The article seems incomplete. Sure we may be burning three times more coal than we'd have to if we could perfectly convert it to energy. That has literally never factored into an argument I've seen about renewables - it's always "we currently produce X GigaWatts 24x7, and renewables don't let us do that".
Saying we burn coal at 30% efficiency isn't addressing anything useful. And it's one of those articles where many won't completely follow it, but they'll come out with an impression that the premise is true because of some "sciency bits", when with some more content they could've actually been educated in something useful.
Or you could say, "nuclear power would solve this quicker than anything" and you'd be right :-)
It's a factor in arguments where people say "we don't need to just clean up electricity, we need to replace all fossil energy." They're usually referring to primary energy in these arguments. If you look at barrels of oil consumed per day in the US, then just plug the barrel-of-oil numbers into a unit converter to see how many terawatt hours it comes to, it looks hopeless to put a dent in oil consumption with electric vehicles and renewable electricity.
But as the Bloomberg article points out, we don't need a 1:1 replacement of joules from fossil fuels with joules from non-fossil energy. If everyone currently driving a Toyota Corolla started driving a wind-charged battery electric vehicle instead, the total energy consumed would shrink dramatically without any behavioral changes. Most of the oil energy demanded by those Corollas is simply wasted as heat.
Is no one pointing out that this isn’t the part that makes replacing fossil fuels hard? This is focusing on a completely irrelevant metric. It’s a great motivator for why we need to shift but it has no impact on how hard it will be to replace oil. There’s 100 practical reason for why it’s hard, namely that clean energy sources are not under our direct control to scale up and down as we need more/less. We can’t tell the sun to be strongest at 6pm when everyone gets off work so we’ll need more energy. You can force the wind to blow. The best way to solve this is improving battery tech but that’s a HUGE task. What we have currently is a focus on quickly growing increase in clean energy sources as a baseline energy source with a diversified mix of other sources along with natural gas peaking plants that are far cleaner than coal and provide near immediate response times to surges on energy demand which is incredible.
South Australia already has days when solar alone is providing most of it's power [1] [2]. It's not that hard. You scale up renewables, and build curtailing (throwing away excess clean energy) into your cost model (until storage gets cheaper, which it will; Tesla is shipping almost 800 MW of utility scale battery storage per quarter). Australia's entirely grid will be clean by 2030 at their current rate of renewables deployment. Yes, yes, not everywhere is Australia, but the sun and wind potential is significant in most geographies where people exist. Let us not use edge cases to guide our path forward.
This problem is way overstated, as most fossil fuel and nuclear power can't be easily or efficiently ramped down either. We also have energy storage technologies other than batteries: the most common being pumped-storage hydroelectricity (basically a reversible hydroelectric dam, where we pump water up during excess power usage and use the generators during high demand).
It is relevant to the improved battery tech problem however and makes the task less huge. Wind is also fairly reliable in that the day night cycle alone creates it since it is created by temperature differentials. Across a broad area it is impossible for there to not be wind short of being messed with by hyperadvanced aliens scenarios like ensuring all areas of the earth are being heated equally.
Seems like a simplistic but a very conceivable short sighted overlooked detail in touting fossil fuel advantage to quote so called primary energy for fossil fuel, and yet it kinda feels like a straw man is hiding somewhere. Are there actual past articles and literature that conflates the two when speaking of fossil fuels? Setting the bar too high for renewables would be a big fallacy, but where has that happened exactly? It'll be cool to look back at old articles and twitter posts and spot this conflation or at least to ask for clarification.
Here's an example from the linked article @mcwone shared below that may present us with an opportunity to spot the fallacy in play:
Meanwhile, with batteries, it costs roughly $200 to store
the energy equivalent to one barrel of oil.
Lazard, “Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis”; utility-scale lithium battery LCOE (levelized cost of energy) @ $108–$140/MWh converts to $180–
$230/BOE (barrel of oil energy equivalent).
