Economists : Any models / predictions of the economic world after fossil fuels?

In My Humble Opinion
41

In a different discussion there was a poster that linked to a Youtube channel of engineering claiming that the price for the changes to apply solar power in the US were too massive just for California, then MIT showed that for a similar amount the changes could be made for the whole of the US. The amount was big but not impossible to achieve, if we had only looked at the ones that claim to have it about right then inaction follows.

As for grid storage, the progress is clear:

Of course as the latest MIT report pointed out, government support and developments from the manufacturing sector are needed.

42

There’s a massive battery storage in Australia (and similar projects underway in the USA). Apparently the major use in Australia is to smooth out the supply situation. It has already limited the abiltity of local companies to pull an Enron - deliberately or through accidents. It fills in for the grid almost instantaneously when the demand exceeds supply or supply drops, thus limiting the variability of demand pricing.

Doing a quick check on my household power use, for example - during a peak month like January, I would use about 600M^3 of natural gas. To replace that with electricity, if my math still works, would be about 192kWh a day, which means about 32A continuous. This is doable, but strains the capability of a 100A (240V) supply.

I would think the house of the future will need that all the main power draws communicate with each other - That the controller for the house be able to say “Freezer, you’re still below optimum, you can wait while the house heats.” Or even go the other extreme, to slightly overheat the house or the hot water tank so as to allow the furnace or tank to shut off while other appliances take their turn.

This in turn would require smart appliances, so the majority of today’s appliances would need smart interactive controllers. This works for the furnace and air conditioner, it has an external thermostat which can be replaces with something smarter. My fridge, freezer, hot water heater, oven, etc. have no such smarts. This would suggest a decent number of appliances will need replacing in order to accommodate electric heating on a limited supply.

Several quibbles: this does nothing for the distribution system, which I assume is sized for average high load, not for one where everyone draws close to maximum. All the distribution transformers may need replacing. Some things, like cooking, cannot be postponed, forcing the system to adapt by turning off other appliances. Perhaps things like a Tesla Powerwall (14kWh battery) would be standard for the higher end consumers to smooth these supply issues.

So the economy will have a surge in appliance manufacturing, batteries, old appliance recycling, house control systems. etc. thus accelerating our trip into the micromanaged world of connected computer control and monitoring of everything - also exacerbating the divide between the technologically advanced countries and those still developing.

43

No, it’s not. That headline, in fact, is a good example of how to lie with statistics. It doesn’t matter if grid storage has tripled, if the raw amount we are talking about is still utterly trivial.

Note that they are talking about POWER capacity (MW), and not storage capacity (Measured in power over time). This reflects the fact that the large majority of the battery capacity we have is used for either instantaneous load-following or for arbitrage (storing energy for short periods so you can transllate the energy from off-peak to peak times to save money).

According to the EIA, in 2019 the U.S. had about 1.688 GWh of storage capacity, and a direct delivery power capacity of 1.022GW. So let’s scale that up in the same ratio as your latest numbers, which are 4.6 GW, then the US today has about 7.64 GWh of grid storage. How much is that?

Well, let’s take just one power station - the Indian Point nuclear power station that was recently closed. Let’s say we replace trhat power with wind and solar, and we decide we need two weks of battery storage to safely do so and not risk blackouts when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

Indian point could produce about 2 GW of power, with a capacity factor of over 99%. let’s call it 100%. That means in 24 houtrs it would produce 48GWh of energy. A two-week backup battery that could cover for 2 GW of solar and wind when it’s not producing would therefore require 672 GWh of storage.

All the storage capacity currently in the U.S. would only be able to back up one 2 GW power plant for 3.82 hours before it’s completely depleted.

In 2021, the U.S. used 3,871 TWh of electricity. That’s about 440 GW per hour.

So, all the battery storage the US has built to date could store just over 1 minute of US electrical production. If you got rid of all fossil fuels and nuclear and tried to run the grid on intermittent sources, to get a 2-week backup of all that you will need to multiply the current amount by a factor of 525,600.

