It isn't sufficient but CO2 emissions have been dropping substantially for some time: by about one-third per capita and 20% total from their respective peaks [1].
Solar price for both installation and power production has dropped like a rock since 2010 but that's expected to continue [2]. The beauty of solar is that it has no moving part and is the only form of direct power generation. Everything else involves moving a turbine, which increases costs (capital and opeartional), maintenance and complexity.
This is also why I simply don't believe nuclear fission power generation has a future: it's way too expensive and takes too long to build. Small modular reactors are a fad that ignore the greater efficiencies of larger vessels.
Nuclear fission could do direct power output, we just have criminally crippled the industry which resulted in serious underfunding and thus lack of research for the past 70 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
Solar by itself can’t replace power generation needs no matter how cheap panels get without batteries. They can only offset some demand (same for wind). And we just don’t have the capacity to do grid scale batteries - we barely have enough for electric cars and we’re ramping that up as fast as we can.
The best time to have built a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. There just simply isn’t an alternative right now to drastically increasing fission capacity. China is doing it too. We have no excuse in the West aside from protecting oil interests.
The expense and time to build are not intractable issues - we just don’t do it enough to have economies of scale at play. Same goes for waste - without a double sided market nuclear is more expensive than it needs to be and legislation is blocking the second side of the market for spent fuel, which unlike fossil fuel emissions isn’t waste and can be reused for lots of applications instead of being buried in the ground (+ can be reused in breeder reactors)
> Solar by itself can’t replace power generation needs no matter how cheap panels get without batteries. They can only offset some demand (same for wind).
Not so.
While my following suggestion is a fantasy from the POV of geopolitics, from the purely technical perspective it's dead simple to wrap the planet in a 1Ω wire that hooks up all the major deserts so that at least one of them is in daylight at any given moment.
It's a square meter cross section of aluminium costing a few hundred billion dollars at current prices, not that current prices are the real cost anyway as that would take several years of current global output.
But on paper it's fine.
> And we just don’t have the capacity to do grid scale batteries - we barely have enough for electric cars and we’re ramping that up as fast as we can.
Right now, sure. But that fast ramp-up is very fast, and once we have enough for cars, it's fairly straightforward to just reuse the worn down car batteries for another few thousand cycles in static power storage before they get fully recycled.
The nuclear industry has had trillions of dollars worth of subsidies thrown at it for coming up on a century and it has done nothing but get more expensive.
We can't afford to pour more money into maybes when we have proven, simple, extremely safe, highly distributable technologies like solar and wind.
Source? Subsidies are hard to define and measure of course & even harder to compare across technologies, but renewables have definitely seen a trillion dollars worth of subsidies already (it was getting $200 billion a year since 2016 & that's not when subsidies started). According to [1] we get more energy output for every $ invested in nuclear than we do wind or solar.
> We can't afford to pour more money into maybes when we have proven, simple, extremely safe, highly distributable technologies like solar and wind.
I guess me and you disagree in that I view nuclear as proven, safe [2] & highly distributable (the Candian nuclear reactor is in many countries). There's a lot of FUD around nuclear & a not insignificant amount of it is funded by oil companies because they recognize how big a threat nuclear is to them [3]. It's aided by the fact that there may be legitimate security concerns although it's really hard to separate that from fear mongering to maintain the current status quo world order based around oil.
> Wind: In an average year, nobody would die. A death rate of 0.04 deaths per terawatt-hour means every 25 years, a single person would die;
Nuclear: In an average year, nobody would die – only every 33 years would someone die.
Solar: In an average year, nobody would die – only every 50 years would someone die.
So nuclear sits roughly between solar & wind in terms of deaths to generate said power & this includes all nuclear accidents (& of course single large scale events distort the typical deaths observed whereas solar & wind are baseline deaths that doesn't really change with improved tech as it does with nuclear). There's no safer, cheaper & as scalable a technology to wean off of fossil fuels. I wish there were & it would be nice if solar & wind were that, but they're not.
