Energy Transition
May 28, 2021 10:04 PM   Subscribe

Where Wind and Solar Power Need to Grow for America to Meet Its Goals [ungated link] - "A broad shift toward renewable energy could transform landscapes and coastlines all over the United States." (Net Zero America Project)

also btw...
  • Biden Administration Strikes A Deal To Bring Offshore Wind To California - "The Biden administration plans to open the California coast to offshore wind development, ending a long-running stalemate with the Department of Defense that has been the biggest barrier to building wind power along the Pacific Coast. The move adds momentum to the administration's goal of reaching 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035, coming just weeks after the country's first large-scale offshore wind farm was approved off the coast of New England."[1,2]
  • Headwinds: Offshore wind will take time to carry factory jobs to U.S. - "For the first several years at least, most of the manufacturing jobs stemming from the U.S. offshore wind industry will be in Europe. Offshore wind project developers plan to ship massive blades, towers and other components for at least the initial wave of U.S. projects from factories in France, Spain and elsewhere before potentially opening up manufacturing plants on U.S. shores... because suppliers need to see a deep pipeline of approved U.S. projects, along with a clear set of regulatory incentives like federal and state tax breaks, before committing to siting and building new American factories, [wind turbine makers] say – a process that could take years."
  • From powerful tidal turbines to huge wave machines, Scotland is becoming a hub for marine energy - "In mid-May, a prototype wave energy converter weighing 38-metric tons arrived in Orkney, an archipelago located in waters north of mainland Scotland. Later this summer the bright yellow, 20 meter long piece of kit — dubbed Blue X — will be transported to one of the European Marine Energy Centre's test sites, where it will undergo initial sea trials. Developed by a firm called Mocean Energy, the Blue X will be the latest piece of technology to be put through its paces at Orkney-based EMEC... Since its inception in 2003, EMEC has become a major hub for the development of wave and tidal power, helping to put the U.K. at the heart of the planet's emerging marine energy sector."
  • End of wind power waste? Vestas unveils blade recycling technology - "Using the new technology the glass or carbon fibre is separated from the resin and then chemicals further separate the resin into base materials, that are 'similar to virgin materials' that can then be used for construction of new blades. Vestas said. The project is a cooperation between Vestas; chemical producer Olin, which produces resin for turbine blades; the Danish Technological Institute, an independent research and technology institute; and Denmark's Aarhus University. The project aims to develop the technology for industrial scale production within three years and also sees potential for the technology to be used for airplane and car components."
  • Sensor-driven turbine platforms could unlock 4,000 TWh of offshore wind - "In US waters alone, 58 percent of offshore wind capacity—some 4,200 TWh per year—is beyond the reach of fixed-foundation wind turbines, which are commercially limited to depths of less than 60 m. Offshore wind represents a massive untapped resource and could go a long way toward addressing the approximately 4,000 TWh of electricity used in the US last year. To access offshore wind power, companies have been experimenting with floating platforms that would support the industry's largest turbines. Yesterday, General Electric and Glosten, an engineering consultancy, announced a new design and control scheme that could significantly lower the cost of floating offshore wind as part of the ARPA-E ATLANTIS program."
  • China-s First Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Rolls Out - "China's first floating offshore wind turbine is now rolling off the production line, the Chinese wind turbine manufacturer, MingYang Smart Energy, said."
  • European energy giants team up to develop large-scale offshore wind project in North Sea - "Formerly known as Statoil, Equinor's biggest shareholder is the Norwegian state. A significant player in the oil and gas industry, the company has also sought to diversify its portfolio to include renewables. Among other things, it is a key backer of the Dogger Bank Wind Farm, a major offshore wind project off the coast of northeast England. In June 2020, Norwegian authorities opened up two areas in the North Sea — the aforementioned Sørlige Nordsjø II and another called Utsira Nord — for the development of offshore renewables."
  • First Turbine Up at World's Largest Offshore Wind Farm - "The first of the total 165 wind turbines has been installed on the Hornsea Two offshore wind farm in the UK, where the wind turbine installation phase began this week... Once commissioned in 2022, Hornsea Two will become the largest operating wind farm in the world, taking the mantle from its sister project 1.2 GW Hornsea One."
  • Denmark's Orsted to work with South Korean steel giant on offshore wind, renewable hydrogen - "Orsted wants to develop as much as 1.6 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind in the area, with the company saying commissioning of these facilities could take place in 2026 or 2027. This timeline is subject to a number of conditions, including permits, an off-take agreement and a final investment decision. Looking at the bigger picture, authorities in South Korea want to develop 12 GW of offshore wind capacity by the year 2030."
  • Unusual Property in Hydrogen Fuel Device Discovered – Could Be Ultimate Guide to Self-Improvement - "When Mi's Si/GaN device achieved a record-breaking 3 percent solar-to-hydrogen efficiency, he wondered how such ordinary materials could perform so extraordinarily well in an exotic artificial photosynthesis device – so he turned to senior author and Berkeley Lab scientist Francesca Toma for help."[3]
  • Batteries used in hearing aids could be key to the future of renewable energy - "Such advances are injecting new hope that rechargeable zinc-air batteries will one day be able to take on lithium. Because of the low cost of their materials, grid-scale zinc-air batteries could cost $100 per kilowatt-hour, less than half the cost of today's cheapest lithium-ion versions."
posted by kliuless (27 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
I haven't read any of the links but I will say this, which I've been thinking about for a while...

