I thought I'd be constructive for a change, so share your thoughts on what the optimal energy mix is for a country, hypothetically, of course. My only contribution would be that a country should rely as much as possible on the resources it has. I'm a fan of self-sufficiency. Not every country can have it, which is where it gets interesting. Your turn.
The optimum energy mix will depend on the optimization criteria themselves such as cost ,high availability, sustainability, self-sufficiency as you mentioned, and so forth.
The weight assigned to each of these criteria will change according to country.
What has happened is that the environmental zealots who are in charge have skewed the calculation entirely toward sustainability and environmental concerns resulting in the lopsided condition we see today. The one cardinal rule I would suggest is borrowed from the IT industry - avoid single point of failure - but even in the IT industry, not everyone follows the rules...😉
And yet their energy system is the penultimate in unsustainable, more of fantasy or ecotopian dream than anything else. They don't really believe in it, they just like the 99% to be impoverished because they believe we will be easier to control that way.
Irina, you make a good point point about optimal energy mix and "self-sufficiency". We need a critical mass of nation states and societies that are coherent unlike the current incoherent globalist paradigm. David Bohm (Quantum Physicist) clearly talks about this in this short video:
He talks about the need for "coherent thinking" versus "incoherent thinking"....this endless quest for power via militaristic conflicts with ecological objectives as it is currently evident.
Self-sufficiency is key. Specifically, varied economic (natural, currency, man made, technology) resources; technology innovation, development and capability; strategic military strength; geo-political stability
“Cooperative Federalism” is a dynamic partnership, with the State Utility Commissioners, state utilities, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy, state and regional transmission lines has lasted for almost 80 years with very positive impacts.
The instinct to disparage 80 years of successful electricity system and promote a federal environmental policy is understandable.
However, the federal agencies have not demonstrated an expertise for the technological, scientific, engineering, and economic development since the EPA was formed.
“This uniquely American reliance [Cooperative Federalism] on regulatory, state, and local climate policy has never quite worked [this is not true] —the country still lacks a comprehensive plan to decarbonize its electricity sector, for instance, which remains dirtier than Western Europe’s—and it has been too disjointed to help the United States transition away from fossil fuels.”
Ultimately, federal agencies appear to be
unable to keep politics out of electricity and grid regulations.
The problem is at this point probably over 80% of the entire federal government apparatus is now under control of the Malthusian Globalist Psychopath Parasite Welfare-Bum Davos Bankster Cult. And so they are using that apparatus to create energy scarcity, and we well know how they love scarcity. For Rent-Seekers Scarcity = Big profits. For Megalomaniacs Scarcity = Impoverishment = Control over the Masses.
Baseload electricity should lean heavily on Nuclear power as a rule everywhere. Places like Iceland where geothermal is everywhere should use geothermal.
There is the short to medium term where of course every nation should utilize all the practical energy sources they can muster, in the most efficient way that they can also achieve at economical cost levels. That means Hydro, nuclear, coal -- moving to supercritical coal for electricity, gas -- moving to efficient CCGT for power generation. Focusing on efficient baseload generation for a an efficient grid.
Any biomass or stranded natural gas available should be used for methanol production which can directly substitute for gasoline in vehicles and DME which can directly substitute for diesel fuel in road transportation. And develop extreme efficiency methanol engines for road transportation especially as single speed generators for series hybrid hyper-efficient vehicles. Methanol can also sub out for fuel oil in home heating.
Jack Devanney optimized Germany’s grid for wind, nuclear, battery storage, and hydrogen electrolysis with underground storage. Read Options for Germany to see results for different costs of generation.
Fossil fuels and nuclear. Hydro where available. Wind and solar are useless except for special applications. A century -- or two or three -- it likely will be almost all nuclear. Then it should be diversified by fuel type -- uranium, thorium etc. At least that is how it looks to me now, but I'm just an English major wearing a Trump T-shirt who once attended a one-room school with no indoor plumbing.
Long term there really is no alternative to Nuclear energy. Both fusion and fission. Right now we are quite capable of building factories that turn out Small Modular Reactors by the tens of thousands. Preferably molten salt reactors. At a cost of ~$2M/MWe. There is no form of energy that can compete with that at scale. Certainly local areas might do better with gas, coal or oil if they are blessed with ample economical resources. But in the big picture, nuclear is quite capable of making every nation on the planet self sufficient in energy, even some tiny little nation, like Luxembourg or the Maldives. Or anywhere in the Arctic, Antarctic, under the sea, the Moon, Mars, Earth orbit.
The energy density of ordinary rock is 42X that of coal in MJ/kg just from the uranium & thorium contained in that rock. The energy contained in the World's depleted uranium and used nuclear fuel is worth $3,000 trillion @ an energy price of $100/bbl of oil.
One rare earth mine that makes materials for wind turbines will produce enough waste thorium & uranium annually to supply all the energy needs of the entire planet every year burnt in Molten Salt Reactors. They will pay you to take the thorium and uranium away. And any metal mine you can extract the uranium & thorium by adding an additional flotation circuit. We will never run out of uranium & thorium to power our civilization. We will long run out of regular construction materials before we will run out of fission fuel. And then there is fusion. And asteroids. And the Moon.
If you have plentiful energy, you can recycle everything, including water, so in fact you don't need to use any more resources except uranium/thorium/deuterium/tritium/helium4. And those are unlimited supply. And there are lots of mineral resources on the asteroids, Moon & Mars. One asteroid has 10's of $trillions worth of minerals.
