Coal Market Set To Collapse Worldwide By 2040 As Solar, Wind Dominate (bloomberg.com) 375
Jess Shankleman reports via Bloomberg: Solar power, once so costly it only made economic sense in spaceships, is becoming cheap enough that it will push coal and even natural-gas plants out of business faster than previously forecast. That's the conclusion of a Bloomberg New Energy Finance outlook for how fuel and electricity markets will evolve by 2040. The research group estimated solar already rivals the cost of new coal power plants in Germany and the U.S. and by 2021 will do so in quick-growing markets such as China and India. The scenario suggests green energy is taking root more quickly than most experts anticipate. It would mean that global carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels may decline after 2026, a contrast with the International Energy Agency's central forecast, which sees emissions rising steadily for decades to come.
The report also found that through 2040:
-China and India represent the biggest markets for new power generation, drawing $4 trillion, or about 39 percent all investment in the industry.
-The cost of offshore wind farms, until recently the most expensive mainstream renewable technology, will slide 71 percent, making turbines based at sea another competitive form of generation.
-At least $239 billion will be invested in lithium-ion batteries, making energy storage devices a practical way to keep homes and power grids supplied efficiently and spreading the use of electric cars.
-Natural gas will reap $804 billion, bringing 16 percent more generation capacity and making the fuel central to balancing a grid that's increasingly dependent on power flowing from intermittent sources, like wind and solar.
The report also found that through 2040:
-China and India represent the biggest markets for new power generation, drawing $4 trillion, or about 39 percent all investment in the industry.
-The cost of offshore wind farms, until recently the most expensive mainstream renewable technology, will slide 71 percent, making turbines based at sea another competitive form of generation.
-At least $239 billion will be invested in lithium-ion batteries, making energy storage devices a practical way to keep homes and power grids supplied efficiently and spreading the use of electric cars.
-Natural gas will reap $804 billion, bringing 16 percent more generation capacity and making the fuel central to balancing a grid that's increasingly dependent on power flowing from intermittent sources, like wind and solar.
Burn Baby Burn (Score:4, Funny)
Gods but that Dino sludge and other fuels in the ground for us. If he didn't want us to use them, they wouldn't be there.
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Re: Burn Baby Burn (Score:2)
Do you also put faith in Gartner reports?
I remain skeptical. Someone should put this on their calendar and keep track.
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I believe that you may be missing the sarcasm in the original post.
That's easy to miss, since attempted irony is usually indistinguishable from cluelessness on slashdot posts.
China and India are the biggest markets (Score:2)
Re:China and India are the biggest markets (Score:4, Informative)
China and India are the biggest markets for just about everything. That includes nuclear power. It seems odd that an article that wants to sing the praises of how wind and solar are going to power the world that they'd not even mention that nuclear power already powers a good sized portion of it, more than what wind and solar do now, and nearly as much as coal.
I see this as just another example of bias in the news. Bloomberg is an organization with a far left bias and nuclear is seen as some sort of threat or something. Like some evil entity that is only alluded to with words like "he who must not be named" or something. If they left out nuclear power in this piece then I have to wonder if it is because wind and solar don't look so great by comparison. They'll mention coal because coal is no real threat, but nuclear cannot even be mentioned once.
What we do see is that China and India are taking a true "all the above" strategy on energy since they have active development of nuclear energy. Unlike the USA which has an "all the above... except nuclear" strategy. I believe this attitude will change in time. But will it be soon enough? Until wind and solar is cheaper than coal we will be burning coal. We know nuclear is cheaper than coal, and as green as solar. Obama and friends held back the industry for a decade. We could have saved a lot of carbon in that time.
Lithium Ion Batteries... what about flow batteries (Score:5, Insightful)
I can understand lithium ion batteries for portables and maybe for a home, but grid scale batteries will likely be flow batteries or other such tech. Why because they are big and stationary. You don't need particularly compact or space efficient batteries on that scale. It is more important to be durable, low toxicity, and inexpensive (relatively).
