This is a great piece and resonates with me a lot. I was an early employee at a climate tech startup ~3 years ago. I moved into climate tech intentionally from local gov contracting, it’s a great field for someone like a Data Engineer or Data Science kind of role, lots of opportunity to work on many different things.
I agree with the post that the utility scale space is a hard slog but I honestly believe the only way to scale renewables is to make it economically attractive for investment and any tech that can reduce operational cost of these assets to increase margins and attract more investment into utility scale renewable generation. A carbon price would be a huge boost to this space, things are still progressing without it but I think it would seriously accelerate our energy transition as well as spur innovation for non energy related carbon intensive industries. The current state of low interest rates world wide and funds having a harder time finding good returns means a lot of groups building solar utility scale assets are banks/funds with little knowledge/interest in energy generation, pulling together those with the how to knowledge to materialize their return on investment.
I highly recommend working in this space, its technically challenging and I think it has a bright future. It’s not as big and flashy as a lot of software startup worlds but small teams can still have a big impact. I also sure prefer working on these problems than working on platforms trying to sell more ads.
> lots of opportunity to work on many different things.
What could you use help with? If a software engineer could invest 2 weeks in producing something useful for your company (including adding a feature to an existing open source project), what would be a list of potential quick projects?
Not a list but data analysis tooling is probably a large category of things that need work on. A lot of our customers are deep knowledge experts but not highly computer literate, a lot are good enough with Excel but still struggle with UTC conversion. Large amounts of effort goes into validating the quality of our data by our customers and we look for ways to help but it is a large domain to itself while we are still focusing on making our data better and more accessible. We’re slowly building trust by giving data freely to researchers but validation of our data, handling formats, date time conversions, carefully equating temporally and spatially, etc is still largely manual and significant barrier of entry for some. I’ll keep in mind to build a specific list at some point.
I know the tool targets existing solar users, but as a potential user, it would help me answer the question "Should I get a 5kw solar panel?". For the same input on the left, I'd like to see historic monthly data for the past 3 years, telling me how much energy my potential panels would generate per year.
Also, would be useful to include some info on how much of that energy would actually used when passing through batteries and all the system. If some panels 100kwh in a month, that doesn't mean I can simply subtract 100kwh from my energy bill, but how much could I subtract?
Appreciate the feedback and likely we'll have more tooling is this space coming out over the next 12-24 months, and the data for others to build these tools sooner than that. We need to get the data correct and easily accessible first and then the hope is we won't be the only ones building the tools on top and others like yourself can see gaps in what is useful and map that to data we have.
Specifically regarding "historic monthly data for the past 3 years..", you can tackle it multiple ways, but likely the most scalable for us is monthly averages of a "typical" year for a specific location rather than last X years we can look back on 10+ years to get a better idea "typical" and synthesize it down to monthly.
Combining cost comparison, batteries and individual energy consumption is another level of complexity again and not something that can give accurate answers to without knowing highly specific details. How much you could subtract you could take a guess at by looking at your electricity bills and having a guess that >50% of your consumption is probably during the day when the sun is out, but again a couple of heavy usage days when it is cloudy will throw off your averages. There are lots of websites about the economics of getting solar/battery, so while where I work will produce good data to help with those calculations, it will always be individual behavior that determines about worth while the purchase is.
As a rule of thumb (in Australia), it is around a 7 year payback at the moment, and batteries will not save you money at this stage.
I'm working on environmental software at the moment, the best unanswered service? A good data API for climate emergencies and disasters classification/push notifications. We can pull in rain data, satellite imagery etc. but correlating it with problems that have a lagging effect (eg. rain today means flooding next week) is a problem I find isn't super scalable from an entry level at the moment. Disaster response is mostly an even by event analysis today.
That is a great area to work in! I use to work in a government agency in on a very similar area (bush fire hot spot tracking), so your efforts are appreciated! Tedious is one way to put it, but I agree the tech side of push notifications, servers, APIs etc isn't hard but as you've alluded to, disaster detection/classification is tricky and if you are interested in the space, government jobs tend to be the most stable as commercially it doesn't have an obvious "market" consumers are willing to pay for. Similar to utility scale sector in energy, you'll have a hard time as a small team convincing government and commercial weather operators that your detection or forecasting of events from satellite imagery etc are more accurate, so my advice would be to do this with your eyes open and produce as much data validation evidence as you can to share widely so others can validate it.
Working with live satellite imagery has a lot of challenges, and pulling clean data out of them consistently. Each satellite is different and has its own biases, operational issues that can be tricky but working on these problems I think is a really useful skill so not time wasted IMO.
I’m a data scientist (with a background in environmental economics) working in US gov. contracting, and my goal is make the switch to climate tech or similar. Where would you recommend looking to get started (conferences, communities, companies, specialized job aggregation sites, etc?)
That's highly debatable. While you might sell software/solar panels/magicwidgets to a small subset of people, for the most part no technology is going to have a meaningful impact on current greenhouse gas emissions.
As I said to Wren (I really tear into them in this post, I feel I was fair though)[1] after they post their introduction thread here:
> We're going to make changes by convincing people they really don't need to take their 4th international vacation in as many years, nor do they need their 3rd iPhone in 5 years, that their year and a half old MacBook is perfectly fine. They don't need the newest model just because it now has ultra holographic flurm instead of super holographic flurm because all they do is watch YouTube and write emails with the damn thing.
Sure you might sell a regional power provider on using some software that does something a little better to improve efficiency 1/2 % which will absolutely make a difference but while you're doing that, a few new coal plants went online in India/China/a developing country. Also the power company that you sold it to is losing obscene amounts of electricity, generated by fossil fuels, via transmission loss
So you develop something for ICE cars that cuts out cylinders when lower demand is required, turns off the engine at stops, uses a solar panel to recharge a battery specifically for defrosting the windows instead of relying on the ICE charged lead-acid battery, etc but while you are designing that for a specific line of cars over the course of 2 years China alone added tens of millions of new drivers to the road driving ICE vehicles that aren't burning fuel optimally.
While you are writing software, or developing a widget, to shave a few grams of CO2 emissions off of each customer a day websites/apps like YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram are generating tens to hundreds of grams of CO2 per gigabyte of data transferred.
While you're trying to reduce the footprint of people with 6-figure salaries that can afford to spend money on reducing their footprint, you have hundreds of millions to billions of up and lower middle-class consumers consuming more and more as their greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at staggering rates.
While you're developing software to plan the best optimized routes for a UPS driver or commercial flight, you have people watching vidieos on YT trying to figure out where they want to take their 4th exotic vacation to (by plane, at a couple of tons of CO2 roundtrip per passenger) where they'll eat out the entirety of the time probably generating a bunch of petrochemical derived single-use packaging.
You even have Y Combinator doing contradictory stuff in this field, as I said in an open letter to them [2]
>Another example of something that wholly puzzles me is, YC has recently asked for solutions to global warming, chiefly carbon sequestration solutions. We're going to produce close to 40 gigatons of carbon this year that will enter the system, that's insanity. If you filled the 10 most massive bodies of freshwater in the world with Azolla (see the Azolla event) you'd only pull roughly 10% of that amount out of the atmosphere annually, and you would only sequester a fraction of that. Yet YC, for the interviews for companies that get an invite, they want the founders to fly to the Bay Area for a 10-minute interview. FOLKS! One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person.
People can make immediate and real impacts on their greenhouse gas emissions by cutting 1 day of meat consumption out a week. Then 2 days. Then get meat down to being a special occasion, or never, consumption.
People can make immediate and real impacts by opting to watch a documentary instead of flying to Antarctica to take pictures with penguins.
People can make immediate and real impacts by reading a book from a library instead of having Netflix streaming in the background why they play Candy Crush or Angry Birds on their phone with the air conditioning blasting 70F air at them while they're wrapped up in a blanket with a hoodie on when it's 75F out.
