Total phaseout of fossil fuels

[Samson]

No where in my statement did I advocated for diverting funding away from solar and wind, the only other competition for solar and wind for bulk generation is hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear (The former two relies on geography). Given what I have on the table right now, I don't see solar and wind to be efficient and reliable enough to be used as a base load power plant when the power output of a solar power plant and wind farms have fluctuating outputs that's dependent on the weather, time of day, and season thus cannot be relied upon to use for electric generation 24/7. Compared to a nuclear power plant, a solar plant has less uptime due to the factors I've already outlined (Season, weather, and time of day). Given the choice, I'd much prefer going for nuclear energy for my base load power needs and use solar facilities as peaker plants. Saying that "I'm getting the economics/science wrong" is just going into ad hominem territory (no where in my post did I placed in an economic argument when my argument is centered around capacity factor and uptime). I know what I am talking about because I live in the region and we don't get as much sunlight during the winter compared places like Arizona. We do have some photovoltaic arrays, but they don't replace base load power plants. There’s a reason why we don’t have thermal solar plants in the northeastern United Stated (and places outside southwestern US) and good luck having any solar power during the winter months up in Alaska.

If there’s advancements in which fluids within a thermal solar plant (especially concentrated solar power plants) can hold heat for 24 hours with minimal loss of heat during the heat exchange when the sun is down. Then I would be for it, especially since it’s using the same concept of a thermal power plant (e.g. using a boiler to generate steam to turn a turbine connecting to a generator) and don’t need any additional facilities and/or devices to convert DC to AC (Photovoltaics, I would need not only space for battery storage to store and distribute power during months with long nights, but also take into account needing a DC to AC inverter).

First I am sorry if you felt I was calling you specifically wrong, I try to use one for the generic you but it does not come naturally.

I do not think base load makes much sense in a renewable focused energy grid. Base load used to mean the stuff that is always on and produces the bulk of the power that is needed around the clock. In a renewable focused energy grid that is the renewables when they can. What you need is on demand power, when demand peaks or when both wind and sun are low. Nuclear is really bad for that.

There are loads of good ideas for energy storage, we really should be putting more effort into them. Some will fail, but some will not.

Saying it's not fair that Germany and the UK burned all this coal and now we can't is a bit like showing up late to a party where there's only one bottle of wine left and it gets split evenly and everyone gets half a glass of what's left, and then complaining that the people who were there before you already had two glasses. Unless Jesus shows up to turn some water into wine, there's only so much wine available, and there's no way that all the latecomers can get two glasses apiece. The math doesn't work.

That is not really the situation though. A better analogy would be the people before still chugging the wine as fast as they can, while telling those who come late to go easy on the few drops they have got. Except the big guy who came late and grabbed a load of the booze.

And airline travel. Does total phase-out mean no airline travel?

This is going to be a hard one. I wonder if fast ships may be able to meet the residual demand of intercontinental travel.

Or do we replace as much as we realistically can with rail, and use carbon-capture to offset the remainder? This is where I'm assuming "total phase-out" actually means "net zero after accounting for carbon capture" rather than "absolute zero no matter what"; as much as carbon capture still needs to prove itself, should we make it even somewhat economical, it can play a role in countering those toughest-to-phase-out areas.

This is where I argue about the maths. How does carbon capture "offset" air travel? We may need to do carbon capture, but unless the air travel somehow enables the capture I do not see how they are related.

 

[Moriarte]

This is where I'm assuming "total phase-out" actually means "net zero after accounting for carbon capture" rather than "absolute zero no matter what"

Net zero is supposed to mean "as close to zero as possible", so, 1-2% would be net zero in my mind, but I could be wrong.

Seafaring transportation being one where we have some promise for reducing it, but not yet eliminating it unless we go back to the Age of Sail. And airline travel. Does total phase-out mean no airline travel? Or do we replace as much as we realistically can with rail, and use carbon-capture to offset the remainder?

There is an ongoing revolution in the industry of battery cell production. So many people are producing electric cars today - the consequence is that battery production facilities expand, new battery fabs are constructed, while price of a battery cell constantly drops. In a very short time, I believe we'll be able to mass produce battery powered ships and airplanes. We already have working prototypes of both, the yachts, small planes, but it's a little too early (in the tech tree) to mass produce battery powered commercial airliners or cargo ships. Perhaps in 10 years.

 

[Quintillus]

That is not really the situation though. A better analogy would be the people before still chugging the wine as fast as they can, while telling those who come late to go easy on the few drops they have got. Except the big guy who came late and grabbed a load of the booze.

I see your point, it's inexact, and by and large the early industrializers are still emitting more, including per-capita. I suppose the analogy breaks down in part because it's harder to change one's lifestyle and reduce energy usage by 80% over a short period of time than to split up that last bottle of wine.

This is going to be a hard one. I wonder if fast ships may be able to meet the residual demand of intercontinental travel.

The question becomes how do you power it?

I see Moriarte is suggesting battery-powered ships. I am not sure about that, especially as a primary means of propulsion and not as a supplement. Ships often travel thousands of miles at a time, and as I understand it one of the challenges is the cargo space required by that quantity of batteries, as well as their weight weighing down the boat. Fuel oil is still more energy-dense than batteries.

Another challenge is making sure the batteries still work and don't short out should the ship take on some water, including during bad storms. Probably not a new challenge given that ships already have electrical systems, but it would take it to the next level.