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Tesla has already installed several grid scale lithium battery sites. One in S. California where they had that large methane storage leak. Others on some islands.
Lithium battery grid storage can be installed and provide energy for about 1.5 cents/kWh
Re:Lithium Ion Batteries... what about flow batter (Score:5, Interesting)
Tesla is a mega manufacturer of a single battery technology. They will continue to tell you that their battery can do everything and is ideal in every circumstance. The existence of their product at grid scale doesn't necessarily mean it's the best one. Kind of like my nextdoor neighbour who owns a Dodge Ram (I live in a dense European city) who drives around for 15min after he gets home looking for two parking spots next to each other because he doesn't fit in a single spot. He has this car which is great for the purpose it's built, but not so good as a daily commuter.
Flow batteries are larger than Lithium by a factor of 2 currently. This is not relevant in grid scale applications. What is relevant:
- 100% depth of discharge.
- Hugely increased cycle count.
- End of cycle count means one cheap component needs to be replaced: the membrane.
- Estimated 20yr life span is much higher than lithium.
- No cooling required.
- Non-flammable, non-toxic.
- Expansion is as simple as dropping a container of liquid next to the existing battery and connecting a hose.
Lithium battery grid storage can be installed and provide energy for about 1.5 cents/kWh
The most conservative estimate for Tesla's grid storage solution which is the cheapest on the market includes daily cycling over 15 yrs is $0.15/kWh for wholesale cost of a Powerwall (double for retail), and $0.08/kWh for grid scale solution.
Vanadium flow batteries had that cost several years ago already due to their much longer life times and much deeper cycle capability. UET estimates they'll have grid storage available for under $0.05/kWh by the end of the year.
Speaking of because someone has something available it must be good: Redflow ZCell is a lovely little flow cell you can buy for your home. You can replace the Tesla Powerwall with it in a couple of years when the Powerwall is dead. The ZCell costs about 1.5x more and lasts nearly 3 times longer.
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Speaking of because someone has something available it must be good: Redflow ZCell is a lovely little flow cell you can buy for your home. You can replace the Tesla Powerwall with it in a couple of years when the Powerwall is dead. The ZCell costs about 1.5x more and lasts nearly 3 times longer.
Your numbers appear to be obsolete. And also specific to Australia. ZCell's cost ~$17,000AUD installed for 10 kWh with a 10 year warranty and isn't available in the US. Telsa Powerwall 2's now cost $8,200USD installed for 13.5 kWh with the same 10 year warranty. Both products support 100% discharge of their nameplate capacity. The Tesla does it by overprovisioning cells. The ZCell does it inherently to the tech.
ZCell depended on a longevity advantage for their cost competitiveness with lithium. That
Re:Lithium Ion Batteries... what about flow batter (Score:4, Interesting)
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Molten salt energy storage? Could we use something else to heat this salt? Something "green"? Molten salt nuclear reactors sound like a great idea to do just that.
I like solar thermal. Not because I think that they'd ever be viable but because they'll do the research in materials and such that would be directly applicable to molten salt reactors. Solar might work for quite a large band of area at the equator, perhaps between 30 or 45 degrees north and south, but outside that area solar does not work so
Re: Lithium Ion Batteries... what about flow batte (Score:3)
36 days?!? That there is absolutely viable and we should do it everywhere.
Sorry, I am kinda stoned. But that is nothing to write home about. I got better uptime with Windows ME.
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Tesla somehow manages to be competitive now, but it really is the wrong tool for the job.
Nova Has a pretty good documentary on this (Score:2)
Troy Roberts,
This rather nice documentary [youtube.com]deals nicely with grid batteries.
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Like these? [redflow.com] Or these? [greentechmedia.com]
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That's great if you have a hill to pump the water up to. Out here on the Great Plains we don't have many hills.
An odd thing happened some time in my youth. We call this area the "wind corridor" now. Before that we called it "tornado alley". I don't think that change in nomenclature was because there was any real change in the weather patterns around here. It's hard to sell windmills in "tornado alley" but they sound great for a place called the "wind corridor". Too bad we don't have any hills so we ha
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Excellent! But no nuclear? (Score:4, Informative)
There was absolutely no mention of nuclear power in this article. Is not China and India investing in that technology too?