World battery production is about 250 GWh per year. Elon Musk says his new battery factory will produce about that much, so let’s double it. 500 GWh per year. How long will it take to build out that grid storage if we double battery manufacturing capacity and devote every battery to grid storage? Well, that number is close to about one hour of grid storage.

So, if we double annual battery production it will only take 8,760 years to get 2 weeks of backup storage for the grid.

Now, we can cut that down by removing power used by hydro, and we can cut the storage down to a week if you want (although there are plenty of periods longer than that where wind and solar produce very little). Maybe we can even do a little better with a high frequency DC grid that could pump power around the country with low losses. Maybe we only need a total of a few days’ power for backup. Feel free to cut the estimate by a factor of ten if you want - now we only need 876 years at double our current production rates and devoted all world battery production to American grid storage.

This is clearly not feasible. We aren’t going to be replacing baseload power with grid scale batteries. Not now, not ever. There are other options such as pumped storage of water, but they can’t come even close to making up the slack.

This all gets worse when we add another 20% or so of load to the electrical grid from the ‘beautiful transition’ to electric cars. And we haven’t talked about getting rid of natural gas heating.

This is why the only solution to global warming MUST include substantial nuclear power. Not just a new plant here or there, but production of hundreds of new nuclear plants. The sooner we get started, the better for the planet. The longer we dick around with half-solutions and blind alleys that match our political preferences but don’t match reality, the worse it’s going to get.

44

Lots of other options too. I recently worked on a conceptual study for storing renewable Hydrogen in salt caverns. Please note that salt caverns are already used to store Natural Gas and Natural Gas Liquids all over the world.

The idea is to convert renewable energy (wind and solar) into hydrogen by electrolysis and store them in salt caverns at high pressures (2000+ psi).

That hydrogen is then converted to power using fuel cells and/or gas turbines when solar/wind are not available.

Hydrogen storage underground in caverns is already a reality https://www.airliquide.com/sites/airliquide.com/files/2017/01/03/usa-air-liquide-operates-the_world-s-largest-hydrogen-storage-facility.pdf

In another idea, compressed air is stored in salt caverns in place of hydrogen. Energy from compressed air is recovered using turbo expanders.

I work in the renewables area and there are many such technologies in different states of maturity.

New energy generation shy away from Nuclear because of many reasons like they have to be big, nobody really knows the Carbon footprint of Nuclear (1) (it is kept under wraps) , nuclear fuels may not be as plentiful as portrayed, etc etc

(1) — the Carbon footprint of mining and concentrating nuclear fuels is kept under wraps. While it is true that nuclear power plants do not make CO2, the process of making nuclear fuels is energy intensive and water polluting.

45

And we can discount the rest because I implied what was still needed when I pointed that more progress should be made with the help of government and industry. Instead of straw-manning, the info is better coming from the MIT report already linked to. That there is a lot to do does not equal “let’s not do that.”

46

One argument against expanded civilian nuclear energy is that half the fuel used in the US in 2021 came from Kazakhstan or Russia. Plus it takes a ridiculously long time for new plants to come online. And we in the US still haven’t figured out where to store nuclear waste.

47

There are plenty of ideas in very early stages of exploration. But I was under the impression that we are supposed to be getting rid of fossil fuels starting now, and urgency matters. Lots of jurisdictions are shutting down baseload power NOW. indian Point has no replscement, for examp;e. Germany is shutting down 4 GW of nuclear and replacing it with 1 GW of coal. That’s a terrible result that comes from not taking planning for an intermittent grid seriously.

These pilot projects of various storage techniques are all fine, but none of them present a feasible grid storage solution that could be implemented at scale within the next 20 years. I don’t think most people have a sense of the gargantuan scale of the energy system. If we hsd a fully-tested, feasible and inexpensive energy storage concept today, it would still take decades to implement it. And all of the current studies have issues that we do not have decent solutions for as yet.

For example, Hydrogen electrolysis is extremely energy expensive. Hydrogen gas is very hard to contain as the molecule squeezes through just about anything. It also causes steel embrittlement, making transport difficult.

