The Remarkable Progress of Renewable Energy

[bilby]

Wind farm with ability to power one million households up and running

Situated 23 kilometers (around 14.3 miles) off the coast of Zeeland, in the southwest of the Netherlands, the 752 megawatt (MW) Borssele 1 & 2 offshore wind farm spans an area of 112 square kilometers. It uses 94 wind turbines from Siemens Gamesa.

In an announcement Friday, Orsted described the facility as the second-largest operating offshore wind farm in the world. The largest, Hornsea One, has a capacity of 1.2 gigawatts (GW) and was also developed by Orsted.

...
A number of major offshore wind projects located in European waters are now in the pipeline. These include the Dogger Bank Wind Farm in Britain, which left the EU in January 2020.

A 50:50 joint venture between SSE Renewables and Equinor, the Dogger Bank facility will have a total capacity of 3.6 GW once completed, making it the largest in the world.

I have to marvel at the scale of those projects.

I know right?? The biggest ones are almost as big as a real power plant! (for the ~30% of the time that the wind is actually blowing).

 

[bilby]

Green Hydrogen: Could It Be Key to a Carbon-Free Economy? - Yale E360 - "Green hydrogen, which uses renewable energy to produce hydrogen from water, is taking off around the globe. Its boosters say the fuel could play an important role in decarbonizing hard-to-electrify sectors of the economy, such as long-haul trucking, aviation, and heavy manufacturing."

I agree. Synfuels like H2 will have an important to play in a renewable-energy economy, because of their much higher density than batteries. H2 itself is difficult to store, because of its low boiling point. But one can make easier-to-store synfuels like ammonia, methanol, and hydrocarbons.

As renewable power prices drop, researchers tally up their added costs | Ars Technica - "Matching demand when the supply of wind and solar varies has costs, but small ones."

Philip Heptonstall and Robert Gross of Imperial College London decided to try to figure out what the costs actually were. After wading through hundreds of studies, the answer they came up with is somewhere between "It's complicated" and "It depends." But the key conclusion is that, even at the high end of the estimates, the added costs of renewables still leave them fairly competitive with carbon-emitting sources.

So energy storage and long-distance transmission are not impossibly expensive.


US renewable energy industry cheers Joe Biden election win as 'beautiful day' | Recharge - I agree.

Betteridge's Law applies.

And "not impossibly expensive" isn't sufficient. They need to be cheaper than other ways of meeting the objective of producing ultra low emissions electricity on demand.

It's the "on demand" part that makes renewables incapable of achieving that objective.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Wind farm with ability to power one million households up and running

More like zero households.

Intermittent sources like solar and wind save some fuel in the generators, that's it.

 

[fromderinside]

Eyup.

So what?

If energy is produced it can be used to produce more energy or enable energy collection from other sources it opens for exploitation. Wind could wind up as starter of an ever expanding energy productive chain.

 

[bilby]

So intermittent electricity is practically valueless.

Electricity in the developed world is a service, not a commodity. You need it when you need it, not when it happens to be available.

If only we could power humanity with activist enthusiasm, renewables would be fucking fantastic. But we can't, and they're not.

Intermittent renewables are like prayers. Hugely popular, widely believed to be extremely important and valuable, considered by many to be a sign of highly moral behaviour, but utterly useless nevertheless.

 

[skepticalbip]

Eyup.

So what?

If energy is produced it can be used to produce more energy or enable energy collection from other sources it opens for exploitation. Wind could wind up as starter of an ever expanding energy productive chain.

Are you suggesting that wind power could be used to drive drilling rigs when drilling for oil?

 

[Angra Mainyu]

So intermittent electricity is practically valueless.

Electricity in the developed world is a service, not a commodity. You need it when you need it, not when it happens to be available.

If only we could power humanity with activist enthusiasm, renewables would be fucking fantastic. But we can't, and they're not.

Intermittent renewables are like prayers. Hugely popular, widely believed to be extremely important and valuable, considered by many to be a sign of highly moral behaviour, but utterly useless nevertheless.

Eventually, they'll make enough big batteries. Expensive and wasteful, but given enough waste of resources on it, doable.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So intermittent electricity is practically valueless.

Electricity in the developed world is a service, not a commodity. You need it when you need it, not when it happens to be available.

If only we could power humanity with activist enthusiasm, renewables would be fucking fantastic. But we can't, and they're not.

Intermittent renewables are like prayers. Hugely popular, widely believed to be extremely important and valuable, considered by many to be a sign of highly moral behaviour, but utterly useless nevertheless.

Eventually, they'll make enough big batteries. Expensive and wasteful, but given enough waste of resources on it, doable.

But until then we aren't accomplishing much.

 

[aupmanyav]

World largest solar energy plant inaugurated this month in Gujarat, India - 30 gigawatts, 72,600 hectares.

 

[bilby]

So intermittent electricity is practically valueless.

Electricity in the developed world is a service, not a commodity. You need it when you need it, not when it happens to be available.

