A few years ago I set out to make a series of “Renewable Energy Solution of the Month” videos, but I’ve been swamped in the meantime by continually trying to keep up with and sort out the tidal wave of information, and disinformation, about climate change itself. Finally I’m getting back around to presenting the hopeful facts. Speaking to thousands and thousands of people has convinced me that, if you only talk about the problem, and not the path forward, its almost as if people literally, physiologically – can’t hear you.
One more reason to support Dark Snow this year:
For months I’ve been gathering interviews with people I know who are following the renewable energy explosion – and everywhere I go, I’m telling people that we are in a stage very much like the internet in about 1993 – taking shape and about to blow up. In fact, the key enabling technologies for renewables are growing right out of the distributed information network that is shaping the new century. There’s no going back, and the companies, and countries, that do not grasp the scale of the change we are seeing, may not survive.
Tamino wasted no time in reblogging the video from Yale Climate Forum.
I guess Elon is the new Jobs – with us hanging on every word – hopefully without the reality-distortion field.
I suppose I’ll be the lone dissenter on this one. While I appreciate all the news on the solar front, I guess I don’t get it. The path forward is to just sit back and wait for solar to take over? We should just hope that that’s enough to reduce CO2 levels? So far, carbon emissions haven’t dropped to anywhere near adequate levels in any of the countries and states that have very low carbon created electricity – Germany, France, Ontario, Sweden, etc.
I’m all for renewables, in that I think they’re a vital part of the equation in addressing our problems, but they’re just a part – and I think a rather small part. All the ‘free market’ cheering just keeps us traveling along the same, wrong path that we’ve been on the past 30+ years, and I don’t think it matters what technology that entails (solar or fossil carbon). All of this is about expansion of the economy and the concentration of wealth within that economy.
I rather think we are headed towards a significant increase in solar power over the next 2-3 decades, as Musk says, but there is precious little evidence that our total carbon emissions will drop significantly at the same time. If anything, expanding power generation will help fuel an expanding economy, which will increase fossil carbon use in the other areas where it’s currently employed besides just electricity. It will also create greater availability for fossil carbon in developing countries.
I also don’t get why we should cheer for the ‘disruptive’ nature of solar power. Right now the grid works by extremely complicated balancing of the various sources of power generation. If solar does indeed price out the other sources, making them unprofitable, wouldn’t there be major problems maintaining grid supply? Wouldn’t that cause those without solar (and those with solar but no battery backup) to have both faltering electricity supply and rising costs?
I know that occurrence is supposed to increase solar demand, but there is a large segment of our society that won’t be able to get solar under any condition, and these happen to be those already abused by our ‘free market’ – the poor. People renting or with bad credit don’t have either the physical space or the credit necessary to buy or lease into a solar paradigm. In essence, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The same dynamic will happen with electric vehicles.
The inevitable result of a ‘free market’ is to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of the few. I know it seems like solar is a democratizing force, but inevitably under this economic system there will eventually be fewer and fewer companies controlling the supply. We see the same trends happening right now in the truly democratizing force, and disruptive technology, of the internet.
I understand the need to provide answers. I know why that’s important, because people do create mental blocks to bad news. They don’t want to hear about getting a shot at the doctor’s office unless they get a lollipop. But what if the answer is wrong – or at least very incomplete?
That’s precisely it, Jim, as these two electrical engineers in the power business will tell you. This is completely aside from the issue of back-feeding the grid: if everyone is trying to do it at the same time, the grid blacks out. So what is the excuse for allowing anyone to do it, except as part of a scheduled and contracted sale? The painfully obvious conclusion that net metering can only scale so big is resolutely denied by far too many.
It would be reasonably easy to put that solar power to use, with demand-side management. Where demand peaks in the evening, the load is typically residential air conditioners that are off or set on low all day. Solar power could make ice in the hours around noon and satisfy the evening A/C demand peak using that ice, time-shifting the demand spike and serving it with RE. Yet I find massive resistance to this notion, including down-votes here. Resolute denial, everywhere.
