The order directs Vistra to retire 2 GW of coal generation by the end of the year. ... The process to retire so much coal by the end of the year must begin very soon, as Vistra must notify the Midcontinent ISO (MISO) of any intended retirements 180 days in advance.
Two weeks ago:
"In a Surprise Announcement, Colstrip Units 1 and 2 to Close by Year-End"
The growing disconnect between the politics and the reality of renewables versus (specifically) coal is troubling.
The current Australian government has been denying climate change since they came to power in 2013. They've been talking down renewables and placing national-security-scale importance of the role of coal in Australia's future economic success (which I actually find a significant worry because the bottom will drop out of the coal market sooner rather than later). Without much support from federal government policy (but with some support from state governments), renewables in Australia have been steadily growing in their contribution to the overall energy generation mix at a rate higher than expectations, such is the purely commercial justification of renewables.
And yet politics is trying to (s|t)ell a different narrative without providing any foundational reasoning other than motherhood statements about the importance of coal to Australia's economy.
Either politicians know more than they're letting on about the fragile state of Australia's economy and its fundamental over-dependence on a single mineral, or the Australian powers-that-be are over-dependent on a single mineral for their power base.
The more politicians talk down renewables, the more they damage their legitimacy on any other topic; the more they advertise that their speeches are for sale.
I have to admit, Australia looks particularly weird from afar. I mean, you guys are baking under intense light for huge parts of the year and yet someone thought "I know, let's burn some coal". I mean, at least here in Canada people have a sort of emotional attachment to burning things for heat.
It's a complicated (and somewhat regional) story. But at the root of it is something our politicians have known for a long time, which has made (for example) constitutional alterations almost impossible to achieve: Australians are very, very easy to scare when it comes to any change from the status quo. All a politician has to do is hit the 'this will affect your standard of living' riff (whether justified or not), repeat it endlessly, and a change is usually nixed.
Why? It would require a book. Donald Horne's 'The Lucky Country' covered some of it. My (highly contestable) short version is that Australian culture is preturnaturally shallow. There is nothing that holds our society together other than material consumption. Citizens are somewhat aware of this, and are (perhaps subconsciously) terrified of what might happen if anything threatens our lazy prosperity. We have nothing to fall back on - no heroic national myths, no exceptionalism, no religion, no idealism, no common ground.
We have nothing to fall back on - no heroic national myths, no exceptionalism, no religion, no idealism, no common ground.
That's all true, and yet Australians are very protective of what they consider "theirs". Maybe it's because of this historic void meaning all they've got is their material things and social status etc.
I'll have to have a read of The Lucky Country, thanks for the reference.
I think it's because Australia is so rich in mineral deposits, and there's so much momentum behind Australia depending on digging shit up and selling it overseas that politics lacks the will to fight the existing momentum because there's still so much money in it.
If Australia had gotten on front foot and built out more solar / wind / renewables, almost to excess, it would be able to then apply that potentially excess power into either local manufacturing with much lower electricity / energy overheads and / or "exportables" such as hydrogen fuel cells (effectively exporting our free and abundant sunlight).
This technology is under discussion at the moment, so maybe it's not matured to the point of viability even now, but it's not something that's factored into any Australian political speeches about the country's future economic opportunities.
It IS amusing. It provides great insight into the competing priorities of the human condition. Then it becomes depressing.
Australia is too dependent on extractive industries. Once that happens, things go downhill, as the owner of the resources is a rent seeker, and his only goal in life is to reduce his overheads and keep the good times rolling.
As the Chinese diversify their sourcing of materials in Africa, Australia is pretty fucked later this century.
Unfortunately the Australian electricity grid is so hopelessly mismanaged I can't make a case that renewable over cheaper options are the major cost driver. There is some evidence from SA that it is likely to be a mistake, but there is a lot going on [0]. If renewables are cheaper we will use them, the government isn't really doing anything overt to support the coal industry. Nothing that really moves the needle on coal vs. alternatives as a power source.
As for "over-dependence on a single mineral" - it isn't quite that bad. We have 2 major minerals, coal and iron ore in roughly equal quantities [1]. It is a pretty scary state of affairs, we have really screwed ourselves over by focusing the nation's investments into property speculation rather than into growing businesses and useful infrastructure.
I think the strategy of promoting coal in the 21st century is basically to be the first to run out of it. Kind of like a furniture store doing a liquidation sale. Nobody wants that product, but the store doing everything they can to sell as much as they can possibly sell is the difference between having a convertible asset and having a liability. In national terms, coal & coal mines = GDP. For every country that mines coal, the goal is to not be the last one selling it for power generation. That's why there is a push from the top to outproduce everyone else.
