Green Energy Revolution Megathread

[The Brain]

I would think a good business plan might be for the EU to partner with Morocco/Algeria to build up a lot of solar plants/undersea cables and thus help move away from the Russia-sourced energy pressures.

Being dependent on North Africa sounds awesome. An Algeria situation where the French cannot afford to leave? Sweet.

[Jacob]

I would think a good business plan might be for the EU to partner with Morocco/Algeria to build up a lot of solar plants/undersea cables and thus help move away from the Russia-sourced energy pressures.

Being dependent on North Africa sounds awesome. An Algeria situation where the French cannot afford to leave? Sweet.

Is it going to much worse than being dependent on Saudi Arabia and environs?

EDIT: Also if trouble arrives defending power generating installations (that generate revenue for at least some locals too) is going to be much simpler and clearer than trying to maintain a colonial province with a substantial number of colonizers in conflict with locals.

[The Brain]

I would think a good business plan might be for the EU to partner with Morocco/Algeria to build up a lot of solar plants/undersea cables and thus help move away from the Russia-sourced energy pressures.

Being dependent on North Africa sounds awesome. An Algeria situation where the French cannot afford to leave? Sweet.

Is it going to much worse than being dependent on Saudi Arabia and environs?

EDIT: Also if trouble arrives defending power generating installations (that generate revenue for at least some locals too) is going to be much simpler and clearer than trying to maintain a colonial province with a substantial number of colonizers in conflict with locals.

Why would the alternative be Saudi Arabia and environs? They don't have a lot of uranium. If you use oil to produce electricity you're doing it wrong.

[Jacob]

Why would the alternative be Saudi Arabia and environs? They don't have a lot of uranium. If you use oil to produce electricity you're doing it wrong.

Good point.

But if you're using uranium, then solar energy is just an alternative not a dependency

[jimmy olsen]

Muy bueno

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/energy-commodities/sea-of-solar-panels-turns-mexican-desert-green

Sea of solar panels turns Mexican desert green

Tue, Apr 24, 2018 - 11:08 AM

From a distance, it looks like a deep-blue sea has formed in the middle of the Mexican desert.

But this is no mirage - it's the largest solar park in Latin America.

With 2.3 million solar panels - covering the equivalent of 2,200 football fields in the arid northern state of Coahuila - the Villanueva power plant, built by Italian energy company Enel, is part of Mexico's push to generate 43 per cent of its electricity from clean sources by 2024.

Arrayed across the sand in seemingly endless rows that stretch to the horizon, the solar panels are made to turn in tandem with the sun, like a giant field of shimmering metallic sunflowers.

The US$650-million project came online in December and is due to produce 1,700 gigawatt hours when fully operational later this year - enough to power 1.3 million homes.

Mexico won plaudits from environmentalists in 2015 when it became the first emerging country to announce its emissions reduction targets for the United Nations climate accord, ambitiously vowing to halve them by 2050.

To get there, it is tendering clean energy projects in which private companies produce, sell and purchase electricity on an open market.

The three projects tendered so far have generated an estimated US$8.6 billion in investment. The resulting electricity will power some 6.5 million homes, according to government figures.

The Villanueva plant is the largest solar project in the world outside China and India.

[jimmy olsen]

Great news.

www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-20/storage-will-be-the-next-biggest-thing-in-energy

[jimmy olsen]

Sounds incredible!

https://www.cnet.com/news/if-renewable-energy-can-power-entire-countries-why-isnt-everyone-doing-it/

Iceland isn't blessed with much wind or sunlight. Not only does that make vitamin D a commodity, it also means solar and wind power is hard to come by.

And yet 100 percent of Iceland's electricity comes from renewables. Not 30 percent by 2025, like the US, or Australia's 23.5 percent by 2020 target. It's 100 percent renewable right now. Today.

The heating and air conditioning of homes and office buildings: All fueled by geothermal energy. The electric sockets that power fridges, computers, TVs and more: Powered by hydroelectricity. And Iceland isn't alone.

Costa Rica. Albania. Ethiopia. Paraguay. Zambia. Norway. The electricity produced by all of these countries is either 100 percent green, or a few percent short.