“If solar does indeed price out the other sources, making them unprofitable, wouldn’t there be major problems maintaining grid supply? Wouldn’t that cause those without solar (and those with solar but no battery backup) to have both faltering electricity supply and rising costs?”
No. Be careful because this is just the message the FF industry wants you to believe. Sociopolitical systems and the distribution of wealth are not directly related to energy source. As far as facts in the matter are concerned, it has been proved in the real world that high renewables integration does not cause those concerns. Peter’s videos are full of references to the fact that the flames of those concerns are spread by those who wish to discredit renewables, but have no basis in fact.
Cheering for the disruptive nature of solar power has nothing to do with social unrest, and everything to do with upsetting the status quo of centralized power and unlimited consumption, the short term exploitation of the earth for short term selfish gain. In particular, their disruptive nature means the end of coal, an immediate hazard to all our futures.
“People renting or with bad credit don’t have either the physical space or the credit necessary to buy or lease into a solar paradigm.”
Actually, people renting can buy into community solar. Everyone benefits from renewables because they lower the cost of energy. See my comments below. Renewables don’t guarantee equitable socioeconomic systems, but they offer the possibility that centralized power does not.
“The inevitable result of a ‘free market’ is to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of the few. ”
You are talking about the sociopolitical and economic systems. They are not directly connected to the subject of renewables, except that renewables extend the possibility of group participation and control that centralized power plants tend to exclude.
You point out some valid concerns about socioeconomic systems, the future, and the collision between unlimited growth and limited resources. The dissonance between an economic system bent on growth and limits can not be resolved by renewables. Renewables are a possible means of solution for a sustainable future. We are the ones tasked with the choice of using them.
I translate that as “being able to meet your needs”. Branding consumption of electricity, an energy medium with no inherent emissions or ecological impact save heat, as a sin against the planet is anti-human. The Swedes consume about 15,000 kWh/capita/year, yet Sweden has per-capita CO2 emissions far below those of Denmark and Germany. The EIA states that Sweden consumed 306,200 bbl/day of petroleum in 2013, or 11.6 bbl/capita/yr. If half of this could be substituted with electricity at Sweden’s rate of 23 gCO2/kWh, Sweden would eliminate 5.8 bbl/capita @ 317 kgCO2/bbl (1.84 tons) and add about .068 tons from electricity, for a net savings of about 1.77 tCO2/capita/year. That would reduce Swedish emissions to just about 4 tons/capita/year, within striking distance of climate neutrality.
Germany and Denmark don’t have a prayer.
In the real world, Germany’s Energiewende is underpinned by burning lignite, and all save one of Denmark’s power stations also burn coal. The grids of Sweden, France and Ontario use essentially none.
Renewables, like serfs, are tied to the land. As such, they are very feudal; who controls the land, controls the renewables.
“Branding consumption of electricity, an energy medium with no inherent emissions or ecological impact save heat, as a sin against the planet is anti-human.”
I’ll address some points here. One, your statement is incorrect. Electricity has far more ecological impact than just heat. There is the mining process on all sources, the transmission lines cutting across the land, the metal extruded for generators and stations, the travel miles used to service lines, the paper used for bills, and so on – let alone the carbon emissions from all those processes plus the use of fossil carbon for direct generation.
All forms of economic transaction involve some impact on nature. Power generation is especially impactful because it fuels the many other types of economic transactions, which generates further impacts on nature.
We don’t sin against the planet by doing these things. The planet is a coalesced ball of elements. I’m not a Gaia worshipper or a tree hugger. It’s just a matter of how much we can do these economic activities sustainably, which can be quantifiably measured and which can be seen in impacts such as desertification, species loss, algal blooms, and on and on.
To be truly anti-human is to be willfully blind to these impacts, because it will come back to bite us. More specifically, it will bite our descendants.
I’m not against electricity use. I’m against over-consumption and against humans surpassing sustainable practices. We don’t include these topics in discussing ‘solutions’ often enough, just more technology, and it irks me. We want the party to continue forever and ever.
“Renewables, like serfs, are tied to the land. As such, they are very feudal; who controls the land, controls the renewables.”
