Let’s start with economists’ favorite metric: growth. When an economy is growing, more money is being spent. More stuff is being produced, more services are being performed, more businesses are being started, more workers are being hired—and, because of this abundance, living standards are probably rising. (On the flip side, during a recession—literally, when the economy shrinks—life gets materially worse.) Right now America’s economic-growth rate is the envy of the world. From the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, U.S. GDP grew by 8.2 percent—nearly twice as fast as Canada’s, three times as fast as the European Union’s, and more than eight times as fast as the United Kingdom’s.
“It’s hard to think of a time when the U.S. economy has diverged so fundamentally from its peers,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. Over the past year, some of the world’s biggest economies, including those of Japan and Germany, have fallen into recession, complete with mass layoffs and angry street protests. In the U.S., however, the post-pandemic recession never arrived. The economy just keeps growing.
Growth is there and the international growth component contributed from both undeveloped nations and “BRICs” are very significant in my view.
The way the system works, it is much easier to build something than call for austerity. So the idea of building a dual system with infrastructure and proven ideas that could work in a more fossil fuel deprived world, but not depending on it for some time, is probably the way forward. And that is why I think the renewables industry should be promoted heavily. I have to agree with all the arguments that it is much easier to maintain infrastructure including energy infrastructure, than to build it from scratch. All quick win ideas to conserve energy are welcome. The industry will need all surplus supply left over. Demand is endless for each human being if allowed by affordability btw – we can fly around the earth and buy it all.
God I love the press and talking heads going on about how great things are. Guess Biden has a slamdunk come November. No way with this great news will people think otherwise.
It does not matter what you and I think about it. China wants to be the leader when it comes to batteries, and also wean themselves off the habit of using coal and oil. That leads to at least a few decades of heavy EV battery production most likely, unless the inputs to production are interrupted.
The glory days for electrical vehicles are here apparently. And nothing is going to save the world in the end. It is about time to get more pragmatic than just watch fossil fuel reserves deplete while the waste products do their natural act.
We had nuclear fission for power in the 1950s. It was never, and never will be, a technology problem.
People who keep spouting about new disruption (ugh, I hate that term) from the Big Tech sector are clearly not aware of history. EVs are not new. Efficient lighting is not new. Heat pumps are not new. Nor are PV, wind turbines or any of the rest of it, outside some material science improvements and the shrinking semiconductor. The most efficient way of moving freight and people was invented in the 1800s and was properly expanded across whole continents before oil was even a thing. We can’t even do that today in the West.
This is why not one of these supposed experts can explain why none of this was done in the ’70s, when most of this tech was not only in existence, but mature. Because it’s all yet more green grifting on the latest fad, as with AI now.
I simply don’t pay attention to those who even entertain the notion of carbon neutral by 2050 or diets consisting entirely of lab grown meat and greenhouse foods, or everyone having an EV or flying hydrogen powered airliners. They are deeply unserious people. They are great capitalists, though.
Did you own a smartphone in the 70s? When I saw my first Iphone that a friend had bought around 2007, I thought I would never get one. I probably got my first one in 2011 or so, I thought the same thing about cell phones, laptop computers, electric cars, etc.
I was wrong every time just as you are now.
Kodak also never thought digital cameras would catch on.
Disruptions have happened in the past and will continue to happen in the future. Ignore them at your peril.
Okay. How does an iPhone save the world from energy shortfall and resource depletion?
Conflating die shrinks on semiconductors is not changing anything like that. There are no TSMCs out there making PV cells a billion times cheaper or more efficient. Planes do not fly a billion miles further. You cannot feed people on a billion times less nutrients or heat them with fewer Watts.
I get how impressive the little supercomputer in my pocket is. I just want to know why that’s relevant.
KLEIBER —
Disruption is a useful term in product marketing. I recommend the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.
Or just go on “hating” it. Its all the rage among internet users.
An important slide as part of that show indicates that 86% of the worlds population is in countries that import fossil fuel. Of those, almost all have abundant renewable energy resources….resources that have barely been tapped thus far.
Also consider that even within countries that produce fossil fuels, almost all of the production capital flow is into the hands of just a few.
These factors give an additional big incentive for escalation of renewables deployment.
A critique- they present multiple projection charts based on Rysted 1.6 vs 1.8 degree scenarios. These are wildly optimistic. We are already on a path to far exceed those levels…meaning that the fossil fuel decline is and will be far slower than their projections presented show.
But they have the trends/aspirations right.
Hickory …
” Of those, almost all have abundant renewable energy resources….resources that have barely been tapped thus far.”
This is the classic mistake most people make. It doesn’t matter how big the resources of wind and sunshine are, we can only collect that energy with machines we’ve built. It takes huge quantities of energy, almost all fossil fuel energy, to mine, concentrate, process, transport, smelt, manufacture, transport again, then deploy the machines to collect the wind and solar energy..
It’s all fine while we have a growing supply of fossil fuels to perform all these processes, but we are already needing a rapidly increasing quantity of this fossil energy to counter the lowering grades, deeper, more remote harder ores, because we mined all the easy to get stuff first.
We had one minor hiccup in gaining fossil fuels in 2022, which sent the price up. It also sent up the price of solar, wind, and batteries during this period, because of the intensity of fossil fuel use in the above processes.
Relative to what price will do, when we get permanent reductions of oil output at an accelerating rate as measured in millions of barrels per day/per year, the 2022 ‘blip’ will look like nothing. All the costs of every process from mining onwards will go through the roof.
We have to remember that it is oil that made most of the coal and gas we use today available and without oil the production of both these fossil fuels will also rapidly fall.
Every current use of oil will be competing for the lower quantity available when we get the great deceleration in availability at an accelerating rate.
The path humanity has chosen is to build more stuff, requiring more fossil fuels to do it, as can be clearly see with the increases in energy consumption and population since we became fully aware of climate change/damage in around 1990.
Since 1994, well after we became fully aware, world population has gone up by around 45%, while energy use has increased by around 55% of which fossil fuel makes up about 88% of that increase!!
In that 30 year period we have massively ramped up fossil fuel use and population, added a bit of non fossil fuel energy to the mix, of which hydropower is about a quarter.
In the last 30 years we have added huge quantities of both population and energy use to the system, while solar and wind make up around 7% of the increase in energy use. We had to build the mines, processing plants and factories before a single solar panel could be made, likewise for wind turbines. We had to increase the capacity of cement production before we could add a single foundation for a wind turbine, yet these necessary increases are hidden in general ‘growth’ numbers.
It’s modern civilizations ‘growth’ that has led to the climate problems, the loss of ecosphere, the 70% reduction in non human and domestic animals, mammal loss, the 70% reduction of insects and the 70% loss of non domestic fowl birdlife in the last 54 years, let alone the damage to oceans and life in the oceans.
Solar and wind are a rounding error in the increase of energy used to get us to 2024, where the background energy use of the entire system just to maintain it has increased in those 30 years, before we consider ‘growth’. Any increase in any major component to a meaningful level would take further growth in fossil fuel use to make happen, it’s that simple.
In those 30 years of adding solar and wind to the system, we have not replaced the methods of mining, processing, transport and manufacturing them to intermittent electricity they provide, nor even tried to do so, yet all the solar and wind built 25-30 years ago has either been replaced or needs replacing, likewise in 25-30 years time for those machines built today. They all suffer from entropy, especially quickly, because they are fully exposed to the elements!! Sure we add a bit of solar and wind here and there to look like we are replacing fossil fuels, but any mine like the one linked to by Islandboy still has enough fossil fueled generation capacity to run the electricity side of the operation.
When oil production falls year over year, at some point in the future, no matter how much money is thrown at it, growth will also end, production of everything, from oil and gas pipes to solar panels to bulldozers will start to fall, there just wont be the energy to keep production of everything going.
We can keep believing that sun and wind are unlimited and free, or try to degrow before we fossil fuels leave us. We have chosen to believe we have no fossil fuel spend to get the ‘free’ sun and wind energy, while the materials to harness this energy just magics into existence…
Yes. The critical distinction between a natural ecosystem, which utilises the solar energy flow,and an industrial civilisation utilising that flow, is that the first system uses an energy collecting and storage
system that is self replicating,biodegradable, and does not require mining and manufacturing for its existence. Human societies which have endured have been a part of the first system. Industrial civilisation is a short term aberration built on exploiting a one-time sequestered energy store.
Future human societies, if we survive this century, will again be part of that first system. By then, the
planet will be largely inhabitable though, as the CO2 levels increase inexorably, and the remains of the natural world largely destroyed in our attempt to escape from a predicament of our own making.
Its not complicated.
Fossil fuels are peaking. Humanity can just stand around with their hands in their pockets and heads in sand and pretend that energy poverty will simply happen to someone else.
But that is not what people and countries do. Just like you they will try to manage their situation.
A small percentage of fossil fuel goes to on-farm agricultural use, just a few percent in the US. Most people consider that to be a good use, even if there is room for significant improvement as liquid fuel shortage develops. Its a priority use.
Likewise, the percent of fossil fuel use for deploying non-fossil energy production is an easy choice to make. Each unit of fossil energy input results in many units of net non-fossil energy output. Its pretty simple. Its a priority use of a small percent of the overall fossil combustion, in fact it is the only energetically net positive use of fossil fuel that there is.
You can ramble on with falsehoods and exaggerations.
But you have your vested interest, which is of course far more important than any concern you have for the environment….just look at your economic behavior over the past 50 years.
Hickory, here is where you have it all incorrect…
” Each unit of fossil energy input results in many units of net non-fossil energy output.”
Can you show or prove this? no-one else can…
All the EROEI type calculations and reports that get published showing a nice bright green future, always have ‘boundaries’ they set when counting energy inputs..
This is because it’s so hard to include all energy especially the embedded energy in the background system of civilization that building everything used.
Whether it’s bridges, roads, ports, or people with expertise or trucks, ships and trains to transport, it all suffers from entropy and has to be replaced using energy to do so. I’ve not found a single report that counts any of it in their EROEI calculations.
It’s assumed it all exists, so we don’t count it, this includes the EROEI calculations for new coal, new gas and new oil as well. We built the system with the really cheap energy, over the last 200 years, using high grade ores of everything to do it.
All the EROEI studies omit the replacement of all the built infrastructure and educated human environment, as if they were separate from building ‘energy producers’.
If we tell ourselves fairytales about how good the energy returns are, by leaving out most of the energy inputs, of course the picture looks ‘rosy’.
As the EROEI of fossil fuels continues to fall, modern civilization is not maintainable anyway, which is precisely why we have increasing inequality in the western world and much higher debt levels. Modern civilization is a ponzi scheme based on energy. We all know what happens when a ponzi scheme based on money fails, because new money doesn’t come into the system.
It’s the same for modern civilization when energy stops growing, only taking longer until the real collapse sets in.
You and everyone else can go on ‘believing’ that rebuildables will save us, but it’s only a belief, not the reality of the situation…
Here is something ‘out there’ to consider. If renewables did have an EROEI of say 20:1, then why wouldn’t some business buy $1B worth of renewables and make $1B worth of renewables each year over the life of the first ones, a perpetual motion machine guaranteeing riches forever. Then they could take the first years production of energy and make $2B ‘worth’ of renewables in the second year, $4B in the third year, By the 4th year you now have $4B to make another $4B of renewables, so $8B ‘worth’ of renewables..
It’s a money making machine, if the total EROEI really was 20:1, or even 10:1, for that matter even if it was 2:1 it’s a perpetual motion machine capable of providing free energy until we ran out of space to put up solar panels or wind turbines.
All renewables, nuclear geothermal or whatever, are all just derivatives of fossil fuels. We are using up fossil fuels faster in an attempt to fool ourselves and the masses that believe in the fairytale of a bright green future..
What would you think was the best course of action for humanity, knowing that fossil fuels are leaving us, if you thought the perpetual motion machine of renewables was not possible??
My take is power down as much as possible, reduce population rapidly, by birth control and allowing the chronically in pain to end their lives with dignity and pain free when they decided to. Stop wasting resources on fairytales, maybe even a compulsory world wide 5%-10% reduction in fossil fuel use every year, plus a rewilding of as much farmland as possible, with a minimum 2%-5% every year. Of course it would take a one world government to implement, with harsh penalties for those not conforming, plus a total redistribution of wealth and people, much more crowded housing, compulsorily wherever necessary, etc, etc, which is totally not going to happen…
In other words there is no way out, our modern civilization will collapse, because people will chose to believe the fairytale before accepting reality, and reality will hit with collapse before people will accept radical change, but by then it’s way too late.. Similar to just about every civilization before ours that also collapsed..
Hideaway. You would do better with a reality based approach.
Really, its worth considering.
It is good to stand on firm ground.
Yes indeed- hydroelectric, nuclear, solar, wind and geothermal electrical generating projects all over the world really do put out much more energy than it took to deploy them, including the entire lifecycle inputs. Thousands of them.
Lifecycle energy payback times for utility scale PV in the US is just a year or two, for example. Don’t try this in a closet.
March 2024- US NREL https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/87372.pdf
Hickory, do you ever fully read those type of reports or the references they refer to??
Spread throughout are such statements as these, all quoted from the reports…
“diesel, burned in building machine, average”
“heavy fuel oil, burned in industrial furnace 1MW, non-modulating”
“natural gas, burned in industrial furnace >100kW”
Right throughout these type of reports, they always ‘reference’ other reports for stat’s they use. As you follow the chain of references to get to original source of actual information, it ALWAYS comes back to the energy used in the processes, as per the quotes above when you dig deep enough.
With the utility PV they cover down to the gravel used in the concrete and roads for the energy usage, which makes the report look comprehensive..
However reading the details, you find ‘X’ tonnes of gravel required the lorry to use ‘Y’ gallons of diesel to transport the gravel to site. (That’s the diesel mentioned above to the ‘machine’ being the PV site set up, with all the diesel used by different equipment).
How much energy is apportioned to the truck? ZERO. How much is apportioned to the excavator at the gravel pit ZERO (just the diesel used). How much is apportioned to the drivers of the excavator and lorries? ZERO. How much energy is attributed to the building of roads and bridges from the gravel pit to PV site? ZERO.
