According to this 2011 article in The Conversation (a blog that is new to me), the idea that solar and wind can’t provide reliable electricity is just wrong. This article doesn’t even focus on batteries and other storage technologies, which have certainly improved since 2011. Basically, as long as the grid is fed by a variety of sources spread over a fairly large and varied geography, it will not be all that common that the renewables are not providing the necessary baseload. And in that case, standby gas generators can make up the difference without too much trouble. All this suggests that the “reliable baseload” argument is mostly fossil fuel industry propaganda. Just put it out there, and it will be picked up and repeated by know-it-alls for a long time. And the beauty of propaganda in our current age where everyone has a voice and all voices are equal is that this repetition is free, and the more something is repeated the more people will believe it, even smart people who are not experts in the subject will believe it and repeat it themselves, until it drowns out any accurate information released too little, too late.
Tag Archives: renewable energy
September 2018 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- People in high-pressure jobs are abusing prescription amphetamines to stay focused.
- There is a growing chorus of concern among economists and journalists about a new financial crisis.
- A huge earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be by far the worst natural disaster ever seen.
Most hopeful stories:
- The Suzuki and Kodaly methods are two ways of teaching music to young children that may actually help them think later in life. Training in jazz improvisation may also be good for young brains in a slightly different way.
- There are some bright ideas for trying to improve construction productivity, which has languished for decades. Most involve some form of offsite fabrication.
- In energy news, there’s a big idea to produce half the world’s electricity from sunlight in the Sahara desert. Another idea for collecting solar energy in otherwise (ecologically) wasted space is solar roadways, and there are a few prototypes around the world but this doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet so far. Another big idea is long-term storage of energy to smooth out fluctuations in supply and demand over months or even years.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- There are a few stubborn holdout serious scientists who still think it was volcanoes not an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
- In biotech news, gene editing is starting to be used for food crops, starting with soybean oil. Also, old mice can live longer if they are transfused with the blood of young mice. And there is a new (to me) book about de-extinction.
- In robot news, a Japanese robot can count and inspect trees in a forest. Robots can also lay bricks.
what’s up with solar roadways
This article from “The Conversation” surveys a number of solar road installations around the world. It is pretty down on them, saying they are less efficient and less cost-effective than solar panels on solar farms or rooftops. Okay, but it never says they make bad roads. So where this has been tried, you have functioning roads that didn’t generate electricity before and now do. Most technologies have a tendency to improve and come down in cost over time, so the fact that these pilot projects are up and running and generating power without major mishap doesn’t seem to me like a reason to give up on the idea.
half the world’s power from the Sahara
There’s a big idea to provide half the world’s energy from solar panels in the Sahara desert, using the actual desert sand as a raw material to manufacture the panels. An interesting article in Science says that wind and solar farms on such a large scale could actually change the local weather drastically by altering wind and surface temperatures, ultimately increasing rainfall and allowing more vegetation in the desert.
In this study, we used a climate model with dynamic vegetation to show that large-scale installations of wind and solar farms covering the Sahara lead to a local temperature increase and more than a twofold precipitation increase, especially in the Sahel, through increased surface friction and reduced albedo. The resulting increase in vegetation further enhances precipitation, creating a positive albedo–precipitation–vegetation feedback that contributes ~80% of the precipitation increase for wind farms. This local enhancement is scale dependent and is particular to the Sahara, with small impacts in other deserts.
Could this work on Mars? I guess not, because you don’t have the water vapor in the atmosphere to begin with. Unless you get that alien ice breaker thing from Total Recall (the 1990 version, again, I don’t recognize the 2012 version’s right to exist) – why do I keep coming back to this movie?
Saudi AramCo IPO may not happen
Saudi Aramco was planning a $2 TRILLION initial public offering which would have been unique, but now it sounds like that may not happen. Aramco is interesting:
Aramco is a company like no other. Its profits easily outstrip those of every other company on Earth, from Apple to Exxon Mobil Corp. The billions of petro dollars it pumps out every month underpin the kingdom’s decades-old social contract: generous state handouts in return for the political loyalty that maintains stability in the birthplace of Islam. Those dollars also finance the lavish lifestyles of hundreds of princes. For decades, diplomats have joked that Saudi Arabia is the only family business with a seat at the United Nations. As the world’s largest petroleum producer, Aramco is key for global economic growth and international security. At one point during the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, the U.S. even considered the possibility of seizing the company’s oil fields by force, according to declassified British intelligence papers.
Apparently, the U.S., China and India are all pressuring Saudi Arabia to pump more and lower the price of oil, while it needs to prop up the price of oil to support this IPO.
The main problem is valuation. There’s a wide gulf between MBS’s ambitious $2 trillion target—which the prince says is nonnegotiable—and the $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion that most analysts and investors see as more realistic, according to two persons directly involved in the internal discussions. The gap between what the market thinks Aramco is worth and what the Saudi royals want is so wide that, even at the narrowest end it would overshadow the combined value of America’s two largest oil companies—Exxon Mobil and Chevron Corp...
Fund managers also worry that the value of oil fields could dwindle as governments ramp up their efforts to reduce fossil-fuel consumption to fight climate change. The spread of electric vehicles, for example, will reduce demand growth over the next two decades. In May a group of investors including Standard Life Aberdeen, Fidelity Investments, and Legal & General Group warned oil companies about the risk of global warming. “As long-term investors, representing more than $10.4 trillion in assets,” they said in an open letter, they believed “the case for action on climate change is clear.”
