Wow, just found your stack but already appreciate the math here. Realistic numbers are important for these assessments. I don't think in history it's ever been more obvious that we should have doubled down on Nuclear and then tackled the "green" alternatives.
That being said, hyperbole aside, ridiculous claims are exactly what drive future production. You won't find any successful company that didn't claim it could do something deemed impossible at the time. Setting ultra high expectations often results in eventual solutions. I realize I don't need to tell you this, you most certainly have a strong grasp on the limitations of technology. The advancements are often quite astounding and unexpected. Tesla is also counting on the continued expansion of the EV industry to propel innovation. Early on Elon open sourced the Tesla stack to drive that competition and quite literally create a market for him to win in. It wouldn't surprise me in a decade if the energy sector looks quite different.
At times scientists and engineers develop a solution and then look for a problem to solve. This obsession with transitioning to “green” technologies is based on what problem requiring solving?
Religion has conditioned humans to believe absurdity in order to prove their faith so as to obtain salvation. Give me a break -- like some sanctimonious can grant me salvation -- what the f**k is salvation but the ultimate con? In other words, we are genetically designed to love emotional memes and to hate actual facts.
BTW, I have a machine which will tap into all the energy you need as it uses a worm hole to the 6th dimensions where energy is limitless. Believe me, some angel told me this secret and wrote it out on gold tablet or was it on a rock from some mountain? Yo olvidi. Just give me your money and then salvation, er I mean, the energy tapping device is yours.
Religion has reached peak absurdity with the suicide cult of Marx. Not even a god to worship, yet absolute faith in some fantastical "utopia" if only we enslave everyone. Orwell did not intend 1984 to be a how-to guide, but the political left worships it as their unholy bible.
In Congressional hearings, a Xiden official was asked a truly simple question: "Sir, you are asking us to spend trillions of dollars because you assure us that the Earth will become too hot if we don't. Please tell us, then - if we spend this money, how much difference in temperature will it make by 2050?"
It isn't obvious, and may depend on browser. Right above your comment I am viewing is a link saying, "Return to thread." It takes me back to the original thread at your post. I use FireFox, mileage may vary with other browsers.
I've tried to have this conversation with electrical engineers. Even there, with the electrical engineers who didn't have a background in the corner of electrical engineering involved in power generation and the grid, most could not grasp the enormous gap in the amount of energy generated from burning fossil fuels, and that from wind and solar.
Smil is my go-to antidote to all the futuristic crap that I come across every day. And I'm always depressed by the credulity of general media reporters and editors, who seem to have abandoned the skepticism drilled into me as a mainstream reporter some 50 years ago.
The worlds battery production has been doubling every 2 to 3 years for the last 20 years. Today Tesla makes more batteries in a single day then was made by the human race from batteries inception to year 2000. These are world numbers and while Tesla is one of the biggest battery manufacturers in the world they are by no means the only one. I live in Ontario I can keep up with how many battery factories have been announced in the last year and all of them are going to be huge. This is a moon shot task it’s not going to be easy but if we all work towards the goal it’s not impossible just really hard. Cleaning up the air in our cities and on our roads plus hopefully helping the environment in the process is worth it.
Today's LiIon battery tech is a dead end for grid storage. Not enough Lithium in the world to provide a bare minimum of 5 day's worth of backup to allow decommissioning fossil fuel plants. Form Energy and ESS Inc might scale, being mostly water and iron, but are only about 50% efficient so you have to put 2 KWH of energy in to get 1 KWH of energy out - more than doubling delivered cost by the time you add in capital and other costs as well. Thus, solar and wind are also dead end tech for renewable energy.
Nuclear costs 3-5x more than combined cycle natural gas - an economic disaster for the world if everything switched to nuclear. Even the new modular designs, not one of which has been delivered for evaluation of cost estimates, do not suggest they can ever become cheaper than 3x the cost.
The ONLY solution out there with even a predicted possibility to scale, cost less, not require terratons of rare/toxic materials, or take up immense tracts of land is closed loop geothermal - just recently made possible by new technologies. The first commercial plant won't be completed until next year, and their CEO happily admits the LCOE for early plants will be no better than nuclear (it will take practice to get costs down).
If you want to live off-grid in the desert, solar plus batteries may be fine and provide you reliable power so long as you don't have more than 2 days' worth of overcast. For the world, it is a fantasy this century.
Even though I have believed in climate change for over twenty years, I would never buy a Tesla.
I own a turbo diesel Volkwagon New Beetle. It is twenty years old and still gets 45 miles to the gallon. My engine gave out recently at 300,000 miles and I replaced it for $8,000 US. The only other significant maintenance I've had to do is to replace the timing chain three times (routine maintenance) and the alternator (one time). The car had no problem when I lived in are area of cold weather for a few years.
Total cost per mile for running this vehicle (excluding fuel and routine oil changes):
$25,000 (up front cost) + $8,000 (new engine) + $1,000 (alternator) + $2,000 (timing belt changes) =$36,000/300,000 miles = 12 cents per mile
Total cost per mile to run a Tesla:
$44,000 (up front cost) + $32,000 (2 battery replacements) = $76,000/300,000 miles = $25 cents per mile
More than twice as expensive as my Diesel New Beetle.
If the Quaise Energy's tech proves out, then that potentially upsets the apple cart immensely. As for this weather dependent approach to energy? What's not to embrace about switching from fossil-fuel extraction to an incomprehensibly huge mineral extraction industry approach so that we can make "zero emission" vehicles. As for "battery production"??? Perhaps the wannabe engineers who favor weather-dependent solutions to all our ills can show us engineers how the math works out WRT for proven/known mineral reserves that are needed to meet said future capacity and how existing global mining and refining capacity is many orders of magnitude below what's needed? You can build a blant that produces batteries in huge quantities, that doesn't mean you have the raw materials and the mining/refining capacity to meet that demand. OOOPS!!!!
I've had Quaise on the list I'm tracking for some time. They appear to be using the same technologies as Eavor dotcom - the latter being considerably ahead of the game today. Having finished their final deep drilling tests in NM this January, they immediately received an additional billion Euros in funding to build 6 more plants in Europe beyond the one in Germany already under construction and due to be completed this year. Since then, Californistan has placed an order for one plant up to 200 MWE. Our pathetic DoE, on the other hand, just committed $80 million to "study" closed loop geothermal problems already solved by Eavor - nearly guaranteeing that it will be another decade before we see anything useful from our Federal government. Thus it ever was.
As for batteries, we CAN build enormous quantities of them. Form Energy and ESS Inc. each offer variations on iron/water RedOx batteries, with Form being a self-contained more traditional battery the size of a dishwasher storing 100kWh of energy, and ESS Inc's solution being a flow battery (allowing the user to independently size the desired max output vs the maximum storage capacity. However, at 50% and 70% round trip efficiency, respectively, the cost of the source energy must be considerably lower than the sale price to make the economics work. I believe these will be most useful at substations, providing communities with unbroken power supply should the main lines become disrupted.
Had not heard of Eavor - will definitely check out. Thanks for the reference. Interesting on the battery chem. I'm not big fan of intermittent, weather influenced means of producing energy. I absolutely detest wind power and bristle at any suggestion that wind is "green" - not remotely. Closed loop geothermal is not intermittent and its hard to find a down side on any aspect of this as a solution. Plus it entirely eliminates the need to have a fuel as a combustion source in order to produce power.
Took me a while to reply - I was upgrading to a new computer, with the usual hassles. I'm a lifelong pilot and until Covid owned my own plane. Flying across the USA at lower than jet liner levels would make you cry at the massive eyesore of wind and solar.
What is most fascinating now is that it is 5 months since Eavor received a BILLION Euros in funding - and I have yet to hear a peep out of ANY of the left wing, right wing, or mainstream EcoAlarmist sources about them. Only very small articles with short mentions. Why, it almost seems as if these people don't WANT there to be an actual solution...
After EPA for 8 years, EcoAlarmist, Inc. needs a reason to exist and solving problems cramps their style. If Quaise and Eavor (and alike pan out), these little trolls' heads are going to explode trying to figure out what to do next.
"Although the paper doesn’t give exact projections, it uses a “20-year horizon” and claims that building the infrastructure for a “sustainable energy economy will cost $10 trillion” while continuing to rely on hydrocarbons will cost, they claim, about $14 trillion."
How can the transition to renewables and electric transportation be accomplished without using conventional vehicles that rely on hydrocarbons?
If done properly (i.e. get the government completely out of it and wait for REAL solutions which actually cost less), the cost will be less than $0 (transitioning will happen because it SAVES money). It will also occur much faster that way.
Real solutions (regardless of financing) will still need conventional vehicles for all of the transportation required. Renewables move nothing but require transportation for their own manufacture and installations. A little realism costs very little.