It’s the same rubbish as everywhere else, leaving out huge gobs of energy because they are too hard to account for. The trucks, excavators, roads and bridges, plus the drivers, workers have long lives so we attribute ZERO energy use…
How do you think that report gets a lower carbon footprint for the making of PV panels in the USA compared to importing from high carbon intensity countries?
Easy, by attributing ZERO energy use, and therefore CO2 ‘spend’ on all the workers involved. Yet the imported panels are so much cheaper than the USA made panels (which is why the govt has put tariffs on them!!).
Every single research document you can find on EROEI has the same exclusions, all the too hard to measure stuff is excluded, they set boundaries, so it all gives a false image of the energy used.
We need the entire background system operating normally so that the roads are maintained, the new factories are built when required, the trucks, excavators, milling machines are obtainable when needed. The workers have to be educated, well fed, have transport to the mines, factories, sites of PV building. There needs to be young workers educated at schools, for when the older ones retire. None of it operates or gets built without the accountants and lawyers doing the numbers in the background with contracts, nor the managements putting it all together.
Every single aspect requires energy to perform, yet we don’t want to count any of it, as it would show that solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal or whatever machine made energy source are not viable energy sources, which would prove to people there is no sustainable future possible for modern civilization..
We know that using coal, oil and gas, plus high grade ores, worked to build the current modern civilization, for a small proportion of the overall world’s population. No-one has actually shown that we could maintain it with lower EROEI fossil fuels and lower ore grades either!! (My calculations say no it can’t be maintained!!)
It’s your preference to believe whatever you want to. It doesn’t have to be reality. however don’t rely on the papers you, Dennis, Islandboy, Alimbiquated and others keep pointing to as the definitive answer as they clearly are not, by leaving out huge aspects of energy inputs in their calculations..
You need to ask yourself why these type reports leave out so much energy use, with these ‘boundaries’ of only energy in the processes, and no energy component for all the workers and capital equipment used in every stage from geologists looking for resources right through to the accountants and lawyers involved in finance and contracts.
It’s all energy consumption, while leaving out huge amounts gives the entire system a false accounting of the output relative to the input.
We only have one way of accounting for all these background energy inputs and that is the dollar cost in today’s dollars. It’s certainly not perfect, but leaving out most of the dollar and energy cost, the way the papers referred to work out these numbers, is just false accounting. What it needs to be compared to is not cost of NEW coal, gas, oil, but to the costs of what we built the system with, to see if it’s possible to replace the present system as parts age.
It clearly isn’t possible, as ‘NEW’, solar, wind and batteries cost way in excess of what a ‘new’ coal fired plant built in the old very dirty, polluting style, sitting right next to the coal pit; costs to bring electricity to modern civilization. As the Adaro situation in Indonesia clearly shows, new coal plants are a fraction of the cost of building solar wind and batteries (or pumped hydro).
We clearly don’t have the coal resources to build everywhere with cheap dirty coal, nor can the environment stand any more, but kidding ourselves about the energy return of solar, wind and batteries, just sets us up for massive failure and collapse when the fossil fuels availability start to decline with a vengeance with solar, wind and batteries not making up the energy deficit, with the sudden ‘product’s shortage (fertilizers, plastics, explosives, acids, chemicals, coke etc) all biting at the same time.
Did you know it takes 400kg of petcoke to make 1 tonne of Alumina, even in the geothermal plants of Iceland??
Because we’ve been kidding ourselves for decades about powering the future, we have effectively just backed ourselves into a corner of ‘near future’ collapse, in regards to modern civilization.
Hickory, it occurred to me today as I was reading through that link on EROEI, that all the work done in this field by thousands of such reports, are all trying to show renewables in a good light against fossil fuel sources of electricity.
None of them are trying to show if it’s possible to run a modern civilization. It’s all about the boundaries set. They all assume the background system continues as normal, while setting their boundaries to compare renewables with fossil fuels, like the Lazard LCOE type reports.
They never compare with what we built the entire system of modernity with.
The reports compare total possible output of solar and wind, with limited capacity of coal, gas and nuclear power, because a lot of the time the renewables will be going first as the grids have been set up. They add handicaps to coal of CCUS, which is not happening anywhere, plus add costs of purchasing and transport of fossil fuels, that didn’t happen with the early power plants we built the system with..
To me they all prove that new coal, gas and nuclear are unviable to run a modern civilization, with the limitations they place on them, just like renewables. We are cooked if we keep trying to increase fossil fuel use, until we can’t, or we we collapse by trying to use too expensive renewables.
I suspect we just keep going in the direction we have been for decades, telling ourselves stories of saving the planet by going to renewables, while we burn more fossil fuels in the attempt to change, until we cannot increase fossil fuel use because of peak oil, where all the feedback loops of the downslope lead directly to collapse of the entire complex system…
While we’re waiting for the cliff, we should at least have a soundtrack.
Using some Hideaway as a lyric prompt, the A.I. music generator suno.com generated these:
[Verse]
Diggin’ deep in the ground, fossil fuels we scrape
Iron giants chew earth, while resources dissipate
Wind farm dreamin’, but reality slaps
Need fossil fire, to spark up solar traps
[Verse 2]
Smelters blaze, metal tough like crew
Fuel’s the lifeblood, makes turbines true
Can’t escape the loop, ores gettin’ lean
Dug all the easy gold, now we chasin’ dreams
[Chorus]
Machines hummin’ on fossil breath,
Clean energy’s tale got a backtrack of death
Buildin’ hope, buried in coal
Wind and sun shine, but it takes a toll
[Bridge]
Precious minerals, hauled from earth’s chest
Dream of green power, in capitalist quest
Remote lands cry, ores dry and thin
Dig deeper we must, ‘cause we in it to win
[Verse 3]
Supply’s shrinkin’, demand risin’ like the tide
Fuels burn faster, can’t run, can’t hide
Got visions of clean, but dirt skews the way
Burnt black gold, keeps the green at bay
[Verse 4]
Makin’ tech magic, but reality haunts
Rotors spin on backs of fossil taunts
Harvest sunshine, wind’s gentle kiss
Blood and sweat in the mix, truths we twist
[Chorus]
Solar panel dreams, but it’s diesel in the seams
Wind turbine hopes, fossil fuels, they still the beams
Building up that tech, gotta dig and smelt and wreck
Glistenin’ green dreams, but in fossil fuel we interject
[Bridge]
Diggin’ deep for that coal, oil rigs on patrol
Machines to the front line, but who pay the toll
Fossil fuels dwindling while we chase the solar glow
Sunshine abundant, but its harvest moves so slow
[Verse 2]
Transport in cycles, heavy metal gears
Processing it all, burnin’ fossil fears
We took the easy mine, left with rocky peers
The harder the find, the costlier in years
[Chorus]
Solar panel dreams, but it’s diesel in the seams
Wind turbine hopes, fossil fuels, they still the beams
Building up that tech, gotta dig and smelt and wreck
Glistenin’ green dreams, but in fossil fuel we interject
[Bridge]
Fuel-fueled fantasies, a loop that ain’t set free
Machines eatin’ energy, while tryin’ to plant a tree
The balance delicate while nature charges fees
Fossil fuels whisperin’, ain’t as green as it seems
Hickory — It doesn’t matter how big the resources of wind and sunshine are, we can only collect that energy with machines we’ve built.
The same applies to fossil fuel of course. The good news is that renewables are simper to get energy out of, because they don’t required mucking around with hot high pressure fluids.
Thank you for the link. A most interesting and thoughtful analysis and in an easy to read form. Makes a change from the BS emanating from all the hand waving cornies, who cannot come up with any tangible plans of how renewables are going save the world.
Simply put: they won’t.
After billions of years of evolution photosynthesis can on average do little better than 1% of conversion of sunlight into biomass as power density in terms of kW of insolation converted into an edible crop or converted into a biofuel such as ethanol.
Conversion of agricultural “waste” by a gasification would deplete soil organic carbon and effectively displace essential nutrient such as NPK., as well as other trace elements essential to plant productivity.
Meanwhile the felon that the Republicans want to take over is claiming that we should make all bitcoins in America, because that would make America “energy dominant”.
Nothing like a war to cancel climate change progress.
RUSSIA’S WAR WITH UKRAINE ACCELERATING GLOBAL CLIMATE EMERGENCY
Russia’s invasion has generated at least 175m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e), amid a surge in emissions from direct warfare, landscape fires, rerouted flights, forced migration and leaks caused by military attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure – as well as the future carbon cost of reconstruction.
We have no idea how a human brain even works and have the most basic grasp of what constitutes sentience. Expecting inferior silicon facsimiles to somehow replicate this, and to also do it as efficiently has not only not been proven, it may not even be possible. The physical limits of silicon chips are already in view.
Keep in mind Sabine is a physicist and not a computer scientist anyway. Her videos on the history of money and capitalism vs. socialism, as well as one of her climate change ones, tells me she isn’t all that knowledgeable about things she deems worth making a video on. So, take with a pinch of salt. She has fun takes, just go with those working in the field for another view. Numberphile do excellent computer science explainers for tech in the news.
Anyway, the current AI bubble is not going to lead to AGI. The data and energy required expand exponentially with little to be gained. LLMs ≠ AGI, no matter what anyone in Big Tech says. There needs to be another method to use ANNs or GANNs in machine learning.
In other matters we do have much better grasps on efficiency improvements. Electric motors are super efficient and there’s little more to be gained. Most inefficiencies today I can think of come from the rentier based capitalist system in place, not so much the technology. Any system that values savings in dollars over physical resources is essentially backwards. I’m thinking of importing, say, lamb from New Zealand to the UK because their market is cheaper, despite the massive energy and carbon cost of doing so from half a world away when Wales exists.
We have a 5Kw solar system on our roof, It’s been there for 13 years now. If you look up the tables for our area we officially get an average of 4hrs/d of solar, however reality is different. We have averaged under 3 hrs/d over the life of the array up to now…
In the last 16 days though, early winter near the shortest day, we have had a very cloudy period, 16 days where the total out put is 72kwh for this entire period an average of 4.5Kwh/d from a 5kw system, with the last 4 days giving a total of 12Kwh or just 3Kwh/d!!. We only use around 23kwh/d without a heat pump operating (wood heating). If we used a heat pump to heat the house our power use would skyrocket. Nor do we charge an EV.
Theoretical solar input for an ‘average’ 16 days at our location is 320kwh for our 5kw system, but of course the averages never take into account the variance from summer to winter. In summer we can get over 35Kwh in a day.
If we had a 20kw system, with 50Kwh of battery storage, we would still have needed some type of backup power during periods like this. 20Kw in summer giving over 140Kwh/d would be mostly wasted power.
Meanwhile for the whole state over this period, and there has been 7 days in a row with virtually no wind, we would have needed over 1,000,000Mwh of battery storage ($400B at today’s costs at best!!) to compensate for lack of both sun and wind. They have often been only 2% – 3% of grid power, and despite then being ‘capable’ of near 100% of power when the sun shines and wind blows, we’ve had a week where the combination of the 2 never exceeded 10% of total power. As I write this the state is also using 951Tj of gas, a lot for just heating, while there are several heavy chemical plants as well.
Replacing that gas used for heating with electric heat pumps would require the battery storage to go up by a magnitude…
Even if the capacity of solar and wind were tripled, it wouldn’t have made much difference.
You guys can go on all you like about prices for solar, wind, batteries etc falling, but you don’t have a clue about the actual scale needed and the materials required on a world wide basis that’s promoted. We would have to destroy every remaining natural ecosystem, dig up nearly the entire planet in the process, use the last of the fossil fuels to build it all…. then what? Dig up under all the oceans, to build recycling facilities based on chemicals and heat processes we derive from the fossil fuels we no longer have??
Totally destroying the last of the natural environment, sending CO2 levels to 700-800ppm, while jacking up every industrial process to build the ‘electrical’ world, all based on fossil fuel use, to buy modernity another 30 years, then what?? Hope for a miracle?
They are also going to have 5MW of diesel generators and 27MW of gas generation as ‘backup’.
The mine (from DFS not article), runs on 25MW of power for approximately 8,000hrs/yr. They also have the price of power per tonne of ore for each operation, it adds up to $5.20/tonne of ore.
The 4Mt/a plant will have an electricity cost of $20,800,000/yr. They are paying and outside contractor for the power. This works out at $0.104/kWh
10.4c/kWh to operate this microgrid on mostly renewables. Now you know why no Alumina smelter in this country (or any other) is going alone offgrid, as the local one near me pays just 1.4c/kWh for their mostly coal fired power from the grid..
Hideaway.
It would be (will be) feasible for the world to offset something like 60-70% of the current fossil fuel consumption by 2050, if it was a goal.
And if it isn’t a goal now, it will be one as fossil fuels deplete and the earth roasts.
That would be a good start, along with learning to live with less energy.
Yes, we can certainly learn to live with less energy.
And by 2050 population will have peaked, and we will be about 15 years beyond peak global combustion day.
Saving 30% of the earth for non humans is just going to guarantee a lot more extinctions as the climate rapidly changes.
Look at the natural world, when the climate changed slowly over time. Species would move further north or South depending on if the climate was warming or cooling with freedom, except for predators or being out competed and change due to evolution over time.
With the rapid climate change we’ve induced upon the planet, most species can’t move nor adapt fast enough, plus we have set aside forest or national parks, with many kilometers of farmland, fences and roads inbetween, restricting movement of the natural world.
We have basically told the natural world to stay in place and adapt to the new climate that we humans have changed, yet we seem to be shocked when species after species go extinct..
There is nothing sustainable about ‘leaving’ 305 for nature, it needs to be 80%-90% to be sustainable. That’s how far into overshoot we really are, considering 30% a worthy goal…
Maybe use the grid to move energy from one part of the nation to the other. Has the entire nation had no wind and cloudy weather for 16 days? A proper analysis looks at the entire system, not just a tiny corner of the World.
We do have a large grid, the AEMO grid is one of the largest in the world, spreading from Northern Queensland to Tasmania in the South.