At the rate things are currently going, it looks like China will be the last one selling it. The international market will go first, and finally the domestic market will shrivel up in the next decade or two, and so will coal's material contribution to any country's GDP.
This all boils down to economic realities, available technology, etc.
Yes, the politicians can wring their hands but don't end up actually doing much because they understand that people like to complain about global warming but when asked how much money they are willing to spend to reduce carbon emissions, the dollar amount is usually like 20 bucks per person/per year. Macron discovered how angry people get when you actually force them to pay more and he quickly backtracked. None of the Paris signatories have met their goals, nor are they on track to meet their goals, because of political reality, not despite it.
So the politicians are generally smarter at reading the pulse of the public than the activists on this issue. People care, but only a little bit.
But as technology continues to progress, I have no doubt that long term we will not be using coal anymore. But solar has serious problems, the most intractable being the disposal of the solar cells -- they are quite toxic, and no one has figured out what to do with the decommissioned cells -- and we will have a lot of them if solar accounts for a non-trivial share of global electricity output. As in billions would need to be disposed of each year. So I don't think solar is the answer, given current materials.
Personally, I like nuclear, but I could be wrong. We will move on from coal just as we moved on from wood and whale oil and all the energy sources of the past, but it's going to happen on a timeline determined by technological feasibility and economics, not by politics or political pledges.
> But as technology continues to progress, I have no doubt that long term we will not be using coal anymore. But solar has serious problems, the most intractable being the disposal of the solar cells -- they are quite toxic, and no one has figured out what to do with the decommissioned cells -- and we will have a lot of them if solar accounts for a non-trivial share of global electricity output. As in billions would need to be disposed of each year. So I don't think solar is the answer, given current materials.
Source? I find it hard to believe this is a problem given they last decades, I'm not aware of any major problematic materials in solar panels, and the primary alternative is burning coal.
There are many alternatives to solar other than burning coal. For example, you can build a nuclear plant or hydro dam, or use more natural gas or biomass. The world is not divided into solar v. coal -- solar is not even a major player in global energy right now.
In terms of sources about the disposal issues for solar, there are many discussions about this online, but here is a nice, readable, layman's introduction to the problem:
"To understand the challenges of solar waste, it’s helpful to understand how the panels are built. There are different types of solar panels, but most of them contain aluminum, glass, silver, and an elastic material called ethylene-vinyl acetate. The problem is that they can also contain more dangerous and sometimes cancer-causing, materials such as lead, chromium, and cadmium. Functional panels are sealed off with glass and are very safe. But when the glass breaks or the panels are damaged, those substances can leak.
This risk is especially high with poorly made solar panels installed in areas that experience extreme weather, like hurricanes and hail. Winds and rain can break the glass, allowing chemicals to leach into the soil and then into the water system"
Now imagine a world where solar is a major player. So world energy consumption was 1.575 × 10^17 Wh (2013) and growing at, say, 3% per annum (conservative). (wikipedia).
Let's imagine that in 2033, when world energy consumption is 2.8 * 10^17 WH, solar accounts for 1/3 of that. Now today's panels are about 1.65 m^2 and can generate about 300W (https://www.solarpowerrocks.com/solar-basics/how-much-electr...), so let's say due to improvements in science, that becomes 600W. And let's say they do that 12 hours per day nonstop year round, to produce 2.63*10^6 WH per annum.
That means they can account for 1/3 of world energy needs if we have 38 Billion of these futuristic solar cells (the ones with double the current energy output and that produce peak output 12 hours each day 365 days per year).
That's about 20% of the area of Arizona. And let's say that due to external damage and internal failure, the cells need to be replaced once every 40 years, so that means we need to recycle about 1 billion of these cells each year, each weighing about 25kg, so that is 25 Billion kilograms of waste that would need to be recycled each year, contaminated with some nasty chemicals. And that number too will grow by 3% each year as global energy use increases.
And this situation is only going to get worse because as we do more research and create more efficient cells, that's not going to happen by switching to more organic compounds. It means more exotic compounds.
And we still need to find something else for the other 2/3 of global energy use.
> There are many alternatives to solar other than burning coal. For example, you can build a nuclear plant or hydro dam, or use more natural gas or biomass. The world is not divided into solar v. coal -- solar is not even a major player in global energy right now.