Have you ever been to any of the oil distribution towns on the caprock in West Texas? Or anywhere similarly entangled with oil and its byproducts in a production sense? All that collection and refining equipment that dominates the town with its lights and its smell... its SMELL...

Why aren't people bitching about that? Why are they resigned to it being a fact of their life, living with that stench and those pumpjacks to the horizon (it's really flat)?

Now... Okay... Welcome to green technology. It also has equipment and things required which change the area in which they are placed.

But they have NO SMELL.

Accept the new tech pollution, enjoy your nostrils. You're welcome.
posted by hippybear at 10:43 PM on May 28, 2021 [18 favorites]




On wind energy solid waste (i.e. tired turbine blades): your per capita share by mass over 20 years is 9 kilos.

For coal? And here we're talking about just the solid waste, not the CO2: 40 days to get that much per person. And then how long does it take your garbage bags to weigh nine kilos per person in your house? Shorter than that, probably...

YouTube video version of this thesis, Medium post version.
posted by tss at 1:26 AM on May 29, 2021 [16 favorites]


Excellent post! Off to read.
posted by meinvt at 2:28 AM on May 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


In terms of inspiring ideas, I’d like to add Finnish company Polar Night Energy and their plans to use sand as a storage medium for renewable energy. Sand - pretty much and kind - can be heated to temperatures of several hundred degrees. Because it is a good insulator, it can hold that energy for months. Interview with the founders.
posted by rongorongo at 3:14 AM on May 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


Biden Administration Defends Huge Alaska Oil Drilling Project [NYT]

The administration declined to explain how its position on the Willow project aligns with its climate change policies. But in its court filing, the government said the Trump administration adequately considered Willow’s impacts on fish, caribou and polar bear habitat. It also upheld the method used by the prior administration to account for the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the project.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:10 AM on May 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


grid-scale zinc-air batteries could cost $100 per kilowatt-hour
Li-Ion will be this cheap soon if it isn't already. It's hard to compete with that phone/laptop/car/grid learning curve.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 6:37 AM on May 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


The developments in offshore wind have been astounding. Especially in the shallow, sandy waters of the North Sea, the rate at which the UK, Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands have been building is pretty amazing, as is the rate of cost decrease. The UK is now targeting 40GW of offshore wind by the end of the decade and that is pretty plausible given the available pipeline.

For reference, average demand on the GB electricity grid is only 30GW and there's about 10GW of onshore wind and 14GW of solar. It's not very windy today so only 3% of our power is from wind at this moment but 22% is from solar, 8% biomass, 25% nuclear (of which 6% in France), and 36% CCGT. There is no coal on the grid at all.

Only 10 years ago, there would have been 25% CCGT, the amount of nuclear, and most of the rest coal.

If you want to know why there is so much interest in something as energetically implausible as green hydrogen, we'll soon have a few thousand hours a year when we have excess electricity even after demand side response and after filling up the batteries (there's already 1.5GW, 4.5MW by end of 2022). So if electrolyser capex costs come down (big if) then the energetic efficiency of hydrogen production only matters compared to other processes that could be ramped up quickly, have low capital costs, and high electricity consumption.