If there are two things I've learned from these discussions it's that:
1. Nuclear advocates always talk about capital costs of building nuclear plants but never operational costs because the LCOE of nuclear fission energy is terrible and incrasing [1]
2. Nuclear advocates like to talk about deaths because that's highly favorable to nuclear rather than, say, clean up costs. Nuclear disasters get hand-waved away even though we've had multiple of them despite there only being ~700 nuclear plants built. Chernobyl is hand-waved away because USSR. But what about Fukushima? Japan is a developed and regulated country. Tsunamis happen.
So far $82 billion has been spent on the Fukushima clean up with no end in sight [2]. The final cost will probably exceed $1 trillion and take decades, maybe a century or more. The site requires active cooling still, which is where all the continaminated wastewater comes from, and the technology to clean up the core does not exist with no viable plan in sight.
The nuclear deaths, unlike all the other sources, also ignores rest of system deaths (e.g. mining, enrichment, transport, construction and decommissioning accidents). Once you include those it looks far more like gas and oil than wind and solar (which invariably include the kitchen sink on the death toll). If you wanted to put solar on a level field with nuclear you'd only include deaths from skin cancer directly attributable to installation.
My understanding is that those numbers for solar are installation and maintenance costs. They don’t include things like constructing the panels, mining the raw materials to make panels etc. additionally, to be comparable to nuclear, solar needs insane amounts of batteries so then you start having to include cobalt mining.
There’s no perfect comparison possible because it’s an interconnected system. We still use fossil fuels to build and transport solar cells for example, so what the “true” number is is very hazy and hard to quantify. The point is nuclear and solar do not compete in the same league. Nuclear competes with coal, natural gas, and hydro. Electricity sources that have 24h reliable generation capabilities. Hydro is arguably the safest but it is quite ecologically destructive and also limited as to where you can do it.
I doubt your numbers then, as when I googled I found “There have been no deaths caused by carrying panels or laying panels on a roof. Electricians are required to connect the panels and inverters as it is.” -- https://reneweconomy.com.au/trojan-horse-industry-angry-at-q... so in the 158TWh generated by solar in Australia, that gives an average deaths per TWh of 0.003, nearly an order of magnitude lower.
Why doesn't solar+battery provide reliable generation capabilities? There are any number of off-grid solar only projects, it's simply a matter of cost, not capability.
People are trying to find alternatives to cobalt. Lithium ion in general too cause it's density is not as good as we need it to be for grid scale & automotive use-cases. But that's all forward looking stuff. Nothing in your links suggests cobalt is getting removed. If anything it shows that the % of worldwide cobalt mining being used for batteries is growing - in other words, batteries are dominating the need for cobalt. I don't have any specific knowledge of mining, so I don't know cobalt specifically, but my understanding is that cobalt mining is more of a problem based on where the mines are and maybe ecological damage, not so much that mining it is especially dangerous (in other words, conflict prone regions where the mining has the effect of supporting unstable regimes / inhumane conditions / slavery). That's where I'd say uncounted deaths are happening.
Re deaths per tw, keep in mind that for solar 1 person would die every 50 years. So no one dying from carrying panels / laying panels is not really surprising or indicative the numbers are wrong. Also note that most of these numbers are for industrial power generation, not roof-top solar which has a higher fatality rate. But the point is that for wind, solar & nuclear, the death rate in a given year is basically 0 (same actually for hydro because the entire death toll comes from 1 accident). That's important in terms of understanding that the safety profile for this technology is very similar & way way way below oil & gas (& just the numbers attributed directly & ignoring the very large externalities). At numbers that low, it doesn't really matter so much.
> Why doesn't solar+battery provide reliable generation capabilities? There are any number of off-grid solar only projects, it's simply a matter of cost, not capability.