It would be great if solar could in fact be cheaper than coal in 20 years or so but I've already been told for 20 years that solar will be cheaper than coal in 20 years. I stopped believing these claims a long time ago. Solar has a lot of issues that merely lowering the price of the panels will not solve.
I do believe that wind can get their prices down to where it could compete with other energy sources. Like solar though it has problems of being intermittent. I hear claims that batteries and other storage systems can address this but I ask, what stops people from charging these batteries with cheap and reliable coal or nuclear? Batteries can follow load changes better then coal or nuclear can, so use those for peak load and forget about wind or natural gas.
One thing that puts a limit on the costs between wind and nuclear, wind takes ten times the steel and concrete of nuclear per megawatt of installed capacity. People ask, where is all that concrete? All I you are steel towers and a three big blades turning about. The answer is that the concrete is in the anchor that holds up that tower. If we can assume that the concrete anchors fatigue in 50 years or so, just like it would in a nuclear reactor, then we will need a continuous recycling of concrete to keep up with even an unchanging demand for electricity. If you need X tons of concrete for a gigawatt nuclear power plant then you will need 10X tons for a gigawatt of wind power.
Making concrete has a carbon footprint associated with it. That means that nuclear not only can have a smaller carbon footprint than wind but already does. Future nuclear reactors will likely require less concrete and steel than it does now with advancements in technology. So wind is already behind and the competition is not standing still.
So, it's great that we can look forward to cheap wind and solar in a decade or three. What should we do until then? We can keep burning coal. We can shutdown large sectors of our economy, which would likely delay this new wind and solar advancement. Or we can use nuclear power.
I believe that nuclear power is the only logical choice today. When or if wind and solar catch up then we can switch to that.
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Nuclear already collapsed. Notwithstanding the technical merits, humans cannot be trusted to manage it effectively.
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I agree that we should be doing more nuclear.
But for my state [lazard.com] anyway, wind production in Texas, not counting government subsidies, runs from $36 to $51 per megawatt-hour while an average national cost for coal-fired electricity ranges from $65 to $150 per MWh and for gas, depending on the type of plant, from $52/MWh to $218/MWh.
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Agreed, nuclear should be in the mix.
Also another point: strip mines _should be_ going up in price as the land they are using becomes more valuable for other purposes (even wildlife preservation.) Eventually we should hit the tipping point where coal just doesn't make economic sense.
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Nuclear has already been priced out by renewables + storage.
China has cancelled most of its new nuclear, its just finishing stuff that was already in the pipeline.
Guess you won't need those subsidies anymore (Score:2)
I still call B.S. on the current incarnations of green energy. Wind and solar haven't been around long enough to reach their inherent lifespan which means nobody has come to grips with the replacement costs. Lots of people are seeing line items on their electric bill for decommissioning coal and nuke plants. That line item will be changed to wind/solar disposal and replacement fees. They aren't going to get more efficient either.
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This is actually pretty interesting to me, because we've been looking at solar. I dunno about solar at scale to replace plants, but residential setups are pretty damn cool. Even without any tax benefits or subsidies, a setup at my place that would cover most of my energy needs (even in winter, selling the extra in summer to pay for the cost of conventional power in the winter and nights)) would pay for itself in about 6 years, and they can last for 30 or something. That's not half bad.
Already old report (Score:4, Insightful)
India just scrapped plans for 15 coal plants and went with solar instead. The report is way behind on cost of solar power. Solar is already below cost of coal in India and China.
Re:And yet people continue the Warming Alsrmism (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the verified warming trend will suddenly stop because we're slightly ahead of schedule to stop producing as much CO2 and other gases as we thought. It's like watching movies about spacecraft who, when they cut off their engines, magically come to a stop in space.
Same principle.