Thinking of the UK where I live. Starting with an understanding that society's energy demands fall into 3 main categories for transport, heat and electricity. I would move all electricity production to nuclear and lean towards fast reactors that can utilise the large stockpile of plutonium at Sellafield. High temperature process heat for the most part would come from advanced nuclear also. Lower temperature home heating would be supplied with a combination of heat pumps and nuclear district heating. The UK has a reasonable supply of coal, oil and gas. This would ideally be used as material input for chemical production. During a transition oil they would be used in Hybrid Electric Vehicles. The long term aim of having an excellent mass system for personal transport for longer distances and within cities. Walking and wheeling would become more prevalent for shorter journeys up to 5 miles. We would use nuclear power to produce hydrogen for fertiliser and cement production. Agriculture would become more intensive with vertical farms and such. In short the musings of ecomodernists.
I would hope that this sort of vision would allow for high energy production, consumption and extensive human flourishing.
Like several others here today, I'm for optimizing fossil fuel and nuclear energy - all of which have stood the test of time with relatively few catastrophes, considering their vast scopes of operation. Meanwhile, the "popular" renewables have failed to deliver reliable power in useful quantities, even on a fairly small scale, and over the short term. It's a doomed experiment that's being touted as a miraculous new reality.
Renewables need radical rethinking, and even if we do that work, there's no evidence that they will be effective solutions for our energy needs. It's problematic in every aspect, and true expertise is in short supply. Otherwise we'd be hearing from someone besides Al Gore and Greta Thunberg.
So why must we fill our open lands with thousands of ugly bird-killing windmills and acres of black-hole solar panels? And I especially hate the corollary to "green" thinking: that we must lower our consumption, sacrifice common comforts, and worst of all, happily return to the days when wind and fire were all we had. No thanks.
As for self-sufficiency, plenty of regions around the world have large fossil fuel reserves and the capacity for nuclear installations. We have a global army of experts who can make it happen - they've already done it many times. Let's concentrate on expanding infrastructure and creating a robust supply chain. Let's fight for energy options that have a long, highly successful track record.
I don't know what the optimal mix of coal, nuclear, natural gas, and hydro power would be. I think that should be dependent on area situations for transportation, geography, water availability, etc.. BUT, there should be zero wind and solar in the mix. They are thermodynamically incompetent, wasteful, toxic, and land destroying.
There is a solution. It is NOT the renewable energy solution being pursued so avidly.
The optimal energy mix is not a mix - it is nuclear fission, NOW, and if and whenever it happens, fusion.
Electricity can do all that civilization requires if we have enough of it, reliably and cheaply.
H2 as a fuel is untenable, as presently conceived for NetZero 2050, for many fundamental reasons.: one being it is not primary or secondary energy, but at least tertiary. eROI is too small.
The USA is now discussing 50 new fission plants, but we need about 300 - all ultra-supercritical plants.
China, India, Russia, even Germany and Japan, are building various useful nuclear and thermal designs.
Given the uranium-thorium resource on the planet, and using breeder reactors, nuclear will be safe and last for more than 1000 years for a population of 10 billion, all living at DOUBLE the present USA 240 KWh per day energy consumption.
Hydrocarbons should be saved for feedstocks, not for burning. They are too valuable to burn.
I have just completed some calculations on the build-out of wind and PV. The answers are sobering.
To match the present global primary energy consumption by 2050; not the much larger 2050 demand, we must exponentially ramp up the construction of PV "parks" and connect them into the grid. This starts at a modest 8 km2 PER WEEK in 2022, and ramps up, doubling every four years, reaching a peak just above 310 km2 per week by 2070 (since the early PV parks begin to be replaced before 2050) and settling to roughly 300 km2 of new PV parks per week, in a steady state AND IN PERPETUITY.
Even those numbers do not really work since they satisfy only the present average energy demand, not peak demand and ignore storage or dynamic reserve and all energy demand growth.
A fifty-fifty wind-PV mix is even worse. The area of PV for the planetary system is approximately 2 MILLION square kilometers, if I use optimistic numbers, and over 50 million square kilometers for wind.
Naturally, hooking all that into a grid is extremely challenging. Copper, silver, neodymium, etc. all aren't feasible to mine, process, and fabricate at the required ramp-up rate. We do not even have enough balsa wood for the wind turbine rotors which must be replaced every 6-8 years. The ecological devastation caused by the PV parks and wind farms is extreme. AND, the demonstrable climate consequences exceed to "hoped for" effects of decarbonization!
For canada: we use about 3400 TWh of end use energy now, of which 630 is electrical. With the efficiency improvements from electrification, the remaining 2800 might be reduced to 1400 (EVs, heat pumps etc, but some syn fuels). This means we need 2000 TWh of electricity, and products of it like H2. Take our 390TWh of hydro power and as much more as practical, maybe 500TWh. Add as much wind and solar as this will back dispatchably, say half the hydro amount or 250 TWh. We could probably use anouther 250 at most of mostly wind for hydrogen production, bringing us to ~1000 TWh of 'renewables' dominated by hydro.
We have 100 TWh of existing nuclear, this needs to be increased 10x to 1000TWh.
The remainder, mostly feed stocks for chemicals can come from oil and gas, used directly, with the residual emmisions captured.
If, due to our not great capacity factors the 250TWh of wind for dedicated hydrogen is less economic, we would increase nuclear to 1250 TWh and use the excess above grid demand to make the hydrogen for chemicals etc.
Our feedstocks can also use biomass gasification from waste products for the CO for syn chemicals.
We have plenty of Uranium for this, and luckily plenty of hydro resources. Best case for an energy independant country.
