Your bet for the energy source of the future?

[Jo498]

Although I have a degree in physics, this was 20 years ago and I have not really followed fusion anymore. But since my teenage years in the 80s it was the perennial hope and nothing really ever happened. (Certainly little things were happening but nothing big enough to make headlines outside the scientific community, only the  occasional "cold fusion" sensations...) Sure, one problem is incentives. Nobody wants to spend on the Apollo project scale because there is not enough pressure or incentive to do so.

This is also true for an eco-friendly transformation we could have launched 40 or more years ago. Too many people still make good money from a fossil fuel infrastructure, so why change anything?

The danger is, of course, that we keep digging ourselves into the hole of high resource usage and fossil fuel dependence. So when the shortages hit us it migh lead to such breakdown and turmoil that there is not enough left for an "Apollo scale effort" to make fusion technical feasible (if it actually is feasible, this seems still an open question to me).

[Loge]

40 years ago the technology just wasn't ready for a power grid based on renewables. Growian is an example of a failed attempt. Wind turbines of that size have only recently become viable. Similar with solar power. 1970s solar panels just weren't very efficient either, and expensive to make.

[Jo498]

I didn't mainly mean renewables for electricity, although here obviously the paths technologies took could have been different if reactions and research focus after the first Club of Rome reports and the early 70s oil crises had been different.

I rather meant things like downscaling, conservation, better insulation etc. Simply not eating up all technological advances e.g. in fuel effiency by exactly balancing them with heavier, faster and overall simply more cars.

And e.g. the best fast train tech (TGW and Shinkansen) was already there in the mid/late 1970s and could have been used in favor of exponentially increasing air travel as well as building more freeways and having more cars etc. The air travel expansion is really the maddest thing ever and in Europe very recent. I remember very well that in the 1980s even well off people hardly ever travelled by plane for their holidays. Nowadays flying is sometimes the cheapest way of travel (but of course still the worst energetically/emissionally).

[mcbigski]

Fission and more fission.  Most of the actual arguments against seem to be that the scare mongering has been so effective.  Zero carbon and centuries possibly millenia of fuel available.  Renewables are cute and all but mostly aren't available on demand.  Fission will and up winning by attrition if the greens dont succeed in crashing the system and getting 80% of us killed first.

[TrueMetis]

Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I:Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure,and materials

I used to think nuclear was the only way to get off fossil fuels, then I thought they would be an important component. Now? I can take them or leave them.

We can do 100% renewable, we can do it with the tech and resources we have now. The only question is, do we want to?

[Altherion]

30 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I:Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure,and materials

I used to think nuclear was the only way to get off fossil fuels, then I thought they would be an important component. Now? I can take them or leave them.

We can do 100% renewable, we can do it with the tech and resources we have now. The only question is, do we want to?

I've read this article before and the part you linked is not the most interesting one. There's little doubt we can generate water, wind and solar power generation with existing technology. To reach levels where these alone amount to, on average, 100% of what we currently use would take an effort unprecedented in peace time, but it can be done. There's a problem though and I've highlighted in bold: doing it on average is one thing and always (every second, every hour, every day and every month) matching supply with demand is quite another. To be fair, these researchers address this in Part II.

It's worth reading in full, but here's the summary from the conclusion section:

Quote

A 100% WWS world can employ several methods of dealing with short-term variability in WWS generation potential, to ensure that supply reliably matches demand. Complementary and gap-filling WWS resources (such as hydropower), smart demand-response management, and better forecasting have little or no additional cost and hence will be employed as much as is technically and socially feasible. A WWS system also will need to interconnect resources over wide regions, and might need to have decentralized (V2G) or perhaps centralized energy storage.

So if storage is helpful but possibly not necessary and measures such as demand management are helpful but obviously insufficient then... where is the trick? It's in this statement "A WWS system also will need to interconnect resources over wide regions" and the scales they're talking about are thousands of kilometers. Basically, if you build what they call "supergrids" over such distances, then the variations in wind, water and solar average themselves out and even with the transmission losses, there would be always be enough. For example:

Quote

Czisch (2006; 2007) similarly calculated that electricity demand for 1.1 billion people in Europe, North Africa, and near Asia could be satisfied reliably and at low cost by interconnecting wind sites dispersed over North Africa, Europe, Russia, and near Asia, and using hydropower from Scandinavia as back up.

In other words, their abstract is correct in that the barriers to 100% WWS are social and political rather than technological... but they massively understate the size of these social and political barriers. Which do you think is more likely: Europe, Russia, near Asia and North Africa all participating in a common interdependent system or, for example, a successful Manhattan Project 2.0 in a bid for viable fusion? I would definitely say the latter.

