I agree. Every energy source has its place but we should be realistic about how big this place should be. Solar's place, I think, is on rooftops and in the yards of industrial facilities that have no better use for those yards.
If economical then there is no little to the amount of renewable power that you want.
The “But” is do you have the storage?
If you don’t then all you want is the minimum guaranteed useable renewable power.
The discussion is generally misplaced on production and it’s costs. The reality is whether the power is available to the consumer and that means for an intermittent supply like renewables the issue is to fix the storage not remove the other more certain sources of power.
It ain't about "renewables". It's about wind & solar. Hydro & geothermal are rational, reliable forms of energy. And I don't get "minimum guaranteed useable". What you want is reliable 24/7 power, because storage is a joke. The only place storage works is in exceedingly blessed locations that have lots of water flows and giant reservoir hydro power plants, like Norway & Quebec. And even using that valuable storage to buffer wind & solar is dubious at best due to high transmission costs and there are much better uses for loads of hydro storage, like supplying the peak & shoulder daytime demand, leaving efficient baseload nuclear, CCGT & supercritical coal run continuously, which is the lowest cost generation.
And yes battery storage costs have dropped but nowhere near enough to make wind & solar practical. It is sheer idiocy to waste valuable battery storage on wind & solar when you need balls-to-the-walls production for the next 40yrs to supply BEVs for the transportation sector. A much more practical and efficient way to use them.
This is what the "Green Hydrogen" fuss is all about H20 is very energy intensive to pull apart, as opposed to say U308, a large heavy atom. It presupposes that these turbines will be spinning like tops and throwing off so much electricity that it makes sense to rip apart water molecules, compress and store them and move them. If we had kept building out our nuke fleet we maybe could have done that, sheer fantastical Red Queen thinking...and even then it's still probably less energy intensive than building gigawatts (terawatts?) of storage batteries..
Irina, you always makes me smile even when the subject is so serious!. But I think I am liking her husband now too. You just have to love good rational people! There seem to so few of them left.
It is really not the fact of the lunacy in building wind and solar in a hurricane zone, but the fact that they are using an inferior product when there are better solutions available. My thought is that solar has been around for more than 100 years, first patent in 1883 I believe, why is it still only 20% efficient at best? Storage is a long way from being worth a flip and I don't believe it is the solution either, thanks Elon for a massive waste of our tax dollars!
Why spend all that effort, when the problem is to clean up oil and gas, which they have done to a point, plan on nuclear for the future when oil and gas run low and keep the prices, affordable, the service efficient and most of all reliable. How rational is that?
The old saying here in Texas is... if you don't like the weather, just wait a minute and it will change. Unfortunately that's not the case this summer and unfortunately the way that Washington is going that won't change either. Glad to have you back!
Happy to hear I make you smile, JF. :) And yes, I married a smart man. :)
The question about solar efficiency is a very good one. I think there are limits to boosting panels' efficiency and maybe these limits are being reached because they are difficult to push back. let's hope someone with expert knowledge will join the discussion.
Solar panels work by the photoelectric effect. Photons hit the panel, and excite an electron into a conduction band. Not all photons have the right energy, and not all band gaps are created equal. The situation is a little more complicated, including p/n junctions and so forth. But basically...the photoelectric effect drives the situation.
Here are two Wikipedia articles on it.
The first article, and relevant quote:
Traditional single-junction cells with an optimal band gap for the solar spectrum have a maximum theoretical efficiency of 33.16%, the Shockley–Queisser limit
The Shockley–Queisser limit only applies to conventional solar cells with a single p-n junction; solar cells with multiple layers can (and do) outperform this limit, and so can solar thermal and certain other solar energy systems. In the extreme limit, for a multi-junction solar cell with an infinite number of layers, the corresponding limit is 68.7% for normal sunlight
Efficiency isn't a big issue with solar PV. It's all about intermittency and that means storage. Even if solar cells were free they still wouldn't be a practical form of electricity production for all but niche applications. The only way to make wind & solar practical is to have some sort of chemical based storage that is very inexpensive. The best chemical based storage right now is methanol. But the PTB hate methanol almost as much as they hate nuclear. Still even electricity to methanol is maybe barely practical for transportation applications. And it is still more practical and more efficient to use surplus baseload nighttime electricity for methanol production so that you can make almost all generation baseload.
