Wind and solar need to replace fossil fuel, not mere overtake them. And they need to do so now.
Cont: Global warming discussion V
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Wind and solar need to replace fossil fuel, not mere overtake them. And they need to do so now.
Hercules56
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Wind and solar will not give us enough power to maintain our current materalistic, ever-spending ever-buying economy.
We need more fission power plants and fusion power. World should come together now and create a Manhattan Project to create safe fusion power.
Hercules56
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AMOC could shut down as early as 2025. I don't expect that soon, but even within 25 years would be terrible. Ice Age in Europe.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/worl...-current-collapse-climate-scn-intl/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/worl...-current-collapse-climate-scn-intl/index.html
lobosrul5
Philosopher
Scandinavia, Germany, and the UK would start having winters like the same latitude in Canada if I'm not mistaken.
Hercules56
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No, I think much worse, colder and snowier.
lobosrul5
Philosopher
The record low in Winnipeg Canada... and thats hardly that far north is negative 54 Fahrenheit. I don't think its gonna get much colder than that. Also, it may actually be drier. For comparisons sake, London England (not Ontario), which is actually a bit further north, record is negative 3.
Yes, they will. I think you base your idea on the lies of Big Oil and Big Nuclear. Fission and fusion are not necessary even though the nuclear lobby would like us to think so.
No, we don't need that. There are so many things 'the world' (or 'we' or whatever) 'should come together' and do. It remains to be seen if fusion will ever become a reliable source of energy, but wind and solar are already well-known, reliable and safe - in particular as long as the world hasn't and won't 'come together'. (Nuclear plants are great targets!)
Big Oil and Big Nuclear will probably continue to claim that solar and wind aren't reliable sources of power. Solar appears to be worth the investments even in an often cloudy northern country like Denmark. Owners of fields with poor soil have discovered that solar panels deliver a more profitable 'crop' than agriculture. (And why not place them on roofs of buildings to power air conditioning?)
I don't see why states like Texas aren't already full of them. Plenty of sun and plenty of barren land. Oh yeah: Big Oil lobbyism and politicians like Ted Cruz to lie about the cause of blackouts. (It also requires ordinary people who believe their lies, but I tend to blame the liars, not the ones who are duped by them.).
'Big Wind' and 'Big Solar' lobbyists are beginning to appear - at least around here.
Meet Invest in Denmark at WindEurope 2023 in Copenhagen
Wind Europe annual event in Copenhagen 2023
ETA: As for "... to maintain our current materalistic, ever-spending ever-buying economy."
You do know that many people in 'our (!) economy' need to have more than one job just to pay the rent and other bare necessities, don't you?!
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Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
Actually it will. New solar panels are coming that produce twice as much power at half the cost. New batteries are coming out that use sodium which is much cheaper and safer. Solar is already cheaper than coal, so once these new products hit the market coal is dead. The transition will be much faster than 'experts' predict.
More 'big energy' fantasies. Fission power plants take many years to build. We will build more, but by the time they come online solar + wind and storage will be cheaper.
Fusion is a pipe dream, and betting our future on it is a huge mistake. Any resources we waste on trying to develop it are resources we could have put into renewables to get a return on now, not at some distant time in the future that probably won't happen.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist
Nobody is betting our future on fusion. After all, renewables exist.
Do you think the resources are coming out of the same bucket? We can afford both.
Meanwhile in this week's episode of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, they (briefly) discuss Copenhagen Atomics, a company that claims that it will be able to produce modular truck-sized thorium breeder reactors on a commercial scale by 2028. Their claims are scientifically plausible - the only real question being whether they can genuinely scale up their process to commercial levels in that timeframe.
For some reason, many skeptics have bought into the idea that nuclear is the only viable alternative to fossil fuel. They aren't even all Republicans and Cruz supporters.
Many things are scientifically plausible, for instance all the stuff that kills germs in Petri dishes.
Wind and solar actually works. Now! Not hypothetically by 2028. It worked 20 years ago and has improved since then.
Many things are scientifically plausible, for instance all the stuff that kills germs in Petri dishes.
Wind and solar actually works. Now! Not hypothetically by 2028. It worked 20 years ago and has improved since then.
W.D.Clinger
Philosopher
Various sources say Texas accounts for something like 12-18% of total US solar energy production from photovoltaics. For example:
Texas ranks second in population as well, so its second-place ranking in total solar energy might correspond to a fairly average per-capita ranking, and CleanTechnica does indeed say Texas ranks only 22nd in solar energy per capita.
