Wind/solar don't produce baseload power absent storage. If you can't scale storage proportionately to wind/solar, you can't compare w/s to nuclear because baseload and non-baseload supply are not mutually substitutable.
I was speed-watching a couple of videos on YouTube about this fifteen minutes ago. Search for "The Limiting Factor".
Battery capacity will be a minor constraint, but only minor, as there are constraints in the PV and wind turbine supply chains as well.
Those constraints are primarily NIMBY, the consenting processes for mines, refineries, and assembly factories in the case of PV and batteries, and for deployment in the case of wind.
Part of the way this problem is solved is addressed by the article:
- overbuild renewables
- connect grids together
If regional grids are connected together, then excess capacity in one region can be used by another. You don’t have to store your own electricity for later if you your neighbour can sell you their excess.
Except we need to use electricity for heating and the availability of solar inversely correlates with demand for heating and wind isn’t really able to make up for it.
Because the effect is seasonal neighboring regions can’t really help each other. So yew either need to build an incredible amount of transport capacity over a really long distance or come up with some kind of storage solution. Doing both on scale is unimaginably expensive.
Yes, nuclear power isn’t able to adjust as quickly as renewables or coal/gas, but if required it can add reduce about 10 percentage points per minute.
This isn’t done because of the economics. Fixed costs are much higher.
Solar energy is not zero in the winter months, it’s just reduced. Whether solar remains viable in the winter months is an economic question regarding the final price after overbuilding.
Wind being unable to work in to winter is an assertion that will need some backing up.
Unimaginably expensive is not accurate description. A) hydro is an already existing solution that can work as storage. B) HVDC lines are unimaginably expensive compared to what? Nuclear, while dependable is not exactly cheap either.
There is actually an inverse correlation between summer and winter in the northern and southern hemispheres. I wonder what the engineering issues with that scale of power transmission are, and if they're any worse than the political issues.
95% correct. "Planting a lot of trees" has been proven dead wrong because of simple math, plant matter decay, and increasing fucking forest fires. Instead, #teamtrees couldn't face reality while doing the disservice of misinforming and lying to millions of people for egotistical and aspirational post-factual rhetoric. https://youtu.be/gqht2bIQXIY
> "Planting a lot of trees" has been proven dead wrong because of simple math
Planting a lot of trees and let the trees grow still looks a much better plan that most of the other options and magical solutions. We just need to find the courage to try it seriously.
Forest fires are a crime in 90% of the times. The idea that we can't do what we need to do because criminals exist is not acceptable. We just need to make this crime much more expensive, painful and unprofitable for that people
Yes of course people know this. But policymakers "flatten" knowledge when making policy. See James C. Scott's "Seeing Like A State" for discussion of how this plays out in development projects.
Considering how energy intensive it is to gather, shred/pulp, transport, and pump said material - wouldn’t it be a lot better to do that with algae or the like though?
Trees are tough, and grow well in inhospital and rough terrain. That’s basically their value prop? Growing them in good crop land for something like this would be a waste, for instance.
They are good for building materials, and that is one of the longer forms of sequestration. Transport and processing is a big cost there already, and makes it dubious carbon neutrality wise currently.
> Not logging those trees is neither conservation...
not chopping forests is by definition, a basic advise in all serious treatises know by men, on conservation of biodiversity on forest ecosystems [1]
[1] Only exceptions when is a mono-culture, or when we deal with alien species
Yes, I know that biodiversity can increase in ecotones. But to have a forest boundary, you need to have a forest first.
> ... or sequestration
trees take CO2 from the air and store it in wood, a structure that can last potentially for several hundreds or even thousands of years. Half of this structure is buried in the soil. Tons of carbon. If this is not the very own definition of sequestration of CO2, I don't know how to call it.
A sofa can't grow.
> those crops not only would sequester carbon faster most likely (if you buried them)
What crops? corn? wrong. The soft wood Paulownia? Wrong again. The Paulownia superfast thing is based in a lie.
