in the next few years; 100s soon thereafter.
Higher electricity prices at peak rates will become more and more common and will definitely have an effect on when people charge.
https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-options/time-of-use-base-plan/time-of-use-plan.page
I think these programs are a very good idea, since making consumers react to power prices to alter their consumption habits is good. But I'm a little skeptical of how much energy consumption can be altered this way and how many people will accept it. Very little of the energy I personally use can be scheduled for off-peak consumption, and the few things I could possibly change would be annoying enough that I wouldn't do it without a large financial incentive. My current energy bill wouldn't be high enough to change my consumption habits and if you try to tell a large group of people to change their consumption or face higher prices you will have the same pushback you get with a carbon tax. As far as charging goes, if I'm going to delay charging one of my vehicles I have to be pretty confident that I won't need it any time soon. I have a PHEV and the few times I have decided I didn't need to charge it right away when I got home I ended up forgetting I needed to run an errand later and always regret it.
Agree that many consumers won’t make many changes without significant incentives and the the fear of not having a charged car will limit uptake. A couple minor points though: 1) Peak pricing will be pushed by utilities, not the legislature like a carbon tax, so faces a much smaller implementation hurdle. 2) More and more devices will shift demand automatically, especially with thermostats and water heaters, as you can easily bank some of the temperature changes overnight.
No utility is going to change my thermostat temperature or decide when I get to take a shower. Pretty sure most people feel the same way. I would rather pay more for electricity than live in a cold house.
Matt... you're not even in the Neoliberal Shill bracket this year... there's no need to do this! :p
Alternatively, you use excess capacity from solar/wind to make hydrogen which you then run through fuel cells when capacity is needed. To make hydrogen, you need water and energy. No fossil fuel needed. Some storage issues, yes (hydrogen is highly explosive and difficult to store) but the technology exists already.
Methane synthesis is only modestly less efficient than hydrogen, and is much easier to store (liquifies at much higher temps, doesn't embrittle metals, etc.), so I think if you want to go that route, making synthetic natural gas from captured CO2 and then re-burning it in methane peaker plants is probably the smarter play.
I was wondering if aluminum refining might be the thing that uses all the summer daytime excess electricity, but hydrogen probably makes a lot more sense. But who knows, maybe it's superpowerful machine learning networks that need a huge amount of electricity to train, so that AI are only trained in the summer.
Aluminum would be worse than general grid use. These kinds of industrial process really do not like changing rates or worse turning off. Aluminum needs constant 24-7 power, so it pairs well with hydro, and would with nuclear, but there would be even more storage required for solar than for general grid.
It’s also why companies mined bauxite in various far-away places and shipped it to Iceland to take advantage of Iceland’s sweet, sweet geothermal capacity.
That makes sense - thanks for the info.
I think it's important to remember that making green hydrogen is an energy storage process, just like charging a battery. Battery storage is many magnitudes more efficient than turning electricity into hydrogen and then turning hydrogen back into electricity. But hydrogen is much easier and cheaper to store in enormous quantities. It is by no means certain at this point which side is going to make bigger technological advances in time to transform our energy grid.
Worth noting that while renewables are cheap GLOBALLY it is not really the case that they are cheap in the United States.
Solar still costs ~ double what it costs in Europe and nearly triple what it costs in China. Figures are comparable for wind, but not my area of expertise.
There is basically no market for “merchant” solar - selling into the market at market rates. New solar construction needs significant revenue subsidy (in addition to the 26% cost subsidy) to be built.
Activists need to reconcile themselves with the fact that consumer energy prices will have to rise significantly as part of a successful energy transition.
The implicit carbon savings of renewables more than makes up for any subsidies. If ratepayers were carrying the cost of their pollution, gas and coal would be much more expensive.
Sure, but people don't want to pay much higher electricity for carbon savings. Rising electricity costs in California aren't popular and they're only at 20% solar penetration.
I've even heard that net CO2 taxation is not yet popular. :)
Interesting omission of hydrogen. You can use electricity to create hydrogen, which can be stored and then used to create either heat or electricity in fuel cells. Getting to "cheap hydrogen" isn't easy, but it would seem to help you escape the problem with storing renewables.