Just as it appears we have a true solution emerging for grid power (closed loop geothermal, predicted by NREL and IEAA to eventually become as cheap as $40/MWH, or 33% less than combined cycle natural gas), it looks like we probably have a winner for mobile energy storage which can challenge the supremacy of hydrocarbons. Consider first that an entire Tesla drivetrain (inverter, charger, motors) now costs less than $1000 to manufacture - far less than any ICE engine plus transmission etc. So, the only things standing in the way of EVs kicking ICE butt (economically speaking) is cheap reliable grid power and cheaper batteries.
For the latter, it may be just a bit premature to say "we are there" but it appears we are. Influit Energy solved the energy density problem of flow batteries, which have existed for over 100 years. Their Gen 1 product is set to have a system energy density of about 1.23x LiIon, for about 1/2 the cost. They are commencing production for their first customer, the USAF, as we speak. Their Gen 2 product (here it gets into projections) they believe will provide 4-5x the energy density of LiIon for 1/3 of the cost. That's a 300+ mile range Tesla with a battery pack costing $6,800 vs the current $20,000, or a 900+ mile range Tesla for about the same price.
Making projections of the future based on current front runners is foolish - like making projections about the video storage market based on VHS vs Beta.
In the short term is likely to be longer than you think. Evs kicking CVs butt will not happen as long as installing solar and wind projects... and EV charging stations requires CVs using gasoline and biofuels (which depend on gasolines).
Ayn Rand is supposed to have written: "You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of reality."
She did indeed. I will point out that you don't know how long I think it will take for ICE to "go away." It may never go away entirely. The Navy patented a process several years ago to make clean-burning carbon neutral synthetic diesel from seawater - the principle cost driver is the cost of electricity. Find a cheap enough source of electricity, and ICE may remain a force for a very long time - at least for niche purposes. But, in that event it won't be the same - the warmistas will have nothing to cry about with clean ICE.
It takes about 22 years for about 80% of ICE vehicles built to reach the end of their lives. If every vehicle built from today forward were an EV, it would still be nearly 30 years before they were effectively gone. However, economic reality drives the purchasing behavior of 8 billion "greedy consumers." The moment EVs become an obviously "better deal" than ICE, ICE sales will plummet just like horse sales plummeted after the turn of the century (1900).
Well I have to agree that nobody knows how long Mr. Galt will think about anything. The reality is that fossil fuels (for better or worse) will be required for transportation before EVs can take over. What that means is fossil fuels will be needed... and no amount of rhetoric to the contrary will make a bit of difference.
"Although the paper doesn’t give exact projections, it uses a “20-year horizon” and claims that building the infrastructure for a “sustainable energy economy will cost $10 trillion” while continuing to rely on hydrocarbons will cost, they claim, about $14 trillion."
How can the transition to renewables and electric transportation be accomplished without using conventional vehicles that rely on hydrocarbons?
I believe some of the The 16 trillion is to build more wells refineries etc. the current carbon extraction system needs to be constantly added on to as wells run dry over time. One thing lots of people don’t count when they look at their fuel usage is that on average it takes bout as much gas to get the gas to your gas station as you use. The gas needed to extract the oil from the ground transport the oil to refineries, refine the oil into usable gasoline then transport the gasoline to the station is a depending on where about equal to what you use. Governments help subsidies some of those costs which is why it’s part of the 16 trillion.
Yes, that's part of the transition. But all of that relies on conventional vehicles that run on fossil fuels. There is no way around that for the foreseeable future.
I can't believe that we've made it this far chasing unicorn farts and pixie dust. None of these goals are staked in any kind of reality, but we are plowing trillions into achieving them. The all green fantasy has to be one of the biggest grifts in the history of civilization.
Net zero isn't actually zero. Pushing it off on the next state or next country doesn't eliminate anything. The fantasy that we'll be able to quit mining, smelting, and building once we get enough green energy is thinking in way simpler terms than reality. Upping from 10 to 100 isn't nearly as easy as you make it sound.
Nah. Climate change is linear and proceeding at a glacial (pun intended) pace. Innovation is exponential. Which one wins?
Your comment is correct insofar as the current propped-up technologies are concerned. Solar, wind, and LiIon batteries are all pretty much dead ends.
The earth has all the energy we need for the next 5 billion years - until the sun goes red giant and incinerates the planet. In the past year, we've figured out how to harness it. 7 plants are already funded since December, and the cost per kWh will (after a learning curve) drop to less than the cost of energy from natural gas. See Eavor dotcom.
For transportation, something like Influit Energy will win. No toxic nor rare materials. Better energy density than LiIon. Can't catch on fire. Can refuel in minutes, just like petrofuels, or recharge overnight at home.
Real solutions are coming, but real solutions were never what the zealots wanted. They wanted an excuse to siphon trillions of taxpayer money to political groups.
Well, crashing the economy is one goal but the immediate siphoning of taxpayer monies to favored political groups is an immediate benefit to them - the real "green" they are after.
We have watched this so often since the greens took over a corner of the left. Think of all the cash they have received from the government?preferred NGO's either as direct payments or loan guarantees then they produce nothing and close. Solyndra was an attention grabber but just the tip of the iceberg. The climate change act will squander billions more, I wonder how many of the players are the same this time?
Exponential growth can be a hard thing for some people to wrap their heads around. The Photovoltaic industry has kept up an average 38% year on year growth rate over the last two decades, meaning in 2022 it produced 660 times more PV than it did in 2002. Apply that growth rate to the 2022 world battery production of 700 GWh and you get enough production to do a master plan every 6 months. Linear thinkers get surprised by the future every time.
PV panels now account for only 21% of the total cost of solar. If they were free, we could only hope for a 20% cost reduction - and they still wouldn't work at night.
How many days of battery backup do you need with solar as your primary power source in Minnesota? Alaska?
Solar and wind are distractions. Closed loop geothermal is here, enough power for the next 5 billion years. Current leader is Eavor dotcom, but there will be many, many others.
Fully installed PV has been averaging double digit cost reductions for well over a decade. It's not just the panel prices coming down, it's everything.
For a sanity check on your closed loop geothermal: 13% efficiency on the Rankine cycle gives you a huge generation cost even if the drilling was free. NREL's "should cost" is 81.5 million for a 9 MWe plant (if it works, and for how long...). You can install 100 MW of solar for that and it's fully bankable/ financeable at ultra low rates... I wouldn't bet against geothermal to be part of the picture in some areas but it's not going to take much of the market. It will simply be too easy to use power on demand or store it in cheap forms (ie thermal storage).
We already have tons of options for low temp geothermal- all the enhanced oil recovery projects have heated their reservoirs with steam for decades. Put water down an already existing (free) hole and comes back up at near boiling (around Eavor's temps). The issue is that the low delta Ts make for horribly expensive generation costs, and like every other geothermal project including Eavor's they suffer from reduced output as the heat is depleted locally.
"Fully installed PV has been averaging double digit cost reductions for well over a decade. It's not just the panel prices coming down, it's everything."
Not disputing that. In fact, I did a "Sunday study" (Google, Excel) and plotted prices for solar (equipment anticipated life vs output vs cost) since about 1960 (about as far back as you could even get solar). Guess what? It's been exponential decline (about 3.5 years for prices to drop by half) since then. Problem is, unless we see a breakthrough (i.e. increase in panel efficiency, reducing required number of panels per kWh) we're coming to an end of that and will only see marginal reductions henceforth.
"For a sanity check on your closed loop geothermal: 13% efficiency on the Rankine cycle gives you a huge generation cost even if the drilling was free."
Incorrect. When the "fuel" is free, efficiency doesn't matter a whit. All that matters is full lifetime costs divided by lifetime kWh delivered. They anticipate that the bores will last 50+ years (there may be "repairs" from time to time from seismic shifting, but since they can now "reconnect" loops which break that would be a nominal relative effort compared to the original drilling). I'd happily bet money that geothermal will reign supreme within a decade as the clear choice for new and replacement generation. Too many advantages - low use of land, low use of materials, build a whole plant in under a year, etc.
Also, as technique improves it will additionally become practical to simply dig deeper for an increased temperature delta. The theory of "local depletion" becomes somewhat meaningless when they build with that in mind - single bore; multiple "fields" radiating in different directions - simply rotate the "field in use" and the other fields recover through natural conduction.
The earth won't run out of heat in the next 5 billion years...
"Incorrect. When the "fuel" is free, efficiency doesn't matter a whit. All that matters is full lifetime costs divided by lifetime kWh delivered."
You're not following. Low efficiency means larger rotating equipment and cooling loads (cooling towers, etc) which in turn drive higher costs. If the power block alone is over $2.40 per watt there's an implicit floor cost. And suggesting that you can simply run it for longer to recoup your investment sounds great until you get to bankability. Now you're trying to prove to a banker that this new tech which has only just been commissioned is going to last for 50 years. And your future O&M cost will come down because drilling, which will be required, will get cheaper? Good luck with that. Do you really believe they'll give you the same interest rates as Solar projects any time soon? Because cost of money dominates LCOE, especially with longer term financing.