Because there are multiple decades' worth of investment in fossil fuel assets that need replacing, and renewables started competing on price alone (ignoring global warming externalities) in just the past few years. That's also why Germans pay eye watering prices for renewable electricity; Germany installed renewables on a large scale before the costs came down.
It's too bad that reality doesn't really care if you have clever accounting tricks to show that "things aren't really as bad as they look!"
The only number that matters at all is global green house gas emissions. We need to get that to zero, and it has continued to go up.
Imagine you have a drinking problem and your doctor tells you you need to stop drinking alcohol or you will suffer liver failure. You can argue all day about what percentage of your drinks are alcoholic. "Doctor, I drink 3 cans of coke and only 12 G&Ts now, not 1 can of coke and 24 beers like I used to, I went from 4% of my drinks being non-alcoholic to 20%!" If your daily total alcohol consumed keep rising you have a problem.
That's the situation we're in with co2 emissions. There are many clever ways to make it look like everything is fine, but reality doesn't care. If our global CO2 emissions continue to rise we have absolutely no hope.
Totally right that what matters is greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Tackling them, however, is going to take all our muscles. Many climate deniers have used the 80% of primary energy from fossil fuel figure as a way to claim it's too hard to do anything about the problem or to say there's been little progress. That's misleading and I wrote the article to explain to correct that narrative.
It’s funny, I’m not a claimant change denier, but I don’t view emissions as a problem. An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing. There’s also volcanos, etc.
I’m a lot more worried about chemicals outside of CO2. Such as lead or pesticides. CO2 fluctuates massively throughout the year. Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other chemicals. CO2 is also far less damaging to the body.
Not saying it’s not important, just I think we’d be better off focusing on issues such as pesticide contamination
The guy that wrote is is a big Oil lobyist, and the Manhattan Institue is a conservative/big oil think tank
It is like someone from the early 1900s saying: Combustion engines will never take over, steam is 98% of power... etc.. etc..
yet in 10 years they did take over, first cars, then larger vessels (trains and boats). Coal/Steam power generation for trains was seen as a super polluting thing and unwanted in cities anymore.
Same thing is happening again, this time it is the combustion's engine turn to get replaced with something cleaner
That's a very deceptive article. It compares the levelized cost of electricity from wind and solar generation (using Lazard's LCOE numbers) against gas production cost from a shale well. You have to pay for the power plant construction, operation, and maintenance in addition to the fuel in order to get electricity from gas. And the well owner has to charge more than bare costs for the fuel in order to stay in business.
“Electrical devices can sometimes offer higher than 100% efficiency,” said BNEF analyst Matthias Kimmel. That might seem odd. How can there be more energy as output than input? But that’s exactly what heat pumps and air conditioners do. They use electricity to shift heat from the outside to inside, or vice-versa, and typically provide three units of energy service for one unit of energy input, meaning an efficiency of 300%."
Article seems to arguing against basic thermodynamic laws. Air conditioners and heat pumps do not output more energy than they consume. You can't move heat around without expending lots of energy. I'm suspicious this is just uptalk trying convince people renewables can replace fossil fuels without any new data, just confusing lines of arguments.
A restive electric heater (AKA joule heating) is by definition 100% efficient: All energy consumed by the device is turned into heat (if you're mega-pedantic, you could argue some is lost as light and sound).
A heat pump just moves heat from outside to inside. Sure, it's 42*F out, but that's still heat energy that can be moved. This process is more efficient than converting electricity into heat because you get more heat energy in the room than the electric energy you put into the device.
This came up in the last hackernews post I've seen on the topic. It essentially boiled down to that air conditioner efficiency (and similar machines) is measured using a different formula than energy conversion efficiency.
well my 80m2 apartment is fully heated to about 22.5C with an air heat pump drawing about 600W with an outside temperature of 0C. So take from that what you will about efficiency.
The article tries to explain the difference between primary, final and useful energy to justify why moving to renewables would be easier than at first glance. But I just don't feel like I got convinced in the end. If anything I'm more confused now than before. In special this part about air conditioners being 300% efficient sounds to me like maybe they don't know what they are talking about.
