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Power Earth

Imagining an All-Renewable Grid With No Blackouts Without Long-Duration Batteries (stanford.edu) 227

Posted by EditorDavid from the going-green dept.
Slashdot reader SoftwareArtist shares an announcement from a Stanford University institute for environmental studies. "For some, visions of a future powered by clean, renewable energy are clouded by fears of blackouts driven by intermittent electricity supplies," the announcement begins.

"Those fears are misplaced, according to a new Stanford University study that analyzes grid stability under multiple scenarios in which wind, water and solar energy resources power 100% of U.S. energy needs for all purposes." "This study is the first to examine grid stability in all U.S. grid regions and many individual states after electrifying all energy and providing the electricity with only energy that is both clean and renewable," said study lead author Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford... Imagine all cars and trucks were powered with electric motors or hydrogen fuel cells, electric heat pumps replaced gas furnaces and water heaters and wind turbines and solar panels replaced coal and natural gas power plants. The study envisions those and many more transitions in place across the electricity, transportation, buildings and industrial sectors in the years 2050 and 2051...

Interconnecting larger and larger geographic regions made power supply smoother and costs lower because it upped the chances of available wind, sun and hydro power availability and reduced the need for extra wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. A significant finding of the study was that long-duration batteries were neither needed nor helpful for keeping the grid stable. Instead, grid stability could be obtained by linking together currently available batteries with storage durations of four hours or less. Linking together short-duration batteries can provide long-term storage when they are used in succession. They can also be discharged simultaneously to meet heavy peaks in demand for short periods. In other words, short-duration batteries can be used for both big peaks in demand for short periods and lower peaks for a long period or anything in-between.
Other findings:
  • Cleaner air would spare about 53,200 people from pollution-related deaths every year. It would also spare millions more from pollution-related illnesses. Total estimated health costs saved each year: $700 billion.
  • Building and operating a completely renewable grid may create 4.7 million long-term jobs.
  • Per capita household energy costs were nearly 63% less.
  • New electricity generators would occupy about 0.84% of U.S. land (versus roughly 1.3% occupied today by the fossil fuel industry).

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Imagining an All-Renewable Grid With No Blackouts Without Long-Duration Batteries More

Imagining an All-Renewable Grid With No Blackouts Without Long-Duration Batteries

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  • Contradictory (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bluegutang ( 2814641 )

    You can't say that it will be cheaper for consumers AND that it will create millions of jobs in addition to the existing jobs people have. All those extra salaries have to come from somewhere.

    • Re:Contradictory (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @03:48PM (#62095021)

      You can't say that it will be cheaper for consumers AND that it will create millions of jobs in addition to the existing jobs people have. All those extra salaries have to come from somewhere.

      One place it comes from is not paying for the actual fuel or displosal of nuclear waste and so on which the current grid requires. Also, if the energy becomes cheaper since renewables are much cheaper, many more industries such as synthetic fuel product or farming under synthetic light become viable which wouldn't otherwise exist and so new jobs are created elsewhere as well.

      • Eliminating "costs" associated with waste disposal (etc.) means cutting jobs related to those things. All costs are, at some point, labor costs even if it's not immediately obvious. The only way to add total jobs without increasing burden on the consumer (or taxpayer) is to reduce the pay for each job.
        • ...or increase productivity per employer, which is what modern renewable sources may enable.

          • ...or increase productivity

            "Increasing productivity" is the OPPOSITE of "creating more jobs".

            Productivity is defined as the value produced divided by the hours of labor to produce it.

            So if renewables "create jobs" (more labor) to produce the same energy output, then they lower productivity.

            • Electrified future requires much more electricity generated than is being generated today. Hence there's no prospect of "the same energy output". Hence your argument is irrelevant.

              • Electrified future requires much more electricity generated than is being generated today.

                Electrification of cars requires only 20% more power and charging is variable demand that can fill troughs in current demand. So we will have better use of existing infrastructure rather than needing new capacity.

                Switching from gas furnaces to ground-loop heat pumps cuts energy use since the heat pumps are more efficient. So job losses in the gas industry will be greater than new jobs in green energy.

