I believe in reality, not appeals to authority. Reality says that you can produce solar panels without human labor, as we are 90% of the way there now. Reality says you can make windmills with less human labor. Reality says these systems could be pre-packaged so installation requires minimal labor. Reality says that at below $1 a watt, it’s the least expensive method to produce electricity in the world.
So yeah, as a pretty good engineer myself, I’d say this idea looks pretty feasible. So now we have to, over the next 30 years, figure out how to store all this cheap power so we can run on it exclusively. Since the cost for a battery pack for a passenger car is plummeting -according to sources like General Motors, not Tesla - there’s how we can electrify our vehicles. And if the batteries are that cheap, you can do some quick napkin math. Say you need to store 1 kilowatt hour, produced for 2 cents from solar and moved via HVDC lines for 2 cents, to be 2 cents. Well, for a first order estimate, if you store that kilowatt hour at one cycle a day for 5 years, and you use 50% of the nameplate capacity of a lithium ion battery to do it, you need the battery to cost $17 a kilowatt hour. Best we have donenow is $145.
So as you can see right away, the problem is now storage, not production. The production costs are already low enough to run the entire world, 100%, on just solar, with a transition period where you let some of the existing capital equipment wear out. But the storage costs are about 10 times what they need to be to even store power briefly. You obviously can’t afford to have weeks or months worth of battery storage, it would be too expensive.
So, logically, I arrived at my proposed synthetic fuel discussion. But I’ve been calling you bad, snide names because we can’t even have a discussion until you acknowledge basic reality, which is that the production problem is basically solved, it’s a storage problem.
Pumped hydro is great but there is limited capacity. And of course dams cause their own problems with the enviros. Chemical are also much easier to move over large distances than electrons.
It is. Hugely so. I thought this as well. But there’s a major point you are missing.
If you synthesize methane, the energy density of it, especially liquid methane, is enormous. Only a little worse than gasoline or diesel. You can pump it into underground storage depots that essentially are the same natural gas wells we long ago drained dry of the same methane.
So this lets you bank energy against a future shortfall, an enormous amount of that energy. It costs you all but maybe 10% of the energy at best, from the original solar joules - plus the machinery to do all the electrolysis and gas compression and CO2 gathering - but you can synthesize and store enough methane to supply all of the world’s energy for a year or more.
The problem with things like pumping water upstream is that you run out of water or lake space. Same with every other method you can name.
But at that sort of efficiency, you’ll have to increase the solar panel area by at least an order of magnitude for the same usable yield - so sure, you don’t need to seize land for an artificial lake, you need to seize much more land for your solar farms.
Not true, either. The key point you’re missing is that the conditions under which you need this extra energy happen only a small percentage of the time. 3-5% or so. And you put the extra panels required in the optimal desert biomes, since fuel is transportable. Europe would stick theirs in the Sahara and move the fuel by LNG tanker to ports where it is needed. The USA would probably put theirs in the deserts of Arizona/New Mexico, and move the fuel by the existing network of pipelines. And so on.
The panels are twice as productive in those biomes, so it ends up being something like 5100.5, or 25% more total panels needed.
Interesting … just seven years before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, nuclear fission was strictly fringe science, only wack-o’s thought a uranium atom could emit anything heavier than an alpha particle … less than ten years to develop the technologies to send people, props and cameras to the Moon’s surface to film the fake landings …
So the OP’s conjecture that we could be 100% renewable energy in 30 years is certainly possible … until recently all my electric power was 100% renewable and at 7.5¢ per kW-hr … but it just so happens that it’s very windy exactly where the BPA’s main trunk line from the Columbia River to California lies … the pilot solar farm at Hanford worked well enough that we’re a go for scaling up …
Perhaps the OP could explain better how he’s reducing carbon into ethanol … other than letting plants do this (c.f. Brazil’s energy policies) …
To get methanol, you do this reaction in reverse. You get the CO2 from the atmosphere, and hydrogen from water. You get the energy from solar PV panels, of course. Technically it would be more efficient with a hybrid system, where you concentrate sunlight onto the methanol reformer to provide the heat to do this directly, instead of converting to electricity then heat again. But solar thermal plants require a lot of planning and hand assembly, while solar PV plants can be installed with minimal skill and labor if packaged correctly. (not as raw panels, but as complete assemblies)
The concept is that during the day, when demand for electricity is less than production, you shunt the excess electricity into making the hydrogen through electrolysis. The hydrogen gets buffered in tanks and run through either a Sabatier reactor or methanol reformer, giving you methane and methanol. You can then store it in vast tanks, pipeline, etc, and reuse some of the capital equipment and pipelines and such we have today for doing all this.
Re: CO2 to MeOH, I don’t think anyone has mentioned that there is a plant that already does this in Iceland. However, they use a concentrated CO2 stream from their geothermal steam.
That’s the beauty of electricity. It’s portable. As is liquefied methane.
The solar cells can be installed where it make sense for them: a desert. The methane converters can be installed where it makes sense for them: the sea shore. The methane storage and the power plants that consume it can be sited where it makes sense for them: places with suitable geology & cheap land. Once we can generate far more power than we need at a low enough price the transmission and conversion losses become footnotes in the financials rather than show-stoppers.