Even if someone cracks cold fusion TODAY, replacing the tens of thousands of power plants around the world... the concrete alone required would release a mind boggling amount of CO2 to produce and replacing them would take decades.
Developing software or a widget to optimize one's impact is just selling people hopium. Getting people to radically change their habits (stop travelling, stop ordering from Amazon five times a week for one item each time, stop ordering Uber eats and cook something, reduce meat consumption, shop with a minimal waste mindset, don't buy food if you're going to throw half of it out, make tv a treat not a daily necessity etc).
Sure, there is investor money to be pilfered in this field but ehhhh.
I'm sorry but that sounds wildly idealistic. "If everyone acted in a certain way, the world would be perfect and we'd have peace forever."
People drive SUVs, eat burgers, and travel on jet planes because it's fun and cheap. Make those things less cheap, say by introducing carbon taxes, and people will do less of them. It's really really hard to get people to change their lifestyles absent any immediate, external pressure.
It's awesome that you're doing all those things. I do many of them too (biking to work, shopping 2nd hand for many things, stubbornly repairing electronics etc) but not because I think it has any substantial impact. I do because it's the right thing to do and because it presents a positive example. It can show others that a rich, fulfilling life is possible without the frills of consumerism.
Kinda like "hey urribody, let's build a bunch of solar panels and wind farms, maybe build 3 or 4 nuclear plants too and we'll save the world"?
Or kinda like Y Combinator wanting to turn most of the Sahara into algal pools, where the desalination alone would use more electricity than humans currently produce, have worldwide implications on weather patterns due to the evaporation, and cause considerable impact on the health of the Amazon by drastically reducing how much dust crossed the ocean to fertilize it? http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/
The plans you're suggesting as too idealistic don't require the cooperation of every human being on the planet. Yours do.
They also hold the chance of turning someone a profit. Yours don't.
By definition, they're less idealistic than what you're proposing. They may be crazy, but definitely less idealistic. And have a higher chance of being tried out.
>The plans you're suggesting as too idealistic don't require the cooperation of every human being on the planet.
Every human being on the planet is part of the problem. And yes, turning the Sahara into enough tidal pools as outlined by that Y Combinator page would be the largest project in human history, the most expensive project in human history, would require more power plants than currently exist on the planet to be constructed solely for powering the project, would create an unimaginable amount of brine that couldn't be dumped back out at sea as it would kill all of the costal life of Northern Africa, would require construction efforts in 11 countries...
Solar has a very limited range of latitudes that make it effective and would require massive amounts of batteries to replace power at night/during periods of less than cooperative weather.
Wind is even more limited in where it may be employed, you need consistent wind but not too much wind.
Hydroelectric requires dams and flooding large swaths of land and are pretty limited to where they can actually be constructed.
Writing some code that makes a process work a little more efficiently doesn't make a meaningful impact on overall power consumption.
Etc etc, so on and so forth.
All human beings are causing the problem (even primitive, uncontacted, tribes as they're likely generating more carbon from their fires than they are actively sequestering) so all human beings need to participate in retarding, and reversing, their greenhouse gas emissions.
And it's still smaller than what you suggest. Think about that.
> Writing some code that makes a process work a little more efficiently doesn't make a meaningful impact on overall power consumption.
Sorry, you're saying an engineer cutting their personal meat consumption is more effective than that same engineer making entire power plants more efficient? I think they should be doing both but the latter is far more effective, for that one person to do.
> all human beings need to participate
Cool. Let me know if you figure out how to do that.
So... corporate action is meaningless because other companies will continue to pollute. Technological advancements are meaningless because other countries will continue to use old tech.
But... individual actions are meaningful because... other people won't continue to live wastefully... I guess? I don't see the logic here at all.
Exactly the thought I had. I do generally agree with the feeling that consumerism fuels waste and therefore unneeded emissions, but to suggest that radical change happens at the personal level and not at the corporate level seems off.
To the point:
> Developing software or a widget to optimize one's impact is just selling people hopium.
Wouldn’t shaving 1% of emissions for a manufacturing company reduce emissions far more than me reducing my emissions by cutting out meat for a week? Intuitively, small cuts at a large scale across many companies would save us much more than small cuts at a small scale across many people.
Anyways, I think it must be attacked from all these angles. But in my view, corporate emissions should be the bigger target. Sure, we could all be blamed for the problem. But individuals make choices based on what is available to them at the time with the resources they have. Most people never take an international fight and many never set foot on an airplane at all. Most people in the world are poor.
Individual action is great for environmentalists, but it will never be enough when the vast majority of people don't care about their own emissions. A carbon tax will make everything you mention more expensive and doesn't rely on ignorant truck drivers to switch to Priuses or travel-lovers to stop traveling.
Renewables have already made a significant difference in CO2 emissions. It’s rather shocking how much wind + solar are dominating new generation simple due to cost savings.
That’s covering a subset of US energy usage as they ignore things like passive solar heating and crops etc. It’s useful when comparing specific kinds of resources, but it’s important to consider the context and assumptions used.
In terms of electricity generation solar+wind is about 10% of total generation which is a massive increase from 2010.
Renewables are also extremely limited in practical use.
- The sun only shines so many hours a day and only certain latitudes are good candidates.
- Wind is quite noisy (sorry but it is, we've got a lot of wind here in Indiana that I've driven by going from Indy to Chicago. Absolutely not something I'd want near me. Much smaller scale vertical wind turbines are also quite loud and just plain annoying at higher speeds) and is ineffective at slow and high wind speeds, the wind also only blows at certain times.
- Hydroelectric generally requires dams, constructing dams often floods large areas of land which completely destroys ecosystems in that flooded land and often poses a considerable risk to downstream human settlements in the event of a catastrophic failure. They also rely heavily on obscene amounts of concrete which will build in a large amount of CO2 production into the construction.
- Hydroelectric relying on waves has varying level of impact on coastal ecosystems.
With sun and wind you can only implement it so far before you hit a wall, the wall being the need for huge amounts of grid storage to serve dark/not windy times.
Without drastic developments in battery technology, and PV efficiency, renewable aren't going to be a singular solution. They're going to remain a small percentage of the solution.
Renewables are also something that aren't really an option at a consumer level. You often have one power company that serves your home/apartment, if you do have a home and you live in an area where PV makes sense from a light availability then it is often more expensive than most people can afford and can take decades to be break even. Tesla announced something like $21.85 per square foot for their solar roof which comes to $43,700 for a 2,000 square foot home while in large parts of the country you can get a decent 2,000 square foot home for $100-200k and the median household income in the United States is only $63,688.
However adjusting your thermostat 1F warmer in the summer and 1F cooler in the winter, going to a local museum instead of taking that roadtrip or flight, eating hamburger once every other week instead of a few times a week etc are all far more practical changes people can implement in their lives than say installing PV and battery systems at their home or instead of buying an EV that costs thousands (if not tens of thousands) more than the ICE vehicle they'd otherwise purchase.
It's awesome, legitimately awesome, to pursue technology to help us solve the problem but thinking technology will be our savior is foolish at best. We have to radically change our lives if we want to even significantly slow those annual CO2 emissions. Food, clothing, recreation, convenience all needs to change.
It's not even that difficult. In the past year or so I've:
- Gone 90-95% whole food plant based with my eating
- Stopped going to the movies every other week and now only go for big films like the most recent Star Wars
- Stopped buying printed books if a digital copy is available for purchase
- Buy in bulk, with as little packaging as possible, when I can.
- Stopped driving 25-40 miles roundtrip every weekend to go sit in the living rooms of friends when we're just going to have the same conversations we do via text messages and instead only go see them once every couple of months each to eat together and actually have quality conversation
- Stopped driving to the fancy grocery 10 miles away and use the one a block from my apartment complex entrance, doing my groceries on the way home from work when I'm passing it anyway
- I pretty much only drive to work and church now instead of getting in my car on the weekend and driving around looking for something to do
- Video content I stream, I stream at lower quality now. Every gigabyte of data transfer saved is potentially several hundred of grams less CO2 generated. Podcasts, where available, I stream via their lower bitrate feed (unfortunately of the podcasts I listen to, only Mysterious Universe has a lower/higher quality feed).