"Problem is, unless we see a breakthrough (i.e. increase in panel efficiency, reducing required number of panels per kWh) we're coming to an end of that and will only see marginal reductions henceforth."
You many or may not realize this has been the mantra of many for the last decade and a half. There are plenty of studies from 10-15 years ago that suggest it's impossible for solar to continue getting cheaper at the same rate. And yet here we are- Solar's kept up a 24% learning rate and even more conservative estimates that show that reducing put it will out of reach for new, unbankable technologies any time soon. Short version I'd be happy to take your bet. I believe you seriously underestimate the challenge and time it takes to get a new technology bankable which is a requirement before any tech can be deployed at real scale.
"You're not following. Low efficiency means larger rotating equipment and cooling loads (cooling towers, etc) which in turn drive higher costs."
No, I followed completely and already answered that:
" All that matters is full lifetime costs divided by lifetime kWh delivered."
In other words, if they save $20 million in drilling costs but have an additional $10 million in equipment costs for the same energy output and duty lifetime, they come out ahead with the lower temp solution. I'm sure they have lots of bright minds to figure out where that optimum trade-off point is; the drilling tech is capable of depths up to 20km, so it will be a purely economic decision.
"Now you're trying to prove to a banker that this new tech which has only just been commissioned is going to last for 50 years."
The only thing you have to convince them of is that you can keep the bore open for a predictable maintenance cost. Every other piece of machinery is already a known quantity to the bankers from other endeavors, including the Rankine cycle converters. Interest rates will drive a go/no-go decision.
"You many or may not realize this has been the mantra of many for the last decade and a half. "
I don't pay any attention to the fan-boiz. I run the numbers myself - it is a relatively straightforward calculation. The sum of panels, inverters, and other electronics are already less than half the installation cost, the rest mostly labor - meaning that at the current efficiency levels of panels, there is no more than, say, about a theoretical 30% remaining savings even possible unless robots start automatically performing installs. That's it - there's nowhere else to cut costs.
That said, I do believe solar will achieve 40% on thin film produced using a commercial roll to roll printing process - becoming nearly as cheap as paint. I simply do not count on that in the short term, as "breakthroughs" and "paradigm shifts" are notoriously tricky to predict. Possibilities include Perovskite PV and nanoantenna arrays. Around 1970, for example, the cover of Popular Science proclaimed that "Clean, cheap fusion is only 30 years away!" It still is...
"The only thing you have to convince them of is that you can keep the bore open for a predictable maintenance cost. Every other piece of machinery is already a known quantity"
You said it yourself: "It is anticipated bores will last 50 years"... Prove it to a skeptical banker's independent engineer. Again and again, because local geology will make for different degradation rates. It will also impact the rate of corrosion in heat exchanges. And if you need to base your loan on a 50 year payback you incur other risks: who's to say some other tech doesn't come along and make yours obsolete? The discount rate will be such that in the early days any assumptions past 30 years will be worthless. I'm betting heavily you've never had to get a technology through bankability yourself.
I'll also note the even the company's rosy projections suggest "the technology could one day supply 10-20% of world electricity". Shouldn't that be 100%? Clean, baseload energy anywhere- what makes up the rest? Meanwhile wind and solar was already over 10% of world electricity combined a year ago and still increasing exponentially- solar alone will be over 10% before close loop geothermal becomes bankable (assuming it ever does). Seems like unless Eavor's projections are wrong you've already lost.
"I run the numbers myself - it is a relatively straightforward calculation." With assumptions for future efficiency gain, etc all baked in. And apparently you've figured it out better than the guys over at NREL...? Sure.
At one point years ago I tried to install a small wind turbine by Bergey on my acreage in KS - way before the huge wind farms that are now only 2 miles away. The county DNR wouldn't approve the battery room. Big industrial batteries like those in fork trucks lined up in containment. They were too hazardous for approval. My MS was in industrial systems including power, and am fully certified in HazMat by the HMAC, I couldn't be trusted with the permit. That told me all I needed to know about KS wind power.
This "linear thinker" actually has experience developing mineral resources. In the early 1970's I participated in the development of a large Molybdenum mine on the continental divide in Colorado. It was designed to extract 40,000 to 50,000 tons per day of ORE. The largest mine being developed at that time. And the LAST mine of that size of any kind in the US. It is still in operation. It caved in the top of a mountain on the east side of the divide and filled most of a valley with tailings on the west side. Nothing like it has been developed in the 50 years since then.
It is relatively simple even for individuals whose skills are pretty much limited to arithmetic to calculate the amount of resource development necessary to facilitate JUST THE BATTERIES for the cars and light trucks that will replace current demand. In round numbers, it will require the development of the equivalent of 50 to 75 mines like the last one that was started 50 years ago. Each mine will take about 10 years to develop from initial discovery thru permitting to production. And as a whole these developments will annually generate tailings (waste) equal in volume to three to five times the annual volume of solid waste we currently dispose of in landfills. And the composition of the mine/mill waste will be anywhere from sightly more toxic than current solid landfill to MUCH more toxic.
Further complicating the process is that the necessary developments cannot just be developed in somebody else's back yard -- they have to be developed where the ores are located.
Interestingly, it does not get better. What I have cited above is only for car and light truck batteries. It is not for windmills, solar panels and transformation and transmission facilities which will likely double (or more) the resources that will be required to develop facilities to generate and transmit "green energy".
Oh, and most of these processes require water -- you know, that stuff of which there is not enough of right now in many of the places where we expect we will discover the requisite minerals.
Finally, mineral development does not generally follow Moore's Law. Yes, economies of scale may be recognized early in the exploitation of minerals. But as exploitation proceeds, developers are compelled to develop lower and lower quality resources that cancel out the expected economies of scale. That's pretty much where copper is worldwide now. And it's where oil and gas will be in the not too distant future.
Yep. Solar + wind + batteries simply require too many resources. Closed loop geothermal will be the answer. It will take a couple of years to get the cost down lower than power from natural gas, but it will happen.
Will transitioning to closed loop geothermal enable the hydrogen fuel cell transportation by allowing the production of electrolysis generated hydrogen at a reasonable cost? If not, then I don't see how closed loop geothermal solves the EV transportation mining problem.
Hydrogen "sounds great," and because of that it has been the "fuel of the future" for 100 years. I suspect it still will be in another 100 years. There is literally no advantage to using Hydrogen as a portable fuel when compared to other alternatives. Tough to store, low energy density, expensive in terms of energy to produce, capable of generating explosions. The fundamental nature of Hydrogen as a non-dense chemical storage medium to be "burned" will never change.
If we ever get to the point that we have converted almost all transportation to batteries yet still need a chemical fuel to burn for niche markets (like long distance jets), a vastly better solution is already available. Our Navy has patented a process to produce clean burning carbon neutral synthetic diesel from seawater. Search: "Low-cost catalyst helps turn seawater into fuel at scale"
The primary cost driver to produce it is the cost of electricity. Like hydrogen, it requires more energy in than you get back out (like an inefficient battery). However, it can be used as a drop-in (pour-in?) substitute using our existing transportation infrastructure and equipment. It can even be "mixed" with traditional diesel, just as ethanol is mixed with gasoline today. The same process can also make a synthetic gasoline - but I suspect that within 5 years there will be little or nothing gasoline is used for which can't be replaced by some form of battery. My current favorite for portable energy which is entering low-volume production today is Influit Energy. Already 1.23x more energy dense than LiIon at about 1/2 the cost for materials, they anticipate a generation 2 product which will be 4-5x more energy dense - more than enough for almost any intended use. Non-toxic, requires no scarce materials, cannot burn, and it can either be charged in place like any other EV battery, or the spent electrolytes can be fast-swapped for charged electrolytes in minutes just like fueling your ICE vehicle. Oh - and if tanks are ruptured, the mixed liquids will merely heat up for a few hours.
I plan to buy stock when it goes public. However, before I do I want to know they have a "patentable process" - if not, they will simply be imitated. Flow batteries are not new, they've been around for 100 years. Nanoparticles are not new. Suspending solids in an equal-density liquid is not new. However, perhaps the patent courts will recognize this as patentable.
Great! Now calculate how much HAZARDOUS CHEMICAL waste will be generated with that kind of growth.. then how about adding every imaginable battery operated toy, gadget, & tool to the growing massive MOUNTAINS of TOXIC BATTERY WASTE going into landfills all over the place.. BTW, when they crush the now obsolescent 1st, 2nd,3rd generation Solar Panels (which is what they are doing) do you know what gases are going directly into our atmosphere (look up aerosolized Benzene/Lead, etc..). Yeah, next you can get ready for massive new taxes to start covering disposal costs NOT BEING CURRENTLY ACCOUNTED FOR.. The pushers are getting their pockets lined at the expense of a population of fools!