By that logic that's also true for nuclear getting cheaper. The point is not just one of cost (& these plants are fairly expensive but not prohibitively so per se). The point is that we simply can't convert raw materials into batteries fast enough. We're trying to rapidly scale battery manufacturing capacity as quickly as possible, but to date we have 3 plants worldwide right now (2 in Australia & 1 in California which sum up to 700 MW). That's just waaay to small if you're talking about getting things powered by solar reliably globally. Also remember that batteries degrade over time which means it's a 300 MW plant today but in 20 years it's probably a 100 MW plant. It's a pretty big maintenance cost that would need to get factored in. Now comparing batteries to power generation obviously isn't fair because they just need to absorb load for a set amount of time so I don't know if these are small plants individually, but a single nuclear plant can generate GWs of power very easily without any degradation in that generation capability 24/7. Yes - the plant needs to be physically maintained & that's not cheap either - there's no perfect answer. So over time could we get solar + battery to work? Probably. But this shit is going to take a very long time - like maybe by the end of the century we could be 100% renewables. I'm skeptical but it is a possibility - my skepticisim comes from the fact that there are several high temperature manufacturing applications for which renewables don't work at all whereas nuclear can 100% easily replace fossil fuels. Meaningfully investing in nuclear would also have a significant payoff in that we could probably get off of fossil fuels within ~30 years and nuclear tech itself would change massively (molten salt reactors or thorium reactors which fail safe & can't melt down, getting cheaper plants by building more of them because right now we do a single nuclear project after very many many years, direct energy capture to avoid the need of a turbine & water, etc etc).
It seems telling that nuclear, the only technology that could legitimately threaten the oil and gas industry in a short amount of time, is also the only technology that got more expensive as more capacity got installed. Why do you think that might be?
Disaster cleanup is a problem for sure. I think it’s still cheaper than oil and gas because those industries externalize all their costs.
Look. I’m not against solar and wind. I just think nuclear is the only way to feasibly rapidly decarbonize our energy production and solar and wind proponents always ignore that solar and wind just can’t do that on their own. Yes grid scale batteries are being invested in but it’ll take forever to build enough capacity assuming we even can in the first place - a not insignificant portion of battery production overall has to go to vehicles too and there’s no sign we’re getting our shit together to use car batteries as part of grid scale storage (the electrical distribution aspects are very difficult)
> It seems telling that nuclear, the only technology that could legitimately threaten the oil and gas industry in a short amount of time, is also the only technology that got more expensive as more capacity got installed. Why do you think that might be?
It's because every time safety fails, we find a way to solve that problem, and solving it costs money. Sometimes a lot of money.
So Chernobyl absolutely confirmed that containment buildings are not optional. Fukushima resulted in increased requirements for availability of backup power in case of a disaster.
Solar and wind don't really have that, because if a wind turbine falls apart in a hurricane, it's not really significantly different from any other random structure doing the same thing. Being killed by a chunk of turbine blade in a hurricane is not different from being killed by a chunk of a house, and in general not very likely because they rarely have people living right next to them. So we don't demand that wind turbines can survive anything nature can throw at it.
And yet, we have newer generations of reactors that fail safe & don’t need containment buildings. Why would we stick to building designs that are 70 years out of date?
> But what about Fukushima? Japan is a developed and regulated country. Tsunamis happen.
What happened at Fukushima should have been foreseeable and thus prevented. In this regard it's an entirely valid point.
When it comes to how many died, not so much: not only is it a ratio of 1 dead from the incident and 2202 from the evacuation, there were also 19,759 dead from the earthquake and tsunami that damaged the reactor.
Likewise with regards to the issues other than loss of life, the impact of the reactor itself ought to be compared to the impact of the earthquake and tsunami. Besides damaging the reactor, these other impacts included 5 million tons of debris and 25 million trash; 230,000 cars and trucks being damaged or destroyed; 1.5 million households losing water and at least 4.4 million households lost electricity; 10% of fishing ports being damaged; the total collapse of 121,852 buildings, half-collapse of 281,042 buildings, and partial damage to 727,391 buildings[0]; damage to 7 dams and the collapse of one (itself leading to loss of life).
> There's no safer, cheaper & as scalable a technology to wean off of fossil fuels. I wish there were & it would be nice if solar & wind were that, but they're not.
Your data on safety a) contradicts your claim in parts, b) is a decade out of date, c) ignores value for money
In reality, Solar is safer, cheaper and more scalable. Wind is safer, cheaper and more scalable. The two combined are even safer, cheaper and more scalable. Adding batteries makes them yet safer, cheaper and more scalable again.