I really think it's important to spread the message that the technology for 90% clean grids is completely uncontroversially here. This is a deployment exercise we're looking at.

People continue to talk and think about how exactly the last 10% will work (at the moment, the trajectory in places like US and UK with lots of gas generation is to just keep the capacity around and use progressively less and less every year) and how to decarbonise home heating, steel making, etc. but if you gave me or virtually anyone else who spends their time thinking about energy systems $5tn / year for ten years, we'd spend 95% of it in the same way and not really disagree about how to spend it until about eight years in when we got down to the last ergs of the system.

I go back and forth on how to think about "climate doomers", on the one hand, they're right that on our current global policy track, we're looking at between 2.7 and 3.1 degrees of warming by 2100 which would be profoundly catastrophic. (2.4 degrees based on committed targets, the gap is due to targets which have not yet led to policy and/or funding). They're also right about the horrors that this will bring. My disagreement is essentially about tactics. I think that making the scale of the threat clear to people does not actually motivate them, it scares them so much that they block it out. A lot of "climate denialism" is a reaction to being told that unless they do something they think is impossible, their grandchildren will inherit a blasted hellscape. Of course, a rational response to that is to try anyway but people are not rational and so they choose to believe that it isn't real so they don't have to make an impossible choice.

Tell those same people that for a few hundred a year, we can get most of the way there, and suddenly they do believe that global warming is real (i.e. they knew it was all along, deep down) and are willing to vote to make the solutions happen.
posted by atrazine at 7:28 AM on May 29, 2021 [34 favorites]


Locally, there is starting to be some pretty strong pushback on permitting renewables (ie, wind and solar) projects at the local level, with some counties imposing a moratorium on new developments. Right now only California is moving forward with off-shore wind; the battles will be epic once Oregon and Washington start to open offshore areas for development.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:48 AM on May 29, 2021


One of the interesting ideas I've come across is that when most vehicles are electric, they can effectively be used to store energy from the grid, and it can be sold back when there's high demand, much as people do with their excess solar energy. So if you're not using your car today, you can allow the stored energy to be fed back into the grid, and then charge it up again the next night or whatever. Inefficient, possibly, but a useful transitional technology before better storage solutions come online.
posted by pipeski at 8:06 AM on May 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


I know it's a tiny part of all this, but the other day I was out driving with the windows open behind a truck and got a face full of exhaust and I realized that there's a good chance my kids will one day live in a world where that just... isn't a thing. And I know cars are a huge problem even if they aren't emitting greenhouse gases, but for the miles driven in the US in rural areas (1/3 of all miles driven), I'm glad that Ford already has 70,000 F-150 Lightning pre-orders.
posted by gwint at 8:13 AM on May 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


Also the Vestas announcement about turbine recycling is huge. The waste coming from decommissioned blades was really becoming an issue (and a bit of a RW talking point-- so hold onto that link if you hear someone complaining about it)
posted by gwint at 8:17 AM on May 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


How do we consistently own goal this shit?

1) Restore the full 30% tax credit for American manufactured panels using American manufactured solar cells.
2) Tax credit American value adding to any other renewable energy products
3) Bring green manufacturing to the rust belt through some sort of targeted program of manufacturing and value added tax credits.

We're going through a revolution in energy generation and we're politically squandering it. We have all this infrastructure in the Appalachians and local economies wrecked by both decarbonization and natural gas. Why aren't we working to bring green manufacturing jobs to these areas? It boggles the gd mind.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:25 AM on May 29, 2021 [9 favorites]


atrazine, great insights. After three decades of following and advocating for rational energy policy in response to climate change, I'm hesitant but ready to have some new hope. I'm also highly conscious of how cynicism can really slow progress - both in cynically made arguments and genuine cynical response to technology promises.

Bottom line is we don't need to know how to solve the last 10% to fully commit to the next steps. And, we are working on it. A perfect example is building heat. Here in Vermont we are on a path towards a statewide mandate for net-zero construction by 2030. I'm advising the regulators to be as expansive as possible in the definitions of net-zero because I don't want to leave out all the existing building stock. Realistically, there will still be buildings on non-electric fuels at least until 2075. That is okay. If we systematically identify the biggest consumers and get them on renewable electric we will be doing what we need to do.