Re:And yet people continue the Warming Alsrmism (Score:5, Insightful)
The rate of increase for CO2 is in decline. CO2 is not in decline and it will take hundreds of years for it to decline.
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CO2 is not in decline and it will take hundreds of years for it to decline.
That is assuming that we don't actively do anything about it. There are plenty of things we can do to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, such as ocean fertilization, growing biofuel crops and sequestering the CO2, and enhanced weathering [wikipedia.org]. It is also plausible that we can learn something new in the future and develop new technology.
Re: And yet people continue the Warming Alsrmism (Score:2, Interesting)
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You mean like effectively abandoning nuclear power development?
Nuclear power is as "zero carbon" as wind or solar but the world effectively stopped building nuclear power plants 40 years ago. Had they not stopped then perhaps we could have shut down a lot of aging nuclear power plants by now because we'd have the electrical capacity to replace them.
As it is now we can expect many nuclear power plants to still be in service 80 years after they were built, triple their intended life span. If we should see a
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Maybe you should think before you cheer for something inherently opposed to what you believe.
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You don't get to make an argument only when it suits you.
Re: And yet people continue the Warming Alsrmism (Score:4, Insightful)
However, Ben Franklin's quote that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" did exist 30 years ago. Alas, large groups of humans have never been very good at learning things.
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Where the CO2 is going now is into the oceans. In probably 20 years there won't be ocean seafood for the most part. The oceans are already acidic enough that the base of the food chains are having trouble growing. Won't take long for that to kill off vast numbers of ocean species.
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A new Ice age, naturally occuring, was predicted to start about the years 3000 to 5000, far away from the 2040 you claim.
If we had continued with putting that much dust and particles into the atmosphere as we did in the 1920ies to 1960ies, the layer of particles would have shielded a part of the sun light, cooling the Earth. Luckily we started putting filters in exhausts and chimneys, moved away from heating apparte
Re:And yet people continue the Warming Alsrmism (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, this is the first I have heard this. The things to be considered are that coal fired plants are generally operated for 40 or 50 years. So, is the cost of solar cheaper than continuing to use the coal plants that exist? No. What is going to happen if they are correct is the construction of new coal plants will slow and stop by 2026. The remaining coal plants will continue to operate for some time.
Further, even if the CO2 emissions are lower than was originally predicted, no where in the article did it suggest that will happen quick enough to prevent some of the bad side effects of all the carbon released into the atmosphere. You seem to assume, because coal use will slow down the that everything will be hunky dory. I suspect that is wishful thinking on your part.
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While your second point is quite valid, the estimated economic viability of a coal (or any other plant) could well change depending on a number of external factors. If coal demand drops, some mines will close which could make the transport economics of a particular plant less favorable. If grid demand drops because of on site power generation the even the maintenance / financing costs of a coal burner may not make much sense.
In many places you have to at least partially clean up your mess - which is anot
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A large number of recent coal plants are built right on the mine. Those will be the last to die. Transport cost on coal is a killer already, transmission lines are cheap in comparison, east of the Mississippi they don't generally have to go that far.
About the only thing you could use in a conversion is the line. Maybe a cooling tower/water plumbing, but most likely not for a combined cycle.
Can only replace not convert (Score:2)
No - burning gas in a boiler is extremely wasteful compared with gas turbines.
The only things you can reuse are the switchyard and the building - even the stacks are unsuitable due to the very large difference in exhaust temperature.
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Yes.
Expected design life for those 40-50 year old plants was around 25 years. It's not just a case of putting a few patches on them to keep them running anymore. Once you get to the point where it's looking like you have to replace turbine rotors on top of everything else a rebuild is looking cheaper, and then economics gets in your way even if the expected total is less than an alternative (long lead time and huge capital
Re:And yet people continue the Warming Alsrmism (Score:4, Insightful)
All of the models that indicate signifincant warming are predicated on the continued rise of CO2 emissions.
Yet that is madness, The quickening rise in Solar power and electric cars mean that CO2 levels will be in decline by the end of this decade, never mind the ones after.
