Renewable Energy Set To Be Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels By 2020, Says Report (independent.co.uk) 261
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Continuous technological improvements have led to a rapid fall in the cost of renewable energy in recent years, meaning some forms can already comfortably compete with fossil fuels. The report suggests this trend will continue, and that by 2020 "all the renewable power generation technologies that are now in commercial use are expected to fall within the fossil fuel-fired cost range." Of those technologies, most will either be at the lower end of the cost range or actually undercutting fossil fuels. "This new dynamic signals a significant shift in the energy paradigm," said Adnan Amin, director-general of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IREA), which published the report. "Turning to renewables for new power generation is not simply an environmentally conscious decision, it is now -- overwhelmingly -- a smart economic one." The report looked specifically at the relative cost of new energy projects being commissioned. As renewable energy becomes cheaper, consumers will benefit from investment in green infrastructure. The current cost for fossil fuel power generation ranges from around 4p to 12p per kilowatt hour across G20 countries. By 2020, IREA predicted renewables will cost between 2p and 7p, with the best onshore wind and solar photovoltaic projects expected to deliver electricity by 2p or less next year.
I'm wondering what's going to happen (Score:4, Interesting)
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There's a lot MORE coal production elsewhere though, so blaming the ME for the majority seems incorrect. China as the highest coal 'producer' was around 3.8 gigatonnes of coal annually, so just on that scale is more than 7.5x as destructive.
All those stats are highly rounded and not current anymore, but the scale should be a nice indicat
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Uhm. Not too likely at this point. Fossil fuels make up a third of Russia's budget revenue and over half of its exports. (Source: Bank of Finland's Economies in Transition policy brief No. 5 from last year entitled Overview of Russia's oil and gas sector [helsinki.fi],the Bank of Finland keeps a pretty close eye on Russia, it being one of the largest trading partners we have and a major geopolitical question mark if unstability/collapse hits). Quoting the brief:
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when the US and the rest of the world loses collective interest in the middle east?
It's not just the middle east but they are going to be the ones hit the hardest. The answer is that there will be a shift in power and it will ultimately have a positive and stabilizing effect. However, the resettlement of power can sometimes turn very ugly with events like civil wars and genocides. The faster the world abandon's their oil supply, the shorter and more tumultuous the transition period will be. Their economies are going to stagnate if they haven't invested in an educated populous.
TL;DR: a
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It already is. Thanks to "fracking," the USA has now discovered massive reserves of oil and natural gas domestically, and allowed the revival of many supposedly "tapped out" oilfields. The USA is set to become one of the world's largest producers of natural gas--and we have such a surplus supply that Shell's Pennzoil division is making motor oil from natural gas!
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Not gonna happen. Less than half of the oil the US imports is used as fuel in the first place. Even without being used as fuel, petroleum is still in massive demand as a chemical feedstock.
Not to mention something under a third of the US's oil imports come from the Middle East in the first place - the bulk comes from Canada, Central, and South America.
Far more interesting to me than the
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Poor Norwegians. Just a single trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund to get them through the transition.
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I'm wondering what's going to happen when the US and the rest of the world loses collective interest in the middle east? Saudi Arabia is just now trying to figure out how to modernize their country when the price of oil collapses. They're desperately trying to get women into the economy because their current social system isn't compatible with the kinds of two income families countries want/need to maintain the growth/profit margins they're used to.
Well, the Gulf and Arabia i general is one of the cheapest and most efficient places to generate solar energy. They have lots of space for solar plants and very few people complaining about solar panels ruining their view and offending their sense of aesthetic harmony. Some of the smaller countries in the region are already stating to realise this so my theory on what will happen when oil starts to decline is that if they can figure out a way to export the energy or switch to high energy manufacturing they
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when the US and the rest of the world loses collective interest in the middle east? Saudi Arabia is just now trying to figure out how to modernize their country when the price of oil collapses.