Really? You're pointing out solar panels have a waste disposal problem and then name nuclear as an alternative? Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of nuclear too, and just about every other alternative you mentioned. I just think it's absurd to be worrying about solar panel waste in the larger context here. Hydro dams flood a lot of land, natural gas releases a lot of CO2.
> To understand the challenges of solar waste, it’s helpful to understand how the panels are built. There are different types of solar panels, but most of them contain aluminum, glass, silver, and an elastic material called ethylene-vinyl acetate. The problem is that they can also contain more dangerous and sometimes cancer-causing, materials such as lead, chromium, and cadmium. Functional panels are sealed off with glass and are very safe. But when the glass breaks or the panels are damaged, those substances can leak.
Doesn't sound like anything not already found in a coal fly ash pond [1]. You can probably simply dump deprecated solar panels in a pile with a dirt berm next to the solar plant and come out way ahead of a coal power plant.
I'm not saying this isn't a problem that should be dealt with. I just do not believe this is a problem that would be even 1% as bad as the problem we have right now. I think that if your line of reasoning results in even a slight delay of the deprecation of a coal power plant at the expense of solar development, we've come out way behind in terms of environmental impact.
If you are going to claim this is a problem, I think we should see evidence for that compared to alternatives that actually exist or can realistically be built. How much lead, cadmium, chromium end up in the environment from power generation today? And how much would do so if we disposed of solar panels in even the worst possible manner?
Nuclear generates waste, but it's several orders of magnitude less, so it's much easier to manage.
For coal, absolutely, there is fly ash, but if your plan is to just dump the current global production of aluminum into ponds every year, you are going to have a problem. These materials need to be recycled, not dumped. E.g. for a normal 2 inch thick cell. You have a volume of 600 million cubic meters that needs to be disposed of annually, and it's growing each year by 3%.
The problem here is that people don't realize the scale of the issue -- and I was quite generous in my estimates.
Not necessarily. Most governments of wealthy nations are determined to prop up fossil fuel use regardless of so-called 'economic' or environmental fundamentals. This is very well-established in research but for a recent newsy report see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/25/g20-nati....
You might say this can't go on forever as it soaks up government revenue unsustainably. But many decades can pass before 'forever' is hit, and we're in amongst the decades that really count, right now.
It can go on for a long time indeed. The issue is that eventually your infrastructure is hopelessly outdated. And your key industries run by goldbricks whose core competence is demanding subsidies and hand outs.
See the US steel industry for an example. It was a long hard fight but we did it. The US steel industry went from being a world leader to not particularly important in 50 years.
"The clean energy industry should enjoy this moment while it lasts. One of the main reasons coal-fired power plants produced so little in April was because some were down for routine, springtime maintenance. Coal is forecast to return to its perch as the second-biggest source of electricity -- after natural gas -- as those units return to service and demand peaks this summer."
What's your point then? The point of the article is that the renewable share of the energy production budget is growing (and coal isn't), and the notable data point is that "for the first time ever, renewables surpass coal". That's the way news works. It wants a fact to hang the trend on. And both the fact and the trend are correctly reported.
The fact that this is a local maximum doesn't say anything about the shape of the function on either side.
We don't need to speculate. We have the data on US coal use. The trend is aggressive and consistent in the downward direction.
Dec 4 2018: "EIA expects total U.S. coal consumption in 2018 to fall to 691 million short tons (MMst), a 4% decline from 2017 and the lowest level since 1979. U.S. coal consumption has been falling since its peak in 2007, and EIA forecasts that 2018 coal consumption will be 437 MMst (44%) lower than 2007 levels, mainly driven by declines in coal use in the electric power sector."
Simultaneously the US is bringing effectively zero new coal-based production online:
"In 2007, coal-fired capacity in the United States totaled 313 gigawatts (GW) across 1,470 generators. By the end of 2017, 529 of those generators, with a total capacity of 55 GW, had retired. ... Only one, relatively small, new coal-fired generator with a capacity of 17 megawatts is expected to come online by the end of 2019."
If, as implied, this maintenance is done on a regular yearly basis, and this is the first time that that's been enough to change coal's placement in the mix, it would still seem to indicate that the larger trend is starting to outweigh the fluctuations.
> But the trend is clear: Renewable energy will continue to eclipse coal in future months as more wind and solar farms are deployed, EIA’s forecasts show.
I would like to see how the renewable section breaks down in to carbon-intensive varieties vs others.
Non-solar, non-hydro renewables make up the bulk of renewable energy, and with the notable exceptions of wind and geothermal, many of these methods are very dirty. Burning of waste/biomass is probably not significantly better than coal from an emissions or pollution standpoint.
