Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sat Apr 18, 2020 12:47 pm
A couple of years working in a petroleum lab taught me one very important lesson: 99.9% of the population has
no idea what is entailed in saying things like "zero emissions by 2xxx!" The initial buy-in is huge.
A bit like you, I work in the energy industry, although a bit downstream of extraction. Over the last decade plus I've done all kinds of work in power, gas and renewables - I started out writing schedulers for thermal power stations, and branched out from there. I spent a while doing financial optimisation of windfarm designs and layouts, a while on energy storage projects, a while doing simulations of the future European transmission network etc. And as you say, people have no idea. I've seem so much wrong-headed thinking out there - a particular bad example that springs to mind is a report that Poyry did for Greenpeace many years ago which claimed that going green was cheap and easy on the basis of simplistic LCoE (levelised cost of energy) numbers, completely ignoring the absolutely massive immediate capital investment that would be paid back of 30 - 50 years (the lifetime of many of the assets in question). In the power industry, changing the fuel mix significantly over a decade or two is incredibly fast, not slow.
If you built a solar plant large enough to power the world for the same cost per annual kilowatt hour as solar plants in the US, it would cost $325 trillion (about 44 months of global GDP). And that doesn't include the cost of the batteries or the extra capacity needed to account for energy loss in the batteries (scaling up will probably lower costs, but remember large solar plants are only about 15% cheaper to build than home installations, so don't expect magically low numbers).
Batteries don't solve this problem for most of the world. They are not designed to be cheap for low power, high energy applications like weekly or seasonal storage.
Maybe, in a very sunny location near the equator, adding a battery or two to a PV system does the job. But if you want reliable baseload power in Europe, you have to deal with the situations where there's no wind for a week in the winter. Unless you're lucky enough to have a tiny population and lots of hydro, like Sweden, that means one or more of three things:
1. Maintaining massive overcapacity in thermal power generation so that you can use to fill the gaps
2. Building massive overcapacity in renewables so that there's still enough power at very low load factors
3. Use of other storage technologies which can store more energy, but at the cost of lower cycle efficiencies (which means they're only economic to run if the value of the energy in is almost zero)
You also, as you mention, have massive problems with the grid. You need to invest to keep the grid stable: inertia, frequency response, etc. Currently thermal plant provides most of these services, but if you really want 100% green energy then you need alternative solutions.
And on top of that you need massive grid investment to allow other energy demands to be shifted to electricity. In the UK, homes consume much more energy in total in the form of gas (for heat) and fossil fuels (for transport) than they do electricity. The proposal to green these other sectors is primarily to electrify them: we should shift to electric vehicles, install heat pumps, etc.
This means that annual electricity transmission will have to increase to multiple times its current level. So not only do you need to build renewables to replace existing electricity demand, they must also feed new electricity demands, and you need to be able to transport all that energy that currently doesn't travel via the transmission and distribution networks. The current electricity grid was constructed over generations and is deeply embedded in other physical infrastructure: bits of it, especially at lower voltage levels, are buried in the ground, embedded in roads etc. The sheer amount of investment required to upgrade all of this is staggering.
The other choice is to surrender the goal of reliable power. This is the fundamental reason why governments are looking at smart meters, demand side response etc. The idea is simple: let's avoid paying for some of the backup capacity and grid upgrades by making demand match available supply instead of vice versa. This can either take the form of charging people more when there are supply problems ("smart" meters) or paying people to consume less when there are problems (demand side response). Typically smart meters are targeted at individual consumers, while DSM and interruptible supply contracts are targeted at businesses. There are two problems with this approach:
1. Cultural
The pricing required to make enough consumers pay attention to their smart meter and, for example, not run their dishwasher when the grid is stressed would be punitive, and severely politically unpopular. Energy pricing is already a big political issue - how big will it be when people are forced to sync their lives to the needs of the grid instead of vice versa?
2. Economic
In the industrialised world, most manufacturing and high energy industry is optimised to be high CAPEX, low OPEX. Investment is made to reduce variable operating costs, but this means that
you must run baseload to minimise CAPEX per unit output. As soon as you have to stop your process regularly, a massive amount of investment becomes stranded because you can't pay off your shiny factory designed for baseload production, unless you hike prices of course.
If you scale back natural gas production, or greatly increase the annual energy demand to build those photovoltaic panels, then you will increase the up-front costs of building those solar plants even more. Since solar panels require about 3.64 times as much energy to manufacture as they produce in a year, you couldn't expect to build solar capacity to 165 annual petawatt-hours in less than a generation without putting a serious strain on the existing grid.
I also truly believe that energy is a key, necessary but not sufficient input to economic growth. Economists talk a lot about innovation driving growth, but all physical processes require energy to take place. Efficiency can be increased, but only to a certain extent. When we talk about subsiding renewables, paying for backup capacity, upgrading the electrical grid, ... and all these other measures that will increase the total price of energy (either direct or indirect via taxation for subsidies), what we're really saying is that more energy and other resources will be redirected back into the energy supply system itself, leaving a lower net amount of gross production available for the rest of society. There's been a lot written by others on Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), but we're effectively lowering it, at least during the investment phase and probably permanently, which will have a lot of knock-on impacts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_re ... y_invested
