Researchers: World can reach 100% renewable energy system by/before 2050

https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/themes/themes/science-and-technology/22012-researchers-agree-the-world-can-reach-a-100-renewable-energy-system-by-or-before-2050.html

by ingve • 4 years ago

151 297 4 years ago

helsinkitimes.fi

HidyBush2• 4 years ago

Now add a political researcher to the group and see that percentage drop rapidly

bfung• 4 years ago

Totally agree - technologically possible. Now who’s ambition, will, and money are behind this to get those who are in the middle, don’t care, or need to look after themselves first in the ecosystem to get this done?

seydor3• 4 years ago

governments have been funding renewables left and right because it's a populist measure, and it creates jobs that guarantee voters. The dynamic is a positive feedback loop on that front. Europe is subsidizing teslas. But one has to look at the downsides. Germany has overinvested in solar, but the results are feeble as it's not a sunny country and renewables are unreliable.

Even if there was an agreement on 100% renewables, i m certain it would get squandered in silly but popular projects such as solar curtains or rooftop

thrown_2212• 4 years ago

No it really isn't technologically possible.

Throw in a physicists who actually understands the difference between power, energy and time offset and the green grid plans that assume the sun shines at midnight underestimate the cost of replacing on demand power by two orders of magnitude.

frankfrankfrank5• 4 years ago

You make the foolish assumption that theses "researchers" are not biased simply because you agree with the premise due to your own bias.

It is rather surprising to me how people who used to rail against the "evil corporation" now love them some evil corporation simply because evil corporations have been created to pilfer society through renewable energy.

It could be a scene from 1984; yesterday the people hate corporations they always have been at war with and always will be, today they have been told to love corporations and they do so with zealous mania.

HidyBush2• 4 years ago

Buddy, what has that got to do with my reply? lol

MadSudaca• 4 years ago

I find this highly unlikely, but then again I'm not a "researcher", so what do I know?

revertmean• 4 years ago

Far less than the people who actually researched the matter, obviously.

frankfrankfrank5• 4 years ago

Is this a sarcastic comment? It is hard to tell these days, because it is ironic in many ways.

badpun4• 4 years ago

We've already allowed narrow-field experts to largely dicate our policy re: covid response, and the results are worse than the disease. Let's hope more people are brought into decision making this time.

ManuelKiessling• 4 years ago

Source?

Boltgolt• 4 years ago

"results worse than the disease" by what measurement?

badpun4• 4 years ago

Inflation getting out of control which will disproportionally affect poor people in Africa, Asia etc. Whereas we might have to get less nicer car on our next trade-in, they might not be able to get enough food. Plus, if the strained economy results in even just one war, the deaths and suffering from it alone will probably be greater than the lives saved via covid response.

postsantum• 4 years ago

For children for sure. Two years of lockdowns and wearing useless masks caused psychological damage and impaired learning. Not a good trade-off

bombadilo• 4 years ago

The quality of comments on HN has really started to degrade.

frankfrankfrank5• 4 years ago

Yes, your comment is very low grade. I agree.

badpun4• 4 years ago

Yes, please stop posting ad-hominem attacks like that. If you have nothing to contribute beyond them, just refrain from posting.

thrown_2212• 4 years ago

energy storage

The thing no one talks about.

A battery that can store energy over 24 hours costs more than an equivalent nuclear power plant, loses half it's capacity within a decade and has never been build.

The closest one in South Australia could match a nuclear plant for all of 10 minutes and still needed the solar panel and wind generation to work.

We're out of time. We don't have another 40 years to wait for renewables to mature.

hackerlight3• 4 years ago

Can't you sell the excess capacity to another country? Or convert the excess capacity to green hydrogen which is used as an energy source for things like steel manufacturing?

ThunderSizzle• 4 years ago

If we're talking Europe sized countries. But Europe is pretty small relati ely speaking...it's hard to move a lot of electricity thousands of miles without losing too much.

thrown_2212• 4 years ago

High voltage inter connects are also more expensive than nuclear power to build.

Outside of Russia there are no transcontinental high voltage lines.

The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country.

The European market is probably the most tightly coupled in the world and the inter-border power lines can carry less than 20% of most countries power demand.

Or convert the excess capacity to green hydrogen which is used as an energy source for things like steel manufacturing?

We don't have 40 years to wait for that technology to mature. We need to be cutting emissions now. Green energy has resulted in increasing use of fossil fuels. The only reason why total CO2 production has dropped is because we've been building gas power plants instead of coal.

martyvis2• 4 years ago

Snowy Hydro 2.0 will be able to generate from water storage dams, 2GW of continuous energy for 175 hours. As long as gravity keeps working it should be good for a while. https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/

thrown_2212• 4 years ago

Brilliant.

We just need 10 of those and we'd have covered the base load of NSW as long as there isn't a drought in the worlds driest continent.

Now all we need to do is build a few mountains to put the dams in and we're golden.

pydry5• 4 years ago

has never been build

Unless you count pumped storage, in which case it has.

inglor_cz• 4 years ago

The trouble with pumped storage is that in most cases, our ancestors were smart enough to identify all the locations that lent themselves to building a dam and built them. Often more than 100 years ago. We aren't the first generation to be faced with the energy storage problem.

In Central Europe, where I live, there aren't that many opportunities left to build new ones on a large enough scale. Also, if a drought comes, you suddenly have a double whammy on your hands: not enough water and not enough electricity.