30-40% Nuclear -+ create a huge export industry ( i cannot see the masses agreeing with this)
20-30% Gas + divert to chemicals as much as possible when intermittent are higher (a globally responsible approach that helps to support fertilizer production at affordable prices)
20-30% Wind + storage mix
20%-30% Rooftop solar /Pumped Hydro, Hydro, Geothermal (still being developed)
Rules -
EVs may only be charged by intermittent sources ie rooftop or solar wind powered charger stations (no base load!!)
Wind /Solar farms only allowed on Non arable land
Fix building energy inefficiency ie Insulation, shading, ventilation. ( I did this with my house and halved my energy bill)
Holistic measurement tool to understand CO emission and abatement with no political bullshit
Better late than never. It depends on what if any resources are available and the energy density thereof. I just don’t get why more attention isn’t turned down, towards the molten core of the planet. If they can drill miles through salt domes, why not find technology that will allow steam injection or just drilling down and across and harvest the heat from below, make electricity and return it? I thought Ormat was going to do that but they can’t seem to be able to figure it out...SMR’s for sure. The grid in the USA is one catastrophe from failing completely.
There are people working on geothermal. It's costly, I understand, because to get to the big heat, you need to drill quite deep. But someone's working on it.
Aug 20, 2022·edited Aug 20, 2022Liked by Irina Slav
I agree Irina. Each country should do its best to rely on what resources it has to generate energy. I am a nuclear proponent myself and there are several new designs that work safely but they do not generate weapons grade nuclear material. I do not think the wind and current solar panels are the answer to our energy problems. Moving right along we now have water problems the greenies are calling because of Global warming. Let the resource wars begin!!!!!!!!!!!!
Before you can determine the optimal mix, you must define your metrics to evaluate the optimal mix, collect data on resource cost, and make realistic predictions on demand and supply cost. You must consider future electrical demand, commodity cost, availability to capital, permitting cost, and availability to fuel.
A responsible organization will collect all the information and run mathematical models with statistical variations for possible weather and political events.
Electrical generation assets have a long life, often exceeding 20 years. It is important that due process be done.
Reliability, affordability and environmental sustainability are often the goals. But how do you measure them? Reserve margin at peak demand, cost of service, installation cost, exposure to extreme weather, lower emissions, land usage, and the list goes on and on.
In the end there is no optimal mix. There are thousands of combinations and everyone has there own metrics. The best mix is probably one that no one likes because that means everyone comprised.
Personally I like fuel diversity based on geographic location.
ALCOHOL - I am a big proponent of alcohol as a simple, super-clean, viable, sustainable and also carbon-neutral fuel for engines, cooking and heating. Making alcohol can be extremely inexpensive and it can be decentralized. There are countless folks who currently fly under the radar (because of authoritarian policies and permits) who make it for their own farming or vehicle use.
There are some cool things which you can do with the waste products from making alcohol, i.e. the ‘mash’ and the CO2 which the process gives off as waste. Such as, feed the mash to fishes in your fish farm pond. Use the fish poop to fertilize your greenhouse and the CO2 to bring about a flourishing greenhouse (CO2 in a greenhouse also kills the bugs). …this is being implemented. –Sidenote: Greenhouses will often buy a machine which creates CO2.
Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), an American multinational food processing and commodities trading corporation.
David Blume Website - http://www.permaculture.com/ “Alcohol Can Be A Gas” by David Blume – A 600 page book with graphics and DVD (which I have). David Blume is very approachable for interviews. Try emailing Tom Harvey tharvey (at) blumedistillation.com
The original cars (Model T – introduced in 1908) were designed to be run on ALCOHOL (ethyl alcohol also called ethanol). No infrastructure existed for fuel. Henry Ford had it all worked out, because most of America’s population at that time had farms. Many farms already had stills with which to make alcohol. Alcohol was easy to make from all kinds of things ( e.g. corn, apples, fruits, grains, potatoes, beets, turnips, etc.) Thus, Henry Ford had the “problem of fuel infrastructure” solved. The average Joe could make their own fuel, and/or sell alcohol to people who had cars.
Prohibition eventually came into effect at the start of 1920 as a result of, not a simple Federal Law, but a Constitutional Amendment. Prohibition was instigated as a Covert Operation by Rockefeller. He financed it with huge sums of money for this era, funding organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Movement. Prohibition lasted from the beginning of 1920 until December 1933. It had the net effect of taking alcohol out of the marketplace as a fuel source.
Irina, first I would like to give you two compliments: 1) you are one of the pioneers on this subject and I thank you for all that you are doing; 2) this polling of an optimal energy mix is a brilliant idea. As I peruse the 29 comments currently submitted I see the diversity of thought on the subject. Some that are inline with your charge of 'a country should rely as much as possible on the resources it has' which brings up additional energy sources that don't normally come to mind for someone like me located in the U.S. (I do take exception to comments, some of which you love, that suggest the solution to this transition problem is for us to all get together as one world government to be successful -or at least that's how I read or heard them).
As a point of full disclosure I must admit I think that 'climate change the catastrophe' is a grand hoax perpetrated on the world for money and power. Having said that my response to your inquiry is my thoughts as if we were to make our best efforts to achieve 'transition' here in the U.S.
Let's start with two more comments: 1) fossil fuels must stay in the mix as they currently are until they are reliably replaced (little by little as I see it); and 2) electrical system energy losses are about 65% (according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, EIA, which is also the source for my other following statistics).
Two centerpieces of the transition would be the electric grid and transportation. 60% of electricity feeding the grid is generated by fossil fuel with 1% of electricity out of the grid going to transportation. The infrastructure to expand the grid is enormous therefore without expanding the grid for transportation, generating electricity to feed the grid without fossil fuels is a daunting task all in itself. The only logical power sources to do this are nuclear, solar, and wind. With all the problems of solar and wind, the best option to ween off fossil fuels is nuclear.
