Some truth to people who think we can be 100% renewable

[catii]

Yes, LiFePO4 type batteries are the way to go - today - but keep an eye on the upcoming sodium-ion that will likely replace lithium-ion in the near future.

 

[NW-Bound]

I am not knowledgeable in this field, so just learned that they have made sodium-ion batteries with the same energy density as LiFePO4 batteries. It looks like they still need work to improve the battery life.

 

[Koolau]

So many new technologies and improvements in old technologies. I am totally fascinated by the science and technology. Some will make the grade and others will fall by the way side. Incremental improvements are certainly welcome and useful. Still, fossil fuels (since we've all but ruled out nuclear) will continue for many, many more years supplying our base load of energy. No act of Congress, no force of will, no "hope", no "wish", no "data", no "report(s)", no individual commitment, no "surge", no level of conservation will alter that by very much. I can conceive of a day when renewables will indeed match our needs (as humans). I will not live to see it and I even doubt that my grandkids will live to see it.

It the mean time, it may be possible to chip away at carbon emissions and work toward the goal of 100% renewable. But "thinking does not make it so" comes to mind. As always, YMMV.

 

[eroscott]

Informative 'cartoon' on 'turbines'.

"Wave power hasn’t yet made a splash because it’s hard to use waves to spin turbines, and because the sea is a harsh place to build things."

Why Can't We Get Power From Waves? Video via Minute Earth Apr 2nd

To learn more, start your googling with these keywords:
Wave energy converter - a device for turning the mechanical energy of ocean waves into mechanical energy (flow of a substance) or electrical energy
Oscillating water column - an open-bottomed chamber filled with air and water, whose wave action moves the water column up and down like a piston, forcing the air out past a turbine
Attenuator - a long multisegment floating structure oriented parallel to the direction waves travel, where differing heights of waves along the length of the device flex the connections driving hydraulic pumps that can be connected to turbines
Oscillating body - a floating buoy that oscillates with waves, generating electricity within the buoy or by pulling on a generator or by pumping water through a turbine
Overtopping device - a reservoir filled by waves to a height higher the average nearby ocean, into which reservoir water is released, spinning a turbine

 

[NW-Bound]

So many new technologies and improvements in old technologies. I am totally fascinated by the science and technology. Some will make the grade and others will fall by the way side. Incremental improvements are certainly welcome and useful. Still, fossil fuels (since we've all but ruled out nuclear) will continue for many, many more years supplying our base load of energy. No act of Congress, no force of will, no "hope", no "wish", no "data", no "report(s)", no individual commitment, no "surge", no level of conservation will alter that by very much. I can conceive of a day when renewables will indeed match our needs (as humans). I will not live to see it and I even doubt that my grandkids will live to see it.

It the mean time, it may be possible to chip away at carbon emissions and work toward the goal of 100% renewable. But "thinking does not make it so" comes to mind. As always, YMMV.

I always welcome steps toward more renewable energy.

But even when all our cars are EVs, and all the electricity we use come from solar and wind generators, people still forget something. What do people do for heating in the winter, if not burning something?

Here's the source of energy that Germany uses. It's more than electricity, and includes fuel for transportation, residential heating, industrial uses, etc...

 

[eroscott]

I always welcome steps toward more renewable energy.

But even when all our cars are EVs, and all the electricity we use come from solar and wind generators, people still forget something. What do people do for heating in the winter, if not burning something?

Trick question? At some point you generate enough excess electricity to heat as well? Examples: My son's house is all electric. My father-in-law heated their entire basement with electricity which was nice as that heat rose up.

Yes resistance heat is not efficient but if you generate excess and it is cheap then who cares? Also there are places that are perfectly OK with heat pumps that are a lot more efficient.

Energy.gov site:
https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/home-heating-systems/electric-resistance-heating

Electric resistance heating is 100% energy efficient in the sense that all the incoming electric energy is converted to heat. However, most electricity is produced from coal, gas, or oil generators that convert only about 30% of the fuel's energy into electricity. Because of electricity generation and transmission losses, electric heat is often more expensive than heat produced in homes or businesses that use combustion appliances, such as natural gas, propane, and oil furnaces.

If electricity is the only choice, heat pumps are preferable in most climates, as they easily cut electricity use by 50% when compared with electric resistance heating. The exception is in dry climates with either hot or mixed (hot and cold) temperatures (these climates are found in the non-coastal, non-mountainous part of California; the southern tip of Nevada; the southwest corner of Utah; southern and western Arizona; southern and eastern New Mexico; the southeast corner of Colorado; and western Texas). For these dry climates, there are so few heating days that the high cost of heating is not economically significant.