Depends on what kind of batteries they use. ESS Inc and Form Energy use iron and water. LiIon is a non-starter for global grid storage - there simply isn't enough lithium and all the other reasons you mention.
But, unreliables are probably an overall dead-end solution anyway. Except in the desert, you'd need at least a week's worth of backup to actually retire the fossil fuel backup generation capacity, maybe more. MOST of that storage would never be used, making it pure expense with no offsetting revenue.
Nuclear costs 3-5x more per KWH than natural gas, with absolutely no predictions claiming it will ever get lower than 3x - disastrous for the world economy.
That leaves only closed loop geothermal. Odd how none of the Warmistas are even talking about that...
On one level it's going to be an environmental disaster. Our grand children are going to be looking around at all this old stuff windmills and solar panels dotting the landscape and ask us what the hell we did to the place. But it's going to happen, and I believe it's still better than the alternatives, and most without a dog in the hunt (unlike the author) agree.
First it "can't possibly work", then "it's going to be terrible if it does" and "it's all a conspiracy". FUD thrown against the wall to see what sticks. Meanwhile you're reading the blog of a bought and paid for shill of the fossil fuels industry believing every word. It's a crock.
All the competent analysts say it's coming. Check Bloomberg New Energy, which does their analysis purely based on economics, not carbon or regulation. Will it be 100% in 20 years? No, but it's happening, because the economics dictate that it will. Utility scale PV costs have been decreasing double digits per year for over a decade- over a 5x reduction. It doesn't need to keep that much longer at all to obliterate the energy world as it was a decade ago.
What makes you think that mining and manufacturing can keep pace with this exponential growth? It's easy to grow exponentially when your industry is comparably small and not encroaching on the limits of other industries, but the idea that this can continue indefinitely is absurd.
Prices spiked and the market reacted. If there are sufficient raw materials (there are) and incentive (there is, look at lithium prices now) industry will find a way. Even with a "mature" industry. US aircraft production 1939-1943: over 90% year on year growth. Combat aircraft 150% growth year on year 1940-1944, doing in four years what it took the PV industry 12 to do. It can't continue indefinitely, but it doesn't need to.
So, 4 years of growth during the strongest possible economic pressure (total war,) and then what happened combat aircraft production after the war ended? What is the economic driver that's going to push humanity to do this? Most people and nations in the world have already proven that they don't give a shit about climate change enough to do much about it, and a large percentage of the ones that do understand the math involved well enough to know that building a power grid based on wind, solar and batteries is insane.
There are much better low carbon options available that don't require miracles to work and aren't absurdly wasteful of land and materials. The core concept of using inverters and batteries instead of rotating mass and copper coils to balance grid scale AC power is inherently wasteful and impedes efficient recycling of materials.
If you think that the future is going to be anything like you described you should put your money where your mouth is and invest in lithium mineral rights, and we will see. I work in the electrical industry and stand to benefit from this fantasy if it actually happened, but I am also smart enough to know it's a fantasy. Elon obviously is too, but he's still happy to profit from the idea. Using lithium batteries for grid scale power is a fantastic way to keep the price of his products high because it's a need that can never be met, and I'm 100% sure that he's aware of this fact.
The simple driver is greed. Solar and wind are now the cheapest ways to make energy in many parts of the world, and because they're engineering and production based they are only getting exponentially cheaper. The trick is that to get that low price you need to be able to take the energy on their schedule, not yours. If you can figure out how to do that there are fortunes to be made. Keep in mind that until a couple years ago this wasn't true: wind and solar were significantly more expensive, so there was zero incentive to figure this out. Now there is, and as renewables get cheaper the incentive just gets bigger. If you're in the business you likely know that in many parts of the Midwest wholesale prices for electricity go negative and average of four hours a day? Meaning if you can charge a battery in four hours the power companies will pay you to do it? Greed. Money makes the world go round, and if there's money in it industry will respond.
And no I wouldn't invest in Lithium mineral rights, though if you want to place a long bet look at SQM- when they switch from open pond evaporation to direct extraction they'll get an exponential production bump.
Making AC power isn't that useful if you can't make it when the power is needed. This is not a market waiting to be exploited by batteries, it's a fact of life integral to power generation that dictates everything we do with our power grid. In an emergency or for short periods of time it can make sense to use inverters and batteries to stabilize power flows, but it's never going to be an efficient or environmentally friendly way to operate the power grid at a massive scale for long periods of time.
Even daily fluctuations in renewable output are extremely cost prohibitive to cover using batteries, that is why grid operators instead use pumped hydro and gas or hydroelectric fast switching capacity to make up for these shortfalls. Obviously though, wind and solar don't just fluctuate on a daily basis but also seasonally in most places, and these discrepancies are impossible to cover with batteries. I encourage you to look at the numbers yourself if you initially disagree.
If you are actually serious about using primarily wind and solar for grid power you should be looking at pumped hydro, not batteries. Using batteries only makes sense to the people who sell batteries. Personally, I'd rather see my money spent on clean power that works, and doesn't require a massive amount of resources, land, and trash to accomplish less than the competition.
"Making AC power isn't that useful if you can't make it when the power is needed." Because we built a world around energy that's available on demand, but that's not the world we're talking about.
When you've got a source of cheaper power it makes sense to build more of it- even if you need to throw some away it's still cheaper than the alternative, especially if that alternative is a gas peaker plant. How much more you build depends on how much cheaper it gets. Bloomberg's models have us overbuilding solar by 3x by 2050 to address seasonality, etc.
So back to that power not being useful because it's not on your schedule... Today I can buy a heat pump water heater with 120 gallon capacity that's got enough power and storage to heat both the house and hot water for a typical home. Add a second tank and the same heat pump can store cold water for AC. Run that heat pump daily when prices are cheap and you've got your heating and cooling fully covered. Payback can be under 2 years if you have solar or access to wholesale electricity prices in many places, and it's only going to get better.
In short the economics dictate that we make hay when the sun shines and don't when it doesn't. The carrot's big if you can do that.
I will add that in most cases that I'm aware of, the reason for any near-zero electricity prices is due to an over-investment in wind and solar and does not actually represent "free power," but instead wasted power that was paid for by utility customers and taxpayers and will now be thrown away because it's not being generated when it's needed.
Trying to capitalize on a problem created by irresponsible political interference in the power grid with more irresponsible investment in a different unecessary and wasteful technology is not an impressive endorsement for either one. Power grids that don't heavily invest in wind and solar don't generally have gross overproductions of power when it's not needed and can't be used, this problem doesn't need to exist. If it's going to exist, it should have been planned out better and done in an area where the power could be stored with efficient pumped hydro, as nuclear plants did in the past. If we held wind and solar generators to the same standards that we hold other generation systems to, there would be a whole lot less of both.
There is an interesting debate on this article in the FaceBook forum Renewable vs Nuclear Debate. Basic innumeracy even from solar advocates who claim to be engineers.
It's all about scale. I often ask people to estimate how many days a billion seconds is after telling them a million seconds is roughly 11days. They are gobsmacked at the answer. People seem to think that FF can be replaced in the background with zero disruption by regressive renewables mainly because, IMO, they have zero understanding of scale.
It’s a fair analysis if Tesla were the only OEM of batteries in the world. But we all know that’s not the case. There are dozens of such OEMs. Your main takeaway / calculation is, therefore, meaningless at best. Recommend you do a little extra work to estimate current and expected total battery manufacturing capacity across all OEMs and then re-calculate your number. Perhaps you’d be better served by focusing on feedstock material shortages instead?
Partly true. Lithium for global grid storage is, however, a dead end for the simple reason that there is not enough lithium in the world to provide a week's worth of backup for the grid.
Wow, just found your stack but already appreciate the math here. Realistic numbers are important for these assessments. I don't think in history it's ever been more obvious that we should have doubled down on Nuclear and then tackled the "green" alternatives.
That being said, hyperbole aside, ridiculous claims are exactly what drive future production. You won't find any successful company that didn't claim it could do something deemed impossible at the time. Setting ultra high expectations often results in eventual solutions. I realize I don't need to tell you this, you most certainly have a strong grasp on the limitations of technology. The advancements are often quite astounding and unexpected. Tesla is also counting on the continued expansion of the EV industry to propel innovation. Early on Elon open sourced the Tesla stack to drive that competition and quite literally create a market for him to win in. It wouldn't surprise me in a decade if the energy sector looks quite different.
At times scientists and engineers develop a solution and then look for a problem to solve. This obsession with transitioning to “green” technologies is based on what problem requiring solving?