That leaves 94 % transportation, 78% industrial, 50% residential, and 47% of the energy generated by fossil fuels to be replaced by ??? It's folly to think replacing a great deal of this load can be done by generating more electricity (with 65% system lose) with solar and wind. If you expand the electric grid you could put a dent in these numbers by using even more nuclear which would be the superior answer to using much more solar and wind (which would already be replacing fossil fuels to support the grid).
Before moving on to address transportation (which is 90% Petroleum based), it is worth mentioning that transitioning to natural gas (NG) within the fossil fuels is more friendly to climate change than petroleum and coal. To get anywhere close to the stated goals of reduced CO2 it may not only be necessary to maintain NG as is but to also increase its use to replace petroleum and coal.
That leaves transportation. To me EVs only make sense with 'point of service' electric generation unlease nuclear is generating the electric (there are still serious issues with the materials, metals, batterys, recycling, etc). This is where hydrogen, LNG, ammonia, et al come in. Hydrogen fuel cells are the holy grail but how many years until we can make and distribute enough hydrogen to replace the majority of our transportation needs (and the vehicles currently in use). Until then we must rely on converting and using lower (not necessarily 0) emmitting CO2 fuels. As a final note marine transportation is working hard to convert to nuclear, LNG, Hydrogen fuel cells, etc. Air transportation???
Thanks for this valuable input and for the compliments.
I am myself very much opposed to the "one world, one government" idea but I think commentators here mean us coming together as a species, rather, at least I like to think so.
I suspected as much about the one world government and I agree with the sentiments about getting on the same page. I believe it was the Bohm video that triggered me and I pictured the woman in charge of the EU or the UN guy and I don’t agree with their sentiment that the science is settled so shut up and send money. I much appreciate the LinkedIn forum (although I’m not sure how widely distributed ‘our’ feed is -are there just a couple dozen of us? You, David, Tim, Doug S, Armondo, Stuart, etc, or is it widely distributed?). Thanks again for all your in depth work. We need to start changing minds because after all spending hundreds of billions of dollars in the wrong direction is a terrible waste.
I have no idea about the width of distribution to be honest but we do what we can with social media. Wasting billions on something that doesn't work is indeed a terrible waste.
[assuming energy mix is actually referring to power mix] A country is too heterogenous to be considered. The great hydroelectric dams of New York are not present in the deserts of Arizona. Hawaii, with its relatively high confidence of wind and sunshine, might be well suited for wind and solar power while a country like Germany (horrible wind/solar consistency) is ill-suited for such power generation. There is no optimal for a country like the United States, particularly with the various states part of RTO and non-RTO markets.
It is unlikely that there will be any self-sufficiency in the United States, either. We simply consume too much. Many claim the U.S. to have achieved "energy independence", citing that we are a net exporter of petroleum as proof. Few take the time to think it through. When we consume 18-19 million barrels of oil per day and have only ever produced 12-13 million barrels of oil per day at our absolute peak, how is that energy independence? This problem highlights the broader problem - we are a society addicted to platitudes.
Evidently, the optimal mix meets a country's energy needs now and in the mid-term future (cf. electrification of everything) while it's low carbon and affordable.
With this in mind, my guess is 80% baseload (nuclear and/or hydro, although the latter is a risky bet) with sufficient wind + solar + interconnectors to cover the remaining 20% from local generation or imports. Wind and solar only allowed if connect to batteries/pumped storage or generating hydrogen or some other way of storing electricity.
When there's surplus electricity from RES, it goes to hydrogen/storage instead of disrupting the daily market.
Finally, cherry on top - a couple of gas-fire power stations with CCSU for balancing/backup.
Aug 23, 2022·edited Aug 23, 2022Liked by Irina Slav
Firstly my base assumption is that we have an intrinsic ability/liability to tend towards "ignorance". This tendency implies any optimal energy mix from a practical/theoretical standpoint, even if perfect will be corrupted over time. Though It might seem irrelevant, it is relevant to the sustainability to any optimal mix (which is also likely to change over time given consumption habits and technological abilities).
In short: We really really need to get the incentives structure correct to create a balanced energy mix, then imbue it with the ability to selfcallibrate... a trivial task for sure.
"Optimal" depends on your objective. We talking 100% available power to all citizens at all times, or as cheap as possible with potential for horrific "meltdowns" in functionality at certain events (I believe most societies have "chosen" the latter (unfortunately).
Cheap energy becomes its own downfall over time (due to mall investments or lack of them), thus I am a firm believer of more pricey energy but with more antifragility built in. My assumption is decentralization with many small suppliers (and some large) is the best overall setup, as monopolies/oligopolies end up in the same corner (large, anticompetitive and against innovation).
Base load can come from either centralized sources such as water power, gass, coal, nuclear etc. Though I imagine a higher degree of distribution of "renewables" would ensure a higher potential "baseload" potential also from such "insecure" energy producers. (say, every house with some own solar panels)
Plan for 10 Generations in the way indians were said to do.
The optimum energy mix will depend on the optimization criteria themselves such as cost ,high availability, sustainability, self-sufficiency as you mentioned, and so forth.
The weight assigned to each of these criteria will change according to country.
What has happened is that the environmental zealots who are in charge have skewed the calculation entirely toward sustainability and environmental concerns resulting in the lopsided condition we see today. The one cardinal rule I would suggest is borrowed from the IT industry - avoid single point of failure - but even in the IT industry, not everyone follows the rules...😉
And yet their energy system is the penultimate in unsustainable, more of fantasy or ecotopian dream than anything else. They don't really believe in it, they just like the 99% to be impoverished because they believe we will be easier to control that way.