ZeroGravitas15• 4 years ago

This is one of the specific things they are now saying they have good science on, allowing previous models that forecast it as a problem to be updated:

Fifth, many scenarios suffer from incomplete power-to-X routes, a lack of comprehensive sector coupling, and excessively high costs assumed for key flexibility-providing technologies: batteries and electrolyzers. These are the two most important VRE supporting technologies that strongly increase the VRE supply share in scenarios by overcoming the day-night limitation of solar PV, supporting strong electrification of practically all on-road transportation, squeezing out biofuels for road vehicles, and enabling highly cost-attractive power-to-hydrogen-to-X routes for almost all remaining energy segments that cannot be directly electrified, including long-distance transportation, high temperature industrial energy demand that may remain despite comprehensive direct electrification, and hydrogen-based chemicals demand in industry. Thus, low-cost batteries, low-cost electrolyzers, and established power-to-X routes strongly increase the VRE share in covering the total primary energy demand. Solar PV benefits more from low-cost electrolyzers than wind power, since low-cost electricity is most efficiently matched with relatively inflexible energy demand categories through the intermediaries of hydrogen storage and electrolyzer-based power-to-X routes

Since you mention Australia, they seemed to be one of the first movers on green hydrogen, though everyone else seems to have caught up recently.

The amount of hydrogen used just for fertilizer globally dwarfs the amount of pumped hydro storage by multiple orders of magnitude.

thrown_2212• 4 years ago

Great, where is the link to cheap batteries that can store energy overnight?

There aren't any because they don't exist.

Renewables without grid scale storage are a pipe dream. We don't have grid scale energy storage and we won't have it for decades yet.

defrost3• 4 years ago

Utility scale MW Compressed Air Energy STorage is much much cheaper . . .

[1] https://energystorage.org/why-energy-storage/technologies/co...

[2] https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/sepm/article/view/1574/131...

and, of course, there are other approaches.

thrown_2212• 4 years ago

That's great. How much does a 25 TWh storage plant cost?

markvdb2• 4 years ago

A battery that can store energy over 24 hours costs more than an equivalent nuclear power plant, loses half it's capacity within a decade and has never been build.

Multiple have been built, for cheaper than a nuclear reactor, losing zero capacity within a decade.

I present you Nant de Drance [0]:

- 20 GWh of storage capacity

- 900 MW of power

- 2.1 * 10^9 USD cost

This kind of project cannot be replicated just anywhere. Other fairly cheap large scale scalable electricity storage solutions do exist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nant_de_Drance_Hydropower_Plan...

TheLoafOfBread2• 4 years ago

Show me where you will build it in Poland or even Germany?

pjc502• 4 years ago

I'm not sure we have another decade for each nuclear plant to get built, either.

powerhour5• 4 years ago

> energy storage
The thing no one talks about.

Given how many people talk about energy storage every time renewables come up (including in this very thread), would you agree to stop pretending they don't? You're not smarter than the rest of us for "finding" the storage issue or better for "revealing" it to us. Just stop telling lies, that's all I ask here.

thrown_2212• 4 years ago

What lies?

sigmoid102• 4 years ago

What this article claims as "new" has been known for so long, the Onion even turned it into a joke years ago: https://www.theonion.com/scientists-politely-remind-world-th...

Technology isn't what's stopping us from saving the planet, greedy corporations and corrupt politicians are.

trinovantes• 4 years ago

I'd say NIMBYism is also a big contributor. Renewable energy farms are rarely located near population centers and convincing rural people to sell their land to generate/transport energy to urban centers is a multiyear process with single holdouts stalling projects. The alternative of invoking eminent domain is also politically unattractive.

IngoBlechschmid• 4 years ago

I agree, and want to add that I feel that NIMBYism would decrease if the residents (as opposed to huge corporations) would earn the profits from those renewable energy farms. You think differently about a wind park at the horizon if you know that each rotation earns turn earns you money.

DoingIsLearning5• 4 years ago

Most governments are converting coal to Methane gas ("Natural Gas"). Replacing one lobby with another.

Most governments are not deploying storage solutions that would allow continous energy supply irrespective of intermitent renewable energy generation.

Neither of the above has anything to do with NIMBYs and everything to do with spineless anemic Energy Policy.

Mountain_Skies• 4 years ago

Is it surprising that people who are looked down upon and kicked at every opportunity might not want to lower their quality of life so those who never miss a chance to broadcast their hate for rural folks can increase their standard of living even further? "Uneducated rednecks" in "flyover country" at least understand the concept of reaping what one sows.

bluGill7• 4 years ago

Farmers love wind farms on their land. Once the windmills are up they farm most of the land as before, and get a nice lease payment from the land they can't farm.

NIMBY is the town folks who have to look at them, but don't really get any benefit from them. A few farmers refuse to lease their land for wind turbines, but there are a lot more who have run the numbers and are trying to get someone to lease their land for wind turbines.

ZeroGravitas15• 4 years ago

We could always have been moving faster, saving more money and more lives, but we really didn't have good science on the last few percent of carbon emissions from the power system.

The deniers updated their messaging too, so you regularly see (and see in these comments today) people saying "Yeah, renewable energy is cheaper and cleaner but ... desperately makes up something to justify their believing lots of obvious lies ... in 2050 when we have lots of cheap, clean renewable energy something vague and bad will happen so we should just slow down and burn more fossil fuels for reasons.

So it's good to recognize that we now have better answers for the delaying tactic questions.

pydry5• 4 years ago

At some point the carbon lobby will lose the political upper hand.

This will impact their ability to do public relations/lobbying and that will lead to more taxes and lower profits which will impact their ability still further and so on.

I dont think it'll be a linear decline - there is a political feedback loop here.

At some point after that deniers and skeptics will likely cease to be a thing as the money to push it will dry up.

sigmoid102• 4 years ago

The delaying people are still the same though. As long as they get listened to by politics, we will never transition to sustainable energy before it's too late. In fact, even today might already be too late if you look at the latest data from Antarctica and Siberia. By 2050 we will need nothing short of a miracle.

atoav• 4 years ago

They will go like...

storing energy is an unsolvable problem

Yeah sure. But if you have an abundance of electrical power you can literally lift up concrete blocks with a crane and generate electricity by letting them down. You can pump water up and use turbines. If you live in a flat area you can do the same in mine shafts. A German guy developed a way of cutting huge granite cylinders out of solid rock that you can lift up and let down producing high pressure waterflows that can be used to store energy. You can split water into hydrogen and oxygen and run turbines off of it, you can charge batteries. You can warm up sand in insulated containers and use the heat to power turbines. There is so many ways to store energy it is hard to enumerate them.