> but be far more scalable and efficient in doing so.
If you, say, clear cut some land, or turn previously unproductive land into fertile land, you start from roughly zero carbon ‘at rest’.
The trees, when they grow, pull the vast majority of the carbon in their structure from the atmosphere. 99% or close to it.
At some point, the tree growth plateaus - it may have been slow the first year or two, then accelerated the next 10 years, then gradually tapers until it hits it’s maximum growth potential at that site (give or take). That may be in 20 years, or 100, but it will happen sooner or later.
During this time, trees die - and their carbon gets broken down and re-released in the form of methane or co2.
Roots, debris, etc. roughly equal the amount of plant matter above ground.
All of this rots when the trees die or burn (which happens on an ongoing basis), which releases the carbon back to the atmosphere in the form of co, co2, methane, etc. except in rare exceptions.
You can tell this is the end result because if you dig into/in these forests, they aren’t sitting on thick beds of carbon. Typical soil depth is 3-6ft before you hit bare mineral soil. So they’re in equilibrium over time.
So if you start with bare/no carbon and add trees, you’ll on average be able to temporarily store 71,614 kg of carbon per acre. Until the trees die, or burn.
If you harvest the trees and either bury them (where they can’t rot) or use them for construction, you can reset it and sequester the carbon. That has costs however.
If that isn’t done, then the carbon store is temporary - the carbon will eventually get back into the atmosphere, and the forest will have net zero carbon uptake at some point in the meantime.
The EPA recently estimate the US releases 6.1 billion metric tons of Co2 and equivalents per year (as of 2021). If we estimate an average acre of forest plateus at ~ 72 metric tons of co2 stored, that means you'd need to plant ~ 85 million acres of forest to EVENTUALLY store that co2 - per year. Just for the US alone. And hope none of those forests completely die off, don't end up growing, or burn eventually.
There are approximately 800 million acres of existing forest in the US (a heavily forested nation). Accounting for 7.5% of all forested land in the world.
It's not clear there even IS that much land which could support a forest to last even a decade, let alone land that would support it for long enough for these forests to mature - or not just burn/die soon.
We'd have converted 100% of our existing cropland to forests in about a decade, just trying to counteract each years co2 equivalent emissions.
And that is 40% of all land in the US!
Add together 800 million acres of existing forest, and 900 million acres of farmland and we're nearing almost all fertile land in the US total. Even if we could squeeze out another 10% AND keep all these forests going (while we starve as we have no farms/crops anymore?) we'd still be completely out of room in less than 2 decades, with all potentially tree bearing land covered. While we still continue to produce carbon.
And if these trees die or burn, any carbon they stored is back into the atmosphere.
Carbon wise, trees are springs/capacitors, not 'sinks'. They help buffer spikes, but they don't solve the real problem - too much carbon coming from 'out of the carbon cycle' geological stores and being injected directly into the atmosphere at massive scale.
To solve that problem, the carbon needs to get taken out of the carbon cycle again. And as long as those trees are above ground, that can't happen.
If you spend all your time building a limited, temporary buffer - that catches on fire in high heat no less! - instead of a more scalable solution, then you’ll end up burning while people who actually did the math go ‘wtf’.
The problem is that implementing solutions, especially multiple solutions, requires a functioning civilization with reasonable amount of international cooperation and capacity for compromise. But our civilization is set up such that these mechanisms only work so long as there is enough growth that the surplus can be spread around, and while its never been spread around very fairly, right now we're in the double whammy of having less and less surplus to spread around (for multiple reasons, but the costs of the climate crisis alone are already a significant part of that) and at the same time the elites are grabbing ever larger portions of that shrinking surplus. The consequence is that global civilization is becoming too dysfunctional to actually implement the "multiple solutions" that are needed with the urgency that's needed. Or maybe it never functioned that well in the first place, but with each passing day and each additional crisis that goal is moving further into an unattainable future.