Maybe these problems can be solved, but we aren’t going to be filling enough caverns with hydrogen to back up the grid in any time that is likely to be implemented in current global warming mitigation plans.

You cannot shut down your current energy system on a hope that you’ll figure out something to replace it with, or in hope that you won’t run into any long periods of power interruption. Germany did that, and look where they are. We have to be smarter than this, or we will kill millions of people.

48

‘The Rest’ is just MATH. Anyone can do it. Actually, it’s not even math - it’s grade school arithmetic. The EIA was the source for all the raw numbers. You dismiss all that because your report says, “We need government and industry to help”. My point is that it doesn’t matter how much help you get, you will not be replacing baseload power with grid battery storage. I don’t care if you get the governments of the entire world to help. And we didn’t even touch on how many new lithium mines you’d have to open, or how many other raw materials you’d have to mine and process to do it.

It’s a funny world where actually doing the math is ‘straw manning’, while hand-waving away a massive problem by saying, “we need government and industry to help” is some sort of reasonable response.

49

It was straw-maning because I was not saying that, in fact as I referred to the MIT study, the clear implication was that there is a lot to be done, so you were wrong in your attack. so meh.

What it looks again is that the argument from you is that ‘hard to do equals “lets not do that”’. A lot of the solutions in any case do require a lot to be done and as the researchers at MIT reported (and that team included engineers BTW), there are reasons to be optimistic about what it can be done. (Of course this then is a time to remind many that me and experts pointed out more than a decade ago that it was going to become more expensive the longer we waited to stop CO2 emissions.)

Oh, and I did touch on the options to lithium batteries, now that was more than hand-waved, it was ignored to then make a silly point about others not “touching” that.

50

Far more ideas that have already been implemented and are working successfully :slight_smile:

Here is a list of PEM electrolyzers in the US
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/us-hydrogen-electrolyzer-locations-and-capacity

Far bigger Alkali electrolyzers are also in operation. Please google Neom.

Here is a list of Hydrogen projects worldwide coming online or already operational :slight_smile:

California already has the Mirai hydrogen car. Hydrogen trucking is moving fast too.

Most Amazon, Homedepot, … warehouses have already moved to hydrogen .

Hydrogen electrolysis is not at all expensive. It is 50+ year old technology. Water has been electrolyzed since there was submarines. Hydrogen has been made by electrolyzing water from hydropower - these were the first 70 years + old ammonia plants making ammonia fertilizer.

Hydrogen embrittlement is very well understood and metallurgies to mitigate are cheap and plenty.

There is a 600 mile long Hydrogen pipeline from Airproducts for more than 40 years now that spans from Texas to Louisiana

51

What about the idea of using plugged-in electric vehicles as an energy source? So that if overnight a small amount of electricity is needed to balance demand, it can be obtained over thousands of plugged-in cars. People would have to agree that a small percentage of their battery storage could be used for this, perhaps in exchange for lower charging rates.

52

The way Industrial contracts are setup, most industries pay for the peak rate. Lets say there is a 1 month contract, and the contract will go something like 5c a kWh if your peak rate is 1MW, 7c a kWh if your peak rate is 2 MW, and 15c a kWh if your peak rate is 5 MW. If you go to 5MW, then the entire month’s usage is charged at the 15c rate - not just the few hours you run at 5MW. There is a lot of money riding on the peak rate for the power company.

The power company puts in the needed infrastructure for the 5MW rate. Now they guarantee that power will be available even at the 5 MW level. Plug in cars may not be able to guarantee that - and hence the power companies cannot rely on them.

53

Electric cars can be part of the solution - not so much for grid storage, but for personal mitigation if the grid becomes unreliable. A transfer switch and an 87 kwh battery can keep your house going for a few days if the grid goes down. So electric car batteries are a good way to add resiliency.

However, there’s not nearly enough energy in those batteries to be useful as real grid storage for a long-term event that kills both wind and solar for a long string of days. And those events are quite common. See my math above for how much grid storage an entire year’s production of car batteries would give you.