And if you have much more wind and solar power than you need you don't even need to worry that much about the efficiency of the storage system. Sure, you're gonna select the one that you can finance, maintain and find the space for, but a lot of that stuff could be built literally everywhere.

Storage is no argument any serious engineer would pull out. Serious engineers would say that our electrical grids are not capable to deliver that much energy if we try to replace every form of energy with electrical energy — and they would be right. But this is again not an impossible problem to solve. We know how to transmit electricity pretty well. We just need to build the infrastructure.

_ph_11• 4 years ago

In my eyes, not "having good science on the last few percent of carbon emissions" was never a valid reason. We always had good science on how to get rid of 80-90% of the carbon emissions. So we should have done that quicker, as even if that were the limit for quite a while, it would cut down the problem by 80-90%. That would have given us valuable time to solving the remaining emissions.

tomp• 4 years ago

If “green technology” was superior on it’s own terms (cheaper, more available, etc) it wouldn’t need support from politicians.

Hint: it’s not, it’s a massive failure, and stupid countries like Germany are now paying the price.

jl62• 4 years ago

Fossil fuels have two major unaccounted-for externalized costs: pollution, and the national security risk inherent in importing fossils from unsavory regimes.

Once you account for these, renewables are far cheaper.

All the green movement is really doing is calling for better accounting standards for energy.

croes2• 4 years ago

Yeah sure, because superior always wins ... not.

Just look at France on how cheap and available nuclear energy is for instance.

Germany is paying the price because politicians blocked green energy they effectively hindered the expansion of solar and wind energy.

Take Bavaria as example they don't want wind turbines and prefer nuclear energy but the don't want power lines for wind energy from north Germany or a nuclear repository. Instead their Minister President suggests fracking, not in Bavaria of course.

dgb233• 4 years ago

If X inferior to Y but X is supported by politics to a degree that Y is being slowed down and prevented, then Y still needs political support, even if superior in objective terms.

wccrawford• 4 years ago

Yeah, "green technology" isn't more profitable if corporations don't have to deal with the consequences of non-green energy production. Everyone knows that.

Some people are also interested in not destroying the environment they live in, though. They are interested in acting as a global society to stop destroying the planet.

To that end, they want to pass laws that force corporations to clean up the messes they make and include the cost of that in their energy production. If they had to pay for the mess they make, it might very well make "green" energy more profitable and also help our environment. At the very least, they'd have to stop destroying the environment.

DoingIsLearning5• 4 years ago

If “green technology” was superior on it’s own terms (cheaper, more available, etc)

You should inform yourself before making wild claims. Fossil fuels are cheap mostly because of government subsidies.

Reminder that 6.8% of the world's entire GDP (5.9 trillion US dollars) was spent on subsidies for fossil fuels just in 2020. [0]

[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...

Kim_Bruning7• 4 years ago

For quite some time, some pioneers found a use for Renewables and improved efficiency. The ROI was (marginally) viable to them. Over time technology got cheaper/more efficient (gradual improvements to ROI), and slowly more and more people started to adopt renewables, better insulation, heat pumps, etc.

Recently, energy prices in Europe have (roughly) doubled [1].

And suddenly -by comparison- that same ROI starts to look very interesting to a lot more people.

[1] (YMMV, check your local energy spot prices for actual numbers)

gonzo412• 4 years ago

I somewhat think the obvious political decision is to embrace a bit of corruption for the greater good, and just offer the fossil fuel companies the opportunity to transition to green energy and own the next great monopoly. Or just pick new winners.

frankly dealing with a monopoly and a bit of corruption is better than dealing with the effects of climate change.

te_chris• 4 years ago

We're already dealing with effects so in this case we get both. Which I guess is what the oil companies want.

username223• 4 years ago

I’m on board with corruption for the greater good. Giving Joe Manchin $1 billion and a yacht would be a bargain.

madaxe_again• 4 years ago

You can no more be “a bit” corrupt than you can be “a bit” pregnant.

They’d just pocket the monopoly and continue BAU. More profitable in the short term.

Kim_Bruning7• 4 years ago

People have called the Onion the world's most reliable source.

ekianjo• 4 years ago

Technology isn't what's stopping us from saving the planet, greedy corporations and corrupt politicians are.

and the anti-nuclear crowd that has been brainwashed for 50 years

photochemsyn3• 4 years ago

I'd modify that to 'greedy states and corporations' as the state-run socialist-style nations with excess fossil fuel reserves (Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Russia, etc.) are just as bent on exporting their fossil fuels as those that adhere to Wall Street corporate capitalism models (the USA, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, UAE, etc.).

In both cases, the problem is explainable - here's a person sitting on an oil well that brings them US$10 million per year (or equivalent), resulting in a lifestyle of relative luxury and abundance, and you say to them, shut down that oil well, use your saved resources to put up solar and wind turbines and batteries to meet your regional energy needs, and reduce your yearly income by 90% as a result, because no more exports!

Short-sighted greed is certainly a universal phenomenon, we can conclude.

manytree• 4 years ago

At press time, representatives from the world’s leading economies had signaled that they would continue to heavily rely on fossil fuels until they had something more than an overwhelming scientific consensus to go on.

Lol

zokier• 4 years ago

Many young people are depressed because they feel climate change cannot be stopped. We want to offer them hope by showing that our world can get all its energy needs from renewables at a price below that of fossil fuels

idk, to me saying that fossils can be replaced by 2050 is pretty much same as saying that climate change cannot be stopped. I think the discussion has largely moved from preventing the climate change to trying manage how bad it will be, as it seems pretty inevitable at this point.

dgb233• 4 years ago

Yes, damage control becomes more and more necessary. That just means any progress is becoming more urgent.

d0mine• 4 years ago

The fact that we might have a technology to do something says nothing about whether it is actually will be done.