                • Those things are true. They still don't disprove what I said. Notice how you for example ignored hydrogen production for chemistry, agriculture, or metallurgy.

            • ...or increase productivity

              "Increasing productivity" is the OPPOSITE of "creating more jobs".

              Productivity is defined as the value produced divided by the hours of labor to produce it.

              So if renewables "create jobs" (more labor) to produce the same energy output, then they lower productivity.

              What makes you think all jobs are paid the same?
              Replace a 200k worker with two 50k workers increases productivity, reduces wages, and increases jobs.

            • if renewables "create jobs" (more labor) to produce the same energy output, then they lower productivity.

              I think there is some confusion here, introduced by the article. Your statement is correct, as long as the discussion is confined to the narrow area of energy production - and renewables may indeed require more jobs per the same unit of energy output.

              However, energy production isn't a stand-alone, independent economic component. It relies on a whole swath of other areas - coal mining, oil or natural gas extraction, pipeline construction and maintenance, other fuel transportation industries (like oil or LNG

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          Note the language isn't 'add total' but 'create', it doesn't speak to how many jobs it obsoletes. So 'net add' does not seem to be spoken to, nor does it speak to geographic distribution of the labor (e.g. fossil fuel has particular hot spots for labor that are not in the United States.

      • One place it comes from is not paying for the actual fuel or displosal of nuclear waste

        ....and the reason those are expensive is because of the all the people employed to extract and process the fuel etc. Clearly, there will be lots of jobs lost in those industries plus their support industries.

        There is nothing inherently wrong with this - as technology progresses some industries decline and new ones are born but it is disingenuous to ignore the lost jobs while only mentioning the new ones created if, for not other reason, than the sectors losing jobs are a great place to recruit and retr

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by sfcat ( 872532 )

        Also, if the energy becomes cheaper since renewables are much cheaper

        Except this isn't really true. What is true is that they have a low cost of deployment. That's why the media is always showing you the amount of renewable capacity. But that doesn't matter at all. What matters is the amount of power they deliver and is used and what it costs to do that. When that's what you measure, renewables are very expensive (about 15 cents per kwh). Also, renewables, even with all the money Germany poured into them, aren't even keeping up with the annual increase in energy demand

        • Re:Contradictory (Score:5, Insightful)

          by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @04:52PM (#62095251)

          When that's what you measure, renewables are very expensive (about 15 cents per kwh)

          This is belied by the actual contracts which are a fraction of what you claim.

          That's why even Germany is using more fossil fuels today than they did 10 years ago even with 100x more renewables in the mix

          I beg your pardon? [cleanenergywire.org] Oh, they don't. So I guess all the preceding rubbish you wrote can be ignored since the conclusion is trivially refuted by facts.

          As a counterpoint, France right next door makes 75% less CO2 per watt than Germany because they listened to their engineers and use nuclear.

          French nuclear plants are old, so I don't see how your causality works back in time. When they were built, there was no renewable competition so they didn't have another option. Also, France has nuclear power to a large extent because France *is* a nuclear power (that is, it built up an industry to produce weapons). Germany didn't have such ambitions (post-WW2) or any such incentive.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by sfcat ( 872532 )

            This is belied by the actual contracts which are a fraction of what you claim.

            The ones PG&E signs in CA are about 15 cents / kwh. Please point out which contracts to which you are referring. And Germany has the highest CO2 output per watt in Europe. And your chart is capacity, not production. You should reread my post as you are clearly not understanding what I wrote. Installing 1000s of solar panels that don't make much power isn't the same as deploying the same capacity of other power sources. You need 6x the amount of renewables to equal the same about of fossil fuels.

            • Re:Contradictory (Score:5, Insightful)

              by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @05:51PM (#62095429)

              The ones PG&E signs in CA are about 15 cents / kwh. Please point out which contracts to which you are referring.

