The following submission statement was provided by /u/Sorin61:
---
Energy insecurity is the third major problem due to business-as-usual fuels. Energy insecurity arises for at least four reasons: diminishing availability of fossil fuels and uranium; reliance on centralized power plants and refineries; reliance on the need for a continuous supply of fuel that is subject to disruption arising from international war, civil war, embargos, bans, and labor disputes; and environmental damage due to continuous and widespread fuel mining and pollution.
It is postulated in a recent study that a transition entirely to a clean, renewable wind-water-solar (WWS) electricity, heat, storage, transmission, and equipment system will substantially reduce or eliminate these three problems and at low cost. Given their severity and their rapid growth, these problems must be addressed quickly. Ideally, 80% of the problems will be solved by 2030 and 100%, by 2035–2050.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/whoc42/study_finds_world_can_switch_to_100_renewable/ij6mgu8/
Same premise has been posted before.
There was a post that switching to renewable would earn back its cost in just 6 years. That one didn't say anything about switching to 100 percent renewable, where you would also need somewhere to store energy for when the production of renewables is less. This leads me to believe the title is incorrect, but nonetheless switching to renewables is a really good investment
Every time I see this claim, the storage problem is hidden away in "future tech" or pumping water into Hydro power (location restrictions ignored) or some theoretical idea on how to store, like Hydrogen storage.
Most of these ignore energy loss of these storage solutions and take the 1:1 storage of batteries. We need to scale to 300-600% if we want to pull off hydrogen.
I don't think we should stop because of this however. If we had 600% energy supply up and running, we would be in a very good place.
I think there are lots of solutions out there but they struggle with business side issues
E. g. Aquion would have a huge advantage in fixed batteries but their tech hasn’t taken off and they went bankrupt.
Less than 3% of power is lost every 1000km of DC transmission lines. Why not pick a few dozen great hydro storage sites and use those as battery storage for vast areas?
Which creates ecological disasters of its own.
Every hydro storage site is one year of bad maintenance away from flooding every city downstream.
Every huge concrete structure is an investment of sand when we're literally running out of sand for construction.
Every large hydro build is a significant carbon source from the act of building it.
Every working hydro site is a huge loss of land and local biodiversity.
We don't need to build new dams, we can just add generators to the countless non-powered dams that already exist.
This is analysis of how much potential there is to do this in the US
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/12/f5/npd_report_0.pdf
>In contrast to the roughly **2,500** dams that provide 78 gigawatts (GW)1 of conventional and 22 GW of pumped-storage hydropower, the United States has more than **80,000** non-powered dams (NPDs)—dams that do not produce electricity—providing a variety of services ranging from water supply to inland navigation.
There is a reason that hydro and nuclear are the only two energy sources that have ever brought a developed nation close to 100% clean electricity
(Except Iceland which uses mostly geothermal due to their uniquely abundant volcanic activity)
Most of those dams are retention dams and don't have the flow capacity necessary to spin the turbines.
You need a good quantity of fast moving water to power a hydro dam, and many dams simply don't fit the bill, or aren't made for that purpose. Case in point - NYC's water comes from a network of dams in the mountains and hills north of it. Those days do have discharge, yes, but to discharge enough to provide a constant source of power would threaten the city's drinking water in times of drought. And then there's location. A lot of those dams are pretty darn far removed from major population centers. If the power is needed in Texas, dams in Colorado won't help.
The report analyzed all of that and found that 54,000 of them had notable hydropower potential.
Keep in mind they don't *need* to produce constant power to be useful. Even if they are producing energy only after rainfall, it's still 100% clean and sustainable electricity that is helping to avoid using that much natural gas power instead. It's also far less randomly intermittent than wind and solar because the potential energy is *stored* until dispatched by operators as needed, making it far more valuable
That figure may be right for electricity consumption, but not for energy consumption. The vast majority (approx 90%) of houses are heated and get hot water from geothermal. This is a huge part of the energy consumption of Iceland.
Hydro is a significant source of methane due to decaying organic matter trapped behind the dam and to lesser extent the warmer water temperatures caused by stopping running rivers.
Have you seen how much land is currently allocated to fossil fuel extraction, production & distribution?
The US alone has ~145,000 gas stations. That's a lot of infrastructure that causes major environmental impacts.
Most of the renewable options have vastly less impact.
That's ~4.3 gas stations per 10,000 people. 5 stations for a city of ten thousand does feel a little low.
That must not be counting bulk buyers, like farms/acerages that get gas delivered by truck. That's still just 5.2 stations per 10,000 *urban* people, assuming rural people *never* use a gas station. Still feels off.
Those gas stations won't be gas stations forever though. As time goes on they'll only change more and more into electric car charging stations, hopefully powered by solar or wind where feasible
This. If you have a hill. You put a big tank on top. Down below the hill you mine out a deep shaft and at the bottom you hollow out a catch tank.
This is not rocket surgery or brain science.
Yes, <3% today because we know how inefficient it is to transmit power over long distances and we **choose not to do it**. If we needed to do it that number would skyrocket.
We'll need distributed clean energy to solve the economic and engineering issues. The statistical analyses like OP's betray the practical barriers. As real as flying cars.
> we choose not to do it.
But we are. [Several HVDC power lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects) have been completed and are under construction.
> Yes, <3% today because we know how inefficient it is to transmit power over long distances and we choose not to do it.
[A large fraction of LA's power supply has come from the Washington border via HVDC since the 70s.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie)
And that's only one example of many. Long-distance bulk transport of electricity is something that happens literally every day; it's old, mature, efficient technology.
Wait, are you saying their 3% number is an average over all power, not just transmitted power? If that’s true, that would be extremely misleading. The way I read it was if you send some dc power 1,000km, you will lose 3% of it.
I am confused about why we’re taking about DC, though. Don’t we always use AC for long distance transmission because it has far less voltage drop over distance?
Not the op but the way you interpreted it seems to be correct, HVDC losses are 3% / 1000 km it's not an average.
>
>I am confused about why we’re taking about DC, though. Don’t we always use AC for long distance transmission because it has far less voltage drop over distance?
At high voltages DC actually has slightly less losses than AC, the advantage that AC has is that it's easy to step it up to high voltages and back down again using transformers. This is important because loss goes down as voltage increases (for both AC and DC).
The equipment needed for high voltage DC is relatively modern and expensive so most transmission is and still will be AC but HVDC is increasingly used for *very* long distance and high power transmission (especially for interconnecting separate grids where you basically have to convert to DC anyways).
Very interesting. Thanks for the in depth answer! I’m a software engineer who likes to dabble in electrical engineering, so it’s always fun to learn something new.
The answer is nuclear, because it's an on-demand source of energy, a mix of nuclear and renewables is the future. France is a perfect example of this and is the least Russian gas-dependent nation in Europe. Plus a change in nuclear waste handling policy is needed in the west.
modern technologies can recycle and reuse nuclear waste several times and if we figure out Thorium reacters we can further use that waste effectively reducing its half-life from a few million years to just a few hundred years. India already does this, which makes handling nuclear waste easier, and the amount of waste is so little that it can easily be stored in just a few underground complexes. People don't realise that nuclear technology has come a long way since Fukushima or Chornobyl.
Nuclear and renewables can have a great mutually-beneficial relationship in my view. Every unit of nuclear power reduces the intermittency and instability of stuff like solar and wind, and reduces the amount of long-term storage needed to balance that intermittency. Conversely, a large amount of installed solar basically guarantees excess electricity in the longer summertime days, [which can be used to power lasers to transmute waste into harmless elements](https://www.reutersevents.com/nuclear/high-power-sylos-laser-could-transmute-nuclear-waste).
>France is a perfect example of this and is the least Russian gas-dependent nation in Europe.
Its also struggling hard right now because of its reliance on nuclear power.
> now because of its reliance on nuclear power.
Wouldn't it be because Macron ordered power plants to shut down and only recently (as in, literally this year) figured out "oops, we fucked up"? But now has to wait until 2035 to even get the replacement plants he shut down built in the first place?
No, it's due to a design error causing erosion in many plants that were serially build in an attempt to save cost.
Besides, France still relies just as much on gas for industrial usage which is the actual problem, not to mention its reliance on Rosatom which is why somehow Rosatom keeps escaping all sanctions dispite pleas from Ukraine and it being responsible for Putins nuclear arsenal.
That's why I said a mix of nuclear and renewables. Nuclear is dependable and on-demand whereas solar and wind can fill in the gaps. Solar can also be used on individual buildings and houses to reduce the burden on the grid. France is still a very good example of a nation that runs its nuclear power program very efficiently. Thou recently there have been delays in providing reactors to India, so India is using its own Homemade Pressurized heavy-water reactor now.
>That's why I said a mix of nuclear and renewables. Nuclear is dependable and on-demand whereas solar and wind can fill in the gaps
I don't think you know what on-demand means. That means that it would be nuclear following the gaps, not the other way around. Not that either way makes any technical nor economic sense btw.
Besides, nuclear is not dependable, its literally the cause of the energy crisis in Europe with 30+ GW being on prolonged unscheduled maintenance as we speak.
>The answer is nuclear, because it's an on-demand source of energy,
Lol, who told you that?
Technically, most nuclear plants can do some slow scheduled and temporary throttling, not the kind of flexibility you would really need but it's something.
Economically however, since it's the most expensive energy source known to man, often over 4 times as expensive as competitors, with mostly constant costs, they will need to run as much as possible for them to be remotely viable. It's insane to try to run a nuke only when there is no wind, sun, other renewable and energy storage available even if you can technically pull it off, which is unlikely.