In ERCOT wind is 2nd in generation to Gas Combined-Cycle generation (basically jet engines running natural gas). Coal is slightly behind wind and solar and biomass is tiny.
I dug a little deeper into the EIA reports and their non-hydro renewables category is almost 90% wind. Wind and hydro alone are almost even with coal in April, with the other contributions being quite small.
There is a huge wind power boom in north Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. I saw thousands of windmills driving through there a couple months ago, and must have passed two dozen semis loaded up with blades to build more. It's a sight to see.
Solar (if you include non-utility solar) was about 3.5% of the total electricity produced in April. That's actually pretty significant. Solar only scraped 1 percent starting in 2015.
(Although I worry about the second derivative... solar's growth is not as impressive in the last 12 months as it was the 12 months prior.)
Yeah people compare solar pricing to subsidized baseload prices. Which is unfavorable. Instead of the more lucrative peeking plant pricing which is higher. Often a lot higher.
Gas Combined Cycle is more than just jet engine running natural gas: it’s also using exhaust gasses to boil water to make steam to run steam turbine. You have both direct electricity generation from turbine burning gas, and also second stage of steam turbine generation.
Is that true across the nation? I know California isn't the whole energy market but their renewable energy mix is solar, hydro, fission, wind, geothermal, and biomass in that order. It's true that non-hydro, non-solar sources are larger than hydro+solar, but not by a lot and none of the renewable supplies are carbon-intensive.
Wind, by the way, is growing much faster than solar in California and could be larger than solar within a few years.
We see that in 2018 coal produced 1,146,393 thousand Megawatts, which is a decrease of ~60,000 from 2017 (corrected!). Solar produced 66,604 thousand MW in 2018, an increase of ~13,000 from 2017.
In terms of percent of coal, the sources are:
* solar 6%
* hydro 25%
* nuclear 70%
* natural gas 100%
* other renewables (mostly waste/biomass) 31%
Why are you assuming other renewables is mostly waste/biomass? In the notes below the table, wind is cleary mentioned.
My guesstimate would be that wind was a large proportion. I confirmed by checking wikipedia.
EIA Total for year was listed as 4,177,810 in 1000s of MWhr
Other Renewables 354,445 in 1000s of MWhr
2018 Wind power generated 274,962 in 1000s of MWhr. So makes up over 75% of other renewables. Chart shows wind has grown from 94,000 in 2009. Which combining with the EIA data, showing 143,388 in 2009, means most of the growth in non-solar renewables is from wind.
It takes carbon that was not in the air and puts it into the air. The marginal decision to burn a bunch of wood or coal for a unit of energy produces roughly the same effect. It would be better to keep that carbon out of the atmosphere.
Especially when grown specifically, biofuels may have a strong net negative effect as conversion from forest/swamp to arable land releases a huge amount of stored carbon. Burning a forest to grow palm ethanol is a step in the wrong direction.
If you keep growing, cutting down, burning and regrowing trees the co2 load in the atmosphere will look like a sine wave (ish). The long-term trend will be flat, not upwards.
We can't "regrow" coal in the same way (across reasonable time scales). (Although burning coal, and planting a corresponding amount of trees and never cutting them down is also an option)
But if the waste biomass is just going to rot if we don’t burn it, the carbon will return to the atmosphere without having any energy harvested along the way. Might as well get something out of the cycle. Granted, we are speeding up the cycle by burning it now vs rotting over time, it the balance of carbon is the same.
That is not the only possible cycle. It could be stored and set on it's way to beoming a fossil fuel in the distant future; the carbon removed from the current short-term cycle. Perhaps not as profitable as the cycle you describe though.
No really, how? Have you invented some new process for long-term carbon sequestration from waste biomass?
These are hard problems that don't lend themselves well to the HN-preferred format of one-line tech solutionism. If it were as simple and easy as all that, we wouldn't be in this crisis to begin with.
There's no need for any sort of "new process for long-term carbon sequestration". We just need to stop taking carbon that is in the process of being sequestered by natural cycles and putting it back into the atmosphere. This is an economic challenge not a technical one.
There is no natural sequestration on any kind of timescale that can possibly help us. During the carboniferous era, bacteria had not yet evolved that could break down dead plants. Now, those bacteria exist.
That's a pretty strong absolute, which probably means it is not true. It is possible to oversimplify things from multiple angles.
Recent work[1] has argued that microbal and fungal diversity did not play a significant role in the development of coal deposits, but rather it was a combination of environmental effects that generated swamps where anaerobic conditions prevented plant decay. These conditions still exist today, we are just actively removing them.