For example, there is no need for war, we can feed everyone using the technology available today but it is almost certain millions will continue to die from hunger every year and of cause the peace is just a wild dream.

londons_explore• 4 years ago

The world could reach 100% renewable energy by next year if every citizen took a massive cut to their quality of life.

And it isn't going to happen at all if at least some citizens don't take a cut to their quality of life (compared to what they could have had with no action)

So it's a trade-off....

curiousgal• 4 years ago

See I hate this kind of statements. Even if every citizen "did their part" simple actions by corporations can undo all of their effort.

DoingIsLearning5• 4 years ago

No! Implying that this has to do with lifestyle is the same trite that BP came up with when they pushed the PR spin of "carbon footprint" to deflect attention onto consumers.

What you suggest would push many Energy companies and the entire Oil&Gas complex into insolvency. So I can guarantee that politically there will be no "trade-off".

Of course emissions per capita matter but this constant spin that consumers drive demand and depiction of industry as a passive agent victim of consumer desire is naive at best and malicious at worse.

goodpoint2• 4 years ago

This is plain false. Quality of life is in no way strictly correlated with energy usage and pollution.

It's product of thousands more variables and the most important ones are urban planning and social issues.

perrygeo2• 4 years ago

Quality of Life is too fuzzy to make such a strong statement. But if we take economic output as a proxy, it's your view that is demonstrably false.

You're roughly claiming that "Decoupling" (economic growth without resource consumption) is not only possible but has already occurred? Seriously? Global GDP is very highly correlated with energy use, fossil fuel use specifically.

You probably heard that some countries (the US, EU) are in the process of decoupling. Bullshit. Looking at this on a per-country basis is a deeply flawed analysis at best, a deceptive account trick. We have a global trade network and you can't outsource your fuel consumption to China, import their products, and call yourself green. If you extend the analysis globally, you will not find decoupling at all - energy is the economy.

I encourage you to read this paper by the European Environmental Bureau: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/

seydor3• 4 years ago

They could start by not commuting to the office/university

muhaaa4• 4 years ago

Renewable energy is a lot less energy dense than oil or nuclear. Just to maintain renewable energy projects we need to re-invest about 25% of its energy output to keep it going long-term. This 25% needs to come from your living standards. Compare that to oil of about 10% and nuclear of less than 5%. Going green means that we loose productivity and have less money available on non-essential products and services. And many "greens" think they can keep their iPhone - I dont think so -, far away vacation - nope -, having a car - maybe a tiny one which you share with the whole family (incl. uncles and aunts).

Isinlor2• 4 years ago

What we care about is overall cost, not how much is required to reinvest.

If a renewable energy source is for example twice cheaper overall including the need to reinvest 25% then it is twice cheaper overall.

frankfrankfrank5• 4 years ago

Interesting that you speak from some group of "we". Seems presumptuous at best.

muhaaa4• 4 years ago

The major driver of renewables costs is investment. The wind blowing and sun shining does not cost anything.

Sadly regarding renewables, there is no twice cheaper available right now. Maybe through innovation somewhere in the future. Right now only hydro power is close to fossil fuel energy density. But it is only available in a few places around the world.

creativenolo2• 4 years ago

The cost of fuel is rapidly increasing in lots of countries, which is affecting living standards. And global warming is affect living standards.

It's about everyone's best option for energy production and consumption. Rather than the "greens" and their iPhones — let's have the discussion and make informed choices, rather than accepting the status quo as the choice.

muhaaa4• 4 years ago

Lets see what the "informed choice" is? Freezing to death in winter or burn higher energy dense fuels. But you have a choice :-D

pfdietz17• 4 years ago

Energy density is an irrelevant metric. I don't care about the energy density of the source producing the power coming out of my sockets; I care about what it costs me.

Energy density is at best a contributor to cost, but if we have the actual cost there's no reason to use this dubious substitute. No reason, that is, unless you know the actual cost figures do not support your argument and are trying to dissemble.

muhaaa4• 4 years ago

The beauty of energy density is that you pay energy to get energy. You pay 1 kWh to get out 4 kWh in renewables. Thus you have 3 kWh available for society. Oil provides 9 kWh for society per 1 kWh investment. Nuclear provides 19 kWh for society. In developed economies we are about 12 kWh for society per 1 kWh investment. Thus going to renewables will cut society wealth by a factor of 4! The energy is not gone but it is redirected to maintain renewables infrastructure. If you live in the US rn, your renewables living standard will be equivalent to Mexico rn.

Money is quasi-energy. The petrodollar is not a joke. It literally binds the US dollar to barrels of oil. As everybody needs energy / oil, everybody needs US dollars.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 4 years ago

Ah, linear extrapolationists are again at their game.

The world doesn't need 100% renewable energy, and does not need to build enormous power storage farms to deal with unstable power supply from solar and wind. The correct answer is nuclear power, and the sooner people will stop having NDS (Nuclear Derangement Syndrome), the better for humanity.

cameronh90• 4 years ago

How do we deal with the security issues of nuclear, though?

Look at the situation in Ukraine with Russia actively threatening the stability of their nuclear power plant as a bargaining chip. Attacks on nuclear facilities during war are quite common, even the US has done it a few times.

Also, unstable countries need energy too - would it really be a good idea to start building nuclear power plants in Syria or Somalia?

Perhaps we need an international UN agency in charge of all nuclear reactors in the world, with every country signing a defence pact? To be clear, I do want nuclear power, I just don't feel like society is stable enough to deliver it.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 4 years ago

By nuclear deterrence. None of this would have happened if Ukraine had nuclear weapons. And nuclear weapons are best developed when you have nuclear power production and a lot of nuclear physicists.