These advances will drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions, the same emissions that are threatening the Great Barrier Reef and California's Redwood Forests, among other precious ecosystems.

But a renewable future seems out of reach in countries like the US and the UK. My own country, Australia, is rich in renewable resources and has the money to invest, yet only around 15 percent of electricity is sourced from renewables. This is one of the many reasons Australia's energy is now costlier, less reliable and more damaging to the environment than ever.

There are many contributing factors to this. Among them is a troubling combination: The closure of coal stations and huge amounts of gas exportation have caused a deficiency in traditional power, but, as in the case of the US and the UK, the government hasn't yet committed to renewable energy sources like solar, wind and hydro power.

It all prompts the question: If Iceland can get all of its electricity through renewables, why can't everyone?

Summer is coming
Historically, hydropower has been the cheapest way to source renewable electricity. But that's changing. Wind and solar (also called photovoltaic solar, or PV) have become the most economic forms of electricity. They are the renewables of tomorrow.

Solar energy for a long time was a nonentity, but exponential growth means a bright future. For the past four decades, solar energy has grown 37 percent each year on average, according to Matthew Stocks, a research fellow at Australia National University. That equals a doubling in solar production every three years, a trend that's not expected to stop.

This should mean great things for Australia, a country so rich in solar potential that some have dubbed it the Saudi Arabia of solar.

"We have huge potential, far more than enough for our own needs, and we could be exporting solar energy in the future to Asia," said Mark Diesendorf, associate professor of environmental science at the University of New South Wales.

But that's the future. Right now, solar panels around the country have a combined installed capacity of just over 7 gigawatts. Germany, despite being smaller and with less sun exposure than Australia, has an installed capacity of 41GW in solar energy.

Solar can be implemented in two ways. Panels can be installed on the roofs of houses and buildings of all sorts, which absorb and convert sunlight to electricity that's then stored in a battery. Then there are solar farms, where huge panels occupy a large swath of land, absorb the sunlight and funnel energy to the electricity grid.

Germany has an elite solar game because a portion of its population, spurred on by government incentive, has added rooftop panels, Diesendorf said. Meanwhile, Australia's hopes lie in solar farms.

"Australia has huge land area that is excellent for solar, especially if we're looking at large-scale solar," Diesendorf said. "I see most of the growth in renewable energy in Australia in solar and wind."

At the moment, wind is a greater contributor of electricity than solar. Farms are set up in a similar way. Huge turbines flow either with or against the wind. Wind spins the turbines, which are connected through a rotor and gear boxes to a power generator. As the turbines spin, power is generated.

Wind power is soaring in the US. Ironically, the state with the greatest wind capacity is oil-lovin' Texas.

Wind power can be sent straight to the electric grid, or stored in a battery. The trouble with the latter is that, at the moment, batteries big enough to store lots of energy are expensive.

Thank God for eccentric billionaires.

Elon Musk became a sensation in South Australia last year after he decided Teslawould build the world's biggest lithium-ion battery there. He said he'd do it in 100 days or it'd be free. It was done in 60.

Drawing energy from nearby wind turbines, the battery has an installed capacity of 100 megawatts, making it roughly three times larger than any other battery of its kind.

The battery is designed to help out during periods of need. "The peaks are only 2 to 3 hours in width," Diesendorf said, "and batteries are good for short, rapid bursts of power."

But when you need electricity for more than just a few, it's best to look out to the great blue.

Under the sea
Solar and wind electricity are inexpensive and reliable, but they're also variable. Everything is aces when the sun is shining on a breezy day, but a night with no wind means no new energy. And while excess solar and wind power can be stored in batteries, batteries big enough to hold more than a day's worth of energy are still pricey. That's where water comes in.

Hydroelectricity is usually created through dams. Water from rivers gets funneled through tunnels, where it smashes through turbines housed in a power station. As the turbines turn, their rapid rotations create electricity.

Australia gets around 7 percent of its total power from hydro.