It's spelled "Nobel". I'm also not the first person to suggest it. So if it works, the prize wouldn't go to me.
Either way you haven't made a case, or provided sources, for why it wouldn't work.
Some methods are apparently snake oil[1]. But others, such as pumping into saline aquifers[2] may be viable (the source on that is naturally suspicious).
No, no the "noble prize" is an award I personally give out to the HN comment that best exemplifies the common phenomenon on this board where a glib oversimplification of a massively complicated issue is used to dismiss the importance of far-reaching changes in favour of a one-line technical fix.
I'm aware that far-reaching changes need to occur in society and the economy to solve the climate crisis. Reduction of consumption, renewable energy, planting more forests, efficient transportation, heating and cooling, re-evaluating what we value in life - all of these will play their part. I don't think carbon sequestration alone will fix everything. But if it has the potential to help, why not look into it?
> But if the waste biomass is just going to rot if we don’t burn it, the carbon will return to the atmosphere without having any energy harvested along the way. Might as well get something out of the cycle.
This perfectly illustrates the problem with overemphasis on 'carbon accounting.' It leads well-meaning people advocate cutting down the last shreds of wilderness on environmental grounds, because this pernicious carbon oversimplification says we're not "getting something" out of that wilderness land.
In truth wilderness cleans air and water pollution, wetlands and forests buffer precipitation to prevent floods and droughts, and large-canopy trees ~single-handedly cycle rain back up and power the terrestrial water cycle (you heard me right, trees cause ~all inland rain). Even if you prefer to exsanguinate nature and reduce it to bean-counting 'ecosystem services,' surprisingly humans do get something from letting carbon rot blissfully undisturbed on a forest floor somewhere.
So it's not quite accurate to say "the carbon will return to the atmosphere without having any energy harvested along the way" -- bugs and fungi are "getting something" too! This seems insignificant, but such decomposition organisms play major ecosystem roles in breaking down air and water pollutants.
To bastardize Arthur C. Clark, "nature is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology."
> Granted, we are speeding up the cycle by burning it now vs rotting over time, [but] the balance of carbon is the same.
Except in this case, that time variable is very important! It's basic math:
The rate of carbon sequestered per hectare per year is constrained by sunlight and photosynthesis, so the only parameter we can tweak to achieve further gains is the time: how long is the average carbon atom removed from the atmosphere? 1 year? 100 years? Because in the latter case, the equilibrium amount of carbon that can be stored (tonnes/hectare) is 100x greater. Try getting a 100x improvement in photosynthesis!
Humans have so far released ~1,600 gigatonnes from fossil fuels, and Earth has 11.9 gigahectares of non-tundra land. Dividing, that requires 134 tonnes of additional carbon stored (as trees, soil, buildings, somehow) per hectare.
Forests store up to 600 tonnes/hectare, so this at least seems physically and thermodynamically achievable (unlike most "carbon sucking machine" proposals).
If carbon is stored in biomass at 5 tonnes/ha/year, to sequester 134 tonnes/ha, again by simple division we must store that carbon for an average of at least 27 years. Or longer, if you want to 'alter' less than 100% of Earth's surface. :)
Obviously the only practical way to implement this is to integrate this carbon storage in our agricultural and built landscapes. What we need is high-carbon-density agricultural systems, suburbs, and cities.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
I count 4144.6 megawatts of coal retirements planned for 2019. But this table was last updated in April.
2000 MW of coal retirements directed this week:
"Illinois directs Vistra to retire 2 GW coal by 2020"
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/illinois-directs-vistra-to-...
The order directs Vistra to retire 2 GW of coal generation by the end of the year. ... The process to retire so much coal by the end of the year must begin very soon, as Vistra must notify the Midcontinent ISO (MISO) of any intended retirements 180 days in advance.
Two weeks ago:
"In a Surprise Announcement, Colstrip Units 1 and 2 to Close by Year-End"
https://www.powermag.com/in-a-surprise-announcement-colstrip...
That's another 614 MW to retire by year's end.
The current Australian government has been denying climate change since they came to power in 2013. They've been talking down renewables and placing national-security-scale importance of the role of coal in Australia's future economic success (which I actually find a significant worry because the bottom will drop out of the coal market sooner rather than later). Without much support from federal government policy (but with some support from state governments), renewables in Australia have been steadily growing in their contribution to the overall energy generation mix at a rate higher than expectations, such is the purely commercial justification of renewables.