While the wholesale price of electricity was high in Victoria, it was negative in Queensland, during the day, as the winter is the ‘sunny’ time up there and temperatures are mild so no need for air conditioners..
Here’s the problem, that applies everywhere in the world. Even though it’s one large grid, the ability to get electricity from a couple of thousand kilometers away is very limited. It would take new dedicated HVDC transmission lines capable of sending down 10-12GW of power, a few times a year.
It would be an enormous expense and vast use of resources for only limited use, possibly 10% of the year at best. It also doesn’t address night time use, unless the huge build out of extra solar, in excess of what Queensland needs, plus a few TWh of batteries for night time sending the electricity down South and for use in Queensland.
What you end up with is a huge excess of build out in both the North and the South of the country with huge battery banks at each end. Queensland with an excess of power in the winter, sending it South, while providing ofr themselves as well, while in Victoria an oversized system so that excess power could be sent North in summer at when we have excess power during the day most of the time.
You can’t have the massive battery systems at just one end either, unless the transmission lines were also massively oversized.
I did a rough calculation on the copper needed for the giant HVDC cables used for an underground system of 8.8GW over 3,000km. They use a copper core centre of 200mm2 inside the alumina outer layers. Even ‘only’ 8.8GW would use 430,000 tonnes of copper and cost a total of around $A58B to build (excluding any land cost!!)
My whole argument is that this is all needed to keep modernity going and is a massive increase in material use, from the transmission lines, to the batteries and all the solar and wind needed to be built, compared to what we built the system with. Plus there is no additional electricity either, to run the EVs and heat pumps and everything else electrical..
All the actual plans only consider the ‘average’ amount of electricity production needed from solar and wind, and never the variance from summer to winter, unless it’s the hand wave, that you have done about building a bit of extra transmission. When ever the whole picture of what’s needed is taken into account, it’s massively more complicated than the hand wave, and massively more material intensive.
The Australian consumers simply can’t afford the type of system necessary, so it has to fail. already they are changing the way customers are billed, always costing more with some new types of charges being introduced into the system. This on top of back to back 25-30% price increases over the last 2 years, plus starting on July 1, some home owners are being charged to send their solar power into the grid during peak sum hours. (after being given subsidies by the govt to install solar panels in the past!!)
In regard to the materials we use for this buildout, we gain access to it all by using fossil fuels in every stage of the mining, processing, manufacturing, transportation and deployment of it all, a lot of it oil, that we simply don’t have, to do the job!! This is all before considering all the environmental damage of the extra fossil fuel burning and the extra natural systems ripped to pieces to mine the materials.
You always have the hand wave solution, when the reality is it can’t be done on a scale involving the billions of humans we have on the planet without destroying the natural world. Yet such is the desire to hold onto modernity and all the benefits to individuals that enjoy it, that we can happily deny the bad future that is guaranteed to befall us by making up nice fairytales that sun and wind are unlimited, without considering we only gain the benefit from machines we have to build and replace…
You need to consider the alternative and compare over the life of the projects, in the US a combination of wind and solar is cheaper. Costs for wind and solar are likely to fall as the cost of fossil fuel rises so the relative cost of wind and solar will become cheaper over time.
Advanced High Voltage Cables use aluminum with a composite core (no copper is used). Overhead cables are far cheaper than buried cable.
Dennis … ” Costs for wind and solar are likely to fall as the cost of fossil fuel rises”
Except that is not what happened in 2022 when the cost of solar, wind and batteries all rose when the price of fossil fuels rose..
Why would you even expect this to happen when the mining and manufacture of everything ‘renewable’, totally relies upon fossil fuels??
You also assume the land overhead cables go over is ‘free’. This is correct if you assume solar, wind, coal, oil, gas, and land are ‘free’ to humanity to use, all just being parts of the natural world.
A whole lot more giant transmission lines over land is a poor idea when the climate is changing and storm getting stronger.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UZHMlSMs5o
The grid cam be updated in existing rights of way using advanced conductors to increase capacity. this is what Europe has already started and what the US, Australia, and Canada should do as well, some of the existing HVAC network could be replaced with HVDC on existing rights of way. There are a lot of areas of Canada, Australia, and the US where population density is low and those areas might have less difficulty with new rights of way.
Dennis, the main part of my reply to you was about the cost of solar, wind and batteries going up in 2022, when fossil fuel prices went up.
Why wouldn’t you expect the same to happen in the future when we have shortages of fossil fuels??
As I’ve already explained, overhead cables more exposed to extreme weather to move vast quantities from one side of a country to the other is a bad idea, come large more violent storms that destroy the transmission towers.
You continually take one bit as if it’s the answer, forgetting we are in a complicated system with lots of feedback loops.
Hideaway,
I don’t expect a shortage of fossil fuel, demand will decrease as fossil fuels get replaced with other sources of energy, fossil fuel prices in general have been rising for years while the cost of wind and solar have mostly decreased. The relative cost of wind and solar compared to fossil fuel powered electric power will continue to decrease.
Overhead cables are far less expensive and have been used for 100 years or more. Too expensive to bury cables for transmission. It is a good option if you want to overstate costs however.
There were a number of factors causing solar prices to rise in the US in 2022 besides increasing fossil fuel prices, mostly uncertainty over US tariffs on imported solar equipment from China. There was a severe disruption of World trade in the aftermath of the pandemic which caused commodity prices in general to rise and high inflation, this affected everything including wind and solar power project costs.
Dennis,
I know that you are an academic and perhaps are a little light on processes and costs in the real world. I frequently encounter academics making supposed technology breakthroughs that never see the light of day.
Carbon fibre power cables will most likely turn into such an application. Apart from the astronomic cost of carbon fibre, the e is the little problem of capacity. Stas are very difficult to come by because the business is dominated by of small number of producers who are very, very secretive about their capacity to produce and the process technology. Patents on the subject are sparse and of little value. The common denominator is a product called ACN ( acrylonitrile) which is used in the production of acrylonitrile fibres, known as polyacrylonitrile fibres (PAN). Usually there is a co-monomer. ABS is a polymer made from ACN ( ACN, butadiene, styrene) and is used in computer cases.
The actual production capacity of carbon fibres tow is not disclosed but it is likely to be of the order of around 200,000 tonnes per year- i.e not very much.
ACN is produced from propylene and ammonia. To date there is no economic non-fossil synthetic route to propylene, and a synthetic route to ammonia is similarly challenged. All propylene and virtually all ammonia is produced form fossil sources.
The idea that a power grid could be supported by thousands of miles of carbon fibre high voltage cable , above ground, requires a new economic model or a magic money tree ( or magic money forest), especially if it were to be used intermittently.
You might like to look into the interconnectors in Europe. Most are around 1GW, so moving power around Europe is a challenge. A planned internconnector between Germany and Sweden has been scuppered by the Swedes not trusting the German grid.
It is suffice to say that the proposed Morocco to Northern Europe sub -sea HVDC interconnector project appears to have sunk without trace.
Like a number of posters on this blog, I prefer reality over fantasy.
“[HDVC transmission lines] would be an enormous expense and vast use of resources for only limited use, possibly 10% of the year at best.”
If there is sufficient pumped hydro capacity available, improved transmission lines would have an outsized effect since there are some electricity storage capabilites in the system outside of batteries. And that is very much the case for Australia, with the big pumped hydro projects proposed in Queensland for example.
Whether it is justified to improve the grid a lot in Australia or not is up to debate. In Europe where distances are not that great and population high it is a no brainer to enhance the grid. It has to been done with sound judgement. Maybe it is sufficient that the south east of Australia cooperate to improve the grid at the most important distances for example.
“The copper needed for the giant HVDC cables used for an underground system”.
I can solve the problem for you. Just use aluminium in overground lines as much as possible. And add a carbon fiber core instead of steel to increase capacity with 100%+. Underground cables are different though and should often rely on copper for longevity and some other reasons. But the quantity of material we are talking about for this is not that great, is it?
Kolbeinih …. “In Europe where distances are not that great and population high it is a no brainer to enhance the grid.”
If Europe wants power when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, when fossil fuels are no longer being used, then they will have to have long HVDC grids accessing power from one end of the continent to the other, or from Africa and vice versa.
It’s still all extra material use and cost. Above ground transmission lines are always possible, except no-one wants to compensate the land owners the new lines will go over, which restricts what the land can be used for. That would make it cost too much…
All the talk of Aluminium taking over from copper is great, except for the energy use to make Aluminium and the 400kg/t of petcoke used in the process, that wont be available in a fossil fuel free world.
My suspicion is that every proponent of the bright green future has no idea how ubiquitous fossil fuel use is, in industrial processes, not just as energy but as products that are essential for the processes.
Hideaway
It’s simply incredible that people can’t understand something so basic. Unfortunately it’s impossible to help the blind. I personally have given up. All we can acquire is a label from the sophoric rhetoric. Climate deniers, fossil fuel shill, etc etc.,
It’s so stupid it’s hard to tolerate. But it helps me know how to interact with the general population. They’re even dumber than the people posting on the site.
The bottom line is energy is the economy and the velocity is prosperity. If you don’t get that statement unfortunately you’re stupid.
There is some 5MW of diesel standby and 27MW of gas generation that were brought online earlier this year, but these will often be switched off and will operate only when the renewable resources are unavailable.
Doesn’t say are switched off says will be. That can also be interpreted as never will be.
Way to move the goalposts! First say you can’t produce renewables with renewables. Then when someone says that renewables are being used to support the production of renewables say “It’s not 100% renewables, it still needs a fossil fuel back up”. Sheesh! Give me a break! If a guy can’t point out the silver linings around the dark clouds that you guys are always pointing at, if there’s no hope, why don’t you just go and find a nice cliff and end your misery. I prefer to look for things that improve the chances that we won’t ALL go to hell!
Drawing on millions of atmospheric measurements from around the world, the report revealed a sharp rise in human-related nitrous oxide levels. The findings raised researchers’ concerns that too little is being done to rein in the gas, the vast majority of which is produced by agriculture. Nitrous oxide heats the Earth’s atmosphere 300 times more effectively than carbon dioxide, scientists say, and can linger for more than a century. Emissions soared 40 percent in the four decades to 2020, said the Global Nitrous Oxide Budget, which relied on the expertise of 58 international researchers. As a result, levels of the gas in the atmosphere climbed to 336 parts per billion in 2022—a 25 percent increase over pre-industrialized levels. The surge was far greater than previous predictions by the UN panel of climate scientists.
The predominant source is ‘agricultural practices’, which if you dig just a little deeper is the nitrogen fertilization of soils, plowing, and manure concentration/handling/runoff.
Its all about maximizing yield of carbs and protein for humanity of 8.2 billion chunky apes.
Each ape control the biologic productivity a big chunk of land that used to be called the natural world.
This won’t subside until population subsides.
Maybe John. Most of humanity is used to getting food from plowed croplands fertilized with nitrogen products. We demand an awful lot from croplands, throwing a huge amount of fossil fuel enabled nitrogen at it.
I suppose weaning down off of concentrated animal production facilities like feedlots and poultry factories would help somewhat.
Main thing is to get the human population down back under a billion. Hopefully without too much cruelty.
Looks like this heating pathway is baked in the cake.
I believe that the drumbeats for homo-engineering against climate warming is going to gain momentum this decade.
HICKORY —
Humanity will start moving away from eating animals when it gets more expensive than meat substitutes.
Back in 2011 Taco Bell (or actually its parent YUM) was sued for selling stuff as “beef” that was only 35% cow based.
This was sort of a public relations disaster at the time, but it is the shape of things to come. Vegan and vegetarian food is getting more and more common in packaged food chain restaurants, and the marketing push is getting strong as costs fall.
In fact, that 35% beef claim is about the same level as the amount of chicken meat in commercially available chicken nuggets. Americans alone chomp through about 2.3 billion servings of chicken nuggets a year, so companies have a vast incentive to shave costs.
As food science gradually improves, the percentage of cheaper substitutes for meat will increase. If people start complaining, marketing will straighten them out.
You’ll hear old folks ranting about the good old days when everyone ate meat, but eventually the majority will bow to the will of their corporate overlords, as they always do when exposed to enough propaganda spin. It won’t be any worse than the glop they sell already.
You may think of veganism as something your crazy tattooed hippy niece does to annoy her mother at Thanksgiving, but for corporate America it’s a godsend.
AI has been around since Alan Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954).
The reason AI takes so much energy is companies are trying to grab the entire internet and train on it.
The bottleneck of AI is that the algorithms are the sames ones from the 1970s and the exponential curve of Moore’s law is coming to an end.
AI is a sophisticated pattern matcher that works great on text and video/pictures which humans can relate too. And makes your feel like it is “alive and thinking”.
but struggles as soon as the rules change or the training data becomes outdated.
Its called overfitting.
A true AI robot with an already functioning “brain” wouldn’t require that much energy. Its the algorithms can’t learn like humans can.
Case in point, as Alimbiquated pointed out above, the human brain runs on some glucose at 20 W when under load. My PS5 when playing a taxing game is using over ten times that to produce a somewhat photorealistic image and little else in terms of cognition.
We’re just nowhere near AGI, much as I dove into ChatGPT and zero shot reasoning via LLM papers last summer. They’re all marketing to try and prop up the tech bubble after metaverses, NFTs and crypto all failed.
Kleiber —
The progress in computing has been amazing. A solar powered pocket calculator can deliver more computation power than the first computers in the 40s that filled whole buildings and needed hundreds of kilowatts of power. But we’re still far far away from the efficiency of biological systems.
I agree that AGI is probably a long way away. We lack both the energy and the data to train them, and our current models probably aren’t good enough anyway. AI is a field where experts always seem to be wrong.
On the other hand, current tools do seem to be having some impact on the job market.
Old Chemist- that looks like a great and important read to digest, from an author who appears to have given the subject plenty of thought and deep inside knowledge of this industry that is in its early moments. I plan to take the time to do so.
The vast majority of people have absolutely no clue what is on the doorstep with this whole deal.
Thank you
“To put this in perspective, suppose GPT-4 training took 3
months. In 2027, a leading AI lab will be able to train a GPT-4-
level model in a minute.”