Religion has conditioned humans to believe absurdity in order to prove their faith so as to obtain salvation. Give me a break -- like some sanctimonious can grant me salvation -- what the f**k is salvation but the ultimate con? In other words, we are genetically designed to love emotional memes and to hate actual facts.
BTW, I have a machine which will tap into all the energy you need as it uses a worm hole to the 6th dimensions where energy is limitless. Believe me, some angel told me this secret and wrote it out on gold tablet or was it on a rock from some mountain? Yo olvidi. Just give me your money and then salvation, er I mean, the energy tapping device is yours.
Religion has reached peak absurdity with the suicide cult of Marx. Not even a god to worship, yet absolute faith in some fantastical "utopia" if only we enslave everyone. Orwell did not intend 1984 to be a how-to guide, but the political left worships it as their unholy bible.
In Congressional hearings, a Xiden official was asked a truly simple question: "Sir, you are asking us to spend trillions of dollars because you assure us that the Earth will become too hot if we don't. Please tell us, then - if we spend this money, how much difference in temperature will it make by 2050?"
Talk about cults!
Deflection, posturing, silence.
Dumb questions by snarky people are a poor substitute for science
So, your position is that the American people have no business asking what trillions in proposed spending will benefit them?
That's both dumb AND snarky - certainly efficient, but not a very practical life strategy.
This site does not allow me to trace back to view context
It isn't obvious, and may depend on browser. Right above your comment I am viewing is a link saying, "Return to thread." It takes me back to the original thread at your post. I use FireFox, mileage may vary with other browsers.
A huckster is gonna huck, and the rube bait is gonna be rubed.
But the clarity and integrity of the Bryce’s of the world are exposing the fraud. Thank you!
I've tried to have this conversation with electrical engineers. Even there, with the electrical engineers who didn't have a background in the corner of electrical engineering involved in power generation and the grid, most could not grasp the enormous gap in the amount of energy generated from burning fossil fuels, and that from wind and solar.
Smil is my go-to antidote to all the futuristic crap that I come across every day. And I'm always depressed by the credulity of general media reporters and editors, who seem to have abandoned the skepticism drilled into me as a mainstream reporter some 50 years ago.
The worlds battery production has been doubling every 2 to 3 years for the last 20 years. Today Tesla makes more batteries in a single day then was made by the human race from batteries inception to year 2000. These are world numbers and while Tesla is one of the biggest battery manufacturers in the world they are by no means the only one. I live in Ontario I can keep up with how many battery factories have been announced in the last year and all of them are going to be huge. This is a moon shot task it’s not going to be easy but if we all work towards the goal it’s not impossible just really hard. Cleaning up the air in our cities and on our roads plus hopefully helping the environment in the process is worth it.
Today's LiIon battery tech is a dead end for grid storage. Not enough Lithium in the world to provide a bare minimum of 5 day's worth of backup to allow decommissioning fossil fuel plants. Form Energy and ESS Inc might scale, being mostly water and iron, but are only about 50% efficient so you have to put 2 KWH of energy in to get 1 KWH of energy out - more than doubling delivered cost by the time you add in capital and other costs as well. Thus, solar and wind are also dead end tech for renewable energy.
Nuclear costs 3-5x more than combined cycle natural gas - an economic disaster for the world if everything switched to nuclear. Even the new modular designs, not one of which has been delivered for evaluation of cost estimates, do not suggest they can ever become cheaper than 3x the cost.
The ONLY solution out there with even a predicted possibility to scale, cost less, not require terratons of rare/toxic materials, or take up immense tracts of land is closed loop geothermal - just recently made possible by new technologies. The first commercial plant won't be completed until next year, and their CEO happily admits the LCOE for early plants will be no better than nuclear (it will take practice to get costs down).
If you want to live off-grid in the desert, solar plus batteries may be fine and provide you reliable power so long as you don't have more than 2 days' worth of overcast. For the world, it is a fantasy this century.
Even though I have believed in climate change for over twenty years, I would never buy a Tesla.
I own a turbo diesel Volkwagon New Beetle. It is twenty years old and still gets 45 miles to the gallon. My engine gave out recently at 300,000 miles and I replaced it for $8,000 US. The only other significant maintenance I've had to do is to replace the timing chain three times (routine maintenance) and the alternator (one time). The car had no problem when I lived in are area of cold weather for a few years.
Total cost per mile for running this vehicle (excluding fuel and routine oil changes):
$25,000 (up front cost) + $8,000 (new engine) + $1,000 (alternator) + $2,000 (timing belt changes) =$36,000/300,000 miles = 12 cents per mile
Total cost per mile to run a Tesla:
$44,000 (up front cost) + $32,000 (2 battery replacements) = $76,000/300,000 miles = $25 cents per mile
More than twice as expensive as my Diesel New Beetle.
"Tesla's "Master Plan" for weather-dependent renewables will require 960 years of Gigafactory battery output. "
Probably not, because wind and solar won't be the winning strategy. Closed loop geothermal is about to explode (figuratively).
If the Quaise Energy's tech proves out, then that potentially upsets the apple cart immensely. As for this weather dependent approach to energy? What's not to embrace about switching from fossil-fuel extraction to an incomprehensibly huge mineral extraction industry approach so that we can make "zero emission" vehicles. As for "battery production"??? Perhaps the wannabe engineers who favor weather-dependent solutions to all our ills can show us engineers how the math works out WRT for proven/known mineral reserves that are needed to meet said future capacity and how existing global mining and refining capacity is many orders of magnitude below what's needed? You can build a blant that produces batteries in huge quantities, that doesn't mean you have the raw materials and the mining/refining capacity to meet that demand. OOOPS!!!!
I've had Quaise on the list I'm tracking for some time. They appear to be using the same technologies as Eavor dotcom - the latter being considerably ahead of the game today. Having finished their final deep drilling tests in NM this January, they immediately received an additional billion Euros in funding to build 6 more plants in Europe beyond the one in Germany already under construction and due to be completed this year. Since then, Californistan has placed an order for one plant up to 200 MWE. Our pathetic DoE, on the other hand, just committed $80 million to "study" closed loop geothermal problems already solved by Eavor - nearly guaranteeing that it will be another decade before we see anything useful from our Federal government. Thus it ever was.
As for batteries, we CAN build enormous quantities of them. Form Energy and ESS Inc. each offer variations on iron/water RedOx batteries, with Form being a self-contained more traditional battery the size of a dishwasher storing 100kWh of energy, and ESS Inc's solution being a flow battery (allowing the user to independently size the desired max output vs the maximum storage capacity. However, at 50% and 70% round trip efficiency, respectively, the cost of the source energy must be considerably lower than the sale price to make the economics work. I believe these will be most useful at substations, providing communities with unbroken power supply should the main lines become disrupted.
Had not heard of Eavor - will definitely check out. Thanks for the reference. Interesting on the battery chem. I'm not big fan of intermittent, weather influenced means of producing energy. I absolutely detest wind power and bristle at any suggestion that wind is "green" - not remotely. Closed loop geothermal is not intermittent and its hard to find a down side on any aspect of this as a solution. Plus it entirely eliminates the need to have a fuel as a combustion source in order to produce power.
Took me a while to reply - I was upgrading to a new computer, with the usual hassles. I'm a lifelong pilot and until Covid owned my own plane. Flying across the USA at lower than jet liner levels would make you cry at the massive eyesore of wind and solar.
What is most fascinating now is that it is 5 months since Eavor received a BILLION Euros in funding - and I have yet to hear a peep out of ANY of the left wing, right wing, or mainstream EcoAlarmist sources about them. Only very small articles with short mentions. Why, it almost seems as if these people don't WANT there to be an actual solution...
After EPA for 8 years, EcoAlarmist, Inc. needs a reason to exist and solving problems cramps their style. If Quaise and Eavor (and alike pan out), these little trolls' heads are going to explode trying to figure out what to do next.
Precisely.
"Although the paper doesn’t give exact projections, it uses a “20-year horizon” and claims that building the infrastructure for a “sustainable energy economy will cost $10 trillion” while continuing to rely on hydrocarbons will cost, they claim, about $14 trillion."
How can the transition to renewables and electric transportation be accomplished without using conventional vehicles that rely on hydrocarbons?
If done properly (i.e. get the government completely out of it and wait for REAL solutions which actually cost less), the cost will be less than $0 (transitioning will happen because it SAVES money). It will also occur much faster that way.
Real solutions (regardless of financing) will still need conventional vehicles for all of the transportation required. Renewables move nothing but require transportation for their own manufacture and installations. A little realism costs very little.
They certainly will at least in the short term.
