Zeroing in on Decarbonization

http://news.mit.edu/2020/zeroing-decarbonization-nestor-sepulveda-0115

by chmaynard • 7 years ago

28 47 7 years ago

news.mit.edu

adrianN5• 7 years ago

I wish we did less modelling and more shutting down coal plants in favor of basically anything else.

Not snarky: when was the last time you called your utility to tell them you demand renewables? Or your state (for renewable mandates) and federal (national policy) Congressional reps? Protest at a coal plant?

Wishing is cheap, action pays the bills. I do all of the above. And there are signs of progress. The federal gov approved one of the largest PV plants in the US for California. Nevada is prepping for a 1.2GW PV facility with 600MW of storage.

Utility won’t switch off fossil fuels? Get rooftop solar and capture every damn incentive you can, or convince your local government to form a coop or muni utility to source clean power with a PPA at scale.

adrianN5• 7 years ago

I get my electricity from a company that sells greenwashed energy and wrote a local politician and a MEP about renewables. I unfortunately don't have a roof where I can put panels as I rent an apartment.

cagenut2• 7 years ago

If you're in any of these states/regions in the US you can opt-in to 100% renewables via a third-party-supplier:

https://cleanchoiceenergy.com/how-it-works/areas-we-serve/

If you're in a state that has a "community solar" program you can also join/opt-in to a project. Here's a company that exists to put investors in solar projects together with subscribers:

https://solstice.us/

matthewdgreen• 7 years ago

It's easy in many states to pay for a "renewable" energy plan. In practice this means that your energy still comes from the same sources, but your utility purchases renewable energy credits from other solar and wind providers elsewhere in the country and "retires" them. This adds a small amount per-kWh to your bill, but in practice it's still dirt cheap. The problem is that I don't know if the prices are high enough to incentivize providers to actually build out renewable energy sources, or if this just makes people feel good.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

When did anyone called a large company to ask them to operate differently ? and succeeded into being heard ?

m12k• 7 years ago

A fee and dividend system[1] so the price of emission is actually included in the price of products is pretty damn important too. As is, it's only hippies and governments that are helping - with that system all companies and consumers would be incentivized to help cut emissions too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend

jlevers2• 7 years ago

In work published last year in the journal Joule, Sepulveda and his co-authors made a powerful case for using a mix of renewable and “firm” electricity sources, such as nuclear energy, as the least costly, and most likely, route to a low- or no-carbon grid.
Recognizing that “absolutes exist in people’s minds, but not in reality,” Sepulveda sought to develop a tool that might yield an optimal solution to the decarbonization question.

The second part, I think, is very important to keep in mind when discussing whether or not to use nuclear to help solve the climate crisis. I'm not a big fan of nuclear, but if deploying huge amounts of it is what it takes to get us to zero carbon emissions by 2050, I'm for it. Yes, nuclear has its risks, and it's not renewable, but I think it would be worth pursuing as a stepping stone to get us to net-zero emissions sooner, while we figure out how to power the entire world via truly renewable energy. IMO, the potential risks of failing to address climate change rapidly enough are much larger than the risks of wide-spread nuclear power.

pfdietz10• 7 years ago

The typical slight of hand in such studies is to ignore long term storage, like hydrogen, and then conclude nuclear is needed instead of all-renewables.

brnt2• 7 years ago

A good argument against (long-term) storage could be that it does not exist yet. Not in commercial quantities at least. I think it would be accurate to state we can build nuclear in sufficient required TWh's right now, but we could not do the same for the storage we would need in a 100% renewable scenario.

More and more I think we just don't have the time for research anymore, and we should prioritize getting rid of carbon over going as green as possible. (Naturally I will agree that renewable is ultimately better than non-renewable nuclear.)

manfredo4• 7 years ago

Nuclear is renewable through uranium seawater extraction: https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514

fulafel3• 7 years ago

The uranium in seawater is same as uranium in the ground, not renewable.

cagenut2• 7 years ago

I'm in favor of an 80/20 policy. 80% renewables, 20% nuclear.

The thing is, we're already at 20% nuclear. So the "debate" over it is largely a distraction/delay-tactic.

pfdietz10• 7 years ago

But that doesn't work. If you go 80% renewable, there will be long periods where 100% of demand is being satisfied by the renewables (because they are so variable). This makes the economics of nuclear just horrible, as it needs to be selling its power at a good price most of the time to make ends meet. Nuclear and high penetration renewables just don't mix well.

rtpg• 7 years ago

Nationalizing the power grid reduces the problems caused by atomization of the players

fulafel3• 7 years ago

They should mix ok there are no fossil sources messing up the market in your 80/20 scenario:

If people are willing to pay enough for the 20% of time that nuclear stays in business. If not, we make do with just renewables.

The practical issue how how the nuclear plant sells electricity can be handled either with contracts (they could sell electricity to resellers in "one month of continuous production" types of units) or by running them in load-following mode, french/german style, whichever is more profitable.

In practice it seems fairly likely that there are many electricity applications where is pretty inelastic up to at least 10x current cost, so there will be demand for some amount nuclear power.

adrianN5• 7 years ago

You still need storage when you go 80% renewable, so any extra production by renewables can be used to generate hydrogen or charge batteries or something so that the nuclear plants can still sell their energy. It's not like they don't get any subsidies today, there is no reason why they shouldn't get any in the future.