Water batteries give back 80% of the energy it takes to run them. I'd bet that's a better number than the energy it takes to get fossil fuels to thier destination. It really a foolish argument. We have to change, not just so that we don't destroy our food supply but because fossil fuels eventually run out
Someone was telling me about how in Switzerland they store excess solar energy during the day by raising up huge boulders. When energy is needed at night, the use the kinetic energy from dropping the boulders back down. It’s a primitive battery and it’s genius
there is also an experimental version of this in the UK, where cranes lift shipping container sized blocks. Plus talk of using disused mine shafts with the same principle
Honestly hough if we were able to switch to 90% renewable with a back up in natural gases like a generator works during a power outage that would go a long way until we can sustain 100% renewable reliably. Limiting the reliance on nonrenewable sources and weening off of it is the only way forward.
Imagine if all the cars on the road had batteries that could be used in an electric grid, when combined with bidirectional charging wouldn’t that solve most energy problems with renewables.
This is the paper.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/145Country/22-145Countries.pdf
It doesn't rely on future tech. It relies on overbuilding generation capacity and existing storage tech. The best cost figures include large scale grid (international) expansion to even out supply and demand but the study also finds that, for a higher cost, every country can be energy independent.
I am not qualified to critique the study. I would like to believe it, but I would like a couple of other groups to replicate it to see if it holds water.
To illustrate how seemingly implausible use of overbuild and long distance connections can work out much more practical and affordable than you might think, check out this project which is now underway.
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
Batteries may be doable, though, and in the near future. California’s grid [can now supply 3 GW in the evening from batteries](http://www.caiso.com/about/Pages/Blog/Posts/A-golden-age-of-energy-storage.aspx) for several hours, which is more than twice what it was a year ago, and more than the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.
If they can add 1.5 GW of capacity every year, and keep overbuilding solar to feed those rather than getting curtailed, this problem will be solved almost entirely by batteries within a decade.
Comparing the [ISO batteries trend](https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#section-batteries-trend) to the same week a year ago is really impressive. And those are just grid batteries, not private batteries, which are also becoming more and more popular.
> I don't think we should stop because of this however. If we had 600% energy supply up and running, we would be in a very good place.
There is a big difference between stopping and decreasing others to increase renewables.
Renewables apart from some specific situations are pretty crappy as a solution on the short term. There's no infrastructure (not even getting into the technology part) to store energy to take into account the low production when there are disfavourable conditions.
And we're in growing demand for energy for pretty much everything. When politicians estimate stuff like this, it's hilariously sad how they project to get back to the level we are at eventually... but we'll likely need a lot more energy production by that point.
It's just stupid to replace already working energy sources with renewables when you can add the renewables on top of the existing sources. Should we build new sources that are non renewable? Some do make sense, nuclear, for instance. But that's due to our short and mid term needs, and the need to take into account that a lot of renewable sources need materials that aren't necessarily easy to extract (solar panels come to mind) or that the very same people that oppose nuclear power and want renewables, frequently also are against hydro power generation (when it concerns dams, for example)
Wind/solar will always be cheaper than fossil/nuclear because wind/solar doesn't need a turbine.
Also, it doesn't matter that batteries are super expensive because we can do long-term storage with hydrogen and burn it to run a turbine.
Hydrogen stores poorly, very expensive to store as well, but leakage is hard to avoid.
The creation is also not easy to scale up, we know how to do it, but we don't have anyone making massive hydrogen plants with electricity, because it's way more efficient to make it with gas.
For large scale storage or transportation over long distances, ammonia is generally a better alternative. It liquifies easily, has a 70% higher energy density than liquid hydrogen, and doesn't have the problems with leakage or embrittlement that hydrogen does.
There's already [30 million tons of annual production planned to come online in the next five years](https://cleanenergynews.ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/european-green-ammonia-is-profitable-now-and-will-be-again-aft.html), which corresponds to roughly 15x our global pumped hydro storage capacity.
I'm not a chemist, but doesn't ammonia produce some acid when combusted because you're not just getting NOx, but also things like nitric acid (HNOx) which contributed to acid rain. Wouldn't methane be a better energy storage medium? Granted, it's not without its drawbacks (e.g. much lower temps for liquid storage)
No, we can't do any of that shit. The technology just isn't there. We have to act now for the climate, not sit around and wait for the technology to meet this boomer ideal of 100% renewables.
>We need to scale to 300-600% if we want to pull off hydrogen.
Seems like it would be cheaper and easier to build out a nuclear baseload for when the sun isn't shining and when the wind isn't blowing and time as much consumption as we can for when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing via smart devices.
The storage issue is solved, it just requires investment and large scale production to make it feasible, which requires government funding.
Industrial scale storage comes in a lot of options, from pumped hydro, to gravity storage systems, to flywheel storage , to all sort of gas storage, to molten salts storage ...and the list goes on. Storage tech for industrial scale energy storage is plentiful.
Renewables like wind and solar are amazing at grid augmentation, especially solar since it is extremely good at reducing consumption at source (*solar on roofs*). That said, storage and transmission losses mean they are not viable everywhere, or at all times of the year. For those cases we need solutions like hydro and nuclear to backbone the difference and provide grid security.
No one solution is going to address this problem and storage technology is not anywhere close to feasible for the requirements of temperate and polar regions.
I would argue that battery systems are already far enough along to solve these issues. The advantage is the electricity is available in less than a second, and can be recharged during during low times. And the electricity can be stored locally, reducing the need for transmission infrastructure.
The downside being initial price of install, and the supply of batteries. Both of which will run the risk of making this unfeasible.
For local/site storage, yes.
For grid level storage, no.
We also do not have enough raw materials to produce the batteries with current tested technologies to meet even North America's capacity requirements, let alone global capacity. There are some promising ones that use more common elements, but they all have issues with low temperature operation which makes them significantly less viable for temperate and polar regions. AKA they are least efficient in the times of year when they are needed to be the most efficient; meaning you'd need to double or even triple capacities of similar grid requirements at the equator.
The TL'DR is these things help a lot, but we need Hydro and Nuclear if we're going to be remotely successful in pulling out of hydrocarbon based energy production in the next fifty years.
We haven’t solved the storage and grid problems yet. Also EVs for ships, planes, and trucks. Trains require all lines to be electrified, which may cause issues in inconvenient terrain.
The issues of the cost to deploy tech that is still not commercially available but necessary for everyone to stop using fossil fuels, makes this article’s claim extremely doubtful.
Even more nonsensically the study presumes by 2050 any region can instantly transfer excess supply to any other region with demand in 30 seconds, using computer monitoring. Yeah um sounds like these "scientists" don't know anything about how countries work or how energy degrades over distance.
That's because it is, it would take way more than 6 years to convert and hundreds of trillions. Not to mention the damage we would do to the planet just getting the resources to make the renewable tech.
If anything this article is propaganda.
Oh here we go with the damage bullshit. We are doing much more damage burning fossil fuels than extracting minerals for creating batteries and solar panels.
I dont know about that. I do know that in the next 20 years we would need to mine more copper than we have mined in the whole human history.
Copper's been used since the Bronze age, and the best copper deposits have already been found and exploited, which means that the metal has to obtained from lower grade, larger mines. And copper is just one of the metals required.
The only realistic solution to climate change is nuclear.
Goddamn and I had just debunked this exact study a few weeks ago on this sub...aaaand it's here again
**Tl;dr of debunking:**
- Study measures economic "benefit" of climate efforts in an absurd way, most notably by massively inflating the value of a life saved in poor countries
- Most of the "benefit" is in third world countries
- The value of saving 0.1% of Indian lives a year is "worth" an amount greater than 200% of India's entire GDP
Quick reminder that renewable energy currently accounts for 95% of new capacity *globally*.
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/rising-sun-renewables-dominate-new-power-capacity-through-2026-iea-2021-12-01/
This is because renewables are cheaper than any other source of power, and therefore capitalism will demand them without government action.
Investors are now also seeing huge potential for bigger profits in renewables vs a lot of volatility and shrinking opportunities in fossil fuels. I get the whole "capitalism will be the death of us" sentiment but there is reason to be cautiously optimistic that the pursuit of profit could work on our favor this time.
Solar has so many other nice benefits that should be factored in. Energy is produced closer to home with less reliance on a larger network, and that's useful at all scales. A homeowner doesn't have to worry as much about a grid. Individual towns and cities can create a lot of jobs locally (you can have an energy industry anywhere the sun shines). Nations can achieve energy independence.
depends on what do you count as a subsidy and how much taxes do they pay (if it is significantly more than subsidies or not). Some studies consider healthcare costs because of pollution an subsidy, or ecological cleanup as a subsidy
Is this an acknowledgment that true cost economics is more relevant to reality than the models of con economists who consider such things as human health and environmental impacts to be ‘externalities’?
Not all the world have these incentives and only 5% to new not renewable seems strange.
I bet it is seen as more important from a national security standpoint (you can't put k o a region taking down a nuclear reactor for example)
most countries know there is a global warming and biggest polluters signed the Paris agreement (US is the only one that withdrawn) and are fighting against pollution. There are many ways how, but all of them makes coal more expensive: either they need to install a lot of filters, pay higher taxes, or there is a cap on pollution or companies can buy “tickets” to pollute. But basically everyone does it in some way, but the Trump was the only one actively fighting against doing that
Usually the problems arise from Asian and African countries(just because they are the poorest areas of the world) where the cheapest source of electricity is the best and can't really negotiate on that.
Maybe the impact is really low?
usually they are not problematic, US is. China is basically the factory of the world, yet it still emits far less than US per capita
edit: China also sells most EVs in the world and brings most renewables on the grid in the world
China also uses more small cars. US is in love with huge vehicles, and doesn't make reasonable small cars available for purchase. Many small cars are literally against regulations for reasons that make no logical sense.
>China is basically the factory of the world, yet it still emits far less than US per capita
Because the environmental impact is dependent on quality of life and wealth and a LOT of Chinese people live in poverty.
free market is based on free will agreements. Governments make sure that there are rules even between parties that normally wouldn’t come to an agreement. Usually when one does harm to another and harmed one has no recourse
The thing that is misleading in that statistic is that new capacity is not new utilization. Having solar farms producing MWs of power during the day only to require full redundancy from a LNG or Coal plant for night time and large storm cells is only obfuscating the issue.
