The Environment

[RedDenver]

 

[RedDenver]

 

[teachercd]

14 hours ago, RedDenver said:

 

Uggg, the New Zealand Times???  That paper totally leans __________.  Ha

[Moiraine]

My guess is some jerk climate scientist time traveled back to 1912 to plant this to lend weight to the lie.

[RedDenver]

1 hour ago, Moiraine said:

My guess is some jerk climate scientist time traveled back to 1912 to plant this to lend weight to the lie.

Damn that Dr. Emmett Brown!!

[RedDenver]

 

[RedDenver]

46 minutes ago, 4skers89 said:

It looks like MIT is throwing some reality into the battery storage issue which is surprising given how science has become ruled by politics.  

http://technologyreview.com/2018/07/27/141282/the-25-trillion-reason-we-cant-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/

It's vox but:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/8/9/20767886/renewable-energy-storage-cost-electricity

Moving the conversation to this thread. I'll read that paper when I've got some time.

[RedDenver]

5 hours ago, 4skers89 said:

It looks like MIT is throwing some reality into the battery storage issue which is surprising given how science has become ruled by politics.  

http://technologyreview.com/2018/07/27/141282/the-25-trillion-reason-we-cant-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/

It's vox but:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/8/9/20767886/renewable-energy-storage-cost-electricity

The Vox article sums up the paper pretty well, and the paper actually supports my point. Grid storage batteries are already commercially available for $156/kWh, so we can replace 95% of the existing grid with just wind/PV plus batteries available today. In fact we can probably do better than 95% since we can use other technologies like high voltage DC interconnects and load dispatching. From the article:

Quote

 

Trancik’s team found that if the EAF target is lowered from 100 to 95 percent, the cost target that storage must hit rises to $150/kWh. (More specifically, lowering the EAF reduced the total cost of energy storage by 25 percent for the first tier of storage technologies and 48 percent for the second tier.) That’s a much more tractable number, within reach of existing technologies.

 

Why does lowering the EAF so little ease the pressure on storage so much? The explanation is in those rare meteorological events of extended low wind and sun. They don’t happen often over a 20-year span, but building enough storage to deal with them when they do happen makes the last few percent of EAF exponentially more expensive. To lower the EAF to 95 percent is to say, “something else can handle those rare events.” (As to what that something might be, we’ll discuss that later.)

 

Second, remember, the team is modeling a system in which storage is doing almost all the flexibility work. In fact, there are other sources of grid flexibility. My favorite candidate for flexibility dark horse is “load flexibility,” demand-side programs that can shift energy consumption around in time. Another source of flexibility is enhanced long-distance transmission, to carry renewable energy from regions that produce it to regions that need it. Another is dispatchable renewables like run-of-the-river hydro and advanced geothermal.

 

 

[4skers89]

19 minutes ago, RedDenver said:

The Vox article sums up the paper pretty well, and the paper actually supports my point. Grid storage batteries are already commercially available for $156/kWh, so we can replace 95% of the existing grid with just wind/PV plus batteries available today. In fact we can probably do better than 95% since we can use other technologies like high voltage DC interconnects and load dispatching. From the article:

 

I just don't see it.  These batteries are the same damn batteries in a cell phone which I don't get more than a few years from.  Are these batteries recyclable?  I remember reading that lithium is actually not that abundant and couldn't possibly supply the needs for BESS and electric cars.  As with all things I believe the market should decide these things.  If climate change is to be subsidized, all technologies should be subsidized equally.  Also, all products should be made in US.  It would be incredibly stupid to use taxpayer money to subsidize green projects made in China.

Quote

But there’s a problem with this rosy scenario. These batteries are far too expensive and don’t last nearly long enough, limiting the role they can play on the grid, experts say. If we plan to rely on them for massive amounts of storage as more renewables come online—rather than turning to a broader mix of low-carbon sources like nuclear and natural gas with carbon capture technology—we could be headed down a dangerously unaffordable path.

 

[RedDenver]

21 hours ago, 4skers89 said:

I just don't see it.  These batteries are the same damn batteries in a cell phone which I don't get more than a few years from.

They are not the same. "Lithium ion batteries" is a broad category with thousands of different chemistries, compositions, structures, etc. Also, how the batteries are managed makes a giant difference in how long they last. People only use cell phones for a few years on average, so the manufacturers can cut costs by designing the battery systems to only last about that long.

 

For a real world example, Tesla has cars with batteries that have lasted 300,000-500,000 miles.

 

Quote

Are these batteries recyclable?

Yes. In fact not only can the batteries be recycled at end of life, but before that can be used as stationary energy storage after they no longer have enough capacity for use in a vehicle. For example, typical battery capacity in current EV's is about 75 kWh. A typical american household uses about 30 kWh per day in electricity. So even if a EV battery has lost 50% of it's capacity (Tesla's are around 20-25% loss at EOL of the vehicle), it would still have 37.5 kWh of storage capacity, which is more than an average house needs for an entire day.

 

Quote

I remember reading that lithium is actually not that abundant and couldn't possibly supply the needs for BESS and electric cars.

