So electricity prices aren't exploding and industrial production isn't collapsing? Sure there's a way to get to 100% renewables. Crush demand, sacrifice reliability and pray that really bad things don't happen during dunkelflaute. This is where the West is headed if it doesn't regain sanity.

Zippergate said:

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This discussion is several years too late. Just about everyone now recognizes that renewables, given current technological realities, have insurmountable problems with scale and intermittency. It may make sense at a limited scale in places with the best renewable resources (e.g., California solar) but the amount of storage needed to back up a 100%-renewable grid is beyond comprehension. Natural gas is the present. Nuclear is the future. See the deal Microsoft announced today to bring Three Mile Island back online as the latest of many datapoints illustrating this trend.

Just a reminder: The world has spent trillions upon trillions of dollars on renewables over the last couple decades. Fossil fuel share of total energy use during that time has dropped from 82% to..........81%. Every percentage point gets more and more expensive.

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Are you aware of the story of the 100 days (63 actually) Hornsdale battery plant in Adelaide Australia?

Here's a bit of a primer




Are you aware of S curve of innovation?





Car replaced horse.
Phone replaced telegraph.
Color tv replaced B&W
Digital camera replaced film.





It happens over and over again.

There's about to be a massive shift in energy.
Not because of environmentalism.
Not because of government subsidies.
But because it's better, cheaper.
You just don't realize it yet.


Here's a talk



You can flap your gums all you want.
I believe that change is coming.

That's awesome. When we have those batteries, then perhaps we can talk about transitioning to a 100% renewable future. The problem is, there is no evidence that such a breakthrough is at hand. All current battery chemistries are extremely mineral intensive. Backing up several weeks if not months of electricity would require more minerals than we could practically mine. See Mark Mills. And even if the storage problem is solved, it doesn't change the fact that the EROEI for renewables is extremely low, a tiny fraction of fossil fuels or nuclear. So a large fraction of energy production is lost just to expanding and maintaining the energy production system thus requiring an even large energy production system. It's the ultimate Rube Goldberg apparatus.

The burden of proof is on you and your green brethren. The current system supports the needs of billions of people. It's what has brought billions out of poverty, raised living standards, and made places like the northern United States habitable for millions of people. The green transition puts those lives and our entire standard of living at risk. There are no credible studies that this can be done. (Sorry, that clown at Stanford that all the greens love to quote is not credible)

BTW, there IS an s-curve for energy. It's called nuclear.

concordtom said:

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Zippergate said:

---

This discussion is several years too late. Just about everyone now recognizes that renewables, given current technological realities, have insurmountable problems with scale and intermittency. It may make sense at a limited scale in places with the best renewable resources (e.g., California solar) but the amount of storage needed to back up a 100%-renewable grid is beyond comprehension. Natural gas is the present. Nuclear is the future. See the deal Microsoft announced today to bring Three Mile Island back online as the latest of many datapoints illustrating this trend.

Just a reminder: The world has spent trillions upon trillions of dollars on renewables over the last couple decades. Fossil fuel share of total energy use during that time has dropped from 82% to..........81%. Every percentage point gets more and more expensive.

---

Are you aware of the story of the 100 days (63 actually) Hornsdale battery plant in Adelaide Australia?

Here's a bit of a primer




Are you aware of S curve of innovation?





Car replaced horse.
Phone replaced telegraph.
Color tv replaced B&W
Digital camera replaced film.





It happens over and over again.

There's about to be a massive shift in energy.
Not because of environmentalism.
Not because of government subsidies.
But because it's better, cheaper.
You just don't realize it yet.


Here's a talk



You can flap your gums all you want.
I believe that change is coming.

---

Zipperhead also looks at a 7 year old and declares they will never be able to hold down adult responsibilities

And some people look at a rock and think it will grow because the plant right next to it grows.

Above ground transmission lines is an entirely different issue from energy generation - unless you're talking about non-dense locations like mine where we will no longer need transmission lines at all, because we can generate and use right there, on site. (I have 5 acres).
Cities like SF will still need transmission lines, and I assume always will.

The current topic was about energy ge station and storage. The sun and wind are constants and free.

And nuclear sites can be attacked by terrorists and leave a massive forever scar upon surrounding widespread geography - unlivable. So, that's not ideal. Certainly not ideal.

Naysayers just need to recognize and get with it. Or, be late adopters and miss out on capital.

PG&E could certainly adopt, but they've got millions and millions of miles of power lines to tend to - as you rightly state! That's a massive burden which I don't think they can escape. People like me will disconnect and be independent so we aren't financially tied to their burden - accept when they go belly up and the state absorbed their debt through taxation. But, what are ya gonna do??? Leave California??? Sigh.

Roll on you Golden Bears!
(which are extinct, by the way).

Zippergate said:

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And some people look at a rock and think it will grow because the plant right next to it grows.

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That's a stupid analogy. Surely you can come with something better.