This isn't speculation, look at China's rollout of nuclear, solar and wind.
At best, you can credibly argue that once 80% of electricity is renewable and we've electrified most heating, land transport and industry ... that nuclear, in some regions, might be a lower cost way to cover the last 10% or so.
But that's the nuclear-bull, renewable-bear scenario. If renewables over perform expectations, like they repeatedly have done, or nuclear doesn't pull out of its multi-decade slump, then there's very little room for it.
Really not sure what your argument about China is. The vast majority of their energy production remains oil & coal. This follows from previous analysis that a focus on renewables means that your dependency on oil & coal remains. It’s telling that France is one of the few countries to go all in on nuclear & remains one of the few countries that has reliable year round carbon-free power generation (& a surplus that it exports to other countries). Germany went away from nuclear in favor of renewables & their reliance on fossil fuels went up.
If solar and wind were truly more scalable, they’d be significantly reducing our dependence on fossil fuels & yet they’re still not to this day. They offset some demand but demand grows faster than our ability to actually take away from fossil fuels.
Yep, they're definitely still rising, despite a slight drop in 2020 (thanks, COVID). Not sure there's any point in talking about per-capita emissions.
That US emissions have been falling since ~2007 (and China appears to be leveling off) is some reason for hope but the likes of India, Indonesia and other large developing nations are more than making up for the difference.
CO2 emissions have been exported from west to east, they still haven’t come down one bit and the rate of growth has barely deflected despite 20+ years of concerted effort.
b) Would it work as theory predicts? (and is there scientific consensus it would?). Do the economics pan out as hoped? Unintended consequences? We don't know.
I'd be very hesitant to most geo-engineering plans for these reasons alone. It's a gamble, and we've done enough harmful geo-engineering already.
c) Politics. Say 1 country wants to do this. But neighbouring countries do not, and regard it as cross-border pollution. Good luck...
Pretty much the only certainty here is available raw materials (rocks to crush, and heaps of 'waste' sulfur).
Hey, why not? We're already fighting to make "Mad Max", "The Matrix", and "Terminator" into reality. What's one or two (dozen) more dystopian / apocalyptic movies made real? Might as well, since it's clear that our "leaders" intend the death of all living things in the quest for infinite profits. Feels like our planet's leadership has been infiltrated by "Star Trek" Ferengi.
We could, in theory and with massive disruption, end emissions tomorrow. But even if we did, warming would continue for some time as the baked-in increases from the already high-levels of greenhouse gasses continued heating the planet (and this assumes that we haven't already triggered a tipping point such as melting permafrost releasing more gigatons of methane, further exacerbating warming).
Or, do you have some plan to eliminate warming instantly?
IDK about "tomorrow" but I think they mean something on the spectrum of non-emissions-reductions geoengineering interventions that ranges from seawater-pumping to create clouds for albedo increases to stratospheric sulfur to intentional algal blooms for carbon capture, etc. I don't think they're achievable _immediately_, but I think there are reasons to believe that we could make rapid progress there (in _addition_ to emission reductions) if we could agree on how to do it without just wrecking the planet in a new and creative way.
>>how to do it without just wrecking the planet in a new and creative way
YUP. That is kind of the issue. Among the geoengineering ideas, the only one that seems to be at least reasonably reversible and tunable would be solar shields orbiting or at L1. Even that, the feedback loops are long. Overshooting/undershooting could easily get into the wrecking-and-not-recovering zone.
Likely the only sure thing is C02/Methane capture, at massive scale, which currently would burn insane amounts of energy
I dunno, I think intentional geo-engineering shouldn't have to hold itself to a higher standard of caution than everyone else on the planet. When this past summer, we saw record high ocean surface temps b/c container ships had cut back on their sulfur emissions and produced less artificial cloud cover, that highlighted to me that we're _already_ doing these things, but we hold ourselves to a much higher standard if doing it intentionally than if doing it on accident. Somehow a shipping companies does it on accident for decades that's not so scary, but if a group wants to do it intentionally (say, with seawater so it doesn't produce acid rain), that's irresponsible.