“Electrical devices can sometimes offer higher than 100% efficiency,” said BNEF analyst Matthias Kimmel. That might seem odd. How can there be more energy as output than input? But that’s exactly what heat pumps and air conditioners do. They use electricity to shift heat from the outside to inside, or vice-versa, and typically provide three units of energy service for one unit of energy input, meaning an efficiency of 300%.
I wrote the story. The efficiency here isn't breaking the first law of thermodynamics. It's just the industry's way of measuring how much work gets done for a certain amount of input. If the work is heating or cooling, then shifting heat from in one direction or another can be done using heat pumps, which move three units of thermal energy for every unit of electrical energy consumed. Might that explain the conundrum?
Heat pumps move more heat (which has the same unit as energy, that's why you can put the numbers in a ratio and get a unitless number) than they use energy for the process. This is the crucial point for heating with them, otherwise they would make little sense (except for using them for cooling) over having an electric heater instead.
Air conditioners move heat from inside the house to outside. So, they can provide more cooling (move more heat) than the equivalent input energy. That is how you come up with greater than 100% efficiency.
Another example is to light up a candle, then use a peltier element and a heatsink to generate electricity. Then use that electricity to power a led. The outcome is that you have some of the candle light, but you will have a much more light from the led.
This discussion of heat pumps makes me want to add that we may also ignore cogeneration too much. We just don't think about heat flows and temperature enough.
There is, of course, the communal thing, done in Sweden and Russia and college campuses, with a power plant and steam pipes going to apartments.
But what about an appliance for suburban America? Like, combine a gas turbine generator with an HVAC system and hot water tank (pretty sure you can buy things like this in Germany). No unsolved technical problems here. You generate electricity for your home, heat it with waste heat, and absorb temporary excesses in capacity by usefully heating water. You could imagine integrating other things too: If you need more heat than you use electricity, then you might as well use the electricity to do something high-value (cryptocurrency is a crime against the environment, but you might as well compute some hashes in your resistive heater). All this becomes an elaborate way to burn natural gas to make heat, but you get a bunch of other things out besides. The "smart controller" aspect then becomes interesting -- but even that is "just simple automation", not super-difficult AI.
Maybe logistically, the "everything is electric; electricity comes from renewables/nuclear; and heat comes from heat pumps" solution is easier in the long run?
But this more "decentralized heat engines" solution has the "advantage"(?) that it could run on biomass, which is easy to store (however, I am aware of the problems of wood pellets and deforestation).
What is wrong with the concept of a heat pump? A resistor converts electricity into heat 100% efficiently, and a heat pump is often 3x as efficient at heating a house vs electric baseboards.
[+] [-] robertlagrant|5 years ago|reply
Saying we burn coal at 30% efficiency isn't addressing anything useful. And it's one of those articles where many won't completely follow it, but they'll come out with an impression that the premise is true because of some "sciency bits", when with some more content they could've actually been educated in something useful.
Or you could say, "nuclear power would solve this quicker than anything" and you'd be right :-)
[+] [-] philipkglass|5 years ago|reply
But as the Bloomberg article points out, we don't need a 1:1 replacement of joules from fossil fuels with joules from non-fossil energy. If everyone currently driving a Toyota Corolla started driving a wind-charged battery electric vehicle instead, the total energy consumed would shrink dramatically without any behavioral changes. Most of the oil energy demanded by those Corollas is simply wasted as heat.
[+] [-] phkahler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aardvarkr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m (OpenNEM scoped to South Australia, trailing 7 days 30 min granularity)
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-25/all-sa-power-from-sol... (All of South Australia's power comes from solar panels in world first for major jurisdiction)
[+] [-] notthemessiah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ip26|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nasrudith|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxramos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxramos|5 years ago|reply
We'll I'm struggling to track that quote in the article to its primary source assuming I landed on the right place https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
So then why haven’t we?
[+] [-] philipkglass|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Homunculiheaded|5 years ago|reply
The only number that matters at all is global green house gas emissions. We need to get that to zero, and it has continued to go up.