He mentions energy storage in the article, but thankfully doesn't waste much time talking about it. Currently energy storage is so expensive and inefficient that you are probably better off building an oversupply of renewables than investing much in energy storage. Lots of companies are trying to tackle this problem so I'm confident that we will get there eventually, but it depends on some pretty major technological advancements to make the cost come down and then it will take a decade or more to build the facilities and infrastructure to store even a small percentage of our grids power. So if you want to wait decades to replace coal that's fine, but all the progress we have made so far and most of the progress we make in the next decade will still depend on natural gas.
As we ramp up solar production we might not be able to cover all of our needs when there is a shortfall of production but at the same time we'll have more electricity than we know what to do with when the sun is shining brightest. I wonder if it would make sense to use that extra electricity doing carbon capture from the air and synthesizing more natural gas from that and water.
Since it comes from atmospheric CO2 it would be carbon neutral on net and we could keep using all of our existing natural gas infrastructure instead of just abandoning it. Also, while electric flight might make sense for very short range flights I don't see anybody taking an electric plane across the pacific any time soon baring things like beamed microwave power from satellites. Designing planes that can use compresses methane seems doable, though, and it's a lot easier to work with than hydrogen.
We could also synthesize more complex fuels, but that's sort of complicated and I'd imagine that minimizing capital intensity would be a big factor in enabling this.
I think more likely we'd take already-existing electricity-hungry industries that don't need to run 24-7 and run them preferentially during the sunny times. I'm thinking aluminum smelting, but some have mentioned hydrogen generation, or perhaps certain kinds of cloud computing.
Most energy intensive industries don't change rates nicely. Hydrogen would work for some kinds of electolysers, but the utilization would be low so CAPEX high per produced quantity. There will be a utilization where even free power is not cheap enough to make it cost effective.
The problem with that is the CAPEX is very high when the utilization is low. The way above demand times are a small portion of the time.
Low capital utilization means that your capital expenses will be higher than they would otherwise be. That doesn't necessarily imply that the savings from lower input costs won't overcome the loses from higher capital costs. And especially as electricity costs can get very low at certain times there's a lot of incentive to find ways to produce cheaper but less efficient plants. I couldn't find any numbers from a full Sabatier plant but this paper on hydrogen costs suggests that electricity price savings can cover a large decrease in duty cycle and have it come out a wash. https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/20004-cost-electrolytic-hydrogen-production.pdf
Based on the numbers they use, if you have free power and a $1000/kw electrolyzer you have $6/kg H2 at ~20% capacity factor. A big portion of the ‘excess’ power will be available less often than this.
> As a broader strategy, though, almost all of the really promising dams have already been built. But even if they hadn’t been, the ecological cost of damming rivers is non-trivial. And that’s the real issue here. There’s no such thing as a way to make electricity that doesn’t have some kind of ecological footprint, and that includes the renewables themselves. After all, the escalating cost of renewables once you run out of gas complementarities really just amounts to the fact that you need to build more stuff.
This is an extremely important point, and I think it should be made louder, more broadly, more generally. Hydro has environmental costs just like solar requires mining some somewhat rare elements and just like we're not really sure what to do with gigantic composite wind turbine blades when we decommission worn-out units. And just like "zero-emission" cars do not exist because lithium mining isn't cheap and because tire wear is (for circa-2020 vehicles) a major source of particulate emissions, no matter whether you have a tailpipe attached to your car or not.
This isn't meant as a bad-faith whataboutism, although unfortunately you'll read whataboutist arguments that look similar. I fully expect my next car to be at least a plug-in hybrid. It's instead an earnest plea that individuals make personal decisions, and policymakers make policy, based on real actual fact patterns rather than well-meaning slogans that sound nice but aren't true.
Make that next car a full electric
Good post but Matt neglects discussing the role of housing which consumes lots of energy. We moved into a condo this January from a detached house and our utility bills for both electricity and gas dropped by 70%. Our living space decreased by only 20%. In our building all heating/cooling is done by individual heat pumps up on the roof. We get abundant sun during the day and the heating system hardly runs during the winter. Kitchen is all electric and the induction range uses less energy than our old gas cook top in the house. Town houses use less energy that a detached house of the same square footage as the exposure to the elements is on averaged reduced (end units would have more; middle units less). Moderate/high rise units have even less environmental exposure.