If only we could power humanity with activist enthusiasm, renewables would be fucking fantastic. But we can't, and they're not.

Intermittent renewables are like prayers. Hugely popular, widely believed to be extremely important and valuable, considered by many to be a sign of highly moral behaviour, but utterly useless nevertheless.

Eventually, they'll make enough big batteries. Expensive and wasteful, but given enough waste of resources on it, doable.

I am rather hoping that the much cheaper, far safer, and massively less environmentally damaging Gen III+ and IV nuclear reactors will render such nonsense redundant before we waste too much time, money, resources, and environmental capital on them.

But I am constantly impressed by just how good people are at ignoring the things they don't want to be true. Which severely tempers my optimism.

 

[bilby]

View attachment 30843
World largest solar energy plant inaugurated this month in Gujarat, India - 30 gigawatts, 72,600 hectares.

How much electricity does it generate at night?

 

[barbos]

Solar+Batteries are already cheaper than fossil fuel electricity. If you take into account real costs of global warming

 

[Angra Mainyu]

So intermittent electricity is practically valueless.

Electricity in the developed world is a service, not a commodity. You need it when you need it, not when it happens to be available.

If only we could power humanity with activist enthusiasm, renewables would be fucking fantastic. But we can't, and they're not.

Intermittent renewables are like prayers. Hugely popular, widely believed to be extremely important and valuable, considered by many to be a sign of highly moral behaviour, but utterly useless nevertheless.

Eventually, they'll make enough big batteries. Expensive and wasteful, but given enough waste of resources on it, doable.

I am rather hoping that the much cheaper, far safer, and massively less environmentally damaging Gen III+ and IV nuclear reactors will render such nonsense redundant before we waste too much time, money, resources, and environmental capital on them.

But I am constantly impressed by just how good people are at ignoring the things they don't want to be true. Which severely tempers my optimism.

Yeah, I hope to be proven wrong, but I'm not optimistic, at least in democratic countries. Anti-nuclear activists seem to be too powerful in many of them, and probably rising in others.

 

[aupmanyav]

How much electricity does it generate at night?

You have a valid question there (wrt batteries). Gujarat and the adjacent Maharashtra (Mumbai) regions have industries. Power is required in the night also. I do not know about how many million batteries these people have purchased. But then, we have no dearth of sunlight during the day. Similar projects could come up in Rajasthan's desert. They should probably produce as much power as they need at any time. Night-time power could come from nuclear power plants.

Yeah, I hope to be proven wrong, but I'm not optimistic, at least in democratic countries. Anti-nuclear activists seem to be too powerful in many of them, and probably rising in others.

Not in India. Why should we hesitate to use nuclear energy if we need it? Next year, our Fast Breeder Test Reactor (500 MW) also will go critical.

"Madras Atomic Power Station (MAPS) located at Kalpakkam, south of Chennai, India, is a comprehensive nuclear power production, fuel reprocessing, and waste treatment facility that includes plutonium fuel fabrication for fast breeder reactors (FBRs). It is also India's first fully indigenously constructed nuclear power station, with two units each generating 220 MW of electricity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madras_Atomic_Power_Station

 

[lpetrich]

I am rather hoping that the much cheaper, far safer, and massively less environmentally damaging Gen III+ and IV nuclear reactors will render such nonsense redundant before we waste too much time, money, resources, and environmental capital on them.

I'll believe it when I see it. I suspect that such nuclear reactors will end up economically preempted by renewable-energy sources. Just like nuclear fusion.

 

[aupmanyav]

Good, if that happens.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Not in India. Why should we hesitate to use nuclear energy if we need it?

Who's "we"?

The government probably should not hesitate, unless the anti-nuclear activists are too powerful and the government properly reckons that moving forward will either result (at best) in electoral defeat by someone who promises not to develop nuclear energy and decommission current power plants, or much worse in violent social unrest with consequences that outweigh the benefits of nuclear energy, or things like that.

But you tell me they're not too powerful. Good; let's hope it stays that way.

Next year, our Fast Breeder Test Reactor (500 MW) also will go critical.

Good.

 

[bilby]

https://www.energyjobline.com/article/britain-has-been-wind-power-free-for-9-days/

An older article, but still relevant.

 

[aupmanyav]

Who's "we"?
The government probably should not hesitate, unless the anti-nuclear activists are too powerful and the government properly reckons that moving forward will either result (at best) in electoral defeat by someone who promises not to develop nuclear energy and decommission current power plants, ..

The people who have voted for the current national government. That is not a big issue in India. A party proposing cutting down on nuclear development will not win in India. We have neighbors like China and Pakistan.
Yes, there are attempts by Western Christian organizations to create unrest in India under various guises. The current government knows how to handle that.

An older article, but still relevant.

Yeah, winds may fail us, but in India, Sun never fails.

 

[skepticalbip]

An older article, but still relevant.

Yeah, winds may fail us, but in India, Sun never fails.

Well, except there is the monsoon season for a couple months, an occasional typhoon, and, of course, an average of 12 hours of darkness every 24 hours.