Guthur• 4 years ago

Nonsense because non of it is actually renewable.

There is an insane amount of commodity input into so called renewable energy sources.

And what happens once you have two or more dry, becalmed winters, going to be hellishly cold when there is no juice in the battery and you've killed all meaningful hydrocarbon energy sources. On a long enough time line you will eventually not have enough storage to cover these scenarios. The idiocy of the narrative "climate change makes the climate unpredicable, solution become dependent on the climate", fucking moronic.

The EU could be a revelation of what's to come. The current drought has brought hydro to it's limits, the progressive liberal foreign policy has starved it of hydrocarbons. If this winter is cold and becalmed europe will collapse and all of you bleeding heart liberal bear responsibility for the millions who will die.

And if we do get through this winter we'll have the massive global shortfall in food due to the war on fertilizer both the Netherlands and Canada are waging.

You know what, fuck the animals and fuck the climate I want to be able to eat and not freeze to death.

No credit no control. No vote no power.

d3ckard• 4 years ago

Mate, Europe ain’t gonna collapse. Even with cold winter, enough resources to keep citizens running will be found. We might have to cut production output, yes. There will be more climate related deaths, yes. But we ain’t gonna collapse.

fatherzine2• 4 years ago

Systems subject to stress sometimes do exhibit a phase change, also known as "collapse". Hard to predict when and what shape, but the probability of a phase change is rather uncomfortable. When it happens, we will likely blame social / ethnic group X, because our brains are, sadly, hardwired for social scapegoating in face of severe grief.

dgb233• 4 years ago

This reads like FUD. If more progress was made on the renewable energy front we would be in much better shape.

Brakenshire3• 4 years ago

Has anyone seen any good explanations or visualisations of how long term storage would be achieved? For instance in Britain solar in winter has 1/10th of the output in summer, and we can have lulls in wind output for many days at a time. Using these resources to reduce gas use makes sense, but our current plans call for about 30% of electricity generated from gas using carbon capture and storage. How would this be handled under a 100% renewable scenario? Is it just generating Hydrogen?

Or it is that these intermittency gaps can be closed using long distance connectors? Has anyone done studies showing exactly where resources would need to be located and the length of connectors, modelled against weather and demand patterns?

andy_ppp2• 4 years ago

Pumped hydro and hot sand batteries should be enough if we get our act together and actually commit to something. There’s also no reason solar from Spain or Morocco couldn’t be wired in at some point. Obviously we currently have a chicken and egg situation where it’s not worth building the X times our peak need in renewables without the storage and not worth building the storage when renewables are a fraction rather than a multiple of our current supply.

yisonPylkita3• 4 years ago

The problem with getting electricity from Spain or Morocco (or any other country) during winter is not a technical but a political one. Once a nation energy security depends on an another nation you may end up in situation Germany found herself in

jl62• 4 years ago

Hydrogen for short term storage, ammonia for medium term storage. Both much less efficient than just using electricity directly, but the aim is to drive down the cost of generation so that the inefficiency doesn’t matter so much.

There are also tons of other short-medium term storage solutions, and we probably need all of them that we can get our hands on, but hydrogen and ammonia are the ones that feel most likely to operate at grid scale.

pfdietz17• 4 years ago

Hydrogen is not for short term storage. In short term storage, efficiency becomes important, and the round trip efficiency of hydrogen isn't great.

gregwebs• 4 years ago

Yes, long distance transmission for geographical diversity of wind power. This is studied a lot in the power generation industry. Without long distance transmission you need natural gas peaker plants capable of the same output as solar/wind, and solar/wind is more expensive than just building natural gas plants (but less CO2). We cant build enough batteries to use in place of peaker plants until sodium batteries are production ready and produced at large scale (this could happen by the end of the decade though).

naasking6• 4 years ago

For instance in Britain solar in winter has 1/10th of the output in summer, and we can have lulls in wind output for many days at a time.

Grid expansion can average over regional lulls. Renewables also need to be built to provide significant overcapacity. Storage can help, but you can do it with only those two.

kitkat_new2• 4 years ago

For instance in Britain solar in winter has 1/10th of the output in summer, and we can have lulls in wind output for many days at a time.

Wind has higher output during winter

Brakenshire3• 4 years ago

Wind has higher average output in winter and at night, but even in winter and at night, it has lulls which last for many days. Look at the wind and solar generation numbers for Germany for a month last winter:

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...

If you connect wind production across regions the lulls can be averaged out, but I want to know how reliable that is and what distances are required.

ZeroGravitas15• 4 years ago

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

Suggests Great Britain would ideally have only 1% solar, and storing 8% of the wind production as Green Hydrogen

Doing it without Green Hydrogen, just solar wind batteries would double the cost.

Connectors help too, though they also cost money to build. As renewables and batteries have plummeted in price, connectors have become less necessary. Once you have Green Hydrogen you can ship it around and store it like LNG.

DoingIsLearning5• 4 years ago

Just like when dealing with the losing side of a war we need to have a serious debate into implementing an exit strategy for Oil&Gas companies.

We have plenty of technical solutions, but they will all continue to face an enormous amount of friction due to Oil&Gas profits/lobby.

We need a political solution and we need to have an honest debate on how to sunset a trillion dollar industry without them putting up a fight.

jsty• 4 years ago

Not just Oil & Gas companies - but oil and gas nations. There's quite a few geopolitically important countries that either derive a large proportion of their GDP / foreign exchange from hydrocarbons, or rely on them so heavily there's no practical path for transition by 2050.

Compared to the difficulty in getting these nations to play a full and productive part in any transition (requiring essentially restructuring a large chunk of their economies), settling up with extractor companies will be a walk in the park.

bobse• 4 years ago

How many paid "experts" do you need to "set the Science"?

andrewclunn• 4 years ago

Cue substance free ideological posting in 3... 2...

lettergram7• 4 years ago

I read these titles and always facepalm and laugh.