Electric resistance heating may also make sense for a home addition if it is not practical to extend the existing heating system to supply heat to the new addition.
<snip>
[Outline]
Types of Electric Resistance Heaters
- Electric Furnaces
- Electric Baseboard Heaters
- Electric Wall Heaters
- Electric Thermal Storage

Below image via: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/heat-and-cool/home-heating-systems

Desc: Household Heating Systems: Although several different types of fuels are available to heat our homes, nearly half of us use natural gas. | Source: Buildings Energy Data Book 2011

 

[unclemick]

Pssst - insulation. I haven't done a - Pssst in a long time.

Europe and parts of Canada are putzing around with passive houses with boatloads of insulation. SIP's in new construction are popular on U tube.

Thinking of playing around with some Structural Insulated Panels at the farm this year for a battery/electrical control room for my solar panels and windmill.

Only at the hobby level mind you - solar pond aeration, solar golf cart, lithium battery powered Polaris EV and lithium power tools.

Probably add more PV panels and small windmills this year as the weather warms.

heh heh heh - Missouri Wind and Solar loves me. If ER'd long enough sometimes just watching grass grow doesn't always last and we get er 'hobbies.'

 

[NW-Bound]

Trick question? At some point you generate enough excess electricity to heat as well? Examples: My son's house is all electric. My father-in-law heated their entire basement with electricity which was nice as that heat rose up.

Yes resistance heat is not efficient but if you generate excess and it is cheap then who cares? Also there are places that are perfectly OK with heat pumps that are a lot more efficient.
...

Not a trick question!

About homes being all electric, yes, both my homes, one in the low desert and the other at 7,000 ft-elevation are all electric, and both have heat pumps for cooling as well as heating.

I have no problems with my electric homes, because that power is generated for me, by generation plants burning coal, natural gas, and splitting atoms. Tough luck getting 365/24/7 power from solar for that, and I am in the Southwest.

Solar and wind energy can have outages as long as several days, if not weeks. We have talked again and again about the lack of huge storage to store enough energy to last such outages.

In the winter, up in the northern states, how are they going to get solar power when there's a snowstorm? If they cannot even get enough power for lighting, where is the excess power for heating? For charging their EVs? For industrial use?

We will not be 100% RE for a long time to come. Again, the following is what I agree with.

... I can conceive of a day when renewables will indeed match our needs (as humans). I will not live to see it and I even doubt that my grandkids will live to see it.

It the mean time, it may be possible to chip away at carbon emissions and work toward the goal of 100% renewable. But "thinking does not make it so" comes to mind. As always, YMMV.

+1000

One can just glance at the chart of energy sources that Germany still depends on, despite being gunho about RE. See how much RE they generate, vs. how much total energy they are using. Still a very very long way to go.

Here it is again.

 

[kcowan]

That is what bothers me about chart. It seems that something happened in 2009 and that renewables are replacing nuclear. What other conclusions can anyone draw from that form of data presentation?

(I was in a job where chartsmanship was a prized talent back in the day. This form makes the viewer the least informed.)

 

[NW-Bound]

That is what bothers me about chart. It seems that something happened in 2009 and that renewables are replacing nuclear. What other conclusions can anyone draw from that form of data presentation?

(I was in a job where chartsmanship was a prized talent back in the day. This form makes the viewer the least informed.)

Which chart were you referring to?

Lol, when I lived on Hawaii people didn't use fuel. BBQ's in the park via coal, never used the A/C...not sure about hot showers but there were a lot of folks who hitchhiked down or up Mt Haleakala so they didn't even need petrol The A/C didn't work in our honda beach cruiser and we didn't even care. When we sold it nobody else seemed to care that looked at it and it sold quick lol.

Not all places have a temperate climate like Hawaii does. In many places, people have to run AC in the summer, and switch to heat in the winter. I guess we do not have to, if we are as tough as the native Americans who had no such luxury.

Even in Hawaii, people still need to keep refrigerators running at night, even if they turn off the light to go to sleep. Something has to generate juice to keep various machinery working. And most of Hawaiian cars still run on gasoline.

We can look at Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria (2017) to see how miserable life can get when there is no electricity, no gasoline, no fuel.

 

[Totoro]

That is what bothers me about chart. It seems that something happened in 2009 and that renewables are replacing nuclear. What other conclusions can anyone draw from that form of data presentation?

Something did happen, in 2011: Fukushima.

 

[GalaxyBoy]

That is what bothers me about chart. It seems that something happened in 2009 and that renewables are replacing nuclear. What other conclusions can anyone draw from that form of data presentation?