This, I agree on. It’s not talked about, but I don’t see something that requires significant material wealth as democratizing. The people that have solar panels are the people at the top of the world’s economic ladder. They might not be the 1% per se, but they are the 10% on a global basis. One could point to the solar pv leasing programs, but these are controlled by corporations, which over time will merge into a select few. However, the same is true of nuclear generation.
I wrote inherent emissions or ecological impact. Most of the things you listed are one-time or fixed impacts. The only difference between a wire or transformer that’s sitting idle and one running at maximum power is how much heat is dissipated. A PV panel with power being drawn from it emits less heat than one that’s open-circuited.
Carbon-based fuels have considerable impact, whether they’re fossil or not. (Corn ethanol, anyone? Biomass-fired powerplants?) But nuclear energy has several possible sources of fuel which either have minuscule impacts (ocean recovery of uranium) or use waste products (thorium from rare-earth refining, breeding of depleted uranium to plutonium). Nuclear power sits very, very lightly on the earth.
There are limits to how much heat we can dissipate directly and still have a liveable world. (Just imagine having so much biomass that its metabolism replaces the heat of the Sun, like Niven’s concept of the Puppeteers’ home world.) But those limits are a long way off; we’d have to go up by orders of magnitude to reach what’s currently trapped by our GHG additions.
“Renewables, like serfs, are tied to the land. As such, they are very feudal; who controls the land, controls the renewables.”
You seem to be a bit overstretched there. He who controls the land… pretty much controls everything. This is not a logical argument for or against renewables or anything else. It is simply a blanket statement that would apply to anything. Distributed energy offers the possibility of distributed control of energy while centralized tends close off that possibility. As for the real world, as the video states, 50% of the investment in German renewables is individuals, collectives, and so on. In the US, rooftop solar PV is a middle class phenomena. In practice so far, distributed solar has had some democratizing qualities.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/10/21/2723401/middle-class-rooftop-solar-revolution/
And there you are wrong. Wind relies on the energy that the motions of the atmosphere transmit down within reach of the collectors (turbines). The ultimate limit of wind power may be as low as 0.5-1 watts per square meter of land area. If you get 1 W/m² out of a 2.6 km² plot, that’s 26 MW.
A 2.6 km² site is easily capable of hosting 2 nuclear units of 1100 Mw(e) each (closer to 3 or 4). Being able to produce 2200 MW out of a square mile makes one a whole lot more competitive than 26 MW, or even 260 MW. Further, your competitors/enemies can’t shadow your nuclear plant and take your power by building other plants upwind, the way they can with a wind farm. Your fuel can come from anywhere in the world. You only need a few tens of tons per year per GW, which can fit in a single shipping container riding on one truck.
If the USA had a free market instead of regulatory capture of the NRC by the fossil industry, people who didn’t like their power prices could form a consortium and build their own plant. But you can’t do that, because agitator groups fronting for coal and gas interests have a heckler’s veto.
“In particular, their disruptive nature means the end of coal, an immediate hazard to all our futures.”
Go to the ‘World’ total at the bottom of the spreadsheet:
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=1&pid=1&aid=2
I’ll believe when I see it.
On limits – while I personally believe that production peaks in oil, NG, and coal will create serious economic troubles, causing a potential end to growth in the developed countries (I’m not certain it will end growth in developing countries), I don’t see renewables as replacing fossil carbon in anything near adequate time scales. Instead, I see them as smoothing the negative economic impacts from the peaks in fossil carbon, ensuring their maximum use over time. Sorry. I’m open to being convinced otherwise, because it’s not a pretty picture.
The only real answer is addressing human behavior. More technology just enables the continuance of the status quo in human behavior.
We want to lower carbon emissions? Mandate it. Price carbon heavily. Punish egregious emitters. Stop the tar sands and the dirtiest sources. Enacts laws to leave fossil carbon in the ground. Advance mass transport and walkable communities. Start talking about appropriate technologies and growth. Have a debt jubilee and reset our monetary system. Address corruption in our governments, campaigns, and media. People won’t like these things – but we’re the problem. Our natural desire is to surpass limits as long as we can.