There's around 15 million metric tons of known lithium reserves worldwide. Current EV batteries take about 1 metric ton of lithium to make 100 cars. If we don't find other sources of lithium, then we could make roughly enough car-sized batteries for 1.5 billion cars. There are roughly 1 billion vehicles on earth.

 

So we'd either need to find more lithium reserves or find something other than lithium to use in batteries. Both are possible. There's a way to get lithium out of seawater, which would give us another 230 billion metric tons of reserve - way more than we need for BESS and EV's. There are also a number of potential alternatives for lithium.

 

Quote

As with all things I believe the market should decide these things.  If climate change is to be subsidized, all technologies should be subsidized equally.  Also, all products should be made in US.  It would be incredibly stupid to use taxpayer money to subsidize green projects made in China.

I don't think the market should decide all things, but I agree with the rest. We should stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry as it's a mature technology that shouldn't need subsidies anymore. And we should invest in renewable technologies and require any company that uses subsidies for R&D, capital, operations, etc. should be restricted from operating outside the US.

[4skers89]

 

[funhusker]

6 minutes ago, 4skers89 said:

 

Granted, I've only watched it once about 2 months ago.  But what are your thoughts?

 

This doc (as i remember) basically says we're screwed unless we control the population.  Is that what you think?

[RedDenver]

7 minutes ago, 4skers89 said:

 

This movie has been widely discredited.

Planet Of The Humans: One Moore Rebuttal To Widely Debunked Anti-Renewables Documentary

Quote

 

The recent documentary “Planet of the Humans,” produced by Michael Moore, has generated an incredible number of fact checks and debunkings. Scientists, journalists, activists, energy experts, and even another documentary filmmaker have published debunkings (see below for links to over 30 other critiques.) Meanwhile, the fossil-fuel funded climate denial network has praised it, with one former tobacco lawyer-turned climate denier saying that “my friends and I have been saying these things for years about renewable energy.”

 

With dozens of published pieces identifying so many errors in the documentary, it can be overwhelming to sift through. But the basics are simple. The movie includes three core claims: that renewable energy sources aren’t any better than fossil fuels (they are!), that the environmental movement has sold out to those energy interests (they haven’t!), and that the real problem is population growth (it’s not!). These arguments are not only outdated in some cases and plainly false in others, but the idea that there are simply too many people on the planet is a fundamentally racist and dangerous misanthropic myth.

 

 

[4skers89]

6 minutes ago, funhusker said:

Granted, I've only watched it once about 2 months ago.  But what are your thoughts?

 

This doc (as i remember) basically says we're screwed unless we control the population.  Is that what you think?

The film was interesting because of what the guy found out about solar, wind and how biofuel plants are the thing now.  If you look at the equation for CO2 emissions, it uses energy unit per person, CO2 per energy unit, etc... but the first term is P (population) so it's hard to ignore if climate change theory is to be believed.  I do think there is a lot of groupthink on global warming and one prominent environmentalist has came out and apologized for his role in creating the hysteria. Activists say global warming is backed up by SCIENCE which means people created a bunch of models.  COVID is a good example of the reliability of models.  I almost went to graduate school under a professor whose decades worth of work was discredited due to a mathematical error in his early papers.  That was a far more rigorous field that could be backed up by math, climate SCIENCE is not.  Recently Al Gore made a comment about the ozone hole scare being a trial run for global warming.  That was a blast from the past and people started asking whatever happened to the ozone hole?  Turns out it hadn't really changed and they suspect countries (China) are still using the old freon.  Trump was right to pull out of the Paris agreement.  All countries should be held to the same standards since it's a global problem. If all countries can't abide by the same standards then it must not be that big of an issue.  Alarm bells go off when activists contend that wealth redistribution is necessary to solve climate change.  We need to dial back the hysteria and consider the options.  Activists tend to advocate the most difficult and painful solutions and like most on the left, are historically wrong.  I'm a proponent of nuclear energy which solves the problem.  I think that's a good test for activists.  If they reject a reasonable solution then maybe climate change isn't that severe. The problem with population control is something you hear anytime you watch the news- economy grew by ... which means either population grew or consumption increased.  Some countries use immigration as a lazy way to grow their economy.  If economies aren't growing, neither are investments, on average.  I'm a conservative and there is a finite amount of fossil fuels which are irreplaceable in construction, farm and large transportation equipment.  If there is a reasonable way to conserve fossil fuel with an alternate power source for cars and trucks then I'm all for it.  The alternative needs to be honestly evaluated and all factors considered.  I think the film made the point about solar when you figured out the amount of energy required to produce them you might as well just used the conventional energy in the first place.  It's kind of like recycling.  It doesn't conserve resources when all things are considered and it's only benefit being it makes people feel better since they believe they are doing something good.

[RedDenver]

9 hours ago, 4skers89 said:

The film was interesting because of what the guy found out about solar, wind and how biofuel plants are the thing now.  If you look at the equation for CO2 emissions, it uses energy unit per person, CO2 per energy unit, etc... but the first term is P (population) so it's hard to ignore if climate change theory is to be believed. 

 

Activists say global warming is backed up by SCIENCE which means people created a bunch of models.  COVID is a good example of the reliability of models.

Amazing that you managed to both put forth how population matters based on  a mathematical model for CO2 emissions and implied models are worthless in the same post.