I wouldn't worry about that in our lifetimes. The Iran Shah was right when he said "oil was too valuable to burn". If we collectively decided to not drive our cars tomorrow we'd still be refining ludicrous amounts of crude oil.
While our petrol and diesel consumption is levelling off, our consumption of aviation fuel and bunker fuel shows no signs of slowing down. Even if they stopped our consumption of oil based products is still skyrocketing at an alarming rate. Where will we get the plastic to individuall [seriouseats.com]
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And it has many uses other than just transportation.
Though 71% of the oil use in the US is for transportation. That's a pretty huge drop in demand if you convert even a portion of the transportations sector to electricity. It won't eliminate demand for oil, but it will but pretty strong downward pressure on the price.
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Yes, but here's the thing. The vast majority of oil is used for transportation, between jet fuel, bunker fuel for ships, and gasoline. Furthermore, that is VERY inefficient. The utter best you can hope for out of ICE is 50%, which is theoretical, not economically viable. So roughly 30% of oil is literally being thrown away/wasted.
Remove that demand, and the price of oil falls, really hard. The sum total of all other uses of petroleum can be satisfied without the middle east.
Goody we can stop subsidies and Tax Credits (Score:2)
We can also get rid of giveaways like net metering while at it.
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Net metering is no giveaway, anyone that claims as such has no idea about the matter.
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Says Mr. "I can't tell the difference between sea and land ice" :)
Start re-educating/retraining coal miners (Score:2)
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We may be seeing the last "hurrah" of coal over the next 20 years. The development of new nuclear reactor technologies such as the molten salt reactor fueled by plentiful thorium-232 could end the age of coal within 40 years.
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Nuclear is a boondoggle... and that goes double for new unproven technologies. Even if governments were to decided to start a massive build-out of reactors, it
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Of course, I would help a lot with credibility if the molten-salt people do their homework correctly, before making outstanding claims.
https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
Re: Start re-educating/retraining coal miners (Score:2)
In round numbers, how many solar installers are needed in the poverty-stricken Appalachian region? Once every miner's shack and double wide gets a solar installation placed on top of it, what will they do? Collect unemployment until a new job training bill comes along and gives them another glimmer of hope.
Not counting the cost of storage (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is the cost of storage. Renewables are intermittent meaning we need storage or baseload backup. 96% of our current storage is done thru pumped hydro [wikipedia.org]. All of our current storage will last less then a hour. It is not feasible to scale that up to a 100% percent renewable grid [pnas.org]. Batteries are even more expensive and less feasible for grid level storage.
Given the realities of climate change, it is immoral to oppose nuclear power
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The latest bid prices for wind and solar in the US included solar and were cheaper than old and already paid for power plant coal power. (approx 3 cents a kwh). These bids included storage.
Storage + renewable prices have already reached parity or cheaper than coal in most of the US. This paper indicates the remaining rest of the continental US will reach parity in a few years. Battery prices have fallen precipitously over the last 5 years and storage is competitive with generation.
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Re:Not counting the cost of storage (Score:4, Informative)
Uh not even close. The bid prices in the US for solar are around 0.188kWh around 0.30kWh for solar. Coal however does come in at around 0.032kWh however. If you use batteries for load balancing? Double that. Triple it if it's a combined solar/wind battery balancing system. Those prices are still half of what we pay in Canada. It still is cheaper to build a coal power plant, it is still cheaper to flood thousands of KM of land and build a dam. Kinda like what they're doing out in BC, where there are no lack of passes for wind. And it's *still* cheaper to build a brand new hydroelectric dam.
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https://www.vox.com/energy-and... [vox.com]
I suggest you use news that isn't 20 years old. The most recent bids in Colorado for new solar are cheaper than old coal.
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That caught my eye, so I looked up data about a pumped storage hydroelectric power plant that is ~300km from me. The flow is ~188m^3/s and the capacity of the reservoir is 3 700 000 m^3. Which means that it could go for 5.4 hours delivering 735 MW.