Instead, we seem to just hope that solar power and the ‘free market’ will provide us with the cure – which is just desire in a ‘green’ form.
You are a little hard on an energy revolution that just started and is up against huge entrenched political interests. Its not a shoe in. No one is saying its over. What is said is that it has just begun and big changes are in the works. And no, we are not just supposed to wait for it, we have to fight for it. Right here on these pages you see evidence of the battle being waged. Its no longer about renewable capabilities or economics. Although given the propaganda, many are unaware of renewables capability. Its a political and ideological battle. We can’t stand idly by and wait for an outcome. We have to choose it. Its your choice, not a fait accompli. The whole point is that the myths erected to sway opinion against renewables based on economics or feasibility have been shredded. That is no longer an excuse for inaction. Right now, China is carbon. Can we convince them not to grow at more than 7% a year and that the consequences are disastrous? Renewables can grow at remarkable rates, but they cannot stop more coal from being burned in an expanding Chinese economy. That takes choice. It has nothing to do with technology. Those papers guiding us to a 100% renewables future are not suggesting unlimited growth.
Elon Musk is doing wonders for the auto industry and even more for GTLEO transport, but I think he’s got a bit of a god complex. If he truly appreciates the difficulty of making an all-RE grid, he shows no sign of it.
Take his Gigafactory notion, aimed at producing 30-50 gigawatt-hours of battery packs per year. Call it 60 GWh, just to be generous. Suppose all of them go into solar storage units. How long could one year’s worth of Gigafactory production keep the grid running after the sun goes down?
The average load on the US grid is about 450 GW, so we get this equation:
t = 60 GWh / 450 GW = 2/15 hr = 8 minutes.
Either we need a dozen Gigafactories devoted soley to grid-tied battery systems for years (no vehicles, no electronics), or we face facts: solar PV won’t do the heavy lifting, and we need to turn elsewhere.
The world as a whole is expanding the use of coal far faster than RE can catch up. The BP energy review has this (I hope the graphic renders):
In general, the people who are most concerned with climate-changing emissions are also demanding that energy be “decentralized” and “democratized”. In practice, this means burning natural gas for backup—hardly the way to a climate-neutral future. It’s as if all these buzzwords were specifically chosen to prevent any move to the one energy source with a confirmed track record of decarbonizing electric grids, and I am sure this is no accident.
Bah, it excised the entire image tag including the surrounding href. Here it is:
http://blogs.shell.com/climatechange/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Increase-in-coal-use.jpg
A dozen gigafactories wouldn’t do it. It would take the output of about 50,000 gigafactories (or 1 gigafactory for 50,000 years) to store enough electricity to run an all-solar grid, assuming a typical 25% capacity factor for solar.
Ain’t happening.
“If anything, expanding power generation will help fuel an expanding economy, which will increase fossil carbon use in the other areas where it’s currently employed besides just electricity.” This is not a given. Its arguing that we will move to another limit. Up until now, humanity has moved from limit to limit without making a conscious group decision about the future. Since none of us has a crystal ball, all we can say is, so far, humanities response to limits has been checkered. We responded to CFCs, and other challenges. What is not clear is if we can wake up and realize that our present compound growth based system of economics is anathema to sustainability. That thought is being subtly played out in this video, with utilities exhorted to stop selling electricity as an ever increasing commodity. I don’t think everyone will get the shift from commodity consumption growth to the new paradigm instantly. But it is coming…. just like resource limits have responses. Impacts like less driving and less auto ownership, high fuel prices do likewise. In other words, the change to a new non compound commodity consumption is a natural response to the changing limiting conditions of the world.
Having read (both here and on other green blogs) about how we can run everything on solar panels – especially if we just “power down” – I thought I’d investigate just how much power the Internet uses. After all, I assume that those who spend time on blogs advocating that we “power down” at least want to keep the Internet “powered up.” Otherwise, they wouldn’t be here blogging about it – rather, they’d toss the iPhone in the trash and spend the time previously devoted to online activities to something like chopping firewood.