-to get a glimpse of the energy implications on page 75-78
and the section on power page 83
No matter how fast or at what scale AI trains on data, it is still limited by the algorithms.
Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Regression Analysis, Neural Networks, Clustering.
There will need to be a break thru in the algorithms to move beyond pattern matching.
If the human brain contains algorithms that AI does not ( I am pretty certain it does ), then no matter how much data AI trains on it won’t be able to replicate it.
I think AI will be disruptive as well, but is overhyped.
Andre,
To the contrary I think its underhyped, meaning vastly underestimated effects by almost everyone.
If there is electricity.
I worry that the power acquired by those who utilize AI most effectively will enable them to grab a huge chunk of the electrical generation that would otherwise be available for the general public. That could be the police state, huge robotics corporations, information/data control monopolies, electrical system or some behemoth mixture of these things.
Its all a huge wildcard.
Yest it is technically possible but how many miles of reconductored HV transmission lines have been installed?
To date very little and this report is typical BS that I would expect from a consultant. Do I believe the numbers – not really. The cost is astronomic (their numbers) and the build out so far is miniscule for what might be required.
There simply is not enough capacity of CF for a rapid build out, and the indicated cost is likely to be a fraction of reality. How many times have we been told that unreliables are cheaper and getting cheaper. Not where I live, and no-one wants to build new wind turbines without a subsidy. Strange that.
Why don’t you ask zee Germans what they think about unreliables.
The paper say about 90k miles of reconductoring have been put in place, there are appendices with real world examples. Perhaps actually reading the paper before dismissing it would make sense. Capacity can be expanded, or steel reinforced advanced cable can be used, but results in lower operational limits due to more sag at high temperatures. Cost needs to be compared with a new project that has similar capacity. Obviously you are not omniscient as experts in several nations think this is a viable approach, I guess they didn’t consult with you.
This has little to do with the type of energy, it is upgrading the grid for higher power requirements regardless of whether coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind or solar are used to produce the electricity.
I did actually read the paer and noted the numbers in appendix II. Your reference was for moving power over large distances to cope with periods of low wind/ low insolation. If I remember rightly form East to west in Australia. That woulds be a big investment for even one GW, which would be required intermittently.
You never, acknowledged the limitation of material availability that I highlighted. There are simply only limited global capacity for CF production and the actual production method requires multiple steps and very high energy inputs.
I see this more of means of upgrading the distribution network, rather than long distance across continent power delivery.
You may be correct that there is not adequate capacity at present, I don’t know the industry in any detail. Capacity can be expanded if there is demand and the existing network can move power throughout the existing network as needed. The capacity expansion needed is for both transmission and distribution. Widely distributed wind and solar requires very little backup capacity, most of this backup capacity already exists. Increasing the capacity of the existing network by reconductoring with better equipment allows far greater flexibility in moving power where needed.
I don’t know what the capacity of these manufacturers for cable is currently, what can be produced can be utilized and if the companies see future need for more capacity they will expand their capacity.
Why don’t you ask zee Germans what they think about unreliables.
Zee Germans are installing renewables at a record pace. And so far this year, renewables have generated a record breaking 65% of electricity in the country.
I asked Gemini to count the total energy input to make 1kW of solar panels installed, and asked it to include all embodied energy, proportioned correctly, to account for all the missing parts of all the EROEI research papers, that it agreed missed embodied energy. This included machines, factories, and the people involved, including the appropriate proportion of their education and working life….
It was obviously a long conversation to nuance out all the bits correctly..
Here is the answer….
“Recalculating Payback Period:
Using the same rough estimate of 325,110 kWh for embodied energy:
Payback Period = Embodied Energy (kWh) / Annual Energy Production (kWh/year)
Payback Period = 325,110 kWh / 2,190 kWh/year = approximately 148 years
This is a significantly shorter payback period than the previous estimates because we correctly accounted for the power output per hour and the total daily sunlight exposure.
Important Considerations:
This payback period is still an estimate. Real payback periods can vary depending on factors like:
Location and sunlight hours (areas with more sunshine will have shorter payback periods)
Embodied energy (which can be lower than our estimate)
Panel efficiency (which can be higher than 20%)
Focus on Long-Term Benefits: Even with a payback period of 148 years (which might still be an overestimate), solar energy offers clean energy generation for 25-30 years, offsetting the upfront embodied energy and reducing reliance on fossil fuels.”
Previously it kept trying to tell me that 1kW of solar with an average of 6hrs/day only gave 1.2kWh of electricity, as in it factored in the 20% efficiency of the panels. The hardest part to train it was to get it to accept that 6hrs of sunshine on 1kW of solar panels produced 6kWhrs of electricity!!
Not even do I think the payback period is anywhere near the 148 years it came up with, but most of the calculations for embodied energy in the operating system of modernity were way higher than even I’d imagined. Then when I questioned it on these numbers, it conceded it might have underestimated some!! It only included 2 years for education..
My conclusion, AI is really dumb, but the embodied energy in every aspect of modernity is way higher than everyone thinks it is!!
Now most people in the world and most countries can purchase electricity or liquid fuels if they have money. More money earned (or stolen) means more energy purchase is possible.
I wonder if we will arrive at a future where that is not enough.
You may also have to be on the right list to be eligible. A list kept by the state, by the algorithm, by the approved social network, by the Alliance of Certain Nations.
The energy networks may be controlled down to the smallest packet by AI enabled security mechanisms.
Is your need in alignment with the state?
Are robotic, security and compute industrial users willing to share energy with you?
For what purpose?, they may inquire.
“You may also have to be on the right list to be eligible”
Nothing new here. It’s called discrimination- “the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of ethnicity, age, sex, or disability”
Soon we will see if the Supreme Court is going to officially add “political power” to the list of entitled treatment.
You, you and you, jail(no energy). Orange hair and comb over, it was only an election and national secrity secrets. That’s not really a big deal, if you know what I mean. Enjoy your freedom(energy).
Thanks Hideaway, I now know the difference between aluminium and alumina.
Aluminium is produced from alumina in electric smelters at very high power ratings (typically 260 MW or 6200 MWh/day). The electricity can of course be renewable as it is in Quebec, Iceland and the UK.
Alumina is produced from bauxite in the four-step Bayer process. Process heat is traditionally supplied by fossil fuels (but doesn’t have to be, at least to 500C). In the EU, USA and Australia, process heat is via natural gas; elsewhere it tends to be coke/coal based.
“Using a conservative production metric, the panels produced by Tongwei in 2024 will contribute around 27 exajoules of electricity to the grid, while the oil and gas pulled out of the ground by Exxon this year will account for a mere six exajoules. In fact, all seven of the biggest petroleum producers combined will contribute less energy from their products this year than just Tongwei’s long-tail solar production. ”
Now maybe there won’t be enough fossil fuel energy and enough raw materials to continue manufacturing solar panels at an ever increasing rate for many years to come. On the other hand……. maybe there will.
The pessimists almost invariably insist on discussing renewable energy in terms of the present day world wide economy. They rant on about being realistic……. and then argue that transmission lines can’t be built partly because right of way is too expensive to simply unobtainium.
Once the chips are down, whatever government is in power at any particular place will exercise eminent domain, and the dozers will be knocking down houses and trees the same way they knock them down to build highways .
The global population is going to peak and decline, no question. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that it’s going to decline one HELL of a lot faster than predicted.
If an aluminum smelter can be run ten percent, or fifty percent, or eighty percent, on wind and solar power, that’s good enough to stretch our depleting natural gas or coal resource out by decades at least, maybe most of a century…….. while in the meantime, there are less of us every year needing aluminum, and Uncle Sam or Big Brother or whoever is in charge will make sure little or none of it is used for beer cans.
We can, and we will, because we won’t have any other option, adapt to using a rather minor fraction of our current western energy per capita.
We can upgrade an existing house to be near net zero for about the same money as is needed to buy a typical new car.
I can’t claim any expertise in tabulating the total amount of energy needed to build a solar panel or wind turbine, but in the real world, it’s perfectly obvious that virtually all the energy collectively used to build out renewable infrastructure IS ALREADY , or WILL BE , used for other purposes……. from hauling beer to building sports stadiums to robotic lawn mowers to aircraft carriers.
And while it may take x energy to build a truck, and run it for ten years, depending on the length of the haul, a typical gravel truck hauls at least fifteen tons, and can typically make anywhere from two to ten or more round trips from quarry to job site. That’s one hell of a lot of gravel …… probably enough to make the concrete needed to build a fair sized solar farm. And when that truck is worn out……… it’s pretty damned close to one hundred percent recycled, minus a little plastic, glass and tire rubber……
The driver is going to eat, no matter what he does. The truck maker is going to build trucks… and in reality only a minute percentage of the total amount of hauling by truck is devoted to hauling gravel or steel or coal or other such materials…… and only a very small percentage of such stuff is used to build wind and solar infrastructure.
Perfection is a beautiful concept, but seldom if ever accomplished in real world circumstances.
We aren’t going to build an entirely sustainable economy this year or next year or even over the next two or three generations. But it’s not our job, today, to do that. It’s our job today to do whatever we can working in that direction.
There are countless ways to adapt and adjust to ever less available energy on a per capita basis. We’ll do it, once we have to. Let’s not forget that when it’s necessary, or at least convenient to our leaders, we put on uniforms, pick up rifles and spend the next few years either killing or getting killed, lol.
Anybody who refuses to understand that once it’s a question of our collective survival as nations, we’ll drive micro mini electric cars that will go only forty miles on a charge……. if that’s the only kind of car available.
If the only way to buy potatoes is whole, raw, more or less directly from the field, we’ll buy them that way…….. once frozen french fries are taxed out of existence.
Once we’re forced to do so, we’ll give up beef and pork, cut way the hell back on chicken, and live mostly on beans and bread…… and be all the healthier, on average, for doing so.
INDIA’S NEW COAL POWER CAPACITY IS SET TO SOAR IN 2024
India expects to add as much as 15.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity this year, the most in nearly a decade, anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg on Wednesday. India, the world’s second-largest coal consumer, looks to boost baseload capacity amid surging power demand and continues to bet big on coal to provide most of the increased electricity supply. Despite booming renewable capacity additions, India continues to rely on coal to meet most of its power demand as authorities also look to avoid blackouts in cases of severe heat waves.
The US economy is now so fantastically good, it’s reached “Superstar Status”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/us-economy-excellent/678630/
Let’s start with economists’ favorite metric: growth. When an economy is growing, more money is being spent. More stuff is being produced, more services are being performed, more businesses are being started, more workers are being hired—and, because of this abundance, living standards are probably rising. (On the flip side, during a recession—literally, when the economy shrinks—life gets materially worse.) Right now America’s economic-growth rate is the envy of the world. From the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, U.S. GDP grew by 8.2 percent—nearly twice as fast as Canada’s, three times as fast as the European Union’s, and more than eight times as fast as the United Kingdom’s.
“It’s hard to think of a time when the U.S. economy has diverged so fundamentally from its peers,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. Over the past year, some of the world’s biggest economies, including those of Japan and Germany, have fallen into recession, complete with mass layoffs and angry street protests. In the U.S., however, the post-pandemic recession never arrived. The economy just keeps growing.
Sure
Growth is there and the international growth component contributed from both undeveloped nations and “BRICs” are very significant in my view.
The way the system works, it is much easier to build something than call for austerity. So the idea of building a dual system with infrastructure and proven ideas that could work in a more fossil fuel deprived world, but not depending on it for some time, is probably the way forward. And that is why I think the renewables industry should be promoted heavily. I have to agree with all the arguments that it is much easier to maintain infrastructure including energy infrastructure, than to build it from scratch. All quick win ideas to conserve energy are welcome. The industry will need all surplus supply left over. Demand is endless for each human being if allowed by affordability btw – we can fly around the earth and buy it all.
God I love the press and talking heads going on about how great things are. Guess Biden has a slamdunk come November. No way with this great news will people think otherwise.
Right? Right?!
Just remember, every accusation by a Republican is a confession?
Right?
Our Dim friends are not immune
For the EV fans. An opinion piece from Cleantechnica. For once it describes a realistic account of EV’s
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/06/11/unsold-tesla-cars-piling-up-in-america-australia-germany/
Soory guys, but this is not going to help save the world; quite the opposite- a great waste of resources.
Carnot,
It does not matter what you and I think about it. China wants to be the leader when it comes to batteries, and also wean themselves off the habit of using coal and oil. That leads to at least a few decades of heavy EV battery production most likely, unless the inputs to production are interrupted.
The glory days for electrical vehicles are here apparently. And nothing is going to save the world in the end. It is about time to get more pragmatic than just watch fossil fuel reserves deplete while the waste products do their natural act.
Thanks Carnot
The report from the Rocky Mountain Institute that I linked to below takes an entirely different view! I was led to the RMI document by this! Conservatives and incumbents have predicted the end of wind and solar for decades. They are still wrong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZcrt2RKpCk
Russian Navy arrives in Cuba. An announced visit.
Fires missiles near USA.
GUYANA is tracking as well (I didn’t realise they could track anything)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13500937/Russia-naval-exercises-Caribbean-summer-stops-Cuba-Venezuela-tensions-Ukraine.html
Russia to stop in Venezuela next.
Food for thought! The Cleantech Revolution, It’s exponential, disruptive, and now.
ISLANDBOY,
Great link, thanks.
Islandboy,
Thanks.
Another link (the book is also good)
https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/brighter-1-the-future-of-the-environment
We had nuclear fission for power in the 1950s. It was never, and never will be, a technology problem.
People who keep spouting about new disruption (ugh, I hate that term) from the Big Tech sector are clearly not aware of history. EVs are not new. Efficient lighting is not new. Heat pumps are not new. Nor are PV, wind turbines or any of the rest of it, outside some material science improvements and the shrinking semiconductor. The most efficient way of moving freight and people was invented in the 1800s and was properly expanded across whole continents before oil was even a thing. We can’t even do that today in the West.
This is why not one of these supposed experts can explain why none of this was done in the ’70s, when most of this tech was not only in existence, but mature. Because it’s all yet more green grifting on the latest fad, as with AI now.