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Well, I like to argue differently: It is immoral to propose nuclear power, as it is too costly and pursuing nuclear takes away funding from more efficient solutions and solutions which can be faster deployed.
Storage is really a serious issue only once you have more than 60% renewables. Storage prices are expected to go down significantly. Also demand-side electricity management, large-sale power distribution, over provisioning, and efficiency improvements will also help to reduce the problem. I do not see a
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I do not see a fundamental problem going to 100% renewables.
You might not, but that national academy of sciences does. They have rejected the feasibility of the leading 100% renewable plan. [pnas.org] Many of the worlds top climate scientists have repeatedly said nuclear power is the only viable path forward on climate change [theguardian.com]
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Not even close. A nuclear power plant built today needs to have an economical life of 50 years, and it will still have a discounted construction cost per kWh of over $0.07. That doesn't include operations cost, maintenance, waste disposal, or decommissioning.
The age of nuclear is over until major issues are solved. For now, 10-year life natural gas plants are the only socially (or morally if you insist) acceptable means of provid
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Unless the tax payers, the private sector invested in pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the 1950-90's most nations have existing dams that would have to be upgraded.
Someone had to think of the reverse electric motor driven pumps at the time. Many design just went for a reservoir and saved costs as generation only.
Pump back can be
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Re: Not counting the cost of storage (Score:4, Interesting)
You say that but I remember a couple very long and hot summers where Dad sat by the TV watching the weather channel on satellite, waiting for the wind to blow and the rains to start. Crops won't grow without the rain, and the winds bring the rain.
So we sat in the farmhouse, and watched the weather channel. Weeks at a time. My brothers and I would play with our Lego blocks almost afraid to talk to Dad since he was oddly quiet everyday.
Oh, I'm sure someone will point out that if it was the summer and there's no clouds then for sure then solar panels would make a lot of electricity.
I can recall some relatively warm and calm winters. I tried to make a flight but the fog hanging over the Midwest was not moving. Planes had to be diverted for the fog. Many flights were cancelled. Even taking buses was not advised with such heavy fog. This was around Christmas time and a lot of people wanted to travel. The air was so still that air quality advisories were everywhere. It was warm for winter but people still needed heat. People were burning wood for heat, coal power plants were working hard. Some farmers ventured in the fields to dispose of melting manure. Everything stank.
No sun. No wind. Days at a time. Covering entire states.
Oh, then the wind blows. Along with the wind comes, hail, snow, sand, rain, and whatever else it can pick up from the ground. Then there are tornadoes, ice storms, lightning. All kinds of fun in the Midwest.
Give me nuclear power. Nuclear power doesn't care what the weather is like. It's cheap, safe, reliable, and we would not be reliant on Arabian oil or Chinese solar collectors.
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Nuclear isn't built on the idea that it requires storage. Nuclear is built on the idea that it carries total base load, or near base load. Most nuclear power plants are based around the idea that they'll carry between 70-85% of all grid demands at all times. It's the "fast spinup" plants that cover peak, over-demand and so on. That's coal, hydroelectric, natural gas. Wind/solar? Wind has to blow meaning if it's not, it has to rely on storage to balance load. Solar the sun has to shine, doesn't work ou
THIS is how The Invisible Hand ... (Score:2, Insightful)
THIS is how The Invisible Hand eliminates greenhouse gas emissions. B-)
Cost of renewable energy collection drops as tech advances.
* Solar photovoltaic,
Exactly right (Score:2)
The people worried about carbon emissions are just not realizing the huge downturn in output we'll see over the next few decades. They are worried about what things might be lime in 100 years when within 50 we'll have a massive drop in CO2 output.
Instead they should be focusing on real pollution which has a far larger lifespan in the environment than CO2...
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Unfortunately, we'll still be producing lots of CO2 during those 50 years before the drop. Which will produce very bad results.
The market is moving far too slowly if we want to do things like keep Florida above the ocean.