Thanks for all the info, always so interesting to hear from Meredith - I guess the way I worded my question, now that I reread it - how rational is that? Was poorly written- should have been written - now that's rational! Nuclear is the most rational solution and always has been. Glad I got the responses I did - that way I have learned so much more!
The human race is using approximately 25 Terawatt Years of energy at present, of which 80% (20 TWy) comes from hydrocarbons. According to various resources, total proven hydrocarbon reserves are 1,385-ish Terawatt Years. If consumption stays the same, that's 1,385 / 20 = 69.75 years.
As long as we are quoting stats, in August 2018, the DOE noted that of all the energy splashed into a conventional car's gas tank, only 12 to 30 percent actually goes to move the car down the road.
Everything else is lost to engine inefficiencies, heat, or used to power accessories, the DOE says.
More than agreed with that. Currently the most efficient batteries are hydro systems that create electricity in periods of peak demand and pump the water back up the hill with cheap electricity in the middle of the night.
Welcome to Substack, Irina. I have enjoyed (if that’s the right word) your work in Oil Price and your discussions with Robert Bryce. You are an important energy thinker.
But they are loyal and lovable and have a therapeutic effect, and Vlad says hi. :) They're just not big enough to save a human from drowning and they hate water, so...
I hope those offshore wind turbines don’t kill seabirds the way the turbines on land kill eagles. Jonathan Livingston Seagull would be sad. “Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall.“ . . . that is until they crash into a wind turbine blade!
I agree. Every energy source has its place but we should be realistic about how big this place should be. Solar's place, I think, is on rooftops and in the yards of industrial facilities that have no better use for those yards.
If economical then there is no little to the amount of renewable power that you want.
The “But” is do you have the storage?
If you don’t then all you want is the minimum guaranteed useable renewable power.
The discussion is generally misplaced on production and it’s costs. The reality is whether the power is available to the consumer and that means for an intermittent supply like renewables the issue is to fix the storage not remove the other more certain sources of power.
It ain't about "renewables". It's about wind & solar. Hydro & geothermal are rational, reliable forms of energy. And I don't get "minimum guaranteed useable". What you want is reliable 24/7 power, because storage is a joke. The only place storage works is in exceedingly blessed locations that have lots of water flows and giant reservoir hydro power plants, like Norway & Quebec. And even using that valuable storage to buffer wind & solar is dubious at best due to high transmission costs and there are much better uses for loads of hydro storage, like supplying the peak & shoulder daytime demand, leaving efficient baseload nuclear, CCGT & supercritical coal run continuously, which is the lowest cost generation.
And yes battery storage costs have dropped but nowhere near enough to make wind & solar practical. It is sheer idiocy to waste valuable battery storage on wind & solar when you need balls-to-the-walls production for the next 40yrs to supply BEVs for the transportation sector. A much more practical and efficient way to use them.
This is what the "Green Hydrogen" fuss is all about H20 is very energy intensive to pull apart, as opposed to say U308, a large heavy atom. It presupposes that these turbines will be spinning like tops and throwing off so much electricity that it makes sense to rip apart water molecules, compress and store them and move them. If we had kept building out our nuke fleet we maybe could have done that, sheer fantastical Red Queen thinking...and even then it's still probably less energy intensive than building gigawatts (terawatts?) of storage batteries..
Irina, you always makes me smile even when the subject is so serious!. But I think I am liking her husband now too. You just have to love good rational people! There seem to so few of them left.
It is really not the fact of the lunacy in building wind and solar in a hurricane zone, but the fact that they are using an inferior product when there are better solutions available. My thought is that solar has been around for more than 100 years, first patent in 1883 I believe, why is it still only 20% efficient at best? Storage is a long way from being worth a flip and I don't believe it is the solution either, thanks Elon for a massive waste of our tax dollars!