Pumped hydro, pictured below, is a little different. It's the battery of the hydro world. Water is pumped from a lower reservoir to an elevated one, where huge quantities of it are stored. When electricity is needed, the floodgates of the elevated reservoir open, shooting through turbines and creating electricity.

"Pumped hydro is a technology that's been around considerably longer [than batteries] at a much greater scale and is actually a much cheaper way of storing energy," said ANU's Stocks.

If we could build enough of these pumped hydro stations as backup for the variability of solar and wind power, Stocks said, Australia could easily get all of its electricity from renewables.

And we don't need as many of these stations as you may think.

"We've been looking at something on the order of 10 to 30 of these systems spread around Australia in order to balance out the variability of the wind and the PV," he said. There are over 22,000 eligible locations for such stations, according to ANU's research.

Historically, hydropower has been the go-to renewable way to create energy. But while the economics of wind and solar power are quickly outpacing hydro, pumped hydro stations offer a type of storage that's difficult to achieve with those power sources.

Musk's Tesla battery was chosen for South Australia after a severe storm in September 2016 caused an almost-statewide blackout for multiple days. That blackout is exactly the situation pumped hydro can get a city out of.

Energy has been at the forefront of Australian politics ever since South Australia's blackout. But politics, experts say, won't likely speed anything up. Politics are the reason Australia's electricity isn't more renewable right now.

The winds of winter
Diesendorf and his team at UNSW have been simulating Australia's electricity market using only renewable energies. They've found that a renewable Australia is very much achievable.

"We've simulated up to six years using real data on sun and wind and electricity demand, and in our peer-reviewed paper we've shown we could have operated the national electricity market if we'd installed enough [infrastructure] entirely on renewable energy with the same reliability as the same existing system," he said.

"This is not science fiction, this is for real."

But transitioning into renewables isn't a technical challenge, both Diesendorf and Stocks agree. It's a political one.

"The wind, the PV, the high-voltage transmission lines, pumped hydro, batteries are all sitting there ready to go," said ANU's Stocks. "It's just a question of how do we transition from a system that is dominated by coal to one that is dominated by renewables."

Energy has been a hot political topic in Australia over the past decade. A carbon tax, which penalized companies that were big carbon emitters, was enforced in 2011 by the federal Labor government and became one of the most controversial policies of the decade. Some believe it may have lost Labor the 2013 election.

Many of Australia's members of parliament aren't sold on climate change, according to the Institute of Public Affairs think tank, which makes pushes for renewable energy tough. This isn't just an Australian problem: Around half of the US Congress denies climate change, too.

"Some politicians are beholden, [they have] too close a relationship to the fossil fuel industries, particularly the coal industry," Diesendorf said. "Sadly we have politicians spouting nonsense that they know is nonsense. Our ministers are not stupid, they know they're talking nonsense, but they think, wrongly, that their future in politics is best assured by sticking to the most powerful industries, which in this case are the mining industries."

Part of the reason Germany's solar push was so successful was that its government subsidized citizens who bought panels and batteries for their homes. But if a government is unwilling to commit to renewable energy, it's not just citizens who shy away.

"We've had a very extended period where division over clean energy has been a political process," said Stocks. With the division comes uncertainty for businesses, he explained, who need to know their 20- or 30-year investment in wind, solar or hydro energy is a safe one.

"If there's uncertainty around politics, then things grind to a halt," Stocks said.

Turbines in motion
Today, Iceland gets around 25 percent of its electricity from geothermal energy, and a whopping 75 percent from hydropower. This didn't happen overnight.

The first hydrostation in Iceland was built in 1904, with a few more popping up in the following decades. These were relatively small projects set up by enterprising farmers and local technicians. There was great debate about how and when to use hydro power.

It wasn't until 1947, over 40 years later, that the government started getting serious about hydropower. It built a station with an installed capacity of 10MW. The National Power Company (Landsvirkjun) was set up in 1965, and that's when hydro started to become an electrical bedrock for the nation.

The average US household uses 911 kilowatt-hours a month, according to Inside Energy. Today, Iceland's biggest hydroelectricity producer is the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Plant -- it creates around 4,600 gigawatt-hours of energy a year. In total, Iceland's hydropower stations generate roughly 13.65 terawatt-hours a year, says the International Hydropower Association.