Maybe that last paragraph is wishful thinking, I don’t know. Personally I want to believe it. Maybe the market is starting to reduce how much it thinks oil is worth in the long term if viable alternatives emerge.
stranded fossil fuel assets
An article from Cambridge (University, not Analytica) in Nature Climate Change estimates potential losses if renewables were to lead to a sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels.
Our analysis suggests that part of the SFFA would occur as a result of an already ongoing technological trajectory, irrespective of whether or not new climate policies are adopted; the loss would be amplified if new climate policies to reach the 2 °C target of the Paris Agreement are adopted and/or if low-cost producers (some OPEC countries) maintain their level of production (‘sell out’) despite declining demand; the magnitude of the loss from SFFA may amount to a discounted global wealth loss of US$1–4 trillion; and there are clear distributional impacts, with winners (for example, net importers such as China or the EU) and losers (for example, Russia, the United States or Canada, which could see their fossil fuel industries nearly shut down), although the two effects would largely offset each other at the level of aggregate global GDP.
So coal subsidies might be “making America Great Again”, but not for long. And they might not even have the desired effect according to this article, which argues they would primarily benefit nuclear. And solar energy, it turns out, is a growth industry creating jobs in many Republican districts.
offshore wind competitive with natural gas
Huge, new offshore wind turbines can be competitive with natural gas, according to Bloomberg. Skeptics in the article bring up the intermittent nature of wind, but don’t address whether battery storage could be a cost-effective solution at this point.
Vicar of Bray
Michael Liebreich at Bloomberg New Energy Finance describes renewable energy investments some oil and gas companies are making, which he calls the “Vicar of Bray”. I don’t quite get the reason for that name.
Under the first strategy – which we could call the Vicar of Bray – oil and gas companies attempt to maintain leadership of the commanding heights of the energy industry as it shifts away from fossil fuels to clean energy, through a perfectly-timed and elegantly-executed redirection of capital and human capacity.
Early attempts at the Vicar of Bray include BP’s famous “Beyond Petroleum” rebranding under Lord Browne in 2000 – which was followed by the investment of $8 billion in clean energy, some of which was later written off. Similarly, Shell tried to gain a leadership position in the nascent solar sector by buying Siemens Solar in 2002; six years later it sold the sub-scale and failing operation. David Crane, former CEO of NRG, famously failed in his attempt to turn it into a clean energy company.
Today, it looks like all the major European oil companies are planning on some variant of Vicar of Bray. Shell (disclosure: whose New Energies Advisory Board I recently joined) has announced its intention to invest $2 billion per year in its New Energies division until 2020, out of its total capital spending of $25-30 billion; BP is investing a more modest $0.5 billion out of its $15 billion capex budget. French oil giant Total has committed to 20 percent low-carbon businesses within 20 years (although this includes mid-stream and down-stream gas). Statoil has been investing in floating offshore wind as well as carbon capture and sequestration, and this year announced its relaunch as Equinor, removing “oil” from its name, if not from its cash flows.
Trump may bail out obsolete coal-fired power plants
According to Bloomberg, the Trump administration is about to subsidize obsolete, inefficient, and polluting coal-fired power plants. Remember the Republican sound bite about “picking winners and losers”? Hypocrites.
The plan cuts to the heart of a debate over the reliability and resiliency of a rapidly evolving U.S. electricity grid. Nuclear and coal-fired power plants are struggling to compete against cheap natural gas and renewable electricity. As nuclear and coal plants are decommissioned, regulators have been grappling with how to ensure that the nation’s power system can withstand extreme weather events and cyber-attacks…
The Energy Department would be relying partly on the Federal Power Act — the so-called Section 202 authority — that lets the administration order guaranteed profits for power plants that can store large amounts of fuel on site. And the Energy Department would be tapping the 68-year-old Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era statute once invoked by President Harry Truman to help the steel industry…
The issue is a priority for some of the president’s top supporters, including coal moguls Robert E. Murray and Joseph Craft of Alliance Resource Partners, who donated a million dollars to the president’s inauguration. The move would be one of the most direct efforts by Trump to make good on campaign promises to revive the nation’s shrinking coal industry…
microgrids in Puerto Rico
The Puerto Rico blackouts have provided some opportunities to test microgrids, or small-scale combinations of intermittent renewable energy with battery storage.
Broken transmission lines and utility poles have been repaired–at a painfully slow pace, though the majority of Puerto Ricans finally have power again–but the grid is still vulnerable (last week’s blackout followed another blackout two weeks ago). The next hurricane season is a little more than five weeks away. In the event of another storm, a network of microgrids could keep going even if the larger grid fails again…
Though the current microgrids are used at individual buildings, in theory, larger systems could support a whole community. Jonathan Marvel, a Brooklyn-based architect working with Resilient Puerto Rico, is talking to mayors about the possibility of microgrids that could provide power to 20,000 people.
Individual microgrids could also be linked together. In Arizona, Sonnen is adding solar and energy storage to thousands of new homes in a community to create a “virtual power plant” that can share energy between homes. When connected to the grid, the system helps stabilize the overall grid, but it can also operate if a disaster takes the larger grid out. Sonnen has done the same thing in Germany.