If you remove researchers who have differing opinions *of course* you’ll get the claims you want. Particularly, when those researchers are funded in a way that incentivizes particular claims.

Now to these easily debunked claims, look at energy production vs capacity vs consumption in Germany:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany

Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables.

This is every country. Because renewable energy comes in bursts. This also doesn’t include the fact it costs a ton of fossil fuel energy to produce a lot of these renewable systems (solar, wind turbines, batteries).

I’m not saying this isn’t a “doable” goal, but only way you might get there by 2050 is destroying quality of life, population reduction and investing all resources into this space. You’d also have to force countries like China and Russia with force… so good luck.

yisonPylkita3• 4 years ago

Especially Russia since they’ll only benefit from climate change - destabilisation of Europe via refugees from Africa and more arable land in Taiga

_ph_11• 4 years ago

If you think climate change leads to more arable land in Russia, well, I think you are wrong. And of course, Russia is missing the least arable land. They could do with some airplanes and more population in general though.

_ph_11• 4 years ago

You are wrong in several points. First of all, if we switch from burning fossil fuels to electricity for providing most uses of energy, energy consumption falls by 2/3rds. Heat pumps are easily more than 4x as effective per unit of energy used than burning fossil fuels. Similar numbers for electric cars and many other usages. So we are litterally looking at a moving goal post :)

Renewable energy also doesn't come in "bursts". Yes, the maximum available production varies over time, for that we need to compensate. By storage, by grids, by having more flexible loads (for many decades providers worked hard to make loads non-flexible to make their jobs easier, now it is the other way around). And of course, some amount of power2gas will provide us with perfectly renewable gas which can be easily stored for whenever it is needed - we only want to limit that because it uses more power than using the electricity directly.

And no, to get there we are not "destroying quality of life". There is no idication it would even compared to our current quality of life. Quite the contrary, as cheap, clean energy will improve quality of life. You are also missing, that our quality of life isn't given. It currently is constantly reduced by the effects of climate change we are already experiencing. Europe is going through a catastrophic hot and dry summer. With ironically energy shortages as the water cooling for nuclear power plants is failing.

Just being able to maintain todays quality of life would be quite an accomplishment, which can only be achieved by cutting CO2 emissions very quickly, if at all.

BlargMcLarg• 4 years ago

I don't think anyone is arguing whether or not they are more efficient. Yet, in practice:

Heat pumps

Most governments seem awfully eager on pushing the costs onto individuals. With big inflations and a breakeven point anywhere between 5 and 20 years case-by-case, that's a hard sell for individuals and causes no end of political pressure. In practice, a lot of people are not eager to move to heat pumps in older houses, while (re)building is still severely hampered.

Similar numbers for electric cars and many other usages.

Same as above. Electric car subsidies are incredibly limited, used electric cars still have to flow to the market at a rate they become affordable for the less fortunate. At the same time, there's not a whole lot being done about the short duration of generations which is part of what causes environmental issues (goes for everything, not just cars). Of course, combatting that means products have to become more expensive to keep the current cashflow alive, something most stakeholders aren't willing to bet on. Alternatives are cheaper public transit (which would beat out EV altogether, especially if the used vehicles become electric themselves), but again, governments don't seem too eager to invest into it beyond some token experiments.

And you can say this for anything. We already have solutions. We have tons of solutions, some for individuals, some for entire communities, some for the rich, etc. We're just not implementing them or trying to implement them without hurting the status quo (or pushing the pain onto specific groups). Which makes everything just not work in practice and we're waiting for the theory to magically solve our disputes, instead of adapting to the theory.

Case in point: remote work. If the environment was our biggest concern, remote work wouldn't be a discussion.

lettergram7• 4 years ago

With ironically energy shortages as the water cooling for nuclear power plants is failing.

lol what? No, energy shortages are occurring because of government rationing of fossil fuels.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/20/europe-to-ask-countries-to-r...

I can debate the other points, but the fact remains — 12 years into Germany “going green” and hundreds of billions of dollars and all they can show for it is… drum roll… 10% of their energy consumption and they’re currently rationing energy.

Deltioner• 4 years ago

Your first sentence is very condescending.

Would be fine if your comment would actually criticize something not mention.

But it states that they include energy storage.

You 'facepalm and laugh ' while probably only skimming the article.

tcfhgj3• 4 years ago

Renewable energy doesnt come in bursts: Wind across big areas (e.g. Europe), biogas, running water, geothermal power, osmotic power, etc.

I don't know where you are taking renewable energy capacity from and what are you trying to say. Same goes for producing wind turbines, which actually doesn't require fossil fuel at all.

I’m not saying this isn’t a “doable” goal, but only way you might get there by 2050 is destroying quality of life, population reduction and investing all resources into this space.

You couldn't make less baseless comments

Manuel_D21• 4 years ago

Wind absolutely does come in bursts. Peak production is as much as 4x as much as trough production. There's also hourly variation: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2015.02.25/main.png

naasking6• 4 years ago

Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables. This is every country. Because renewable energy comes in bursts.

Any engineer could have told you that switching to renewables requires grid expansion and ideally energy storage with renewable overcapacity generation. The more grid expansion, the less storage you'll probably need and vice versa. Germany is just another case of politicians not listening to experts.

lettergram7• 4 years ago

Germany is just another case of politicians not listening to experts.

The politicians pay the “expert”. So unfortunately, I think you’re mistaken. This was my primary point, you get what you pay for.

I totally agree any engineer or frankly anyone with baseline competency and a minor amount of research would come away with the same conclusions. The challenge is these “experts” have every incentive to push the political agenda. Further, they’ll ban anyone who disagrees. How many “global warming deniers” (99% of whom just believe humans aren’t the primary cause) are banned from discussion? All of them. They are all ridiculed, banned, and many can’t get grants or publish.

Th challenge is even with storage capacity (even a hell of a lot of it), you’re still going to get issues on the edges. For instance, if a volcano erupts and blacks out a region relying on solar… you’re out of luck.