Yet Iceland is still very much just the tip of the hydro iceberg. It's just one of many countries that reap huge rewards from hydro power, according to Martin Young, director of policies and risk for the World Energy Council.

"Some 99 percent of Norwegian power generation comes from hydro," said Young. "Other countries such as Brazil, Canada and New Zealand make extensive, successful use of hydro, and have maintained electricity during periods of drought."

Australia currently has more modest aims. The federal government hopes to have 23.5 percent of energy come from renewable sources by 2020. In the US, a country that Stanford University says has more than enough resources to run entirely on renewables, the goal is 30 percent by 2025.

"On the technological and economic side, the prospects are excellent," Diesendorf says of renewable energy.

"But the struggle is on the political, institutional, cultural areas, trying to get movement from governments and industries that are tied to the past."

Tech Enabled: CNET chronicles tech's role in providing new kinds of accessibility.

[Admiral Yi]

That's a silly article.

[Eddie Teach]

And Tim's exclamation only appears to be relevant to the first paragraph.

[jimmy olsen]

That's a silly article.

How is it silly?

[Eddie Teach]

It was silly of you to post it. Why do we need to be persuaded that Australia should use more renewables?

[Admiral Yi]

How is it silly?

Because Iceland and Norway have abundant geothermal and hydro power.  Other countries don't.

[Iormlund]

That's a silly article.

How is it silly?

Iceland and Norway have the lowest population density in Europe and unique geography.

[jimmy olsen]

Incredible!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-02/green-energy-capacity-passes-a-trillion-watts

Green Energy Producers Just Installed Their First Trillion Watts
The next trillion will cost $1.2 trillion by 2023, almost half of the price-tag for the first, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance

By
Jeremy Hodges
‎August‎ ‎02‎, ‎2018‎ ‎3‎:‎00‎ ‎PM

Global wind and solar developers took 40 years to install their first trillion watts of power generation capacity, and the next trillion may be finished within the next five years.

That's the conclusion of research by BloombergNEF, which estimated the industry reached the 1-terrawatt milestone sometime in the first half of the year. That's almost as much generation capacity as the entire U.S. power fleet, although renewables work less often than traditional coal and nuclear plants and therefore yield less electricity over time.

The findings illustrate the scale of the green energy boom, which has drawn $2.3 trillion of investment to deploy wind and solar farms at the scale operating today. BloombergNEF estimates that the falling costs of those technologies mean the next terrawatt of capacity will cost about half as much – $1.23 trillion – and arrive sometime in 2023.

"Hitting one terrawatt is a tremendous achievement for the wind and solar industries, but as far as we're concerned, it's just the start,"said Albert Cheung, BloombergNEF's head of analysis in London. "Wind and solar are winning the battle for cost-supremacy, so this milestone will be just the first of many.''






The world had a total of about 6.2 terrawatts of installed capacity in 2016, about 1 terrawatt of that being coal plants in China, according to the research group. Like all milestones, reaching 1 terrawatt is an arbitrary mark that scratches the surface of the debate about how much renewables will contribute to the world's energy system.

Each power plant works at a different ``capacity factor,'' a measure capturing both the efficiency of the facility in generating electricty and how often it works. On average, wind farms have a capacity factor of about 34 percent worldwide, meaning they work about a third of the time, according to BloombergNEF. Some of the best sites have factors above 60 percent. For solar photovoltaics that track the sun, those readings range from 10 percent in the U.K. to 19 percent in the U.S. and 24 percent in Chile's Atacama desert. By comparison, coal plants have a 40 percent capacity factor and nuclear sometimes double that.

Even so, the terrawatt of installed capacity for renewables marks substantial growth for an industry that barely existed at the start of the century. More than 90 percent of all that capacity was installed in the past 10 years, reflecting incentives that Germany pioneered in the early 2000s that made payouts for green power transparent for investors and bankers alike.

Asian nations absorbed 44 percent of the new wind and 58 percent of solar developments to date, with China account for about a third of all those installations.