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Control and conversion IS semiconductor tech, with all the Moore's Law benefits.
Only in part. The issues with power electronics are not generally with component density but rather with component properties (max voltage, max current, heat losses, lifetime, manufacturing costs etc.). These things do advance but not in line with Moore's law which was about digital circuitry.
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Those things you mention are all already at 95% - 99% efficiency.
You can make them cheaper by finding cheaper materials, but not more efficient.
Re: THIS is how The Invisible Hand ... (Score:2)
Fusion (Score:3)
>"Renewable Energy Set To Be Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels By 2020"
Or we figure out effective fusion, finally, and all our problems with energy and everything related to it just go "poof"! Energy related nation conflict, emissions, waste, land use, most of the danger, most of the cost, supply issues, many of the grid issues, could all quickly disappear.
OK, so I am living in a dream world. But it COULD happen.... based on how long it has already taken, probably not by 2020, unfortunately.
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Sorry, but due to the cost of tritium, DT fusion, the only kind we can hope to do in the next 50 years, will be about $1 per KWh.
Effective fusion has been figured out long ago. The Sun fuses 93 million miles away, and we collect its energy here.
No way will earth fusion reactors compete with solar and wind.
instead, we'll be using it for spacecraft and military ships and submarines.
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I'd argue that the large reactor reactor designs suck the worst. laser and tokamaks are expensive failures, and ITER will be another.
a working fusion reactor won't one of these big silly monsters; it will be something in the direction of a fusor/polywell if it happens at all.
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I've been hearing lots of promises about fusion for at least 30 years now.Any day now it will happen LOL !
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Even if you had your load mostly from fusion, you still need pumped storage for grid balancing.
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Fusion isn't that great. It doesn't ramp up/down very well, for example. It's also gonna be expensive compared to renewables. While it will be great in niche applications, I don't imagine it will have a massive impact on the electrical grid. By the time it becomes commercially viable it just won't be needed.
Geopolitical changes (Score:3)
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Remove fossil oil, and relation between nations change. Saudis will be obvious loosers.
The Arabs are actually sitting on, or rather under, another massive energy resource which is solar. They can produce solar energy very efficiently, without interruption and at low prices. If they start using their sovereign wealth funds to begin prepping now and if they can get that energy to market somehow they do stand a chance of transitioning relatively smoothly.
I wonder if Russia's economy is diverse enough to avoid collapse.
Ummm.... No.
And without oil, US interest for middle east vanish, will US Israel support too?
No, not as long as pandering to the Christian community in the US is key to wining elections in the US so unless there is a sudden
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Remove fossil oil
How? By not burning petrol in cars? Where will we get our aviation fuel? Our bunker fuel? How do we manufacture plastics? How do we repair let alone build new roads? How do we put roofs over out heads (rhetorical, personally I find asphalt tiles bizarre given the many alternatives)?
Saudis will only be the obvious losers if they rest on the laurels and don't invest in the obviously coming changing refining requirements. They sit on a lot of undesirable heavy and sour crude which is ripe for plastic manufactu
Cost curves of fuel vs. electric just intersected (Score:2)
Cost curves of fuel vs. electric just intersected roughly 10 weeks ago in late 2017. Note: That is cost for electric going down, like pretty steep. And that's with *todays* electric vehicles, with shitty batteries and no economics of scale. Experts expect ICEs to be basically gone in 10 years, simply by economics alone. Some say in roughly 5 years from now people will start paying for someone to take their ICEs, so bad will be their feasibility vs. EVs. The private owned ICE car industry is in for an equiva
Diversity of energy sources more important (Score:4, Insightful)
Even more important than "renewable" energy is diversity of energy sources. Every source of energy has its drawbacks:
- Hydroelectric dams are "renewable" and fossil-free. But they disrupt river life.
- Wind farms kill birds and (in some people's view) ruin landscapes.
- Nuclear energy creates waste products that are very, very hard to safely dispose of, and create risks of leaking in natural disasters.