I simply don’t pay attention to those who even entertain the notion of carbon neutral by 2050 or diets consisting entirely of lab grown meat and greenhouse foods, or everyone having an EV or flying hydrogen powered airliners. They are deeply unserious people. They are great capitalists, though.
Kleiber,
Did you own a smartphone in the 70s? When I saw my first Iphone that a friend had bought around 2007, I thought I would never get one. I probably got my first one in 2011 or so, I thought the same thing about cell phones, laptop computers, electric cars, etc.
I was wrong every time just as you are now.
Kodak also never thought digital cameras would catch on.
Disruptions have happened in the past and will continue to happen in the future. Ignore them at your peril.
Okay. How does an iPhone save the world from energy shortfall and resource depletion?
Conflating die shrinks on semiconductors is not changing anything like that. There are no TSMCs out there making PV cells a billion times cheaper or more efficient. Planes do not fly a billion miles further. You cannot feed people on a billion times less nutrients or heat them with fewer Watts.
I get how impressive the little supercomputer in my pocket is. I just want to know why that’s relevant.
KLEIBER —
Disruption is a useful term in product marketing. I recommend the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.
Or just go on “hating” it. Its all the rage among internet users.
I read this, but all I hear is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at085Op84Oc
An important slide as part of that show indicates that 86% of the worlds population is in countries that import fossil fuel. Of those, almost all have abundant renewable energy resources….resources that have barely been tapped thus far.
Also consider that even within countries that produce fossil fuels, almost all of the production capital flow is into the hands of just a few.
These factors give an additional big incentive for escalation of renewables deployment.
A critique- they present multiple projection charts based on Rysted 1.6 vs 1.8 degree scenarios. These are wildly optimistic. We are already on a path to far exceed those levels…meaning that the fossil fuel decline is and will be far slower than their projections presented show.
But they have the trends/aspirations right.
Hickory …
” Of those, almost all have abundant renewable energy resources….resources that have barely been tapped thus far.”
This is the classic mistake most people make. It doesn’t matter how big the resources of wind and sunshine are, we can only collect that energy with machines we’ve built. It takes huge quantities of energy, almost all fossil fuel energy, to mine, concentrate, process, transport, smelt, manufacture, transport again, then deploy the machines to collect the wind and solar energy..
It’s all fine while we have a growing supply of fossil fuels to perform all these processes, but we are already needing a rapidly increasing quantity of this fossil energy to counter the lowering grades, deeper, more remote harder ores, because we mined all the easy to get stuff first.
We had one minor hiccup in gaining fossil fuels in 2022, which sent the price up. It also sent up the price of solar, wind, and batteries during this period, because of the intensity of fossil fuel use in the above processes.
Relative to what price will do, when we get permanent reductions of oil output at an accelerating rate as measured in millions of barrels per day/per year, the 2022 ‘blip’ will look like nothing. All the costs of every process from mining onwards will go through the roof.
We have to remember that it is oil that made most of the coal and gas we use today available and without oil the production of both these fossil fuels will also rapidly fall.
Every current use of oil will be competing for the lower quantity available when we get the great deceleration in availability at an accelerating rate.
The path humanity has chosen is to build more stuff, requiring more fossil fuels to do it, as can be clearly see with the increases in energy consumption and population since we became fully aware of climate change/damage in around 1990.
Since 1994, well after we became fully aware, world population has gone up by around 45%, while energy use has increased by around 55% of which fossil fuel makes up about 88% of that increase!!
In that 30 year period we have massively ramped up fossil fuel use and population, added a bit of non fossil fuel energy to the mix, of which hydropower is about a quarter.
In the last 30 years we have added huge quantities of both population and energy use to the system, while solar and wind make up around 7% of the increase in energy use. We had to build the mines, processing plants and factories before a single solar panel could be made, likewise for wind turbines. We had to increase the capacity of cement production before we could add a single foundation for a wind turbine, yet these necessary increases are hidden in general ‘growth’ numbers.
It’s modern civilizations ‘growth’ that has led to the climate problems, the loss of ecosphere, the 70% reduction in non human and domestic animals, mammal loss, the 70% reduction of insects and the 70% loss of non domestic fowl birdlife in the last 54 years, let alone the damage to oceans and life in the oceans.
Solar and wind are a rounding error in the increase of energy used to get us to 2024, where the background energy use of the entire system just to maintain it has increased in those 30 years, before we consider ‘growth’. Any increase in any major component to a meaningful level would take further growth in fossil fuel use to make happen, it’s that simple.
In those 30 years of adding solar and wind to the system, we have not replaced the methods of mining, processing, transport and manufacturing them to intermittent electricity they provide, nor even tried to do so, yet all the solar and wind built 25-30 years ago has either been replaced or needs replacing, likewise in 25-30 years time for those machines built today. They all suffer from entropy, especially quickly, because they are fully exposed to the elements!! Sure we add a bit of solar and wind here and there to look like we are replacing fossil fuels, but any mine like the one linked to by Islandboy still has enough fossil fueled generation capacity to run the electricity side of the operation.
When oil production falls year over year, at some point in the future, no matter how much money is thrown at it, growth will also end, production of everything, from oil and gas pipes to solar panels to bulldozers will start to fall, there just wont be the energy to keep production of everything going.
We can keep believing that sun and wind are unlimited and free, or try to degrow before we fossil fuels leave us. We have chosen to believe we have no fossil fuel spend to get the ‘free’ sun and wind energy, while the materials to harness this energy just magics into existence…
Yes. The critical distinction between a natural ecosystem, which utilises the solar energy flow,and an industrial civilisation utilising that flow, is that the first system uses an energy collecting and storage
system that is self replicating,biodegradable, and does not require mining and manufacturing for its existence. Human societies which have endured have been a part of the first system. Industrial civilisation is a short term aberration built on exploiting a one-time sequestered energy store.
Future human societies, if we survive this century, will again be part of that first system. By then, the
planet will be largely inhabitable though, as the CO2 levels increase inexorably, and the remains of the natural world largely destroyed in our attempt to escape from a predicament of our own making.
Its not complicated.
Fossil fuels are peaking. Humanity can just stand around with their hands in their pockets and heads in sand and pretend that energy poverty will simply happen to someone else.
But that is not what people and countries do. Just like you they will try to manage their situation.
A small percentage of fossil fuel goes to on-farm agricultural use, just a few percent in the US. Most people consider that to be a good use, even if there is room for significant improvement as liquid fuel shortage develops. Its a priority use.
Likewise, the percent of fossil fuel use for deploying non-fossil energy production is an easy choice to make. Each unit of fossil energy input results in many units of net non-fossil energy output. Its pretty simple. Its a priority use of a small percent of the overall fossil combustion, in fact it is the only energetically net positive use of fossil fuel that there is.
You can ramble on with falsehoods and exaggerations.
But you have your vested interest, which is of course far more important than any concern you have for the environment….just look at your economic behavior over the past 50 years.
Hickory, here is where you have it all incorrect…
” Each unit of fossil energy input results in many units of net non-fossil energy output.”
Can you show or prove this? no-one else can…
All the EROEI type calculations and reports that get published showing a nice bright green future, always have ‘boundaries’ they set when counting energy inputs..
This is because it’s so hard to include all energy especially the embedded energy in the background system of civilization that building everything used.
Whether it’s bridges, roads, ports, or people with expertise or trucks, ships and trains to transport, it all suffers from entropy and has to be replaced using energy to do so. I’ve not found a single report that counts any of it in their EROEI calculations.
It’s assumed it all exists, so we don’t count it, this includes the EROEI calculations for new coal, new gas and new oil as well. We built the system with the really cheap energy, over the last 200 years, using high grade ores of everything to do it.
All the EROEI studies omit the replacement of all the built infrastructure and educated human environment, as if they were separate from building ‘energy producers’.
If we tell ourselves fairytales about how good the energy returns are, by leaving out most of the energy inputs, of course the picture looks ‘rosy’.
As the EROEI of fossil fuels continues to fall, modern civilization is not maintainable anyway, which is precisely why we have increasing inequality in the western world and much higher debt levels. Modern civilization is a ponzi scheme based on energy. We all know what happens when a ponzi scheme based on money fails, because new money doesn’t come into the system.
It’s the same for modern civilization when energy stops growing, only taking longer until the real collapse sets in.
You and everyone else can go on ‘believing’ that rebuildables will save us, but it’s only a belief, not the reality of the situation…
Here is something ‘out there’ to consider. If renewables did have an EROEI of say 20:1, then why wouldn’t some business buy $1B worth of renewables and make $1B worth of renewables each year over the life of the first ones, a perpetual motion machine guaranteeing riches forever. Then they could take the first years production of energy and make $2B ‘worth’ of renewables in the second year, $4B in the third year, By the 4th year you now have $4B to make another $4B of renewables, so $8B ‘worth’ of renewables..
It’s a money making machine, if the total EROEI really was 20:1, or even 10:1, for that matter even if it was 2:1 it’s a perpetual motion machine capable of providing free energy until we ran out of space to put up solar panels or wind turbines.
All renewables, nuclear geothermal or whatever, are all just derivatives of fossil fuels. We are using up fossil fuels faster in an attempt to fool ourselves and the masses that believe in the fairytale of a bright green future..
What would you think was the best course of action for humanity, knowing that fossil fuels are leaving us, if you thought the perpetual motion machine of renewables was not possible??
My take is power down as much as possible, reduce population rapidly, by birth control and allowing the chronically in pain to end their lives with dignity and pain free when they decided to. Stop wasting resources on fairytales, maybe even a compulsory world wide 5%-10% reduction in fossil fuel use every year, plus a rewilding of as much farmland as possible, with a minimum 2%-5% every year. Of course it would take a one world government to implement, with harsh penalties for those not conforming, plus a total redistribution of wealth and people, much more crowded housing, compulsorily wherever necessary, etc, etc, which is totally not going to happen…
In other words there is no way out, our modern civilization will collapse, because people will chose to believe the fairytale before accepting reality, and reality will hit with collapse before people will accept radical change, but by then it’s way too late.. Similar to just about every civilization before ours that also collapsed..
Same old ridiculocity on EROI.
Hideaway. You would do better with a reality based approach.
Really, its worth considering.
It is good to stand on firm ground.
Yes indeed- hydroelectric, nuclear, solar, wind and geothermal electrical generating projects all over the world really do put out much more energy than it took to deploy them, including the entire lifecycle inputs. Thousands of them.
Lifecycle energy payback times for utility scale PV in the US is just a year or two, for example. Don’t try this in a closet.
March 2024- US NREL
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/87372.pdf
Hickory, do you ever fully read those type of reports or the references they refer to??
Spread throughout are such statements as these, all quoted from the reports…
“diesel, burned in building machine, average”
“heavy fuel oil, burned in industrial furnace 1MW, non-modulating”
“natural gas, burned in industrial furnace >100kW”
Right throughout these type of reports, they always ‘reference’ other reports for stat’s they use. As you follow the chain of references to get to original source of actual information, it ALWAYS comes back to the energy used in the processes, as per the quotes above when you dig deep enough.
With the utility PV they cover down to the gravel used in the concrete and roads for the energy usage, which makes the report look comprehensive..
However reading the details, you find ‘X’ tonnes of gravel required the lorry to use ‘Y’ gallons of diesel to transport the gravel to site. (That’s the diesel mentioned above to the ‘machine’ being the PV site set up, with all the diesel used by different equipment).
How much energy is apportioned to the truck? ZERO. How much is apportioned to the excavator at the gravel pit ZERO (just the diesel used). How much is apportioned to the drivers of the excavator and lorries? ZERO. How much energy is attributed to the building of roads and bridges from the gravel pit to PV site? ZERO.
It’s the same rubbish as everywhere else, leaving out huge gobs of energy because they are too hard to account for. The trucks, excavators, roads and bridges, plus the drivers, workers have long lives so we attribute ZERO energy use…
How do you think that report gets a lower carbon footprint for the making of PV panels in the USA compared to importing from high carbon intensity countries?
Easy, by attributing ZERO energy use, and therefore CO2 ‘spend’ on all the workers involved. Yet the imported panels are so much cheaper than the USA made panels (which is why the govt has put tariffs on them!!).
Every single research document you can find on EROEI has the same exclusions, all the too hard to measure stuff is excluded, they set boundaries, so it all gives a false image of the energy used.
We need the entire background system operating normally so that the roads are maintained, the new factories are built when required, the trucks, excavators, milling machines are obtainable when needed. The workers have to be educated, well fed, have transport to the mines, factories, sites of PV building. There needs to be young workers educated at schools, for when the older ones retire. None of it operates or gets built without the accountants and lawyers doing the numbers in the background with contracts, nor the managements putting it all together.
Every single aspect requires energy to perform, yet we don’t want to count any of it, as it would show that solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal or whatever machine made energy source are not viable energy sources, which would prove to people there is no sustainable future possible for modern civilization..
We know that using coal, oil and gas, plus high grade ores, worked to build the current modern civilization, for a small proportion of the overall world’s population. No-one has actually shown that we could maintain it with lower EROEI fossil fuels and lower ore grades either!! (My calculations say no it can’t be maintained!!)
It’s your preference to believe whatever you want to. It doesn’t have to be reality. however don’t rely on the papers you, Dennis, Islandboy, Alimbiquated and others keep pointing to as the definitive answer as they clearly are not, by leaving out huge aspects of energy inputs in their calculations..
You need to ask yourself why these type reports leave out so much energy use, with these ‘boundaries’ of only energy in the processes, and no energy component for all the workers and capital equipment used in every stage from geologists looking for resources right through to the accountants and lawyers involved in finance and contracts.
It’s all energy consumption, while leaving out huge amounts gives the entire system a false accounting of the output relative to the input.
We only have one way of accounting for all these background energy inputs and that is the dollar cost in today’s dollars. It’s certainly not perfect, but leaving out most of the dollar and energy cost, the way the papers referred to work out these numbers, is just false accounting. What it needs to be compared to is not cost of NEW coal, gas, oil, but to the costs of what we built the system with, to see if it’s possible to replace the present system as parts age.