If even 10% of the population adapted similar practices, you'd create much more of an impact than selling a few solar roofs to the wealthy or designing a piece of software for a regional power plant to use to make some process a fraction of a percent more efficient.
The Tesla roof is not representative of the market. Their targeting a market segment that’s not going to buy an ‘ugly’ solar panel. It’s the same reason their selling a 250k roadster and a 35k car at the same time.
Anyway, most people pay for solar installations via loans. Generally the out of pocket costs are close to zero and monthly costs are equivalent to grid power. In some cases installing solar is a pure cost savings with zero upfront costs and lower monthly costs.
> Renewables are also extremely limited in practical use.
From my experience, they are a lot less limited than people realize. The UK's use of wind is a good example [0], studies have been done in Australia where we previously thought the upper limit of renewables would be 20% of power generation only 10 years ago, each yeah they are revising this number upwards thanks to technology developments. South Australia is a good example here too [1].
Just because we can't easily foresee a solution that is 100% renewable/carbon free energy generation _right now_, doesn't mean we shouldn't head in that direction. Waiting around for a perfect solution and sitting on our hands is exactly what we shouldn't be doing.
Also in regards to your comments for individual behaviors impacting the planet, turns out people can walk and chew gum at the same time. I'm vegan, avoid flying (haven't flown in >5 years), work remote and have solar panels on my house. Making personal changes like you and I (and many others and growing) have done absolutely makes a difference, but so does the technology development. For example
> With sun and wind you can only implement it so far before you hit a wall, the wall being the need for huge amounts of grid storage to serve dark/not windy times.
I work mainly in the solar radiation forecasting area, basically thickness of clouds forecasts. Something that the _tech_ we've developed performs really well at is forecasting the next 4 hours, updating every 5-15 minutes thanks to the amazing tech that is the latest generation of geostationary weather satellites. As you likely know, one of the important properties of an electricity grid is stability which the intermittent nature of renewables like solar don't excel (as you've pointed out) at especially if you live anywhere there are commonly clouds. One way to improve stability is to smooth out the variability and to know ahead of time how much the power output is going to change. You might think this is just a 1-2% improvement but actually this is impacts _how much_ solar power generation to can add to an electricity grid by a lot and it also GREATLY reduces the size of battery required to get that smoothing of power generation. Does it get us to 100% renewable energy generation? No, but it lets us rush for higher penetration whilst maintaining stability in electricity networks, which helps generators make money, which makes investment look more attractive, which builds more solar, you see the cycle.
So yes, you can only implement them so far, but how far this can be taken is generally rising in many countries, and getting there quickly is important.
Yes, if everyone made the individual choices today, the world could drop our CO2 emissions very quickly in a short period of time. Social problems are hard and sadly we have leaders without the political will to go against their own personal self interest and that of their large emitter donors [2]. So while some lobby to try and change this, others try to encourage those with money from their large emissions to put their money somewhere else that will reduce emissions by making it more profitable. A carrot AND a stick as it were. It isn't just "hopeium", people in these fields are working their butts off and the inertia is building, it's not going to be easy so yes I think the future is bright _for the climate tech industry_ as there are positive contributions to be made. As for the general future re climate change, no, it is not looking bright but working to make it less shit is something I'd encourage others to do.
Wind varies wildly between locations. England being an island probably helps a ton as coastal areas tend to generally be windy. If we look at a wiki entry [1] on the coastline of the UK:
>the coastline as measured by the standard method at Mean High Water Mark rises to about 19,491 miles (31,368 km).
With the general coasltine of the United States being 12,383 miles.
The UK also has nearly 1/5 the population, has virtually no air conditioning while 16% of residential electricit consumption and 6% of total electrical consumption in the United States is from air conditioning [2].
So there is limited carryover here with something like wind. Same goes for solar, solar is great at certain latitudes and in certain regions (think weather) but other latitudes and regions is just not practical.
The UK is also much smaller than something like the United States, that means a much more efficient grid can be constructed. You will also just have less transmission loss because you have much fewer units of measure of power lines.
Granted regarding wind, but there are a lot of coastal areas in the world and other windy non coastal regions as well. As for solar and latitudes, this is primarily an economic choice, so while yes some areas of the world will produce more watts/m^2 (see global maps of Global Horizontal Irradience), solar utility generation can still make economic sense |in or near a lot of populated places around the globe. Sure, high density islands would be a silly use of space for solar but being islands, wind would likely make more sense|.
And yes, transmission of power is also a problem for places like Australia being so large, but even with this people are genuinely looking into building large _international_ electricity connections under sea between north of Australia and Singapore [0] backed by 10GW of solar generation capacity [1], a $20B investment that they are willing to bet will _make_ money, not heavily gov funded.
A lot of people are also looking at hydrogen generation from excess renewable power as another way to recoup some profit when grid generation prices go to 0 or negative. Deciding _when_ to do these kinds of activities is largely where _climate tech_ can help out. Again, even relatively small improvements allow for larger shifts if what we do and can have a large impact of investment including how attractive the scaling of these technologies can be. Because energy generation and consumption are such fundamental parts of modern life, being clever with how you do both of these things can lead to whole different approaches. As clean energy generation costs drop there will be other carbon net negative (maybe negative) activities that become economical, creating a space where money can be mode is the fastest way to accelerate change in the modern world.
Some of these choices will no doubt cause their own problems that will need to be solved, but at this stage world needs to look towards harm minimization, and quickly when it comes to the climate crises. With hindsight I'm sure we'll be able to look back and highlight ways it could have been done better, hell we can do that now but those with the power to make that change seem unwilling to show leadership.
If you are a programmer/technical minded person, climate tech is still a positive contribution and I think is an industry that will be growing. If you are a politician, yes, you'll likely have the _chance_ to make a far larger impact and all power to you, but I'll be doing what I can with the skills and knowledge I have.
> As far as bending the warming curve towards 1.5° C is concerned, I think policy and regulatory reform is currently a larger source of leverage than technology.
Refreshing to hear this from someone working in climate tech.
Absolutely. And before anyone claims that any such action would inevitably favour the well-off at the expense of the poor, let me point out that schemes like carbon fee and dividend exist that implement a carbon tax in a non-regressive way by returning the collected tax revenue to the population in form of a dividend paid equally to everyone. That way, people with carbon-intensive lifestyles (eg, lots of air travel), who tend to be well-off, pay more, and people who can't afford overseas vacations every year will more likely than not pay less carbon tax than the dividend they receive. This incentivises low individual carbon emissions without disproportionately affecting less well-off people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend
If you think that pricing carbon externalities into all goods now and offering a dividend later (yearly? Quarterly? Monthly?) will not be regressive, ask anyone living paycheck to paycheck how they feel about it.
It might balance out in the big scheme of things, but it isn't going to be doing any favors to people who are already precariously balanced and lack the savings to make personal adjustments. You can be sure there will be mass protests if the price of gas, food, and electricity double (esp food in northern climates where transportation and refrigeration add a lot to produce and frozen goods as well as meats).
> pricing carbon externalities into all goods now and offering a dividend later
Nothing prevents the dividend from being offered upfront. It would be trivial for most governments to finance this.
Ask someone living paycheck to paycheck if they'd take $500 now in exchange for higher (but less than the $500 they get) costs on certain items. Most people living paycheck-to-paycheck are not the biggest consumers.