- Solar energy farms require a lot of land, and endanger and displace wildlife.
- Tidal-powered turbines kill marine life.
Any energy source, if replicated at extremely large scales, will have major undesirable side effects. If instead we have a wide array of sources, each one's negative impacts won't be as widespread.
Just like with investing money...don't put all your eggs in one basket.
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Solar energy farms aren't the best way to go about it. There's a lot of space available on domestic roofs - in areas where sunlight is plentiful, you can generate a substantial amount of energy from your roof.
Now, getting the grid to cope with that kind of input is another matter.
But you're absolutely right about diversity. I wonder about the kind of mindset that thinks an all-electric dwelling is the way to go.
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"Wind farms kill birds" - overblown negative - loads of birds die flying into vehicles, cats kill millions more birds than all the turbines. All farms require a lot of land, at least with solar panels you can still have sheep on the same land to keep the grass cut and provide shade for the sheep.
"Any energy source, if replicated at extremely large scales, will have major undesirable side effects." - Major - certainly in the form of fossil powe
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You're right, I didn't list drawbacks of fossil fuels, because the story was about renewable energy. The drawbacks of fossil fuels are widely known: air pollution, accidents that foul rivers and oceans, minor earthquakes.
With that said, I think fossil fuels can be a part of a diverse energy future. We should reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, but not necessarily eliminate it.
You can nit-pick the negative effects of specific items on my list, but regardless, there are drawbacks to any energy source, at l
A little bit misleading (Score:2)
Renewable Energy Set To Be Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels By 2020, Says Report
There are two main sources of fossil fuel consumption, electricity and automobiles. This refers to electricity consumption, in essence replacing old fossil fuel burning power plants with clean, renewable energy. Hooray! Sign me up to get my house outfitted with highly efficient solar shingles. Unfortunately, this doesn't help fossil fuel consumption by automobiles but it's definitely progress in the right direction.
The challenge for climate change will be getting China to consider the alternative
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The challenge for climate change will be getting the US to consider the alternative
FTFY
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The challenge for climate change will be getting the US to consider the alternative
FTFY
Negative. The problem is how this issue is spun. US may use more kWh per capita but in terms of total consumption, China beats us hands down. China's consumption is also increasing while the US's consumption is decreasing. Evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. Thanks for playing though.
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china is however pushing hard on EV's and removing coal.
It's obviously not effective:
China: https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
United States: https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Talk is cheap, results are all that matters.
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China knows the problem they have and politically is heading in the correct direction whereas trump is not.
The data doesn't support your argument if you ACTUALLY look at it. Our energy consumption trends are levelling off and going down over the past 20 years. China's has consistently gone up. And this is not about Trump you idiot. We're are talking the past TWENTY YEARS. That would be Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Trump. Take your Trump hating shit elsewhere moron.
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You just left out most of the costs of fossil fuels!
What, objectively, is the full cost of fossil fuels?
Re:It already is... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the claimed problem is that many things have been left out of the calculation, the response would be first to look into what those things are, rather than jumping straight to demanding a corrected final result.
I suspect you're not asking in good faith, due to the absurdity of the way you phrase the question.
But if you were just being lazy, then I'll spoon feed you the search term: "fossil fuel externalities." That will return your years and years worth of reading materials on the subject, and you can very quickly find out if the orders of magnitude of the external costs justify conclusions about the relative costs even without having precise "objective" numbers.
Also, please note that that isn't really what "objective" means. Perhaps you meant something different, like "unbiased." Using the philosophy definitions of the terms, figuring out the costs after including externalities is clearly subjective. Using common English definitions, neither is relevant until you're making an actual accusation of bias.
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Wars and Pollution come to mind (Score:2, Insightful)
Then there's pollution. Even if you pretend climate change is a Chinese hoax smog isn't. Asthma, lung cancer, respiratory & heart di
Re:Wars and Pollution come to mind (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems you may have come to one of the answer as to why Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other oil rich nations are investing in nuclear power. They are investing in solar power too, it seems. Why would they invest in nuclear power if solar power holds so much promise on providing cheap energy?
