There's a huge "wind belt" running north from the Texas panhandle up to Canada. At one time, T. Boone Pickens was looking into exploiting this, but he went for oil instead. There's no big electrical load in that area, so high-voltage DC lines to the West Coast, east to the Midwest, and south to the major Texas cities would be needed.
2,000 km transmission lines are now routine.[1] They've taken 2-4 years to build in Brazil and China. So this is quite feasible.
Politically, building long-haul transmission lines in the US is a huge hassle. Efforts to build a 730-mile line between Wyoming and Nevada (where it can attach to existing lines to California) have been underway since 2013, one jurisdiction and landowner at a time.[2] And this for something which is completely non-polluting. It's DC; you don't even get induced stray voltages.
Yeah, and areas of that "wind belt" can get pretty violent at the extremes. It includes Tornado Alley [1], which we got to experience in full force in 2017. The house got hit by a mile-wide EF4 tornado. We were fortunate -- it only took half the house and one of the vehicles -- but the three houses around the corner were left to slabs, swept clean as the day the foundations were laid -- and hundreds of heads of cattle from the surrounding ranches were just gone -- no one ever figured out where they landed; however, other items were discovered 50 miles away. That was a crazy day.
Great link - thanks! I was curious to see how total energy consumption changed over the same time span. According to a super-useful EIA tool[0], it was apparently (and surprisingly) almost flat, despite a 15% population increase.
Its very likely the first metro area in US to live off Renewables is going to be Dallas-Ft.Worth. Of course, Austin is close too.. but all those wind farms are closer to Big D than Austin.
Georgetown, TX, just north of Austin, has gone 100% renewables. Of course, that's a little bit of an accounting trick, in that while 100% of energy purchased is paid for at solar/wind rates, it still uses the same Texas grid that relies on coal and gas for reliability.
Thus, while it's great that more cities are going to all renewable, that doesn't mean we're much closer to solving the storage and stability problems with renewables.
Georgetown is also smaller and more affluent. It's not a good measure of a diverse rollout. Anyone in Texas (and surely other states) can choose all-renewable electric companies too.
Wind is better than Solar when considering dynamic generation problems, also in terms of output per dollar Wind is gives better return in Texas than Solar. Everything said and done, there are not many places where Solar and Wind can reliably replace conventional sources of power.
They can do it anywhere with sufficient storage effort. That is a massive challenge but so is extraction of fossil fuels. The people who say it can’t be done are lacking vision.
Storage is just direct access to the energy arbitrage market. The problem isn't "How storage makes money," but rather, "how can I make money on storage." Storage requires large capital investments for what are typically small relative returns.
However, there are some markets that are ripe for roll-out and Texas actually has a surprise advantage in the energy storage market. Many of those natural gas or oil wells are suitable reservoirs for compression storage of energy once they run dry which significantly lowers the capital costs of setting up that type of energy storage. Hell, some of those wells are even deep enough that they could be used to generate geothermal power in the future.
I'm imagining what Enron would have done with this market. For those that don't know Enron actually did interesting things in the energy market for about 10 years before it went fully over to the dark side.
If you do the math on this you realize that the low value of gravitational potential energy makes it a horrible storage vehicle on a large scale for pretty much anything except pumped hydro.
Places where it's sunny and windy seem to build out both. I'm not sure why you're talking about which one is "better" when they're different and complementary.
These charts miss Hydroelectricity, which is currently 70% of renewable energy production worldwide.
Seattle is more or less entirely powered by renewables, with 97% of Seattle City Light's energy coming from Hydro, Nuclear or Wind: http://www.seattle.gov/light/FuelMix/
The problem with hydro is mostly fish. Anyways, from an economic perspective, hydro is definitely renewable, and works much the same way a wind turbine does (substitute blowing wind with flowing water).
Here in Colorado people are always pushing the '300 days of sunshine' myth but there is a lot of truth to most of the state being sunny and dry most of the year.
Most people are chronically dehydrated all their lives. I've found, at least for lips, the urge to reach for chapstick frequently means I should be reaching for a water bottle instead. (Setting aside extreme conditions like subzero skiing)
There are already technologies that can create oil from energy+water+air. The key component that can make it economically viable is an excess of energy. And that happens to be the main issue with solar and wind, we need some kind of energy storage solution to store the excess produced energy. Common solutions explored are batteries and hydro dams.