Certain items? everything is influenced by petroleum, whether transportation, manufacturing or fertilization. Our clothes are made from it. Machines are powered and lubricated by it. Food is cooled and packaged with it. I wouldn't be too hopeful that the cost of anything wouldn't be affected, unless those goods have externality costs excluded, in which case you aren't really pricing in externalities, you're just running another UBI scheme.
Prices fluctuate all the time. How many tons of CO2 are consumed by the machine that spins yarn? Sure there’s an added cost, but of pennies — this strikes me as a weak counter argument.
At a nominal price of $20/ton, a few things will go way up in price, but almost everything else will see at best a blip, with an added incentive to the producers to reduce the carbon content because that matters at industrial scale (company saves $3m over 30m units by switching to a non-petroleum glue whatever) not to an individual consumer (who would see a cost increase of 10¢).
Canada has a carbon tax and an end of year rebate. They have been introducing it step by step, it’s per province so numbers are hard to summarise. The Wikipedia page has plenty of info for you to rest assured: it works. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada
They are a northern climate. There are no mass protests. Carbon emissions are going down.
Instead of asking people how they feel about a theoretical scenario, you can look at reality.
It is still debatable whether carbon emissions are falling. Most of the country hasn't got enough data under a carbon tax, and oil and gas pricing has swung more significantly over the last 10 years than the carbon tax impact, and that didn't impact consumption very much.
For people living paycheck to paycheck that can be handled through adjustments to tax withholding. So less money would be withheld from each paycheck. We already handle numerous other taxes and tax credits / deductions the same way.
Rapid price inflation for staple goods will likely cause civil unrest either way. The only way to make a carbon tax politically feasible will be to slowly phase it in over many years so that people have time to adjust.
There won't be mass protests, there will be vocal minority protests like we saw in France. For better or worse, vocal minorities can do a lot of damage to the policies we need.
You have to be a bit careful here, though. If you think that "policy and regulatory reform" means international agreements limiting greenhouse gases are the way to go, unfortunately I am afraid you are in for a really long wait. On the other hand, policies that push for new technologies, then kind of yes, but then it is more difficult to distinguish which one, the policies or technologies are the more important source of leverage (personally I do no think that it is even a feasible comparison).
For example, "everyone" is laughing at Germany's super Energiewende that it is a expensive failure that has not managed to reduce Germany's dependence for coal at all. But then, if you have a look when Germany has built solar, it's share of the global new capacity at that time and compare that tho the learning curve and price development of solar, it is a bit difficult to conclude anything but Germany's policies have pretty much singlehandedly brought solar from laughably expensive novelty to something that actually can be competitive in certain markets. Then China continued from there, and now we are extremely close (if not already over) a tipping point where solar just keeps getting cheaper subsidized or not.
Germanys problem is, that nuclear is supposed to be banned long before coal.
Now while I agree, that in the long term all energy should be from renewable sources, in the short term it is much more important to get those coal plants off the grid. Instead there were new ones being opened.
In the late 80s early 90s I was against nuclear power, because I saw no reason people/govt would want to off of it until the collected problems were disastrous.
In the late aughts I changed my tune because coal is just too disastrous and indeed, people/govts werent motivated enough.
So while I understand the simple practicality of going nuke to get off coal, I also expect that most of the potential downsides of nuclear will become reality before people will be motivated enough to do anything about it.
It's fuzzier than that. For example, there is a lot of momentum behind carbon capture and storage research and implementation that was built up under previous presidents (yes, even pre-Obama), and it would take a great deal of work for congress to re-route funding that the Department of Energy has already allocated. Even 45Q tax credits for capturing and storing CO2 started working through the federal government before the current administration, with the partial goal of determining what a carbon price would actually be.
CCS technology may be currently used to say "look, clean coal!", but it's still useful and important for a low-carbon future.
Isn't this from the continued steady decline of coal power in the US and not any new policy? The current administration hasn't made good on their policy to boost coal power (imo that failure being a good thing).
What recent policies have been passed that you think should be lauded?
The point is that "Trump has to go for anything to happen" contradicts facts. If anything, the virtue signalling by other politicians has been less effective than whatever happened under Trump.
>The point is that "Trump has to go for anything to happen" contradicts facts.
Unless we can point to a policy change then "Trump has to go for anything to happen" seems reasonable, doesn't it? If the gains are from coal's decline, it seems reasonable to be worried that won't be enough.
It happened under Trump's tenure due to the economics of coal power and wind, despite his campaign promises to prop up coal and the phase out of wind power subsidies.
The reduction isn't even close to the scale of the cuts required to make meaningful progress on climate.
As someone earlier in the thread said, look how much progress has been made under a hostile policy regime. Imagine if there was actually a carbon tax and oil subsidies were transferred to clean tech.
The US is the largest developed economy and has some of the high per person emissions in the world. It’s hardly going to be possible for another country to have a larger fall if it’s five times smaller with half the per person emissions.
The other point is this relies on fracking, and the carbon intensity of fracking depends on the level of escaped Methane. It can actually be worse than coal. And Trump has just reversed a lot of the regulation which prevented venting of Methane from fracking sites.
I work in a company in the climate tech space, and this all rings very true. Our customer is utilities and I have stayed from fairly early stage through acquisition. It's frustratingly slow moving at times, but we've also been able to have a meaningful impact. Each person in the company can honestly say that they've contributed to emissions reductions to the point that really nothing they do could ever make them carbon positive again. Most of this is due to the scalability of software.
It's also been really interesting to see how regulations play into this. Getting utilities to value reducing their topline revenue through user energy efficiency requires regulation, and our customer base mostly reflects which utilities are under such regulations, though we also have a customer experience play for when that's not a primary driver.
Like layoric, I would also recommend working in this space for similar reasons. I would also add my experience is that the people are great. It's not get rich quick, so the people here are driven mostly by mission and interesting problems, which leads to a generally high level of positivity.
> I would also add my experience is that the people are great. It's not get rich quick, so the people here are driven mostly by mission and interesting problems, which leads to a generally high level of positivity.
This is a great point and I've found this as well, even if the mission drive is not there, others are just glad to be working on something that isn't one way or another selling ads and grounded in the real world (sun/wind/energy) so makes for a great group of people.
Smart metering should be compulsory in all households with a display showing the current spot price. I should be able to see that right now electricity is expensive or cheap to decide if I should wash my clothes or run the AC.
Its crazy the electrical utility industry ties itself in knots to guarantee supply and meet demand peaks when consumers blindly use electricity when they feel like it. Changing demand behaviour should be a priority if we want wind and solar to become more widely used.
This is a good point. Demand flexibility is a great resource.
However, effectively zero consumers pay the spot price currently. Distribution utilities worry that time-varying electricity prices (1) are confusing to consumers (2) any change in rates triggers regulatory review and creates winners and losers (i.e. some bills go up, others go down).
I work with utilities, and we are seeing a lot more interest in time of use and dynamic pricing. I think EVs will help a lot with socializing time-varying prices. Incentivizing consumers to charge at night is hugely beneficial for everyone, which means you can roll it out to consumers in a way that always reduces costs, making it feel less punitive than a time-varying rate that otherwise might help or hurt.
Incentivizing consumers to charge EVs at night only makes sense right now because of surplus base load capacity on the grid from nuclear and fossil fuel power plants. As the generation mix shifts more toward solar and wind it will eventually make more sense to charge during the day. The key will be to embed smart agents in EV chargers and other power hungry devices so that they can dynamically choose when to activate based on spot prices.
Wind is phenomenally cheap power, total demand at night is low, and wind production is usually highest at night. I would not be surprised if it always made sense to charge up storage at night.
The only exception would be if so much storage capacity came online that the variability of wind was completely absorbed & the arbitrage disappeared.
It's not so crazy to me that we try to maintain the same quality of life. Watching the meter and waiting until 9 PM to wash your clothes is a pretty sad state of affairs. Sweating through your clothes in a heat wave because everyone else wants AC is even worse.