It clearly isn’t possible, as ‘NEW’, solar, wind and batteries cost way in excess of what a ‘new’ coal fired plant built in the old very dirty, polluting style, sitting right next to the coal pit; costs to bring electricity to modern civilization. As the Adaro situation in Indonesia clearly shows, new coal plants are a fraction of the cost of building solar wind and batteries (or pumped hydro).
We clearly don’t have the coal resources to build everywhere with cheap dirty coal, nor can the environment stand any more, but kidding ourselves about the energy return of solar, wind and batteries, just sets us up for massive failure and collapse when the fossil fuels availability start to decline with a vengeance with solar, wind and batteries not making up the energy deficit, with the sudden ‘product’s shortage (fertilizers, plastics, explosives, acids, chemicals, coke etc) all biting at the same time.
Did you know it takes 400kg of petcoke to make 1 tonne of Alumina, even in the geothermal plants of Iceland??
Because we’ve been kidding ourselves for decades about powering the future, we have effectively just backed ourselves into a corner of ‘near future’ collapse, in regards to modern civilization.
Hickory, it occurred to me today as I was reading through that link on EROEI, that all the work done in this field by thousands of such reports, are all trying to show renewables in a good light against fossil fuel sources of electricity.
None of them are trying to show if it’s possible to run a modern civilization. It’s all about the boundaries set. They all assume the background system continues as normal, while setting their boundaries to compare renewables with fossil fuels, like the Lazard LCOE type reports.
They never compare with what we built the entire system of modernity with.
The reports compare total possible output of solar and wind, with limited capacity of coal, gas and nuclear power, because a lot of the time the renewables will be going first as the grids have been set up. They add handicaps to coal of CCUS, which is not happening anywhere, plus add costs of purchasing and transport of fossil fuels, that didn’t happen with the early power plants we built the system with..
To me they all prove that new coal, gas and nuclear are unviable to run a modern civilization, with the limitations they place on them, just like renewables. We are cooked if we keep trying to increase fossil fuel use, until we can’t, or we we collapse by trying to use too expensive renewables.
I suspect we just keep going in the direction we have been for decades, telling ourselves stories of saving the planet by going to renewables, while we burn more fossil fuels in the attempt to change, until we cannot increase fossil fuel use because of peak oil, where all the feedback loops of the downslope lead directly to collapse of the entire complex system…
While we’re waiting for the cliff, we should at least have a soundtrack.
Using some Hideaway as a lyric prompt, the A.I. music generator suno.com generated these:
https://suno.com/song/798d26a5-597c-45b5-afc4-0b4ce5b92cc5
https://suno.com/song/c3837742-c568-4e88-b1c8-b27c14d5b14e
[Verse]
Diggin’ deep in the ground, fossil fuels we scrape
Iron giants chew earth, while resources dissipate
Wind farm dreamin’, but reality slaps
Need fossil fire, to spark up solar traps
[Verse 2]
Smelters blaze, metal tough like crew
Fuel’s the lifeblood, makes turbines true
Can’t escape the loop, ores gettin’ lean
Dug all the easy gold, now we chasin’ dreams
[Chorus]
Machines hummin’ on fossil breath,
Clean energy’s tale got a backtrack of death
Buildin’ hope, buried in coal
Wind and sun shine, but it takes a toll
[Bridge]
Precious minerals, hauled from earth’s chest
Dream of green power, in capitalist quest
Remote lands cry, ores dry and thin
Dig deeper we must, ‘cause we in it to win
[Verse 3]
Supply’s shrinkin’, demand risin’ like the tide
Fuels burn faster, can’t run, can’t hide
Got visions of clean, but dirt skews the way
Burnt black gold, keeps the green at bay
[Verse 4]
Makin’ tech magic, but reality haunts
Rotors spin on backs of fossil taunts
Harvest sunshine, wind’s gentle kiss
Blood and sweat in the mix, truths we twist
https://suno.com/song/62981b2a-2b13-4fa2-8db5-e6ea5d164508
https://suno.com/song/610a285b-8dba-49ba-9b29-ad235cb7f0d1
[Verse]
Machines snatchin’ sunshine, thinkin’ we got it made
Fossil fuel lifeline, without it, we just fade
Mining deep, deep, down, ain’t no easy grades
Harder ores, more chores, from Mother Earth raids
[Chorus]
Solar panel dreams, but it’s diesel in the seams
Wind turbine hopes, fossil fuels, they still the beams
Building up that tech, gotta dig and smelt and wreck
Glistenin’ green dreams, but in fossil fuel we interject
[Bridge]
Diggin’ deep for that coal, oil rigs on patrol
Machines to the front line, but who pay the toll
Fossil fuels dwindling while we chase the solar glow
Sunshine abundant, but its harvest moves so slow
[Verse 2]
Transport in cycles, heavy metal gears
Processing it all, burnin’ fossil fears
We took the easy mine, left with rocky peers
The harder the find, the costlier in years
[Chorus]
Solar panel dreams, but it’s diesel in the seams
Wind turbine hopes, fossil fuels, they still the beams
Building up that tech, gotta dig and smelt and wreck
Glistenin’ green dreams, but in fossil fuel we interject
[Bridge]
Fuel-fueled fantasies, a loop that ain’t set free
Machines eatin’ energy, while tryin’ to plant a tree
The balance delicate while nature charges fees
Fossil fuels whisperin’, ain’t as green as it seems
Hickory —
It doesn’t matter how big the resources of wind and sunshine are, we can only collect that energy with machines we’ve built.
The same applies to fossil fuel of course. The good news is that renewables are simper to get energy out of, because they don’t required mucking around with hot high pressure fluids.
Did I say that?
Its a strange point to make, kind of like saying that “we can only use petrol for propulsion if we burn it”. No shit Sherlock.
er I meant Hideaway
Beg to differ: https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/HALFWAY.pdf
Kleiber,
Thank you for the link. A most interesting and thoughtful analysis and in an easy to read form. Makes a change from the BS emanating from all the hand waving cornies, who cannot come up with any tangible plans of how renewables are going save the world.
Simply put: they won’t.
After billions of years of evolution photosynthesis can on average do little better than 1% of conversion of sunlight into biomass as power density in terms of kW of insolation converted into an edible crop or converted into a biofuel such as ethanol.
Conversion of agricultural “waste” by a gasification would deplete soil organic carbon and effectively displace essential nutrient such as NPK., as well as other trace elements essential to plant productivity.
Meanwhile the felon that the Republicans want to take over is claiming that we should make all bitcoins in America, because that would make America “energy dominant”.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/06/12/trump-we-want-all-remaining-bitcoin-to-be-made-in-usa/
Demented madman Trump sinks further into insanity?
Nothing like a war to cancel climate change progress.
RUSSIA’S WAR WITH UKRAINE ACCELERATING GLOBAL CLIMATE EMERGENCY
Russia’s invasion has generated at least 175m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e), amid a surge in emissions from direct warfare, landscape fires, rerouted flights, forced migration and leaks caused by military attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure – as well as the future carbon cost of reconstruction.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/13/russia-war-with-ukraine-accelerating-global-climate-emergency-report-shows
Interesting concept – but is it something that will be useful at scale?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240610-how-the-concrete-in-your-house-could-be-turned-into-a-battery
It’s for ‘new’ concrete and lowers the strength of the concrete, but guess where the carbon black comes from?
Mostly refineries, using heavy aromatic oils as the feed source..
Like every single one of these bright ideas for a green future, it totally relies upon fossil fuels…
“RFK Campaign Spells ‘United States’ Wrong on Ballot Petition”
Never were the brightest porch lights on the block, but this is scary.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/rfk-team-refiles-ballot-petition-after-united-states-typo.html
Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest video say she doesn’t believe in the AI singularity because there isn’t enough energy for it.
The problem (as so often) is energy efficiency. A human brain only needs 20W.
We have no idea how a human brain even works and have the most basic grasp of what constitutes sentience. Expecting inferior silicon facsimiles to somehow replicate this, and to also do it as efficiently has not only not been proven, it may not even be possible. The physical limits of silicon chips are already in view.
Keep in mind Sabine is a physicist and not a computer scientist anyway. Her videos on the history of money and capitalism vs. socialism, as well as one of her climate change ones, tells me she isn’t all that knowledgeable about things she deems worth making a video on. So, take with a pinch of salt. She has fun takes, just go with those working in the field for another view. Numberphile do excellent computer science explainers for tech in the news.
Anyway, the current AI bubble is not going to lead to AGI. The data and energy required expand exponentially with little to be gained. LLMs ≠ AGI, no matter what anyone in Big Tech says. There needs to be another method to use ANNs or GANNs in machine learning.
In other matters we do have much better grasps on efficiency improvements. Electric motors are super efficient and there’s little more to be gained. Most inefficiencies today I can think of come from the rentier based capitalist system in place, not so much the technology. Any system that values savings in dollars over physical resources is essentially backwards. I’m thinking of importing, say, lamb from New Zealand to the UK because their market is cheaper, despite the massive energy and carbon cost of doing so from half a world away when Wales exists.
We have a 5Kw solar system on our roof, It’s been there for 13 years now. If you look up the tables for our area we officially get an average of 4hrs/d of solar, however reality is different. We have averaged under 3 hrs/d over the life of the array up to now…
In the last 16 days though, early winter near the shortest day, we have had a very cloudy period, 16 days where the total out put is 72kwh for this entire period an average of 4.5Kwh/d from a 5kw system, with the last 4 days giving a total of 12Kwh or just 3Kwh/d!!. We only use around 23kwh/d without a heat pump operating (wood heating). If we used a heat pump to heat the house our power use would skyrocket. Nor do we charge an EV.
Theoretical solar input for an ‘average’ 16 days at our location is 320kwh for our 5kw system, but of course the averages never take into account the variance from summer to winter. In summer we can get over 35Kwh in a day.
If we had a 20kw system, with 50Kwh of battery storage, we would still have needed some type of backup power during periods like this. 20Kw in summer giving over 140Kwh/d would be mostly wasted power.
Meanwhile for the whole state over this period, and there has been 7 days in a row with virtually no wind, we would have needed over 1,000,000Mwh of battery storage ($400B at today’s costs at best!!) to compensate for lack of both sun and wind. They have often been only 2% – 3% of grid power, and despite then being ‘capable’ of near 100% of power when the sun shines and wind blows, we’ve had a week where the combination of the 2 never exceeded 10% of total power. As I write this the state is also using 951Tj of gas, a lot for just heating, while there are several heavy chemical plants as well.
Replacing that gas used for heating with electric heat pumps would require the battery storage to go up by a magnitude…
Even if the capacity of solar and wind were tripled, it wouldn’t have made much difference.
You guys can go on all you like about prices for solar, wind, batteries etc falling, but you don’t have a clue about the actual scale needed and the materials required on a world wide basis that’s promoted. We would have to destroy every remaining natural ecosystem, dig up nearly the entire planet in the process, use the last of the fossil fuels to build it all…. then what? Dig up under all the oceans, to build recycling facilities based on chemicals and heat processes we derive from the fossil fuels we no longer have??
Totally destroying the last of the natural environment, sending CO2 levels to 700-800ppm, while jacking up every industrial process to build the ‘electrical’ world, all based on fossil fuel use, to buy modernity another 30 years, then what?? Hope for a miracle?
I don’t want to be that guy but can you use W for the unit of Watts. Uppercase w. Just for future references.
What is this? https://reneweconomy.com.au/lithium-miner-switches-on-australias-biggest-off-grid-hybrid-renewables-system/
Islandboy, did you read the article??
They are also going to have 5MW of diesel generators and 27MW of gas generation as ‘backup’.
The mine (from DFS not article), runs on 25MW of power for approximately 8,000hrs/yr. They also have the price of power per tonne of ore for each operation, it adds up to $5.20/tonne of ore.
The 4Mt/a plant will have an electricity cost of $20,800,000/yr. They are paying and outside contractor for the power. This works out at $0.104/kWh
10.4c/kWh to operate this microgrid on mostly renewables. Now you know why no Alumina smelter in this country (or any other) is going alone offgrid, as the local one near me pays just 1.4c/kWh for their mostly coal fired power from the grid..
Hideaway.
It would be (will be) feasible for the world to offset something like 60-70% of the current fossil fuel consumption by 2050, if it was a goal.
And if it isn’t a goal now, it will be one as fossil fuels deplete and the earth roasts.
That would be a good start, along with learning to live with less energy.
Yes, we can certainly learn to live with less energy.
And by 2050 population will have peaked, and we will be about 15 years beyond peak global combustion day.
In the meantime we should set aside 30% of the earth for non-human-
30×30 is a worldwide initiative for governments to designate 30% of Earth’s land and ocean area as protected areas by 2030.
https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/protect-water-and-land/land-and-water-stories/committing-to-30×30/
Saving 30% of the earth for non humans is just going to guarantee a lot more extinctions as the climate rapidly changes.
Look at the natural world, when the climate changed slowly over time. Species would move further north or South depending on if the climate was warming or cooling with freedom, except for predators or being out competed and change due to evolution over time.
With the rapid climate change we’ve induced upon the planet, most species can’t move nor adapt fast enough, plus we have set aside forest or national parks, with many kilometers of farmland, fences and roads inbetween, restricting movement of the natural world.
We have basically told the natural world to stay in place and adapt to the new climate that we humans have changed, yet we seem to be shocked when species after species go extinct..
There is nothing sustainable about ‘leaving’ 305 for nature, it needs to be 80%-90% to be sustainable. That’s how far into overshoot we really are, considering 30% a worthy goal…
Hideaway,
Maybe use the grid to move energy from one part of the nation to the other. Has the entire nation had no wind and cloudy weather for 16 days? A proper analysis looks at the entire system, not just a tiny corner of the World.
Dennis, glad you suggested that.
We do have a large grid, the AEMO grid is one of the largest in the world, spreading from Northern Queensland to Tasmania in the South.
While the wholesale price of electricity was high in Victoria, it was negative in Queensland, during the day, as the winter is the ‘sunny’ time up there and temperatures are mild so no need for air conditioners..
Here’s the problem, that applies everywhere in the world. Even though it’s one large grid, the ability to get electricity from a couple of thousand kilometers away is very limited. It would take new dedicated HVDC transmission lines capable of sending down 10-12GW of power, a few times a year.