However, producing oil from the excess energy is also a form of energy storage. And Texas already has the infrastructure to refine and distribute oil. Since the produced oil would pull CO2 from the air, it would be effectively carbon neutral.
What if Texas blankets the state in solar and wind? They could continue to be a oil producer, but with the additional benefit of producing carbon neutral fuel. With a carbon tax, this fuel could become quickly price competitive with traditional "fossil" fuels (pulled from the ground). And even without a carbon tax, it's possible a significant percentage of the population would be willing to pay extra for carbon neutral fuel. Or another way would be for government to require a certain percentage (such as the current 10% ethanol, they could say 10% must be carbon neutral fuel source). There's a lot of possibilities and potential to much more quickly address climate change than waiting for EV cars to become the majority.
syngas definitely seems like one of those holy-grail technologies that could save us from ourselves if we can make it economical. Plug-in replacement for transportation, one of the most difficult places to decarbonize. As a bonus, syngas is pure by nature, so engines burn cleaner without any need to worry about things like "low sulfur diesel".
That's probably not a terribly stupid idea; transporting energy as gas in a pipeline might be significantly more efficient than electricity through wires.
The oil and gas are going to be extracted as long as the global market prices make it worthwhile to do so. The only way that changes is if renewables come down in price enough to make fossil extraction uneconomical. So the more we build out, the better, even if it happens at the same time as fossil extraction.
We're still really only partially (fractionally even) serious about pursuing renewable energy.
We need to increase capacity of renewable energy production, of course, but that is the easiest part of the whole equation. We also need serious investment into energy storage, by orders of magnitude more than what we have today. That will be at least as large an investment as building out the base capacity. And we need massive improvements to the power grid to make it possible to transmit power from where it's generated to where it's used, which will be at least as big an investment as either the capacity or storage problem.
Fortunately, all of these problems will benefit from technology advancements, and all of them can represent capital investments which provide lasting long term value (not just in CO2 emissions reductions but also in improving the resiliency of the power grid). There are tons of people working on the generation problem. The storage problem is about in the same state that generation was maybe 20+ years ago. And the grid problem? You could fit everyone working on it into a conference room, a small conference room. We desperately need to amp up investment in every aspect of this field ASAP.
potholer54 (who runs a truly great bad anti-global-warming junk science debunking channel -- totally check it out) also mentioned something about a recent discovery for an economical way to covert wind and solar power into ammonia, as a medium for storing hydrogen as a liquid. I'm not entirely sure about that, because while potholer54 is truly great in his usual wheelhouse, he's perhaps a bit bad at evaluating new technologies. (Like, he counts solar roadways as as promising future development.)
However, if that's true, we could see pipelines and tanks of ammonia criss-crossing Texas and the rest of the US, allowing us to fungibly transfer renewable energy. Basically, we could use the systems and techniques we have already developed for doing this with Natural Gas, including the kinds of interfaces those systems have with the current power grid.
Unfortunately, a cursory search for this technology seems to contradict this.
The headline is a misnomer. Renewable ammonia was made from electrolytic hydrogen via hydroelectricity in the 20th century. Ammonia-fueled generators have been demonstrated before too. Even the new low pressure catalyst has near-identical antecedents.
All that said, putting existing ideas together in an evolutionary way can yield revolutionary outcomes. In the past 40 years there has been no revolutionary change in terrestrial photovoltaic cell technology, but continuously compounded evolutionary changes have taken the industry from kilowatts to gigawatts of annual cell production.
Storing environmentally friendly generated electricity in reactive chemicals would solve lots of problems (storage; reuse of existing energy industry infrastructure; energy-dense fuel for cars, trucks, and planes; lowering CO2; etc.) However, ammonia is quite corrosive.
Because the steel pipes transporting natural gas throughout the US are under pressure, they are subject to a peculiar form of degradation, stress corrosion. Normally, steel can rust or corrode when exposed outdoors. Simple coatings of paint, tars, polymers, etc. can protect steel, and natural gas transport pipes are coated on the outside to protect them from moisture, air, and the natural PH variations found in different environments. These pipelines and their coatings are examined periodically to prevent catastrophic failures. The pipes are perhaps one-half to two meters in diameter and have a wall thickness of one to three centimeters if I recall.
Stress corrosion is not like normal rust on the surface of steel. It happens inside the steel, along the inter-granular crystalline boundaries within the steel itself. Somehow, the stress inside the steel produces higher rates of corrosion (there is a large literature on this subject, google "stress corrosion"). This type of corrosion can be dangerous because pipes can burst without visible warning of their condition. Detection of stress corrosion requires inspection systems that are much slower (ultrasound, electromagnetic induction measurements, etc.) and less practical than simply looking for corrosion on the outside of the pipes.