Also, in a giant storm or disaster that shuts down wind and solar, do you really want to bleed energy out of the transportation system needed for people to evacuate? One of the risks of an all-electric energy system is loss of redundancy and diversity. We need to avoid cascading failure modes.

54

Now this was also pointed out many times in the past, there were concessions made ages ago in treaties and protocols.

It was pointed then that we can’t go cold turkey. Pressing the idea that proponents of change wanted us to go back to the stone age (or that proponents of change wanted to do the whole shebang now) are very old arguments to discourage the actual step-by-step changes that are/were actually proposed.

55

IMHO:

  1. Cars are usually charging overnight, not during the day. That would need to change for this to work well.
  2. Current batteries can only be recharged so many times before degrading, and this would hasten their death. I believe that recharging chemistry can have weird effects on the health of the battery when you’re always depleting/recharging to the same place. The willingness of people to sign up for this would depend on the specifics of the battery technology and how expensive it is to replace.
  3. Likewise, the system would need to not drain your car just before you want to use it. In the morning, my car still needs to be able to get to work - before the sun has fully lit up the solar plants. So the total amount of capacity is probably, really, only a few percentage points of everything stored in cars.
  4. There’s a fairly non-negligible amount of power loss over cables between the power plants and the power station. To efficiently use car power, you would probably want to use it directly against your house/apartment complex, not send it back to the central station. That would probably require some fancy technology in the car itself but - again - you’d be limited to just using a few percentage points of the car’s capacity since you still want to be able to climb into it and drive somewhere. It’s not the same big, juicy block of lithium storage as a Tesla Power Wall that has nothing else to do but suck in as much power as it can and let it all go before 5am the next morning.
56

But taking a few percentage points of power from the thousands of EVs in an area might be enough to meet a spike in demand, perhaps enough not to need to bring a power plant online?

57

I’m not sure how much 5% of a Tesla battery compares to, say, the power use of a washing machine through a full wash load.

I do suspect, though, that a Tesla Power Wall is the size that it is for a reason and that if it could be 5% of the current size and still be useful, then they’d sell one that size.

58

I’m talking about five percent (or whatever amount) from multiple vehicles to smooth the demand in a particular area. So much more than five percent of a single Power Wall.

59

You know that the world bank report is based on achieving net zero by 2100? Are you okay with that? Our idiot-in-chief in Canada is demanding that we hit net zero by 2050. Is that not the plan any more?

The actual source document for that one-page glurge of handwaving is not available right now, so I can’t see their numbers. But sentences like “improving energy efficieny lowers demand” (nope), and “To reach zero net emissions before the end of this century, the global economy needs to be overhauled.” do not give me the warm fuzzies. They also talk about ‘designing cities for mass transit’. Sorry, our cities are already ‘designed’. We aren’t going to be tearing them down and making new ones in any time frame that would be useful.

If your plan requires ‘overhauling the global economy’, prepare for failure because that isn’t going to happen. Whatever solutions we come up with are going to have to fit into the political and economic structures we have today. A new global planned economy is not only infeasible, but attempting it will cause massive destruction and enough civil unrest to topple governments. That’s already happening, even with the relatively mild changes that have already taken place.

The rest of the document is handwaving glurge. No details as tomhow any of this stuff is supposed to happen.

Their big three points:

  1. Plan for the future.
  2. Get prices right.
  3. Ease the transition

So, long term industrial planning that involves remaking the entire global economy, ‘getting prices right’ when prices are emergent and out of their control, and ‘ease the transition’ which looks like they want a giant wealth transfer to poor people and/or a UBI. Is that about right? And we’re going to wait to 2100 to achieve net zero?

To many people, this is going to look like a plan for globally managed socialism and a giant power grab by global elites, not a serious plan to tackle climate change.

60

Here is a power demand curve for a mid-Atlantic region from a decade or so back :

As you can see that the power load can be more than double on hot days compared to “normal days”. Moreover the peak demand occurs in the afternoon when most cars are not at home.

Furthermore there are very few EV cars to even make a small dent in this.