It would be an enormous expense and vast use of resources for only limited use, possibly 10% of the year at best. It also doesn’t address night time use, unless the huge build out of extra solar, in excess of what Queensland needs, plus a few TWh of batteries for night time sending the electricity down South and for use in Queensland.
What you end up with is a huge excess of build out in both the North and the South of the country with huge battery banks at each end. Queensland with an excess of power in the winter, sending it South, while providing ofr themselves as well, while in Victoria an oversized system so that excess power could be sent North in summer at when we have excess power during the day most of the time.
You can’t have the massive battery systems at just one end either, unless the transmission lines were also massively oversized.
I did a rough calculation on the copper needed for the giant HVDC cables used for an underground system of 8.8GW over 3,000km. They use a copper core centre of 200mm2 inside the alumina outer layers. Even ‘only’ 8.8GW would use 430,000 tonnes of copper and cost a total of around $A58B to build (excluding any land cost!!)
My whole argument is that this is all needed to keep modernity going and is a massive increase in material use, from the transmission lines, to the batteries and all the solar and wind needed to be built, compared to what we built the system with. Plus there is no additional electricity either, to run the EVs and heat pumps and everything else electrical..
All the actual plans only consider the ‘average’ amount of electricity production needed from solar and wind, and never the variance from summer to winter, unless it’s the hand wave, that you have done about building a bit of extra transmission. When ever the whole picture of what’s needed is taken into account, it’s massively more complicated than the hand wave, and massively more material intensive.
The Australian consumers simply can’t afford the type of system necessary, so it has to fail. already they are changing the way customers are billed, always costing more with some new types of charges being introduced into the system. This on top of back to back 25-30% price increases over the last 2 years, plus starting on July 1, some home owners are being charged to send their solar power into the grid during peak sum hours. (after being given subsidies by the govt to install solar panels in the past!!)
In regard to the materials we use for this buildout, we gain access to it all by using fossil fuels in every stage of the mining, processing, manufacturing, transportation and deployment of it all, a lot of it oil, that we simply don’t have, to do the job!! This is all before considering all the environmental damage of the extra fossil fuel burning and the extra natural systems ripped to pieces to mine the materials.
You always have the hand wave solution, when the reality is it can’t be done on a scale involving the billions of humans we have on the planet without destroying the natural world. Yet such is the desire to hold onto modernity and all the benefits to individuals that enjoy it, that we can happily deny the bad future that is guaranteed to befall us by making up nice fairytales that sun and wind are unlimited, without considering we only gain the benefit from machines we have to build and replace…
Hideaway,
You need to consider the alternative and compare over the life of the projects, in the US a combination of wind and solar is cheaper. Costs for wind and solar are likely to fall as the cost of fossil fuel rises so the relative cost of wind and solar will become cheaper over time.
Advanced High Voltage Cables use aluminum with a composite core (no copper is used). Overhead cables are far cheaper than buried cable.
Dennis … ” Costs for wind and solar are likely to fall as the cost of fossil fuel rises”
Except that is not what happened in 2022 when the cost of solar, wind and batteries all rose when the price of fossil fuels rose..
Why would you even expect this to happen when the mining and manufacture of everything ‘renewable’, totally relies upon fossil fuels??
You also assume the land overhead cables go over is ‘free’. This is correct if you assume solar, wind, coal, oil, gas, and land are ‘free’ to humanity to use, all just being parts of the natural world.
A whole lot more giant transmission lines over land is a poor idea when the climate is changing and storm getting stronger..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UZHMlSMs5o
Hideaway,
The grid cam be updated in existing rights of way using advanced conductors to increase capacity. this is what Europe has already started and what the US, Australia, and Canada should do as well, some of the existing HVAC network could be replaced with HVDC on existing rights of way. There are a lot of areas of Canada, Australia, and the US where population density is low and those areas might have less difficulty with new rights of way.
Dennis, the main part of my reply to you was about the cost of solar, wind and batteries going up in 2022, when fossil fuel prices went up.
Why wouldn’t you expect the same to happen in the future when we have shortages of fossil fuels??
As I’ve already explained, overhead cables more exposed to extreme weather to move vast quantities from one side of a country to the other is a bad idea, come large more violent storms that destroy the transmission towers.
You continually take one bit as if it’s the answer, forgetting we are in a complicated system with lots of feedback loops.
Hideaway,
I don’t expect a shortage of fossil fuel, demand will decrease as fossil fuels get replaced with other sources of energy, fossil fuel prices in general have been rising for years while the cost of wind and solar have mostly decreased. The relative cost of wind and solar compared to fossil fuel powered electric power will continue to decrease.
Overhead cables are far less expensive and have been used for 100 years or more. Too expensive to bury cables for transmission. It is a good option if you want to overstate costs however.
There were a number of factors causing solar prices to rise in the US in 2022 besides increasing fossil fuel prices, mostly uncertainty over US tariffs on imported solar equipment from China. There was a severe disruption of World trade in the aftermath of the pandemic which caused commodity prices in general to rise and high inflation, this affected everything including wind and solar power project costs.
Dennis,
I know that you are an academic and perhaps are a little light on processes and costs in the real world. I frequently encounter academics making supposed technology breakthroughs that never see the light of day.
Carbon fibre power cables will most likely turn into such an application. Apart from the astronomic cost of carbon fibre, the e is the little problem of capacity. Stas are very difficult to come by because the business is dominated by of small number of producers who are very, very secretive about their capacity to produce and the process technology. Patents on the subject are sparse and of little value. The common denominator is a product called ACN ( acrylonitrile) which is used in the production of acrylonitrile fibres, known as polyacrylonitrile fibres (PAN). Usually there is a co-monomer. ABS is a polymer made from ACN ( ACN, butadiene, styrene) and is used in computer cases.
The actual production capacity of carbon fibres tow is not disclosed but it is likely to be of the order of around 200,000 tonnes per year- i.e not very much.
ACN is produced from propylene and ammonia. To date there is no economic non-fossil synthetic route to propylene, and a synthetic route to ammonia is similarly challenged. All propylene and virtually all ammonia is produced form fossil sources.
The idea that a power grid could be supported by thousands of miles of carbon fibre high voltage cable , above ground, requires a new economic model or a magic money tree ( or magic money forest), especially if it were to be used intermittently.
You might like to look into the interconnectors in Europe. Most are around 1GW, so moving power around Europe is a challenge. A planned internconnector between Germany and Sweden has been scuppered by the Swedes not trusting the German grid.
It is suffice to say that the proposed Morocco to Northern Europe sub -sea HVDC interconnector project appears to have sunk without trace.
Like a number of posters on this blog, I prefer reality over fantasy.
Carnot,
Aluminum cables with carbon composit cores are already in use as state of the art cables for HV transmission.
See
https://www.2035report.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GridLab_2035-Reconductoring-Technical-Report.pdf
Hideway
“[HDVC transmission lines] would be an enormous expense and vast use of resources for only limited use, possibly 10% of the year at best.”
If there is sufficient pumped hydro capacity available, improved transmission lines would have an outsized effect since there are some electricity storage capabilites in the system outside of batteries. And that is very much the case for Australia, with the big pumped hydro projects proposed in Queensland for example.
Whether it is justified to improve the grid a lot in Australia or not is up to debate. In Europe where distances are not that great and population high it is a no brainer to enhance the grid. It has to been done with sound judgement. Maybe it is sufficient that the south east of Australia cooperate to improve the grid at the most important distances for example.
“The copper needed for the giant HVDC cables used for an underground system”.
I can solve the problem for you. Just use aluminium in overground lines as much as possible. And add a carbon fiber core instead of steel to increase capacity with 100%+. Underground cables are different though and should often rely on copper for longevity and some other reasons. But the quantity of material we are talking about for this is not that great, is it?
Kolbeinih …. “In Europe where distances are not that great and population high it is a no brainer to enhance the grid.”
If Europe wants power when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, when fossil fuels are no longer being used, then they will have to have long HVDC grids accessing power from one end of the continent to the other, or from Africa and vice versa.
It’s still all extra material use and cost. Above ground transmission lines are always possible, except no-one wants to compensate the land owners the new lines will go over, which restricts what the land can be used for. That would make it cost too much…
All the talk of Aluminium taking over from copper is great, except for the energy use to make Aluminium and the 400kg/t of petcoke used in the process, that wont be available in a fossil fuel free world.
My suspicion is that every proponent of the bright green future has no idea how ubiquitous fossil fuel use is, in industrial processes, not just as energy but as products that are essential for the processes.
I love all this use of the subjunctive to explain why things that are already there will never appear.
Here’s a list of ultra high voltage power lines, including a lot of DC lines in China.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity_transmission_in_China#UHV_circuits_completed_or_under_construction
Here’s a map of Europe showing HVDC, existing and under construction.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/High-voltage_direct_current#Media/File:HVDC_Europe.svg
Hideaway
It’s simply incredible that people can’t understand something so basic. Unfortunately it’s impossible to help the blind. I personally have given up. All we can acquire is a label from the sophoric rhetoric. Climate deniers, fossil fuel shill, etc etc.,
It’s so stupid it’s hard to tolerate. But it helps me know how to interact with the general population. They’re even dumber than the people posting on the site.
The bottom line is energy is the economy and the velocity is prosperity. If you don’t get that statement unfortunately you’re stupid.
What you need is a numerical model that illustrates your idea.
Islandboy
Read the article
There is some 5MW of diesel standby and 27MW of gas generation that were brought online earlier this year, but these will often be switched off and will operate only when the renewable resources are unavailable.
Doesn’t say are switched off says will be. That can also be interpreted as never will be.
Way to move the goalposts! First say you can’t produce renewables with renewables. Then when someone says that renewables are being used to support the production of renewables say “It’s not 100% renewables, it still needs a fossil fuel back up”. Sheesh! Give me a break! If a guy can’t point out the silver linings around the dark clouds that you guys are always pointing at, if there’s no hope, why don’t you just go and find a nice cliff and end your misery. I prefer to look for things that improve the chances that we won’t ALL go to hell!
I prefer reality over fantasy.
But, as Dwight Eisenhower once wrote about a couple of oil baron brothers and their followers, “Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
On learning to live with less energy, we could all downsize much of what we do.
https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/what-is-a-kei-truck
https://www.kei-trucks.com/
It’s an actual truck, not a gender confirmation device.
“TELO builds electric pickup trucks with the same capacity of an F150, the range of a Tesla, in the footprint of a Mini Cooper…”
Well, it’s building prototypes anyway…
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/06/13/new-telo-electric-vehicle-taps-kei-cult-for-inspiration/
Sounds like another nail in the coffin?
NITROUS OXIDE EMISSIONS SURGE IN CLIMATE THREAT
Drawing on millions of atmospheric measurements from around the world, the report revealed a sharp rise in human-related nitrous oxide levels. The findings raised researchers’ concerns that too little is being done to rein in the gas, the vast majority of which is produced by agriculture. Nitrous oxide heats the Earth’s atmosphere 300 times more effectively than carbon dioxide, scientists say, and can linger for more than a century. Emissions soared 40 percent in the four decades to 2020, said the Global Nitrous Oxide Budget, which relied on the expertise of 58 international researchers. As a result, levels of the gas in the atmosphere climbed to 336 parts per billion in 2022—a 25 percent increase over pre-industrialized levels. The surge was far greater than previous predictions by the UN panel of climate scientists.
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-nitrous-oxide-emissions-surge-climate.html
The predominant source is ‘agricultural practices’, which if you dig just a little deeper is the nitrogen fertilization of soils, plowing, and manure concentration/handling/runoff.
Its all about maximizing yield of carbs and protein for humanity of 8.2 billion chunky apes.
Each ape control the biologic productivity a big chunk of land that used to be called the natural world.
This won’t subside until population subsides.
Hickory, maybe the damage could be far less?
“Shifting to a plant-based diet could reduce agricultural land use by 75%”
~ Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data and Oxford University)
p174 of her book “Not the End of the World”
Maybe John. Most of humanity is used to getting food from plowed croplands fertilized with nitrogen products. We demand an awful lot from croplands, throwing a huge amount of fossil fuel enabled nitrogen at it.
I suppose weaning down off of concentrated animal production facilities like feedlots and poultry factories would help somewhat.
Main thing is to get the human population down back under a billion. Hopefully without too much cruelty.
Looks like this heating pathway is baked in the cake.
I believe that the drumbeats for homo-engineering against climate warming is going to gain momentum this decade.
HICKORY —
Humanity will start moving away from eating animals when it gets more expensive than meat substitutes.
Back in 2011 Taco Bell (or actually its parent YUM) was sued for selling stuff as “beef” that was only 35% cow based.
This was sort of a public relations disaster at the time, but it is the shape of things to come. Vegan and vegetarian food is getting more and more common in packaged food chain restaurants, and the marketing push is getting strong as costs fall.
In fact, that 35% beef claim is about the same level as the amount of chicken meat in commercially available chicken nuggets. Americans alone chomp through about 2.3 billion servings of chicken nuggets a year, so companies have a vast incentive to shave costs.
As food science gradually improves, the percentage of cheaper substitutes for meat will increase. If people start complaining, marketing will straighten them out.
You’ll hear old folks ranting about the good old days when everyone ate meat, but eventually the majority will bow to the will of their corporate overlords, as they always do when exposed to enough
propagandaspin. It won’t be any worse than the glop they sell already.You may think of veganism as something your crazy tattooed hippy niece does to annoy her mother at Thanksgiving, but for corporate America it’s a godsend.
Bingo!
I’m afraid comrades
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Belt
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs®ion=ncus&pkg=T2m&runtime=2024061512&fh=6
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_(meteorology)
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs®ion=us&pkg=T2m&runtime=2024061512&fh=6
Will AI fade away as resources deplete, or will it develop sufficiently to determine the ‘right sizing’ of the human population and the means to achieve that sizing in a prompt fashion?
https://situational-awareness.ai/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/situationalawareness.pdf
AI has been around since Alan Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954).
The reason AI takes so much energy is companies are trying to grab the entire internet and train on it.