ZeroGravitas15• 4 years ago

Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables.

You make a lot of unsubstantiated, untrue and misleading claims, but just to drill into this one for people who haven't seen this classic dodge before:

"Primary Energy Consumption" measures all the energy in fossil fuels. About 2/3 of that energy is lost as waste heat when generating electricity which isn't actually useful for "quality of life" but people love quoting it to make renewables seem ridiculous.

When in fact, it's one of the main reasons they're a good idea and we should Electrify Everything:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545044/

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method

jrmg4• 4 years ago

Can you explain what in the Wikipedia page you linked to substantiates the 60% vs 10% claim? I’m just not seeing it.

lettergram7• 4 years ago

Look at the energy capacity data / charts. 60% of the capacity is from renewables (it’s what the German greens promote as well). But if you look at energy consumption, you’ll see only 10% is from renewables.

xbryanx• 4 years ago

I like Vaclav Smil’s shorthand tool for assessing these claims. Be suspicious of any predicted year for full renewable rollout that ends in a zero or a five.

pjc502• 4 years ago

This is silly: the estimates are rounded, because there's huge uncertainty. It's a very long way away from "these plants will come online on these dates". Perhaps "2045 plus or minus five years"?

We all understand how difficult software development time estimation is, right?

carapace• 4 years ago

From Smil this is a valid criticism in my opinion. He's got the data and he knows how to do the math, so he's basically saying come correct if you want to debate at his level.

RappingBoomer• 4 years ago

the establishment just loves to latch onto a narrative and push it till....either they win...or... there's a civil war...

bedhead• 4 years ago

I’ve researched this extensively and I don’t agree, so there’s that.

This is a common insidious tactic of the media…pay attention to how presumptuous they are especially in headlines. I can’t even keep track of how many baseless claims they make as if they’re accepted fact anymore.

titzer2• 4 years ago

It blows my mind that the very same people who can't seem to talk about anything but growing the economy don't see the incredible opportunity to grow the economy that building tons of new green tech represents. Like, completely replacing the world's energy infrastructure is more jobs (and money) than all the defense projects and military tech we could ever think up, combined.

It's almost like it was never about the economy, but just about keeping the existing set of corporations raking in the profits and protecting them from disruption.

missedthecue2• 4 years ago

My comment isn't related specifically to going green, but replacing infrastructure that works perfectly well just for jobs is basically the broken window fallacy in economics.

Repaving the highway every six months would "create" lots of jobs too.

bognition• 4 years ago

Yes, except the broken window fallacy doesn't quite work here for a few reasons:

First, the current technology is already breaking. It needs to be updated and maintained. So why not invest the same money in the newer tech.

Two, the current technology is way better. We will be able to get more bang for our buck with the newer technologies AND they have the benefit of not poisoning our sky.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

Yes, historically, all major economic booms coincide with some dramatic evolution in the use of energy. If you stop thinking about renewables as some hippy pipe dream and start thinking about them as a roughly two orders of magnitude drop in cost for energy, it's immediately obvious that this is going to kick off another such boom and that it will happen a lot faster than some people expect precisely because of that drop in price.

Initially, not a lot of people believed this and it was kind of expensive to e.g. put solar on your roof and even make the argument that it was at all economical to do so. That changed a few years ago and people around the world are doing the math and coming to the conclusion that these systems pay for themselves in well under half their supposed life time. Ever since that became obvious, there is a lot of demand for solar panels. Companies building more or better panels are popping up everywhere. There's a lot of innovation happening. And the net result is better, cheaper, technology produced at a rapidly expanding scale. We have already hit the point that even the subsidies and incentives that are available for this are not technically needed any more.

IMHO, learning effects, and ongoing research will cause cost to drop much further still. We have nowhere near reached the point of what is technically feasible here at all. What happens when you drop the cost of energy by about 100x in a few decades or so? An economic boom is what happens. Things that used to be prohibitively expensive now become cheap to do. And people start doing these things as quickly as they can.

You might think 100x is an exaggeration. But actually, we've already experienced that with solar in the past 20 years. Price parity was reached more than 5 years ago. I'm actually talking about another 100x improvement So four orders of magnitude in total. About 2 orders relative to fossil fuel powered energy, which is a fair benchmark because that's what we are trying to get rid off. At some point renewables are going to be so obviously cheaper that they start pushing out anything more expensive out of the market. The cheaper things get, the faster that happens. The more it happens, the faster learning effects, R&D, etc. will happen. That massive acceleration is basically what is causing people to move targets.

titzer2• 4 years ago

This gives me hope. It also makes me increasingly annoyed at the political forces that have stood in the way for the past few decades. It would merely be an annoying roadblock in a technological fantasy if it weren't the case that fossil fuels are totally fucking up the planet, and they fucking know that.

ngmc2• 4 years ago

Really glad to see this discussion! My former advisor, Mark Jacobson, is one of the authors of the paper cited in the article. His book "100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything" [1] is a good starting point for folks with a more technical background. I recently started working on my own version [2] for young people and beginners that uses code as a medium to explore these ideas.

Perhaps more directly relevant for the HN crowd, Tom Greenwood's book "Sustainable Web Design" [3] provides simple strategies for reducing the climate impacts of the software systems we build.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/WWSBook...

[2] https://goodenergy.cc

[3] https://abookapart.com/products/sustainable-web-design/

Brakenshire3• 4 years ago

Hi, are there Jacobson papers for 100% renewables looking at geographical distribution of generation, storage and interconnectors, then modelling them against weather and demand, or are they cruder than that? If those papers exist, can you recommend an accessible way to understand these models, and their outcomes? For instance, are there areas for wind generation which are more valuable that others, to provide a balance to regional lulls, and is that data published?