Are we really ready to admit that the late 20th century was peak civilization? It seems to me we have solved all the wrong problems with technology (nitrogen fixation, disease, etc) that put natural checks on population several hundred years before we were ready to actively plan and manage population. As a result, all the problems introduced by overpopulation that are fundamentally unsolvable are getting worse and worse.
I would not be ready to admit anything of the sort, seeing as the solutions included things like decent sanitation and protection against childhood disease. The late 20th/early 21st century raised billions of people out of abject poverty. I can't imagine any viable solution to climate change (or other problems for that matter) that takes these things away.
>Are we really ready to admit that the late 20th century was peak civilization?
Unequivocally yes. If we admit it now and work hard to limit climate change it might be a local peak. If we continue on our current path it's going to end up being the global peak. There is no scenario in which we fix the climate without giving significant ground on quality of life in the first world, especially considering that ideally we should be working to bring quality of life to parity across the developed and developing world.
Incentives make it easier to care as there is a payoff of some form for doing so. Compulsion eliminates choice and has an attached penalty for not complying. It doesn't make it easier to care, it eliminates the choice entirely. They're nothing alike.
A bit late to respond to this one, but the post stated that smart metering should be compulsory. Whether you choose to pay any attention to it or not is entirely up to you.
- Smart tanked water heaters hold heat for many hours. Shut off during high load times. Nearly invisible to user in most cases.
- Space heating & cooling pre-heats or pre-cools before anticipated peak demand & shuts off during peak. E.g. Nest Rush Hour Rewards.
- Electric dryer waits to start until rates are low. Or could even interrupt briefly during a short spike. Clothes will not mind being damp another thirty or sixty minutes.
The user needs to be inconvenienced. Prioritizing convenience the way we do now is going to guarantee the we carry on right up until civilization collapses completely.
I think customers do care but there is a lot of friction in the process to change. Took me several hours to switch energy sources, should be a toggle option on an app.
> Buying EVs and solar panels make us feel good, but only represents marginal progress while oil subsidies artificially prop up the internal combustion engine and campaign finance laws give incumbent fossil fuel companies undue influence to hamstring the deployment of clean technologies.
Become Jeff Bezos and put $10 billion [1] towards lobbying...
Last Christmas I was looking for a good climate charity to donate to. I was disappointed to find that GiveWell [2], which does great reviews of charity effectiveness, found a lot effective charities in public health and one in poverty reduction, but nothing in the area of climate. It's very frustrating.
Giving What We Can has a section on climate charities[0]. One listed is Cool Earth, which I thought Givewell had recommended in the past, but I'm not seeing it in any of their archived recommendations.
(It's also worth noting that addressing global poverty is a pro-climate activity, in addition to be a moral imperative. Its climate-effects may be more long-term than is relevant, though.)
the best bang for the buck will come when one donates to causes that improve literacy and wholesale lifestyle improvements (both children as well as adults)
They will not see immediate results, but the change in a few decades with the new mindset etc will be enormous.
Given that the yellow vests started rioting over a pretty modest increase in fuel taxes, I don't think popular support for dealing with climate change has nearly the level of popular support our respective circles of friends would have us believe.
My own sense is that the typical world leader would love to save their beachfront properties, but lacks the skills to sell the necessary sacrifices when competing with aspiring democratic leaders. Environmentalism needs a populist of its own. Ms. Thunberg did her best, but this really calls for a Lincoln more than a D'ark.
> Given that the yellow vests started rioting over a pretty modest increase in fuel taxes
This is not the full story. To balance the fuel tax increase, the wealth tax for the rich was eliminated. Who knows what would have happened if it wasn't the case.
That’s why all “social good” “incentive” taxes should be revenue-neutral (paying all taxes collected back to citizens as universal income). I have absolutely zero trust in governments to spend any such tax sensibly otherwise, and I’m probably not alone.
A bunch of this resonates with me, having spent many years in climate tech as well. I laughed at the part about selling a pilot to a utility in three months though. That's like super lightning speed in this industry.
I work in climate tech, and it's funny to hear the US democrat candidates for president talking about investing huge amounts in energy research. I think, well yes we could grow our research efforts, but taxing carbon emissions and changing the tax advantages for fossil fuel extraction would be a lot easier than trying to wring another 1% efficiency out of air source heat pumps or doing more grid integration studies...
Energy research is changing the whole landscape of renewables. Any progress there can easily tip the balance in favor. Some luddite tax on old technology is missing the point/the opportunity we have at this juncture, to make batteries/renewables the obvious/cheap choice for energy in the future.
I think it's fair to say both research funding and tax reform should both be pursued. A nice benefit of the "luddite tax" is that it would make renewables and energy storage relatively more attractive, which would drive revenue that could fund product development.
If you think climate change is a big problem I don't see why you wouldn't support both research and policy change. Getting a solution to energy storage would be a huge boost for renewables, for instance.
I'm starting to think the United States needs a 10%er/intellectual/managerial/rational collition.
I'm intentionally leaving that open ended because there are smart people that work for non profits and science. This demographic is noticeably different than the supporters of the 2 leading populist demagogues.
We understand climate change is happening, we see the empty promises of demagogues, we had our taxes raised under Trump, and our health insurance costs go up under Obama.
It's unfortunate that class warfare is developing, but I think the 10%ers are late to the party.
I wouldn't say that. It looks more like the 10%ers had simply been winning since at least the 90s and are slow to abandon a strategy that had been successful for so long.
Yang was a candidate that could appeal to both the populare and the 10%, but I think he suffered from some anti-STEM bias.
I have been in this industry for about the same amount of time, and I absolutely could not have said it better. People entering the space can either try to learn from this article or learn these lessons themselves over 2-3 years, I hope they can do the former to avoid spinning their wheels.
Having worked for a company that built and sold software to utility companies, #s 1 and 5 resonate with me. Consumers don’t care about energy and it's brutal selling to utilities.
Brutal truth is that not only consumers/customers, but also the climate does not care about saving on energy use. Consuming of energy is not a problem, only producing it is. Wasting energy does not generate any greenhouse gases or pollution. We just need to produce 100% clean electric energy from certain renewables or nuclear, and it should be so cheap and competitive that all the industries (including e.g. cement producing) would just move over to it.
Good analysis of the entrepreneurship in the energy sector. I might email him about this contradiction:
1. Consumers don’t care about energy
versus:
I don’t believe that we’ll get where we need to go without a global price on carbon. This is why I volunteer with the Citizens’ Climate Lobby to build political will for a national carbon fee and dividend policy in the US
Someone pointed out to me around 15 years ago that "green" is terrible branding for environmentalism.
Taxing carbon makes living more expensive for people. Most people on the margin will reject anything that makes energy more expensive for them. Dyslexic philosopher George W. Bush once said, "Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."
People don't trust scientists, they trust engineers, because engineers own up to their mistakes and usually make a second-generation product that's better than the first edition, whereas 'science advances one funeral at a time' (the standard paraphrase of Max Planck).
The vast majority of people absolutely 100% do not care about their carbon output. They care about their wallets and quality of life. Advocating for carbon taxes is an exercise in futility, encouraged by artificial fear. IMHO, climate alarmism is propagated by people with good intentions and incomplete analysis of reconstructed data. Scientists have only recently put temperature sensors on the Juan de Fuca volcanic ridge, there's no sensors on the vast majority of the ocean ridges, and only in the last... ~40 years have they started to put fleets of automated temperature buoys into the oceans... We've had a mild winter where I live, but Baghdad Iraq had atypical snowfall this month [0].
But I feel more and more that we’re approaching the point at which technology has gone about as far as it can within the confines of a 20th century policy regime.
The 20th century brought us the electric utility model, which encouraged the economy to develop to use as much energy as possible.
Humanity's best hope is not figuring out how to de-carbonize the economy, but to finish the Book of Physics and figure out where all the energy is hiding. Nikola Tesla promised us it's out there. 21st Century physics is tiptoeing towards an answer.
