I think they overstate the case for clean energy being cheap. It is cheap because the costs of storage are externalized. If you don't have fossil fuel producers then suddenly you have to add a lot of storage into the mix, which is not cheap.
Of course, if it's doable in practice I'm all for it, and if clean energy is really as cheap as they claim, then we'll get there pretty soon just on economics.
This is something I don't think is fully understood by most people.
Most people think "clean energy is just about building solar panels" - it's viewed as this linear process. I think the media often present it this way.
But in fact, between us and a society run by clean energy is all sorts of huge technical hurdles we haven't solved yet. Adding 10,20% renewables is simple enough - but 100% renewables without daily blackouts is incredibly hard. We need many orders of magnitude more battery storage to get there (or some other storage technology).
It's the same for electric cars. The cost of electricity to run an electric car is small, so people assume that if everyone has an electric car, running costs will be low.
But currently electric cars are subsidised by fuel taxes, and low emissions vehicles are encouraged by low vehicle taxes. When every vehicle is low emission, we still need to get the cost of maintaining the roads from somewhere. And electric car charging at home works because only a handful of people do it. When every car on the road is plugged in every night the distribution networks to every street will need to be massively upgraded.
It's a problem because it means most people don't appreciate how far we have to go before a clean energy society is possible. We need to increase investment into this technology by an order of magnitude to have a hope of implementing before climate change has significant effects.
Charging at night isn't great for using solar power without storage. Ideally, we'd incentivize people to use their car's battery to store excess solar power during the day and smooth out the duck curve (perhaps slowly recharging again at night)
> The majority of the cost of road construction and maintenance comes from general taxes. Fuel taxes haven't paid the majority since the 80's.
My point isn't that fuel taxes pay the full costs of the road, but that electric cars in many countries receive favourable taxation (which significantly reduces the cost of ownership) which is only possible because they are a minority of vehicles.
This actually depends largely on the country you're in. In the UK (where I live) the effective tax rate on gas is around 68%, and there's lots of tax breaks for electric cars. The effective tax rate on electricity is 5%, and the cost per MJ of electricity and gas is about the same. Effectively the government tax revenue per mile of electric cars is drastically lower than that of gasoline cars - not a sustainable situation for widespread adoption.
It looks like the tax on gas in the US is significantly lower than in European countries, so the same situation probably doesn't exist to the same degree.
> electric cars generally charge at night and use about the same amount of power as an electric oven. Distribution network changes are not required.
Yes, average power consumption is quite low. In fact over a year the average car (if it was electric) would probably only consume a few hundred watts.
But that's not the problem. The problem is peak demand. A usable electric car charger draws 7kW for a sustained period of time. That's a very different use case (distributed across every house in the country) than currently.
Taking this study for example: "32% of low voltage (LV) feeders (312,000 circuits) will require intervention when 40% - 70% of customers have EVs, based on 3.5 kW (16 amp) charging."
http://myelectricavenue.info/
Bear in mind that's for 3.5kW charging, whereas anyone installing a charger today is putting in 7kW+ charging.
The only way to mitigate distribution network changes is by smart charging on the car side - basically reducing charging rate or times to spread the load. Fortunately that's fairly doable, but it's not necessarily a panacea - if there's a couple of days where many people do higher than average mileage (eg a national holiday) you could find that there's simply not enough capacity locally to sustain charging all the cars on the street.
The problem is that we need to be adopting electric cars _now_ to make a dent in emissions, but there's all these infrastructure problems (I haven't even mentioned on-street charging or long distance journeys...) that will become evident when we do. We need to be fixing them today. Claiming they don't exist is naive. Remember that there's just over 1 million electric cars on US roads today, out of 273 million vehicles. The infrastructure needs to grow by 2 orders of magnitude to support that.
It's not a big deal. Average american drives what 12,000 miles per year? Or 32 miles per day. My car (m3) has a 75kwh battery and has a range of 310 miles or so. So I need (on average) 10.3% of a battery charge or 7.75 kwh. Most people are home for 12 hours a night, so 650 watts. So sure peak might be 3.5-7kw, but the average car load will be much less.. 5-10x less. Keep in mind that the average car lasts 8 years (claims consumer reports), but seems like bad economy is causing that to head higher. So even if 10% of the cars per year switch to electric that's not really all that much power. Especially with wind, solar (both home and utility scale), battery storage (both home and utility), hydro, etc ramping up. The hardest thing for most grids to handle is peak loads on hot days where a fairly large fraction of home AC are running, now that's a load that makes charging an electric car look easy. E-cars by nature tend to balance the load and make the grid easier to design and maintain. Sure tax incentives for storage, wind, and solar should continue. California's SGIP program seems particularly effective. Solar+Storage solutions get a big break, and the grid can make do with less peaker plants because they can tap into residential installed power walls all over the state to handle the peaks that used to require spinning up the least efficient/most expenisve peaker plants.