              For example, Germany already fell below one third of your number in solar auctions. [pv-tech.org] For comparison with a much more solar-friendly region, similar auctions in Chile can now go to as low as a tenth of your figure. [renewablesnow.com]

              And Germany has the highest CO2 output per watt in Europe.

              No, it doesn't. Even in the EU-27, Estonia, Poland, Cyprus, Greece, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Malta all have higher CO2 output per unit of electricity generated. [europa.eu] And that ignores European countries outside the EU-27.

              And your chart is capacity, not production.

              Are you trolling, or just blind? The chart I linked clearly outlines electricity production in TWh over time, for individual types of generation.

              You need 6x the amount of renewables to equal the same about of fossil fuels. You need 9x the amount of renewable capacity to equal the same amount of nuclear. You are fundamentally misunderstanding the data

              Blah blah blag. First "fundamentally understand" the chart I linked, and *then* you can blather something irrelevant about "needing X times more renewable capacity". But even with "needing X times more renewable capacity", renewables still outgenerated German nuclear power by a factor of four in 2020, as the chart shows, so clearly this is no show-stopper for the amount of electricity that can be generated in real-world conditions.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by Uecker ( 1842596 )

              While Germany still has relatively high CO2 output per watt in Europe, it is by far not the highest in Europe. But in the context of this discussion, this overlooks the fact that it has dropped substantially in recent years due to the use of renewables. So the implied statement that renewables did not help is completely wrong. The discussion about capacity is largely irrelevant for economics. If you can sell electricity cheaper even though you need more installed capacity then this is still cheaper. In bo

        • renewables are very expensive (about 15 cents per kwh).

          This is very incorrect. The wholesale price of wind energy is about 2 cents per kwh.

          Wind is cheap and getting cheaper [scientificamerican.com]

          Averge wind power price [statista.com]

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by sfcat ( 872532 )

        The nuclear industry pays a king's ransom for storage of nuclear waste. There is a $75b fund to build storage which isn't used due to political pressure (it isn't because of engineering, science or technology). Newer Thorium powered reactors produce almost no waste. And finally, do you know what nuclear waste is? Its mostly unspent fuel and rare earths. You know, they stuff we make renewables from that we are willing to create huge lakes of acid and move millions of tons of earth to get? The part of r

        • Newer Thorium powered reactors produce almost no waste. And finally, do you know what nuclear waste is? Its mostly unspent fuel and rare earths. You know, they stuff we make renewables from that we are willing to create huge lakes of acid and move millions of tons of earth to get?

          First of all, very little renewable energy is generated using any rare earths. Pretty much the only application of rare earths in renewable energy generation is PMG wind turbines. And second, I'm not sure what radioactive isotopes of lanthanoids have to do with renewable power. Are you claiming that the renewable industry is building turbines out of nuclear waste in secret?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by skam240 ( 789197 )

          And finally, do you know what nuclear waste is? Its mostly unspent fuel and rare earths. You know, they stuff we make renewables from that we are willing to create huge lakes of acid and move millions of tons of earth to get? The part of renewables that you never want to talk about. The huge environmental cost of building renewables that some folks just seem to ignore. The other things in nuclear waste can be used for nuclear medicine and UV sources.

          What are you a shill for the nuclear industry? Any country with a sizeable amount of reactors has infinitely more waste then they have usefully purposes for it. Hence the warehouses full of the shit in every one of these countries and our own constant pursuit for a proper disposal site.

          The vast majority of nuclear waste is just that, waste. If it were some magical source of rare earth's that could be extracted at any kind of reasonable cost we'd already be doing that as nuclear waste is expensive to store.

      • What grid??? The only places that have an actual pseudofunctional grid is North America and Europe (and literally a handful of countries outside of that). And it's why battery cars will never save the planet. The rest of the world has no way to charge them, and no reliable way to power electric trains, etc. 80% of the world will not be switching to electric and battery vehicles because they have no way to charge them, so proposing a cost free way to do so is pure bullshit. Whole electric infrastructures ne

    • Re:Contradictory (Score:4, Informative)

      by Christian Smith ( 3497 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @03:51PM (#62095029) Homepage

      The extra salaries can come from not paying fossil fuel company shareholder dividends.