Well yes you are correct... Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to say what they perceive as a sustainability...
Irina, you make a good point point about optimal energy mix and "self-sufficiency". We need a critical mass of nation states and societies that are coherent unlike the current incoherent globalist paradigm. David Bohm (Quantum Physicist) clearly talks about this in this short video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv-YCwl4H5E
He talks about the need for "coherent thinking" versus "incoherent thinking"....this endless quest for power via militaristic conflicts with ecological objectives as it is currently evident.
Self-sufficiency is key. Specifically, varied economic (natural, currency, man made, technology) resources; technology innovation, development and capability; strategic military strength; geo-political stability
Irina, here is my three cents worth:
“Cooperative Federalism” is a dynamic partnership, with the State Utility Commissioners, state utilities, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy, state and regional transmission lines has lasted for almost 80 years with very positive impacts.
The instinct to disparage 80 years of successful electricity system and promote a federal environmental policy is understandable.
However, the federal agencies have not demonstrated an expertise for the technological, scientific, engineering, and economic development since the EPA was formed.
“This uniquely American reliance [Cooperative Federalism] on regulatory, state, and local climate policy has never quite worked [this is not true] —the country still lacks a comprehensive plan to decarbonize its electricity sector, for instance, which remains dirtier than Western Europe’s—and it has been too disjointed to help the United States transition away from fossil fuels.”
Ultimately, federal agencies appear to be
unable to keep politics out of electricity and grid regulations.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/08/senate-climate-inflation-reduction-bill-passed/671073/
The problem is at this point probably over 80% of the entire federal government apparatus is now under control of the Malthusian Globalist Psychopath Parasite Welfare-Bum Davos Bankster Cult. And so they are using that apparatus to create energy scarcity, and we well know how they love scarcity. For Rent-Seekers Scarcity = Big profits. For Megalomaniacs Scarcity = Impoverishment = Control over the Masses.
Baseload electricity should lean heavily on Nuclear power as a rule everywhere. Places like Iceland where geothermal is everywhere should use geothermal.
There is the short to medium term where of course every nation should utilize all the practical energy sources they can muster, in the most efficient way that they can also achieve at economical cost levels. That means Hydro, nuclear, coal -- moving to supercritical coal for electricity, gas -- moving to efficient CCGT for power generation. Focusing on efficient baseload generation for a an efficient grid.
Any biomass or stranded natural gas available should be used for methanol production which can directly substitute for gasoline in vehicles and DME which can directly substitute for diesel fuel in road transportation. And develop extreme efficiency methanol engines for road transportation especially as single speed generators for series hybrid hyper-efficient vehicles. Methanol can also sub out for fuel oil in home heating.
Jack Devanney optimized Germany’s grid for wind, nuclear, battery storage, and hydrogen electrolysis with underground storage. Read Options for Germany to see results for different costs of generation.
https://gordianknotbook.com/download/low-co2-electricity-the-options-for-germany/
His book is an absolute master stroke. And it’s a **free** pdf from his website!
I was already pretty well versed in nuclear science, but I learned a TON from reading it.
Fossil fuels and nuclear. Hydro where available. Wind and solar are useless except for special applications. A century -- or two or three -- it likely will be almost all nuclear. Then it should be diversified by fuel type -- uranium, thorium etc. At least that is how it looks to me now, but I'm just an English major wearing a Trump T-shirt who once attended a one-room school with no indoor plumbing.
Long term there really is no alternative to Nuclear energy. Both fusion and fission. Right now we are quite capable of building factories that turn out Small Modular Reactors by the tens of thousands. Preferably molten salt reactors. At a cost of ~$2M/MWe. There is no form of energy that can compete with that at scale. Certainly local areas might do better with gas, coal or oil if they are blessed with ample economical resources. But in the big picture, nuclear is quite capable of making every nation on the planet self sufficient in energy, even some tiny little nation, like Luxembourg or the Maldives. Or anywhere in the Arctic, Antarctic, under the sea, the Moon, Mars, Earth orbit.
The energy density of ordinary rock is 42X that of coal in MJ/kg just from the uranium & thorium contained in that rock. The energy contained in the World's depleted uranium and used nuclear fuel is worth $3,000 trillion @ an energy price of $100/bbl of oil.
One rare earth mine that makes materials for wind turbines will produce enough waste thorium & uranium annually to supply all the energy needs of the entire planet every year burnt in Molten Salt Reactors. They will pay you to take the thorium and uranium away. And any metal mine you can extract the uranium & thorium by adding an additional flotation circuit. We will never run out of uranium & thorium to power our civilization. We will long run out of regular construction materials before we will run out of fission fuel. And then there is fusion. And asteroids. And the Moon.
If you have plentiful energy, you can recycle everything, including water, so in fact you don't need to use any more resources except uranium/thorium/deuterium/tritium/helium4. And those are unlimited supply. And there are lots of mineral resources on the asteroids, Moon & Mars. One asteroid has 10's of $trillions worth of minerals.
Whatever the energy source, the underlying principle needs to be the well-being of people, as in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Thinking of the UK where I live. Starting with an understanding that society's energy demands fall into 3 main categories for transport, heat and electricity. I would move all electricity production to nuclear and lean towards fast reactors that can utilise the large stockpile of plutonium at Sellafield. High temperature process heat for the most part would come from advanced nuclear also. Lower temperature home heating would be supplied with a combination of heat pumps and nuclear district heating. The UK has a reasonable supply of coal, oil and gas. This would ideally be used as material input for chemical production. During a transition oil they would be used in Hybrid Electric Vehicles. The long term aim of having an excellent mass system for personal transport for longer distances and within cities. Walking and wheeling would become more prevalent for shorter journeys up to 5 miles. We would use nuclear power to produce hydrogen for fertiliser and cement production. Agriculture would become more intensive with vertical farms and such. In short the musings of ecomodernists.