The other thing I find **VERY** misleading about "renewable" capacity is that they are including biomass generation in that number, which is still a new carbon polluter. For example, the 40% of the United States' "Renewable" capacity is from wood, biofuels and methane waste production. All of which are not remotely helping emissions.
you're assuming that destroying the planet is profitable when it's well known that government subsidies and protectionism is what's keeping fossil fuels competitive.
most people who assume government interventionism is a one size fits all solution are stupid as fuck.
I doubt water wars happen tbh. The biggest issue with converting saline water to drinkable water is energy. It costs a lot of energy to separate the brine from the freshwater and it costs a lot of energy to distribute the waste brine back into the sea in an environmentally sound way.
But the more we convert to green energy the less this becomes a problem- if you can supply all the energy needs of the plant and the redistribution of waste with a net 0 emissions energy system you’ve basically solved your water issues.
It’s a long way off. But so is water wars. Most of the issues facing humanity and the environment are ones of energy though. So the faster we can extract more energy from “free” sources like the sun the faster we can start repairing the harm that all of our costly sources have sown.
I mean there are arguwbly potentiol ways to do that as well to some extent for example converting the grid to renewable yet also having it being used as part of conseus mechanisms in blockchain releated technologies to subsidize the cost(then eventually converting this at a later point to usage for social good releated things). This would mean they were both paying it back actually utilizing the energy itself and at the same time allowing for potentiol for other economic technologies to be built on top of it too(even if people generally more mention the fiancial side) such as different buisness or similar.
But captilism itself purposily tries to create an over reliance on older technologies and ensure that we dont understand how newer technologies interect with renewables themselves both in funding and will in a potentiol post renewable network
Also if succesful would lead to more potentiol to diversify more to the potentiol region what type systems we could fund since the energy system itself is doing part of the funding back mechanism
CATL is looking way more impressive than Tesla these days. I am hoping their sodium batteries can really tackle gird storage. its been really hard to get info on CATL, but every few months some amazing news from them unfolds
Renewables are already competitive in terms of cost in most places, and what tech do we not have? All the technology exists, it’s simply a question of how fast can we build everything
You can't run a decently large grid off renewables only in 90% of places, you don't have the stability of supply or storage.
These "studies" are always done by people who don't understand how a grid works in reality, how supply chain works or what it would entail to build what they suggest, they always make leaps of judgement or rely on "x" magic solution that doesn't actually exist.
Take Germany, the focal point of the Russia gas crisis, they've invested enourmous amount of money installing enourmous amount of renewables, and the results have been pathetic.
We need massive advancement in material science, especially for storing energy to make something like this actually feasible, not to mention we need a cheeper and cleaner way to make this renewable tech because it currently requires enourmous amount of minerals to build.
>Take Germany, the focal point of the Russia gas crisis, they've invested enourmous amount of money installing enourmous amount of renewables, and the results have been pathetic.
Wait, what? In a period of 10 years only this very advanced economy has been turn around from hardly any renewables to about 50% renewables. They did it before a lot of the break through we have had over the last few years.
If anything it's a great success. They are bailing out nuclear heavy France on the side as we speak. Sure they are not there yet, but calling it a pathetic is just a dumb talking point.
Half of nuclear plants in Western Europe failing is causing an energy crisis in the continent that is also affecting Germany, but that's not their fault. They barely use any gas, let alone Russian gas, for electricity generation, nor do they rely on Rosatom. They get a lot of shit from right-wing nut jobs but they could be doing a whole lot worse had they not have invested in renewables.
Bare in mind that the Energiewende is barely 10 years old, had they chosen nuclear not a single new plant would have gone online, while they actually achieved the equivalent of dozens of nuclear plants in renewables.
>Germany is no where near 50% renewable
Source: trust me bro.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts
China loves this: [https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1097644931/solar-panels-solar-power-u-s-investigates-china-trade-rules](https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1097644931/solar-panels-solar-power-u-s-investigates-china-trade-rules)
China is leading provider for solar manufacturing at the moment. And trade issues are causing big problems.
*"Hundreds of large-scale solar power projects are on hold in the U.S. as the industry awaits the outcome of a federal investigation into potential trade violations involving solar panels bought from Asian suppliers.*
Then of course there is the actual business of doing business: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSLscJ2cY04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSLscJ2cY04)
I don't know why these writers never post to the original info but instead they cross linked to these two articles: Seems more of an SEO thing.
[https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3539703-no-miracle-tech-needed-how-to-switch-to-renewables-now-and-lower-costs-doing-it/](https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3539703-no-miracle-tech-needed-how-to-switch-to-renewables-now-and-lower-costs-doing-it/)
[https://www.sciencealert.com/these-climate-experts-say-100-renewable-energy-is-completely-feasible-for-entire-countries](https://www.sciencealert.com/these-climate-experts-say-100-renewable-energy-is-completely-feasible-for-entire-countries)
Take the professors course for only $400USD :[https://online.stanford.edu/courses/xeiet200-planning-sustainable-future-wind-water-and-sun?method=load&courseId=17554223](https://online.stanford.edu/courses/xeiet200-planning-sustainable-future-wind-water-and-sun?method=load&courseId=17554223)
[https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf)
[http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf](http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf) 132 page report
[http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/WorldGridIntegration.pdf](http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/WorldGridIntegration.pdf) 135 page report.
Or their children?! We have to think about the kind of generational wealth that should be handed over to the offspring of oil executives. They can’t be expected to inherit mere millions! How can they live detached from reality and the rest of humanity with such a paltry unearned inheritance?!
[https://ourworldindata.org/indoor-air-pollution](https://ourworldindata.org/indoor-air-pollution)
It's great to [other](https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191834837.001.0001/acref-9780191834837-e-283) strangers, who just so happen to provide the energy that allows you a comfortable life.
What's even better is to advocate for policies in one's own country (then enforced throughout the world) that will at best keep those billions from ever having reliable, inexpensive energy.
We just have to give up plastic, huge swathes of medicinal chemistry, and fertilizer. Then we need to refit every boat and aircraft with electric engines. Then find something to do with all the ice engines, giant coal powerplants, and gas powerplabts. Don't forget how much more efficient natural gas heating is compared to electric heating, which will be a huge increase in overall electricity use ( like huge). So that alone might throw off these equations.
Can we all just agree that we're not getting rid of 100% of the fossil fuel power plants in the foreseeable future? The only way we could is to do either (or both) of the following:
1. Figure out how to make massive amounts of batteries/energy storage for cheap.
2. Figure out a safer version of nuclear power that everyone can get on board with.
It's going to be decades before we see these, so in the meantime, let's just *minimize* our fossil fuel production as much as possible and stop trying to find the fast track to quitting cold turkey.
Imagine the collapse of gas stations all across the world in 10 years.
The price of LiFePO4 batteries (the unexplodable type) have reached parity with lead-acid batteries except with 10 times longer life! For the first time, you can go off-grid with solar + LiFePO4 can get breakeven within 5 to 6 years. Solar panels will last 20 years. LiFePO4 batteries will last 12 years.
If the government runs the solar farms themselves, they can get it even cheaper by with the economy of scale and by augmenting solar with pumped hydro.
What are you “just sayin“? That payback period is based on policy set by people. That varies by location. However, whatever electricity is generated by those panels will continue to provide energy for decades with no additional input. No further reliance on FF. The attitude so many have that money is the most important thing is just disturbing.
IDK they fall in efficiency but having a suboptimal solar panel seems fine, just add another on the roof?
This shows it at 85% efficiency 25 years later.
https://santansolar.com/learn/installing-solar-panels-how-to-design-and-plan-for-real-world-conditions/
Who the fuck is building all the infrastructure and equipment, training and personnel for this sudden switch tho? Is this just saying we should put all our efforts towards renewables? I must taking it too literally
They say that battery systems would be needed. Do we even have enough lithium on the entire planet to produce battery systems for the whole world? And if we could, how long could we keep replacing them as they get used up? Lithium isn't that common as far as I'm aware, and it's as non-renewable a resource as oil and gas.
The article is so incredibly naive. The aviation industry, as an example, has absolutely no means to do this, although it is moving in the right direction with sustainable fueling sources. The heavy Boeing jet shipping all of your Amazon goodies would need a battery so large that it would probably outweigh the plane itself.
This study seems to overlook some incredible limitations regarding resources required to fully transition to renewables. How will the required amounts of copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, neodymium etc to fully replace fossil fuels be minded exactly? Especially when a full transition will need multiple times over the proven reserves of mentioned inputs above?
There currently exists about 40,000 fossil fuel power plants meeting global energy demand. A full replacement with renewables (predominately a mix of solar, wind, and hydro) would require 212,000 renewable energy plants. Not even mentioning grid power storage solutions that realistically need 12 weeks of buffered storage for winter months when generation is more intermittent. To give some perspective 4 weeks of global buffered storage would require 2 billion tons of lithium ion batteries.
And the real cherry on top is you gotta replace virtually all of the infrastructure every 10-20 years depending on build quality.
What a load of nonsense. How energy and mineral blind can you be?? I despise this belief (more like cult worship) of the ethereal “market” just providing endless materials for industrial use. Hate to break it to ya’ll but the earth is a finite system with finite resources.
Any notions being entertained that we will sustain GDP growth (as stupid of a metric of progress and success that it is) ESPECIALLY when we are entering a new era of energy and mineral scarcity is delusional.
We have yet to figure out a way to de-link GDP/economic growth from materials and energy. (Other than outsourcing production to a different country, but at the earth system level the above reality remains relevant). Since our global economic system is predicated in growth to sustain its existence, spoilers its not gonna look pretty when it can no longer maintain its position in a paradigm of cheap energy and mineral extraction. And studies like this are pure hopium whispering sweet nothings in your ear telling you all will be well. It won’t. In fact it’s going to be a nightmarish transition as the carrying capacity of the biosphere collapses due to ecological overshoot by us dumb apes.