Just as it appears we have a true solution emerging for grid power (closed loop geothermal, predicted by NREL and IEAA to eventually become as cheap as $40/MWH, or 33% less than combined cycle natural gas), it looks like we probably have a winner for mobile energy storage which can challenge the supremacy of hydrocarbons. Consider first that an entire Tesla drivetrain (inverter, charger, motors) now costs less than $1000 to manufacture - far less than any ICE engine plus transmission etc. So, the only things standing in the way of EVs kicking ICE butt (economically speaking) is cheap reliable grid power and cheaper batteries.
For the latter, it may be just a bit premature to say "we are there" but it appears we are. Influit Energy solved the energy density problem of flow batteries, which have existed for over 100 years. Their Gen 1 product is set to have a system energy density of about 1.23x LiIon, for about 1/2 the cost. They are commencing production for their first customer, the USAF, as we speak. Their Gen 2 product (here it gets into projections) they believe will provide 4-5x the energy density of LiIon for 1/3 of the cost. That's a 300+ mile range Tesla with a battery pack costing $6,800 vs the current $20,000, or a 900+ mile range Tesla for about the same price.
Making projections of the future based on current front runners is foolish - like making projections about the video storage market based on VHS vs Beta.
In the short term is likely to be longer than you think. Evs kicking CVs butt will not happen as long as installing solar and wind projects... and EV charging stations requires CVs using gasoline and biofuels (which depend on gasolines).
Ayn Rand is supposed to have written: "You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of reality."
She did indeed. I will point out that you don't know how long I think it will take for ICE to "go away." It may never go away entirely. The Navy patented a process several years ago to make clean-burning carbon neutral synthetic diesel from seawater - the principle cost driver is the cost of electricity. Find a cheap enough source of electricity, and ICE may remain a force for a very long time - at least for niche purposes. But, in that event it won't be the same - the warmistas will have nothing to cry about with clean ICE.
It takes about 22 years for about 80% of ICE vehicles built to reach the end of their lives. If every vehicle built from today forward were an EV, it would still be nearly 30 years before they were effectively gone. However, economic reality drives the purchasing behavior of 8 billion "greedy consumers." The moment EVs become an obviously "better deal" than ICE, ICE sales will plummet just like horse sales plummeted after the turn of the century (1900).
Well I have to agree that nobody knows how long Mr. Galt will think about anything. The reality is that fossil fuels (for better or worse) will be required for transportation before EVs can take over. What that means is fossil fuels will be needed... and no amount of rhetoric to the contrary will make a bit of difference.
"Although the paper doesn’t give exact projections, it uses a “20-year horizon” and claims that building the infrastructure for a “sustainable energy economy will cost $10 trillion” while continuing to rely on hydrocarbons will cost, they claim, about $14 trillion."
How can the transition to renewables and electric transportation be accomplished without using conventional vehicles that rely on hydrocarbons?
I believe some of the The 16 trillion is to build more wells refineries etc. the current carbon extraction system needs to be constantly added on to as wells run dry over time. One thing lots of people don’t count when they look at their fuel usage is that on average it takes bout as much gas to get the gas to your gas station as you use. The gas needed to extract the oil from the ground transport the oil to refineries, refine the oil into usable gasoline then transport the gasoline to the station is a depending on where about equal to what you use. Governments help subsidies some of those costs which is why it’s part of the 16 trillion.
That sounds more like "business as usual," not an "expense to transition."
Yes, that's part of the transition. But all of that relies on conventional vehicles that run on fossil fuels. There is no way around that for the foreseeable future.
I can't believe that we've made it this far chasing unicorn farts and pixie dust. None of these goals are staked in any kind of reality, but we are plowing trillions into achieving them. The all green fantasy has to be one of the biggest grifts in the history of civilization.
Net zero isn't actually zero. Pushing it off on the next state or next country doesn't eliminate anything. The fantasy that we'll be able to quit mining, smelting, and building once we get enough green energy is thinking in way simpler terms than reality. Upping from 10 to 100 isn't nearly as easy as you make it sound.
This is all a dream, none of it will happen. The world economy will crash due to this stupid “transition that isn’t “.
Nah. Climate change is linear and proceeding at a glacial (pun intended) pace. Innovation is exponential. Which one wins?
Your comment is correct insofar as the current propped-up technologies are concerned. Solar, wind, and LiIon batteries are all pretty much dead ends.
The earth has all the energy we need for the next 5 billion years - until the sun goes red giant and incinerates the planet. In the past year, we've figured out how to harness it. 7 plants are already funded since December, and the cost per kWh will (after a learning curve) drop to less than the cost of energy from natural gas. See Eavor dotcom.
For transportation, something like Influit Energy will win. No toxic nor rare materials. Better energy density than LiIon. Can't catch on fire. Can refuel in minutes, just like petrofuels, or recharge overnight at home.
Real solutions are coming, but real solutions were never what the zealots wanted. They wanted an excuse to siphon trillions of taxpayer money to political groups.
Why do you think these commies are doing all this if it isn't to crash the economy????
Well, crashing the economy is one goal but the immediate siphoning of taxpayer monies to favored political groups is an immediate benefit to them - the real "green" they are after.
To the conquerors go the spoils, though, eh?
Which always puts Libertarians / Classical Liberals at a disadvantage, since they are uninterested in "conquering."
We have watched this so often since the greens took over a corner of the left. Think of all the cash they have received from the government?preferred NGO's either as direct payments or loan guarantees then they produce nothing and close. Solyndra was an attention grabber but just the tip of the iceberg. The climate change act will squander billions more, I wonder how many of the players are the same this time?
The Greens are not a corner of the left. They ARE the left - simply those focused on a portion of their plan to seize unlimited power.
Exponential growth can be a hard thing for some people to wrap their heads around. The Photovoltaic industry has kept up an average 38% year on year growth rate over the last two decades, meaning in 2022 it produced 660 times more PV than it did in 2002. Apply that growth rate to the 2022 world battery production of 700 GWh and you get enough production to do a master plan every 6 months. Linear thinkers get surprised by the future every time.
PV panels now account for only 21% of the total cost of solar. If they were free, we could only hope for a 20% cost reduction - and they still wouldn't work at night.
How many days of battery backup do you need with solar as your primary power source in Minnesota? Alaska?
Solar and wind are distractions. Closed loop geothermal is here, enough power for the next 5 billion years. Current leader is Eavor dotcom, but there will be many, many others.
Fully installed PV has been averaging double digit cost reductions for well over a decade. It's not just the panel prices coming down, it's everything.
For a sanity check on your closed loop geothermal: 13% efficiency on the Rankine cycle gives you a huge generation cost even if the drilling was free. NREL's "should cost" is 81.5 million for a 9 MWe plant (if it works, and for how long...). You can install 100 MW of solar for that and it's fully bankable/ financeable at ultra low rates... I wouldn't bet against geothermal to be part of the picture in some areas but it's not going to take much of the market. It will simply be too easy to use power on demand or store it in cheap forms (ie thermal storage).
We already have tons of options for low temp geothermal- all the enhanced oil recovery projects have heated their reservoirs with steam for decades. Put water down an already existing (free) hole and comes back up at near boiling (around Eavor's temps). The issue is that the low delta Ts make for horribly expensive generation costs, and like every other geothermal project including Eavor's they suffer from reduced output as the heat is depleted locally.
"Fully installed PV has been averaging double digit cost reductions for well over a decade. It's not just the panel prices coming down, it's everything."
Not disputing that. In fact, I did a "Sunday study" (Google, Excel) and plotted prices for solar (equipment anticipated life vs output vs cost) since about 1960 (about as far back as you could even get solar). Guess what? It's been exponential decline (about 3.5 years for prices to drop by half) since then. Problem is, unless we see a breakthrough (i.e. increase in panel efficiency, reducing required number of panels per kWh) we're coming to an end of that and will only see marginal reductions henceforth.
"For a sanity check on your closed loop geothermal: 13% efficiency on the Rankine cycle gives you a huge generation cost even if the drilling was free."
Incorrect. When the "fuel" is free, efficiency doesn't matter a whit. All that matters is full lifetime costs divided by lifetime kWh delivered. They anticipate that the bores will last 50+ years (there may be "repairs" from time to time from seismic shifting, but since they can now "reconnect" loops which break that would be a nominal relative effort compared to the original drilling). I'd happily bet money that geothermal will reign supreme within a decade as the clear choice for new and replacement generation. Too many advantages - low use of land, low use of materials, build a whole plant in under a year, etc.
Also, as technique improves it will additionally become practical to simply dig deeper for an increased temperature delta. The theory of "local depletion" becomes somewhat meaningless when they build with that in mind - single bore; multiple "fields" radiating in different directions - simply rotate the "field in use" and the other fields recover through natural conduction.
The earth won't run out of heat in the next 5 billion years...
"Incorrect. When the "fuel" is free, efficiency doesn't matter a whit. All that matters is full lifetime costs divided by lifetime kWh delivered."