Yes, but it was absurd to make a point. Children inevitably grow. Is it inevitable that battery storage will follow an s-curve similar to the i-pod? No. Sure, there will be technological improvements and eventually a step-change breakthrough, but Moore's Law does not apply to energy. You can't just project into the future and assume a geometric increase in the number of electrons that can be crammed into a given quantity of material. So much wishcasting, especially from the Tesla fanboys.

Zippergate said:

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Yes, but it was absurd to make a point. Children inevitably grow. Is it inevitable that battery storage will follow an s-curve similar to the i-pod? No. Sure, there will be technological improvements and eventually a step-change breakthrough, but Moore's Law does not apply to energy. You can't just project into the future and assume a geometric increase in the number of electrons that can be crammed into a given quantity of material. So much wishcasting, especially from the Tesla fanboys.

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I went to the big Solar convention in San Diego in 2009. A speaker there do you have a great education. He said that typical grid price in the United States was about $.10 per kilowatt hour, though more in California. Overtime, good prices were always going up, He said that they installed rooftop Solar price over 20 years worked out to about $.20 per kilowatt hour, but it was declining.

He pointed out that if you charted the increasing price of grid energy and the declining price of rooftop solar, they would reach a point in the future where the two lines crossed and he predicted that would be about 2014.

That was a long time ago that Solar reached grid parity, and it has since continued to get cheaper and cheaper.

I don't understand why you want to deny this reality. Maybe you just don't understand it.

If you own square footage where you can install panels, either land for ground mount, or a building for rooftop, and you have the capital to make the upfront purchase, and the time horizon to let it pay you back, it is cheaper to purchase solar, then buy it from a utility.

You'll tell me that the sun doesn't shine at night, or on cloudy days. You can either use the grid as your options for those times, or you can buy battery storage. There are many options. It doesn't have to be Tesla.

Most of this is not in dispute. Solar electricity is cheap in California, but electricity on demand, which is what everyone expects, is not. If solar is so cheap, why have electricity prices in California increased 3x faster than the rest of the country? The grid is already overwhelmed with mid-day solar. Look up Duck Curve. The low hanging fruit has already been picked. Now, you need storage. You hand-wave the issue away as if it's trivial but it's not. We're talking hundreds of gigawatt hours of storage just to provide a day of backup. And that doesn't begin to cover the storage requirement to account for weather, seasonal variability etc. And the storage requirement to achieve near-100% reliability grows exponentially and grows further as EVs are added to the grid. Now that we have a rough idea of how much storage is required, why don't you look up how much storage California currently has and what the goal is for 2030. And while you're at it, investigate the cost of a mere 100GWH of storage. I think you will be surprised.

There are so many little details that get ignored. Here's an article on the transformer bottleneck and another on the problem of transmission. These issues are far from trivial (because at least a part of the problem is the availability of raw materials which can't just be conjured into existence) and most greens don't even know that they exist. All they look at is the cost of panels coming out of China.

https://www.powermag.com/the-transformer-crisis-an-industry-on-the-brink/
https://open.substack.com/pub/robertbryce/p/47300-gigawatt-miles-from-nowhere?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I'm not against solar. But the notion that California (or Germany) can replace all its energy needs with solar and wind is absurd.

Zippergate said:

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Most of this is not in dispute. Solar electricity is cheap in California, but electricity on demand, which is what everyone expects, is not. If solar is so cheap, why have electricity prices in California increased 3x faster than the rest of the country?

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Wow, you don't know this???
Easy.
Fire liabilities!!

I live in the boonies and PGE is no longer an energy company - they are a tree trimming service.

Ha!

Zippergate said:

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I'm not against solar. But the notion that California (or Germany) can replace all its energy needs with solar and wind is absurd.

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Okay, so we are actually in agreement, for once.
There is no way we are going to make the aggressive targets that have been laid out. This isn't going to happen fast enough.
But the transition is happening. It could take decades. But we are on our way.

Yeah, California has never had fires before. If we had sane forest management this wouldn't be a problem.

Zippergate said:

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Yeah, California has never had fires before. If we had sane forest management this wouldn't be a problem.

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Oh no.
Not this again.
You were so close to rejoining the land of the sane.

Can you tell me you've heard of California's massive wind resources off the northwest coast?

https://calmatters.org/environment/2024/07/california-offshore-wind-plan-approved/

As if the forest management issue has been debunked. Perhaps you should get out of your comfort zone and read sources that don't just regurgitate the regime narrative. Here's the thing. Whatever you think the reason is, your peeps have been in complete control of California for decades. It's all on them; there's no one else to blame.

As for wind, do you think we have better offshore wind resources than the UK? It ain't going well over there. MASSIVE cost overruns such that there are no bidders without hugely increased subsidies. Wear and tear on offshore wind is very high; performance degrades and the useful life is considerably less than advertised. Very expensive power. I assume you're an environmentalist who cares about wildlife. I certainly do. That's why I'm very concerned about the horrific effects that surveying the ocean for offshore wind have had on the east cost. The damage done to the whales in particular is sickening.

I don't expect you to assume anything I say is true, but it would be nice if you could respond with arguments instead of whataboutery.