And yet politics is trying to (s|t)ell a different narrative without providing any foundational reasoning other than motherhood statements about the importance of coal to Australia's economy.
Either politicians know more than they're letting on about the fragile state of Australia's economy and its fundamental over-dependence on a single mineral, or the Australian powers-that-be are over-dependent on a single mineral for their power base.
The more politicians talk down renewables, the more they damage their legitimacy on any other topic; the more they advertise that their speeches are for sale.
Anyway, I just find it amusing.
Why? It would require a book. Donald Horne's 'The Lucky Country' covered some of it. My (highly contestable) short version is that Australian culture is preturnaturally shallow. There is nothing that holds our society together other than material consumption. Citizens are somewhat aware of this, and are (perhaps subconsciously) terrified of what might happen if anything threatens our lazy prosperity. We have nothing to fall back on - no heroic national myths, no exceptionalism, no religion, no idealism, no common ground.
That's all true, and yet Australians are very protective of what they consider "theirs". Maybe it's because of this historic void meaning all they've got is their material things and social status etc.
I'll have to have a read of The Lucky Country, thanks for the reference.
If Australia had gotten on front foot and built out more solar / wind / renewables, almost to excess, it would be able to then apply that potentially excess power into either local manufacturing with much lower electricity / energy overheads and / or "exportables" such as hydrogen fuel cells (effectively exporting our free and abundant sunlight).
This technology is under discussion at the moment, so maybe it's not matured to the point of viability even now, but it's not something that's factored into any Australian political speeches about the country's future economic opportunities.
It IS amusing. It provides great insight into the competing priorities of the human condition. Then it becomes depressing.
As the Chinese diversify their sourcing of materials in Africa, Australia is pretty fucked later this century.
As for "over-dependence on a single mineral" - it isn't quite that bad. We have 2 major minerals, coal and iron ore in roughly equal quantities [1]. It is a pretty scary state of affairs, we have really screwed ourselves over by focusing the nation's investments into property speculation rather than into growing businesses and useful infrastructure.
[0] https://theconversation.com/factcheck-qanda-are-south-austra... [1] https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/
At the rate things are currently going, it looks like China will be the last one selling it. The international market will go first, and finally the domestic market will shrivel up in the next decade or two, and so will coal's material contribution to any country's GDP.
The tipping point isn't here yet, but it's coming. Always follow the money.
Yes, the politicians can wring their hands but don't end up actually doing much because they understand that people like to complain about global warming but when asked how much money they are willing to spend to reduce carbon emissions, the dollar amount is usually like 20 bucks per person/per year. Macron discovered how angry people get when you actually force them to pay more and he quickly backtracked. None of the Paris signatories have met their goals, nor are they on track to meet their goals, because of political reality, not despite it.
So the politicians are generally smarter at reading the pulse of the public than the activists on this issue. People care, but only a little bit.
But as technology continues to progress, I have no doubt that long term we will not be using coal anymore. But solar has serious problems, the most intractable being the disposal of the solar cells -- they are quite toxic, and no one has figured out what to do with the decommissioned cells -- and we will have a lot of them if solar accounts for a non-trivial share of global electricity output. As in billions would need to be disposed of each year. So I don't think solar is the answer, given current materials.
Personally, I like nuclear, but I could be wrong. We will move on from coal just as we moved on from wood and whale oil and all the energy sources of the past, but it's going to happen on a timeline determined by technological feasibility and economics, not by politics or political pledges.
Source? I find it hard to believe this is a problem given they last decades, I'm not aware of any major problematic materials in solar panels, and the primary alternative is burning coal.
In terms of sources about the disposal issues for solar, there are many discussions about this online, but here is a nice, readable, layman's introduction to the problem:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18018820/solar-panel-was...
"To understand the challenges of solar waste, it’s helpful to understand how the panels are built. There are different types of solar panels, but most of them contain aluminum, glass, silver, and an elastic material called ethylene-vinyl acetate. The problem is that they can also contain more dangerous and sometimes cancer-causing, materials such as lead, chromium, and cadmium. Functional panels are sealed off with glass and are very safe. But when the glass breaks or the panels are damaged, those substances can leak.
This risk is especially high with poorly made solar panels installed in areas that experience extreme weather, like hurricanes and hail. Winds and rain can break the glass, allowing chemicals to leach into the soil and then into the water system"
Now imagine a world where solar is a major player. So world energy consumption was 1.575 × 10^17 Wh (2013) and growing at, say, 3% per annum (conservative). (wikipedia).