      • Yes, because of course renewable energy companies will never pay their shareholders dividends, will they?

        • The sun and wind do mot have shareholders.

        • Electricity generators pay lower dividends than fossil fuel companies because it is an inherently less risky business. The returns are so predictable that bonds can often be used instead of equity.

          When you build an offshore platform in the North Sea, a lot can go wrong. When you put solar panels in the Mojave Desert, not so much.

      • Um, no. Because you'll be paying dividends to the company producing the renewable energy.

        Good grief, guys, think. If renewable are cheaper and more reliable, they will propagate all by themselves. They are not, at least, not yet.

        The requirement for hydro? That assumes storage that you can actually *use*. As in: on a wind-still night, you dump most of a lake. Not going to happen - if nothing else, the environmentalists will freak.

        • If renewable are cheaper and more reliable, they will propagate all by themselves. They are not, at least, not yet.

          Last year, 42% of new electricity generation capacity in the U.S. came from land-based wind energy -- more than from any other source -- according to numbers in a series of reports from the Department of Energy (DOE) this week. By contrast, solar amounted to only 38% of new capacity last year.

          https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/3... [cnbc.com]

          That is the vast majority of new capacity. Where subsidies and incentives come into play is accelerating the decommissioning of break even or profitable polluting generators before their end of life as well as financing new capacity where an energy producer might not have enough capital to replace all of their older generators.

      • Do they pay dividends? I thought everyone and the kitchen sink were nowadays using the tax-sidestepping trick of share buybacks so investors can profit indirectly from their shares increasing in value.

      • The extra salaries can come from not paying fossil fuel company shareholder dividends.

        That would be possibly only if they require less net capital investment. If the replacement industries are at least a capital intensive (per unit output) then either customers have to pay more, they have to pay less for labor or else someone else (taxpayers?) has to make up the difference.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Have you seen how much it costs to deal with the damage from fossil fuels and nuclear? Or how much nuclear plants cost to build and run? Renewables are way cheaper, even with more labour involved.

      I'm sure MacMann will be along any moment now to tell us how this is impossible, but the cost of his proposed solution really must be addressed.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

        Have you seen how much it costs to deal with the damage from fossil fuels and nuclear?

        Those costs are salaries for people doing the cleanup.

        So "more costs" means "more jobs", which was Bluegutang's point.

        Or how much nuclear plants cost to build and run?

        The cost to "build and run" a nuclear plant is the salaries of the people doing it.

        So "more costs" means "more jobs".

        Renewables are way cheaper, even with more labour involved.

        No. It is cheaper OR it creates more jobs. It is not "both" unless people erecting wind turbines are paid minimum wage, which they aren't.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
          Not all costs are salaries. If you need to clean up with product X which needs a feedstock, then the price of that depends on factors other than salaries. E.g., (an extreme example for fun) if you could treat nuclear waste using gold, labour would barely count as a factor in proportion to the cost of the gold.

          • The cost of producing gold (or any other product) is the cost of the salaries of the people paid to produce it.

            Gold miners don't work for free.

            • Or the cost of the machine to make gold out of lead.

              Or the cost of the mining robots.

              Why do you think all costs are wages?

              • Or the cost of the machine to make gold out of lead.

                The cost of this mythical machine would be the salaries of the people paid to make it.

                Or the cost of the mining robots.

                The cost of mining robots is the cost of the salaries paid to the people who design and manufacture the robots.

                Why do you think all costs are wages?

                Because when you trace the expenses, ultimately they are paying for someone's labor. There are a few exceptions such as rent for land and interest/dividends paid to investors, but both of these are higher for renewables.

                You can't "do it cheaper" AND "create more jobs" unless those jobs pay much less than the jobs

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
              If you think the cost of something is purely due to salaries you misunderstand economics.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The primary cost of nuclear power is not salaries. It's delays, guaranteed profits, the expensive equipment needed to build the plant and decommission it (much of which is single use only, it becomes part of the plant or high level nuclear waste, or both), the cost of running the regulator itself etc.