There's a spectrum of how controllable these things are (how large a region do you impact? how long does the effect persist after you shut your operation down?), and there are things at the more local / shorter-lived end of the spectrum that I think we should be trying. Are they a "sure thing"? No, not absolutely. But billions of us are pumping carbon into the air and nitrogen runoff into rivers and plastic absolutely everywhere. We're already gambling, but we gotta start picking better things to bet on.
We know that particulate matter in the atmosphere such as volcanic ash can help reduce warming, or even induce cooling, but man made this hasn’t been proven safe.
I am not sure what else you are referring to as far as reducing warming ahead of emissions?
I'm pretty well convinced that we're near or at peak carbon, and very curious about projects that would mitigate some of the bigger impacts while we're in the process of reducing/capturing carbon. Does anyone have suggested reading from reliable sources on the state of thinking around climate engineering?
Apparently China has now reached a level of renewables buildout where they are deploying new power generation faster than industry can consume it. Estimates indicate they will enter a structural emissions decline as soon as next year [1]. And their rate of construction is accelerating. I'd add that the rest of the world will probably catch up, but honestly China is most of the ballgame.
It's a culture built on having a car that gets the snowball rolling. Here in the West car ownership is taken for granted, as an integral part of having a home and a family.
It will be incredibly hard to dismantle the culture. We should start by banning status cars completely so that the cultural value of the car is of utility only.
First you say owning a car is a cultural norm, then you say it should be changed by legislation. I'm afraid it is really hard to change culture with law.
Car tires too need to become biodegradable. And we need to make cars that last twice as long in daily use. And we need all the charging infrastructure. Battery recycling. Noise barriers on every highway to save the wild bees. Green parking buildings that don't soak up heat in cities like large lots do.
The list of stuff that has to be done can keep growing. Can't communicate all that to someone who doesn't want to listen, so we have to communicate "ban cars" and wait for people to afford the attention span required. It's not a clean and simple business.
Important point about the tires. Electric cars will, though, produce less brake dust (which is horrible), because they barely use their hydraulic braking systems.
No its not. How about we first just get rid of the coal power plants and replace them with nuclear/renewables? Then we can just have electric cars. Why is it that climate activists so often ignore the biggest polluters, while putting most of their energy into making the common man make sacrifices? "Get rid of cars, eat bugs, etc." Its almost as if its controlled opposition from the fossil fuel industry itself.
Nuclear, wind, solar. Besides, building a carless society isn't exactly emission free either. For that one would need higher housing density, which means more construction. Concrete production is a major source of carbon emissions.
Really cars are not any more of a problem than other forms of consumption.
You still need all the infrastructure that electric cars rely on.
You'd get rid of private cars, not cars categorically. E.g. you could order a taxi for cheap and the taxi operator could have a car that lasts for 30 years instead of just 15.
This. Increasing renewables without decreasing non-renewables just means... more net emissions. I think statistics on usage of non-renewables are a better indicator of progress than stats on usage of renewables
solar_chase@mastodon.green - The tripling-renewable-capacity target under discussion at COP28: more than we could have hoped for ten years ago, still a stretch goal, well aligned with our modelled pathway to a net-zero future by 2050. BNEF report in front of the paywall for once!
(It is largely thanks to my co-author Meredith Annex that the whole report did not consist of "yes, 11TW is no problem, but if you're not careful it will mostly be bloomin' solar".)
The awful part is that in the short/medium term this means a massive increase in emissions. New devices, infrastructure, mining projects, resource extraction, etc are all needed to power this. All in the aims of some future term decrease in our emissions. If we half-ass this it could be very destructive
If by "emissions" you mean the absolute level of CO2 or other pollutants emitted, then the emissions required to build renewable infrastructure will be much smaller than the total emissions for all other causes. It won't be a "massive increase", given what we've already done.
Or if you mean the annual level of emissions, it's also not clear to me how building renewables causes that level to increase, let alone massively. We already have massive annual emissions, and diverting some industrial production to building renewable energy infrastructure won't cause emissions to go up, since those resources would be diverted away from some other use that would also cause emissions.