> The vast majority of people absolutely 100% do not care about their carbon output. They care about their wallets and quality of life.
This. The abject failure of airlines' "pay an extra $XX on your ticket to offset the carbon emissions of your flight" showed that the vast majority of people are virtue-signalling about climate change but not prepared to make any actual changes to their lifestyle for it.
I've had arguments with "green" friends about their use of cars (I haven't owned a car for >10 years - I prefer walking/cycling). They care desperately about the planet, but they care more about not losing the convenience of their personal car.
I notice the emphasis has shifted recently onto regulation of polluting industries, such as oil companies. I think this is in part because of the complete failure to change people's lifestyles. It's easier to regulate 100 large companies than get 1 billion people to accept responsibility for their lifestyle. But it'll be interesting to see what happens when those companies pass the cost of that regulation onto their customers.
I wonder how much of the failure to sell carbon credits is from the positioning (in x-y screen space and in t) alongside “pay extra for a seat near the front?”, “pay extra to check a bag?”, “pay extra to sit near your family?”, “pay extra for trip insurance?”, “pay extra for WiFi?” and other nibbles at the wallet while you have it out?
I’m also skeptical that these sold carbon offsets actually result in any actual marginal change in the world, but I think it’s more the choice fatigue and feeling of being one more way to be nickel and dimed...
This is exactly what gives me pause when paying these credits offered by the airline.
I wonder if we could charge by total weight of passengers and luggage as that directly correlates to fuel usage.
It correlates but the weight to fuel usage is highly non-linear. The airplane I fly goes only 2-3% faster when it’s 10% lighter (at a constant cruise power setting, meaning the through the air economy only increases by 1/5 to 1/3 the change in mass).
There's an obvious public goods problem here. My personal emissions have no measurable effect on the climate. I could reduce my emissions to nothing and I won't see a difference. If everybody else pitched in, I could personally do nothing and the climate would still be saved. Either way, the outcome is the same whether I help or not, so my incentive is to do nothing.
That's why your friends haven't reduced their personal emissions, but probably support policy changes that would incentivize mass changes in behavior. It's the same reason we can't rely on voluntary donations to build the roads, but people support taxes for them.
I get that, but these are "green" people who demonstrate at rallies for climate change, etc. Of all the people I would expect to "be the change they want in the world", it would be these, at least according to their FB posts.
I wasn't popular for pointing out the irony when at least a few of them drove to a demonstration against a new refinery.
> I wasn't popular for pointing out the irony when at least a few of them drove to a demonstration against a new refinery.
So...they should've walked or biked to protests instead? What if (as refineries often are) it was 100 miles away in a rural area with no public transportation? What about disabled people? People without enough free time to bike 100 (or maybe even 10) miles? People with children?
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Would it be better to have no rallies at all, rather than rallies that people drive to? These people spent their free time going to rallies instead of motorboating on lakes or flying on a jet to go skiing. They have skin in the game.
Effective change requires shifting the system. Personal choices for coffee cups, cars, etc are largely irrelevant besides wrangling your own guilt.
A actual change needed for airlines is to tax airlines at the cost of emissions and pollution they produce and have produced historically. This can be analyzed down to the supply chain level - how much does it cost to build, how much pollution is produced in the process. How much wetlands have been damaged by airfields, etc.
Yes, which is why the companies promote passing the buck on to consumers rather than backing effective regulation. I'm reminded of cafe chains that give you 5p off a coffee if you use a reusable cup because they just love the environment so much but then lobby against imposing the same 5p charge via taxation. This is why the emphasis has shifted. Consumers already have to consider when buying a product without investigating its entire supply chain.
I'd disagree that there is a contradiction between consumers caring about energy, and the author's view that a carbon price is a key tool for carbon reduction. They are two very different things. One is end consumers and their monthly bills and the other is business level market economics.
There was a lot of buzz about smart meters for electricity, with some very optimistic thinking that once people saw their daily usage they would reduce that usage. That didn't work, and we agree at least here that most people don't think about the cost of plugging in a phone to charge or doing some cooking, these are essentials for their life and they'll do them anyway.
On an industry level, with trading of carbon credits and guarantees of origin we're seeing significant financial and brand benefits for companies in carbon reduction and policies do have significant effects.
We're seeing another market force affecting company's climate policies, which might end up being more than government policies and carbon trading, which the author hasn't mentioned. Hedge funds, banks and investors are favouring companies with ecological policies, or ceasing to find those with high negative ecological impacts.
These are all very real impacts, being made now, are the speed of implementation looks to be increasing. All based on a massive scientific consensus that anecdotes and minor objections do not outweigh. "figuring out where all the energy is hiding" can happen in parallel, and indeed is, but so far there's are no real world solutions that will deliver the energy we need or reduce our ecological impact in the short & medium terms.
Climate tech has driven solar and wind generation from the most expensive generation assets to the cheapest over the last 20 years. Energy storage has gone from a product for cordless consumer devices to something that's cheap enough to replace fossil fuel peaking and reliability units. Nest built an energy efficiency product that's a household name. So, yes, the world would be way worse off.
Exactly, we owe a lot to those pioneers that started innovating half a century ago. About five years ago is when non subsidized renewables caught up with just about everything else in terms of unsubsidized cost/kwh. By now, coal plants are going bankrupt and people have all but stopped building new ones. Gas plants are not far behind. I'd say another five years of price drops will push that over the point where that becomes equally uneconomic. Most plants under construction right now are extremely likely to be retired long before their projected end of lives.
To preempt the inevitable "but ... we need unspecified amounts of reserve capacity for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't come out" croqs. This is a real problem that is easily addressed with 1) batteries, cables, and excess capacity (name your safety factor; 10x is feasible and probably still cheaper if needed). Batteries give you local energy buffers. We've used cables to move power around since electricity became commercially available. Multiple interconnected production sites distributed across every country (as well as off shore) can absorb any amount of clouds, or other weather phenomena that might temporarily cause a continent lack of wind & sun. And of course there's no rule that says we can only cover 100$ of our energy needs. A few extra panels, wind mills, etc. can push this to 200, 300, or more percent. Also the excess is actually useful for doing stuff like generating synthesized fuels, desalinating water (or condensing it from thin air), etc.
My main argument here is that clean energy is about to create an economic boom that is similar in size to what happened when we discovered fire, coal, and oil (in that order). Historically every time we reduce the cost of energy, we've had a massive economic boom. IMHO we're on the edge of the next one which will be powered by dirt cheap and plentiful clean energy that we can consume by the twh completely guilt free. The main problem in this space is that people don't see the big picture. Too many tree huggers (no offense) and not enough people with vision.
1. Stop burning coal
2. Get shipping off oil and onto renewables
3. DAC efforts need to be stepped up, both biological and technological
All of those are achieved by turning to Gen 4 nuclear reactors. MSRs are now entering trial phases [1] where nuclear energy generation is not as strictly regulated as in the States. Miniaturization efforts have found solutions where such a power plant [2] could be cost effective for shipping.
DAC efforts are a bit strange. I've looked a bit into tree planting and haven't found anything that looks like it scales with investment. I can't purchase a product knowing it will result in extra efforts, or put another way, if a billionaire would pour in a billion dollars, it wouldn't scale up the operation proportionately to the increased funds. Technological DAC is a solved problem that would scale but needs a power source.
4th gen reactors are the only thing that tackles these points on all fronts.
Would not be a hacker news climate thread without someone jumping in immediately with nuclear.
I am not opposed to the technology in a meaningful way but the problem is that the conditions in which nuclear can thrive - regulatory scheme, public perception of climate change risk, long time horizon infrastructure development, $$$ - non nuclear renewables easily outcompete.
I wonder how the nuclear folks think about this. The tech doesn’t exist in a numerical vacuum of efficiency and dollars per watt. It lived inside a complex ecosystem within which it doesn’t really seem competitive.