It's just a question of what is cheaper or faster to achieve. I don't know enough details to say either way.

hwillis2• 7 years ago

This makes the economics of nuclear just horrible, as it needs to be selling its power at a good price most of the time to make ends meet.

Nuclear is not uneconomical just because it only needs to run 50% of the time. That would just mean the price is double; there's no technical obstacle there.

If twice as expensive is too expensive to compete with batteries (it is not), then nuclear is not economical period.

alikim• 7 years ago

Here is the referenced article if anyone is interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/kj3ny5wk93bxj44/Sepulveda%20et%20a...

pjc50• 7 years ago

I'm not sure this really advances what we know; the "100% intermittent renewables + storage" strategy does get asymptotically more expensive as you move towards 100%. So the referenced article points out that a blend of dispatchable gas+capture and "advanced" nuclear can produce a cheaper overall result.

But! Nuclear takes ages to build, advanced nuclear even longer, and gas+capture is deployed almost nowhere because there's no negative carbon pricing for it.

So perhaps they are viable in the long term. For 2020? Countries need to be accelerating their wind and solar rollouts and using them to push carbon-emitting sources down the dispatch order as far as possible.

The UK is surprisingly far ahead on this, having eliminated coal for most of the year and running a gas/nuclear/wind mix currently at 30% wind.

mscrivo• 7 years ago

Ontario, Canada is even further ahead, having eliminated coal completed by 2014. They botched much of it, with setting up bad contracts, which led to a lot of wasted taxpayer dollars. Even still, it shows it's possible and the outcome was fantastic. Complete elimination of smog days and far lower incidence of asthma cases.

toomuchtodo4• 7 years ago

They also export clean power to US markets at the border. We thank them!

CaptArmchair• 7 years ago

I saw 3 interesting diagrams on Wikipedia that basically tell a big part of the story.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Turns out that the 3 countries who make up for the biggest share in greenhouse emissions are:

* China * The United States * India

Moreover, this graph (a) tells you that the U.S. has the highest C02 emissions per capita whereas India has the lowest CO2 emissions per capita in 2017. Way lower then many developed countries such as the EU28. A Chinese individual have emitted less then a German or South-Korean citizen in 2017.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

The bigger story is in the 3rd graph: population per country as part of global population:

* China: 18.1% * India: 17.5% * U.S.: 4.24%

Every other country below the top-8 only constitutes less then 2% of the global population.

Now, you can draw a few quick conclusions from that.

The total energy consumption in China is far less driven by individual consumption, but is more a factor of the total population. Lots of small consumers drive consumption towards a heck of a big number. Coal is the obvious answer as far as the Chinese are concerned because it provides a cost efficient way of scaling energy production to cater to 18.1% of the World's population.

Moreover, China isn't a particular rich country if you simplify things and use GDP per capita as a metric. Most of the people are relatively poor by Western standards, so their footprint in terms of how they live and consume isn't anywhere near what it is in Europe or North America.

You'd see the exact same dynamic at play in India.

As far as China and India are concerned, they will keep preferring coal unless clean solutions that could cater to the same vast demands become equally or more cost effective and scalable such that they can easily replace coal.

Then there's the U.S. with only 4.24% of the world's population, it manages to end up in the top-3 of most polluting countries, right after China and before India. Moreover, an American seems to have emitted twice the amount of CO2 as a Chinese person did in 2017. And finally, Americans are part of the top 10 richest individuals in the world if you look at GDP per capita.

Here you're looking at a different problem: individual consumption rather then total population. Whereas China and India can't readily reduce energy consumption because of their large population, the U.S. can easily reduce it's huge dependency on energy if individual consumption can be radically reduced.

The big hurdle here is that the biggest consumers of energy are those that fear they will have the most to lose: quality of life through existing conveniences and affordances that they feel will go away because they aren't sustainable. At this point, the whole debate often turns emotional and ends up in yak shaving or bike shedding.

The only other pathway for the U.S is similar to China and India: find a cost effective clean source of energy that can easily replace fossil fuels such as coal.

I would put this moral conundrum in front of you: If drastically cutting back emissions through a better management of personal consumption is clearly within your power and can be achieved today; then why refrain from doing so and passing on the responsibility to energy producers?

This doesn't just apply to the U.S. but to any country with significant CO2 emissions per capita, but it needs to be pointed out that countries with a small fraction of the global population with a high CO2 emission number per capita are those that can and will have the biggest impact on the problem, which contrasts seriously with countries in the opposite situation.

Of course, I understand that my whole expose ignores many, many other complexities that affect the balances such as global emission trade, global transportation and global trade (import/export).

My main point was to demonstrate why seemingly irrational decisions elsewhere in the world - such as investing in even more coal-based power plants - are driven by very different regional economics; and that battle cries such as "reduce carbon dependency" are blanket statements you can't impose everywhere in the world without adjusting it's meaning to the local or regional context.

planck01• 7 years ago

It's not enough to reach zero on carbon emission. There is way too much in the air already that we need to get out of it and somehow bind it to the (sub)surface of our planet to keep it out. And we need to find a way to do that on scale and in an economical viable way or it will never happen.

Zeroing in on Decarbonization

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