          • the expensive equipment

            The equipment is expensive because people expect to be paid to make the equipment.

            and decommission it

            Decommissioning nuclear power plants is expensive because of the salaries of the people doing the decommissioning.

            it becomes part of the plant or high level nuclear waste,

            Handling waste is expensive because of the salaries of the people handling it.

            the cost of running the regulator itself etc.

            Regulators have salaries too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 )

        I'm sure MacMann will be along any moment now to tell us how this is impossible.

        That's who probably upmodded you.

    • Those extra salaries will be offshore in places that pay less and have less environmental regulations.
    • Ignoring that a renewable grid means we aren't constantly at the mercy of the Middle East and can cut back significantly on how much money we give them (both directly and indirectly) and also ignoring that the vast majority of these jobs would just be replacing existing jobs in the fossil fuel industry, economic activity comes from human beings doing productive things. This is a productive thing. Money is a concept we made up. We can decide where is the civilization we put our resources and do so in a way t

      • Dated perspective. We haven't been "at the mercy" of the Middle East in the United States for years. The only thing holding us back has been refinery capacity. There's enough petroleum production potential for North America to be mostly self-sufficient. The only issue would be cost. Saudi oil can still cost less whenever spot prices allow for it.

    • It's not a contradiction. First, you can't expect the fossil fuel jobs and their salaries to not go away, so some costs will simply be incurred in a different industry. Second, electrification of society requires much more electricity to be generated so even with greater total payroll costs the *unit* cost of electricity can still be lower. And third, "cheaper for consumers" includes situations where electricity substitutes for another input such as oil products, where savings for consumers are achieved eve

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      Where does it say it would create "more" jobs? More than what?

      • More than what?

        More than are currently needed to produce the same amount of energy.

        Which is BS.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ichijo ( 607641 )

          More than are currently needed to produce the same amount of energy.

          ShanghaiBill, I think you're lying, or do you have proof that they made that claim?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      It's plausible.

      For one, it doesn't say how many jobs they see this as 'add' versus 'replace'. One point often used to scare people about moving to renewable is that their fossil fuel oriented jobs will disappear. I don't know if there is enough detail to discern how much is 'net add'.

      Even if there is some more labor, it may still be cheaper if the labor offsets non-labor costs associated with alternatives. Whether it is saving on fuel, saving on the cost associated with accidents/liability, or replacing f

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suss ( 158993 )

      The fairies and unicorns that will establish this fantasy power network work for peanuts...

  • "...you just need an order of magnitude more of the shorter-duration batteries."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Which fortunately we are going to have anyway, as we move to electric vehicles and more people get home batteries. The payback time on home batteries is already getting pretty short. Even if you don't have solar to charge them, you can probably use an off-peak rate at night.

      • When the electricity gets spotty and people have to actually rely on those home batteries, do you think poor people will have them?

  • Again? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @03:57PM (#62095049)

    I can imagine all sorts of things. However we are limited by the laws of physics. So much of this vision isn't really compatible with those laws. So you can't build storage (something engineers have been saying for decades)? So just imagine a grid without storage. Next it was that you can't use renewables for base load. So then they argued you don't need base load (which is absurd, that's not how the demand for power works). Then it was you can't build enough panels and batteries to make it work. The mining required would be environmentally catastrophic. They just ignore that one. Now this guy, with no experience in engineering or the energy industry is declaring you can just make 100% renewables work by just routing the power around. Seriously? Do you think engineers didn't already think of that one? You can make loads of money transferring power around. When it is efficient enough to make it work, we already do that. When it isn't, we don't. Capitalism has all sorts of problems, but using energy efficiently isn't one of them. Capitalism is ruthlessly efficient at using the least energy to do the most. Most heavy industries highest costs are from energy. They often will locate their sites near cheap power. We don't even bother to find bauxite sites anymore because we only locate them near cheap power already. Trying to find some sort of way to do these things even more efficiently is very difficult and some academic with no engineering or industry background certainly won't be able to do it.