So no, you can't take or leave nuclear -- at least not without either new technology or massive political changes on a global scale.

[Rorshach]

10 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

My raw sexual magnetism.

Wer're doomed.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

On 3/29/2019 at 8:50 AM, Rorshach said:

Wer're doomed.

Drop some blue pills and take one for the team and the future of the planet.

[DMC]

4 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Drop some blue pills and take one for the team and the future of the planet.

I know this is a joke derived from jokes, but shouldn't it be the opposite in terms of overpopulation.  Where's the anti-Viagra Pzifer?  And how much are you gonna make us overpay for it?

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Just now, DMC said:

I know this is a joke derived from jokes, but shouldn't it be the opposite in terms of overpopulation.  Where's the anti-Viagra Pzifer?  And how much are you gonna make us overpay for it?

Not exactly sure if you paid sufficient attention in biology, but I really don't think two guys getting it on with each other is contributing to overpopulation. If you had pointed the lazyness of me making that gay joke, that would've been a point I'd concede.

With regards to overpopulation, I had already restrained myself from dropping into the obesity thread to suggest to feed the poor by eating the obese (yes, equally lazy rip off from eat the rich feed the poor).

[DMC]

4 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Not exactly sure if you paid sufficient attention in biology, but I really don't think two guys getting it on with each other is contributing to overpopulation. If you had pointed the lazyness of me making that gay joke, that would've been a point I'd concede.

I don't know why I was supposed to assume it was gay sex.  

6 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

With regards to overpopulation, I had already restrained myself from dropping into the obesity thread to suggest to feed the poor by eating the obese (yes, equally lazy rip off from eat the rich feed the poor).

I like it.

[lokisnow]

https://grist.org/article/batteries-are-key-to-clean-energy-and-they-just-got-much-cheaper/

The price of lithium ion batteries dropped 35% year over year, and solar and wind dropped 14-24% year over year. 

That pushes installation of currently bidding real world wind+storage and solar+storage installations below the cost of building fossil fuel installations, and pushes it to the point where they are displacing/closing fossil fuel plants because they have been out competed on price.

In terms of cars, it's not there yet, the inflection point is roughly $100/ kilowatt hour of battery pack, and the price of materials has pushed the raw cost under that threshhold, but they aren't actually past the inflection point because it's about the cost of the battery pack, and when you add in the costs of the manufacturing of battery cells, the installation of battery cells into a battery pack, and the installation of battery packs into battery automobile units the cost goes back up over the $100 threshhold. But much of those costs are dependent on economies of scale and automation, but have a big capital up front cost, which as to be amortized out over several years (which is why tesla's battery manufacturing and battery pack assembly units are there only really closely guarded trade secret and why there are rumors that they have actually got below the $100 / kilowatt hour per installed battery pack).

[Aurane]

I imagine that nuclear power is going to be the dominant power source. At least in the west. Specifically, I think that fusion will be big, but we're not there yet.

[sologdin]

i had high hopes for the newly photographed black hole as fornacem humani generis, but those hopes were dashed when it turned out to be merely a low resolution selfie of sauron's eye.

[Altherion]

3 hours ago, sologdin said:

i had high hopes for the newly photographed black hole as fornacem humani generis, but those hopes were dashed when it turned out to be merely a low resolution selfie of sauron's eye.

Black holes are actually excellent power sources... but unfortunately, we'd need to be somewhere between Kardashev Types II and III to take advantage of them whereas we're currently quite a bit below even Type I.

[lokisnow]

eh, I'm not looking for the damn climate change thread, so this seems close enough.

https://laist.com/2019/05/13/how_ladwp_got_two_lakes_to_store_energy_like_a_giant_battery.php

It's about LAs use of pumped storage, which to those unawares is the use of excess wind/solar energy to pump water uphill so it can then run downhill and power generators when it's nighttime/notwindy. the same water gets recycled a whole bunch and the pumped "battery" is way bigger than any lithium battery currently on hand for LA.

[Larry of the Lawn]

19 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

eh, I'm not looking for the damn climate change thread, so this seems close enough.

https://laist.com/2019/05/13/how_ladwp_got_two_lakes_to_store_energy_like_a_giant_battery.php

It's about LAs use of pumped storage, which to those unawares is the use of excess wind/solar energy to pump water uphill so it can then run downhill and power generators when it's nighttime/notwindy. the same water gets recycled a whole bunch and the pumped "battery" is way bigger than any lithium battery currently on hand for LA.

I heard a segment on the radio about the same type of system being used in the UK.  They said the total volume of water moved back and forth each day was equivalent to the total UK daily water usage.  Pretty cool