The push for renewables is precisely to avoid a climate catastrophe. The models are based on CO2 rise because, thus far, that's exactly what the trend has been.
Arguing that we don't need renewables because renewables will save us is circular reasoning.
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When alarm is scientifically justified, alarmism is moral.
Much past climate alarmism was not justified, and now that credibility has been eroded, many people are no longer listening.
Scientists should stick to the facts, and avoid becoming policy advocates.
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Much past climate alarmism was not justified, and now that credibility has been eroded, many people are no longer listening.
While I'm not a fan of "alarmism," I'd be interested in seeing your citation for "much past climate alarmism was not justified." Specifically what "past climate alarmism" are you referring to, who said it, when, what exactly did they say, and in what way was it shown not to be justified?
And, show me some actual sources, please. I'd like to see something more than just parroting some blog saying "past climate alarmism wasn't justified."
Re:And yet people continue the Warming Alsrmism (Score:4, Insightful)
In every part of the world where people still live in reality, there is an understanding that climate change is happening because that's where all our observations and data point.
In bumfuck stupid conservative 'merica, true fucking morons who are so fucking stupid they think smart people are bad, but that their worthless, uninformed, uneducated, inbred opinion is somehow good... well, there's a lot of loudmouth fucking idiots who continuie to have their heads up their ass and listen to the people who would lose money if we did something to prevent climate change from disrupting the world. They basically are too stupid to give a fuck about the human species. The fact that their head-up-ass anti-science position has spread is because we have a lot of people in 'merica who are fucking stupid, and prefer themselves to remain that way.
Just telling it like it is.
Lack of specifics (Score:3)
I'd be interested in seeing your citation for "much past climate alarmism was not justified."
The 2007 IPCC Report [www.ipcc.ch] contains numerous wildly inaccurate statements.
My question-- the part you failed to quote--said "who said it, when, what exactly did they say, and in what way was it shown not to be justified?"
You didn't answer my question. You asserted that the IPCC synthesis report was "alarmism" with "numerous inaccurate statements," but didn't point out a single inaccurate statement.
So, I repeat: what specifically was inaccurate, and how and when was it shown not to be justified?
Re: And yet people continue the Warming Alsrmism (Score:3)
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Alarmism or not, did you really think we could just keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with no consequence?
It doesn't matter what I think, because I don't live in a swing state. In 2008, most Republican presidential candidates, including the nominee, said that climate change was a real problem that needed to be addressed. In 2016, ZERO Republican presidential candidates said that, including the nominee who is currently our president.
Scientists may have facts and evidence on their side, but they are LOSING anyway, and lost credibility has a lot to do with that. As Cassandra learned, being correct doesn't matte
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It doesn't matter what I think, because I don't live in a swing state.
Have you heard? There's a whole world outside the US of motherfucking A. They have divergent opinions, and they're doing something about it with or without you.
Re:And yet people continue the Warming Alsrmism (Score:5, Insightful)
Market forces and simple exhaustion of supply will greatly reduce the use of coal to make electricity.
Bullcrap. There is no "exhaustion of supply". America, China, India, and Europe all have enough coal to last for centuries. Coal is dirt cheap and in many areas of the world it will continue to be the most cost effective source of power, as long as the emissions are ignored. Coal needs to die, and market forces alone are not going to accomplish that.
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I think that position is a strawman. So once you have infastructure to mine, refine and use a natural resource, you have a sunk cost into that resource. But unlike a low end retailer chain: The profits are actually great, so the company earns a lot of money.
Its not that USA doesn't understand the basic marked forces, its more about the leadership of those companies wanting to sit on their money instead of creating jobs. Quite simply because the US population isn't really earning money on the labor that is n
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That's not what SuperKendall wrote, and it's dishonest of you to imply that he did.
That's exactly what he wrote, and I stand by my statement.
For decades now, the deliberate creation of environmental panic has been used by unscrupulous alarmists like Al Gore to gain wealth and political power. The fear and hatred thus generated has been completely unnecessary, and done more harm than good.
