Interesting Links for 16-08-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Under Marxism, which will be the correct way to eat?

(tags:food cooking communism funny restaurant )

2. New Omicron jab to be rolled out within weeks after UK becomes first country to approve it

(tags:UK Pandemic vaccine )

3. On The Society Of Authors and transphobia

(tags:LGBT authors UK transgender )

4. Estonian government will remove Soviet Union war monuments

(tags:Russia war statue Estonia )

5. Home solar panels will now pay for themselves in just four years as energy bills soar

(tags:solarpower electricity money )

6. The majority of babies born in the UK have unmarried parents

(tags:marriage babies uk )

7. Saving Lake Windermere

(tags:UK water Doom )

Comments

[skington]

The answer to "If we have four years of economically crippling energy prices, your solar panels will pay for themselves in four years" is "the energy prices people are talking about (as a result of the war in Ukraine) are clearly unsustainable and something will happen to fix them in some way or another", though, isn't it?

[andrewducker]

Yup. Although predictions are that they go up before coming down slightly to still more than the current level.

The long-term answer is to stop burning natural gas because (a) the world is on fire and (b) lots of it is produced by awful regimes. And, hopefully, in a few years we'll be almost entirely using renewables and this will all be a distant memory. But I don't know how long that will take.

[danieldwilliam]

and c) natural gas is more expensive than renewables.

[andrewducker]

Excellent point. Although I'm not 100% that renewables, if used for the entirety of our supply, are cheaper than keeping a small amount of gas for unusual circumstances.

[danieldwilliam]

Probably true over the next 20 years.

[andrewducker]

How much oversupply and storage do we need on top of generation to guarantee absolutely no blackouts? I know we can do it, but my memory was that guaranteeing it was remarkably expensive. Although storage may have gotten significantly cheaper than then.

[danieldwilliam]

Nobody guarantees absolutely no blackouts but taking your point as an acceptable level of blackout risk I think a lot of the prohibitive cost comes if you are determined to minimise generation capacity and the dumping of surplus generation.

I think the key commercial break-through is someone finding something that uses a lot of electricity to do something useful and which doesn't mind much being switched on and off somewhat unpredictably.

[andrewducker]

Although clearly some people think it's doable much cheaper than I thought
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180208141214.htm

[andrewducker]

Ooh - this is quite a good one

https://www.reddie.co.uk/2022/08/03/renewable-energy-oversupply-and-storage/

[danieldwilliam]

That links to this

https://www.ldescouncil.com/assets/pdf/LDES-brochure-F3-HighRes.pdf

which is chock full of interesting chat on alternative technologies for longer-duration storage including some heartening numbers on the projected pipeline.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. If someone like these people can get it off the ground then that'll make a massive difference on that front:
https://prometheusfuels.com/news/dude-wheres-my-fuel

We just oversupply greatly and store fuel for the down periods.

[danieldwilliam]

I'm quite excited about those people - I look forward to seeing them go live with some production this time next year.

[andrewducker]

As a somewhat aside, I always find gravity storage numbers a bit silly.

The figures on page 11 have it as 20-1000MW for up to 15 hours. That's 300-15,000 MWH. 10,000MWH is a nice middle ground.

To lift 1 ton 1m takes 9,800 joules. Which is about 2.7WH. Not very much. Your phone battery could list about 6 tons by 1m.

10GWH would take 3.7 million tons up 100m. That's 10 Empire State Buildings, lifted a quarter of their own height. Managing all of that seems like a titanic task. I can certainly understand why water is so much easier to manage.

[danieldwilliam]

On reflection I don't see gravity storage being much use when pumped hydro exists. I was enthused for a bit a few years ago but it just doesn't work as well as PHES for some applications and batteries for other.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, gravity storage sounds awesome when you think "Big block of concrete = big amount of energy!" When you discover that 50 tons of concrete 20m in the air is enough to boil 3 liters of water, it makes the scale of the problem rather more apparent.

[danieldwilliam]

Looking at this for 2020

https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy


and this

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

and this

https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2020


Wind provided 1,862 terawatthours

Solar provided 1,033 terawatthours

hydro provided 4,346 terawatthours

out of about 170,000 terawatthours of total energy demand (the figures are a bit fudged but good enough for this)

So solar is producing about 0.6% of total energy, wind about 1.1% and hydro 2.5%. Total about 4.2%

Hydro is unlikely to increase much over the next two decades so, if we move to 100% energy from renewables the growth pretty much all has to come from solar and wind. (I'm bullish on geothermal but no one else seems to be)

Ten years ago wind was 440 TWH and Solar 65 TWH so over the last ten years wind production has increased by 1,422 or 142TWH per year and solar 965 or 96 TWH - so about 230TWH. Assume the next few years will be better for renewables and or add in a bit of biomass and geothermal and we're looking at about 0.15% of global energy demand moving to renewables a year.

The picture is slightly better for renewables because the fudging I mentioned is to adjust for renewables better efficiency at turning energy inputs in to usable energy.

So we need about a 100-fold increase in the deployment of renewables to get from annualised increases of 0.15% to 15.0% per year shift in energy source.(Renewables provide all energy by about 2035 - allowing for increases in total energy demand) A 20-fold increase gets us from 0.15% per year to 3% per year. (Renewables provide all energy by about 2075. )

That's not great news I think.

[andrewducker]

Your first link has renewables as a percentage of world energy use at 13.5% - I wonder where the difference is.

As you say, solar has gone from 65TWh to 1,032TWh in the last 10 years. That's an increase of 15x. The same increase again would be to 15,000TWh, and again would be 225,000TWh. So if we keep increasing at the same rate we have been over the last ten years then in 20 years' time we'll get there with solar alone.

Wind, going from 440TWh to 1,861TWh, is an increase of about 4x. So another 2 decades would increase that by only about 16x. Which is only about 30TWh in total.

Of course, scaling is very rarely as simple as that, and solar might hit an inflection point in its growth, while wind might take off at a higher rate. But even so that looks pretty hopeful to me.

(Over the last 5 years solar has trebled. Which would still mean about 10,000TWh by 2031, and around 100,000TWh by 2041. Those sound like good figures to me. All figures from here.)

[danieldwilliam]

I think the difference is that one of the data sets adjusts renewable energy upwards to take account of the fact that renewables deliver a greater proportion of directly useable energy - but I didn't follow the explaination any further than noting it.

I think it is probably true that both solar PV and wind have reached a cost inflection point where they are the cheapest avaible option and the previous 10 years are not a super-reliable guide to the next ten years. I'm just looking at the increases in deployment required and wondering where the factories to make the kit are being built today in order to expand production that much in the near future.