"...Matt neglects discussing the role of housing..."
You're absolutely right: town houses, apartments, and condos are all more energy efficient than single family dwellings.
But given how often MY trumpets the advantages of building upwards, I think we should welcome his giving the topic a rest on this occasion.
I thought the standard Matt/YIMBY position is "just let people build what they want".
A distinction without a difference. In effect letting people build what they want would have a ton of building upwards.
"just let people build what they want"
No doubt -- that's Matt's bid for the neo-lib shill prize -- but he has also talked in many places about the ecological advantages of greater density in housing, whether by urbanization or by building up.
Solar and A/C in southern climates pair well. Renewables and heating in Northern climates do not. Peak demand would be start of work but before the sun is up so no help from solar at all, and some days wind is very low. At the same time heat pumps are less efficient so peak demand is even higher.
I don't really understand the enthusiasm for heat pumps. They don't work well in really cold weather, so they can't be that efficient in northern states during the winter.
(1) Heat pump technology is continuing to improve and get more efficient in very cold weather (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v8vizQXwss -- sponsored by the vendor, FYI).
(2) Lots of people live where it's cold enough to need heating, but not super cold very often, and it's easy to integrate a gas or electric heat strip for those unusually cold days..
(3) Because they function as AC units too, it can be an all-in-one solution.
Currently, how cold is too cold for a heat pump?
In my experience, anywhere under about 40 degrees.
Your experience must have been with very old tech. Nowadays temps of 15-20 degrees are fine for most heat pumps and more expensive hyper-heat units can put out heat down to -13 degrees.
https://rmi.org/heat-pumps-a-practical-solution-for-cold-climates/
"Leading products are now capable of performing well below -10°F and operating at more than double the efficiency of resistance or gas systems below zero. These aren’t just manufacturer claims: heat pumps have been successfully field tested in Minnesota (which has some of the coldest winters in the Continental United States) and as far north as the Arctic Circle!"
For a good cost comparisons between heating sources in a relatively cold climate, check out the second table here:
https://www.nh.gov/osi/energy/energy-nh/fuel-prices/
This is outdated. Modern heat pumps can work well down to 0F and below. Pair it with electric heat strips if you’re worried. We’ve loved getting off gas, despite being in the Rockies.
There are also geothermal heat pumps that are good for really cold climates. They are more expensive and not suited for a retrofit in, for example, a NYC apartment.
40 would be pretty bad. Even Atlanta consistently gets under 40 at night in winter.
I have a heat pump at my 900 sq ft apartment in NYC. In the coldest month each winter, my electricity bill is anywhere from $650-$800. Hard to believe this technology is the Green utopia. On the other hand, I fill the gas tank of my car about four times/year, so a cost of about one week of heating my apartment. Don't have any idea how this all translates into my personal carbon footprint, but based on what I pay, the heat pump is a prime offender.
7-8 years old. I agree it's junk. The one before it failed altogether during a cold snap after five years.
Do you happen to know what the temperature is at which a gas-powered furnace and an electric-powered heat pump use the same amount of energy per degree of heating delivered? I was trying to figure this out in mid-February 2021 when my heat pump here in Texas was struggling against the deep freeze to keep our house in the upper 50s. I assume that in a place where houses are designed to stay warm, and with slightly newer heat pumps and ones selected for a colder climate, there could be somewhat better performance. But it wasn't clear to me whether the technology had reached Minnesota winter needs yet. (It seems very likely to be able to meet Boston/New York needs, particularly in apartment buildings where you just have fewer exposed surfaces to lose heat through.)
I think this might give you something close to what you want:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.aceee.org/sites/default/files/publications/researchreports/a1602.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiHzoOZyfD2AhVgmGoFHSScB-cQFnoECDIQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0_llJso_rmd26ZijD33jj-
Speaking of advanced geothermal and nuclear, i wonder if we could build enough of those to render hydro dams pointless. A free flowing Columbia river would be an amazing feat.
Maybe nuclear. Geothermal would be much more difficult because it isn't as "renewable" as it's made out to be.