Whereas, as you say, the need for vast supplies of water in deserts would be a showstopper.
Overall SamualA, the pushback comes from your triumphalist POV that since it is physically possible, it will be trivially doable, so it’s therefore inevitable. Soon. At slight cost. You’ve toned that back some since the OP, but it still shines through loud and clear.
Sending men to the moon is possible too. Has been demonstrably so for almost 50 years now. That it isn’t happening routinely today demonstrates that the physics working is a necessary condition, but far from a sufficient one. In fact, it’s barely WAG 1% of the sufficient conditions of economics, politics, etc. Moving the mountain of installed capital and installed human inertia is the hard part.
Economic decisions made by individuals can shift at lightning speed. Shall I buy a Android or an IPhone? Shop at Walmart or Amazon? Conversely, economic decisions made by governments and corporations spanning large fractions of the economy, the tax infrastructure, and great whacking tracts of land cannot, and will not, happen quickly. It’s an error to generalize from the former to the latter.
Did you read the article? Seriously, you are using a low ball bid by a Chinese consortium that is almost certainly heavily subsidized by the CCP (probably part of the one road one belt vision) as proof that solar is the cheapest and best energy production method and it’s just building automation holding it back?
Tell you what…in 5 years re-open this thread. Then you can come back in and show me how mass-produced Chinese solar has gone from where solar is today to a large percentage of the total power generated globally. I’ll be thrilled if that is the case.
This gets back into the questions you refused to answer, so rather than go there I’ll just say that, looking at the price of a 2018 Chevy Volt, it’s STILL over $30k, which was what your second article said they were trying to drop below. I know you don’t want to deal with this, but think about how many electric cars Chevy (and Tesla and all the rest) are planning to produce. In China, the government has made a huge investment in electric infrastructure in almost all of the major cities (charging stations and the like)…and how many electric cars are on the roads in China? In Europe it’s similar…how many are on the roads there? And what’s the rate at which new ones are being built or projected to be built? But even if you were to magically switch over all current car production from ICE to the full-on battery (leaving aside the performance downgrade issues that would entail), it would take you over 20 years, flat out, to just replace all of the current cars on the road. And this is assuming you could ramp up mine production to the point where you could actually provide the materials needed to build 60 million new AEV cars a year, which is doubtful. The mining system is straining today, and that’s without projects to large numbers of electric vehicles or storage systems.
Only because you are handwaving away all of the problems with production with cherry picked data that you are using to try and demonstrate that ‘production costs are already low enough to run the entire world’. Still, I concede that storage would be a huge issue to solve as well.
That said, there are other methods of storage you might want to consider. One I mentioned in the other solar power thread in GD is using mountains as pressure vessels. Basically, your solar runs compressors during the day with it’s excess, and at night you use that pressure to run turbines for power. There is a group in Europe looking into this, and what little I saw on it was fairly promising. You could do something similar with gravity fed water pumps or other such methods.
For cars, you could go for hydrogen fuel cells instead of batteries (be cheaper as well, though you’d have to build the infrastructure to support it and figure out some serious engineering challenges with storage)…use your solar (or whatever) extra capacity to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen and use that to power your vehicles.
This would also solve the issue of performance, as hydrogen-powered vehicles tend to have more similar performance and fueling characteristics to the current gas and diesel powered ones.
Well, IMHO you have handwaved and cherry picked your way to this point, so I don’t think we can have any sort of discussion until you bother to look at that reality stuff.
Look at that hockey stick graph there. How does the shape of this curve fit within your hypothesis? No doubt you’ll point out that the totals are still around 1% of global energy…but with this kind of power law growth, that won’t last for very long. Solar is the cheapest form of energy generation in the entire world, except for hydro, and hydro is a geography limited resource.
It’s not very portable over long distances. There’s a reason why we bring fuel to power plants rather than sitting them To the well or mine. Even HVDC loses about 3% per 1000 km IIRC. Whereas the entire natural gas transmission and distribution system loses only 3%. LNG is nonstarter where gas pipes are an option, which is why it’s only used for cross-water transmission.
Wont happen until all the natural resources of the world are depleted. The Middle East will never all the world to give up using oil. Too much of an influence to all human governments unless they have their own.
Are there any studies on when the mid east oil will run out?
There is just too much outside influence on congress to do anything that would make sense for the rest of us peons they (lawmakers) consider we are.
The problem is we aren’t going to run out before we ruin trillions of dollars of the world’s real estate. See an article on it here.
It turns out that without any more exploration, energy companies have already found more extractable hydrocarbons in the ground than are needed to blow past the Paris climate agreement and cause permanent changes to the climate of the entire world. You know, enough to flood Florida and Bangladesh, make real estate in Siberia and Canada much more habitable, make certain desert and equatorial regions less habitable : not the end of life on earth, just a huge inconvenience that will cost trillions of dollars in lost land value, etc. Also, probably millions of deaths in the poorest nations.