    The laws of physics don't give a shit about your ideology. Quit pushing this non-scientific, absurdly inefficient technology that can't possibly work. Either use nuclear, accept climate change (please no), or prepare for civil wars like in the last book of the bible. Your call. But quit trying to bet all of our futures on unicorns.

    • You can make loads of money transferring power around. When it is efficient enough to make it work, we already do that. When it isn't, we don't.

      Except there are reasons other than efficiency that we don't do it. Texas has it's own grid that is not up to national standards and not connected to the rest of the country for stupid political reasons (We can take care of ourselves dagnabit!) and last winter when they got some unexpectedly extreme cold weather the whole thing failed spectacularly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

      The laws of physics don't give a shit about your ideology.

      Indeed they do not, but the demonstration from physics and cold hard figures (e.g. Lazard) suggests that renewables will be a major part of future generation and that nuclear, at least any based on currently produced mainstream technologies, will not be used for more than 10-20% of generation due to cost and other factors.

    • The laws of physics don't give a shit about your ideology. Quit pushing this non-scientific, absurdly inefficient technology that can't possibly work. Either use nuclear, accept climate change (please no), or prepare for civil wars like in the last book of the bible. Your call. But quit trying to bet all of our futures on unicorns.

      But that's what they do. First they imagine there's no heaven [wikipedia.org], then they imagine there's ... no laws of physics.

      The problem is that imagination doesn't make it so.

    • You are by far underestimating the rigor of the study

      https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      Man, the nuclear fan boys pop up in any energy related post nowadays.

      It would take a half century to deploy a meaningful number of reactors in this country (I mean, do you think we'd even find a meaningful number of communities to accept a nuke plant? I don't.) Not only do we need solutions sooner than this but in that time batteries will likely be all we need given their current rate of development and the massive sums of money being poured into developing better ones.

      Meanwhile it's incredibly likely we st

    • prepare for civil wars like in the last book of the bible Holy shit, you maintained some credibility until the 3rd last sentence. Then you went full Revelations. NEVER go full Revelations.

  • We focus heavily on death (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @04:04PM (#62095067)
    And not enough on the negative impacts that don't kill you. Like how there's millions of people with long-term symptoms and effects left over from covid. Air pollution has a wide variety of nasty effects. Decreased intelligence is one of them, and an overall decrease in lung capacity. Never mind the cost of treating people who don't just drop dead.
    • They use deaths because they're an easier indicator to use; life/death is binary. It gets complicated & you have to draw sometimes arbitrary lines when dealing with other adverse health effects, i.e. How sick or injured do they have to be to be counted? But yes, deaths are just one of many detrimental effects from extracting, refining, transporting, & burning fossil fuels around where we live, work, & play.

    • You aint lying. My lungs are messed up in part from industrial work. Nothing compared to how it used to be though, the black lung coal miners endured back in the day. Still, its gonna be a lot more stable when being an essential worker does not shorten your life or bring injury, and a huge part of that is electric vehicles. Most warehouses are already there, with only a few propane forklifts floating around, which arent so bad.

  • According to the article, the study authors are counting on large numbers of offshore wind turbines in California. They have obviously never dealt with the California Coastal Commission. LOL. Not to mention all the people up and down the coast with million dollar views. I am sure they will be thrilled to have wind turbines offshore to enhance their beautiful homes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vyvepe ( 809573 )
      The article also talks about variable pricing to achieve flexible demand. It is a pity the study is paywalled. It would be interesting to know what level of demand flexibility they require.
      • I have often thought this would be a good idea. Essentially there could be some mechanism whereby the utility company advertises the price and smart appliances decide if they should use power or not. Refrigerators and air conditioners could let temperatures rise a bit to ride out temporary high prices, for example. Pool pumps and electric dryers could pause. Etc.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by vyvepe ( 809573 )
          There is some low hanging fruit like you mentioned. But there are also things which will irritate people. It is likely price will be often high when people switch on lights and TVs in the evenings. Worse, if it lasts longer and we need to decide whether to switch on fridges again or let the food spoil. Worst if it leads to stopping e.g. an electric furnace for metal alloy production (that adds hundreds thousand in costs to fix and restart it). That is the reason why the required level of demand flexibility

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      https://www.renewableenergymag... [renewablee...gazine.com]
      • That could definitely help get the ball rolling. But there will still be a lot of connected/well-funded/powerful people who will try to fight it if it is near them (basically, standard NIMBY-ism).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

          That could definitely help get the ball rolling. But there will still be a lot of connected/well-funded/powerful people who will try to fight it if it is near them (basically, standard NIMBY-ism).

