Interesting Links for 21-07-2021

[andrewducker]

And then, after the Prince grew tired of Cinderella, she found herself a project

(tags:fairytale fanfic )

Boris Johnson's leaked anti-lockdown messages resemble Telegraph column published just days earlier

(tags:BorisJohnson pandemic OhForFucksSake )

Dominic Cummings: Eight takeaways from his interview

(tags:UK government pandemic OhForFucksSake )

Just a monkey hanging out with some ducklings to brighten your day.

(tags:monkey ducks cute video )

Is any country installing renewables fast enough to reach climate goals?

(tags:globalwarming Doom renewables )

Comments

[original_aj]

The monkey video's gone.

[andrewducker]

Aaand reading the comments, with good reason! Bah!

[dewline]

2. That's still terrifying.

3. Interesting. I'm going to want to re-read this one, and maybe watch the video footage to be sure of my opinions.

5. Things have been speeding up on this front, and yes, there are informed concerns that we're not moving quickly enough anywhere.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, the economics of solar/wind are definitely vastly better than they were, storage is also improving, and it looks like we'd be just fine if we were here twenty years ago.

[danieldwilliam]

Some thoughts on the article on renewables.

1) Fundamentally I agree with the article. I don't think we're moving quickly enough. I think we've got the technology to meet all our future energy needs from renewables at a cost that is acceptable. The deployment is, currently, too slow.

2) I'm not sure that the classic S-curve is the right model to look at the current deployment of renewables. Firstly, electricity is a commodity and isn't changing. The change in technology is about changing the production of an existing output. I think that has implications for the substitution and price sensitivity of the technology. We're not waiting for wireless speakers to come down in price sufficiently that we can all afford them. It's closer to waiting for the cost of canned cola to become cheaper than cola in a glass bottle. Secondly, some of the increase in deployment has been driven by a combination of policy support and reduced cost making the technology cheaper to the end user. As actual costs have come down the policy support has tapered off. However real costs are still falling. Thirdly, when renewable costs fall firmly below thermal generation costs they will be built instead. They don't need to be 50% cheaper to be built. Three or four percent is plenty but once they are consistently cheaper than thermal plants nothing else will be built. Fourthly, I think there have been some capacity issues in renewables manufacturing that have seen shortages in supply and the cost to the project developer not falling and the manufacturers pocketing some profit. Finally, we need to have an eye on system costs. Some renewables are cheaper to build and operate than it costs to run existing thermal generation - but currently only at a certain saturation on a grid. As grids get bigger through interconnection and electrification of transport that helps the overall volume of renewables but you are also waiting for the costs of interconnection, storage and smarter management of supply and demand to come down.

3) Many developing nations, currently not in the top 60 electricity consumers, will be in the coming decades. If they skip thermal generation entirely that is a lot of avoided carbon. As the develop they are likely to pick up more energy intensive industries, reducing demand for electricity in grids with existing thermal generation.

4) Countries that get their renewable deployment right can expect an economic boost from cheaper electricity. Countries that don't will suffer an economic detriment. As GDP is linked to energy demand this has a bit of circle effect.

5) So I think there are some reasons to think that deployment will continue to pick up and what looks like the top of the S-curve today is actually just some lumpiness in the lower section of the S-curve

Also the comments in the article are very interesting.