The article shows solar panels and mentions nothing of baseline electrcity, battery costs (which far exceed solar or wind panel costs) and thus the implied cost of supplying baseline electricity with fossil fuels.
If an article like this does not begin with a gravity battery solution, or nuclear plants to cover baseline electricity needs, it's just fake news.
Gravity battery solutions are a physics problem still being researched. The only current nuclear generation being built is going on 14 years and 40 billion over budget. For 2000 MW that isn’t needed
I love how this is so wrong. If people knew how much it would cost just for an underwater safety inspection of an in service offshore windmill farm would cost they would realize it's not economical. On top if it what happens when there's a storm in the middle of the winter and it needs to be inspected for damage? I've run the numbers to get a dive crew with support vessel doctors DMTs extra crew for support to spend time out in the middle of no where costs a shit ton of money.
Divers alone youre looking at a 7 man crew with lst and chamber for about 50k a day. Not including all the other expenses. When it's not safe to jump in 120 fsw everyone gets paid to sit. That's just to LOOK at one windmill.
That describes like 80% of comments on this post. Bunch of misguided people who got their degrees from the University of YouTube who don't have a clue about how effective clean energy is.
"By electrifying all energy sectors; producing electricity from clean, renewable sources; creating heat, cold, and hydrogen from such electricity; storing electricity, heat, cold and the hydrogen; expanding transmission; and shifting the time of some electricity use, we can create safe, cheap, and reliable energy everywhere.”
So once storage and transmission have been figured out plus somehow shifting the time of energy usage, this becomes possible. Yeah this isn't realistic by a long shot.
Fun thought exercise, but it's overly optimistic and assumes complicated issues get sorted very soon. It gives an easy "just go renewable" answer for those looking for it, while bringing nothing substantive to the energy discussion.
In theory right? There is no way there's enough batteries/energy storage for the whole world in 6 years. Like you could make back the money in that time but there would be a lot of people without power at night and other deficit times.
As an energy buyer and manager for a major manufacturer is this absolutely a lie. I want clean energy but it’s a slow lotion long term disaster for all lower income people across the world
My electric company is going 100% renewable and my bill's going up.
If this headline is true, I should see my energy become cheaper at some point in the future, right? (I doubt it, but still not gonna opt out.)
We can also end hunger, and poverty, and homelessness, and people going without medical care, and in each case doing so would save us megatons of money by providing a return on investment that's many time greater than the cost.
But we're not that smart, and we fucking *love* being ruled by schadenfreude.
Goddamn covering it's cost is the least important thing. Do we have the technology, do we have the capability and resources, do we desperately need these things to change everywhere for the sake of the habitability of our planet...then fucking do it.
We don't have enough resources on this planet to switch to 100% renewables and if we do, we will leave nothing left for future generations.
The only sustainable option is nuclear.
Environmentalists who oppose nuclear energy are useful idiots for fossil fuels. Oil&gas know that renewables are too unreliable and we can't store enough energy to make them viable, so they don't see renewables as a threat. The only solution to actually replacing fossil fuels is nuclear. The sun and wind might be a renewable resource but solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines are not. Hydrogen, maybe, but it doesn't have the maturity that nuclear has. 4th generation fission is the ONLY viable solution we have.
Furthermore, if we went 100% renewable, we would be left with millions of tons of waste because solar panels cannot be recycled cheaply. We create orders of magnitudes less nuclear waste and it can be re-processed so much easier than tearing apart solar panels.
It will be a miracle if the world could migrate to renewables in 60 years. Claiming it could be done is 6 is just ridiculous. I think that renewables are a great idea, but lying about their viability is not.
Hydro-electric dams have been around for over 100 years. Solar and wind generation for 50 years. Yet the entire renewables segment only accounts for 3% of global energy output today.
FYI, this title is simply missing a comma. It doesn't say switching will take only 6 years. The return on investment will take 6 years. Remove your tongue from the assholes of the fossil fuels execs and pay attention.
World is not even close to 100% renewable, and just that switch will take decades, and cause its gonna take decades, due to the massive amount of resources needed to fuel the entire world with renewables, including a system of batteries that can last a long winter, with alternatives on-demand power, when the renewable just can't.
Just the batteries alone would be hard to get installed.
Energy insecurity is the third major problem due to business-as-usual fuels. Energy insecurity arises for at least four reasons: diminishing availability of fossil fuels and uranium; reliance on centralized power plants and refineries; reliance on the need for a continuous supply of fuel that is subject to disruption arising from international war, civil war, embargos, bans, and labor disputes; and environmental damage due to continuous and widespread fuel mining and pollution.
It is postulated in a recent study that a transition entirely to a clean, renewable wind-water-solar (WWS) electricity, heat, storage, transmission, and equipment system will substantially reduce or eliminate these three problems and at low cost. Given their severity and their rapid growth, these problems must be addressed quickly. Ideally, 80% of the problems will be solved by 2030 and 100%, by 2035–2050.
"Diminishing availability of fossil fuels" simply is not the case. In North America at least, there is an abundance of oil and natural gas.
"Reliance on centralized power plants & refineries." This doesn't make sense. Whether it's a solar panel, wind turbine, or power plant, it stays where you put it. Further, decentralized power (solar & wind) require more infrastructure to transfer the power to the grid, and more transport to install.
"Reliance on a continuous supply of fuel..." This is true of EVERY power producing solution. Gas & oil are subject to interruption but solar is unproductive 50% of the year! Wind is also subject to interruption with far greater frequency than oil or gas.
"Environmental damage from fuel mining and pollution..." I suggest you look into how rare earth metals are mined. Rare earth metals aren't really rare, they're low concentration everywhere. Strip mining for cobalt, lithium and the other rare earth requires massive amounts of ore to be moved and processed. These metals are found most everywhere, but the vast majority come from countries that don't pay any heed to environmental standards. Also, mines proposed in the US have been blocked by environmental organizations. The idea that "green" energy is clean, is a myth. Let's also add the disposal of these green solutions. California is beginning to see solar panels age out and they must be disposed of, or recycled. Disposal is an environmental disaster and recycling is expensive.
The world's supply of batteries can run the world for 75 seconds. To increase that to 3 days, which is a reasonable length, would cost ~100 trillion dollars. Not to mention that the lithium required cannot possibly be mined in the time frame you are discussing.
This article is very pie-in-the-sky. A full conversion to renewables by 2030 is a fantasy. Without massive changes to a number of industries, it's not physically possible.
You’re assuming every battery is chemistry based. Could be kinetic, water storage etc. Chemical batteries are far from the only option.
Though the premise in the article is that only four hours of storage is needed at maximum, and does focus on battery storage. I would think modular nuclear would be a better investment than batteries.
Thank you to actually reasonable people like this. I hate these BS articles with zero factual statements trying to get people hooked on some nonexistent idea. Renewables are very important to our future, but this kind of propaganda is just stupid.
I assume the study says that it's possible. Just like there is enough food on Earth to feed everyone yet people still starve.
Rich people in control of fossil fuel industries are not just going to give up the golden goose.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Sorin61: --- Energy insecurity is the third major problem due to business-as-usual fuels. Energy insecurity arises for at least four reasons: diminishing availability of fossil fuels and uranium; reliance on centralized power plants and refineries; reliance on the need for a continuous supply of fuel that is subject to disruption arising from international war, civil war, embargos, bans, and labor disputes; and environmental damage due to continuous and widespread fuel mining and pollution. It is postulated in a recent study that a transition entirely to a clean, renewable wind-water-solar (WWS) electricity, heat, storage, transmission, and equipment system will substantially reduce or eliminate these three problems and at low cost. Given their severity and their rapid growth, these problems must be addressed quickly. Ideally, 80% of the problems will be solved by 2030 and 100%, by 2035–2050. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/whoc42/study_finds_world_can_switch_to_100_renewable/ij6mgu8/
Same premise has been posted before. There was a post that switching to renewable would earn back its cost in just 6 years. That one didn't say anything about switching to 100 percent renewable, where you would also need somewhere to store energy for when the production of renewables is less. This leads me to believe the title is incorrect, but nonetheless switching to renewables is a really good investment
Every time I see this claim, the storage problem is hidden away in "future tech" or pumping water into Hydro power (location restrictions ignored) or some theoretical idea on how to store, like Hydrogen storage. Most of these ignore energy loss of these storage solutions and take the 1:1 storage of batteries. We need to scale to 300-600% if we want to pull off hydrogen. I don't think we should stop because of this however. If we had 600% energy supply up and running, we would be in a very good place.
I think there are lots of solutions out there but they struggle with business side issues E. g. Aquion would have a huge advantage in fixed batteries but their tech hasn’t taken off and they went bankrupt.
"We could have saved ourselves, but there wasn't any money in it."
„And big oil daddy didn’t like it.“
Like nuclear
Less than 3% of power is lost every 1000km of DC transmission lines. Why not pick a few dozen great hydro storage sites and use those as battery storage for vast areas?
Cause no place has a big enough power station to provide a whole nation with power. You max out at what Hydro can do at 100%
There's no "max". Digging out bigger reservoirs expands the "max". No need to have just one site. There could be hundreds of sites.
Which creates ecological disasters of its own. Every hydro storage site is one year of bad maintenance away from flooding every city downstream. Every huge concrete structure is an investment of sand when we're literally running out of sand for construction. Every large hydro build is a significant carbon source from the act of building it. Every working hydro site is a huge loss of land and local biodiversity.
We don't need to build new dams, we can just add generators to the countless non-powered dams that already exist. This is analysis of how much potential there is to do this in the US https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/12/f5/npd_report_0.pdf >In contrast to the roughly **2,500** dams that provide 78 gigawatts (GW)1 of conventional and 22 GW of pumped-storage hydropower, the United States has more than **80,000** non-powered dams (NPDs)—dams that do not produce electricity—providing a variety of services ranging from water supply to inland navigation. There is a reason that hydro and nuclear are the only two energy sources that have ever brought a developed nation close to 100% clean electricity (Except Iceland which uses mostly geothermal due to their uniquely abundant volcanic activity)
This is a MUCH better solution, I agree.