You're not following. Low efficiency means larger rotating equipment and cooling loads (cooling towers, etc) which in turn drive higher costs. If the power block alone is over $2.40 per watt there's an implicit floor cost. And suggesting that you can simply run it for longer to recoup your investment sounds great until you get to bankability. Now you're trying to prove to a banker that this new tech which has only just been commissioned is going to last for 50 years. And your future O&M cost will come down because drilling, which will be required, will get cheaper? Good luck with that. Do you really believe they'll give you the same interest rates as Solar projects any time soon? Because cost of money dominates LCOE, especially with longer term financing.
"Problem is, unless we see a breakthrough (i.e. increase in panel efficiency, reducing required number of panels per kWh) we're coming to an end of that and will only see marginal reductions henceforth."
You many or may not realize this has been the mantra of many for the last decade and a half. There are plenty of studies from 10-15 years ago that suggest it's impossible for solar to continue getting cheaper at the same rate. And yet here we are- Solar's kept up a 24% learning rate and even more conservative estimates that show that reducing put it will out of reach for new, unbankable technologies any time soon. Short version I'd be happy to take your bet. I believe you seriously underestimate the challenge and time it takes to get a new technology bankable which is a requirement before any tech can be deployed at real scale.
"You're not following. Low efficiency means larger rotating equipment and cooling loads (cooling towers, etc) which in turn drive higher costs."
No, I followed completely and already answered that:
" All that matters is full lifetime costs divided by lifetime kWh delivered."
In other words, if they save $20 million in drilling costs but have an additional $10 million in equipment costs for the same energy output and duty lifetime, they come out ahead with the lower temp solution. I'm sure they have lots of bright minds to figure out where that optimum trade-off point is; the drilling tech is capable of depths up to 20km, so it will be a purely economic decision.
"Now you're trying to prove to a banker that this new tech which has only just been commissioned is going to last for 50 years."
The only thing you have to convince them of is that you can keep the bore open for a predictable maintenance cost. Every other piece of machinery is already a known quantity to the bankers from other endeavors, including the Rankine cycle converters. Interest rates will drive a go/no-go decision.
"You many or may not realize this has been the mantra of many for the last decade and a half. "
I don't pay any attention to the fan-boiz. I run the numbers myself - it is a relatively straightforward calculation. The sum of panels, inverters, and other electronics are already less than half the installation cost, the rest mostly labor - meaning that at the current efficiency levels of panels, there is no more than, say, about a theoretical 30% remaining savings even possible unless robots start automatically performing installs. That's it - there's nowhere else to cut costs.
That said, I do believe solar will achieve 40% on thin film produced using a commercial roll to roll printing process - becoming nearly as cheap as paint. I simply do not count on that in the short term, as "breakthroughs" and "paradigm shifts" are notoriously tricky to predict. Possibilities include Perovskite PV and nanoantenna arrays. Around 1970, for example, the cover of Popular Science proclaimed that "Clean, cheap fusion is only 30 years away!" It still is...
"The only thing you have to convince them of is that you can keep the bore open for a predictable maintenance cost. Every other piece of machinery is already a known quantity"
You said it yourself: "It is anticipated bores will last 50 years"... Prove it to a skeptical banker's independent engineer. Again and again, because local geology will make for different degradation rates. It will also impact the rate of corrosion in heat exchanges. And if you need to base your loan on a 50 year payback you incur other risks: who's to say some other tech doesn't come along and make yours obsolete? The discount rate will be such that in the early days any assumptions past 30 years will be worthless. I'm betting heavily you've never had to get a technology through bankability yourself.
I'll also note the even the company's rosy projections suggest "the technology could one day supply 10-20% of world electricity". Shouldn't that be 100%? Clean, baseload energy anywhere- what makes up the rest? Meanwhile wind and solar was already over 10% of world electricity combined a year ago and still increasing exponentially- solar alone will be over 10% before close loop geothermal becomes bankable (assuming it ever does). Seems like unless Eavor's projections are wrong you've already lost.
"I run the numbers myself - it is a relatively straightforward calculation." With assumptions for future efficiency gain, etc all baked in. And apparently you've figured it out better than the guys over at NREL...? Sure.
At one point years ago I tried to install a small wind turbine by Bergey on my acreage in KS - way before the huge wind farms that are now only 2 miles away. The county DNR wouldn't approve the battery room. Big industrial batteries like those in fork trucks lined up in containment. They were too hazardous for approval. My MS was in industrial systems including power, and am fully certified in HazMat by the HMAC, I couldn't be trusted with the permit. That told me all I needed to know about KS wind power.
You should have used these - not HazMat, last forever. https://ironedison.com/product-category/batteries/nickel-iron/
This "linear thinker" actually has experience developing mineral resources. In the early 1970's I participated in the development of a large Molybdenum mine on the continental divide in Colorado. It was designed to extract 40,000 to 50,000 tons per day of ORE. The largest mine being developed at that time. And the LAST mine of that size of any kind in the US. It is still in operation. It caved in the top of a mountain on the east side of the divide and filled most of a valley with tailings on the west side. Nothing like it has been developed in the 50 years since then.
It is relatively simple even for individuals whose skills are pretty much limited to arithmetic to calculate the amount of resource development necessary to facilitate JUST THE BATTERIES for the cars and light trucks that will replace current demand. In round numbers, it will require the development of the equivalent of 50 to 75 mines like the last one that was started 50 years ago. Each mine will take about 10 years to develop from initial discovery thru permitting to production. And as a whole these developments will annually generate tailings (waste) equal in volume to three to five times the annual volume of solid waste we currently dispose of in landfills. And the composition of the mine/mill waste will be anywhere from sightly more toxic than current solid landfill to MUCH more toxic.
Further complicating the process is that the necessary developments cannot just be developed in somebody else's back yard -- they have to be developed where the ores are located.
Interestingly, it does not get better. What I have cited above is only for car and light truck batteries. It is not for windmills, solar panels and transformation and transmission facilities which will likely double (or more) the resources that will be required to develop facilities to generate and transmit "green energy".
Oh, and most of these processes require water -- you know, that stuff of which there is not enough of right now in many of the places where we expect we will discover the requisite minerals.
Finally, mineral development does not generally follow Moore's Law. Yes, economies of scale may be recognized early in the exploitation of minerals. But as exploitation proceeds, developers are compelled to develop lower and lower quality resources that cancel out the expected economies of scale. That's pretty much where copper is worldwide now. And it's where oil and gas will be in the not too distant future.
Yep. Solar + wind + batteries simply require too many resources. Closed loop geothermal will be the answer. It will take a couple of years to get the cost down lower than power from natural gas, but it will happen.
Will transitioning to closed loop geothermal enable the hydrogen fuel cell transportation by allowing the production of electrolysis generated hydrogen at a reasonable cost? If not, then I don't see how closed loop geothermal solves the EV transportation mining problem.
Hydrogen "sounds great," and because of that it has been the "fuel of the future" for 100 years. I suspect it still will be in another 100 years. There is literally no advantage to using Hydrogen as a portable fuel when compared to other alternatives. Tough to store, low energy density, expensive in terms of energy to produce, capable of generating explosions. The fundamental nature of Hydrogen as a non-dense chemical storage medium to be "burned" will never change.
If we ever get to the point that we have converted almost all transportation to batteries yet still need a chemical fuel to burn for niche markets (like long distance jets), a vastly better solution is already available. Our Navy has patented a process to produce clean burning carbon neutral synthetic diesel from seawater. Search: "Low-cost catalyst helps turn seawater into fuel at scale"
The primary cost driver to produce it is the cost of electricity. Like hydrogen, it requires more energy in than you get back out (like an inefficient battery). However, it can be used as a drop-in (pour-in?) substitute using our existing transportation infrastructure and equipment. It can even be "mixed" with traditional diesel, just as ethanol is mixed with gasoline today. The same process can also make a synthetic gasoline - but I suspect that within 5 years there will be little or nothing gasoline is used for which can't be replaced by some form of battery. My current favorite for portable energy which is entering low-volume production today is Influit Energy. Already 1.23x more energy dense than LiIon at about 1/2 the cost for materials, they anticipate a generation 2 product which will be 4-5x more energy dense - more than enough for almost any intended use. Non-toxic, requires no scarce materials, cannot burn, and it can either be charged in place like any other EV battery, or the spent electrolytes can be fast-swapped for charged electrolytes in minutes just like fueling your ICE vehicle. Oh - and if tanks are ruptured, the mixed liquids will merely heat up for a few hours.
Thank you for the expert reply and the heads up on Influit Energy. It looks very promising.
I plan to buy stock when it goes public. However, before I do I want to know they have a "patentable process" - if not, they will simply be imitated. Flow batteries are not new, they've been around for 100 years. Nanoparticles are not new. Suspending solids in an equal-density liquid is not new. However, perhaps the patent courts will recognize this as patentable.