Unfortunately, ammonia is corrosive to steel and the insides of existing pipelines and the valves and other fittings would not be prepared to handle ammonia. So ammonia wouldn't be able to utilize the existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure.
I'm not a metallurgist nor even someone that remembers much of my university chemistry classes so I welcome comments from a more informed HN reader.
So ammonia wouldn't be able to utilize the existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure.
That's not what I'm advocating. I was talking about the precedent of companies that know how to run pipelines, do transactions with storage pools, and scheduling. Of course the physical pipes and other equipment would have to be different. But all of the commercial contractual, financial, and legal frameworks are all pretty much worked out.
Very cool read - hopefully my fellow Texans advocate for a homegrown energy mix with plenty of co-benefits.
The Solutions Project[1] is developing roadmaps[2] for transitioning the entire planet to 100% renewable energy. My college advisor[3] is the lead scientist and one of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered.
A thought occurred to me while driving the other day: Texas seems to be more of an "oil" state than an "energy" state, but it could be devoting a percentage of its largess from exporting oil / oil tech to developing safe nuclear power. For all I know this is already happening, I have no idea, but it seems like if they don't get off "oil" and get onto "energy", the state could be the Detroit of the 2040s
Texas is very much THE energy state. They are the number one producer of oil, natural gas, and wind power in the US. They are among the highest producers of total renewable power in the US as well. If it wasn't for hydroelectric (which Texas is not very suitable for) it would be the number 1 producer of renewable energy in the States. There are also significant levels of Nuclear power produced in Texas at 10% of it's total electrical generation capacity. Texas comprises roughly 1/3 of the US power grid and operates the only State independent stand alone power grid in the US. Texas produces 20% of the US's total energy output and produces twice as much electricity as the second highest producing state (Florida). The power grid is Texas is also extremely reliable and resilient even by American standards.
The state is also a huge technology sector (aerospace, chemical, semiconductor, and software) does a lot of manufacturing, and operates 2 trade borders, the Gulf ports and Mexico.
Texas has $1.8 trillion economy [1], which is the 10th largest economy in the world. To put that in perspective, the Texas economy is ~$500 billion larger than the entire Russian economy [2]. Texas is called the energy capital of the world for good reason, but the energy market is massive -- it includes much more than oil -- and the Texas economy overall is way more diverse than that [3]. It is tied with New York with 52 Fortune 500 corporations headquartered in Texas, only California has more with 54. What happened in Detroit is unfortunate, but Texas is not Detroit. That would be like comparing Dallas to Detroit in the NFL - they both wear silver and blue and they both play on Thanksgiving Day, but they are on polar opposite ends of the spectrum in every other conceivable way.
I am here in San Antonio, I wanted to get Solar on the house, the cheapest quote was $14,000. A lot of new build houses here have solar panels on the top. The issue with that is some fire departments will refuse to do anything but contain the fire if you have solar panels (i guess they need training).
CPS energy (Our big power company) keeps sending fliers that i can be on wind power, the catch is it costs more. Seriously, i can pay more to ensure my power comes from (or is offset by) wind production.
I hope Texas does do more Solar and Wind power. Solar water heaters would be nice here too.
Be careful with solar power hot water. After living in China, I will never ever live in an apartment again whose only hot water option is solar. Way too many warm/sort of cold showers have traumatized me.
> between wind energy from West Texas and the Gulf Coast, and solar energy across the state, Texas could meet a significant portion of its electricity demand from renewable power without extensive battery storage. The reason: These sources generate power at different times of day, meaning that coordinating them could replace production from coal-fired plants.
Under ideal conditions, or even on cloudy, calm days?
If it's only on certain days, the headline and this quote are misleading.
Technically, yes. But coal's main advantage over other electricity sources is that it's cheap. If you capture all the emissions it will no longer be cheap.
Here's one disastrously-over-budget attempt at a coal plant with CO2 capture:
Had they forced the plan to completion, it would have generated more expensive electricity than a new nuclear plant. More expensive than battery-backed solar. More expensive than any other utility scale electricity source in the United States.
Coal's carbon dioxide pollution can be limited through carbon capture technology. The U.S. government recently incentivized power producers to implement this technology with the expanded 45Q tax credit. We'll see if it pencils out well enough for broad adoption.