I was little surprised to find out that the Internet consumes quite a lot of power – about 10% of the total electricity supply. I would have thought it would be under 5%, but apparently not:
http://science.time.com/2013/08/14/power-drain-the-digital-cloud-is-using-more-energy-than-you-think/
“Having read (both here and on other green blogs) about how we can run everything on solar panels ”
I call BS on your exaggeration. Show a reference to back up that statement. I don’t think I or Peter have ever made such a statement. That someone might have done so on some other blog is irrelevant. There are however reams of scientific peer reviewed papers showing that a mix of renewables can be integrated into the grid at high levels with little storage. There are many options in a mix that can do the job. You are making a straw man argument.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/11/1230558/-Sunday-Train-The-Myth-of-Baseload-Power#
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-about-99.9-percent-renewables
Will the grid become unstable? I think Dean Kammen gave a pretty good response. He said before about 1999, engineers were taught the grid would explode and bad things would happen if any more than a few percent renewables were added to the grid. Time to debunk that myth. And a few others. The masters of our consumption were able to harness our egoistic drives to their purposes.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/
“generating systems comprising a mix of different commercially available renewable energy technologies, located on geographically dispersed sites, do not need base-load power stations to achieve the same reliability as fossil-fuelled systems.”
“The principal barrier is resistance from vested interests and their supporters in the big greenhouse gas polluting industries and from an unsafe, expensive, polluting, would-be competitor to a renewable energy future, nuclear power. These powerful interests are running a campaign of renewable energy denial that is almost as fierce as the long-running campaign of climate change denial.”
http://theconversation.com/baseload-power-is-a-myth-even-intermittent-renewables-will-work-13210
The irony is that this is completely backwards. Solar and wind power are both ages-old, having been in use from nearly the dawn of recorded history. They have been used extensively to grind grain, pump water, and dry products of all kinds, to list just a few things. Small yet industrial-scale solar engines date from the 19th century.
There was a time when humanity looked ready to build Amory Lovins’ “green” future; the oft-repeated quote by Henry Ford was recognition of that mindset. The great Romantic notion of “the soft path” somehow stops people from asking the question that ought to burn in their minds every day: what happened to it? Once you dare to ask the question, the answer is obvious: night, winter, clouds and calm happened to it. When those things struck, the “soft” energies didn’t work. So people, having always burned wood until it became scarce, turned to coal, oil and gas instead. Those stockpiles of energy provided heat and power when needed, not just when nature decided to make the sun shine or wind blow.
Wind and solar never were competition for coal, oil and gas. The major renewables cannot do the same things.
Nuclear power can mostly or completely displace coal from electric generation. We know this because it has happened in France, Sweden and Ontario. Nuclear power can displace gas used to heat buildings. Nuclear power, used to charge batteries, can displace petroleum motor fuels. Further, it can do this very quickly: Sweden scaled from zero to 7 MWh/capita/yr in just 11 years, and France and Belgium did nearly as much.
If renewables can eliminate coal and gas, why are Denmark and Germany basing their plans on coal combustion as far into the future as we can genuinely predict? Last, what could be less safe than a plan which guarantees that we lose the world’s coastlines and river deltas?
Nuclear is the only climate solution we can build today. Wind and solar are the would-be competitors, being touted by the fossil-fuel lobbies because they actually leave FFs in the driver’s seat. All the hand-waving about “decentralized energy”, “democratic systems” and the rest is fog to hide that single salient fact.
More on the coming energy revolution.
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/01/fossil-fuels-electric-utilities-conventional-cars-obsolete-2030-even-earlier/
“Oil, natural gas (methane), coal, and uranium will simply become obsolete for the purposes of generating significant amounts of electricity and powering the automobile.”
Its clear that simple economics is now favoring renewables and will do so increasingly in the future. That is irrespective of efforts to accelerate the switch. That revolution is unstoppable. Free markets will cause the switch, but it can be slowed by entrenched interest political lobbying. Nor can renewables stop unlimited growth or in the case of FF, cause us to “leave it in the ground”. We must choose our path rather than leave it to chance.
Since electric cars are typically charged at night, solar isn’t going to do it. And I wonder how many people would switch to electric cars if their morning commute was dependent on the previous night’s weather?