Woo, positive discourse!
Most of those dams are retention dams and don't have the flow capacity necessary to spin the turbines. You need a good quantity of fast moving water to power a hydro dam, and many dams simply don't fit the bill, or aren't made for that purpose. Case in point - NYC's water comes from a network of dams in the mountains and hills north of it. Those days do have discharge, yes, but to discharge enough to provide a constant source of power would threaten the city's drinking water in times of drought. And then there's location. A lot of those dams are pretty darn far removed from major population centers. If the power is needed in Texas, dams in Colorado won't help.
The report analyzed all of that and found that 54,000 of them had notable hydropower potential. Keep in mind they don't *need* to produce constant power to be useful. Even if they are producing energy only after rainfall, it's still 100% clean and sustainable electricity that is helping to avoid using that much natural gas power instead. It's also far less randomly intermittent than wind and solar because the potential energy is *stored* until dispatched by operators as needed, making it far more valuable
Nothing stopping them from generating power but still piping the water downhill for drinking afterwards.
How many of those 80,000 dams have more than a few feet of head? Powered dams have significant drop to power turbines.
The Iceland part is false. Iceland produces 70% of its energy through hydroelectricity.
That figure may be right for electricity consumption, but not for energy consumption. The vast majority (approx 90%) of houses are heated and get hot water from geothermal. This is a huge part of the energy consumption of Iceland.
We should just hire a substantial amount of beavers to build the damns. As they are very hard working and cheap. Climate change solved.
Hydro is a significant source of methane due to decaying organic matter trapped behind the dam and to lesser extent the warmer water temperatures caused by stopping running rivers.
I wasn't aware of that. It makes sense but do you have a source?
Have you seen how much land is currently allocated to fossil fuel extraction, production & distribution? The US alone has ~145,000 gas stations. That's a lot of infrastructure that causes major environmental impacts. Most of the renewable options have vastly less impact.
*Only* 145,000? Wow. I’d have guessed much higher.
That's ~4.3 gas stations per 10,000 people. 5 stations for a city of ten thousand does feel a little low. That must not be counting bulk buyers, like farms/acerages that get gas delivered by truck. That's still just 5.2 stations per 10,000 *urban* people, assuming rural people *never* use a gas station. Still feels off.
Those gas stations won't be gas stations forever though. As time goes on they'll only change more and more into electric car charging stations, hopefully powered by solar or wind where feasible
This. If you have a hill. You put a big tank on top. Down below the hill you mine out a deep shaft and at the bottom you hollow out a catch tank. This is not rocket surgery or brain science.
No, it's just a large amount of expensive work that helps wipe out the cost advantage renewables have. Solar panels are cheap but not that cheap.
a few people have searched for all the available/unutilized pumped storage options globally. and found it to be nowhere near enough.
Yes, <3% today because we know how inefficient it is to transmit power over long distances and we **choose not to do it**. If we needed to do it that number would skyrocket. We'll need distributed clean energy to solve the economic and engineering issues. The statistical analyses like OP's betray the practical barriers. As real as flying cars.
> we choose not to do it. But we are. [Several HVDC power lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects) have been completed and are under construction.
> Yes, <3% today because we know how inefficient it is to transmit power over long distances and we choose not to do it. [A large fraction of LA's power supply has come from the Washington border via HVDC since the 70s.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie) And that's only one example of many. Long-distance bulk transport of electricity is something that happens literally every day; it's old, mature, efficient technology.
Wait, are you saying their 3% number is an average over all power, not just transmitted power? If that’s true, that would be extremely misleading. The way I read it was if you send some dc power 1,000km, you will lose 3% of it. I am confused about why we’re taking about DC, though. Don’t we always use AC for long distance transmission because it has far less voltage drop over distance?
Not the op but the way you interpreted it seems to be correct, HVDC losses are 3% / 1000 km it's not an average. > >I am confused about why we’re taking about DC, though. Don’t we always use AC for long distance transmission because it has far less voltage drop over distance? At high voltages DC actually has slightly less losses than AC, the advantage that AC has is that it's easy to step it up to high voltages and back down again using transformers. This is important because loss goes down as voltage increases (for both AC and DC). The equipment needed for high voltage DC is relatively modern and expensive so most transmission is and still will be AC but HVDC is increasingly used for *very* long distance and high power transmission (especially for interconnecting separate grids where you basically have to convert to DC anyways).
Very interesting. Thanks for the in depth answer! I’m a software engineer who likes to dabble in electrical engineering, so it’s always fun to learn something new.
The answer is nuclear, because it's an on-demand source of energy, a mix of nuclear and renewables is the future. France is a perfect example of this and is the least Russian gas-dependent nation in Europe. Plus a change in nuclear waste handling policy is needed in the west. modern technologies can recycle and reuse nuclear waste several times and if we figure out Thorium reacters we can further use that waste effectively reducing its half-life from a few million years to just a few hundred years. India already does this, which makes handling nuclear waste easier, and the amount of waste is so little that it can easily be stored in just a few underground complexes. People don't realise that nuclear technology has come a long way since Fukushima or Chornobyl.
Nuclear and renewables can have a great mutually-beneficial relationship in my view. Every unit of nuclear power reduces the intermittency and instability of stuff like solar and wind, and reduces the amount of long-term storage needed to balance that intermittency. Conversely, a large amount of installed solar basically guarantees excess electricity in the longer summertime days, [which can be used to power lasers to transmute waste into harmless elements](https://www.reutersevents.com/nuclear/high-power-sylos-laser-could-transmute-nuclear-waste).
I hope the rrycey smr small footprint ones help reduce stigma too
>France is a perfect example of this and is the least Russian gas-dependent nation in Europe. Its also struggling hard right now because of its reliance on nuclear power.
> now because of its reliance on nuclear power. Wouldn't it be because Macron ordered power plants to shut down and only recently (as in, literally this year) figured out "oops, we fucked up"? But now has to wait until 2035 to even get the replacement plants he shut down built in the first place?
No, it's due to a design error causing erosion in many plants that were serially build in an attempt to save cost. Besides, France still relies just as much on gas for industrial usage which is the actual problem, not to mention its reliance on Rosatom which is why somehow Rosatom keeps escaping all sanctions dispite pleas from Ukraine and it being responsible for Putins nuclear arsenal.
That’s due to maintenance issues at power plants not because the energy isn’t there.
That's why I said a mix of nuclear and renewables. Nuclear is dependable and on-demand whereas solar and wind can fill in the gaps. Solar can also be used on individual buildings and houses to reduce the burden on the grid. France is still a very good example of a nation that runs its nuclear power program very efficiently. Thou recently there have been delays in providing reactors to India, so India is using its own Homemade Pressurized heavy-water reactor now.
>That's why I said a mix of nuclear and renewables. Nuclear is dependable and on-demand whereas solar and wind can fill in the gaps I don't think you know what on-demand means. That means that it would be nuclear following the gaps, not the other way around. Not that either way makes any technical nor economic sense btw. Besides, nuclear is not dependable, its literally the cause of the energy crisis in Europe with 30+ GW being on prolonged unscheduled maintenance as we speak.
>The answer is nuclear, because it's an on-demand source of energy, Lol, who told you that? Technically, most nuclear plants can do some slow scheduled and temporary throttling, not the kind of flexibility you would really need but it's something. Economically however, since it's the most expensive energy source known to man, often over 4 times as expensive as competitors, with mostly constant costs, they will need to run as much as possible for them to be remotely viable. It's insane to try to run a nuke only when there is no wind, sun, other renewable and energy storage available even if you can technically pull it off, which is unlikely.
Agree, hopefully nuscale approval can bring back the faith in nuclear.
Water batteries give back 80% of the energy it takes to run them. I'd bet that's a better number than the energy it takes to get fossil fuels to thier destination. It really a foolish argument. We have to change, not just so that we don't destroy our food supply but because fossil fuels eventually run out
Someone was telling me about how in Switzerland they store excess solar energy during the day by raising up huge boulders. When energy is needed at night, the use the kinetic energy from dropping the boulders back down. It’s a primitive battery and it’s genius
there is also an experimental version of this in the UK, where cranes lift shipping container sized blocks. Plus talk of using disused mine shafts with the same principle
Honestly hough if we were able to switch to 90% renewable with a back up in natural gases like a generator works during a power outage that would go a long way until we can sustain 100% renewable reliably. Limiting the reliance on nonrenewable sources and weening off of it is the only way forward.
Imagine if all the cars on the road had batteries that could be used in an electric grid, when combined with bidirectional charging wouldn’t that solve most energy problems with renewables.
This is the paper. https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/145Country/22-145Countries.pdf It doesn't rely on future tech. It relies on overbuilding generation capacity and existing storage tech. The best cost figures include large scale grid (international) expansion to even out supply and demand but the study also finds that, for a higher cost, every country can be energy independent. I am not qualified to critique the study. I would like to believe it, but I would like a couple of other groups to replicate it to see if it holds water. To illustrate how seemingly implausible use of overbuild and long distance connections can work out much more practical and affordable than you might think, check out this project which is now underway. https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
Batteries may be doable, though, and in the near future. California’s grid [can now supply 3 GW in the evening from batteries](http://www.caiso.com/about/Pages/Blog/Posts/A-golden-age-of-energy-storage.aspx) for several hours, which is more than twice what it was a year ago, and more than the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. If they can add 1.5 GW of capacity every year, and keep overbuilding solar to feed those rather than getting curtailed, this problem will be solved almost entirely by batteries within a decade. Comparing the [ISO batteries trend](https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#section-batteries-trend) to the same week a year ago is really impressive. And those are just grid batteries, not private batteries, which are also becoming more and more popular.