Let's imagine that in 2033, when world energy consumption is 2.8 * 10^17 WH, solar accounts for 1/3 of that. Now today's panels are about 1.65 m^2 and can generate about 300W (https://www.solarpowerrocks.com/solar-basics/how-much-electr...), so let's say due to improvements in science, that becomes 600W. And let's say they do that 12 hours per day nonstop year round, to produce 2.63*10^6 WH per annum.
That means they can account for 1/3 of world energy needs if we have 38 Billion of these futuristic solar cells (the ones with double the current energy output and that produce peak output 12 hours each day 365 days per year).
That's about 20% of the area of Arizona. And let's say that due to external damage and internal failure, the cells need to be replaced once every 40 years, so that means we need to recycle about 1 billion of these cells each year, each weighing about 25kg, so that is 25 Billion kilograms of waste that would need to be recycled each year, contaminated with some nasty chemicals. And that number too will grow by 3% each year as global energy use increases.
And this situation is only going to get worse because as we do more research and create more efficient cells, that's not going to happen by switching to more organic compounds. It means more exotic compounds.
And we still need to find something else for the other 2/3 of global energy use.
Really? You're pointing out solar panels have a waste disposal problem and then name nuclear as an alternative? Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of nuclear too, and just about every other alternative you mentioned. I just think it's absurd to be worrying about solar panel waste in the larger context here. Hydro dams flood a lot of land, natural gas releases a lot of CO2.
> To understand the challenges of solar waste, it’s helpful to understand how the panels are built. There are different types of solar panels, but most of them contain aluminum, glass, silver, and an elastic material called ethylene-vinyl acetate. The problem is that they can also contain more dangerous and sometimes cancer-causing, materials such as lead, chromium, and cadmium. Functional panels are sealed off with glass and are very safe. But when the glass breaks or the panels are damaged, those substances can leak.
Doesn't sound like anything not already found in a coal fly ash pond [1]. You can probably simply dump deprecated solar panels in a pile with a dirt berm next to the solar plant and come out way ahead of a coal power plant.
I'm not saying this isn't a problem that should be dealt with. I just do not believe this is a problem that would be even 1% as bad as the problem we have right now. I think that if your line of reasoning results in even a slight delay of the deprecation of a coal power plant at the expense of solar development, we've come out way behind in terms of environmental impact.
If you are going to claim this is a problem, I think we should see evidence for that compared to alternatives that actually exist or can realistically be built. How much lead, cadmium, chromium end up in the environment from power generation today? And how much would do so if we disposed of solar panels in even the worst possible manner?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash#Examples
For coal, absolutely, there is fly ash, but if your plan is to just dump the current global production of aluminum into ponds every year, you are going to have a problem. These materials need to be recycled, not dumped. E.g. for a normal 2 inch thick cell. You have a volume of 600 million cubic meters that needs to be disposed of annually, and it's growing each year by 3%.
The problem here is that people don't realize the scale of the issue -- and I was quite generous in my estimates.
You might say this can't go on forever as it soaks up government revenue unsustainably. But many decades can pass before 'forever' is hit, and we're in amongst the decades that really count, right now.
See the US steel industry for an example. It was a long hard fight but we did it. The US steel industry went from being a world leader to not particularly important in 50 years.
The fact that this is a local maximum doesn't say anything about the shape of the function on either side.
Dec 4 2018: "EIA expects total U.S. coal consumption in 2018 to fall to 691 million short tons (MMst), a 4% decline from 2017 and the lowest level since 1979. U.S. coal consumption has been falling since its peak in 2007, and EIA forecasts that 2018 coal consumption will be 437 MMst (44%) lower than 2007 levels, mainly driven by declines in coal use in the electric power sector."
Simultaneously the US is bringing effectively zero new coal-based production online:
"In 2007, coal-fired capacity in the United States totaled 313 gigawatts (GW) across 1,470 generators. By the end of 2017, 529 of those generators, with a total capacity of 55 GW, had retired. ... Only one, relatively small, new coal-fired generator with a capacity of 17 megawatts is expected to come online by the end of 2019."
Non-solar, non-hydro renewables make up the bulk of renewable energy, and with the notable exceptions of wind and geothermal, many of these methods are very dirty. Burning of waste/biomass is probably not significantly better than coal from an emissions or pollution standpoint.
In ERCOT wind is 2nd in generation to Gas Combined-Cycle generation (basically jet engines running natural gas). Coal is slightly behind wind and solar and biomass is tiny.