Well... I don't know what to tell you but it is. In the 2016 election both Biden and Warren (two candidates that proposed a "green manufacturing" plan for climate change) both admitted that in the short term their plans would lead to a net increase in emissions. And in fact, in 2022 we saw the EU emissions decrease by 2.5%, China's decrease by 0.2%, but the US increase by 0.8% in large part due to their approach to climate change solutions.
> then the emissions required to build renewable infrastructure will be much smaller than the total emissions for all other causes
Let's look at electric vehicles as a more concrete example. A lot of people don't realize that around 10% of lifetime emissions of a vehicle are in its initial manufacturing... for an ICE vehicle. The production of an EV is much more expensive due to their batteries. And in fact over 30% of its lifetime emissions could be in the manufacturing of the battery alone. This is why, in the US, it takes around 28,069-68,160 miles before an EV is actually less polluting than an ICE vehicle.
That's a technology-specific example, but similar dynamics play out in many other ways. One simple one is just... infrastructure. The simple fact that we already have gas stations. We need to invest massive amounts of resources in order to build all these new electric vehicle charging stations
Yes we will (hopefully) soon see something like "economies of scale for emissions" come into play but it's hard to deny that there's a massive upfront cost to simply "building new stuff"
Maybe try linking to reputable research and not something produced by an undergraduate student who says stupid shit like "....and families typically sell their cars before then!" ...yeah and where do you think the car goes? Car Heaven? Of course not. The average age of a passenger car in the US is twelve years old.
"Well AKSHUALLLLLLY" comments like yours trying to "gotcha" efforts to improve carbon impact and efficiency are not helping things. Stop being part of the problem, start being part of the solution.
>in the short/medium term this means a massive increase in emissions
No it doesn't. The resources used to build solar/wind/etc isn't even a rounding error compared to global consumption. Nobody is going to crush their brand new car to replace it with an electric one. Heavy industry is going to replace things on more or less regular replacement schedules not just dump capital assets to switch over unless there is a strong economic incentive.
We are, in fact, going to half-ass it. Fossil fuel things are going to be replaced with renewable electric things not to avoid emissions but to replace old equipment when it becomes an economically reasonable thing to do.
For example, in electric vehicles, the initial production emits much more than a conventional gas car (mostly due to the battery). A lot of people don't realize that as much as 30% of a vehicle's lifetime emissions can be in the initial production alone. As a result it takes ~28-68.2k miles (in the US) for an EV to emit comparatively fewer emissions
Are you looking for a number like that? If you are then you would have to more narrowly defined your use-case. There are far too many factors, infrastructures, conditions, technologies, etc to consider
The Argonne model relied on in the article you linked is quite dated at this point and has its limitations (which are acknowledged by the authors of it themselves).
I see, so that 28K number looks solid, the 68K upper bound applies to a scenario where someone doesn't switch to an EV but buys one and still keeps driving an ICE vehicle too, which seems odd - I would think many drivers could use an EV for all their shorter trips (certainly shopping, likely commuting), but paying to register/license an extra car just for the occasional long trip doesn't seem very practical.
Yeah I don't think it's that much either. I feel a lot of readers are reading my comments as if I'm being hostile towards renewables and downvoting me because of that assumption.
I am not opposed to renewables, nor am I trying to argue that "it takes [insert amount of miles that's well within the average lifespan of a car] for EVs to break even" somehow implies "EVs bad"
Obviously I don't support the continued usage of oil and coal as energy resources
Yes, that's factored in. The average coal plant outputs 830 MW, and obviously nobody is building wind turbines that large. That's why wind power installations are called "wind farms".
The figure I recently read was that solar panels are recouping their manufacturing carbon impact in less than a year when compared to conventional fossil mix.
Solar price for both installation and power production has dropped like a rock since 2010 but that's expected to continue [2]. The beauty of solar is that it has no moving part and is the only form of direct power generation. Everything else involves moving a turbine, which increases costs (capital and opeartional), maintenance and complexity.
This is also why I simply don't believe nuclear fission power generation has a future: it's way too expensive and takes too long to build. Small modular reactors are a fad that ignore the greater efficiencies of larger vessels.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states
[2]: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-t...