I would hope that this sort of vision would allow for high energy production, consumption and extensive human flourishing.
Like several others here today, I'm for optimizing fossil fuel and nuclear energy - all of which have stood the test of time with relatively few catastrophes, considering their vast scopes of operation. Meanwhile, the "popular" renewables have failed to deliver reliable power in useful quantities, even on a fairly small scale, and over the short term. It's a doomed experiment that's being touted as a miraculous new reality.
Renewables need radical rethinking, and even if we do that work, there's no evidence that they will be effective solutions for our energy needs. It's problematic in every aspect, and true expertise is in short supply. Otherwise we'd be hearing from someone besides Al Gore and Greta Thunberg.
So why must we fill our open lands with thousands of ugly bird-killing windmills and acres of black-hole solar panels? And I especially hate the corollary to "green" thinking: that we must lower our consumption, sacrifice common comforts, and worst of all, happily return to the days when wind and fire were all we had. No thanks.
As for self-sufficiency, plenty of regions around the world have large fossil fuel reserves and the capacity for nuclear installations. We have a global army of experts who can make it happen - they've already done it many times. Let's concentrate on expanding infrastructure and creating a robust supply chain. Let's fight for energy options that have a long, highly successful track record.
I don't know what the optimal mix of coal, nuclear, natural gas, and hydro power would be. I think that should be dependent on area situations for transportation, geography, water availability, etc.. BUT, there should be zero wind and solar in the mix. They are thermodynamically incompetent, wasteful, toxic, and land destroying.
There is a solution. It is NOT the renewable energy solution being pursued so avidly.
The optimal energy mix is not a mix - it is nuclear fission, NOW, and if and whenever it happens, fusion.
Electricity can do all that civilization requires if we have enough of it, reliably and cheaply.
H2 as a fuel is untenable, as presently conceived for NetZero 2050, for many fundamental reasons.: one being it is not primary or secondary energy, but at least tertiary. eROI is too small.
The USA is now discussing 50 new fission plants, but we need about 300 - all ultra-supercritical plants.
China, India, Russia, even Germany and Japan, are building various useful nuclear and thermal designs.
Given the uranium-thorium resource on the planet, and using breeder reactors, nuclear will be safe and last for more than 1000 years for a population of 10 billion, all living at DOUBLE the present USA 240 KWh per day energy consumption.
Hydrocarbons should be saved for feedstocks, not for burning. They are too valuable to burn.
I have just completed some calculations on the build-out of wind and PV. The answers are sobering.
To match the present global primary energy consumption by 2050; not the much larger 2050 demand, we must exponentially ramp up the construction of PV "parks" and connect them into the grid. This starts at a modest 8 km2 PER WEEK in 2022, and ramps up, doubling every four years, reaching a peak just above 310 km2 per week by 2070 (since the early PV parks begin to be replaced before 2050) and settling to roughly 300 km2 of new PV parks per week, in a steady state AND IN PERPETUITY.
Even those numbers do not really work since they satisfy only the present average energy demand, not peak demand and ignore storage or dynamic reserve and all energy demand growth.
A fifty-fifty wind-PV mix is even worse. The area of PV for the planetary system is approximately 2 MILLION square kilometers, if I use optimistic numbers, and over 50 million square kilometers for wind.
Naturally, hooking all that into a grid is extremely challenging. Copper, silver, neodymium, etc. all aren't feasible to mine, process, and fabricate at the required ramp-up rate. We do not even have enough balsa wood for the wind turbine rotors which must be replaced every 6-8 years. The ecological devastation caused by the PV parks and wind farms is extreme. AND, the demonstrable climate consequences exceed to "hoped for" effects of decarbonization!
Nuclear is the only way.
For canada: we use about 3400 TWh of end use energy now, of which 630 is electrical. With the efficiency improvements from electrification, the remaining 2800 might be reduced to 1400 (EVs, heat pumps etc, but some syn fuels). This means we need 2000 TWh of electricity, and products of it like H2. Take our 390TWh of hydro power and as much more as practical, maybe 500TWh. Add as much wind and solar as this will back dispatchably, say half the hydro amount or 250 TWh. We could probably use anouther 250 at most of mostly wind for hydrogen production, bringing us to ~1000 TWh of 'renewables' dominated by hydro.
We have 100 TWh of existing nuclear, this needs to be increased 10x to 1000TWh.
The remainder, mostly feed stocks for chemicals can come from oil and gas, used directly, with the residual emmisions captured.
If, due to our not great capacity factors the 250TWh of wind for dedicated hydrogen is less economic, we would increase nuclear to 1250 TWh and use the excess above grid demand to make the hydrogen for chemicals etc.
Our feedstocks can also use biomass gasification from waste products for the CO for syn chemicals.
We have plenty of Uranium for this, and luckily plenty of hydro resources. Best case for an energy independant country.
In Australia
30-40% Nuclear -+ create a huge export industry ( i cannot see the masses agreeing with this)
20-30% Gas + divert to chemicals as much as possible when intermittent are higher (a globally responsible approach that helps to support fertilizer production at affordable prices)
20-30% Wind + storage mix
20%-30% Rooftop solar /Pumped Hydro, Hydro, Geothermal (still being developed)
Rules -
EVs may only be charged by intermittent sources ie rooftop or solar wind powered charger stations (no base load!!)