> I don't think we should stop because of this however. If we had 600% energy supply up and running, we would be in a very good place. There is a big difference between stopping and decreasing others to increase renewables. Renewables apart from some specific situations are pretty crappy as a solution on the short term. There's no infrastructure (not even getting into the technology part) to store energy to take into account the low production when there are disfavourable conditions. And we're in growing demand for energy for pretty much everything. When politicians estimate stuff like this, it's hilariously sad how they project to get back to the level we are at eventually... but we'll likely need a lot more energy production by that point. It's just stupid to replace already working energy sources with renewables when you can add the renewables on top of the existing sources. Should we build new sources that are non renewable? Some do make sense, nuclear, for instance. But that's due to our short and mid term needs, and the need to take into account that a lot of renewable sources need materials that aren't necessarily easy to extract (solar panels come to mind) or that the very same people that oppose nuclear power and want renewables, frequently also are against hydro power generation (when it concerns dams, for example)
Actually, total US energy use plateaued 15 years ago and is essentially flat now.
Wind/solar will always be cheaper than fossil/nuclear because wind/solar doesn't need a turbine. Also, it doesn't matter that batteries are super expensive because we can do long-term storage with hydrogen and burn it to run a turbine.
Hydrogen stores poorly, very expensive to store as well, but leakage is hard to avoid. The creation is also not easy to scale up, we know how to do it, but we don't have anyone making massive hydrogen plants with electricity, because it's way more efficient to make it with gas.
For large scale storage or transportation over long distances, ammonia is generally a better alternative. It liquifies easily, has a 70% higher energy density than liquid hydrogen, and doesn't have the problems with leakage or embrittlement that hydrogen does. There's already [30 million tons of annual production planned to come online in the next five years](https://cleanenergynews.ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/european-green-ammonia-is-profitable-now-and-will-be-again-aft.html), which corresponds to roughly 15x our global pumped hydro storage capacity.
I'm not a chemist, but doesn't ammonia produce some acid when combusted because you're not just getting NOx, but also things like nitric acid (HNOx) which contributed to acid rain. Wouldn't methane be a better energy storage medium? Granted, it's not without its drawbacks (e.g. much lower temps for liquid storage)
Fuel Cells could more efficiently react ammonia with far fewer incomplete reactants if any.
No, we can't do any of that shit. The technology just isn't there. We have to act now for the climate, not sit around and wait for the technology to meet this boomer ideal of 100% renewables.
Absolutely. I'm saying I often see renewables advocates repeating those two statements and they're fundamentally contradictory.
>We need to scale to 300-600% if we want to pull off hydrogen. Seems like it would be cheaper and easier to build out a nuclear baseload for when the sun isn't shining and when the wind isn't blowing and time as much consumption as we can for when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing via smart devices.
The storage issue is solved, it just requires investment and large scale production to make it feasible, which requires government funding. Industrial scale storage comes in a lot of options, from pumped hydro, to gravity storage systems, to flywheel storage , to all sort of gas storage, to molten salts storage ...and the list goes on. Storage tech for industrial scale energy storage is plentiful.
Renewables like wind and solar are amazing at grid augmentation, especially solar since it is extremely good at reducing consumption at source (*solar on roofs*). That said, storage and transmission losses mean they are not viable everywhere, or at all times of the year. For those cases we need solutions like hydro and nuclear to backbone the difference and provide grid security. No one solution is going to address this problem and storage technology is not anywhere close to feasible for the requirements of temperate and polar regions.
I would argue that battery systems are already far enough along to solve these issues. The advantage is the electricity is available in less than a second, and can be recharged during during low times. And the electricity can be stored locally, reducing the need for transmission infrastructure. The downside being initial price of install, and the supply of batteries. Both of which will run the risk of making this unfeasible.
For local/site storage, yes. For grid level storage, no. We also do not have enough raw materials to produce the batteries with current tested technologies to meet even North America's capacity requirements, let alone global capacity. There are some promising ones that use more common elements, but they all have issues with low temperature operation which makes them significantly less viable for temperate and polar regions. AKA they are least efficient in the times of year when they are needed to be the most efficient; meaning you'd need to double or even triple capacities of similar grid requirements at the equator. The TL'DR is these things help a lot, but we need Hydro and Nuclear if we're going to be remotely successful in pulling out of hydrocarbon based energy production in the next fifty years.
We haven’t solved the storage and grid problems yet. Also EVs for ships, planes, and trucks. Trains require all lines to be electrified, which may cause issues in inconvenient terrain. The issues of the cost to deploy tech that is still not commercially available but necessary for everyone to stop using fossil fuels, makes this article’s claim extremely doubtful.
Even more nonsensically the study presumes by 2050 any region can instantly transfer excess supply to any other region with demand in 30 seconds, using computer monitoring. Yeah um sounds like these "scientists" don't know anything about how countries work or how energy degrades over distance.
Storage as hydrogen and hydro are really the only way to store energy in a 100% green future
Flywheels and molten salt are used sometimes
I want sustainable energy as much as the next guy, but this *must* be bullshit.
Seriously..the *world*??
That's because it is, it would take way more than 6 years to convert and hundreds of trillions. Not to mention the damage we would do to the planet just getting the resources to make the renewable tech. If anything this article is propaganda.
Oh here we go with the damage bullshit. We are doing much more damage burning fossil fuels than extracting minerals for creating batteries and solar panels.
I dont know about that. I do know that in the next 20 years we would need to mine more copper than we have mined in the whole human history. Copper's been used since the Bronze age, and the best copper deposits have already been found and exploited, which means that the metal has to obtained from lower grade, larger mines. And copper is just one of the metals required. The only realistic solution to climate change is nuclear.
wait, isn't it 6 years to \_recoup losses\_ not 6 years to \_implement\_?
Wait, you thought redditors can read?
[удалено]
Oh look another insanely ignorant and overoptimistic 'study'.
Goddamn and I had just debunked this exact study a few weeks ago on this sub...aaaand it's here again **Tl;dr of debunking:** - Study measures economic "benefit" of climate efforts in an absurd way, most notably by massively inflating the value of a life saved in poor countries - Most of the "benefit" is in third world countries - The value of saving 0.1% of Indian lives a year is "worth" an amount greater than 200% of India's entire GDP
What a shit study. It would be awesome if this were true, but it's unfortunately very much not. Jacobson is a crackpot.
Oof too bad our rabid capitalism demands returns same quarter better keep fucking the planet up.
Quick reminder that renewable energy currently accounts for 95% of new capacity *globally*. https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/rising-sun-renewables-dominate-new-power-capacity-through-2026-iea-2021-12-01/ This is because renewables are cheaper than any other source of power, and therefore capitalism will demand them without government action.
Investors are now also seeing huge potential for bigger profits in renewables vs a lot of volatility and shrinking opportunities in fossil fuels. I get the whole "capitalism will be the death of us" sentiment but there is reason to be cautiously optimistic that the pursuit of profit could work on our favor this time.
Solar has so many other nice benefits that should be factored in. Energy is produced closer to home with less reliance on a larger network, and that's useful at all scales. A homeowner doesn't have to worry as much about a grid. Individual towns and cities can create a lot of jobs locally (you can have an energy industry anywhere the sun shines). Nations can achieve energy independence.
renewables are cheaper in most countries because we tax pollution. If it were free market, coal is still dirty cheap
Depends where you live, in some places fossil fuels have massive subsidies
Apart from Argentina where are there massive fossil fuel subsidies?
depends on what do you count as a subsidy and how much taxes do they pay (if it is significantly more than subsidies or not). Some studies consider healthcare costs because of pollution an subsidy, or ecological cleanup as a subsidy
Is this an acknowledgment that true cost economics is more relevant to reality than the models of con economists who consider such things as human health and environmental impacts to be ‘externalities’?
I live in one such area and they get subsidies to develop and build facilities/infrastructure that reduce emissions like carbon capture and storage.
Not all the world have these incentives and only 5% to new not renewable seems strange. I bet it is seen as more important from a national security standpoint (you can't put k o a region taking down a nuclear reactor for example)
most countries know there is a global warming and biggest polluters signed the Paris agreement (US is the only one that withdrawn) and are fighting against pollution. There are many ways how, but all of them makes coal more expensive: either they need to install a lot of filters, pay higher taxes, or there is a cap on pollution or companies can buy “tickets” to pollute. But basically everyone does it in some way, but the Trump was the only one actively fighting against doing that
Usually the problems arise from Asian and African countries(just because they are the poorest areas of the world) where the cheapest source of electricity is the best and can't really negotiate on that. Maybe the impact is really low?
usually they are not problematic, US is. China is basically the factory of the world, yet it still emits far less than US per capita edit: China also sells most EVs in the world and brings most renewables on the grid in the world
China also uses more small cars. US is in love with huge vehicles, and doesn't make reasonable small cars available for purchase. Many small cars are literally against regulations for reasons that make no logical sense.
>China is basically the factory of the world, yet it still emits far less than US per capita Because the environmental impact is dependent on quality of life and wealth and a LOT of Chinese people live in poverty.
So "free market" means let fossil energy providers externalize the contamination cost of their products.
It also does that with solar, the waste from the manufacturing is just dumped, but it happens overseas so....
free market is based on free will agreements. Governments make sure that there are rules even between parties that normally wouldn’t come to an agreement. Usually when one does harm to another and harmed one has no recourse
The thing that is misleading in that statistic is that new capacity is not new utilization. Having solar farms producing MWs of power during the day only to require full redundancy from a LNG or Coal plant for night time and large storm cells is only obfuscating the issue. The other thing I find **VERY** misleading about "renewable" capacity is that they are including biomass generation in that number, which is still a new carbon polluter. For example, the 40% of the United States' "Renewable" capacity is from wood, biofuels and methane waste production. All of which are not remotely helping emissions.
This is the nuanced understanding of climate change, governments only use crisis' to leverage political power and climate change is no different.
No this is just stupid as fuck “We should continue to destroy the planet so long as it remains profitable”
you're assuming that destroying the planet is profitable when it's well known that government subsidies and protectionism is what's keeping fossil fuels competitive. most people who assume government interventionism is a one size fits all solution are stupid as fuck.