Is model code available so that it can be run by any of us?

ngmc2• 4 years ago

Great question! The studies do consider the spatio-temporal distribution of generation and demand. Here's a recent paper [1] that develops roadmaps for 145 countries and has infographics with links to additional resources.

I found the source code for the LOADMATCH model [2] used in the studies which can run on a laptop. You can email Mark about data, source code for the GATOR-GCMOM model [3], and advice on running it.

And here's a talk [4] he gave on the topic at NASA Ames Research Center a few years back.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/WWS-...

[2] https://github.com/mzjacobson/Public/blob/main/powerworld.f

[3] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/GATOR/GATOR-GCM...

[4] https://youtu.be/espLfnvuYps

photochemsyn3• 4 years ago

The tipping point has come and gone as far as the climate trajectory goes, although actions taken today will reduce the slope of the trajectory say 50 years from now. When you throw the rudder over on the Titanic too late, you must prepare for the impact. Hence this kind of messaging is rather futile:

"Many young people are depressed because they feel climate change cannot be stopped. We want to offer them hope by showing that our world can get all its energy needs from renewables at a price below that of fossil fuels. When we first proposed this, we were ridiculed, but this paper shows our ideas are now scientific mainstream", says Auke Hoekstra from the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands."

The one (going to 100% renewables) no longer implies the other (stabilizing the climate system within the lifetime of anyone alive today). Hugely expensive steps must be taken - retreat from flood plains that will be experiencing 500-year floods every 5 years, securing water supplies to survive epic droughts (with the additional loss of much of the seasonal snowpack in many regions), building termite-mound like architecture to handle the record heat waves, moving critical infrastructure back from the coastlines to deal with rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion, dealing with insects that love these new warm conditions, etc.

On top of that, replacing the existing fossil fuel infrastructure is going to cost trillions and require a complete reorganization of the global economic system - just look at all the oil tankers, pipelines, internal combustion engines, gas-and-coal fired power plants. No time to watch TikTok videos, it's going to be work, work, work. Scaling up industrial production of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries by a factor of what, 100X? Better get busy, humans.

Think of it more as an exciting challenge, adapting to these frightening new conditions - interesting times!. Of course, we'll have to raid the wealth of the fossil fuel sector and their investors to pay for all this adaptation and industrial development. Sticking the major producers with the bill makes optional sense. Implementing a ban on the global trade in fossil fuels would also be reasonable under these conditions (note that this was the first major step in eliminating the practice of chattel slavery, for comparison).

ErikVandeWater2• 4 years ago

It's all about the tradeoff. 100% renewable energy would nuke the economy.

DoingIsLearning5• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/roshart/status/429501812740079616

ErikVandeWater2• 4 years ago

False dichotomy.

kkfx• 4 years ago

Why not offer a small list of most relevant studies then? I can claim there are hundreds of studies and that MIGHT be true or not, offer a small glimpse is not only useful to teach readers looking for sources but also to prove I've done my research not just claim to have done it.

Beside that: I doubt. Cyclically we see promise, like IBM research that cyclically say they achieve a hyper-big advances in storage, something that "in the near future" can store Zettabyte of data in a rice grain etc, and I still have to see anything even similar. I have built my new home, just six years ago, well insulated, airtight, with proper ventilation, recently upgraded from passive temperature recovery (classic VMC with a paper heat-exchanger) to a heat-pump one, with a small p.v. and lithium storage, all electric again with heat-pumps etc. well it can potentially be "autonomous" IF I'm willing to waste a very big amount of money in a very big battery, much more space for solar panels to have enough energy to recharge the bigger battery AND still depending on a grid or generator for backup because a "reasonably bigger" battery (BEVs alike size) suffice to be comfortable just from a day to the next. Just two day means I need more land to harvest enough energy from the Sun. Oh and that being in France south Alps so in a significantly sunny place. Oh I'm just talking about a home, not a factory.

Sure we can already made let's say a glass production AND recycling factory 100% circular and renewable, we just need mountain hydro nearby. Enough, perhaps, if we are Norway with many mountains, water, little population. Or maybe Iceland with geothermal. Hardly for France.

So far we have seen MANY promises in terms of new battery tech, but essentially nothing really ready. Potentially in 2050 we can even have finally achieved nuclear fusion, witch is renewable formally. But we can't forecast that. It's a hope. It might be even computed in a game-of-if: if we finally discover a battery tech with this and that characteristic we can produce on scale with this and that intensity what time it take to spread it? It's still a study, but just an hypothetical one.

What we see so far is that FOR HOMES we can made single-family homes almost everywhere and power that with electricity only at rate "small enough" to be sustainable even at some arctic latitudes. This on scale means we need abandon dense tall-buildings since YES, we can made them TODAY with similar energy needs BUT we can't really upgrade them in the future, so to be future proof we need homes like cars, with a longer life-cycle but still small enough to be created and re-created after a certain amount of times (like a single human life) to align them with current needs and tech at any point in time. It might be doable if we agree to do so even before 2050 at least in western world, but I see no real push to do so. Just few do so on their own, no plans to design a new society seems to go in that direction, UN New Urban Agenda goes actually in the OPPOSITE direction. The rest are collection of dreams.

devwastaken• 4 years ago

Tell that to the electric grid. Natural gas is still king in the U.S, and always will be. That's because it's the only power source that can scale with demand. When everyone turns their AC on in the summer, or heat in the winter, renewables can only offset the cost.

icu• 4 years ago

The issue isn't that we as a race can reach 100% renewable energy, it's at what cost? Right now displacing fossil fuels comes at such an enormous financial cost it's an all of humanity thing or none (or very little) of humanity thing. Also there would be such high costs for poor nations that rich nations would have to pay way more than their proportional share. Sadly it's wishful thinking to get the entire human population/their respective representatives and despots to agree to solve this problem. Our best hope is that a new technological solution with near zero marginal cost emerges and displaces fossil fuels as much as possible.

Researchers: World can reach 100% renewable energy system by/before 2050

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