And in the meantime, I'll keep riding my hobby horse of not writing codes that encourage people to build sprawling patterns of development to fit in solar capacity on site for a "net-zero" badge of honor, but rather to encourage infill growth and credit structures to get people out of their cars as we improve their buildings.
posted by meinvt at 9:27 AM on May 29, 2021 [8 favorites]


1) Restore the full 30% tax credit for American manufactured panels using American manufactured solar cells.
2) Tax credit American value adding to any other renewable energy products


Does anyone know whether this would be legal under WTO rules? It would definitely be illegal in the EU under State Aid regs.

I tend to think that the US is not going to be in a position to outdo Chinese PV manufacturing, so are we talking about siting Chinese companies in the US to manufacture or somehow trying to stop Chinese companies from trading in the US by unbalancing the scales?
posted by biffa at 9:52 AM on May 29, 2021


Bottom line is we don't need to know how to solve the last 10% to fully commit to the next steps. And, we are working on it. A perfect example is building heat.

Given widespread decentralized energy generation with peak capacity well in excess of typical load requirements, which is pretty much what you always get with wind and solar, and given the high proportion of energy from all sources that ends up doing nothing more interesting than heating buildings, sometimes big, dumb and obvious is going to work better than innovative, smart and efficient.

More from Now You Know (1hr, YouTube)
posted by flabdablet at 10:08 AM on May 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


Why aren't people bitching about that? Why are they resigned to it being a fact of their life, living with that stench and those pumpjacks to the horizon (it's really flat)?

FUD, in industrial quantities.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:52 AM on May 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


I really think it's important to spread the message that the technology for 90% clean grids is completely uncontroversially here. This is a deployment exercise we're looking at.

Exactly right. Many politicians, and much of the public, are still ignorant of how fast the technology has advanced over just the last 10 years. At this point, renewables are so cheap, they are bound to win. Mass fossil fuel extraction is doomed, purely on an economic level.

It's already plain to see in the coal industry. The smart people in the oil and gas business know that their number is up too, and are looking ahead to see how some of their assets and capabilities might be repurposed for things like carbon capture and storage, hydrogen production, storage, and transportation, etc.

Some petroleum diehards are still in denial, of course. I work for a publication that covers legal issues related to energy. We covered the Dutch court's ruling this week that Shell must massively cut its greenhouse gas emissions. (That is not a link to the publication I work for, BTW.)

The article we published on this attracted some surprisingly unhinged comments from some people with legal expertise who are connected to the oil industry -- claiming that renewables are an unworkable illusion being pushed on an unwilling public by the UN, and that the Dutch ruling is a cynical ploy to declare economic war on the U.S. It baffles me that these seemingly smart people could embrace conspiracy narratives, rather than acknowledge what's happening, and why it's happening.

At this point, the energy transition is technologically and economically inevitable. It's just a question of how quickly it happens, and whether government policy helps clear the way for it (Biden is making good moves in this regard) or desperately tries to slow it down (that was Trump's approach).
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:54 AM on May 29, 2021 [7 favorites]


The article we published on this attracted some surprisingly unhinged comments from some people with legal expertise who are connected to the oil industry -- claiming that renewables are an unworkable illusion being pushed on an unwilling public by the UN, and that the Dutch ruling is a cynical ploy to declare economic war on the U.S.

Ironically, I know many people who work on renewables at that same company. I actually think this will save the company by forcing it to make an inevitable transition faster (the company had a 45% reduction goal by 2035 which the court moved up to 2030 and made slightly more challenging in other ways).

Here in Vermont we are on a path towards a statewide mandate for net-zero construction by 2030. I'm advising the regulators to be as expansive as possible in the definitions of net-zero because I don't want to leave out all the existing building stock. Realistically, there will still be buildings on non-electric fuels at least until 2075. That is okay. If we systematically identify the biggest consumers and get them on renewable electric we will be doing what we need to do.

I've seen drafts of the documents feeding into the UK's upcoming heat & buildings strategy (like most government documents they're both very secret and their contents are completely obvious) and the conversation here will be almost entirely about existing buildings.