> electric cars generally charge at night and use about the same amount of power as an electric oven.
That does not sound right. Napkin math: A tiny Renault Zoe has a 52kWh battery. Even assuming 100% charging efficiency, charging for 8 hours over night you’re looking at 52/8=6.5kW per hour. That’s already more than twice as much as an oven, and an extremely conservative approximation.
edit: thanks for pointing out what I missed. I was somehow fixated on full recharges.
Most cars don't need to be recharged fully every night, and don't need a full recharge in 8 hours. If you get home at 8pm and leave at 7pm, that's 4.7Kw/h for 0-100. (I checked my oven and it peaks at 4.5Kw out!)
A Zoe has a 245 mile range on said battery, but assuming you drive at 25% efficiency for 20 miles to and from work, you'll use about 30% of a zoe's battery in a day, which spread out over our 11 hours from earlier gives about 1.5Kw per hour.
- I charge about twice a week, overnight, from around 50% to 100%, if I drive to work every day
I have a relatively short commute to work. So this is may be a lower bound. But charging 52kWh every single day is definitely an extreme case on the other end.
Where I'm from, EVs typically charge at 10A-32A at 220V, or 7.4kW to 22kW with level 2 chargers. That means you can't charge a Tesla from 0% to 100% over night, but then I haven't heard of anyone who actually needs to do that every day, if ever. The closest I've done personally is charge a Tesla I borrowed from around 30% to 100% at a cabin, but then I started when we arrived in the afternoon and we left just before noon.
It's weird that you'd call a 52kWh Zoe tiny btw. 52kWh is quite respectable. It's only half of the largest EV you could possibly buy now, and I'm guessing 50-70kWh will be the standard mid/entry level battery size for a long time.
30-40kWh cars might disappear. That'd kind of be a shame, because it's a useful size for many people. And having a larger battery than you need is a huge waste unless you have vehicle-to-grid to get more value out of the battery capacity you're not using. But then again, maybe the 30-40kWh market will be taken over by second hand 50-60kWh cars with reduced capacity.
> 30-40kWh cars might disappear. That'd kind of be a shame, because it's a useful size for many people. And having a larger battery than you need is a huge waste unless you have vehicle-to-grid to get more value out of the battery capacity you're not using. But then again, maybe the 30-40kWh market will be taken over by second hand 50-60kWh cars with reduced capacity.
I am sad that there are so few good subcompact/ truly low energy options in this market. There is a tiny Chinese car coming to the US, but right now it seems like it's only going to hit a few markets.
The US is the only major market really lacking in this space. Asia and Europe already have a bunch of competitors in the "city car" space with a lot more on the drawing board. Almost none of those companies believe the US is interested in "city cars", if they have a US presence at all.
The American (genital) size contest for SUVs and Trucks has sucked a lot of oxygen out of what is a much more interesting variety in EV production for Asia and the EU.
Not sure of the range of the Zeo, but if you are burning 52kwh daily you are driving a ton. That's about 217 miles a day in my model 3, and with an average speed of 50 mph that's over 4 hours of driving.
Average drives do more like 12,000 a year, not 80k miles.
those 52kwh are a few hundred kilometers of driving. wouldn't assume that to be the daily norm. say you only do 30km, you only need to charge a fraction
100% renewable capacity is where Denmark sits right now, so it can be used as an small example. In good conditions they can operate exclusively on wind.
It actually a bit above 100% to the point where the price can go into negative during optimal conditions. This has put a damper on the enthusiasm for further expanding beyond 100%.
By my estimates, with land wind parks operating on an average ~30% capacity per year and ocean wind parks at around 60%, the average during a year is about half the energy grid generated from renewable and the rest from fossil fuels.
my pet peeve with people mentioning Denmark as the poster child of renewable energy is that has one absolutely enormous advantage - access to two large and stable electric grids to account for the variations and uncertainty of renewable energy.
The continental European grid is massive and Denmark has power lines to Germany, Sweden and Norway. The Nordic grid has massive amounts of hydro power.
Not every country has such access to allow them to go all-in on renewable energy.
The real poster-child for large-scale renewable integration is the UK.
Most importantly it can utilize 82 terawatt-hours of pumped hydroelectric energy storage in Norway. So energy storage is much cheaper than for most areas in the world.
If it gets cheap enough, you can overbuild, which can solve a lot of the problem. Solar only produces peak power for a couple hours, but it produces 50% of peak for up to half the day, and wind delivers 50% or more of peak pretty much around the clock.
Add in transmission lines & a functioning energy market, and demand will timeshift where it can, and whatever arbitrage opportunity finally remains can be met with either storage or curtailment & further overbuilding, whichever is cheaper.
It's not like we need to run the whole grid from storage at night.
Wind Turbines get mostly put on existing farm land (or out at sea? or are they clearing forest to put them up?
I also don't see why farmland and solar can't live side by side. mixed livestock farming and panels higher above the ground seems doable.
I'm sure it's possible to grow crops under solar panels too provided you're not blocking all the light. Google shows there are some studies on it I don't have time to read right now.
This ignores cost of course. but I'm arguing against the idea that we don't have the space.
By calculations, perfect rooftop coverage would produce up to 8% of total energy required. In Poland. The cost would be immense.
See, even with superb photovoltaics only single story homes have the right area to power use ratio to make sense to use solar as main power source.
These cause transportation problems that probably eat all the benefit...
> but 100% renewables without daily blackouts is incredibly hard.
Well, maybe we should just get accustomed to daily blackouts? I mean yeah, it's inconvenient, but so is being choked to death by pollution and staring down a global climate catastrophe. Besides, being accustomed to blackouts would make us better prepared for other causes of blackouts, like a chaos monkey for our power dependency. And to top it all off: people will need to find something to do when their power is out, like maybe go outside and see what we've been working so hard to destroy with our giant SUVs and whatnot.
Indeed it is difficult and requires massive investment.
Storage options include pumped hydro, a proven technology for long durations, and some analysis like that done by Australia's national science agency is already finding that: "wind, solar and storage technologies are by far the cheapest form of low carbon options for Australia, and are likely to dominate the global energy mix in coming decades." https://reneweconomy.com.au/new-csiro-aemo-study-confirms-wi...
100% renewable is not really required and I think it's not so bad to use some fossil gas on occasion. In the future it may actually be renewable-generated hydrogen.
For countries with more population and less land it'll be more difficult to find room for massive wind/solar so I certainly hope the challenges with next-generation nuclear get solved soon as well..
The answer is obvious, at least with our current 'clean energy' systems and their related costs. We would _all_ just need to use MUCH less energy. This of course would force major life style changes and industry output to be drastically reduced, not something most people and business are ready to accept at this time but the point is, there is a way, right now, with what we have but the terms are unacceptable to most.
What's fascinating about 2020 is that for the first time we can radically reduce our total energy usage (as you advocated) while keeping a nearly identical current lifestyle.
How? Electrical systems (e.g. cars/heat pumps etc.) are much more efficient than fossil fuel equivalents. An example, most new gas cars get ~30 mpg today, but a Tesla model 3 gets 141 mpge. So switching from a gas-powered car to a model 3 results in a 75% reduction in energy usage (as you advocate) with the identical ‘lifestyle’. [1]
This effect is found far more generally. Quoting from a detailed report [2] on how to decarbonize America, “One key aspect of electrification makes this transformation possible, and it represents perhaps the most astonishing finding in Griffith’s modeling: Large-scale electrification would slash total US primary energy demand in half, from around 100 quads to about 45-50. This a huge deal — it means America only needs to produce about half the energy with renewables that it is currently producing with fossil fuels.”
I strongly support, dense walkable cities and public transit, but for the first time in history we’ve separated the task of reducing energy usage from convincing most Americans to give up the lifestyle they’re used to. It’s incredibly promising news for the energy transition!
It could be mitigated by alternative infrastructure: better insulation and ventilation, for example passive housing.
Diminish need for air conditioning by adding blinds or other sun shades on the appropriate sides. Use air foils on cargo ships, making them follow trade winds and sea currents (trading polution for increased transit time (increase crew cost)).
Make people commute less (works for white collar jobs, but blue collar?).
Increase veganism.
Look into having agriculture require less chemicals through use of perennials or alternative varieties and crop rotations.
I don't know enough about other industries to do more than yell "electrify all the things" and mandate factories to use renewable electricity, put solar panels on the roof etc...
Unfortunately walls are the major way houses get hot. You could use something with big thermal capacity but it's expensive and heavy. AC or evaporative cooling cannot be avoided, but can be made more efficient.
Increased transit time for ships is from month to many months. Not worth it.
Veganism faces a big problem with water use.
Agriculture is being looked into all the time, but cheap always wins. We need to feed these billions of people somehow, and crop rotation won't do.
Mandating greenwashing is what we have now. The area to cover with renewables to power just a single smelter is huge.
> The area to cover with renewables to power just a single smelter is huge.
That would be an issue only if that prevented the land from being used for other things. Wind power generation doesn't prevent farming on the land or prevent fishing on the ocean. Solar can be deployed on rooftops or parking lots. Solar developments often support grazing animals underneath the solar panels.
The offshore wind farms I have seen photos of have the individual wind turbines packed too closely together to safely navigate a fishing boat between them.
Fish are not uniformly distributed, however, so the fishing impacts of offshore wind farms can probably be reduced by not installing wind farms in fishing grounds.
I agree with what you say. I would like to point out that there are big batteries called water reservoirs that bring huge energy output when actually needed. Maybe with more creative 'batteries' we could solve problems like the ones you point.
I hope we will see big advancements soon enough although I am cautious about this happening anytime soon in the US.
Adding solar or wind seems pretty linear to me. As the % goes up past 20 you need various mitigations, but each set of mitigations is fairly small, and better tech keeps popping up.
> But in fact, between us and a society run by clean energy is all sorts of huge technical hurdles we haven't solved yet. Adding 10,20% renewables is simple enough - but 100% renewables without daily blackouts is incredibly hard. We need many orders of magnitude more battery storage to get there (or some other storage technology).
We're already at the point where it makes more economic sense to build renewable than it does to build infrastructure to support non-renewable energy (in most locations, there are exceptions). In many places, it's more affordable to replace existing, functioning non-renewable generation with clean energy (either solar, wind, or a combination of the two). This is without considering environmental costs, when you consider the externalized costs of environmental damage, the case is even more lopsided.
Maybe we won't be at 100% renewable without massive battery systems, but 70-80% is reachable without a huge investment, particularly in solar rich or wind rich locations. We're not even at 50% at the moment so we have a long way to go before we hit that last 20-30% where it's going to be most painful. Even if we accelerate adoption massively, we have a lot of time to work on that problem.
If nothing else, we can fill that gap with the least dirty non-renewables and eliminate a massive amount of emissions. Nuclear seems like a good choice, particularly some of the new, safer pelletized plants.
> But currently electric cars are subsidised by fuel taxes, and low emissions vehicles are encouraged by low vehicle taxes.
Personally, I think this is the wrong model. Since internal combustion engines cause tons of external damage, we should be taxing those vehicles based on that externalized damage rather than subsidizing vehicles. The fundamental problem with the current approach is the benefit runs out for the manufacturers who are reducing emissions the most.
> But currently electric cars are subsidized by fuel taxes
This is not remotely true. In fact it's the opposite, ICE vehicles are subsidized by externalizing the costs they inflict on society.
> And electric car charging at home works because only a handful of people do it. When every car on the road is plugged in every night the distribution networks to every street will need to be massively upgraded.
The average driver clocks around 10k miles/ year, a little under 30 miles/ day. That's less power use than a typical refrigerator. Much less than air conditioning a 2 story house in California. The energy grid can handle that.
> It's a problem because it means most people don't appreciate how far we have to go before a clean energy society is possible. We need to increase investment into this technology by an order of magnitude to have a hope of implementing before climate change has significant effects.
One of the bigger problems we have with getting funding for clean energy is exactly the sort of arguments you are making here. When you present clean energy like it's an all-or-nothing thing and paint a verbal picture like there is a big, insurmountable wall, people just throw their hands up and want to give up.
We do need to increase investment in this technology, but there are massive, incremental benefits which can be realized at nearly every step along the way.
>> And electric car charging at home works because only a handful of people do it. When every car on the road is plugged in every night the distribution networks to every street will need to be massively upgraded.
> The average driver clocks around 10k miles/ year, a little under 30 miles/ day. That's less power use than a typical refrigerator. Much less than air conditioning a 2 story house in California. The energy grid can handle that.
And with delayed charging and Vehicle-to-grid, it could even be beneficial for the grid.
How much is that due to a lack of investment? How fast could we build that storage if we really wanted to? A fraction of $700B a year seems like it could really change that quickly.
Many of the problems related to storage don't seem like a technology problem. They appear to be a commercialization problem. We're not waiting on some fundamentally new tech. From elevated water to liquid metal batteries to compressed air, many technologies are all being commercialized right now. It feels like we have the ability to really push that forward in a big way.
I think they overstate the case for clean energy being cheap.
I think you misunderstood what cheap means, in the context of public health and a nation scale economy. Cheap is code for "do we want to" and if you implement storage as a public utility there may be no price problem. It makes jobs, it fuels industry. Do you think building out coal and oil and nuclear power was "cheap"?
Of course, if it's doable in practice I'm all for it, and if clean energy is really as cheap as they claim, then we'll get there pretty soon just on economics.