Wind /Solar farms only allowed on Non arable land
Fix building energy inefficiency ie Insulation, shading, ventilation. ( I did this with my house and halved my energy bill)
Holistic measurement tool to understand CO emission and abatement with no political bullshit
I really like the EV charging point. It's only fair.
When they are eating bugs and only driving on odd days of the week they will come around on nuclear power. Just give it time.
Better late than never. It depends on what if any resources are available and the energy density thereof. I just don’t get why more attention isn’t turned down, towards the molten core of the planet. If they can drill miles through salt domes, why not find technology that will allow steam injection or just drilling down and across and harvest the heat from below, make electricity and return it? I thought Ormat was going to do that but they can’t seem to be able to figure it out...SMR’s for sure. The grid in the USA is one catastrophe from failing completely.
There are people working on geothermal. It's costly, I understand, because to get to the big heat, you need to drill quite deep. But someone's working on it.
20% Renewable + 5% Storage
25% LNG/Natural Gas
50% Nuclear as the ground foundation.
Or a better balance in the renewable front, depending on the country.
I agree Irina. Each country should do its best to rely on what resources it has to generate energy. I am a nuclear proponent myself and there are several new designs that work safely but they do not generate weapons grade nuclear material. I do not think the wind and current solar panels are the answer to our energy problems. Moving right along we now have water problems the greenies are calling because of Global warming. Let the resource wars begin!!!!!!!!!!!!
Before you can determine the optimal mix, you must define your metrics to evaluate the optimal mix, collect data on resource cost, and make realistic predictions on demand and supply cost. You must consider future electrical demand, commodity cost, availability to capital, permitting cost, and availability to fuel.
A responsible organization will collect all the information and run mathematical models with statistical variations for possible weather and political events.
Electrical generation assets have a long life, often exceeding 20 years. It is important that due process be done.
Reliability, affordability and environmental sustainability are often the goals. But how do you measure them? Reserve margin at peak demand, cost of service, installation cost, exposure to extreme weather, lower emissions, land usage, and the list goes on and on.
In the end there is no optimal mix. There are thousands of combinations and everyone has there own metrics. The best mix is probably one that no one likes because that means everyone comprised.
Personally I like fuel diversity based on geographic location.
In terms of electrical power (only ever likely to be less than 50% of total energy):
1. Hydro (if you have it).
2. Gas (if you have it - preferably combined cycle)
3. Coal (if you have it).
4. Would only bother with nuclear if you have little of all the above eg. France, Japan
5. Might be a limited role for solar if combined with 1 and 2 and you put it on roofs etc. not to waste land
There is really no substitute for oil, gas and coal in a lot of non-electrical applications unfortunately.
ALCOHOL - I am a big proponent of alcohol as a simple, super-clean, viable, sustainable and also carbon-neutral fuel for engines, cooking and heating. Making alcohol can be extremely inexpensive and it can be decentralized. There are countless folks who currently fly under the radar (because of authoritarian policies and permits) who make it for their own farming or vehicle use.
There are some cool things which you can do with the waste products from making alcohol, i.e. the ‘mash’ and the CO2 which the process gives off as waste. Such as, feed the mash to fishes in your fish farm pond. Use the fish poop to fertilize your greenhouse and the CO2 to bring about a flourishing greenhouse (CO2 in a greenhouse also kills the bugs). …this is being implemented. –Sidenote: Greenhouses will often buy a machine which creates CO2.
Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), an American multinational food processing and commodities trading corporation.
Queued 1:15:00 – A 2013 discussion about ADM and its alcohol production correlating with fish and greenhouse growth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogcv9xS8Pkw&t=4500s
David Blume Website - http://www.permaculture.com/ “Alcohol Can Be A Gas” by David Blume – A 600 page book with graphics and DVD (which I have). David Blume is very approachable for interviews. Try emailing Tom Harvey tharvey (at) blumedistillation.com
The original cars (Model T – introduced in 1908) were designed to be run on ALCOHOL (ethyl alcohol also called ethanol). No infrastructure existed for fuel. Henry Ford had it all worked out, because most of America’s population at that time had farms. Many farms already had stills with which to make alcohol. Alcohol was easy to make from all kinds of things ( e.g. corn, apples, fruits, grains, potatoes, beets, turnips, etc.) Thus, Henry Ford had the “problem of fuel infrastructure” solved. The average Joe could make their own fuel, and/or sell alcohol to people who had cars.
Prohibition eventually came into effect at the start of 1920 as a result of, not a simple Federal Law, but a Constitutional Amendment. Prohibition was instigated as a Covert Operation by Rockefeller. He financed it with huge sums of money for this era, funding organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Movement. Prohibition lasted from the beginning of 1920 until December 1933. It had the net effect of taking alcohol out of the marketplace as a fuel source.
Irina, first I would like to give you two compliments: 1) you are one of the pioneers on this subject and I thank you for all that you are doing; 2) this polling of an optimal energy mix is a brilliant idea. As I peruse the 29 comments currently submitted I see the diversity of thought on the subject. Some that are inline with your charge of 'a country should rely as much as possible on the resources it has' which brings up additional energy sources that don't normally come to mind for someone like me located in the U.S. (I do take exception to comments, some of which you love, that suggest the solution to this transition problem is for us to all get together as one world government to be successful -or at least that's how I read or heard them).
As a point of full disclosure I must admit I think that 'climate change the catastrophe' is a grand hoax perpetrated on the world for money and power. Having said that my response to your inquiry is my thoughts as if we were to make our best efforts to achieve 'transition' here in the U.S.