And there it is, the unvarnished bullshit. Sorry, you're clearly far too biased to say anything meaningful in this conversation.
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So why continue to scare people with a future that will never come to pass, in order to get them to behave in a way they would have done anyway had you simply left them alone?
Uh, because the carbon levels are already high enough to start affecting us negatively. It is already passing. The alarmists have been trying to get us to cut back for 20+ years, way back when it would have made the biggest difference. If the fossil fuel industries had not fought so hard (like the tobacco companies before them), we could have avoided the affects we're seeing now [nasa.gov]:
Effects that scientists had predicted in the past would result from global climate change are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves.
But it's more than that. The alarmists have been reacting to the scientific research that says it will get much worse. What we
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CO2 levels may not decline until breakthroughs in nanotech allow CO2 harvesting on a mass scale.
Breakthroughs in nanotech?
How about plants?
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An ideal form of carbon sequestration is known as "coal".
When the plants which created current fossil fuels were living, bacteria and fungi had not evolved the ability to break down certain key parts of the plants. Today, they have. So we will never be able to go back.
In a hundred y
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Scale. And deforestation is a thing too.
Reforestation is also a thing. Deforestation is rapidly diminishing. It is still bad in Africa and Indonesia, but has fallen dramatically in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. Forests are increasing in North America, Europe, and China.
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Wood isn't nearly as energy dense as coal or oil. And we need to pull out the CO2 that came from coal and oil, so would need multiple times as many trees...every single year.
Simply not viable. Every little bit helps, but this won't be more than a few percent.
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The thing that's fucked is people like you thinking your edgy sarcasm is anything but garbage to dump into discussions.
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The thing that's fucked is people like you thinking your edgy sarcasm is anything but garbage to dump into discussions.
And what, pray tell, did you contribute to the discussion?
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Re:dumping the grid (Score:5, Interesting)
Just wait until other countries start putting a carbon tax on US products produced with dirty fossil fuels.
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They've already got the vehicle to do it and the US has withdrawn from the group so if they go forward we won't even be able to negotiate or even attend the meetings. All they would need to do is reconvene the Paris working group and assess tariffs against non participating countries, as there's only 3 nonparticipating countries it would be trivial for the rest of the world to apply export tariffs to those countries.
And because we pulled out of the treaty we wouldn't even be able to attend the meeting. But
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.... causing our country to fall into a 2nd world status and maybe even 3rd world if we do not watch it.
You really shouldn't use terms you don't understand.
https://www.quora.com/What-are-First-World-Second-World-and-Third-World-countries
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I wish that people knew what "first world", "second world", and "third world" actually mean.
They are not comparative standards of living.
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Chairman Maoâ(TM)s Theory of the Differentiation of the Three Worlds [marxists.org]
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You're of course free to call it "politically-motivated bullshit," but when literally all but handful (two? three?) of countries *in the world* have signed it, the agreement -- for better or worse -- just doesn't seem that political to me...
Re: dumping the grid (Score:2)
I try to avoid some topics. If you do not mind, what definition of 'political' are you using?
To be clear, I point at the responses by the States and businesses, since drawing back from the Accord, to point out that I feel the Accord was not required. While I dislike Trump, I agree with him in is matter.
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when literally all but handful (two? three?) of countries *in the world* have signed it, the agreement -- for better or worse -- just doesn't seem that political to me
That makes it sound like a completely political empty gesture........if it were something that would actually be effective, more countries would have opposed it purely on selfish grounds.
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This is true but as the open source software people have shown us, it's hard to compete with free fuel for your power plant.
Oil is in trouble now because worldwide demand is declining and it's hard to keep everyone in line to keep them from pumping too much oil.
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Fortunately, there are strong economic forces now favoring renewable energy. Trump's push for fossil fuels will give them a temporary reprieve (and add more CO2 to the atmosphere along the way) but the fossil companies should be able to see the writing on the wall. Coal is dead. Oil is next.
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We don't need any "Climate Accords." This will happen natural.