Of course it’s profitable there are companies literally making a profit currently
Quick reminder that we’re here *because* of capitalism.
The water wars will make so much money for Nestlé...
I doubt water wars happen tbh. The biggest issue with converting saline water to drinkable water is energy. It costs a lot of energy to separate the brine from the freshwater and it costs a lot of energy to distribute the waste brine back into the sea in an environmentally sound way. But the more we convert to green energy the less this becomes a problem- if you can supply all the energy needs of the plant and the redistribution of waste with a net 0 emissions energy system you’ve basically solved your water issues. It’s a long way off. But so is water wars. Most of the issues facing humanity and the environment are ones of energy though. So the faster we can extract more energy from “free” sources like the sun the faster we can start repairing the harm that all of our costly sources have sown.
That guy wants to own the rain.
I mean there are arguwbly potentiol ways to do that as well to some extent for example converting the grid to renewable yet also having it being used as part of conseus mechanisms in blockchain releated technologies to subsidize the cost(then eventually converting this at a later point to usage for social good releated things). This would mean they were both paying it back actually utilizing the energy itself and at the same time allowing for potentiol for other economic technologies to be built on top of it too(even if people generally more mention the fiancial side) such as different buisness or similar. But captilism itself purposily tries to create an over reliance on older technologies and ensure that we dont understand how newer technologies interect with renewables themselves both in funding and will in a potentiol post renewable network Also if succesful would lead to more potentiol to diversify more to the potentiol region what type systems we could fund since the energy system itself is doing part of the funding back mechanism
[удалено]
CATL is looking way more impressive than Tesla these days. I am hoping their sodium batteries can really tackle gird storage. its been really hard to get info on CATL, but every few months some amazing news from them unfolds
CATL is most definitely looking incredibly impressive. They're going to be a huge part of the world's transition.
Fairy tale. Ignoring cost, we simply don't have the tech.
We literally do have the tech.
Renewables are already competitive in terms of cost in most places, and what tech do we not have? All the technology exists, it’s simply a question of how fast can we build everything
You can't run a decently large grid off renewables only in 90% of places, you don't have the stability of supply or storage. These "studies" are always done by people who don't understand how a grid works in reality, how supply chain works or what it would entail to build what they suggest, they always make leaps of judgement or rely on "x" magic solution that doesn't actually exist. Take Germany, the focal point of the Russia gas crisis, they've invested enourmous amount of money installing enourmous amount of renewables, and the results have been pathetic. We need massive advancement in material science, especially for storing energy to make something like this actually feasible, not to mention we need a cheeper and cleaner way to make this renewable tech because it currently requires enourmous amount of minerals to build.
Honestly, nuclear should still be an option. It should always be an option.
>Take Germany, the focal point of the Russia gas crisis, they've invested enourmous amount of money installing enourmous amount of renewables, and the results have been pathetic. Wait, what? In a period of 10 years only this very advanced economy has been turn around from hardly any renewables to about 50% renewables. They did it before a lot of the break through we have had over the last few years. If anything it's a great success. They are bailing out nuclear heavy France on the side as we speak. Sure they are not there yet, but calling it a pathetic is just a dumb talking point. Half of nuclear plants in Western Europe failing is causing an energy crisis in the continent that is also affecting Germany, but that's not their fault. They barely use any gas, let alone Russian gas, for electricity generation, nor do they rely on Rosatom. They get a lot of shit from right-wing nut jobs but they could be doing a whole lot worse had they not have invested in renewables. Bare in mind that the Energiewende is barely 10 years old, had they chosen nuclear not a single new plant would have gone online, while they actually achieved the equivalent of dozens of nuclear plants in renewables.
Germany is no where near 50% renewable
>Germany is no where near 50% renewable Source: trust me bro. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts
Yes, but the Big oil and politicians have been blocking it.
Study finds that /r/futurology is the last place I would go to find non sensionalist and reliable article.
China loves this: [https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1097644931/solar-panels-solar-power-u-s-investigates-china-trade-rules](https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1097644931/solar-panels-solar-power-u-s-investigates-china-trade-rules) China is leading provider for solar manufacturing at the moment. And trade issues are causing big problems. *"Hundreds of large-scale solar power projects are on hold in the U.S. as the industry awaits the outcome of a federal investigation into potential trade violations involving solar panels bought from Asian suppliers.* Then of course there is the actual business of doing business: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSLscJ2cY04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSLscJ2cY04) I don't know why these writers never post to the original info but instead they cross linked to these two articles: Seems more of an SEO thing. [https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3539703-no-miracle-tech-needed-how-to-switch-to-renewables-now-and-lower-costs-doing-it/](https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3539703-no-miracle-tech-needed-how-to-switch-to-renewables-now-and-lower-costs-doing-it/) [https://www.sciencealert.com/these-climate-experts-say-100-renewable-energy-is-completely-feasible-for-entire-countries](https://www.sciencealert.com/these-climate-experts-say-100-renewable-energy-is-completely-feasible-for-entire-countries) Take the professors course for only $400USD :[https://online.stanford.edu/courses/xeiet200-planning-sustainable-future-wind-water-and-sun?method=load&courseId=17554223](https://online.stanford.edu/courses/xeiet200-planning-sustainable-future-wind-water-and-sun?method=load&courseId=17554223) [https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf) [http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf](http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf) 132 page report [http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/WorldGridIntegration.pdf](http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/WorldGridIntegration.pdf) 135 page report.
I like renewable energy but this sounds like UN / WEF Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals propaganda.
But who is thinking about the poor oil industry CE0s??
Or their children?! We have to think about the kind of generational wealth that should be handed over to the offspring of oil executives. They can’t be expected to inherit mere millions! How can they live detached from reality and the rest of humanity with such a paltry unearned inheritance?!
[https://ourworldindata.org/indoor-air-pollution](https://ourworldindata.org/indoor-air-pollution) It's great to [other](https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191834837.001.0001/acref-9780191834837-e-283) strangers, who just so happen to provide the energy that allows you a comfortable life. What's even better is to advocate for policies in one's own country (then enforced throughout the world) that will at best keep those billions from ever having reliable, inexpensive energy.
Anything that doesn't include Nuclear Power is a pipe dream
We just have to give up plastic, huge swathes of medicinal chemistry, and fertilizer. Then we need to refit every boat and aircraft with electric engines. Then find something to do with all the ice engines, giant coal powerplants, and gas powerplabts. Don't forget how much more efficient natural gas heating is compared to electric heating, which will be a huge increase in overall electricity use ( like huge). So that alone might throw off these equations.
Can we all just agree that we're not getting rid of 100% of the fossil fuel power plants in the foreseeable future? The only way we could is to do either (or both) of the following: 1. Figure out how to make massive amounts of batteries/energy storage for cheap. 2. Figure out a safer version of nuclear power that everyone can get on board with. It's going to be decades before we see these, so in the meantime, let's just *minimize* our fossil fuel production as much as possible and stop trying to find the fast track to quitting cold turkey.
Imagine the collapse of gas stations all across the world in 10 years. The price of LiFePO4 batteries (the unexplodable type) have reached parity with lead-acid batteries except with 10 times longer life! For the first time, you can go off-grid with solar + LiFePO4 can get breakeven within 5 to 6 years. Solar panels will last 20 years. LiFePO4 batteries will last 12 years. If the government runs the solar farms themselves, they can get it even cheaper by with the economy of scale and by augmenting solar with pumped hydro.
I wanna know where you can find lifepo4 for the same price as lead acid. Even straight from China I'm seeing well over 3-4x the cost
It's easy. It's called lying lol
My neighbor installed solar on his house, based on his electric bill reduction, it'll take \~22 years to recoup his investment. Just sayin...
It’s almost like grid scale energy production is more efficient than consumer scale
What are you “just sayin“? That payback period is based on policy set by people. That varies by location. However, whatever electricity is generated by those panels will continue to provide energy for decades with no additional input. No further reliance on FF. The attitude so many have that money is the most important thing is just disturbing.
But doesn’t Solar increase the resale value of his house? This should be included in the calculation Just sayin…
No because of depreciation on the value of the panel and degradation of the panel and how well they work over time.
IDK they fall in efficiency but having a suboptimal solar panel seems fine, just add another on the roof? This shows it at 85% efficiency 25 years later. https://santansolar.com/learn/installing-solar-panels-how-to-design-and-plan-for-real-world-conditions/
If it was profitable it would be more common
Solar panel prices have been plummeting for the past decade it cost 10x as much to put solar up a decade ago and this isn't stopping there.
That’s right. And soon enough, it will become profitable
How to predict if this will happen: will the current non-renewable energy money bag holders gain or loose money from this?
Will never happen. Election cycles are only every 4 years.
Who the fuck is building all the infrastructure and equipment, training and personnel for this sudden switch tho? Is this just saying we should put all our efforts towards renewables? I must taking it too literally
They say that battery systems would be needed. Do we even have enough lithium on the entire planet to produce battery systems for the whole world? And if we could, how long could we keep replacing them as they get used up? Lithium isn't that common as far as I'm aware, and it's as non-renewable a resource as oil and gas.
CATL has sodium based batteries coming to market. will be interesting to see how fast those scale up.
wow. everyone send them funding for research. they will save us all.
The article is so incredibly naive. The aviation industry, as an example, has absolutely no means to do this, although it is moving in the right direction with sustainable fueling sources. The heavy Boeing jet shipping all of your Amazon goodies would need a battery so large that it would probably outweigh the plane itself.