Why spend all that effort, when the problem is to clean up oil and gas, which they have done to a point, plan on nuclear for the future when oil and gas run low and keep the prices, affordable, the service efficient and most of all reliable. How rational is that?
The old saying here in Texas is... if you don't like the weather, just wait a minute and it will change. Unfortunately that's not the case this summer and unfortunately the way that Washington is going that won't change either. Glad to have you back!
Happy to hear I make you smile, JF. :) And yes, I married a smart man. :)
The question about solar efficiency is a very good one. I think there are limits to boosting panels' efficiency and maybe these limits are being reached because they are difficult to push back. let's hope someone with expert knowledge will join the discussion.
I can't claim true expert knowledge.
Solar panels work by the photoelectric effect. Photons hit the panel, and excite an electron into a conduction band. Not all photons have the right energy, and not all band gaps are created equal. The situation is a little more complicated, including p/n junctions and so forth. But basically...the photoelectric effect drives the situation.
Here are two Wikipedia articles on it.
The first article, and relevant quote:
Traditional single-junction cells with an optimal band gap for the solar spectrum have a maximum theoretical efficiency of 33.16%, the Shockley–Queisser limit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency
The second article and relevant quote:
The Shockley–Queisser limit only applies to conventional solar cells with a single p-n junction; solar cells with multiple layers can (and do) outperform this limit, and so can solar thermal and certain other solar energy systems. In the extreme limit, for a multi-junction solar cell with an infinite number of layers, the corresponding limit is 68.7% for normal sunlight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley–Queisser_limit
Efficiency isn't a big issue with solar PV. It's all about intermittency and that means storage. Even if solar cells were free they still wouldn't be a practical form of electricity production for all but niche applications. The only way to make wind & solar practical is to have some sort of chemical based storage that is very inexpensive. The best chemical based storage right now is methanol. But the PTB hate methanol almost as much as they hate nuclear. Still even electricity to methanol is maybe barely practical for transportation applications. And it is still more practical and more efficient to use surplus baseload nighttime electricity for methanol production so that you can make almost all generation baseload.
Thank you very much, Meredith!
Thanks for all the info, always so interesting to hear from Meredith - I guess the way I worded my question, now that I reread it - how rational is that? Was poorly written- should have been written - now that's rational! Nuclear is the most rational solution and always has been. Glad I got the responses I did - that way I have learned so much more!
The human race is using approximately 25 Terawatt Years of energy at present, of which 80% (20 TWy) comes from hydrocarbons. According to various resources, total proven hydrocarbon reserves are 1,385-ish Terawatt Years. If consumption stays the same, that's 1,385 / 20 = 69.75 years.
As long as we are quoting stats, in August 2018, the DOE noted that of all the energy splashed into a conventional car's gas tank, only 12 to 30 percent actually goes to move the car down the road.
Everything else is lost to engine inefficiencies, heat, or used to power accessories, the DOE says.
https://short-fact.com/how-much-energy-is-produced-by-combustion/
More than agreed with that. Currently the most efficient batteries are hydro systems that create electricity in periods of peak demand and pump the water back up the hill with cheap electricity in the middle of the night.
Welcome to Substack, Irina. I have enjoyed (if that’s the right word) your work in Oil Price and your discussions with Robert Bryce. You are an important energy thinker.
Thank you, Stephen, it's great to be here.
“you can trust the weather about as much as you can trust a cat to save you from drowning” another reason I don’t have a cat!
But they are loyal and lovable and have a therapeutic effect, and Vlad says hi. :) They're just not big enough to save a human from drowning and they hate water, so...
I hope those offshore wind turbines don’t kill seabirds the way the turbines on land kill eagles. Jonathan Livingston Seagull would be sad. “Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall.“ . . . that is until they crash into a wind turbine blade!
I'm sure sooner or later someone would do research on that. I hope they don't.