I don't think they think about it at all. My university had a strong nuclear research program and I took some classes from the professors in the field. It's clearly really hard, to the point that even PhD level intellects can only do it when they're hyperfocused on the nuts and bolts of the physics. I think even beyond that, maybe for national security reasons, people in the nuclear industry don't get outside their bubble much. I'm sure if any of them took a weekend of genuinely trying to understand why it wasn't cost-competitive they'd understand it better than me, but then they'd fall behind in their 'real' research. So they lobby for more state support without ever questioning why they need it.
Right now wind+solar account for less than 1% of global electric generation.
I'm highly skeptical that prices can remain low as that scales out to 10-40% of electric generation, given constraints on things like rare earth metals. There is also the issue of equipment wearing out relatively quickly compared to conventional/nuclear plants.
SMRs, built using mass production rather than one-off construction, and possessing safety qualities far beyond current reactors, will be necessary to provide safe, reliable, clean and cheap energy alongside "renewables", IMNSHO.
In the US alone, wind and solar (including rooftop) produce approximately 11% (about 53GW average) of electrical energy given the very latest data (last 12 months rolling) from: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
(and this should be updated today)
The US consumes about 485GW average electricity, compared to the world total of 2485GW average. So approximately 1/5th.
So US solar + wind ALONE is at least 2% of global electric generation (50GW/2485GW > 2%), twice your claim (again, this is just the solar and wind in the US compared to world total electricity). I suspect your figures are far outdated (not uncommon in this field...).
To me it is pretty simple. I look at places like Germany and Denmark and see how natural gas is booming. I then compare that to nations with a lot of nuclear. Nuclear is expensive, take a long time to build, and can not compete with the price of using a combination of renewables and fossil fuels. It is however the only current example of energy grids that work without fossil fuels.
My political interest in the topic is exclusively in not having fossil fuels being burned for power and heat. The economics of combining renewables and fossil fuels only works to a point, as illustrated by the energy grid of Germany and Denmark. Both countries now need to go to over capacity and battery technology to further reduce fossil fuel usage, and for about the same reason that nuclear has problem competing, battery technology and overcapacity cost too much.
As more countries in EU reach the same point we get fewer countries that need to buy during periods of overcapacity (as show by negative prices). This reduces the interest in building more renewables, and it becomes more attractive to stay at 100% renewable at peak conditions and have fossil fuels picking up everything when its not at peak. This is a typical example of a local maximum and a Nash equilibrium. Any action that goes towards 100% renewables at peak condition are competitive and any action that goes beyond 100% during peak conditions are noncompetitive. Such countries then get stuck, with the problematic consequences that fossil fuels continue to burn.
1$/watt capital costs and 2.5c/kwhr. This blows every other competitor out of the water. I was stunned when I started to research the economics of 4th gen. It's going to win in the end.
If Greenpeace only knew the damage they did back in the 80's and 90's... Granted that nuclear power back then was primitive and dangerous.
You are absolutely right. Most of the innovative projects are putting up shop in less developed countries exactly for this reason. Once proven there the regulatory hindrances in the west will disappear because for industrial purposes nothing else will be able to compete.
MSRs can produce thermals in excess of 2000C which is enough for most smelting operations. This will increase efficiency almost twofold. This will mean all smelting operations will move to areas where the technology can be employed. Because of the economic incentives there will be countries with emerging economies (and already are, see Indonesia) that will take advantage.
This will take a decade or two to percolate but the writing is on the wall. Failing to react to it will only make dinos out of the countries unwilling to change.
They didn't. The nuclear industry failed to innovate themselves out of increasing costs. It is regulatory bodies that set the requirements, not Greenpeace, and those requirements are based on risk calculations.
It could be that the industry is just dysfunctional. But it could also be that nuclear tech is just way harder in the real world than what some people seem to think.
The nuclear industry is still wearing the ball and chain of solid fuels. Everything wrong with nuclear energy is due to that single engineering faux pas. Oak Ridge ran an MSR for 5 years. It would be tragic if it couldn't be mended but it can. I'm 100% sure that Gen 4 will dominate energy generation within 2 decades. I'd put money on that.
There are more than 60,000 power plants in the world, the bulk of which are fossil fuels. Replacing them, with a continually growing power demand as newly middle-class individuals begin to consume more, is effectively impossible without radical change on a planetary level.
Never mind the concrete production for all of the new plants alone would release a staggering amount of CO2.
Even if someone figured out fusion this afternoon, and could start construction of one plant on each continent (sans Antarctica) this year, with the plants going online late next year, we'd still need radical change to hold us over for (likely) the couple of few decades it would take to build enough of the facilities.
Also consider ICE vehicles are still something like 90% of the annual sales in the world too. If you outlawed the production of ICE vehicles in every country in the world today, in 30 years you'd still have many millions of those vehicles on the road being used.
Concrete, plastics, livestock... there are many facets to this problem.
Absolutely. We need all angles at the problem to find a solution. We also need to mitigate the damage we know can't be prevented. Shipping is 12% of CO2 emissions. It's a little bit harder to nail down (found a staggering figure of 46% of all emissions) how much coal contributes but together with shipping they are more than half of all emissions. If you are tackling a hard problem and a solution to half of it is on your doorstep, please answer the bell.
Yeah, sure. Build as much nuclear as you can reasonably integrate into a grid that primarily runs on renewables. But don't trust in Thorium to somehow fix our problem.
Thorcon is using 20% enriched U-235. Their design can accomodate the Thorium fuel cycle in the future but for now it's mostly repurposed nuclear wastes.
I don't remember the figures. There are plenty of videos on Youtube with presentations from the Thorcon team. I think it's 250MW electric, 500MW thermal that the design delivers.
The US uses 4 trillion kWh per year. Assuming 3MW wind turbines at 30% capacity factor, you'll need around 3.5 billion wind turbines. They take around 23 million kWh to manufacture (each), so you'll need to find the energy for that. However, that's not really enough, as the entire economy needs to be carbon-neutral. Electricity usage accounts for about 40% of the total US energy usage, so you'll actually need to multiply everything by 2.5.
Seriously, I understand the "we only have 10 years to do anything" line, but the math is so far from adding up, it completely defeats the point. The only realistic way to achieve the 10 year goal is to radically cut energy usage.
Fair point - I did the calc all at once and screwed up my parentheses. My point still stands. How realistic is it to manufacture 500,000 x2.5 = 1.25 million wind turbines, needing 27 trillion kWh to do so, in 10 years?
That's not going to happen. Nor are thousands of nuclear reactors going to be built in 10 years. Nor is the US going to cut its primary energy use by 60% in 10 years. Nor is the combination of all-of-the-above going to make the US carbon neutral in 10 years. Nor should we give up on continued incremental progress after another 10 years have passed without fully solving the problem.
It's always possible to make climate change even worse by burning more fossil fuels. Regardless of whatever dangerous threshold of emissions has passed in 10 years, it doesn't make sense to resign ourselves to burning the rest of the fossil fuels. I'm afraid that the hardline "we need to have solved this emissions problem in 1X years" rhetoric is counterproductive. It asks too much and will prompt fatalism and/or cynicism when the deadline has passed, there are still billions of living people who need to make decisions affecting the future, and the problem still isn't "done with."
> I'm afraid that the hardline "we need to have solved this emissions problem in 1X years" rhetoric is counterproductive. It asks too much and will prompt fatalism and/or cynicism when the deadline has passed
This is a risk yes, media have a big part to play here to try and build on positive inertia. A good example of the opposite of this is Australia in ~2005 vs ~2015 we went from enough political will to create a carbon tax (that was hugely successful is dropping our emissions in a short period of time) to removing it and likely never going back. IMO this was largely due to medias constant fighting in this direction (to serve those who were lobbying hard in this direction).