TurkeysGhost
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I have to admit I'm not super well read on the subject, but I thought the left criticism of these technologies is that they aren't generally reliable in enough places to make up more than a minority share of energy production, as opposed to nuke energy which can be a direct analogue to fossil fuel power generation without the emissions.
The nice thing about nuclear is that it produces as much as you design it for, generating power reliably regardless of weather conditions. Solar especially is a problem because there's less daylight during winter, exactly the time of year when colder regions generally need more power.
Seeing this problem in Germany right now, where the energy crisis is resulting in more coal plants being brought online. Meanwhile France is on about 70% nuclear power.
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The problem is the fantasy that renewables are zero carbon, and have no environmental impact. The carbon cost of some renewables e.g. off sure wind which require a lot of concrete and maintenace. There carbon cost may be predominantly one off but is not zero. Recycling of renewables is problematic, there are problems dealing with the blades of wind turbines other than burying them. Solar cells are costly to recycle with a significant carbon cost. That is not to say we should not invest in them, but decommisioning costs are usually not included in the economics, in contrast to nuclear power where the decommisioning costs are often used to argue against it.
One of the benefits of modular reactors is that the nuclear module can be taken off site to be decommisioned in a 'factory' rather than decommisioning on site which is expensive.
Meanwhile at MIT, they looked at nearly 1000 scenarios for decarbonising the US. To keep it affordable they found:
https://news.mit.edu/2018/adding-power-choices-reduces-cost-risk-carbon-free-electricity-0906
Its often assumed that the more you roll out a technology, the cheaper it will become, owing to the economies of scale, but with wind/solar, this is only true up to a certain point. When they account of a high enough percentage of a national grid, any further expansion can have the opposite effect, as they are often switched off owing to a lack of demand, or are exported to another country to region at a vastly reduced cost (or even paying someone to take the excess energy, or sending it for storage).
By having dormant wind turbines etc on standby, in addition to active wind turbines, you have capital doing nothing, which adds to the cost (see also having vast energy storage).
Given that nuclear is the safest option for baseload supply, we should invest in new nuclear.
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lomiller
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Evidence?
Fusion power may never happen. There is also nothing on the Fission roadmap that has the potential to replace fossil fuels. Global Uranium reserves are simply too small. What's needed is something like a Molten Salt breeder reactor, and while there is a prototype MSR reactor on the IAEA roadmap it's not a breeder reactor that can burn Thorium or U238.
The other issue with fission and most likely fusion is on display in the Ukraine right now. When nuclear plants are everywhere, as they would need to be to replace fossil fuels every single regional and local conflict runs the risk of some local strongman either sabotaging reactors or harvesting their fuel to make dirty bombs.
There is definitively room to expand nuclear power production but that's more on the order of 3X current production over the next 10-20 years. That's barely enough to make a dent in fossil fuel use
lomiller
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Even in colder regions electricity demand goes up in the day and down at night.
The idea that the constant output of nuclear power is particularly desirable is also incorrect. Demand changes over time and any source that can't easily change to accommodate these changes requires either grid connected storage or supplementary generation from sources like Natural Gas that can come online and offline quickly. This is as true for Nuclear as it is for Wind and Solar.
Great! We have snowplows and icebreakers etc. on standby (almost) all year round, i.e. capital doing nothing. It's not a problem. And unlike snowplows and icebreakers, as soon as storage capacity is available, it won't be a financial problem: You store surplus energy to be used when there is no wind and/or sun. (Unfortunately, you can't plow snow or break ice in advance of snowstorms or sea ice.)
As it is, electric power is cheaper when it's windy and there's plenty of it and more expensive when there's little wind. When electricity is used for heating houses, that's pretty neat. During cold winter storms, electricity is cheaper.
But again, the main argument: Fossil fuels make the planet uninhabitable. The idea of using fossil fuels only now and then to make up for temporary shortages doesn't change that fact, and it is the number 1 problem that has to be solved. Wobs' example is good in this context: Idle windmills will be switched on when the demand rises and switched off when demand is low. The extra capacity needs to be there, of course.
And any source of power that is switched on and off can be considered to be on standby some of the time: "dormant wind turbines etc on standby." It is not specific to wind turbines, and it is as good an argument against all other sources of power.
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lomiller
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If you have nuclear, wind and solar all producing electricity and you have more electricity then you need some of that energy will be wasted. Some people use "base load" as a reason why the power from nuclear plants should be used while the power from wind turbines should get discarded, but there really is no valid reason why this should be the case.
It's a false narrative aimed at trying to skew economic factors in favor of a preferred option. Wind, Solar and Nuclear ALL need to have either grid storage or power generation from some source that can be brought online\offline quickly.