...except that basically every country in the world has signed the Paris Agreement [wikipedia.org], so it's not like this happened without climate accords. That is not to say that the climate accords had any effect -- good or bad -- but it's disingenuous to ignore them.
Re: So, President Trump was right? (Score:2)
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Re:Any moron can extrapolate (Score:5, Insightful)
...by drawing a straightish line on a graph.
Yes, it would be somewhat moronic to draw a straightish line on this graph. [wikipedia.org] Something exponential-ish (or logistic, or...) would be much more sensible.
And "nighttime solar" is already a thing (though they don't call it that). This plant [wikipedia.org] generated electricity for 36 days straight, 24 hours/day.
All forms of energy have problems, it's just a matter of which problems you prioritize. Storage is an engineering (=money) problem, coal an environmental problem, etc.
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Straight lines nothing.
This exists for a reason: http://imgur.com/l3kYm [imgur.com]
Re:Any moron can extrapolate (Score:4, Interesting)
You are ignorant of what's going on in the energy market, your clue should be that your own assessment is in contravention of the wall street press. Storage is there, it's already viable and it's already cheaper than gas. They just executed a 20 year purchase agreement for a solar + storage contract (IIRC it was in Texas) at less than 4cents kwh. That's cheaper than any other source of generation and guarantees 24/7 power.
This isn't even with the big drop in battery prices that's expected as the major battery factories come on line. In case you aren't aware the Tesla gigafactory is one of about 30 similarly sized factories being built right this minute around the world. Batteries prices are projected to fall below the price threshold that they will disrupt entirely the idea of base load. Wall streets been moving money toward this as the trend has intensified, it's been all over the wall street news since 2008 and it's accelerating every year.
Unlike you these people are betting real money on this, billions of dollars are flowing to renewables because of this massive shift in energy production pricing and has been since 2008.
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So, short battery manufacturers?
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar and wind work in low % of overall generation. It doesn't work at high % of total generation. Same with net metering at home installs.
People will keep saying this until it does work in high % of total generation, and then they'll find something else to complain about.
Not that the problems with solar aren't real, but the people working to solve those problems are real also, and sooner or later (and more likely sooner, given the amount of effort being invested), they will solve them.
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Um, ok. Well, anyway, no technological breakthrough is going to change the number of hours per day the sun shines or the wind blows. So that means storage. And that means huge losses storing and retrieving the energy. There is an obsession about wind and solar, and it's religious. People obsess over the technologies and then later come up with these justifications for how "the tech is gonna get there eventually!!!". This is backwards. Why swim upstream and use variable power generation for baseline power? I
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Btw I say this as someone who spent a lot of money on a home 7kW PV system with batteries! I love it but the religious nutso-ism is amazing to watch
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People will keep saying this until it does work in high % of total generation, and then they'll find something else to complain about.
At the moment, solar is competitive with coal on price, but it will never work at high % until the storage solution is solved (because of night and clouds). Storage is where the research needs to be, and the article seems to think we have solutions that will become viable sooner rather than later. No one knows anything though.
After that we can complain about the environmental damage from lithium mines.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is exactly my point. These numbers are just counting MW generated over a year and dividing by MW consumed over same period. Think about it for a few minutes. This is a very very different thing from actually running off of solar and wind.
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With non-renewable resources, on the one hand we have increasing technological ability, while on the other hand the difficulty for extraction goes up with time as the low-hanging fruit is preferentially depleted (there are of course special cases). Contrast this to renewable sources, where the former is true -- increasing technology drives prices down -- but the latter is
Re: Bloomberg (Score:2)
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Bloomberg. There's your first hint that it's a load of horseshit.
There's got to be a pony in here somewhere!
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Hydro-electric produces constantly, although not available to every part of the world. Geothermal constantly, but its practical cost varies widely depending on the geological activity in a region. Solar produces during the day, when demand is at peak. Wind can produce at night, but is only able to supplement a wider grid. Storage systems are already in production and on the market, and will continue to be developed. So how can you say that in 20+ years that there won't be storage systems?
The future is this: