"In “The Hard Math of Minerals” (Issues, January 27, 2022), Mark P. Mills writes that “building solar and wind systems requires roughly a tenfold increase in the total tonnage of common materials … to deliver the same quantity of energy compared to building a natural gas or other hydrocarbon-fueled power plant.” This idea is misleading, since the source cited states that it “excluded” the materials related to the fuels used in power plants. Such fuels must be mined forever. With solar and wind, fuel mining is zero, forever. One recent study that accounted for fuel mining plus infrastructure concluded that one gigawatt of wind capacity replacing coal-generated electricity on the Texas grid reduces total mining by 25 million tonnes over 20 years.
In fact, in North America alone, an average of fifty thousand new oil and gas wells are drilled yearly. These are ignored by Mills. The land required for these new wells is 2,500 square kilometers per year. Once a well is depleted, it is abandoned. The United States has 1.3 million active oil and gas wells and 3.2 million abandoned ones. Worldwide, Reuters estimates that about 29 million wells are abandoned.
Research I’ve conducted with colleagues estimates that fossil fuel infrastructure currently takes up about 1.3 % of US land. This is due to wells, coal mines, oil refineries, pipelines, power plants, fueling stations, and storage facilities. In comparison, transitioning the United States for all energy purposes to 100% wind, water, and solar power may take less than 1% of US land. So not only does a transition to renewables reduce material requirements, but it also reduces land use."
It's pretty intuitive that coal extraction in particular has an extensive land footprint if you've ever seen strip mining, mountaintop mining (especially when the waste rock is dumped into nearby valleys), or open pit mining.
> With solar and wind, fuel mining is zero, forever.
well, you have to first build the solar panels/wind turbines. And then some fuel to power up the gas /oil plants that'll pick up the slack when there's no wind and sun; or you build over the required needs and add batteries (or other power storage methods).
Unfortunately Jacobson's numbers are not nearly as solid as he claims. I learned this digging through years ago. He depends very heavily on implied cost savings of reduced fossil fuel that are based on thin if not nonexistent modeling, just assumptions, for his breakeven calculation. It doesn't take much digging to find similar week foundations across his work in general. I was disappointed when I learned this and confirmed it with a couple people who follow this stuff a lot more closely, one of them professionally as an environmental economist.
You should be aware that there a lot of critism out there that is completely wrong, like ones based on misreading/misinterpreting statements from his studies. You should make sure to read response to criticism if you can find it. I haven't heard this specific criticism before though, so can't comment on that specifically.
But you should also consider that his studies are ridiculously conservative, so there's a lot of room for error that technological improvements can compensate for.
With the first versions of his studies I thought it odd that he didn't include much offshore wind. It was becoming clear that offshore wind was becoming very viable. But he used the current costs when writing the study, not projected future costs. Now I think his studies include off shore wind because the cost has come down far enough that it makes sense to include them in calculations.
I think it's reasonable to assume that the costs of renewables will continue to come down, that solar efficiency will go up, and that we will have at least one or two breakthrough battery chemistry, and possibly a breakthrough in geothermal too, by 2040-2050.
Indeed in your work total produced is 267 TWh/y uncurtailed, in @mzjacobson
study table 9 is 3243 over 3 year so 1080 TWh/y. About a factor of four more. In nameplate factor of 6.2 for solar and 2.4 for wind so somewhat coherent
Also a must read IMHO recent survey paper on the 100% RE field:
All you need to do is open your eyes anywhere in Texas to see how much land gas and oil takes. Every hole in the ground has 1-10 acres of sacrificial land that's just scraped flat. Entire nation-sized ecosystems have been completely wrecked for oil and gas production.
Many thanks for the maps link: it helped me fully realize how spot on is Mark Z Jacobson. I never bothered to look to oil & gas map and street view until now ...
The biggest line item in the estimate is oil wells. They assume an active oil well consumes 12 acres (0.05 sq km) of land. There’s no way that is close to accurate. The well and pump head use a few hundred square feet, max. They usually have an area around the well head that’s mowed for access, and also an access road. Typically, there is also a pipe to carry the oil away. Even if there is on-site storage, the tanks are at most 100’s of square feet.
An acre is over 43,000 square feet. My estimates would have to be off by a factor of 1000 for a well head to occupy 12 acres.
The idea that we would use ~ 1% of the earth’s surface for wind, solar and hydro is similarly nonsensical. Wind farms can be dual use (e.g., cows can live on them).
Solar panels can more than power a one story building on average while using less than the entire square footage of the building. The earth’s surface is no where near 1% buildings. Cities account for less than 1% of the surface.
Instead of using estimated based on what you think the equipment should take up, perhaps you should take a look at the google maps link your sibling posted, and zoom into some oil wells (the cleared land lots) and use the measurement tool (right click) to get the area of some of them (which it shows if you create an enclosed area).
I just measures three, with the following square footage: 443k sq ft, 338k sq ft, 164k sq ft.
Each lot looks to have multiple wells, but there's a lot of just cleared empty land for each lot, so I suspect you're being very optimistic on your assessment of how much land is used for each well. The study cited may be overestimating also, but they cite their sources (even if they aren't explaining exactly where they get well land use amount from), so perhaps there's an explanation buried deeper in there.
The communications around nuclear at the moment are fascinating. I think we are really witnessing a massive PR campaign trying to take advantage of the war in Ukraine.
Everyone is talking about the gas imports from Russia, while nobody talks about oil imports which are not very different (using todays prices the EU imported around 300 billion euro worth of gas and 62 billion worth of oil in 2021. They are obviously over estimates because I used last year's volumes with todays prices).
On top of that many publications talk as if electricity from other sources could easily replace gas, which is also incorrect. Germany which is often criticised generates less than 10% of electricity from gas, similar to France who are the nuclear poster child (that is because gas and nuclear are used for different purposes). Most of the gas in Germany is used for heating and industrial processes.
On top of that we see articles (this isn't the first) who try to reframe the question of energy consumption around land use, which is a complete red hering, designed to make nuclear look more advantageous.
Finally, nobody talks how the situation at the Zaporizhzhia is an illustration of the significant security implications of nuclear. I mean Europe has not been this close to a nuclear disaster in more than 30 years and people arguing we should build more nuclear plants?
> On top of that we see articles (this isn't the first) who try to reframe the question of energy consumption around land use, which is a complete red hering, designed to make nuclear look more advantageous.
I wonder, what's your opinion on these two matters:
- the sixth mass extinction
- carbon sinks
In my opinion as a concerned environmentalist, they are both extremely important and need immediate actions to have even a small chance of being somewhat remedied. Land use is an important facet of how exactly we are destroying the environment and as such it does make sense to consider it as one of the dimensions when planning energy production.
And to be clear, there are lots of species that don't just accept any "close enough" environment as their living place. For example, willow tits in Finland are endangered because here they mainly live in old forests that include dead trees – unacceptable for timber and pulp industry.
Edit: I want to emphasize that I don't see land use concerns as an attempt to reframe the question, limiting the dimensions the energy sector is thought of. Rather, IMO it's a welcome important additional feature to think of.
>> On top of that we see articles (this isn't the first) who try to reframe the question of energy consumption around land use, which is a complete red hering, designed to make nuclear look more advantageous.
> I wonder, what's your opinion on these two matters:
> - the sixth mass extinction
> - carbon sinks
> In my opinion as a concerned environmentalist, they are both extremely important and need immediate actions to have even a small chance of being somewhat remedied. Land use is an important facet of how exactly we are destroying the environment and as such it does make sense to consider it as one of the dimensions when planning energy production.
I agree that these are important issues to consider, however I disagree that this is important in the context of energy production. Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads (in another post someone mentioned that the space parking lots occupy in the US is 5 times larger than the area needed to power the whole country with solar).
These discussions are essentially aimed to distract from the important goal of reorienting our energy production toward renewables. It is telling that almost all pro-nuclear articles that we have seen recently argue which should put more money into nuclear vs renewables, not arguing about what is the quickest way to turn of coal plants. The reason I suspect is that the companies that run and build large nuclear power plants are to a large degree the same companies that are involved in running fossil fuel plants. Renewables essentially threaten the business model of building large power plants that will run and provide guaranteed profits for decades, while renewables which are much more decentralised threaten their business model.
> The reason I suspect is that the companies that run and build large nuclear power plants are to a large degree the same companies that are involved in running fossil fuel plants. Renewables essentially threaten the business model of building large power plants that will run and provide guaranteed profits for decades, while renewables which are much more decentralised threaten their business model.
Citation needed, citation needed, and citation needed. Large wind farms are mega corporate and there's a zillion corporations competing to create big solar installations or to corner the market on solar installs.
> These discussions are essentially aimed to distract from the important goal of reorienting our energy production toward renewables.
And many argue "renewables" should include nuclear, because of how much nuclear fuel there is on this planet. We are in the current carbon bind because economies followed the cheapest, most incremental solution to adding energy production, greased by political corruption and gaslighting. Short-sighted, focused only on solving the problems of the present. Renewals with huge footprint like big solar installs and wind farms are exactly the same kind of short-sighted thinking that will gift us another pile of problems in 30 years. Nuclear power, particulary with small modular reactors, is the best long-term bet. Coupled with residential solar installations, which basically don't mean any new land use, this is a future that is sustainable. Not vast deadlands anywhere.
> > The reason I suspect is that the companies that run and build large nuclear power plants are to a large degree the same companies that are involved in running fossil fuel plants. Renewables essentially threaten the business model of building large power plants that will run and provide guaranteed profits for decades, while renewables which are much more decentralised threaten their business model.
> Citation needed, citation needed, and citation needed. Large wind farms are mega corporate and there's a zillion corporations competing to create big solar installations or to corner the market on solar installs.
I did say suspect, so I don't have proof. However traditionally the nuclear and coal lobby have been working very closely together at least in Germany. Regarding the size of corporations i think we can agree that nuclear projects are much bigger than solar? The biggest builder of solar parks in Germany has a a revenue of 1-1.5 Billion euros, so not small fish, but also not a huge corporation. Moreover, if we look at the distribution of solar capacity Germany had 20 GW of solar capacity in 2016 (could not find a more recent number), of those the large >20 MW installations are less than 2 GW (2022 numbers, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany) so solar is definitely much more decentralised than nuclear or coal.
> > These discussions are essentially aimed to distract from the important goal of reorienting our energy production toward renewables.
> And many argue "renewables" should include nuclear, because of how much nuclear fuel there is on this planet.
First that is not an argument that follows. Second unless we talk about currently viable technology we have about 40 years of uranium left in the world. I know you now come with all sorts of recycling solutions that might work in the future. That might be true, but we need solutions now and renewables are already cheaper so why go for nuclear.
>We are in the current carbon bind because economies followed the cheapest, most incremental solution to adding energy production, greased by political corruption and gaslighting.
Citation needed, because I'm not sure what you are talking about, but nuclear has received many multiples of subsidies compared to solar/wind (mind you coal is still much more).
>Short-sighted, focused only on solving the problems of the present. Renewals with huge footprint like big solar installs and wind farms are exactly the same kind of short-sighted thinking that will gift us another pile of problems in 30 years.
We already established that the land requirements for solar and wind are miniscule compared to other land uses. We could meet capacity needs likely by just putting solar on roofs, roads and parking lots. It's also quite rich to argue against renewables as short sighted while ignoring the nuclear storage elefant in the room. Again recycling is not economically viable and produces large amounts of mid and low grade waste which also needs to be stored. But let's just push that problem to future generations.
> Nuclear power, particulary with small modular reactors, is the best long-term bet.
We see in Ukraine just now how distributing nuclear reactors all over the place is maybe not a good idea. Moreover, that small modular reactors will result in any savings from "economies of scale", generally construction in contrast to fabrication does not benefit much. There was also an article here recently which showed that a significant portion of the nuclear plant cost is the same as any other thermal plant.
> Coupled with residential solar installations, which basically don't mean any new land use, this is a future that is sustainable. Not vast deadlands anywhere.
> Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads
Because until now we've been using power sources with high density.
The largest wind farm to date is Gansu Wind Farwm with planned capacity of 20 GW. I can't find it's total area, but it will have 7000 turbines. Wind turbines need to be about 5 rotor diameters apart, so... That's definitely more than the total area of all nuclear power plants powering France (at 60 GW).
Alta Wind Farm, is the largest in the US and produces 1GW of electricity. It covers an area of 130 square kilometers. Chooz, in France, produces 3GW of electricity, and covers... 2 square kilometers.
Same goes for solar.
If you want to convert all of the world to renewables, the are they will cover will be anything but minuscule.
EDIT: and that's before we go into the problems of:
- base load for solar and wind is 0, and the amount of batteries you need to sustain the load is mind-boggling, to say the least
> > Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads
> Because until now we've been using power sources with high density.
> The largest wind farm to date is Gansu Wind Farwm with planned capacity of 20 GW. I can't find it's total area, but it will have 7000 turbines. Wind turbines need to be about 5 rotor diameters apart, so... That's definitely more than the total area of all nuclear power plants powering France (at 60 GW).
> Alta Wind Farm, is the largest in the US and produces 1GW of electricity. It covers an area of 130 square kilometers. Chooz, in France, produces 3GW of electricity, and covers... 2 square kilometers.
It's funny how you use some anecdotes while several people have made the calculations for how much percentage one would need. Also if you look at the pictures from Alta Wind Farm for example, it's not like the land between the turbines is somehow lost, there is bushes and trees growing in between (not big ones though as the area seems somewhat like a desert.). Similar if you look at many of the turbines in Denmark or Germany they are on fields with cattle grazing in between.
> Same goes for solar.
> If you want to convert all of the world to renewables, the are they will cover will be anything but minuscule.
> EDIT: and that's before we go into the problems of:
> - base load for solar and wind is 0, and the amount of batteries you need to sustain the load is mind-boggling, to say the least
The baseload myth again. Can we please just stop it? Yes we need overcapacity or storage, guess what this also applies to nuclear. This summer France had 40%-100% (the numbers differ I saw 40% in writing but 100% on a French TV channel) of their nuclear power plants down due to heat and maintance. The problem of building overcapacity with nuclear is, they are capex driven, so if you don't have them run at max possible prices will be much higher, making nuclear even less viable.
> - neither solar nor wind can be load-following
Yes and neither can nuclear in any economically feasible way. With the current costs (and even more with future trends), it is much cheaper to build double the amount of renewables than to use nuclear running on some fraction of it's capacity.
> The baseload myth again. Can we please just stop it?
We'll stop it the moment it stops being reality.
> Yes we need overcapacity or storage,
Yes, yes we do. And I've yet to see anyone calculate how much we need of that overcapacity.
When there's no sun, the base load of solar is zero. When there's no wind, the base load of wind is zero.
Worse than that is that it's not an either/or situation. It's not an "either 100% or 0%". It's any value in between. If your wind farm is generating just 20%, it's almost as bad as 0%.
So, you need to have overcapacity for solar (to compensate for no wind). And and overcapacity for wind (to compensate for no solar). And an overcapacity of batteries to compensate for both.
And literally no one is talking about this, and just brushes this aside with "yeah no it's fine".
> This summer France had 40%-100% (the numbers differ I saw 40% in writing but 100% on a French TV channel) of their nuclear power plants down due to heat and mainteance.
Key word: maintenance. This is something you can plan well beforehand (unlike the drops in wind and solar).
Will there be screwups in planning? Yes. Nuclear reactors being down due to heat is not too dissimilar to a hypothetical 10GW battery storage melting from the same heat
> > - neither solar nor wind can be load-following
> Yes and neither can nuclear in any economically feasible way.
I don't think you understand what load following means
> it is much cheaper to build double the amount of renewables than to use nuclear running on some fraction of it's capacity.
Double amount compared to what? Compared to what we have now or compared to the number required to cover all our rising energy needs?
> I agree that these are important issues to consider, however I disagree that this is important in the context of energy production. Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads (in another post someone mentioned that the space parking lots occupy in the US is 5 times larger than the area needed to power the whole country with solar).
Thanks for bringing up the point about comparing energy production's land use against the area taken by other human activity. Agriculture, particularly meat consumption and the required farm fields to feed livestock, is certainly one of the worst offenders in this context. As far as I can tell, the generally car-based city planning with the parking lots, roads and urban sprawl are also a problem in this regard especially in the US. So, I agree that certainly fixing these should have a higher priority from the viewpoint of improving land use.
However, I don't think the land use by electricity production can be completely disregarded. I was unsure about it being minuscule, so just as a quick calculation:
- Electricity from coal requires a median of 15 m² for 1 MWh of energy.
- In 2021, electricity use in Finland was about 86 775 000 MWh. As heavy industry (including steel production) and traffic are going electric, that number is bound to go upwards.
- The total area of Finland is 338 472 km² with about 34 524 km² of that being inland water, resulting in 303 948 km² of land area.
By year 2050 counting from today, using the numbers above I get that 11,67 % of Finland's total land area would be ruined by coal production if all the electricity was produced with coal (luckily it's not), mined locally. Also note that the chart in TFA is about electricity production. Countries with cold winters, such as Finland, also require heating. With a cleaner source, such as 100 % nuclear or roof installed silicon PV that figure would be around 1–2 %.
> It is telling that almost all pro-nuclear articles that we have seen recently argue which should put more money into nuclear vs renewables, not arguing about what is the quickest way to turn of coal plants.
On the forums where I find most of the environmentalist discussion I read, the generally held view is that both nuclear and renewables are required. It's not about either-or. The goal is decarbonizing ASAP while respecting nature in other ways as well and supporting the notion of humankind's prosperity.
Ok I think I misunderstood. You were talking about the land use for coal, which I guess you're right would need some accumulation factor (although I suspect it doesn't grow linearly). But if you would use solar or wind you would not, which was the context of the discussion and hence I misunderstood.
> in another post someone mentioned that the space parking lots occupy in the US is 5 times larger than the area needed to power the whole country with solar
Does the calculation also take into account battery installations?
>Land use is an important facet of how exactly we are destroying the environment and as such it does make sense to consider it as one of the dimensions when planning energy production.
It makes sense to consider it but the overriding dominant factor is still cost which is where nuclear power falls flat on its face.
That's why you'll almost never see an article submitted to hacker news that discusses it.
> Finally, nobody talks how the situation at the Zaporizhzhia is an illustration of the significant security implications of nuclear.
It's in Putin's interest to entertain fear of nuclear in occidental countries. Him moving troops and shelling around Zaporizhzhia could be construed as his latest plan to prevent us from building more nuclear plants.
Anyway the point is moot since Russia is closer to Zaporizhzhia than the EU is and would suffer firsthand from a nuclear incident, so it's not in Putin's interest to actually act on it.
> For almost a decade, emission reductions have stagnated.
Weird that this phrase comes up so much in relation to German progress on renewables and climate change.
> Opportunities missed since 2008
> Indeed, the German government has stumbled in several attempts to put efficient heating on the agenda. In 2019, the interior ministry led by Horst Seehofer cancelled the buildings commission intended to identify ways to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint, while in 2017, the German government coalition failed in a first attempt to agree on a building energy law, which would have set new standards for efficiency in buildings. The NGO Environmental Action Germany has compiled a “chronology of failures” in the sector, starting from 2008.
> Past success, but still 28m tonnes off target
> After years of standstill, the energy used in Germany’s buildings has not fallen nearly as much as targeted. Instead of dropping by 20 percent between 2008 and 2020, final energy consumption had only gone down by 6.9 percent in 2017. Although greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector have fallen by about 44 percent since 1990, progress has largely stagnated since 2011 and studies show the need to significantly ramp up action.
The thing is that we build on wind energy that is not only unreliable as an energy source, but also adds CO₂ for producing/maintaining/rebuilding and usually also producing SF₆ while running (one if not the most efficient greenhouse gas).
I am actually under the impression we actually change just for the sake of change.
The production of CO2 from making a wind turbine depends mostly on how much fossil fuel is used in the rest of the economy. This is not a constant but varies as the rest of the economy is decarbonized. The current numbers are from when we're still using a lot of fossil fuels there. In that situation, displacing fossil fuel usage as quickly as possible is more important than eliminating residual inherent CO2 emission (in wind's case, the CO2 from calcination of limestone in cement manufacture.) Wind turbines can be installed more quickly than nuclear plants, so they win this racing game.
(Solar doesn't really require any cement at all, so in the ultimate non-fossil economy it will beat even nuclear on inherent CO2 production.)
We have enough misinformation as it is that we can do without comments like yours without some kind of citation. No-one thinks that any electricity generation is zero-carbon, the question is only about the relative advantages/disadvantages across many metrics like cost, complexity, security, consistency, scalability, land-use and many others.
FOr example, a wind turbine is an awful lot easier to remove and make good than an entire power station if we eventually build something much better.
> FOr example, a wind turbine is an awful lot easier to remove and make good than an entire power station if we eventually build something much better.
A wind turbine is not replacing a "power station". Do I really need a citation for this?
Also, the efficient way to do it doubles as air conditioning.
So Europe can ditch their weird mixture of pride in not using AC like the profligate Americans (congratulations on your climate, I'm sure you personally worked very hard for it) and sweltering in the summer as heat waves become normal.
> I mean Europe has not been this close to a nuclear disaster in more than 30 years and people arguing we should build more nuclear plants?
If you consider the climate and consequent human life costs of fossil energy sources, the risk of a nuclear disaster does not look very scary.
The Fukushima tsunami killed some 4000 people together with the power plant failure [0], while the heatwave in Germany killed 8000 this year [1]. I did not look at air pollution deaths.
> The Fukushima tsunami killed some 4000 people together with the power plant failure [0]
About 5 of these deaths can be attributed more or less directly to radiation. All the others being linked to the earthquake, tsunami, and stress following the mass-scale evacuation.
> If you consider the climate and consequent human life costs of fossil energy sources, the risk of a nuclear disaster does not look very scary.
The risks of these are not connected, but add up. It's also a bit weird that people are so sure we can reverse the climate change, while forgetting that we can definitely reduce radioactive emission, but see it as a good trade to have more radioactive pollution.
Radioactive pollution turns out to be a much lesser danger to the environment than CO2 (in the long term). The Chernobyl exclusion zone is currently a haven of biodiversity, while the world overall is going through the largest mass extinction event probably since the dinosaur meteor.
> The Chernobyl exclusion zone is currently a haven of biodiversity, while the world overall is going through the largest mass extinction event probably since the dinosaur meteor.
Are you aware that climate change is not a local thing? Therefore you contradict yourself in the same sentence.
I don't understand what you mean. My point was that the worse ever nuclear power plant accident has hurt the planet far less than man-made global warming.
So, if (taking this to an absurd extreme) we went hard on nuclear and there was a Chernobyl every, say, 20 years - but we got rid of all fossil fuel electricity and heating plants - the planet would probably overall be in better shape.
How is land use a red herring? It is the same importance as any other resource required for power production, maybe moreso because it is practically finite.
It depends on how you account for mitigating factors.
With wind production, the wind turbines take up more space than other power sources. However, off-shore wind turbines negate that space requirement, so if a region can do that it is better than taking up land for energy production.
With solar production, the solar panels take up more space than other power sources. However, it is common to place the panels on building roofs where no additional space is taken up. There are even places like France that make use of solar panels on the roofs of other building types like bus shelters and car parks. Done this way, solar does not need any additional/dedicated space.
I've also seen small wind turbine/windmill blades on road signs along with a small solar panel in Wales that don't take up any additional space. These also have the advantage of being self-contained so you don't need to have cables connecting them to the power grid.
It may be less important, but still an important consideration.
In regards to nuclear costs, most comparisons include projects which were plagued by redesign due to regulatory changes. It is likely that reusing designs will reduce costs significantly [0].
In addition, solar and wind must be paired with energy storage. Once this is done, they become uneconomical in most places. There's a reason that Europe, the most pro-solar/wind polity on the planet, has not been able to get energy independence despite their wealth. The costs for a resilient system are just too high.
>In addition, solar and wind must be paired with energy storage. Once this is done, they become uneconomical in most places
Really the only reason solar and wind have taken off is because, unsubsidized, they are cheaper than ALL other forms of energy - even coal (5x cheaper than nuclear).
It's cheaper to pair them with gas than to pair them with pumped storage but it's vastly cheaper to pair them with pumped storage than to build a nuclear plant + storage combo.
The only times nuclear power has been built was because it was deluged with subsidies and that will never change.
>There's a reason that Europe, the most pro-solar/wind polity on the planet, has not been able to get energy independence despite their wealth.
That reason is that it only became as cheap as coal about 6-7 years ago and because cost effectively shifting all your energy infrastructure from one form of power to another takes between 20-30 years and because they viewed achieving energy independence 10 years earlier as not important enough to triple their energy bills.
The relative cheapness of gas also held up the development of pumped storage. Gas was a cheaper peaker.
Of course pairing with gas is cheaper, but that solution isn't going to be carbon neutral. If we only care about cost we should just go back to coal.
I'm not convinced Europe's problems are just timing. Their reliance on gas is a symptom of the weaknesses of renewables. If it is indeed a timing problem, then will they still need gas for 20-30 years? Will we need to wait another 20-30 after that to switch to batteries? Why not spend the next 20 years building nuclear power plants that are already proven and already low carbon? It's not an either-or scenario for renewable and nuclear, but to be good for the climate gas is definitely out.
Also, to respond to your point about pumped storage: what about the locales without mountains for pumping? Battery costs don't look pretty so increasing base load supply via nuclear to alleviate storage requirements makes sense.
By 2021 there were 180 operable nuclear power reactors in Europe. 13 out of 27 EU countries have nuclear power. We live under the constant threat of nuclear terrorism and centralisation of power... wait we don't.
As with all lists randomly pulled out of someone's behind, yours carries zero meaning.
> The communications around nuclear at the moment are fascinating. I think we are really witnessing a massive PR campaign trying to take advantage of the war in Ukraine.
I kind of agree, but how else would you describe the discourse around nuclear after Chernobyl and Fukushima? The fact is that energy policy is a highly technical and complicated subject, but it is often debated in a very emotional way.
>On top of that many publications talk as if electricity from other sources could easily replace gas, which is also incorrect.
Only storage can replace gas. This is because a tank of gas is energy storage. It contains energy and you're storing it.
You need the least amount of storage for nuclear (daily), more for wind (monthly) and still more for solar (semiannual). The storage burden for solar could be reduced by running some energy-intensive processes, like calcining or metal refining, on a seasonal basis. Alternatively, it might be possible to turn nuclear plants on in October and off in April; they have a long startup, but not necessarily months.
How is Russia bombing a nuclear power plant any different from Russia using nuclear weapons. The issue is not the nuclear power plant, it's the mad man willing to cause the end of the world to win his war in Ukraine.
It's literally the difference between bombing a nuclear power plant and using nuclear weapons. If Russia uses a nuclear weapon it uses the yield it wants, where it wants, when it wants, and leaves a pretty distinct footprint behind.
If Russia blows up Zaporizhzhia using conventional weapons it creates a totally different set of problems for Europe and comes with some deniability. They could say that Ukraine did it. It also wouldn't necessarily trigger mutual assured destruction. They just have to say, "Oops" and I bet they'd get a way with it aside from a raft of "powerful sanctions."
> Everyone is talking about the gas imports from Russia, while nobody talks about oil imports which are not very different
Largely because handling oil is just a lot easier. Storage too. Nat gas is limited to LNG and pipelines and there just aren’t that many spare LNG ships cruising around, while any bulk liquids shipper could convert to carrying oil. And not hard for a port to have spare oil on-load or offload capacity, or to bring more such capacity online.
But this is an issue for Russian gas exports too. They’re probably flaring that natural gas that isn’t going to Europe.
> On top of that we see articles (this isn't the first) who try to reframe the question of energy consumption around land use, which is a complete red hering, designed to make nuclear look more advantageous.
Indeed. Similar articles compare mortality rates or co2 across energy sources under a very narrow set of assumptions, ignoring systemic risks and so on.
> The communications around nuclear at the moment are fascinating. I think we are really witnessing a massive PR campaign trying to take advantage of the war in Ukraine.
Paid by who? People can add two and two to get four.
The coming winter in Europe is going to see a lot of governments removed when people start freezing to death.
Do you think europeans live in huts or something? Usually we suffer more deaths in heat waves than any winter. On top of that, any statistic will show you that "europeans" deaths from freezing in cold waves come mainly from... Russia!
I trust 100% in my home to keep me alive in the winter without using heat, even if I need to use gloves and double socks. But I've zero fear of freezing to death.
200+ died in Texas last year because of electricity grid failure [1] gouvernements can survive such situations if there is a reasonable "scapegoat".
In this case, it will be pretty fair to say that any energy shortage is _mostly_ to blame on Russian president. And gouvernements don't stay idle while this happens.
For example : French government has been heavily subsidising everyone's energy bill for almost a year [2]; and the most likely situation for this winter is a period of rolling electricity cuts at the peak (probably January ?) [2].
As said elsewhere, "we don't live in huts" ; 2h without electricity per day a couple times a month in December - January would be a massive pain in the ass, and there will be a couple of well-mediatized drama, but it's not going to cause the same massive social unrest as a total blackout, or a 5€/liter of gas at the pump.
What I really wonder is whether people will be able find practical ways to reduce their own pressure on the grid. Even if your heating is electrical, once you've turned your thermostat down to 19 and put on an extra sweater, I wonder if any extra step (turning of home lights, switching a screen off here and there) is cumulatively having _enough_ of an impact to make a January night peak more manageable.
I'm not entirely ruling out a good surprise ; we might see a wining alliance of the electricity grid engineer, the weather forecaster and the everyday person to detect the peak in advance and adapt just enough.
It would help if we could get our nuke plants back on track sooner, but let the workers work.
I think home quality is well above gas/electricity prices in terms of freezing to death in the winter. For example UK and Ireland are known to have relatively worse housing than central Europe for the climate they have to endure, so they have a high Excess Winter Mortality. A country like Finland, with probably the best houses in the world, have one of the lowest EWM of Europe, despite being one of the coldest countries.
But I have not doubt that EWM will be weaponized this winter.
> The communications around nuclear at the moment are fascinating. I think we are really witnessing a massive PR campaign trying to take advantage of the war in Ukraine.
Well, they'd not really be doing their jobs if they didn't.
If there was an organisation that advocated for renewables, and their PR department didn't tie in an ongoing war in europe with a fossil fuel supplying country to their messaging, you'd think they weren't earning their money and should be replaced with someone who did.
It just so happens that other organisations have the same incentives and their organisational goals are not all as positive for human society.
The oil and gas industry for example, have used this war to advocate for more drilling and to attack rival technologies like renewables. Which is predictable if a little bit sociopathic.
The safe long-term storage of nuclear waste is not a technical problem. It's a political problem. The public opposes even just doing research into safer storage methods for nuclear waste. In 2016, the Department of Energy test wells for deep borehole disposal were cancelled due to protests. The tests were not even going to involve nuclear material! The opposition feared that the tests might show that the area was geologically appropriate for the safe storage of nuclear waste.
Not a problem. You reprocess the used fuel, which makes clean usable fuel and a tiny amount of nuclear waste. This is then mixed with glass and then buried deep underground.
It really helps if you post a picture. Most people unironically picture a barrel of bubbling, glowing green goo when you say “nuclear waste” like something out of The Simpsons. It helps when people don’t have to generate a picture based off of your description[0].
Exactly, nuclear plants in an active war zone are always going to be a liability. Imagine the Ukraine had lots of small nuclear reactors all over the place like nuclear proponents keep insisting is the future. Likely, at least a few of those would have been taking direct hits from artillery or rocket attacks. Explosives and radioactive material can create a big mess. The Russians are using this notion as a very poorly veiled threat. They did it with the Chernobyl plant early in the war and they are doing it with Zaporizhzhia.
Gas is a relatively new thing in the electricity market in Germany and there are way more coal plants in Germany than gas plants. Until the Ukrainian war, the plan was to replace coal with gas and eventually renewables. That plan went into the shredder a few months ago. I don't see that happening anymore. It was not a great plan before and now it's obviously a really bad plan to build any new gas plants. Without cheap Russian gas, these plants will never have a positive return on investment. Likewise producing more grey/blue hydrogen using gas seems madness. People lobbying the use of gas for such things now have to deal with a gas market with unreliable suppliers and wild prices.
As for heating, Germany has a lot of district heating that is dependent on gas. These setups might be upgraded to other sources of heat but that won't happen overnight. Upgrading buildings to use heat pumps is a long term fix to both save energy and reduce dependence on gas. But it can't be done on short notice either. Getting rid of gas for heating will take many years.
So, the short term plan is to import gas from elsewhere via pipes or in LNG form at great cost and use it only for those things that really still require gas. This is expensive and creates a huge economic incentive to do something more economical. So this winter, heating will be prioritized. They'll burn a lot more coal than was planned to reduce the need for gas plants to operate. And when solar/wind fall short, they'll sacrifice some gas reserves via gas peaker plants.
I expect a lot of investment will go towards accelerating the rollout of wind/solar and heat pumps to reduce the need to burn gas and energy storage solutions to reduce the need for using peaker plants. The good news is that there are plenty of solutions in the market that with investment can scale up and reduce cost. Nuclear is not part of any plans (other than to get rid of it) that are currently under discussion. The option to keep a few plants open for a bit longer is the exception to this.
There's a lot of R&D and experimental work being done on Agrivoltiacs, but no clear winners. Raising the panels high enough for machinery adds a lot to costs. Reduced light means only small subset of crops can be grown.
For the most part it seems to do ok as is with grazing animals on land unviable for cropping but there's always tradeoffs.
Surprised how high concentrated solar is though. I would have thought it is more efficient than PV, but guess not
There are actually a lot of people who think it increases overall efficiency for some farms - mainly in areas with more sun / hotter temps / less water. If you have a less dense amount of photovoltaics then you still get quite a bit of sun and they end up reducing the amount of water evaporated by quite a bit which is very important for growing crops in areas like California. We could end up with much higher overall land use efficiency.
There is no need to "raise panels high enough". Bifacial panels may be erected vertically, in fencerows running north/south, with room for farm equipment to run between. Crops and livestock both do better with shade, evaporation loss is lower, and picking up morning and afternoon sun matches the demand curve better.
There is no need to pack the rows tightly, because there is way, way, way more pasture and crop land than could ever be needed for solar. All the revenue the panels provide is extra, on top of revenue from existing land use.
Solar floating on reservoirs, bays, and canals also "takes up" no land area, while it reduces evaporation loss, operates more efficiently kept cool, cuts biofouling, and provides protected habitat underneath.
The desert is a particularly dumb place to put solar panels: the panels get hot and dusty, cutting production, and the high temperature reduces both useful panel life and reliability. But ignorant investors love desert solar, so we are getting a great deal of desert solar.
Concentrated solar thermal will always be a minor player, but the desert is a reasonable place for it. It is a better source of process heat than electricity, but we do need a great deal of industrial process heat.
Bifacial fencerow panels work with almost any crop, orchards perhaps excepted. Since there is so overwhelmingly more land available to put solar on than is needed, only the very best-suited for it need be used.
Some crops do better under horizontal panels, protected by them from harsh rain- and hailstorms. Since there is no need to pack the panels as tightly as they could possibly fit, you can leave plenty of room between for farm tractors. Most stuff towed behind a farm tractor lies much lower, and has no difficulty running under panels mounted at head height.
We may count on farmers to decide how best to deploy solar in their own fields, without second-guessing them.
I am not saying there are no applications, it's a good idea. It needs to work for the farming process though, not the crop. At a certain scale of farm, small machines are not being used.
Again, it would work sure, but it would take a lot of changes for many farms to implement it.
I did not. Maybe we are communicating though. I don't see how it's so hard to believe that sticking big poles with panels on them throughout a field might have an impact on operations. Have you seen a modern commercial farm or do you think we still use tractors with a plow behind them?
Not to mention field harvesters, not to mention automated pickers, not to mention 100 meter wide irigation rigs, not to mention aerial tractors... etc.
Ah yes. Vertical panels while there's agricultural work going on around them never need to be cleaned.
So, they need regular access. In the middle of an active farm (see sibling comment). Farmers will have a dim view of anyone trampling their crops trying to get to these things.
It should be noted that vertical, bifacial PV will do very well in winter. So this strategy, in addition to allowing dual use of land, also helps address seasonality of solar at higher latitudes.
Another thing to keep in mind with solar is that so far we have been optimizing primarily for cost, rather than land use. This means installing panels at a high angle, far apart from each other to minimize shading and maximize energy captured per panel. If land is ever the limiting factor we can tilt solar panels at a shallower angle to reduce shading problems or just accept a certain amount of shading in the morning or evening. This could reduce land use by a factor of 5 or more.
I read a really interesting article about the rise of solar powered fish farms in China some years ago. These use aquaculture techniques with ponds shaded by solar cells, with feed grasses grown as part of the same mini ecosystem. I think there's a ton of open space for exploring how we could colocate solar, wind, and other land uses in a way that's mutually beneficial to each.
How is not the same thing? You can’t use the land for anything else. What just because you didn’t use heavy machinery to extract minerals, but instead covered the land with panels that is somehow morally superior? The land can’t be used for anything else, so it’s essentially “destroyed”.
You can dismantle a solar covered land when needed, in weeks, and get back the soil almost as good as new. A mine place gets wrecked for at least a century. I present you Las Medulas, a gold mine exploited by the romans in the first century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas. Even today, 2,000 years later, all you can see is the huge scar left behind the mine.
And how much electricity can you get per square meter of mined ground for solar vs. coal? The answer is in the linked article, though it is not obvious at first glance. And it's not clear to me how much recycling the materials in the panels is accounted for. Of course you can't recycle coal at all.
Founder of paces.com (YC S22) here, our software identities the best places to build their projects and so this topic is very close to my heart! Some quick thoughts:
>We take an all of the above approach and support the siting of all decarbonized energy from solar to nuclear. The renewables vs nuclear arguments is something people working in the industry don't really think much about, as everyone is trying to execute and build as fast as possible across the board.
>Grid capacity followed by permitting/nimbyism are way bigger limitations than land availability for decarbonizing the grid in the US for at least the next decade.
>Rooftop solar and C&I battery storage are going to be a single digit but crucial part of our energy mix as they bypass issues with transmission.
>Offshore wind will be bigger than many think and it bypasses the land use issue.
>I grew up on a sheep farm in Ireland and am a big fan of Agrovoltaics which also help with land use issues when considering livestock.
Why do you think rooftop solar is only going to be single digit? Is it down to the cost/complexity of installation compared to greenfield solar setups?
Instinctively it feels like there is a huge amount of unused roof area in the UK that could be put to good use. But I feel like it might not be as much as I think once direction is taken into account.
I think people underrate how much square footage it is going to take to modernize a grid.
In a southern enough location, a big enough house might be able to generate enough power for itself for a few months out of the year if it doesnt have an electric car to charge.
But take every high rise, office, vehicle, manufacturing facility, etc in a city and single digit percentage seems pretty good.
Agree with this, but also want to mention something not clear in my post, that we are US focused right now, the energy mix is going to vary alot by geography. The UK does not have the land for lots of large scale solar, so their mix is going to be mostly wind, nuclear and rooftop solar might be a higher % as its a more urbanized country compared to the US. But it is unlikely it will be +10% even there.
But it is not clear from the data if it is including all the pipeline infrastructure and LNG infra in the same way that it includes all the mining for coal.
As fossil plants go, gas will be the cleanest and probably cheapest overall but it is not sustainable at scale. How long until the gas has run out or we are butchering the countryside to try and find hard to reach pockets?
Can we create gas from anaerobic digestion? Sure. Can we do it to have an enormous amount of electrical power generated from it? Probably not. I suspect we might end up with some green gas plants to help with the dynamic load but we haven't built enough digestors yet to feed them.
> Can we create gas from anaerobic digestion? Sure. Can we do it to have an enormous amount of electrical power generated from it? Probably not.
Biogas is great if it is generated from waste. The main issue is that farmer end up growing crops purely for biogas and bioethanol production and it displaces crops we actually need to avoid starving. Same as wood pellets, which are a great way of making use of waste, but terrible if we just cut trees instead.
A post-fossil economy will have a limited quantity of reduced carbon to work with. I suspect the waste stream will have many takers. Uses that can be substituted for (like fueling stationary power plants) will fall by the wayside.
Gas from waste is good because it's carbon negative (especially capturing methane that would otherwise be emitted is important).
But as you say, it might be limited in scale. However, we can now economically synthesize hydrocarbons from electricity, so that's an option, though doing it (and gas-from-waste) for chemical feedstocks is probably the long term destination. Burning stuff is simply not very clean or efficient, so there's usually a better way to do whatever it is we're trying to do.
It's quite obvious from the headline figure that the giant pads needed for exploration and production of gas, and the dumping of the drilling fluids, is not being counted against gas.
I suspect that the elephant in the room is simply money. Who pays?
I would be happy for the government to pay me to save on my electricity bills by installing PV on my roof but I suspect they might not be so keen on the idea. Loans instead? Maybe, but there are all kinds of issues around what happens if you need to sell the property etc.
Same with industrial units. You could have an enormous room that would cost £500K to install PV onto which would be way too much money for most building owners unless the feed-in tariff would cover the cost quickly but why should it? The Energy companies don't want to pay for a feed they might not need at any particularly time of day. Australia had big problems with over-supply of solar at certain times and I believe the rate went negative to try and stop people feeding it in.
For me, solar thermal for hot water is a far more reasonable position, certainly on new build domestic properties. We all use a lot of hot water, even during the summer and having water heated by solar thermal apart from being really effficient, masssively reduces the (usually) gas burden of heating from a boiler or immersion heater.
I also love the idea of a partnership between, e.g. An Underground Station with a limitless supply of heat energy to remove to cool down the stations, and perhaps the hospital next door which uses enormous amounts of hot water. Heat pump anyone?
> Australia had big problems with over-supply of solar at certain times and I believe the rate went negative to try and stop people feeding it in.
This is almost certaintly untrue, in both the wider and narrow senses.
Basically, solar alone will never cause negative prices or 'oversupply', because solar can switch itself off fast enough that any solar bidding a negative price to the market would just turn itself off rather than pay money to someone who uses the power. The same is true of wind turbines.
Because you reference Australia, it was almost certainly coal plants that were bidding negative because it would cost them more to ramp down and back up again as demand changes.
There's some incentive regimes, that can lead to renewables offering to pay people to take their power (if they get paid $X for each used watt, then they can pass some of that subsidy on to a user rather than stop providing) but that's a good thing, not a bad thing. It's just a price signal that rewards flexible demand.
In the words of an Australian coal energy producer:
> Negative prices are a signal to either increase demand or reduce supply. Intermittent and fast response energy sources (such as solar, wind, peaking generators) can stop and start in relatively short spaces of time to avoid negative price periods. Coal-fired generators however, incur significant costs stopping and starting and require many hours to restart. This means they continue generating throughout negative pricing periods as it is more cost-efficient to incur the costs of negative pricing than shutting down and then starting up again. This ensures that they are available to meet peak demand in the late afternoon and evening once the intermittent sources such as rooftop solar and large-scale solar are no longer available.
> because solar can switch itself off fast enough that any solar bidding a negative price to the market would just turn itself off
Wouldn’t this make the panels hotter? I’m guessing they’d accept (or should accept) a slightly negative price but because that’s better than dumping the energy through the panels themselves via excess heating.
> but because that’s better than dumping the energy through the panels themselves via excess heating.
That's not how solar panels turn themselves off, however. To turn a solar panel off, you just disconnect it. It will produce a voltage (which is why handling an uncovered solar panel can be a shock hazard), but no current. It's not dumping the power, it's actually producing no power in the first place (voltage times current is zero when the current is zero).
Eventually we can have grid scale carbon removal systems that can soak up all of the extra electrify on the grid. Probably the same when large industrial processes are electrified, like generating fertilizer.
> I suspect that the elephant in the room is simply money. Who pays?
This one is very frustrating. The core of the issue is the lack of long-term strategy. It has been obvious for decades that paying now is orders of magnitude cheaper than bearing the consequences of things like climate change and a dependence on a madman dictator hell bent on revenge with delusions of grandeur. But the practical solutions are screws that we can’t really use with our free-market hammers.
We had good free-market solutions that we didn't use either, so I'm not totally sure that free-market thinking is the root cause, unless you're referring to people using 'free-market' as an excuse to do things that help the rich and the powerful, while ignoring 'free-market' things that would help other groups, which is often the case.
Probably best to seperate people knowlingly lying about science/politics/economics to suit themselves from the activities themselves, though that can be complicated at times.
> We had good free-market solutions that we didn't use either, so I'm not totally sure that free-market thinking is the root cause, unless you're referring to people using 'free-market' as an excuse to do things that help the rich and the powerful, while ignoring 'free-market' things that would help other groups, which is often the case.
That’s right, we could have done more even within a somewhat free-market framework. Though a lot of people would argue that the moment the government has to step in with incentives and taxes it ceases to be free; this was an argument that was used against cap and trade, for example (though even cap and trade is a terrible solution anyway). These solutions would not really help with large infrastructure projects or the lack of will to address dependence to Russian gas, for example.
Cap and trade is a fine solution. It's basically equivalent to carbon pricing.
You can mess up carbon taxes by setting the wrong price, not increasing it predictably over time or exempting certain sectors, mismeasuring or whatever. That's basically the same things you can mess up with Cap and Trade.
Cross border effects have impacts too, but there's no fundamental reason why carbon pricing or cap and trade wouldn't be a good solution to weaning Germany off Russian gas.
It is cheap on industrial and warehouse roofs, and extends the life of the roof. But they coexist well with pasture and crop land uses, too, as well as reservoirs and canals.
So space for solar is absolutely abundant everywhere.
No, what the comment says above is correct: there's a rather dramatic difference in levelized costs between utility scale solar and rooftop residential solar. Commercial rooftop solar is only slightly better than residential.
There's multiple factors that feed into this, such as how much supporting infrastructure is amortized vs scale, being able to design the array for optimal lighting vs working with an existing building, systematic regular cleaning to keep the array working near peak efficiency... lots and lots more details like that.
This isn't to say residential rooftop solar is bad. However atm it's something of a vanity project for people who can afford the investment. It is most definitely not some sort of obvious solves the whole problem slam dunk idiots in government are ignoring because they're stupid. They know what they're doing and are focusing on the highest impact places to put funds, and that can scale up a lot faster than fighting NIMBYs.
And yeah, I'm really disappointed in Elon's solar roof tile stunt surrounding this.
> It is most definitely not some sort of obvious solves the whole problem slam dunk idiots in government are ignoring because they're stupid.
The thing is, there is no slam dunk obvious solution. But every bit that helps could be part of a more global solution that has a chance of working. Public transport, better insulation, electric transportation, solar panels and wind turbines where it makes sense, large-scale carbon-free baseline production, etc. We need to do all of that.
> And yeah, I'm really disappointed in Elon's solar roof tile stunt surrounding this.
Elon is not on the right side of this. His pseudo-ecologist speeches are just window dressing.
True, retrofitting will always cost more than outfitting during original construction, and having the builder involved enables economy of scale when many (near-)copies of the same house design are built.
At issue is that a residential roof is no bigger than the residence. That does not make residential installations a dumb idea. They just cost more than alternatives.
On very large commercial buildings, a project may claim economies of scale, and support dedicated personnel to keep them operating well.
That said, roofs are far from the best place to site solar.
This misses two power sources, the first (and actually used on commercial scales) is geothermal - I can't find anything on land area usage, but I recall driving through wairakei and just seeing giant masses of pipes periodically being visible in the bush. In NZ it represents 17% (per wikipedia) of the countries power, and is the most stable source of power as it isn't dependent on rain, sun, or wind.
The other more reasonably ignored option is wave based generation. In principle wave generators could generate large amounts of reliable power, but I can't recall any commercial plants in operation. There's one article I found about commercial power generation in Australia [1], but it's a single generator producing only 200kW.
There are groups trying to solve the problem of drilling deep enough to tap into geothermal in countries that don't have fissures useable enough for this like NZ and Iceland. At the depths we can currently get to, we are looking at heat-pump technology rather than the ability to drive steam turbines.
As for wave generation, the problem afaik is simply the hostile environment of the sea and how long the equipment will last in what is basically a large electrolyte! There are a lot of experiments and some small scale production north of Scotland but after a few years, the equipment simply corrodes away. One example: https://www.offshore-mag.com/renewable-energy/article/142032...
Oh, I understand the why of wave energy being challenging, there's a huge amount of energy available to be harnessed, but on the other hand there's a huge amount of energy being put into any equipment, before you even have to deal with the generally hostile environment created by salt water.
I was just saying I was aware that plenty of orgs are trying to develop commercially viable methods and didn't know if any had got to anything beyond small scale testing yet :D
Can anyone explain the assertion that “we’ll run out of land before ever can put in enough solar”. I’ve seen a lot of articles and interviews that say that, but then a whole bunch that don’t even mention the high amount of land use and seem to think that’s not a problem.
Any explanation or good articles would be helpful.
About 40% of US corn is used for fuel ethanol [1]. About 90 million acres of corn are planted in the United States [1]. So around 36 million acres of corn are used for ethanol. Solar farms generally require less than four acres to produce one GWh of electricity per year [2]. Therefore at least 9 million GWh of electricity per year are available by displacement of corn ethanol alone. Total annual US electricity consumption is presently around 4 million GWh [3].
There's vastly more land than is needed for any reasonable mix of solar in a post-carbon world. There's just also lots of speculative and unreasonable scenarios one can dream up if they want to argue otherwise.
Besides that just the area already devoted to fossil fuel extraction would suffice, solar and wind coexist neatly with existing uses, so don't need to "use up" any land at all.
According to linked calculation Solar PV needs 19 sq m per MWh per annum
Per Wiki final total energy consumption is 7050 MTOE which translates to 610 TWH
Multiple this by 10, 1.5 to account for energy losses,1.5 for capacity factor issues and 3.33 for growth in developing countries. Rounding up say the world needs 6000 per annum
Area needed = 6000 * 10^6 * 20/10^6 = 120000 sq km
Even in a densely populated country like India that is roughly 3% of the total land area
The challenge off course is installing it cheaply and balancing demand, supply, transmission etc.
So we have experience building infrastructure of a similar scale, though probably not quite at the speed currently needed to meet carbon emissions targets solely by building photovoltaics.
Of course, deserts, and not cities, are the best places to put solar power, especially since the shade generated can be useful for crops, and we have tons of desert in the US
The country is about 42000 km² big. We won't want to get 100% of energy from photovoltaic, but also we'll need overcapacity to compensate for losses in storage and, to a lesser extent, transmission. Presumably, the land is currently not unused. I don't know what area is currently used by roofs and parking lots, that would be interesting to put this in perspective.
I was under the impression that roofs are not enough by far; perhaps it works when we add parking lots and cover all roads, or perhaps my knowledge is outdated (also because batteries have evolved since I first heard that). Either way, we'd have to cover gigantic amounts of land with electronics. Not saying it can't be done (I don't know enough about it), but not having any hydro to speak of, little space far enough from villages for wind, and no nuclear in the mix for the sake of argument... it sure seems daunting.
It's not clear which country you're talking about; land area of the USA is 9.8 million km².
Melbourne (Australia) is a moderately large city of just under 10,000 km² in area. I'd (very conservatively) estimate at least 10% of that is roof space, so 1000 km² of roof-mounted panels seems pretty achievable.
Global electricity consumption (averaged over the year of 2019) is approx 2.7 terawatts (per statistica.com). Lets call it 100 terawatts (storage losses, switching oil heaters to electricity).
It's straightforward to get 1 kilowatt per square meter from a solar panel, so you'd need about 100k km² of solar panels globally. That's the rooflines of 100 cities the size of Melbourne.
> It's not clear which country you're talking about; land area of the USA is...
You assume that when someone just speaks of "the country" without specifying, it's the place where people think they're the whole world. I left it out to see if exactly this would happen because I was curious. I'm surprised not one but two persons felt certain enough I must mean the USA to correct my figure for the USA in a comment. Goes to show. My username is a city in Germany but apparently that wasn't enough of a hint that it is, for once, not about the USA. Also the USA uses double the energy per capita and has twenty times more people, 900 TWh should also be a giveaway for those who know any country's energy consumption, or at least it was easy to check that I didn't merely take a wrong km² value (also, I'm using metric).
Anyway, I'm glad we can supply global energy consumption this way. Now we just need a global government to distribute the produced energy to countries with higher population densities than the extreme examples you took like USA and Australia. That they can use solar effectively, both from the amount of unused land and favorable latitude, shouldn't surprise anyone. Oddly (no sarcasm here), I don't see them getting around to it either.
I just looked up the landuse of my country and that's about 7% built-up area. https://www.clo.nl/en/indicators/en0061-land-use-in-the-neth... Even if we cover all of that, it's not enough, we'll need to take land away from agriculture which is already only barely enough to feed everyone in a pinch despite having a huge yield per unit area.
Which is not to say we shouldn't do it. I just realized I might come across as "renewables will never work". No, with wind at sea and nuclear (easy to import from any country on Earth since it's so energy dense) we can be self sufficient even though we have enough independent neighbours that we needn't be anyway. It's just that the person I initially responded to wasn't far off, depending on which country they were talking about, and it's something people aren't being realistic about in counties near me. The reason that matters is that it influences policy: rooftop solar and wind are great, go go go, but don't stop there! Don't wait for that to complete, then discover we've replaced 2000's electricity use (not used for transportation or heating) and forgotten about the rest. That's what many countries are doing currently. See people being happy about headlines like "wind and sun were >50% of the energy mix last year!" when they really mean electricity mix and don't realize that this is about 10% of the total energy need.
Ok point taken, funny thing is I'm German, but the 900 TWh threw me off. What I've read is that Germany is projected to have 600TWh in 2030, for perspective electricity consumption in the US is 1500 TWh atm.
However your size for Germany is still off by an order of magnitude. Germany has a land area of 357,000km2. With 13500km2 for producing that electricity we are still at 5% so that is below the 7% of build up area (ignoring wind and other sources).
Sorry but the country is actually the Netherlands. See the link I shared :D. I live in Germany these days but most of this type of info I still know better from when I lived in NL. (E.g. wouldn't know what the statistics bureau here is called, whereas in NL that's just something I grew up with hearing on the news so I know what source to trust.)
That Germany wants to have 600 TWh in 2030 is crazy, I hadn't heard that yet. Very curious how this will work! The only big win I can see would be in heat pumps being 3x more efficient than anything else, but building heating is only a few % of the total use. Industries would also be big wins, but moving steel production abroad is just moving the problem like a hot potato. 82 million people using less energy than their 17 million neighbours did in 2013 would be quite an achievement! In case you remember where you read about that, I'd be curious about a link.
> Sorry but the country is actually the Netherlands. See the link I shared :D. I live in Germany these days but most of this type of info I still know better from when I lived in NL. (E.g. wouldn't know what the statistics bureau here is called, whereas in NL that's just something I grew up with hearing on the news so I know what source to trust.)
Hah, you're reference to the username threw me off (I have to admit I did not look at the link).
> That Germany wants to have 600 TWh in 2030 is crazy, I hadn't heard that yet. Very curious how this will work! The only big win I can see would be in heat pumps being 3x more efficient than anything else, but building heating is only a few % of the total use. Industries would also be big wins, but moving steel production abroad is just moving the problem like a hot potato. 82 million people using less energy than their 17 million neighbours did in 2013 would be quite an achievement! In case you remember where you read about that, I'd be curious about a link.
Ok I think I see where the confusion lies. I've been using numbers for electricity production/consumption while you are talking about total energy consumption (I guess?). I think the question of how to transition heavy industry to non-fossil fuels is definitely a big one, I suspect we likely will need hydrogen technology for that (I don't think anyone knows how to do metal manufacturing with electricity directly). It's actually quite current in the situation now. One of Germanies biggest gas consumers is a copper cable manufacturer. If Germany wants to move of fossil fuels/become independent of Russian gas, copper is crucial, but at the same time to make the copper the only solution at the moment is to use gas.
> we likely will need hydrogen technology for that (I don't think anyone knows how to do metal manufacturing with electricity directly)
As far as I know, indeed, we can't use electricity directly. But it's not just heavy industries like steel that need high heat: also general building heating, transportation (any mode), mining, everything needs to become zero carbon. Hydrogen allows us to transition some industries that can't use electricity directly as far as I know, but that extra step just introduces another efficiency into the system. Even at 1:1 (win some on building heating and mass transport, lose some on e.g. hydrogen conversions), it seems to me like a tough challenge to be self sufficient and climate neutral in western Europe. Gonna need every angle we can get.
The size of the USA is 9,833,520 km² not 42000 km² according to Wikipedia. So 12000 km² corresponds to roughly 0.1% of the total land area.
To get a feeling if we could use rooftop solar to satisfy energy consumption. LA has an area of 1200 km², assuming 30% of the City are buildings and parking lots (not sure if that is a valid assumption) putting solar on those would satisfy about 3% of energy capacity requirements. Judging by that it doesn't seem outrageous (orders of magnitude off) to say we could satisfy all electricity demands with rooftop solar, especially if we add wind and hydro to the mix.
You assume that when someone just speaks of "the country" and "we need" without specifying, it's the place where people think they're the whole world. I left it out to see if exactly this would happen because I was curious. I'm surprised not one but two persons felt certain enough I must mean the USA to correct my figure for the USA in a comment. Goes to show. My username is a city in Germany but apparently that wasn't enough of a hint that it is, for once, not about the USA. Also the USA uses double the energy per capita and has twenty times more people, 900 TWh should also be a giveaway for those who know any country's energy consumption, or at least it was easy to check that I didn't merely take a wrong km² value (also, I'm using metric).
For what it's worth, I just looked up land use in my country, it's "less than 7%" built up (buildings at least, sounds like it also includes roads and parking lots) according to the statistics bureau. 4/5ths is nature, recreation, agriculture. https://www.clo.nl/en/indicators/en0061-land-use-in-the-neth...
That the USA has it easy with gigantic slabs of unused land around and still they're not really making use of it, so that bodes well for those with more people per km² which I think is most other rich countries (aside from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Canada where it's probably not sunny enough anyway, at least not in the places where there is plenty of unused space).
> would satisfy about 3% of energy capacity requirements
Which figure for energy consumption are you using here?
I don't have much to add here, other than a lot of land isn't suitable for solar. From not enough light to too much heat, there's less available land than you'd think.
There is a risk of policymakers reading documents like this and using it to make conclusions about which types of energy generation are 'best'.
That's a bad thing to do, because no analysis like this can truly capture all the upsides and downsides of any particular plant in a specific location.
You know one thing that can? It's profitability.
The profits of a power plant are directly impacted by the cost of land - and a power plant competes for the same land as farms and houses.
As long as our markets correctly price in externalities (for example a per-acre-per-year tax for any land not left untouched), then the market makes far better decisions about what to build where than any policymaker ever could.
It's a reasonable 'spherical cow in a vacuum' type thing to work towards and compare things with, as long as you remember that it's not the default state of the universe or that we live in the best of all possible worlds and there's no room for improvement.
Policymakers, anyway, are used to being lied to, so mostly know better than to be swayed by tendentious material like TFA.
Solar and wind, uniquely, do not compete for land, as they coexist neatly with other uses. This is part of why they are the cheapest power generation that has ever been fielded.
I'm firmly in favor of markets, myself, but I think there are other notable caveats.
You mention pricing externalities being important; it's also important that corporations don't have undue influence in their own regulation, or externalities will become chronically underpriced.
I also think "just profitability" isn't quite correct. Profitability is sometimes antithetical to efficiency and sustainability; take artifical scarcity or planned premature obsolescence, for example.
[On that topic: I've wondered before whether corporations are darwinian. They are large, amoral machines that have a life their own, and presumably the corporations that survive (and that are around today) are the corporations that act in the interest of their own self-preservation, not in the interests of people or life on earth. I have no idea whether the time scales involved are sufficient for the evolution of corporate strategy, but it's fun armchair philosophy.]
Fortunately, "markets" is not synonymous with "capitalism" – markets feature in many economic systems, so we have options.
That puts a lot of trust into the government correctly pricing in externalities. Otherwise, coal would steamroll everything since it is very cheap and abundant.
How do you ever factor in all the externalities? The pollution of coal, the storage of nukes, the offshore child labor mining of battery materials, the everything-is-built-in-China-and-dumped-in-even-poorer-places of everything we touch every part in every part of the supply chain...
And what about the externalities of subsidized farmland? Of different states' property tax schemes? Of humans displaced due to lack of housing development, of habitat loss from any sort of development... there are a million variables to look at and no easy model.
Globalized capitalism IS the story of externalizing costs to further profit, isn't it? Our markets cannot price in all the externalities, and when they do, they end up commoditizing essential things like energy and healthcare and subject basic needs to capital manipulation and financial markets that just skim off the top. We shouldn't be gambling with basic infrastructure on the off-chance that it might allow the rich to get even richer. Not everything is fixed by market forces, and some things can be made worse once you introduce perverse financial incentives to game the system.
For an article about a specific scientific concept (the proportional land use for different types of generator), it’s surprising they actually got that concept wrong in all their examples:
“These can have a small land footprint of just 8m2 per MWh”
This is implies that the land is being consumed by the generator. I assume there is an implied “per year” or “per day” but it’s a little sloppy.
This really highlights one of the big advantages for nuclear on this crowded planet.
I wonder how it would look if you factor in land that has become unusable (to humans) by disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, amortized appropriately of course. Perhaps this was accounted for already.
Is the planet crowded? Whenever I go on a road trip I certainly don't get that impression. There's 20 minutes of cities, an hour of outskirts, then 4 hours of nothing. People don't want to live that far away from everyone else, in general, but wind turbines and solar panels don't get as lonely. All you really have to worry about are resistive losses when bringing the electricity to the people, and that seems very manageable. It's also a problem with nuclear because nobody really wants to live next door to a nuclear power plant. One "hold my beer!" away from being the next "Damn Interesting" article in the lost cities category.
I mean "crowded" is relative, but yeah I'd say we're crowding the planet. There's precious little wilderness left [1]. Livestock outweighs wild mammals by a factor of 10:1 [2]. The chicken is the most common bird, 15x the runner up [3]. Flying insects are down 75% or more since ~1990 [4]. The reefs are dying, we're dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and cooking the planet, there's plastic getting everywhere in the ocean.
Maybe "crowded" is a loaded term and I can see why someone might object when they drive through the countryside and all they can see is miles of roads and fields, but we're stripping the planet of biodiversity, and gobbling all the resources we can. We're shifting the planet is shifting from a biological system to an industrial one.
It's not all bad, and at heart I really do believe humans are the most precious creature here, but we're shitting the bed and spoiling our own cradle.
Lately, nuclear has started looking like a necessary tool if we're going to have any chance at tackling climate change.
What crowded planet? It's not always so easy to generalize things.
We have huge deserts that can't sustain human life properly (lack of water sources). Good for solar power plants though.
I'd much rather have, say, Australian cities ran with solar power from huge installations in the centre of the country than building nuclear plants right next to Sydney or Melbourne.
Of course other countries like Singapore wouldn't have that option. We can't generalize the whole planet ("so crowded").
Singapore is very aggressively installing GW-scale "floatovoltaics", solar floating on their abundant water resources. This is very smart, as the panels stay cool so more efficient, and last much longer. Nobody knows exactly how much longer, because there hasn't been time to find out yet.
It ends with "Currently, there are four other floating solar panel projects underway in Singapore." Of course more projects may have been initiated since then.
It is always easy to promote your favorite by lying. the article author's favorite is obvious.
Solar, of course, does not need to take up any land at all, as it easily coexists with existing uses, whether reservoirs and canals, pasture and cropland, or industrial rooftops. Wind, similarly.
And a nuke, in the US, always fills a square mile. Then there are the uranium mines and tailings beds.
It's not really an electricity source, but recently I was curious about pumped hydro storage, and how to develop any kind of intuition about the relationship between volume of water, height difference, and how much energy you can actually store that way.
I used lake Mead and Hoover dam as an example. I wanted to know how much stored energy is there.
Apparently the U.S. uses 3.9 trillion kwh per year.
Prelude> (3.9 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) / 365
1.0684931506849316e10
That comes out to about 10 billion kwh per day. We'll come back to that number later.
The amount of stored gravitational energy of a thing in joules is its mass in kg times height in meters times 9.8 m/s^2 (on Earth). There are 3,600,000 joules in a kilowatt hour.
Lake Mead is about 29,000,000 acre feet. An acre foot weighs about 2,718,000 pounds. There's 2.2 pounds per kilogram.
The "hydraulic" height of Hoover dam is 567 feet, according to wikipedia. I'm assuming that's when it's full (it isn't, but let's pretend it is). Not all the water would be at the top though. We'll say that the average water molecule is at 3/4 of the height. (It's more than half because the lake has a cross section like a martini glass). I don't know what the real number is, but 3/4 seems good enough for an estimate. We can convert feet to meters by dividing by 3.28.
Huh, that number is pretty close to the one from earlier. If I did my math right, there's about twelve and a half billion kilowatt hours stored in a full lake Mead. So, we could, in theory, maintain a buffer capable of powering the United States for an average day with the amount of stored energy in a full lake Mead.
We could also do the same thing with 1/10th the water and an altitude difference that's 10 times bigger.
If one wanted to actually build something like this to buffer out day/night variations in solar power, the amount of pumps and turbines you'd need to move a lake Mead worth of water every day would be staggering.
This is relevant to the question of land use, because a dedicated pumped hydro system would probably have two reservoirs, or a reservoir and a large natural body of water like the ocean, and the amount of energy you can store scales up with the water volume, which corellates with horizontal surface area. It's kind of an interesting problem to think about... where are the best pumped hydro sites?
That's an impressive site and I remember it being posted to HN recently, but it's a bit overwhelming. I guess the message is that you can do pumped hydro almost anywhere that hills exist, but there must be some "best sites" that get you the most energy storage with the least cost.
Mark Z Jacobson says current fossil fuel infrastructure takes more land than needed for solar in a 100% renewable USA:
https://issues.org/renewables-minerals-energy-transition-jac...
"In “The Hard Math of Minerals” (Issues, January 27, 2022), Mark P. Mills writes that “building solar and wind systems requires roughly a tenfold increase in the total tonnage of common materials … to deliver the same quantity of energy compared to building a natural gas or other hydrocarbon-fueled power plant.” This idea is misleading, since the source cited states that it “excluded” the materials related to the fuels used in power plants. Such fuels must be mined forever. With solar and wind, fuel mining is zero, forever. One recent study that accounted for fuel mining plus infrastructure concluded that one gigawatt of wind capacity replacing coal-generated electricity on the Texas grid reduces total mining by 25 million tonnes over 20 years.
In fact, in North America alone, an average of fifty thousand new oil and gas wells are drilled yearly. These are ignored by Mills. The land required for these new wells is 2,500 square kilometers per year. Once a well is depleted, it is abandoned. The United States has 1.3 million active oil and gas wells and 3.2 million abandoned ones. Worldwide, Reuters estimates that about 29 million wells are abandoned.
Research I’ve conducted with colleagues estimates that fossil fuel infrastructure currently takes up about 1.3 % of US land. This is due to wells, coal mines, oil refineries, pipelines, power plants, fueling stations, and storage facilities. In comparison, transitioning the United States for all energy purposes to 100% wind, water, and solar power may take less than 1% of US land. So not only does a transition to renewables reduce material requirements, but it also reduces land use."
Also see the interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzU05f8lNd0 The Climate Crisis with Mark Z. Jacobson | The PLUS Podcast