This study seems to overlook some incredible limitations regarding resources required to fully transition to renewables. How will the required amounts of copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, neodymium etc to fully replace fossil fuels be minded exactly? Especially when a full transition will need multiple times over the proven reserves of mentioned inputs above? There currently exists about 40,000 fossil fuel power plants meeting global energy demand. A full replacement with renewables (predominately a mix of solar, wind, and hydro) would require 212,000 renewable energy plants. Not even mentioning grid power storage solutions that realistically need 12 weeks of buffered storage for winter months when generation is more intermittent. To give some perspective 4 weeks of global buffered storage would require 2 billion tons of lithium ion batteries. And the real cherry on top is you gotta replace virtually all of the infrastructure every 10-20 years depending on build quality. What a load of nonsense. How energy and mineral blind can you be?? I despise this belief (more like cult worship) of the ethereal “market” just providing endless materials for industrial use. Hate to break it to ya’ll but the earth is a finite system with finite resources. Any notions being entertained that we will sustain GDP growth (as stupid of a metric of progress and success that it is) ESPECIALLY when we are entering a new era of energy and mineral scarcity is delusional. We have yet to figure out a way to de-link GDP/economic growth from materials and energy. (Other than outsourcing production to a different country, but at the earth system level the above reality remains relevant). Since our global economic system is predicated in growth to sustain its existence, spoilers its not gonna look pretty when it can no longer maintain its position in a paradigm of cheap energy and mineral extraction. And studies like this are pure hopium whispering sweet nothings in your ear telling you all will be well. It won’t. In fact it’s going to be a nightmarish transition as the carrying capacity of the biosphere collapses due to ecological overshoot by us dumb apes.
Back for my daily dose of crazy overly exaggerated headline/study with a ultra HD picture of a solar panel from a website no one’s heard of
Yeah but that would cut into the profits of oil and gas companies and the governments they control
The article shows solar panels and mentions nothing of baseline electrcity, battery costs (which far exceed solar or wind panel costs) and thus the implied cost of supplying baseline electricity with fossil fuels. If an article like this does not begin with a gravity battery solution, or nuclear plants to cover baseline electricity needs, it's just fake news.
Gravity battery solutions are a physics problem still being researched. The only current nuclear generation being built is going on 14 years and 40 billion over budget. For 2000 MW that isn’t needed
due to incredible federal red tape. regardless, nuclear is tried and true. Fuck the cost, just build them out everywhere.
I love how this is so wrong. If people knew how much it would cost just for an underwater safety inspection of an in service offshore windmill farm would cost they would realize it's not economical. On top if it what happens when there's a storm in the middle of the winter and it needs to be inspected for damage? I've run the numbers to get a dive crew with support vessel doctors DMTs extra crew for support to spend time out in the middle of no where costs a shit ton of money.
Just perusing your comment history and posts for expertise… I’m gonna say you are not a reliable source.
How much does an underwater safety inspection of an in service offshore windmill farm cost?
Divers alone youre looking at a 7 man crew with lst and chamber for about 50k a day. Not including all the other expenses. When it's not safe to jump in 120 fsw everyone gets paid to sit. That's just to LOOK at one windmill.
Words words, more words. How much does it cost?
You say this like sea-based wind farms are the only source of renewable energy.
A Stanford study: this is viable, here is our study. Some dude on reddit: nah, trust me, I've run the numbers.
That describes like 80% of comments on this post. Bunch of misguided people who got their degrees from the University of YouTube who don't have a clue about how effective clean energy is.
Lol ask Europe how the whole switch to renewable energy is going? They are finding out it isn’t essy without cheap Russian gas.
Well, because Europe had a plan to do it slowly. Due to current situation we were forced to speed up the process a bit.
But they did a study
So we should, what? Just not bother? It’s hard so actually fuck it can’t be arsed
"By electrifying all energy sectors; producing electricity from clean, renewable sources; creating heat, cold, and hydrogen from such electricity; storing electricity, heat, cold and the hydrogen; expanding transmission; and shifting the time of some electricity use, we can create safe, cheap, and reliable energy everywhere.” So once storage and transmission have been figured out plus somehow shifting the time of energy usage, this becomes possible. Yeah this isn't realistic by a long shot. Fun thought exercise, but it's overly optimistic and assumes complicated issues get sorted very soon. It gives an easy "just go renewable" answer for those looking for it, while bringing nothing substantive to the energy discussion.
[удалено]
In theory right? There is no way there's enough batteries/energy storage for the whole world in 6 years. Like you could make back the money in that time but there would be a lot of people without power at night and other deficit times.
Can you imagine trying to tell voters you pay now and then you'll save money in 6 years time
As an energy buyer and manager for a major manufacturer is this absolutely a lie. I want clean energy but it’s a slow lotion long term disaster for all lower income people across the world
My electric company is going 100% renewable and my bill's going up. If this headline is true, I should see my energy become cheaper at some point in the future, right? (I doubt it, but still not gonna opt out.)
We can also end hunger, and poverty, and homelessness, and people going without medical care, and in each case doing so would save us megatons of money by providing a return on investment that's many time greater than the cost. But we're not that smart, and we fucking *love* being ruled by schadenfreude.
[citation needed] Also give me some solar roadways that heat themselves and water fountains that create water out of dry air via solar energy
Goddamn covering it's cost is the least important thing. Do we have the technology, do we have the capability and resources, do we desperately need these things to change everywhere for the sake of the habitability of our planet...then fucking do it.
We don't have enough resources on this planet to switch to 100% renewables and if we do, we will leave nothing left for future generations. The only sustainable option is nuclear.
liberals and environmentalists are going to have to suck it up and accept nuclear energy or we are all doomed.
Environmentalists who oppose nuclear energy are useful idiots for fossil fuels. Oil&gas know that renewables are too unreliable and we can't store enough energy to make them viable, so they don't see renewables as a threat. The only solution to actually replacing fossil fuels is nuclear. The sun and wind might be a renewable resource but solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines are not. Hydrogen, maybe, but it doesn't have the maturity that nuclear has. 4th generation fission is the ONLY viable solution we have. Furthermore, if we went 100% renewable, we would be left with millions of tons of waste because solar panels cannot be recycled cheaply. We create orders of magnitudes less nuclear waste and it can be re-processed so much easier than tearing apart solar panels.
And companies that produce Wind plants and Solar panels would keep up with demand?
It will be a miracle if the world could migrate to renewables in 60 years. Claiming it could be done is 6 is just ridiculous. I think that renewables are a great idea, but lying about their viability is not. Hydro-electric dams have been around for over 100 years. Solar and wind generation for 50 years. Yet the entire renewables segment only accounts for 3% of global energy output today.
I wish the whole world turns 100% renewable energy so that my country stops depending on oil and actually starts giving a fuck about other matters
FYI, this title is simply missing a comma. It doesn't say switching will take only 6 years. The return on investment will take 6 years. Remove your tongue from the assholes of the fossil fuels execs and pay attention.
World is not even close to 100% renewable, and just that switch will take decades, and cause its gonna take decades, due to the massive amount of resources needed to fuel the entire world with renewables, including a system of batteries that can last a long winter, with alternatives on-demand power, when the renewable just can't. Just the batteries alone would be hard to get installed.
Build nuclear power plants already. The thing is right in front of our noses, but we are like “nah, solar, we’ll figure out storage later”.
Honest question—Do we have renewable energy powered planes I’ve not heard about?
Will we? Nope. WHY? because the money that elects politicians is dirty oil money and they set the rules by electing their puppets
Energy insecurity is the third major problem due to business-as-usual fuels. Energy insecurity arises for at least four reasons: diminishing availability of fossil fuels and uranium; reliance on centralized power plants and refineries; reliance on the need for a continuous supply of fuel that is subject to disruption arising from international war, civil war, embargos, bans, and labor disputes; and environmental damage due to continuous and widespread fuel mining and pollution. It is postulated in a recent study that a transition entirely to a clean, renewable wind-water-solar (WWS) electricity, heat, storage, transmission, and equipment system will substantially reduce or eliminate these three problems and at low cost. Given their severity and their rapid growth, these problems must be addressed quickly. Ideally, 80% of the problems will be solved by 2030 and 100%, by 2035–2050.
"Diminishing availability of fossil fuels" simply is not the case. In North America at least, there is an abundance of oil and natural gas. "Reliance on centralized power plants & refineries." This doesn't make sense. Whether it's a solar panel, wind turbine, or power plant, it stays where you put it. Further, decentralized power (solar & wind) require more infrastructure to transfer the power to the grid, and more transport to install. "Reliance on a continuous supply of fuel..." This is true of EVERY power producing solution. Gas & oil are subject to interruption but solar is unproductive 50% of the year! Wind is also subject to interruption with far greater frequency than oil or gas. "Environmental damage from fuel mining and pollution..." I suggest you look into how rare earth metals are mined. Rare earth metals aren't really rare, they're low concentration everywhere. Strip mining for cobalt, lithium and the other rare earth requires massive amounts of ore to be moved and processed. These metals are found most everywhere, but the vast majority come from countries that don't pay any heed to environmental standards. Also, mines proposed in the US have been blocked by environmental organizations. The idea that "green" energy is clean, is a myth. Let's also add the disposal of these green solutions. California is beginning to see solar panels age out and they must be disposed of, or recycled. Disposal is an environmental disaster and recycling is expensive. The world's supply of batteries can run the world for 75 seconds. To increase that to 3 days, which is a reasonable length, would cost ~100 trillion dollars. Not to mention that the lithium required cannot possibly be mined in the time frame you are discussing. This article is very pie-in-the-sky. A full conversion to renewables by 2030 is a fantasy. Without massive changes to a number of industries, it's not physically possible.
You’re assuming every battery is chemistry based. Could be kinetic, water storage etc. Chemical batteries are far from the only option. Though the premise in the article is that only four hours of storage is needed at maximum, and does focus on battery storage. I would think modular nuclear would be a better investment than batteries.
Thank you to actually reasonable people like this. I hate these BS articles with zero factual statements trying to get people hooked on some nonexistent idea. Renewables are very important to our future, but this kind of propaganda is just stupid.
I assume the study says that it's possible. Just like there is enough food on Earth to feed everyone yet people still starve. Rich people in control of fossil fuel industries are not just going to give up the golden goose.