this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Building out more and more renewables doesn't mean anything if emissions aren't falling - and they aren't. Since 2021, nearly 4 full years, the world has closed less than 1% of active coal power plants.
The buildout of renewables has arrived hand-in-hand with an increase in total energy usage. The energy mix has improved greatly in favor of renewables, tons of CO2 per KWh is way down, unfortunately we just use more KWh so total emissions are still rising.
Everything in the meme is a leading indicator for positive change, which is wonderful, but the actual change needs to materialize on a rather short timetable. Stories about happy first derivatives don't count for much.
From your link it, for me, it seems like emissions are platooning, similar to a technological S curve. Even if China and India are growing exponentially, reduction in other countries are enough to slow down the process significantly (specially if you zoom in in the last 10 years).
It’s very hard to predict change, but I suspect the deprecation of solutions that emit lots of emissions is about to skyrocket.
We might already have reached peak carbon emissions. There's also the thing where renewables are so much cheaper that it's in most countries best self interest to build renewables.
The thing the world is doing now is more energy but the cheapest one is electricity so more electricity. The duck curve is an energy storage opportunity that's being taken advantage of more and more. Things are heading in the right direction but it's not fast enough.
The next emissions on the chopping block are household heating and cement and low-med industrial heat with more advanced heat pumps or heat pumps set up in series.
I've decided to become cautiously optimistic recently the more I learn about how science is advancing the renewables despite governments sometimes being in the way.
Closing will come later, when alternatives are widely available. What renewable energy does currently - at least here - is forcing those plants temporarily out of the market, especially during summer months and windy weather. The plants will exist and stay ready in case of need for well over a decade, maybe even two - but they will start up ever more rarely.
Technically, the deal is: we don't have seasonal energy storage. Short term storage is being built - enough to stabilize the grid for a cold windless hour, then a day, then a week... that's about as far as one can go with batteries and pumped hydro.
To really get the goods one has to add seasonal storage or on-demand nuclear generation. The bad news is that technologies for seasonal storage aren't fully mature yet, while nuclear is expensive and slow to build. There's electrolysis and methanation, there's iron reduction, there are flow batteries of various sorts, there's seasonal thermal storage already (a quarter step in the right direction)...
...but getting the mixture right takes time. Instead of looking at the number of closed plants, one should look at the sum of emissions. To remain hopeful, the sum should stop growing very soon.
That was in the link I posted. Emissions are Currently at record highs.
Slowing growth isn't enough; we need significant, sustained, reductions in the very near future, and negative emissions and sequestering carbon in the medium term.
None of that is happening at a scale that would inspire optimism.
Thankfully, we are actually solving this problem by just making solar panels comically cheap. We are going to solve seasonal swings in power demand by just spamming the ever-loving-hell out of solar panels. Solar is so vastly cheaper than nuclear that this is the better option.
If the panels are cheap enough, you can build enough of them to meet your needs even on a cloudy winter day. Then the rest of the year you have dirt-cheap energy. In turn, a lot of power-intensive industries can move to a seasonal model to take advantage of the nearly-free energy during the warmer months. We have a crop growing season, why not a steel smelting season, or an AI model training season?
That's a pretty big gap to cover with spamming more panels. I would venture to guess: this approach would work up to latitude 45 or so.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/surface-solar-radiation-d_1213.html
Where I live, in midwinter, the day is 6 hours long. Over here, wind turns more heads than solar. But yes, solar is riduculously quick to install.
The key is that, watt for watt, new solar right now costs about a quarter what new fission does. The cost difference has gotten that ridiculous. There are other options as well of course. We can use that superabundant power in the summer to split water and make lots of hydrogen, and use that for power in the winter. We can even use it to pull CO2 from the air, convert it to synthetic fuels like synthetic methane, and just run our old natural gas plants for power in the winter.
And we're easily headed to a world where watt for watt, solar is 1/10th the cost of new fission. At that point, even at high latitudes, it makes more sense to use solar power even in winter. I mean sure, if you're at such extreme latitudes that you have months of total darkness, then solar will have a problem there. Maybe small modular reactors make sense for those niche applications. But even then, those areas are probably better relying on synthetic fuels made from solar power plants at lower latitudes. Or even better, those higher latitudes also get very long days during the summer months, so they can make their own hydrogen during the summer and run their grids off tanks of that in the winter. Or, if nothing else, we can always just run some long power cables north-to-south.
Currently, solar still makes economic sense, but from April to October. Lots of it was built rather fast, now the adoption is slowing since the grid can't accept it everywhere.
Consequently, summer is when oil shale miners rest and prepare for the next season.
Since the goal is to get rid of mining oil shale, big plans exist to install a lot of wind power. Sadly, this has gone embarrassingly slow, and it cannot cover winter consumption, and there is not enough storage.
As a result, some companies and building out storage, but only enough to last a few hours.
...and in the next country southwards, there is a huge gas reservoir that could accept methane, enough to last the whole winter, but nobody has a good enough handle on methanation to renewably produce a considerable quantity and store it there. :o
With regard to reactors, it seems likely that getting one would take 10 years and the local country here doesn't even have legislation built out for nuclear power. They're drafting it. Starting from zero is quite slow.
One technology that's being developed that can help is high-voltage superconducting DC power, which can send power thousands of miles. So if it's a sunless, windless day in the Northeast they can send power from the Midwest to stabilize the grid.
Also, I'm very bullish on Iron-Air batteries for long-term grid-level storage.
Didn't Britian just close down it's last coal plant? Also Colorado is switching away as well. I thought natural gas was replacing coal?