The solution depends on what you think the problem is. Climate change is just that. Not the end of the world. The earth is warming, that's a fact. But regardless of the cause, there doesn't seem to be much we can realistically do about it. So we'll adapt, and humanity will keep growing regardless. The solutions I'm interested in are along the lines of how we'll deal with that. It's an unprecedented area of possible innovation. Anywhere you have a gradient of net energy to a system, growth is inevitable.
That's because the solution is radical degrowth. There's no way out of this that doesn't involve massive energy consumption reduction and abandonment of not just fossil fuels, but fossil fuel byproducts. Since the global food supply is both energy-intensive and reliant on petroleum-derived fertilizers (thank you, Green Revolution), that means the earth will support far fewer humans than it does today.
The emissions per killowatt-hour of consumption has gone down, even as energy use has gone up. It has gone down so much that absolute emissions are down, even as absolute energy use is up.
It's not clear to me how this would change if we got more manufacturing here. Energy use would go up, but emissions may not given the continuing decrease per unit energy.
Half of the net CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution has been in the past thirty years. I'm not saying we need more domestic manufacturing, I'm saying we need less petroleum production, worldwide. That will mean less manufacturing in general, all over the world. Perpetual economic growth is a physical and logical impossibility, and pursuing it is a danger to the individual livelihood of every human being on Earth.
I understand. The argument here is not that we don't need less petroleum use. The argument is that we are accelerating a reduction in petroleum use while still growing the economy, which implies that it's perhaps not true that we need less manufacturing all over the world.
And their point is that petroleum use is still increasing during this time, so that supposition is not likely well supported.
I’d also argue that inflation may be showing that much of that economic increase is ‘fake’ - aka based off money printing more than actual productivity improvements.
This is kind of like saying "I've solved the problem, I'm no longer going 100 miles per hour towards the edge of the cliff, I'm only going 70 miles per hour"
One is making a second order statement and another is making a first order statement. Yes we are merely slowing emissions, but yes a decelerating car is much safer when heading towards cliffs.
An argument can be made that we don't expect the car to speed up significantly anymore. But the steering is haphazard. And the terrain is getting steeper. Some people say they're working on brakes.
If that's the only solution, then get ready for 800ppm CO2 because there is precisely zero chance you're going to sell the whole world on that.
Even if you did that to the developed world, you're not going to get the developing world to follow. "Hey yall, we know we colonized you for a long time and stuff but could you please stay poor so we can fix a problem that we mostly created? You cool with that? Thanks!" Yeah, that's going to work.
The laws of physics don't care who emits CO2 or where it's emitted.
Fantasies just distract and make people feel like they're doing something by engaging in performative ideological posturing and theatrics.
Not only is it not a viable solution (we as mankind just ain’t gunna voluntarily degrow ever, sorry), but it’s not even necessary.
We have the technology to decarbonize the majority of the economy already. We already put 1% of the worlds gdp into solar and it’s taking over at an incredible rate. Up that to say 5% and we’d make huge innovations on battery scale, storage , synthetic fuels, etc within short years. I believe we could be 70% transitioned in 10 years if we wanted to, and we would have MORE abundant energy than today. No degrowth nessecary.
We won’t do that either of course.
I'm with you on the first part ("degrowth", at least in terms of energy consumption), but not on the second part. Since most CO2 is consumed by the relatively rich, just going Thanos and killing half of the earth wouldn't help if it was the poor half.
Thus, we have to start consuming less. I feel like all the solutions right now are only band-aid and no one is honest enough to talk about the elefant in the room. The elefant is clearly saying we could consume less but we don't wanna. So we are still prioritising the present at the cost of the future. We try to have a little more luxury today but by doing this bring misery down the road. The narrative (and politics) has to change dramatically for us as citizens to change. Less consumption means a livable future.
You are welcome to radically degrow yourself, but as soon as you start talking about degrowing other people you are not going to end up in a good place.