Great! Now calculate how much HAZARDOUS CHEMICAL waste will be generated with that kind of growth.. then how about adding every imaginable battery operated toy, gadget, & tool to the growing massive MOUNTAINS of TOXIC BATTERY WASTE going into landfills all over the place.. BTW, when they crush the now obsolescent 1st, 2nd,3rd generation Solar Panels (which is what they are doing) do you know what gases are going directly into our atmosphere (look up aerosolized Benzene/Lead, etc..). Yeah, next you can get ready for massive new taxes to start covering disposal costs NOT BEING CURRENTLY ACCOUNTED FOR.. The pushers are getting their pockets lined at the expense of a population of fools!
Depends on what kind of batteries they use. ESS Inc and Form Energy use iron and water. LiIon is a non-starter for global grid storage - there simply isn't enough lithium and all the other reasons you mention.
But, unreliables are probably an overall dead-end solution anyway. Except in the desert, you'd need at least a week's worth of backup to actually retire the fossil fuel backup generation capacity, maybe more. MOST of that storage would never be used, making it pure expense with no offsetting revenue.
Nuclear costs 3-5x more per KWH than natural gas, with absolutely no predictions claiming it will ever get lower than 3x - disastrous for the world economy.
That leaves only closed loop geothermal. Odd how none of the Warmistas are even talking about that...
On one level it's going to be an environmental disaster. Our grand children are going to be looking around at all this old stuff windmills and solar panels dotting the landscape and ask us what the hell we did to the place. But it's going to happen, and I believe it's still better than the alternatives, and most without a dog in the hunt (unlike the author) agree.
First it "can't possibly work", then "it's going to be terrible if it does" and "it's all a conspiracy". FUD thrown against the wall to see what sticks. Meanwhile you're reading the blog of a bought and paid for shill of the fossil fuels industry believing every word. It's a crock.
All the competent analysts say it's coming. Check Bloomberg New Energy, which does their analysis purely based on economics, not carbon or regulation. Will it be 100% in 20 years? No, but it's happening, because the economics dictate that it will. Utility scale PV costs have been decreasing double digits per year for over a decade- over a 5x reduction. It doesn't need to keep that much longer at all to obliterate the energy world as it was a decade ago.
We will definitely transition. It won't be solar, wind, and batteries for the most part. Those are dead ends.
There’s a reason why fast-growing trees never reach the sky, despite initial projections.
What makes you think that mining and manufacturing can keep pace with this exponential growth? It's easy to grow exponentially when your industry is comparably small and not encroaching on the limits of other industries, but the idea that this can continue indefinitely is absurd.
Link to an article from 2005- PV panel grow will stall due to a shortage of polysilicon: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7502547
Prices spiked and the market reacted. If there are sufficient raw materials (there are) and incentive (there is, look at lithium prices now) industry will find a way. Even with a "mature" industry. US aircraft production 1939-1943: over 90% year on year growth. Combat aircraft 150% growth year on year 1940-1944, doing in four years what it took the PV industry 12 to do. It can't continue indefinitely, but it doesn't need to.
So, 4 years of growth during the strongest possible economic pressure (total war,) and then what happened combat aircraft production after the war ended? What is the economic driver that's going to push humanity to do this? Most people and nations in the world have already proven that they don't give a shit about climate change enough to do much about it, and a large percentage of the ones that do understand the math involved well enough to know that building a power grid based on wind, solar and batteries is insane.
There are much better low carbon options available that don't require miracles to work and aren't absurdly wasteful of land and materials. The core concept of using inverters and batteries instead of rotating mass and copper coils to balance grid scale AC power is inherently wasteful and impedes efficient recycling of materials.
If you think that the future is going to be anything like you described you should put your money where your mouth is and invest in lithium mineral rights, and we will see. I work in the electrical industry and stand to benefit from this fantasy if it actually happened, but I am also smart enough to know it's a fantasy. Elon obviously is too, but he's still happy to profit from the idea. Using lithium batteries for grid scale power is a fantastic way to keep the price of his products high because it's a need that can never be met, and I'm 100% sure that he's aware of this fact.
The simple driver is greed. Solar and wind are now the cheapest ways to make energy in many parts of the world, and because they're engineering and production based they are only getting exponentially cheaper. The trick is that to get that low price you need to be able to take the energy on their schedule, not yours. If you can figure out how to do that there are fortunes to be made. Keep in mind that until a couple years ago this wasn't true: wind and solar were significantly more expensive, so there was zero incentive to figure this out. Now there is, and as renewables get cheaper the incentive just gets bigger. If you're in the business you likely know that in many parts of the Midwest wholesale prices for electricity go negative and average of four hours a day? Meaning if you can charge a battery in four hours the power companies will pay you to do it? Greed. Money makes the world go round, and if there's money in it industry will respond.
And no I wouldn't invest in Lithium mineral rights, though if you want to place a long bet look at SQM- when they switch from open pond evaporation to direct extraction they'll get an exponential production bump.
Making AC power isn't that useful if you can't make it when the power is needed. This is not a market waiting to be exploited by batteries, it's a fact of life integral to power generation that dictates everything we do with our power grid. In an emergency or for short periods of time it can make sense to use inverters and batteries to stabilize power flows, but it's never going to be an efficient or environmentally friendly way to operate the power grid at a massive scale for long periods of time.
Even daily fluctuations in renewable output are extremely cost prohibitive to cover using batteries, that is why grid operators instead use pumped hydro and gas or hydroelectric fast switching capacity to make up for these shortfalls. Obviously though, wind and solar don't just fluctuate on a daily basis but also seasonally in most places, and these discrepancies are impossible to cover with batteries. I encourage you to look at the numbers yourself if you initially disagree.
If you are actually serious about using primarily wind and solar for grid power you should be looking at pumped hydro, not batteries. Using batteries only makes sense to the people who sell batteries. Personally, I'd rather see my money spent on clean power that works, and doesn't require a massive amount of resources, land, and trash to accomplish less than the competition.
"Making AC power isn't that useful if you can't make it when the power is needed." Because we built a world around energy that's available on demand, but that's not the world we're talking about.
Cost of power in the US through 2020: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_%28LCOE%2C_Lazard%29_-_renewable_energy.svg
When you've got a source of cheaper power it makes sense to build more of it- even if you need to throw some away it's still cheaper than the alternative, especially if that alternative is a gas peaker plant. How much more you build depends on how much cheaper it gets. Bloomberg's models have us overbuilding solar by 3x by 2050 to address seasonality, etc.
So back to that power not being useful because it's not on your schedule... Today I can buy a heat pump water heater with 120 gallon capacity that's got enough power and storage to heat both the house and hot water for a typical home. Add a second tank and the same heat pump can store cold water for AC. Run that heat pump daily when prices are cheap and you've got your heating and cooling fully covered. Payback can be under 2 years if you have solar or access to wholesale electricity prices in many places, and it's only going to get better.
In short the economics dictate that we make hay when the sun shines and don't when it doesn't. The carrot's big if you can do that.
I will add that in most cases that I'm aware of, the reason for any near-zero electricity prices is due to an over-investment in wind and solar and does not actually represent "free power," but instead wasted power that was paid for by utility customers and taxpayers and will now be thrown away because it's not being generated when it's needed.
Trying to capitalize on a problem created by irresponsible political interference in the power grid with more irresponsible investment in a different unecessary and wasteful technology is not an impressive endorsement for either one. Power grids that don't heavily invest in wind and solar don't generally have gross overproductions of power when it's not needed and can't be used, this problem doesn't need to exist. If it's going to exist, it should have been planned out better and done in an area where the power could be stored with efficient pumped hydro, as nuclear plants did in the past. If we held wind and solar generators to the same standards that we hold other generation systems to, there would be a whole lot less of both.
There is an interesting debate on this article in the FaceBook forum Renewable vs Nuclear Debate. Basic innumeracy even from solar advocates who claim to be engineers.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2081763568746983/posts/3449479285308731/
It's all about scale. I often ask people to estimate how many days a billion seconds is after telling them a million seconds is roughly 11days. They are gobsmacked at the answer. People seem to think that FF can be replaced in the background with zero disruption by regressive renewables mainly because, IMO, they have zero understanding of scale.
It’s a fair analysis if Tesla were the only OEM of batteries in the world. But we all know that’s not the case. There are dozens of such OEMs. Your main takeaway / calculation is, therefore, meaningless at best. Recommend you do a little extra work to estimate current and expected total battery manufacturing capacity across all OEMs and then re-calculate your number. Perhaps you’d be better served by focusing on feedstock material shortages instead?
Partly true. Lithium for global grid storage is, however, a dead end for the simple reason that there is not enough lithium in the world to provide a week's worth of backup for the grid.