Let's start with two more comments: 1) fossil fuels must stay in the mix as they currently are until they are reliably replaced (little by little as I see it); and 2) electrical system energy losses are about 65% (according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, EIA, which is also the source for my other following statistics).
Two centerpieces of the transition would be the electric grid and transportation. 60% of electricity feeding the grid is generated by fossil fuel with 1% of electricity out of the grid going to transportation. The infrastructure to expand the grid is enormous therefore without expanding the grid for transportation, generating electricity to feed the grid without fossil fuels is a daunting task all in itself. The only logical power sources to do this are nuclear, solar, and wind. With all the problems of solar and wind, the best option to ween off fossil fuels is nuclear.
That leaves 94 % transportation, 78% industrial, 50% residential, and 47% of the energy generated by fossil fuels to be replaced by ??? It's folly to think replacing a great deal of this load can be done by generating more electricity (with 65% system lose) with solar and wind. If you expand the electric grid you could put a dent in these numbers by using even more nuclear which would be the superior answer to using much more solar and wind (which would already be replacing fossil fuels to support the grid).
Before moving on to address transportation (which is 90% Petroleum based), it is worth mentioning that transitioning to natural gas (NG) within the fossil fuels is more friendly to climate change than petroleum and coal. To get anywhere close to the stated goals of reduced CO2 it may not only be necessary to maintain NG as is but to also increase its use to replace petroleum and coal.
That leaves transportation. To me EVs only make sense with 'point of service' electric generation unlease nuclear is generating the electric (there are still serious issues with the materials, metals, batterys, recycling, etc). This is where hydrogen, LNG, ammonia, et al come in. Hydrogen fuel cells are the holy grail but how many years until we can make and distribute enough hydrogen to replace the majority of our transportation needs (and the vehicles currently in use). Until then we must rely on converting and using lower (not necessarily 0) emmitting CO2 fuels. As a final note marine transportation is working hard to convert to nuclear, LNG, Hydrogen fuel cells, etc. Air transportation???
Thanks for this valuable input and for the compliments.
I am myself very much opposed to the "one world, one government" idea but I think commentators here mean us coming together as a species, rather, at least I like to think so.
I suspected as much about the one world government and I agree with the sentiments about getting on the same page. I believe it was the Bohm video that triggered me and I pictured the woman in charge of the EU or the UN guy and I don’t agree with their sentiment that the science is settled so shut up and send money. I much appreciate the LinkedIn forum (although I’m not sure how widely distributed ‘our’ feed is -are there just a couple dozen of us? You, David, Tim, Doug S, Armondo, Stuart, etc, or is it widely distributed?). Thanks again for all your in depth work. We need to start changing minds because after all spending hundreds of billions of dollars in the wrong direction is a terrible waste.
I have no idea about the width of distribution to be honest but we do what we can with social media. Wasting billions on something that doesn't work is indeed a terrible waste.
[assuming energy mix is actually referring to power mix] A country is too heterogenous to be considered. The great hydroelectric dams of New York are not present in the deserts of Arizona. Hawaii, with its relatively high confidence of wind and sunshine, might be well suited for wind and solar power while a country like Germany (horrible wind/solar consistency) is ill-suited for such power generation. There is no optimal for a country like the United States, particularly with the various states part of RTO and non-RTO markets.
It is unlikely that there will be any self-sufficiency in the United States, either. We simply consume too much. Many claim the U.S. to have achieved "energy independence", citing that we are a net exporter of petroleum as proof. Few take the time to think it through. When we consume 18-19 million barrels of oil per day and have only ever produced 12-13 million barrels of oil per day at our absolute peak, how is that energy independence? This problem highlights the broader problem - we are a society addicted to platitudes.
Evidently, the optimal mix meets a country's energy needs now and in the mid-term future (cf. electrification of everything) while it's low carbon and affordable.
With this in mind, my guess is 80% baseload (nuclear and/or hydro, although the latter is a risky bet) with sufficient wind + solar + interconnectors to cover the remaining 20% from local generation or imports. Wind and solar only allowed if connect to batteries/pumped storage or generating hydrogen or some other way of storing electricity.
When there's surplus electricity from RES, it goes to hydrogen/storage instead of disrupting the daily market.
Finally, cherry on top - a couple of gas-fire power stations with CCSU for balancing/backup.
Firstly my base assumption is that we have an intrinsic ability/liability to tend towards "ignorance". This tendency implies any optimal energy mix from a practical/theoretical standpoint, even if perfect will be corrupted over time. Though It might seem irrelevant, it is relevant to the sustainability to any optimal mix (which is also likely to change over time given consumption habits and technological abilities).
In short: We really really need to get the incentives structure correct to create a balanced energy mix, then imbue it with the ability to selfcallibrate... a trivial task for sure.
"Optimal" depends on your objective. We talking 100% available power to all citizens at all times, or as cheap as possible with potential for horrific "meltdowns" in functionality at certain events (I believe most societies have "chosen" the latter (unfortunately).
Cheap energy becomes its own downfall over time (due to mall investments or lack of them), thus I am a firm believer of more pricey energy but with more antifragility built in. My assumption is decentralization with many small suppliers (and some large) is the best overall setup, as monopolies/oligopolies end up in the same corner (large, anticompetitive and against innovation).
Base load can come from either centralized sources such as water power, gass, coal, nuclear etc. Though I imagine a higher degree of distribution of "renewables" would ensure a higher potential "baseload" potential also from such "insecure" energy producers. (say, every house with some own solar panels)
Plan for 10 Generations in the way indians were said to do.
Just my two cents, from a non-engineer.