          I don't doubt you are right, but the above should help. In the UK you'd think there would be similar resistance, but it's pretty much vanished now. I'd like to say I can see on shore wind turbines from my garden and that it doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother me, but the next door house gets in the way of actually seeing them.

    • According to the article, the study authors are counting on large numbers of offshore wind turbines in California. They have obviously never dealt with the California Coastal Commission. LOL. Not to mention all the people up and down the coast with million dollar views. I am sure they will be thrilled to have wind turbines offshore to enhance their beautiful homes.

      You can get at some of the assumptions made on the Stanford website, they published a summary of the figures there if not the whole paper. I read it when this first came out a few weeks ago, although I haven't gotten the paper (maybe it's on scihub now, it wasn't at the time).

      I do grid modeling for a living. Just based on the short snippets from summaries of the figures, the whole paper smells like bullshit. For one, and most obviously, a HUGE chunk of the "savings" assumed is from societal cost of carbo

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Klaxton ( 609696 )
        Wind and solar are cheaper than coal power and NG too, so where's this "skyrocketing electric bill" supposed to come from? The study may or may not be accurate, but "per capita household annual energy costs were nearly 63% less than in a business as usual scenario. In some states, costs dropped as much as 79%." Yes it would mean a massive build-out of wind and solar and transmission lines, but the result may not mean higher consumer prices. "based on energy cost savings alone, the payback time may be as sho
  • Joel Pett instead of XKCD this time! https://www.gocomics.com/joelp... [gocomics.com]

  • We haven't put in many car chargers yet, compared to the end-state. We need the rule changed ASAP so that every charging car becomes an available power source, at the very least for the building it's hooked up to.

    I'm assured that making individual house chargers into grid-sources is Hard, so for up to four residences, a building can "merely" have car chargers that can be told by the utility to power that building, and subtract its needs from the grid. (As with all below, you would have the ability to p

  • ===Per capita household energy costs were nearly 63% less.=== I do not see the money I spend on energy dropping at all, let alone being 63% less. That raises a concern for me about the entire study, and what it's purpose was.
  • Then, the losers of this scenario know precisely what they stand to lose and they react with political contributions, lobbying, misinformation campaigns, forming trade groups to nip the competition in the bud, buying up patents and create obstacles, doing every thing they can do, legal, illegal, ethical or unethical, moral, immoral or amoral, to prevent the scenario from being realized.

    And those who stand to win by the scenario often are not paying attention, when they do they don't believe it, or they fall victim to misinformation campaigns. Thus a disruptor comes up only when it flies under the radar

    Case in point: Metal Hydride batteries. They looked promising in 1980s. Too promising, Oil companies bought the patents, specifically prohibited their use in automobiles, till they expired in 2019 they were owned by Exxon-Mobil. If all that R&D that went into Lithium Ion had gone into metal hydrides may be some breakthrough could have happened and it could be cheaper or less dependent on rare-earths... Remember Lithium ion did not look promising back then and was dismissed as a viable battery by the Oil companies.

    Then, how did it come to pass? There was demand for stored electric energy. Consumers were willing to pay up to 10,000 $/kWh. Yes, that is not a mistake or exaggeration. The cost of a Lithium Ion battery powering the huge video cameras lugged by the broadcasters, batteries of isolated weather monitoring stations ran into thousands of dollars in price, and their capacity was so pathetic it was measured in milli-ampere-hours. Not even in whole ampere-hours! Then came all those laptops, consumer video cameras, these guys were willing to pay 1000 $/kWh. The demand was so much Toshiba actually created a hydrocarbon fuel cell to power laptops! The butane fuel of the cigarette lighter powered fuel cell to power the laptops! Even before 9/11 FAA would not have allowed those gizmos on an airplane. A quart of butane fuel in every laptop on board? Come on you gotta be kidding!