(I was in a job where chartsmanship was a prized talent back in the day. This form makes the viewer the least informed.)

If you are referring to the Vermont chart, what happened was that the only nuke plant in Vermont shut down, and since nukes have a large generating capacity and Vermont is a small state, then percentage-wise the impact was very large.

Edit: OH. You are probably talking about the German chart?

 

[kcowan]

Edit: OH. You are probably talking about the German chart?

yes I was referring to the German chart in post #333. A big in in 2009 and a smaller dip in 2011? It really does not tell me anything beyond my earlier conclusion which seems self-evident.

 

[explanade]

yes I was referring to the German chart in post #333. A big in in 2009 and a smaller dip in 2011? It really does not tell me anything beyond my earlier conclusion which seems self-evident.

Fukushima happened in 2008 and 2009 and Germany decided to wean itself off nuclear power.

Decommission old plants as they ended their useful life, not build any new ones, etc.

It's all moot anyways. Nuclear power is just not cost-competitive any more, which is why no private company is stepping up to build new plants in the US.

However in the last couple of weeks, the Senate passed a law to award 40-year Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) for new nuclear plants, to encourage construction of new plants.

So for private entities to be guaranteed a good ROI for new plants, they get 40 year contracts to buy power from these plants. And in order to have positive return, the prices of the power from these plants would be well above market prices for wind and solar, for instance.

 

[eroscott]

Not a trick question!

About homes being all electric, yes, both my homes, one in the low desert and the other at 7,000 ft-elevation are all electric, and both have heat pumps for cooling as well as heating.

I have no problems with my electric homes, because that power is generated for me, by generation plants burning coal, natural gas, and splitting atoms. Tough luck getting 365/24/7 power from solar for that, and I am in the Southwest.

Solar and wind energy can have outages as long as several days, if not weeks. We have talked again and again about the lack of huge storage to store enough energy to last such outages.

Not sure why you are stuck thinking that it has to be 100% or 0%. Why can't there be multiple solutions and dual methods. Some locations (vary by state, country, etc) can use electricity 99% of the time and others 80 or 90+%

I also don't know why you think everything will have linear improvements and things won't change in other curves.

Example of how things can change from yesterday's article:

https://grist.org/article/batteries-are-key-to-clean-energy-and-they-just-got-much-cheaper/

Batteries are critical for our clean energy future. Luckily, their cost has dropped so low, we might be much closer to this future than we previously thought.

In a little less than a year, the cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by 35 percent, according to a new Bloomberg New Energy Finance report. Cheaper batteries mean we can store more solar and wind power even when the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing. This is a major boost to renewables, helping them compete with fossil fuel-generated power, even without subsidies in some places, according to the report. Massive solar-plus-storage projects are already being built in places like Florida and California to replace natural gas, and many more are on the way.

The new battery prices are “staggering improvements,” according to Elena Giannakopoulou, who leads the energy economics group at Bloomberg NEF. Previous estimates anticipated this breakthrough moment for batteries to arrive in late 2020, not early 2019.

According to the report, the cost of wind and solar generation is also down sharply — by between 10 to 24 percent since just last year, depending on the technology. These numbers are based on real projects under construction in 46 countries around the world.
<snip>

 

[NW-Bound]

Not sure why you are stuck thinking that it has to be 100% or 0%. Why can't there be multiple solutions and dual methods. Some locations (vary by state, country, etc) can use electricity 99% of the time and others 80 or 90+%

I also don't know why you think everything will have linear improvements and things won't change in other curves.

Example of how things can change from yesterday's article:

https://grist.org/article/batteries-are-key-to-clean-energy-and-they-just-got-much-cheaper/

We will be using a mix of energy sources for a long time to come. Among the people here, I am "greener" than most with my solar storage system, which is not even tax-subsidized at all as it is an experimental DIY system. I am putting money where my mouth is.

And knowing more about solar energy now, I can see that it is not financially feasible for me, with the current technology, to be off-grid.

The theme of the thread is that 100% RE will not be achievable in a long time. I was just reiterating that statement. Although I really like solar energy, it bothers me when I read people - none here of course - saying we could be 100% RE if it were not for the oil companies and the coal miners. They just do not know that our current technology has limitations.


PS. By the way, we are a long way from even getting 1/3 of our total energy from RE sources. Many charts show only RE energy as a percentage of electricity consumption. The total energy used is a lot more than just electricity delivered by the grid. Just a quick look at the chart for Germany will show that they are at about 15%.