The bottleneck of AI is that the algorithms are the sames ones from the 1970s and the exponential curve of Moore’s law is coming to an end.
AI is a sophisticated pattern matcher that works great on text and video/pictures which humans can relate too. And makes your feel like it is “alive and thinking”.
but struggles as soon as the rules change or the training data becomes outdated.
Its called overfitting.
A true AI robot with an already functioning “brain” wouldn’t require that much energy. Its the algorithms can’t learn like humans can.
Case in point, as Alimbiquated pointed out above, the human brain runs on some glucose at 20 W when under load. My PS5 when playing a taxing game is using over ten times that to produce a somewhat photorealistic image and little else in terms of cognition.
We’re just nowhere near AGI, much as I dove into ChatGPT and zero shot reasoning via LLM papers last summer. They’re all marketing to try and prop up the tech bubble after metaverses, NFTs and crypto all failed.
Humans are more adaptable than AI,
which is why we are no where near a SINGULARITY or being taken over.
“The only constant is CHANGE”
However, AI on the scale of the computing power we have will be disruptive.
A company may ask….instead of paying 10 technical writers, we can pay 1 and make sure our AI bot doesn’t get us into legal trouble and we get sued!!!
Kleiber —
The progress in computing has been amazing. A solar powered pocket calculator can deliver more computation power than the first computers in the 40s that filled whole buildings and needed hundreds of kilowatts of power. But we’re still far far away from the efficiency of biological systems.
I agree that AGI is probably a long way away. We lack both the energy and the data to train them, and our current models probably aren’t good enough anyway. AI is a field where experts always seem to be wrong.
On the other hand, current tools do seem to be having some impact on the job market.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/chatgpt-has-caused-a-massive-drop-in-demand-for-online-digital-freelancers-here-is-what-you-can-do-to-protect-yourself
Old Chemist- that looks like a great and important read to digest, from an author who appears to have given the subject plenty of thought and deep inside knowledge of this industry that is in its early moments. I plan to take the time to do so.
The vast majority of people have absolutely no clue what is on the doorstep with this whole deal.
Thank you
“To put this in perspective, suppose GPT-4 training took 3
months. In 2027, a leading AI lab will be able to train a GPT-4-
level model in a minute.”
-to get a glimpse of the energy implications on page 75-78
and the section on power page 83
No matter how fast or at what scale AI trains on data, it is still limited by the algorithms.
Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Regression Analysis, Neural Networks, Clustering.
There will need to be a break thru in the algorithms to move beyond pattern matching.
If the human brain contains algorithms that AI does not ( I am pretty certain it does ), then no matter how much data AI trains on it won’t be able to replicate it.
I think AI will be disruptive as well, but is overhyped.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=251500
most won’t like KD’s politics, but on Technology he is a guy that should be listened too. (one of founders of first internet companies).
Andre,
To the contrary I think its underhyped, meaning vastly underestimated effects by almost everyone.
If there is electricity.
I worry that the power acquired by those who utilize AI most effectively will enable them to grab a huge chunk of the electrical generation that would otherwise be available for the general public. That could be the police state, huge robotics corporations, information/data control monopolies, electrical system or some behemoth mixture of these things.
Its all a huge wildcard.
I meant overhyped on how intelligent and motivated it actually is.
It could be the wild wild west with electricity grabs.
As Karl mentions in his article, there isn’t a profitible business model around this yet.
Without a doubt certain arganisations (governments, etc) will want to grab all that is on the internet as well.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15droT_mBFK6Kkd1aO5kPzYFUqLdul2qM/view
In just six years (2016-2021), we’ve consumed over 75% of what we did over the 20th century.
Dennis,
Reconductoring of HV power lines.
Yest it is technically possible but how many miles of reconductored HV transmission lines have been installed?
To date very little and this report is typical BS that I would expect from a consultant. Do I believe the numbers – not really. The cost is astronomic (their numbers) and the build out so far is miniscule for what might be required.
There simply is not enough capacity of CF for a rapid build out, and the indicated cost is likely to be a fraction of reality. How many times have we been told that unreliables are cheaper and getting cheaper. Not where I live, and no-one wants to build new wind turbines without a subsidy. Strange that.
Why don’t you ask zee Germans what they think about unreliables.
Carnot,
The paper say about 90k miles of reconductoring have been put in place, there are appendices with real world examples. Perhaps actually reading the paper before dismissing it would make sense. Capacity can be expanded, or steel reinforced advanced cable can be used, but results in lower operational limits due to more sag at high temperatures. Cost needs to be compared with a new project that has similar capacity. Obviously you are not omniscient as experts in several nations think this is a viable approach, I guess they didn’t consult with you.
This has little to do with the type of energy, it is upgrading the grid for higher power requirements regardless of whether coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind or solar are used to produce the electricity.
Dennis,
I did actually read the paer and noted the numbers in appendix II. Your reference was for moving power over large distances to cope with periods of low wind/ low insolation. If I remember rightly form East to west in Australia. That woulds be a big investment for even one GW, which would be required intermittently.
You never, acknowledged the limitation of material availability that I highlighted. There are simply only limited global capacity for CF production and the actual production method requires multiple steps and very high energy inputs.
I see this more of means of upgrading the distribution network, rather than long distance across continent power delivery.
Carnot,
You may be correct that there is not adequate capacity at present, I don’t know the industry in any detail. Capacity can be expanded if there is demand and the existing network can move power throughout the existing network as needed. The capacity expansion needed is for both transmission and distribution. Widely distributed wind and solar requires very little backup capacity, most of this backup capacity already exists. Increasing the capacity of the existing network by reconductoring with better equipment allows far greater flexibility in moving power where needed.
I don’t know what the capacity of these manufacturers for cable is currently, what can be produced can be utilized and if the companies see future need for more capacity they will expand their capacity.
Why don’t you ask zee Germans what they think about unreliables.
Zee Germans are installing renewables at a record pace. And so far this year, renewables have generated a record breaking 65% of electricity in the country.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?interval=year&year=2024
So not much in the way of weeping an gnashing of teeth on the topic.
I asked Gemini to count the total energy input to make 1kW of solar panels installed, and asked it to include all embodied energy, proportioned correctly, to account for all the missing parts of all the EROEI research papers, that it agreed missed embodied energy. This included machines, factories, and the people involved, including the appropriate proportion of their education and working life….
It was obviously a long conversation to nuance out all the bits correctly..
Here is the answer….
“Recalculating Payback Period:
Using the same rough estimate of 325,110 kWh for embodied energy:
Payback Period = Embodied Energy (kWh) / Annual Energy Production (kWh/year)
Payback Period = 325,110 kWh / 2,190 kWh/year = approximately 148 years
This is a significantly shorter payback period than the previous estimates because we correctly accounted for the power output per hour and the total daily sunlight exposure.
Important Considerations:
This payback period is still an estimate. Real payback periods can vary depending on factors like:
Location and sunlight hours (areas with more sunshine will have shorter payback periods)
Embodied energy (which can be lower than our estimate)
Panel efficiency (which can be higher than 20%)
Focus on Long-Term Benefits: Even with a payback period of 148 years (which might still be an overestimate), solar energy offers clean energy generation for 25-30 years, offsetting the upfront embodied energy and reducing reliance on fossil fuels.”
Previously it kept trying to tell me that 1kW of solar with an average of 6hrs/day only gave 1.2kWh of electricity, as in it factored in the 20% efficiency of the panels. The hardest part to train it was to get it to accept that 6hrs of sunshine on 1kW of solar panels produced 6kWhrs of electricity!!
Not even do I think the payback period is anywhere near the 148 years it came up with, but most of the calculations for embodied energy in the operating system of modernity were way higher than even I’d imagined. Then when I questioned it on these numbers, it conceded it might have underestimated some!! It only included 2 years for education..
My conclusion, AI is really dumb, but the embodied energy in every aspect of modernity is way higher than everyone thinks it is!!
Now most people in the world and most countries can purchase electricity or liquid fuels if they have money. More money earned (or stolen) means more energy purchase is possible.
I wonder if we will arrive at a future where that is not enough.
You may also have to be on the right list to be eligible. A list kept by the state, by the algorithm, by the approved social network, by the Alliance of Certain Nations.
The energy networks may be controlled down to the smallest packet by AI enabled security mechanisms.
Is your need in alignment with the state?
Are robotic, security and compute industrial users willing to share energy with you?
For what purpose?, they may inquire.
Denied. Network access privilege rescinded.
“You may also have to be on the right list to be eligible”
Nothing new here. It’s called discrimination- “the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of ethnicity, age, sex, or disability”
Soon we will see if the Supreme Court is going to officially add “political power” to the list of entitled treatment.
You, you and you, jail(no energy). Orange hair and comb over, it was only an election and national secrity secrets. That’s not really a big deal, if you know what I mean. Enjoy your freedom(energy).
Thanks Hideaway, I now know the difference between aluminium and alumina.
Aluminium is produced from alumina in electric smelters at very high power ratings (typically 260 MW or 6200 MWh/day). The electricity can of course be renewable as it is in Quebec, Iceland and the UK.
Alumina is produced from bauxite in the four-step Bayer process. Process heat is traditionally supplied by fossil fuels (but doesn’t have to be, at least to 500C). In the EU, USA and Australia, process heat is via natural gas; elsewhere it tends to be coke/coal based.
An interesting paper on alumina LCA (life cycle analysis):
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-023-02257-8
https://jalopnik.com/solar-power-is-bigger-than-oil-for-the-first-time-in-hi-1851541096
Down in the weeds in this article:
“Using a conservative production metric, the panels produced by Tongwei in 2024 will contribute around 27 exajoules of electricity to the grid, while the oil and gas pulled out of the ground by Exxon this year will account for a mere six exajoules. In fact, all seven of the biggest petroleum producers combined will contribute less energy from their products this year than just Tongwei’s long-tail solar production. ”
Now maybe there won’t be enough fossil fuel energy and enough raw materials to continue manufacturing solar panels at an ever increasing rate for many years to come. On the other hand……. maybe there will.
The pessimists almost invariably insist on discussing renewable energy in terms of the present day world wide economy. They rant on about being realistic……. and then argue that transmission lines can’t be built partly because right of way is too expensive to simply unobtainium.
Once the chips are down, whatever government is in power at any particular place will exercise eminent domain, and the dozers will be knocking down houses and trees the same way they knock them down to build highways .
The global population is going to peak and decline, no question. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that it’s going to decline one HELL of a lot faster than predicted.
If an aluminum smelter can be run ten percent, or fifty percent, or eighty percent, on wind and solar power, that’s good enough to stretch our depleting natural gas or coal resource out by decades at least, maybe most of a century…….. while in the meantime, there are less of us every year needing aluminum, and Uncle Sam or Big Brother or whoever is in charge will make sure little or none of it is used for beer cans.
We can, and we will, because we won’t have any other option, adapt to using a rather minor fraction of our current western energy per capita.
We can upgrade an existing house to be near net zero for about the same money as is needed to buy a typical new car.
I can’t claim any expertise in tabulating the total amount of energy needed to build a solar panel or wind turbine, but in the real world, it’s perfectly obvious that virtually all the energy collectively used to build out renewable infrastructure IS ALREADY , or WILL BE , used for other purposes……. from hauling beer to building sports stadiums to robotic lawn mowers to aircraft carriers.
And while it may take x energy to build a truck, and run it for ten years, depending on the length of the haul, a typical gravel truck hauls at least fifteen tons, and can typically make anywhere from two to ten or more round trips from quarry to job site. That’s one hell of a lot of gravel …… probably enough to make the concrete needed to build a fair sized solar farm. And when that truck is worn out……… it’s pretty damned close to one hundred percent recycled, minus a little plastic, glass and tire rubber……
The driver is going to eat, no matter what he does. The truck maker is going to build trucks… and in reality only a minute percentage of the total amount of hauling by truck is devoted to hauling gravel or steel or coal or other such materials…… and only a very small percentage of such stuff is used to build wind and solar infrastructure.
Perfection is a beautiful concept, but seldom if ever accomplished in real world circumstances.
We aren’t going to build an entirely sustainable economy this year or next year or even over the next two or three generations. But it’s not our job, today, to do that. It’s our job today to do whatever we can working in that direction.
There are countless ways to adapt and adjust to ever less available energy on a per capita basis. We’ll do it, once we have to. Let’s not forget that when it’s necessary, or at least convenient to our leaders, we put on uniforms, pick up rifles and spend the next few years either killing or getting killed, lol.
Anybody who refuses to understand that once it’s a question of our collective survival as nations, we’ll drive micro mini electric cars that will go only forty miles on a charge……. if that’s the only kind of car available.
If the only way to buy potatoes is whole, raw, more or less directly from the field, we’ll buy them that way…….. once frozen french fries are taxed out of existence.
Once we’re forced to do so, we’ll give up beef and pork, cut way the hell back on chicken, and live mostly on beans and bread…… and be all the healthier, on average, for doing so.
Alberta’s last coal plant has powered down and is not expected to burn another lump
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-genesee-2-offline-is-this-end-of-coal-power-1.7237703
Gotta keep the air conditioners running, I guess.
INDIA’S NEW COAL POWER CAPACITY IS SET TO SOAR IN 2024
India expects to add as much as 15.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity this year, the most in nearly a decade, anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg on Wednesday. India, the world’s second-largest coal consumer, looks to boost baseload capacity amid surging power demand and continues to bet big on coal to provide most of the increased electricity supply. Despite booming renewable capacity additions, India continues to rely on coal to meet most of its power demand as authorities also look to avoid blackouts in cases of severe heat waves.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Indias-New-Coal-Power-Capacity-Is-Set-to-Soar-in-2024.html
Rebutting some false claims on alternatives:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1218&context=sabin_climate_change
Rgds
Vince
Good news on LCOE:
Wind and solar power half the cost of coal and gas, one-third the cost of nuclear, says Lazard
https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-solar-power-half-the-cost-of-coal-and-gas-one-third-the-cost-of-nuclear-says-lazard/
Time for our anti-renewable friends to chime in with some deconstruction of Lazard myths…
New Posts are up
https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-june-2024/
and
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-june-19-2024/