Wind made up 54 percent of the first terrawatt but solar is expected to overtake wind in early 2020. China has led the world in installing solar power over the last five years holding 34 percent of global solar capacity and it'll continue to be the world's largest market for both power sources, reaching 1.1 terrawatts in the country by 2050.

``As we get into the second and third terrawatts, energy storage is going to become much more important,'' Cheung said. ``That's where we see a lot of investment and innovation right now.''

[jimmy olsen]

Death to Coal! 

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-nearly-half-of-u-s-coal-plants-could-close-by-2030#gs.vjxpNTE

Report: Cheap Natural Gas and Renewables Could Close Half of US Coal Fleet by 2030


Rhodium Group sees coal's demise accelerating, absent "market interventions at a grand scale."

Jeff St. John August 16, 2018

There's no way around it: The future is dim for U.S. coal.

The U.S. coal power plant fleet has been shrinking for years, with the official tally of coal plants closed exceeding those still open as of late last year. Another 43 gigawatts, or about 18 percent of the remaining 249 gigawatts of capacity, is expected to close by 2030.
Absent "market interventions at a grand scale" — such as the Trump administration's plan to force utilities to buy uncompetitive coal-fired power under the mandate of national security — the same trends are accelerating beyond current estimates, and could lead to the country's coal fleet being nearly halved again by 2030.

These are some of the conclusions of a note released this week by the research firm Rhodium Group. According to its analysis, while "the Department of Energy contemplates action to prop up ailing coal and nuclear plants, low natural-gas prices and cheap renewables have the potential to drive far more coal off the grid."

Rhodium Group's new projections, based on data collected for its Taking Stock 2018 report released in June, use a range of scenarios to project both retirements of coal capacity and reductions in total electricity generated by coal.

Under the most favorable market dynamics for coal, "we project at least 71 [gigawatts] of retirements by 2030, roughly 65% more than currently planned," the firm wrote. That's a higher rate of retirement than the 65 gigawatts by 2030 projected by the U.S. Energy Information Administration's reference case. And it would require natural-gas prices rising to $4 per 1 million British Thermal Units (mmbtu), along with more rapid than expected economic growth.

This high-cost, high-growth scenario could also offer the remaining coal fleet more opportunities to sell power and increase utilization, Rhodium Group states. "In our high energy cost scenarios, we find a 24%-26% decline in coal capacity from 2017 through 2030 leads to an 11%-12% decline in coal generation over the same period. Rising gas prices and demand allow fleetwide average utilization to rise from 55% in 2017 to as high as 70% in 2030 under these scenarios. Even though this is the most favorable outcome for coal across our projections, it leaves coal generation at levels last seen in the early 1980s."

Under the Rhodium Group's "central" scenario, coal retirements reach 92 gigawatts by 2030, with generation falling nearly as much as capacity. "The cliff for coal gets much more treacherous if renewable energy costs decline moderately and natural gas prices are in the $3/mmbtu range," it notes.

And "the cliff gets steeper still if renewable energy costs decline along the most optimistic path and natural-gas prices stay near recent lows at $2.50/mmbtu," it notes. Under this low-price scenario, coal retirements could top 124 gigawatts by 2030, with total generation falling even further, as most coal-fired power plants are unable to compete against cheaper alternatives.

"If natural gas prices stay low, renewable energy costs decline quickly and electricity demand remains weak, the U.S. coal fleet could be nearly half its current size by 2030 with generation at levels not seen since 1965," the report states. These same market forces could "force a huge swath of the nuclear fleet offline as well."



While the Rhodium Group's projections are new, its view of a dim future for the U.S. coal industry is shared by a majority of energy industry analysts and policymakers. The Trump administration has been pushing for policies aimed at combating these market forces, from Energy Secretary Rick Perry's failed attempt last year to classify coal and nuclear plants as critical grid assets, to the DOE's reported plan to use its national security authority to force utilities to buy coal and nuclear power, at a potential cost of tens of billions of dollars to U.S. consumers.

"Stopping or slowing the next wave of retirements would require market interventions at a grand scale — with costs and market distortions that may make such actions a hard sell," the firm wrote.