Here's something the US Marines figured out. Solar panels are difficult to protect in a time of war. They can't be put in a concrete bunker and still provide power. They spent a lot of money on developing flexible and durable solar panels that can be part of their protective structures in the field. They also know that as durable as they are they are still vulnerable to things like rain, snow, and sand.
The US Navy has long been researching means to synthesize fuel from seawater using nuclear reactors to drive the process. They've been very successful and it seems that the only thing stopping them from moving faster is interference from the Department of Energy. We can't have the Department of Defense outshining the Department of Energy on developing energy solutions, can we? We'll probably get this process in the Navy fleets, fueling up Marine tankers that drive out to field hospitals and such, once the DOE can put enough fingerprints on it to call it a "joint effort".
What might this process do for oil rich nations like Saudi Arabia? This process of synthetic fuel doesn't much care where the carbon and hydrogen comes from. It can take crude oil and process it into refined fuels. Fuels without lead, sulfur, and other nasty stuff that gets people sick.
Oh, byproducts of this synthetic fuel process is drinkable water, oxygen, heat, and perhaps some excess hydrogen. Heat, hydrogen, and nitrogen means ammonia fertilizer. Saudi Arabia knows that they will run out of oil some day. A few young princes see nuclear power as a way to keep exporting valuable commodities and not revert to tribes warring over hills of sand and sources of clear water. Water and fertilizer means food to eat and export. They'll probably be exporting oil for a long time yet, but it will most likely come from olives in the future.
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Another thing about solar power: It's decentralised.
Autocrats like big centralised prestige projects.
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If I were making big bets today, I would be looking for a few narrow canyons I cold buy to put in some pumped hydro. That type of base storage is where the next gold rush will be found. Cool thing about pulped hydro is that you can reuse the water over and over.
I also remember hearing about some group looking into reusing old mine railways as they tend to be steepe
Re:It already is... (Score:5, Informative)
Not awful logic, but it overlooks quite a few rather important factors
1. Pumped hydro can be cheap, but only if you use it a lot. Today, it is used to store energy generated during periods of low demand (wee hours of the morning) to store energy to be sold back during periods of high demand. That works because such periods occur predictably every day. Try that with things like wind and solar which are intermittent, with seasonal or 3-4 day supply peaks. The pumped storage costs -- which are mostly capital and maintenance --will be higher.
2. You need to pump a lot of water to do pumped storage. Very roughly, you need to lift 1 cubic meter (1 metric tonne) 100 meters to store 1Kwh. There aren't a lot of sites available that have both abundant water and terrain that will support both an upper and a lower pool.
3. Practical pumped storage efficiencies are typically 70% give or take a bit. That's put 4kwh in to get 3kwh back. That can work, but only when the differential between low demand and peak demand is substantial.
4. Capital costs for pumped storage are very high. Investment recovery time is probably decades. Battery technology IS improving, albeit slowly. It could make your facility obsolete before you've pocketed wealth beyond belief ... or even paid off your loans. Likewise, widespread adoption of electric vehicles charged at off hours could reduce the peak load differential that your economics depend on.
Think of pumped storage as a huge battery that comes only in sizes humongous and even bigger. It has a very long lifetime -- decades, maybe centuries. Its self discharge rate (leaks,evaporation) is low.. No memory effects. Can discharge safely to zero (Don't try THAt with say Lion). . But it has rather low charging efficiency (70% give or take). And it can fail catastrophically (dam failure) which will likely be VERY costly.
Oh yes, and it's not all that great environmentally because of constantly varying pool levels -- plan on being sued ... probably repeatedly -- once radical environmentalists figure that out.
Re: It already is... (Score:3)
They have already moved past this, you don't need pumped hydro or railroad cars with concrete blocks in the back to store excess energy, you just need a large vertically suspended concrete or lead block that can slowly descend with gearing to a generator, takes up minimal room, can be scaled easily, and is currently being tested!