Look at this surface heat flow map of the US: https://www.smu.edu/-/media/Site/Dedman/Academics/Programs/Geothermal-Lab/Graphics/SMUHeatFlowMap2011_CopyrightVA0001377160_jpg.jpg?la=en
The four pink areas (the ones with the highest heat flow), which are Yellowstone, Clear Lake north of SF, the Imperial Valley in SoCal, and Valles in NM, are all volcanoes. They have an active magma body creating a large amount of heat. In fact, the geothermal field at Clear Lake is the largest in the US. The problem with geothermal in most of the rest of the US is that there is no active magma body, even in the redder parts of the map. You can drill and get some heat for a while, but you will eventually drain all the heat and the site will no longer produce any.
If we draw some heat out of the Yellowstone basin, do we make the Supervolcano more or less likely?
I'd hate to have to rely on meteorites for the extinction of humankind -- they have a real intermittency problem.
Drawing heat from Yellowstone won't make much a difference either way. The eruption depends on the amount of water in the magma and the amount of rock above putting downward pressure on the magma. Think of when you shake a pop bottle and then open the cap. Same concept.
New geothermal is not subject to those limitations: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/take-geothermal-seriously
@matt if you haven’t already read you would love this online version if Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.
https://www.withouthotair.com
It’s from a UK perspective but it grounds the energy transition in “how much energy does the UK use va how much energy per meter do renewables give?”
It is still very relevant, and informs my thinking to this day on the importance of nuclear and gas.
It doesn’t touch as much on cost, but does imply similar conclusions about the important of non variable backups to solar and wind.
Sadly Dr McKay died too young, but you can find his lectures on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/GFosQtEqzSE
His work also led to the creation of government calculators for showing how you would achieve the energy transition https://my2050.beis.gov.uk/?levers=111111111111111
Was great; is badly outdated.
In what ways? The basic calculations on watts per square meter from renewables seem pretty solid up to today. People mention that solar is more efficient than his expectations, but when I talk to people it seems to still be in the right ballpark.
Nuclear sucks as a complement to intermittent renewable energy.
Very high fixed costs, slow ramping, and low variable costs? That sounds like something you're going to want to run as much as it can.
But in a grid dominated by cheap intermittent renewables, you need two things to complement it - short-term dispatchable power (and/or demand maangement), and seasonal storage of some kind. Neither of these use cases are a good match for what nuclear can do.
At this point, somebody's going to say something silly like "oh, we could use the surplus energy to recharge <energy storage technology of choice>". Well, guess what, if you're going to use energy storage tech, you may as well use the cheapest source of energy available to fill the storage, and it ain't nuclear.
I agree totally that anybody prematurely shutting down a safely operating nuclear plant is nuts. But the track record of nuclear is so unpromising, and it's such a poor match with the rest of the energy landscape, that wasting political effort trying to streamline the NRC and establish an effective construction pipeline for the things seems like misdirected effort.
To repeat myself, the payoff from matching Australia's rooftop solar installation costs is a far juicier, and far more politically viable, than trying to get nuke plants built.
My concern is that this is both true and fully decarbonising with this approach is prohibitively expensive. Is building out this approach locking us into an incomplete path or stranded assets?
Short version: no.
Longer version: there are multiple studies/plans out there suggesting that very high proportions of renewables won't break the bank.
There's this one for the US from a group of Stanford academics: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/21-USStates-PDFs/21-USStatesPaper.pdf
And the draft grid management plan for the Eastern Australian energy grid has as its central scenario ~95% renewables by about 2040: https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/isp/2022/draft-2022-integrated-system-plan.pdf?la=en
So I believe Matt's central contention -that electricity costs are going to spiral out of control once renewable penetration reaches levels a lot lower than what's required to get emissions down to ~0 - is wrong, at least for the US and Australia.
I have worked in electrical power generation for over ten years and this is the best article I have ever read summarizing our energy situation.
I think this article could be improved by adding a discussion about demand response. This is an important mechanism for enabling higher RE integration to the electric grid. With smart meters, utilities can send real time price signals to consumers, and equipment can be programmed to automatically adjust demand (e.g., EV charging or hot water storage tank setpoints) based on renewable supply, weather, & aggregate grid demand.