Solar and wind can meet world energy demand 100 times over

https://carbontracker.org/solar-and-wind-can-meet-world-energy-demand-100-times-over-renewables/

by billyharris • 5 years ago

69 43 5 years ago

steve918• 5 years ago

There are a lot of ways to generate lots of power, what we're generally lacking is ways to _store_ power to handle things like peaks.

ogre_codes4• 5 years ago

We know a lot of ways to store power. The trick is storing it efficiently. If we have enough surplus power (which may be the case in a few years), efficiency becomes less important.

Panino3• 5 years ago

Just as an alternative to prioritizing storage (we should still do it, but it's not the only constructive use), we could use a lot of excess electricity to create hydrogen, desalinate sea water and pump it inland, create biochar without kickstarting the heating process via combustion, etc.

The hydrogen could be used for hydrogen vehicles and other purposes. Seawater desalination (very partially) addresses sealevel rise while also getting water to dry areas. Biochar sequesters carbon while helping more plants to grow with less water and less chemical fertilizer.

So from a certain point of view, the above pursuits are like investing most of your "excess money" in the stock market rather than putting most of it in a savings account. And since we're starting to address climate change so late we need something better than just a savings account or battery.

makomk• 5 years ago

The difficult part is storing it on the kind of massive scale required full stop. Sacrificing efficiency can only do so much to help solve this, especially since the wasted energy has to go somewhere and dealing with that has its own costs...

dkjaudyeqooe2• 5 years ago

Storing power doesn't seem like an intractable problem. With the huge incentives with the coming electric car market, technology, renewables storage and god knows what else, I imagine there will be a lot of investment pouring into solving this. It's only a matter of time.

aqme283• 5 years ago

Well if you generate enough excess power, you hardly need to store any.

richwater• 5 years ago

This makes no sense.

Without storage excess power is useless at best, dangerous at worst.

qayxc• 5 years ago

Now you shifted the problem to power transmission, because there's no way to generate an excess of power at all times in all locations using just wind and solar.

So while in my region at the time of posting this, 100% of electricity is generated by wind, there'd be 100% less if there was no wind (which happens from time to time).

Solar wouldn't help either, because right now it's dark outside and it will stay dark for another 6 hours.

So right now, even if there's an abundance of power generated elsewhere, it would have to get transmitted efficiently to here (and from here to where it's needed if applicable).

Local storage and massive interconnected power transmission capacity is what's required. And that ain't cheap.

adamcstephens• 5 years ago

Consistency is the reason to store, not amount. The sun doesn’t shine at night and the turbines don’t spin without wind (which also is more likely at night). Modern society is built on always available electricity, and some things absolutely require them (eg a data center).

ogre_codes4• 5 years ago

It feels like within the next 20 years we are going to have a good handle on “green” power to fixed locations. The tricky piece we have left is how do we move people and freight over long distances.

EVs can do a decent job of transporting a few people a short distance, but aircraft and long distance freight has a whole other set of issues.

Look at container ships, one of the biggest polluters and sources of carbon on the planet. How do you remove the need for massive amounts of diesel on those?

How about passenger and air freight? How do we eliminate all the CO2 from jet fuel? In the US we are terrible at infrastructure, but do we invest in a super-train system?

This is likely the next big challenge.

dkjaudyeqooe2• 5 years ago

If you talk to Airbus, the current plan is hydrogen, which is emission free, besides water. Since you can extract it from water by electrolysis, there is an essentially endless supply, assuming you have endless clean electricity.

ogre_codes4• 5 years ago

Hydrogen power is fundamentally a power storage technology. It makes sense to use H2 for that. I've seen some technology that transforms CO2 into jet fuel which is another somewhat carbon neutral technology.

blake1• 5 years ago

Container ships are massive emitters of some pollutants like SO2, but not CO2.

Sources usually put the carbon number at around 3%.[1] this number has been rising in part because the denominator, global carbon emissions, has been falling as power has been emitting less.

[1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/what-we-do/shipping-and...

sacomo4• 5 years ago

Serious question. How do we make enough solar panels and wind turbines that will be capable of producing all of this energy without destroying all of our natural resources/habitats?

tamaharbor• 5 years ago

Reminds me of a joke: This machine does the work of 10 men. Unfortunately it takes 15 men to operate it.

insert_coin2• 5 years ago

It's a funny joke, don't get me wrong. But I'll take the 15 men sitting behind a computer operating remotely a digger inside a mine instead of 10 men breaking their backs and probably risking their lives with a shovel.

bpcpdx• 5 years ago

Not to mention what do we do with old solar panels after they've lived their life. There's going to be a lot since a lot is needed to generate the amount of power needed. There's a good chance it will just get shoved onto some 3rd world country for them to deal with.

soarfourmore• 5 years ago

Could they be renovated to serve lower power items like street lamps?

rad_gruchalski2• 5 years ago

And where do we build them? Because where I live, in order to have them installed, whole chunks of forests are being wiped.

xnx3• 5 years ago

Where is that?

xnx3• 5 years ago

That problem doesn't seem any more significant for wind and solar than other powers sources: mountain top removal for coal, transporting tons of coal in diesel trains, building (and eventually disposing of) giant power plants, etc.

sacomo4• 5 years ago

I can't help but wonder, "what's the point?", if this is all going to result in the destruction of our natural habitats in the end anyway.

insert_coin2• 5 years ago

The world can theoretically meet it, in practice, it is the same situation as the "food" shortage.

Solar and food have a distribution problem, not only a generation problem, but since the world decided nationalism, protectionism and populism is more important than cooperation it is not going to get solved and we'll have to generate our needs and store it many times over in order for the biggest consumers of energy to be satisfied.

Just in time production and energy sharing will remain a dream and we'll keep wasting resources and the planet again and again just for our petty grievances.

dmurray2• 5 years ago

"100 times over" is a lot less than I'd have thought or hoped.

We have to cover 1% of the world's surface with solar and wind farms to pay for our current energy use? That won't be easy.

Panino3• 5 years ago

Anyone breaking even usage-wise with rooftop solar is already much of the way there, and that's excluding utility generated power and big savings from improved home design (e.g. passive solar heating) and other technologies not yet well deployed like ground source heat pumps and air source heat pumps. Once people realize that these technologies are cheaper than the current go-to options, things will happen quickly.

sacomo4• 5 years ago

I'm not very optimistic that we have enough time, nor individuals have enough financial resources, for the market to realize how cheap / efficient these technologies are. We really need this progress implemented as part of large scale systemic programs. The market is simply too slow.

dmurray2• 5 years ago

I don't understand rooftop solar as a large scale solution. We don't propose that every household grows its own food or mines its own ore.

Let us build solar panels on the least valuable rural land, and benefit from the economies of scale and the ease of installation and maintenance - better to look after one acre of solar panels and inverters than the same number spread over a hundred houses. Transmission losses are negligible, easily single digit percent for 100km.

For individuals, it may make sense if they value grid independence or if they can benefit from tax breaks imposed by a government that doesn't agree with my take.

WarOnPrivacy• 5 years ago

I worked to help develop and deploy geothermal for a few years. Like most alt energy, it is was never intended to be the single replacement for fossil fuels.

But deployed to it's strengths - geothermal is yet another valuable component, that can advance the honest goal of marginalizing fossil fuel use.

sampling• 5 years ago

The next problem to solve is how to continue servicing demand for electricity when the sun goes down (an everyday occurrence) and when the wind stops blowing for extended periods of time. Demand for problem is constant, however the electricity generated from solar and wind is not always so.

Solar and wind can meet world energy demand 100 times over

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