 

[PoorOldCountryBoy]

I'm always amazed at how much in denial people are about renewable energy. Net zero homes cost about $20,000 more than regular homes. (Add a little more in the north, a little less in the south). There are a few thousand in the country as of now but California will add at least 100,000 due to their 2020 building codes. As usual, this will spread across the country once CA does it.


Having a zero energy commute is also easily done, I'm assuming anyone with some intelligence can figure this out in 2019.


Yeah, it's not 100% due to industrial uses etc, but why the extreme negativity?


The future is here and 2030 will look a lot greener than 2019. It won't be by central planners, just by people making personal choices. The retirement home we buy soon will be set up to be zero footprint, either originally or by retrofit.

 

[ERD50]

I'm always amazed at how much in denial people are about renewable energy. Net zero homes cost about $20,000 more than regular homes. (Add a little more in the north, a little less in the south). ...

I'd say it is realism, not denial.

Got a link for the net-zero home? I'm sure it can be done, but the devil's in the details.

...

Having a zero energy commute is also easily done, I'm assuming anyone with some intelligence can figure this out in 2019. ...

I guess I have no intelligence. My feeble mind thinks that it takes energy to move something with a non-zero mass, at least that's what Newton says, and I find it best to obey his laws. Tele-commute? I suppose you mean ride a bike (but you will eat more, and growing food takes energy), or solar panels charging an EV? If you aren't already including that in the $20,000 of the net-zero home, that comes at a cost too. And those solar panels could feed the grid instead, so again, devil's in the details.

...
Yeah, it's not 100% due to industrial uses etc, but why the extreme negativity?


The future is here and 2030 will look a lot greener than 2019. It won't be by central planners, just by people making personal choices. The retirement home we buy soon will be set up to be zero footprint, either originally or by retrofit.

Show us the way.

-ERD50

 

[NW-Bound]

I'm always amazed at how much in denial people are about renewable energy. Net zero homes cost about $20,000 more than regular homes. (Add a little more in the north, a little less in the south)...

It is not hard to have a net-zero home. In fact, it's quite easy.

It's because you are using the grid as a battery to store excess energy. You then draw from the grid when you cannot produce, such as at night or on cloudy, rainy, snowy days. You don't have to worry about how the utility company is doing that hard work for you.

When everybody including the utility companies is doing it, then what? Who has to take the excess energy, and where would he put it?

Then when RE is not available, where does the grid get the power?

California already has to pay Arizona to use excess RE energy in early summer when they have more than they can use. Yes, pay somebody else to use power. It's more than free! Halleluyah!

 

[imoldernu]

Am new here, but catching up.

Not really off topic, but maybe not out of the realm of possibility. A philosophical thought:

What if: there was a 50% loss in population, by whatever means. Am looking back at 1969.

Couldn't happen?

Anyway... here's one possibility that hasn't been discussed.... yet.

 

[HFWR]

Good info on topic...

http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-factsheet

 

[ERD50]

...

Anyway... here's one possibility that hasn't been discussed.... yet.

Hey, how's he write backwards?

Pretty cool demo:

He writes on the glass, you would see it backwards, but they invert the image. Hint: he is right handed.


-ERD50

 

[NW-Bound]

What does this high school physics problem have anything to do with RE?

Or are you talking about using a pendulum to store energy? How many trillion pounds does a pendulum have to weigh in order to store enough?

I am not going to bother to compute it, although it is straightforward.

 

[NW-Bound]

Good info on topic...

U.S. Grid Energy Storage Factsheet | Center for Sustainable Systems

They talk about different forms of energy storage being in use.

What is missing is a simple statement of how much we would need in order to be 100% RE.

Of the storage capacity that is already installed, is it 1% of what would be needed, or 10%?

I would bet it is closer to the first number (in geometric terms, meaning 3.16% is 1/2 way between 1% and 10%).

 

[eroscott]

Good info on topic...

U.S. Grid Energy Storage Factsheet | Center for Sustainable Systems

[update]There are several other factsheet pages too. Nice. http://css.umich.edu/factsheets [/update]

That is a really great overview site with nice graphics and 30 references.
(despite NW-bound poopoo'ing it and re-stating if we can't get to 100% then we have failed to satisfy his standards of perfection )

U.S. GRID-CONNECTED ENERGY STORAGE PROJECTS BY STATE IN 2018 **7
MATURITY OF ENERGY STORAGE TECHNOLOGIES **10
CHARACTERISTICS OF ENERGY STORAGE TECHNOLOGIES **11
DAILY ENERGY STORAGE AND LOAD LEVELING **17