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Pumped Hydro as a storage medium for intermittent sources like solar and wind is a good idea if the costs add up (i.e. the cost for x kWh of Pumped Hydro in a given location is lower than the cost for building something else instead to supply the same power, be that battery storage or whatever)
Why worry about that? (Score:3)
You just left out most of the costs of fossil fuels!
Why worry about that?
When the DIRECT cost passes the crossovers, renewables first take up the new loads, then displace fossil fuels for old ones.
So you don't NEED government hacks to map the indirect costs into the market (and provide massive opportunities for graft and rent-seeking). The UN-hidden costs are enough to drive the market.
no it isn't, heres why.. (Score:2)
cost of oil, coal and such is dictated at the moment by market factors - what kind of money can you get by selling it. basically what this means is that if demand goes down they can sell it for cheaper than they are selling it at now.. also for the same reason price of oil will never(in our life) double, since at that point making alternative liquid from coal would be profitable.
anyhow, if it's going to go so low in just two years what kind of an idiot would buy solar _now_ ?
anyhow coal is cheap for the ch
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cost of oil, coal and such is dictated at the moment by market factors - what kind of money can you get by selling it. basically what this means is that if demand goes down they can sell it for cheaper than they are selling it at now.
For a decade or two this may be true of Saudi surface oil (where Jed Clampet and a squirrel rifle drill a deep enough to strike oil), but it isn't true for frack oil where you have to figure in the cost of the sand [reuters.com] and it isn't true for Canadian shale-oil where you have to figure in the energy cost of separation and transportation and already it isn't true for North Sea oil and it's doubtful that it will be true for deepwater wells in the Arctic or Gulf of Mexico or other places even if you can ignore the c
Re:It already is... (Score:4, Informative)
And they left out 2 trillion dollars for a war in iraq over oil.
And they left out 4,000 dead for a war over oil.
And they left out ongoing military capability required to fight a war in that region plus the cost of stationing thousands of troops.
And they left out the nearly trillion dollar subsidy to coal by allowing it to dig up coal for below market rates on federal lands.
And so on.
The subsidies for fossil fuel are woven so deep they don't even look like subsidies any more (like special accounting laws only used by the fossil fuel industry that save them billions of dollars per year).
And the ongoing incalculable health care and productivity costs for everyone who grew up inhaling lead from gasoline.
Alternative enegy isn't pollution free. But the pollution tends to be concentrated geographically instead of spread all over everywhere.
The point is that alternative energy subsidies are a drop in the bucket compared to fossil fuel subsidies.
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The problem is, carrier-scale Hydro is a no-go in the US. They've already passed peak Hydro. And while micro-hydro will make up SOME difference, it won't make up THAT much.
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Not all members of those particular religions are against action on climate change or want to bring about the end of the world. I know people personally who are part of those particular faiths who are very much in favor of cleaning up the planet and stopping climate change.
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Re:Sure (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm sure a ton of people are going to laugh at me saying this, but I suspect those will be the same people who only a year or two ago laughed when the 'nut jobs' claimed renewables were soon going to out-compete fossil fuels at base-load generation on price. We may not be there quite yet eve
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I don't think you can use the liberal word to describe those people you're pointing out.
They're authoritarian as fuck, given all the tendencies of wanting the government to control every aspect of your life and wanting to censor speech.
Also, as a right winger, you're probably pro nuclear, that is also a clean energy source.
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If batteries are not counted as "renewable" then such subsidies can keep flowing every utility bill.
e.g. "renewable" is not getting a direct subsidies but the new battery network all over a state, nation is.
Every habitual structure has to get inspected, be grid connected and has to pay for grid connection every year.
So the claim of no subsidies can be presented but the utility bill pri
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https://thinkprogress.org/char... [thinkprogress.org]
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But it's INTEL ONLY!
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