Bio-coal is conceptually easy to make: just burn the hydrogen out of plants leaving just carbon. Generally called charcoal. The next step is to compress it into a rock.
Of course it isn't cost effective when you can just dig the finished product out of the ground, but conceptually it is easy.
I am not a coal hater, however... My understanding is that there are trace amounts of uranium in coal, so burning coal puts that uranium into the air. Even a tiny amount of uranium per ton, translates to a lot when you consider how many tons of coal per year is burned.
> Natural gas peaking plants make up the difference when demand modulates.
They explicitly say this in the 'garbage' article that's talking about coal, not liquid hyrdocarbons.
FTA:
> Weather, however, remains unpredictable. Texas would still need battery storage and natural gas-fired power plants to fill in gaps when, for example, winds might slacken earlier than expected.
Demand has always modulated. The article points out that there is excess wind/solar capacity available. More than enough to cover current demand. In the US, energy consumption per capita is declining.
I wonder what the fall out is going to be when some weather system arrives that provides cloud and no wind for several days and there isn't enough natural gas, coal, nuclear, grid-scale battery storage or hydro capacity left to meet all of the demand.
I am sure it will be a rare event and probably preferable to continued c02 emissions. Probably will encourage more investment in energy storage.
No wind for several days would take some serious geoengineering to accomplish given there is a day/night cycle and temperature differentials create wind. Let alone also somehow obtaining cloud cover at the same time which won't create a wind from the borders not cloud covered.
That isn't correct. According to a paper from the Fraunhofer Institute:
>...Long phases of no or little wind power are a potential thread to future energy systems with a high share of renewable energies. A frequently cited example observed in Germany was a whole week with very little wind power due to temperature inversion in January 2009.
>...We find the average duration of low wind power feed-in phase to grow linearly with the threshold: Phases with a wind power feed-in of less than two percent of installed power are typically four hours long and phases with less than five percent feed-in are on average seven hours long. However, a period of wind power feed-in below eight percent of installed power that lasts one week occurs every two years and a period of more than ten days occurs every ten years.
I was speaking of wind in absolutes - even then it produces 3% which while not adequate unless massively overbuilt is still something. Although it doesn't mention solar during that time period.
Well... the original poster was referring to the potential problem where you don't get any electricity from wind for several days, so it might have been better if you dealt with that issue rather than speaking of wind in absolutes since utility grade windmills need at least roughly 13 MPH winds to generate power.
>...even then it produces 3% which while not adequate unless massively overbuilt is still something.
Nuclear plants are retiring at a pretty high rate and natural gas units haven't been peakers in many years. Coal and gas has flipped and now gas is serving base load and coal is at the plant's min or used as a peaker.
I thought that a lot of the younger nuclear plants were still around, and that only the very old ones were being retired. Also, aren't gas plants peakers (as well as baseload) due to the fact that they can be spun up quicker than coal?
You might be right on the first part, but in general a lot of us in the power transmission industry at the utility & the RTO & ISO level (those whose software turns on units and determines where to dispatch them) are pretty worried about nukes going away. Especially in the Northeast...there is one region where a lot of coal and nukes are set to retire in the next couple of years and they are import constrained with natural gas. There was a cold snap a few years ago where they had to run all the coal and nukes slated for retirement at Max...so that is where we're at.
Gas plants can be peakers...maybe an expensive unit that can move fast and is reserved for emergencies, but in general the gas prices are so low that the units are very economical and we therefore run them as baseload.
Natural gas steam plants (retrofits from coal-fired) cannot be spun up very quickly. Natural gas turbine plants (e.g. that burn the gas directly in a turbine engine) can and those are the type that are typically used as "peakers"
The plant by my house growing up closed recently, like 15 years before it was originally slated to. There was a bunch of strange corrosion they couldn't account for.
Im pro nuclear but the whole situation at SONGS is a slow moving disaster.
2,000 km transmission lines are now routine.[1] They've taken 2-4 years to build in Brazil and China. So this is quite feasible.
Politically, building long-haul transmission lines in the US is a huge hassle. Efforts to build a 730-mile line between Wyoming and Nevada (where it can attach to existing lines to California) have been underway since 2013, one jurisdiction and landowner at a time.[2] And this for something which is completely non-polluting. It's DC; you don't even get induced stray voltages.
[1] https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-...
[2] http://www.transwestexpress.net/news/index.shtml