Imagine you have a drinking problem and your doctor tells you you need to stop drinking alcohol or you will suffer liver failure. You can argue all day about what percentage of your drinks are alcoholic. "Doctor, I drink 3 cans of coke and only 12 G&Ts now, not 1 can of coke and 24 beers like I used to, I went from 4% of my drinks being non-alcoholic to 20%!" If your daily total alcohol consumed keep rising you have a problem.
That's the situation we're in with co2 emissions. There are many clever ways to make it look like everything is fine, but reality doesn't care. If our global CO2 emissions continue to rise we have absolutely no hope.
[+] [-] akshatrathi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lettergram|5 years ago|reply
I’m a lot more worried about chemicals outside of CO2. Such as lead or pesticides. CO2 fluctuates massively throughout the year. Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other chemicals. CO2 is also far less damaging to the body.
Not saying it’s not important, just I think we’d be better off focusing on issues such as pesticide contamination
[+] [-] rdiddly|5 years ago|reply
Wow that Colin McKerracher is quite the wordsmith. Quite the bard.
(i.e. it's Shakespeare)
[+] [-] mcwone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ardit33|5 years ago|reply
It is like someone from the early 1900s saying: Combustion engines will never take over, steam is 98% of power... etc.. etc..
yet in 10 years they did take over, first cars, then larger vessels (trains and boats). Coal/Steam power generation for trains was seen as a super polluting thing and unwanted in cities anymore.
Same thing is happening again, this time it is the combustion's engine turn to get replaced with something cleaner
[+] [-] philipkglass|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lake-effect|5 years ago|reply
Article seems to arguing against basic thermodynamic laws. Air conditioners and heat pumps do not output more energy than they consume. You can't move heat around without expending lots of energy. I'm suspicious this is just uptalk trying convince people renewables can replace fossil fuels without any new data, just confusing lines of arguments.
[+] [-] colechristensen|5 years ago|reply
They absolutely do.
A heat pump will output more heat where it is wanted than would be output by flowing the electricity through a big resistor.
You put 100 W into a heat pump and you can get 300 W of heat out. You are not cheating thermodynamics, but using energy to move energy.
[+] [-] eulers_secret|5 years ago|reply
A restive electric heater (AKA joule heating) is by definition 100% efficient: All energy consumed by the device is turned into heat (if you're mega-pedantic, you could argue some is lost as light and sound).
A heat pump just moves heat from outside to inside. Sure, it's 42*F out, but that's still heat energy that can be moved. This process is more efficient than converting electricity into heat because you get more heat energy in the room than the electric energy you put into the device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_heating#Heating_efficien... explains it even better than I did.
[+] [-] xboxnolifes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] serpix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dudus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akshatrathi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Microft|5 years ago|reply
Here is something to read on this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
Jump to "Examples" if you like concrete examples.
[+] [-] goodcanadian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bungle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ActionPlankton|5 years ago|reply
There is, of course, the communal thing, done in Sweden and Russia and college campuses, with a power plant and steam pipes going to apartments.
But what about an appliance for suburban America? Like, combine a gas turbine generator with an HVAC system and hot water tank (pretty sure you can buy things like this in Germany). No unsolved technical problems here. You generate electricity for your home, heat it with waste heat, and absorb temporary excesses in capacity by usefully heating water. You could imagine integrating other things too: If you need more heat than you use electricity, then you might as well use the electricity to do something high-value (cryptocurrency is a crime against the environment, but you might as well compute some hashes in your resistive heater). All this becomes an elaborate way to burn natural gas to make heat, but you get a bunch of other things out besides. The "smart controller" aspect then becomes interesting -- but even that is "just simple automation", not super-difficult AI.
Maybe logistically, the "everything is electric; electricity comes from renewables/nuclear; and heat comes from heat pumps" solution is easier in the long run?
But this more "decentralized heat engines" solution has the "advantage"(?) that it could run on biomass, which is easy to store (however, I am aware of the problems of wood pellets and deforestation).
[+] [-] jcampbell1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dboreham|5 years ago|reply