New buildings will mostly be built to high thermal performance with ASHPs. The UK is not as cold as Vermont and as a result we've gotten away with very poorly performing housing stock. A pretty hefty % of it cannot be kept warm in the winter with a low temperature system which means that operating ASHPs with good COP is not possible. A lot of existing construction with solid brick walls or with narrow wall cavities which require internal or external thermal cladding to improve and doing that on brick buildings without causing moisture problems is just hard to get right. I kind of envy American wooden framing as it looks a lot easier to add insulation on the outside since the siding finish often needs occasional replacement in a way that brick doesn't.

I think that doing minimally invasive thermal retrofits is going to be a massive growth business.
posted by atrazine at 7:41 AM on May 30, 2021 [3 favorites]


One of the interesting ideas I've come across is that when most vehicles are electric, they can effectively be used to store energy from the grid, and it can be sold back when there's high demand, much as people do with their excess solar energy. So if you're not using your car today, you can allow the stored energy to be fed back into the grid, and then charge it up again the next night or whatever. Inefficient, possibly, but a useful transitional technology before better storage solutions come online.

We've done some modeling on that. One of the challenges we found is that you can only use vehicles which are plugged in, have a high charge state, and are not likely to be immediately needed in this capacity. Consumption peaks around the time that people come home from their commutes so many cars will be plugged in at home (good) but may be at lower charge states (bad) and in many cases not needed until the next morning (very good, since you're likely to have excess grid energy overnight). Conclusion: Especially in solar-dominated grids (SW US, S. Europe, etc.) you *really* want pervasive chargers at workplaces people are driving to so they are plugged in during solar peaks and then come home to discharge part of their energy.
posted by atrazine at 7:52 AM on May 30, 2021 [3 favorites]


Pervasive chargers in shopping centre car parks should help a fair bit as well. Plus we'd need a standard protocol for both buying and selling electricity at charge points.
posted by flabdablet at 12:40 PM on May 30, 2021


you can only use vehicles which are plugged in, have a high charge state, and are not likely to be immediately needed in this capacity.

If the general expectation becomes that most vehicles are grid-connected any time they're parked, then given the huge disparity between the designed-in maximum range necessary to avoid range anxiety and the actual length of a typical commute, this will tend toward being most vehicles most of the time.
posted by flabdablet at 12:42 PM on May 30, 2021


Back in the EV1 days, Phoenix had charging stations at office parks and shopping centers all over. Some of the chargers stayed in place long after the project was withdrawn.

It's a lack of will that is not moving this forward, not a technology failure. We were doing it 25 years ago.
posted by hippybear at 1:08 PM on May 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


I kind of envy American wooden framing as it looks a lot easier to add insulation on the outside since the siding finish often needs occasional replacement in a way that brick doesn't.

We balance that out by regarding any siding left untouched for 50 years as historic. I’m only partly joking. What I see is that the drive to net zero all construction may be taking us past simpler upgrades on existing buildings. So, rather than an affordable step forward, more and more building owners are facing down major projects. We need a strategy for how to publicly encourage and invest in the decentralized and privatized good that upgrading old buildings turns out to be. At the same time we don’t want to be feeding developers carrots while we pound the rural poor with sticks. It’s a “sticky” problem, but in the last two years I’ve been hearing much more recognition and drive to address it.
posted by meinvt at 2:45 PM on May 30, 2021


Why aren't people bitching about that. There are millions bitching about it. But often the aren't white enough or don't have enough degrees to be supported by the environmental movement, which is funded out of California, the Midwest and DC. So if you don't look the part, you won't get funding, and if you dony get funding, you won't get press. And if you don't get press, there s nothing to post on metafilter.
posted by eustatic at 1:54 PM on May 31, 2021 [1 favorite]


If we are going to take on global warming we are going to need a LOT more of those giant fans.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 7:44 PM on May 31, 2021


It's a lack of will that is not moving this forward, not a technology failure. We were doing it 25 years ago.

DC and other major US cities had the rudiments of a private car charging network in the early 1900s. We're just now getting back to an alternate future we foolishly abandoned over a century ago.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:19 AM on June 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


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