(Although I worry about the second derivative... solar's growth is not as impressive in the last 12 months as it was the 12 months prior.)
Wind, by the way, is growing much faster than solar in California and could be larger than solar within a few years.
We see that in 2018 coal produced 1,146,393 thousand Megawatts, which is a decrease of ~60,000 from 2017 (corrected!). Solar produced 66,604 thousand MW in 2018, an increase of ~13,000 from 2017.
In terms of percent of coal, the sources are:
EIA Total for year was listed as 4,177,810 in 1000s of MWhr Other Renewables 354,445 in 1000s of MWhr
From wikepedia - national trends section graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_State...
2018 Wind power generated 274,962 in 1000s of MWhr. So makes up over 75% of other renewables. Chart shows wind has grown from 94,000 in 2009. Which combining with the EIA data, showing 143,388 in 2009, means most of the growth in non-solar renewables is from wind.
Especially when grown specifically, biofuels may have a strong net negative effect as conversion from forest/swamp to arable land releases a huge amount of stored carbon. Burning a forest to grow palm ethanol is a step in the wrong direction.
We can't "regrow" coal in the same way (across reasonable time scales). (Although burning coal, and planting a corresponding amount of trees and never cutting them down is also an option)
No really, how? Have you invented some new process for long-term carbon sequestration from waste biomass?
These are hard problems that don't lend themselves well to the HN-preferred format of one-line tech solutionism. If it were as simple and easy as all that, we wouldn't be in this crisis to begin with.
There's no need for any sort of "new process for long-term carbon sequestration". We just need to stop taking carbon that is in the process of being sequestered by natural cycles and putting it back into the atmosphere. This is an economic challenge not a technical one.
Recent work[1] has argued that microbal and fungal diversity did not play a significant role in the development of coal deposits, but rather it was a combination of environmental effects that generated swamps where anaerobic conditions prevented plant decay. These conditions still exist today, we are just actively removing them.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442
Either way you haven't made a case, or provided sources, for why it wouldn't work.
Some methods are apparently snake oil[1]. But others, such as pumping into saline aquifers[2] may be viable (the source on that is naturally suspicious).
1. https://grist.org/article/rule-four-of-offsets-no-enhanced-o...
2. https://www.spe.org/industry/carbon-capture-sequestration.ph...
This perfectly illustrates the problem with overemphasis on 'carbon accounting.' It leads well-meaning people advocate cutting down the last shreds of wilderness on environmental grounds, because this pernicious carbon oversimplification says we're not "getting something" out of that wilderness land.
In truth wilderness cleans air and water pollution, wetlands and forests buffer precipitation to prevent floods and droughts, and large-canopy trees ~single-handedly cycle rain back up and power the terrestrial water cycle (you heard me right, trees cause ~all inland rain). Even if you prefer to exsanguinate nature and reduce it to bean-counting 'ecosystem services,' surprisingly humans do get something from letting carbon rot blissfully undisturbed on a forest floor somewhere.
So it's not quite accurate to say "the carbon will return to the atmosphere without having any energy harvested along the way" -- bugs and fungi are "getting something" too! This seems insignificant, but such decomposition organisms play major ecosystem roles in breaking down air and water pollutants.
To bastardize Arthur C. Clark, "nature is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology."
> Granted, we are speeding up the cycle by burning it now vs rotting over time, [but] the balance of carbon is the same.
Except in this case, that time variable is very important! It's basic math:
The rate of carbon sequestered per hectare per year is constrained by sunlight and photosynthesis, so the only parameter we can tweak to achieve further gains is the time: how long is the average carbon atom removed from the atmosphere? 1 year? 100 years? Because in the latter case, the equilibrium amount of carbon that can be stored (tonnes/hectare) is 100x greater. Try getting a 100x improvement in photosynthesis!
Humans have so far released ~1,600 gigatonnes from fossil fuels, and Earth has 11.9 gigahectares of non-tundra land. Dividing, that requires 134 tonnes of additional carbon stored (as trees, soil, buildings, somehow) per hectare. Forests store up to 600 tonnes/hectare, so this at least seems physically and thermodynamically achievable (unlike most "carbon sucking machine" proposals).
If carbon is stored in biomass at 5 tonnes/ha/year, to sequester 134 tonnes/ha, again by simple division we must store that carbon for an average of at least 27 years. Or longer, if you want to 'alter' less than 100% of Earth's surface. :)
Obviously the only practical way to implement this is to integrate this carbon storage in our agricultural and built landscapes. What we need is high-carbon-density agricultural systems, suburbs, and cities.