The hardline approach does seem to have wakened a larger group of people to speak out and support trying to reduce how much worse the climate crisis will get in the coming decades. That combined with more frequent and intense natural disasters might just keep things moving. However, I've learnt never to be surprised by our collective short term memory when counter narratives are constantly bombarding us through media channels.
I agree with you. I support people doing the right thing even for mistaken reasons. That's why I don't normally criticize comments saying that we need to solve the problem in <some arbitrary number of years> even though I believe that "deadline" approach is technically incorrect. I don't look forward to the backlash after these various deadlines pass in the 2030s though.
Fortunately, there is also a longer term trend of battery storage costs and renewable generation costs continuing to fall. It may be short term reactions to wildfires that guide Australian energy investment in the next couple of years, but it will be the technological improvements that keep low-carbon options on top in the next couple of decades.
The headlines absolutely do not help. They turn off people like me, who care deeply about sustainability, let alone your average reader. Nor do those promoting complex/high-tech solutions, or ideas like "you do your part if you buy an EV". The simple fact is - a sustainable, CO2 neutral civilization essentially only has the energy available daily from the sun to sustain itself (unless you include nuclear). This is orders of magnitudes less than our current energy usage. Unless you want another stone age, a compromise is necessary.
I agree as a population we need to reduce our energy usage but I will point something out.
> CO2 neutral civilization essentially only has the energy available daily from the sun to sustain itself (unless you include nuclear). This is orders of magnitudes less than our current energy usage.
The solar energy hitting the earths surface (forgetting what is absorbed in upper atmosphere contributing to winds) is really quite large. An example is I grew up in a territory/state that is 1.421 million square KMs in area. Taking the global average [0] of solar radiation hitting the surface of the planet the amount daily energy hitting the ground in just that area is 1,421,000,000 (square meters) * 6kWh = 8,526,000,000 kWh or 8.562 TWh each day (on average)
Yes we can only access a small percentage of this through technology and practical land/sea use but that is an awful lot of energy in a relatively small part of the globe (NT Australia). But while "those promoting complex/high-tech solutions" are not always promoting useful things, the history of renewable energy is one of incremental improvement and small gains to efficiency. I agree it won't happen over 10 years, and no single technology will hold the solution to all our problems, but I do believe a combination of social change and iterative technology improvements can work together to greatly reduce us making the problem worse over the coming decades.
Better communication of the science and engineering of what is possible is absolutely needed, but so is communication of the science predicting how bad things can get if we don't do anything.
With an added "and that is at the current buildout rate, which basically keeps every qualified person busy". 10x-ing the rate at which we build reactors would require training more personnel and (depending on the type of reactor you want to build) 10x-ing things like the huge machines we need to forge pressure vessels.
Nuclear is not going to happen in time and other technologies that are completely uncontroversial are already running circles around it for the past decade in terms of cost and growth (which would be negative for nuclear). I don't expect meaningful results to come from nuclear investments in the next decades. This would be the same period of time most modern countries will cross the 50-100% covered by renewable energy mark. Much of the current deployed nuclear capacity might actually end up being retired in the same period because most of it is already on the edge of it's economic life and replacements are controversial from a cost perspective (never mind the safety). The status quo is that nuclear plants are multi billion $ projects that take decades to plan and realize and that have very dubious economics.
100% renewable everywhere is not going to happen everywhere in the next two decades; but there are plenty of countries shooting for that on a 15-20 year time line. In 20 years, most of the remaining countries will be actively planning to catch up in a hurry or simply end up importing excess energy from more clued in places at a premium. Even approved plans for nuclear plants (of which there are preciously few) would probably take longer to realize; and lets face it, mostly these plans reside in some drawer gathering dust.
Nuclear is not a solution short term (< 20 years) or mid term (< 40 years) and long term (>40 years) it will have to be cost competitive with vastly cheaper than today renewables. Which is a different way of saying the winter olympics will be organized in hell regularly.
Nuclear security alone makes it a non starter from a cost point of view. Any nuclear reactor requires 24x7 security to prevent people from depopulating their local area with a bit of explosives. Micro reactors make excellent dirty bombs and with tens of thousands of them around it's more a question of when than if somebody manages to do this. The resulting security requirements alone makes them impractical, even if they would be able to compete with the renewable solutions that will be common in a few decades. These are likely to be vastly cheaper than what we have today. The main question is how many orders of magnitude cheaper things can get before people stop caring about the price. Below a certain price, using excess renewable energy to synthesize all sorts of fuels will also become vastly cheaper than refining oil no matter how inefficient that is from an energy point of view (and it's actually not that bad). Ironically, refining oil requires a lot of energy, which comes from ... renewables. That's why Texas leads everyone else with solar and wind deployments.
1 $/watt capital costs and 2.5c/kWhr for 4th gen nuclear. Solar needs to be a heck of a lot cheaper to compete with that.
All you need for 4th gen to appeal to regulators is one country starting it and showing success. Indonesia will test it out. Depending on success of failure, other countries will follow suit.
Solar bids already already dip way below that regularly for several years. By the time any of this is built, << 1c per kwh should be the norm. That only requires a 2x cost reduction which is nothing considering cost trends over the last decade with solar. Think orders of magnitude here.
I'm not talking about currently running solid-fuel reactors that burn only 0.3% of their fuel. I'm talking about 4th gen liquid fuel reactors that manage to burn 99.7% of their fuels (bonus: can burn the waste fuels old reactors leave behind), are walk-away safe and the wastes they do leave have a half-life of hundreds of years instead of millions.
DAC that you can feed power into and that way stream more CO2 into sequestration solutions is mostly a solved issue at scale [1]. Sequestration is also a solved issue [2].
Good luck moving container ships without diesel. You'll also have to put the passenger airlines and air cargo carriers completely out of business.
It is honestly something we need to do but doing so would require every continent to rely entirely upon the resources on that continent. It would also mean all of those hundreds of millions to billions of newly middle class folks around the world would have to give up their newly won quality of life and go back to living how they were before.
We either have to radically change society on nearly every level or cross our fingers and hope a humanitarian (alientarian?) fleet of alien ships show up in orbit with highly advanced technology that can replace all of our energy needs AND actively remove huge amounts of CO2 out of the air.
Jet fuel can be generated carbon neutrally with these 4th gen reactors. They provide high enough thermals to split water and hydrogen energy efficiently and any process where you generate hydrogen you can very easily produce hydrocarbons instead. We have the technology. It's economical. It's safer than any alternative ALREADY HERE. Solar is not carbon free and environmentally friendly. Silicon smelting is a really dirty process. None of the alternatives have the capability to scale the same way.
Assuming they can produce jet fuel, I doubt it would be anywhere close to enough to replace the current fossil fuel.
I've looked before and it is hard to get a decent figure due to military/private/commercial passenger flights, non-passenger military flights, freight flights etc but
>Collectively, United States air carriers burn through 17 billion gallons of jet fuel annually
It's simple really. They need to be cheaper than fossil fuels. Can't find the link right now but I remember reading about it being possible with a little subsidy (way less than oil companies are getting now).
I agree with the post that the utility scale space is a hard slog but I honestly believe the only way to scale renewables is to make it economically attractive for investment and any tech that can reduce operational cost of these assets to increase margins and attract more investment into utility scale renewable generation. A carbon price would be a huge boost to this space, things are still progressing without it but I think it would seriously accelerate our energy transition as well as spur innovation for non energy related carbon intensive industries. The current state of low interest rates world wide and funds having a harder time finding good returns means a lot of groups building solar utility scale assets are banks/funds with little knowledge/interest in energy generation, pulling together those with the how to knowledge to materialize their return on investment.
I highly recommend working in this space, its technically challenging and I think it has a bright future. It’s not as big and flashy as a lot of software startup worlds but small teams can still have a big impact. I also sure prefer working on these problems than working on platforms trying to sell more ads.