    This market place was the one that was funding R&D on Lithium Ion batteries. Not pie in sky labs, not university professors begging for research grants from foundations and think-tanks. Bread and butter, dollar and cents, profits and costs of line managers of battery cells and manufacturers. Sony info-lithium batteries kind of things.

    Dot com boom created thousands of millionaires. It is inevitable one of them will have the crazy idea to duct tape 8000 lap top batteries and power a car. It is inevitable because, there was already a Datsun 210 powered by lead-acid batteries that will wipe the floor with the asses of Maseratis and Lamborghinis ... For two runs and then it will be back on the trailer to be recharged. So some dot com millionaire or the other would get into drag strips and someone will plant the idea of replacing the lead acid with laptop batteries. That millionaire turned out to be Elon Musk, who saw lot more than a drag strip toy in that idea. But that is how disruptors emerge.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

      not university professors begging for research grants from foundations and think-tanks

      That tends to be where many of the fundamental breakthroughs arise.

      • That is true. It is not their fault many of the breakthroughs these brilliant researchers find remain bottled up in their lab.

        There is a whole industry out there with the express purpose of bottling up their research and stopping it from reaching the general public whose taxes funded it.

  • Sure, I can imagine it. I can imagine a lot of things. I can imagine nuclear fusion making electricity too cheap to meter and about 1/10 the number of people on this planet. Wake me up when that happens.

  • Seriously! All these people complaining that the new jobs created will be offset by the loss of jobs in the fossil fuel sector. Stop pretending that jobs in a uniformly unhealthy industry are something we must protect at all costs. Fossil fuel workers have horrible exposure to health risks, and their industry has massive fallout in terms of health and environmental damage to the rest of the population and planet. In 100 years, assuming most scientists are right, are we going to care that we preserved some c

  • In Los Angeles, I have been getting calls from my tenants this past week complaining that their heaters aren't warming their apartments enough, because the temperatures have dropped to a bone-chilling 39F overnight. I had to remind them that our apartment block is all electric and these aren't gas fired furnaces. The future is going to be really cold and comfy for all those folks in actual winter climes where bone chilling temps generally have a minus sign in front of the numeric degrees.

  • Tony Seba and his think tank "RethinkX" studied whether renewables could power the whole USA, and concluded that it would work as long as you have 2 to 4 days of backup (depending on the area) and overbuild the production by about 4x.

    This talk packs in a whole lot of ideas into a brief time, so it's sketchy on the details. I'm looking for a more detailed version so I can look at the assumptions.

    The Great Disruption - Rethinking Energy, Transportation, Food & Agriculture / August 17th, 2021 (Tony Seba) [youtube.com]

    • When you get to that level of storage you will either need hydrogen or massive amounts of pumped hydro. Once you have all that hydrogen backup or experience in building pumped hydro it might be cheaper to just have less over-provisioning and more storage.

  • Mark Z. Jacobson's work has been discredited by the national academy of science [pnas.org]. Anything that snake-oil salesman should be ignored. He sued the scientists who wrote that linked article and lost. Now he owes millions.

  • and wind turbines and solar panels replaced coal and natural gas power plants.

    Well, sure, you can "imagine" it. But if you want to actually replace those plants, you are going to need nuclear. Which is ... conspicuously absent.

  • So the area I live in has pretty frequent power outages due to weather.

    The worst in recent memory had the electricity out for a couple of weeks in the middle of winter. Couldn't fuel to run generators. Heat was wood stoves or gas (NY bans could backfire tremendously), and the local Chinese restaurant basically kept the entire town alive, since they had one of the few gas stoves.

    So I'm wondering about this renewable future, the cost of hardening the electrical grid to withstand adverse weather events, buryin

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