They may be solvable with improvements in battery chemistry, though.

But that's cargo ships. Passengers ships? Could that come back?

It took the Queen Elizabeth 2 five days to cross the Atlantic, the gold standard that a future fast oceanliner would aim for (Queen Mary 2 takes six days westbound and seven eastbound). Is five days to cross the pond fast? I'm pretty sure most people today would say no, and that's why airplanes are popular, in addition to their current price advantage (the cheapest QM2 ticket works out to roughly twice the cost of an economy airline ticket, though to be fair the cheapest berth isn't exactly the old steerage option).

Make the journey much faster than five days and I suspect the energy usage would make the logistics challenging. But don't make it faster than four days and it's going to be hard to convince people to switch.

Battery-powered intercontinental airplanes is probably a bigger challenge than ships... at this point I expect replacing international passenger air travel to be one of the last to be solved. And part of the answer may be "make it much more expensive to fly internationally, to the point that far fewer people do so."

(Edit: But what about hovercrafts? Didn't they used to have one of those between Dover and Calais? Could we be taking hovercrafts for intercontinental travel in the future? Nah... the weight of the batteries would probably make it difficult for them to hover. An interesting thought though)

This is where I argue about the maths. How does carbon capture "offset" air travel? We may need to do carbon capture, but unless the air travel somehow enables the capture I do not see how they are related.

Economically, I'd posit that this would be done by requiring the cost of the carbon capture to be factored into the airline ticket - perhaps that is how the "much more expensive to fly, but still an option if you can afford it" becomes a reality.

Or perhaps carbon capture will become so wildly successful that we simply exempt air travel over a certain distance as a luxury that can be afforded due to the multitude of carbon capture plants. Wouldn't be the first type of travel that's been subsidized, and if we do wind up with that successful of carbon capture, I won't be unhappy about it.

Though part of me still wants to take an oceanliner across the Atlantic some day. There's a certain allure to it that's missing from air travel... and part of that allure definitely goes back to the whole "not crammed in like sardines" aspect of it.

 

[banzay13]

Isn't cheaper to save forest?

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/12/b...ropical-forests-forever-fund-for-rainforests/

• Brazil has proposed a new $250 billion mechanism for conserving the world’s tropical rainforests.
• The “Tropical Forests Forever” fund, sourced from governments and the private sector, would disburse money to tropical countries that achieve set thresholds for limiting deforestation.
• The proposal, conceptually similar to past initiatives, emerges amid a growing interest in nature-based solutions for addressing climate change and other environmental challenges.

 

[Akka]

The question becomes how do you power it

I don't see an easy way to compensate for the energy density of carbon-based fuel.
But a possible alternative would be to use artificial carbon-neutral fuel - producing it through carbon scrubbing, powered by green energy. So we still burn oil, but we only burn what was already in the air to begin with.
Would certainly make it more expensive, but would allow it to run. Problem is of course to be able to scale production up to the needs.

 

[Nick723]

Net zero is supposed to mean "as close to zero as possible", so, 1-2% would be net zero in my mind, but I could be wrong.

On the contrary, net zero takes into account both carbon emissions and sinks. There are lots of carbon sinks (many natural - eg trees) but also man-made (CCS, direct air capture).

Net zero is a far easier goal to achieve than absolute zero emissions, because some emissions / sectors are very hard to decarbonise (eg. Aviation, cement, agriculture).

Net zero is what actually matters as well. Most 1.5 degree pathways have net zero sometime around 2050, with an overshoot thereafter (so carbon actually been net taken out of the atmosphere). But these pathways won’t have absolute zero (or closer to zero) emissions until 2100 or so.

 

[Hygro]

life ain’t fair
We should do it anyway.

 

[Arwon]

No where in my statement did I advocated for diverting funding away from solar and wind, the only other competition for solar and wind for bulk generation is hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear (The former two relies on geography). Given what I have on the table right now, I don't see solar and wind to be efficient and reliable enough to be used as a base load power plant when the power output of a solar power plant and wind farms have fluctuating outputs that's dependent on the weather, time of day, and season thus cannot be relied upon to use for electric generation 24/7. Compared to a nuclear power plant, a solar plant has less uptime due to the factors I've already outlined (Season, weather, and time of day). Given the choice, I'd much prefer going for nuclear energy for my base load power needs and use solar facilities as peaker plants. Saying that "I'm getting the economics/science wrong" is just going into ad hominem territory (no where in my post did I placed in an economic argument when my argument is centered around capacity factor and uptime). I know what I am talking about because I live in the region and we don't get as much sunlight during the winter compared places like Arizona. We do have some photovoltaic arrays, but they don't replace base load power plants. There’s a reason why we don’t have thermal solar plants in the northeastern United Stated (and places outside southwestern US) and good luck having any solar power during the winter months up in Alaska.

If there’s advancements in which fluids within a thermal solar plant (especially concentrated solar power plants) can hold heat for 24 hours with minimal loss of heat during the heat exchange when the sun is down. Then I would be for it, especially since it’s using the same concept of a thermal power plant (e.g. using a boiler to generate steam to turn a turbine connecting to a generator) and don’t need any additional facilities and/or devices to convert DC to AC (Photovoltaics, I would need not only space for battery storage to store and distribute power during months with long nights, but also take into account needing a DC to AC inverter).

You've completely misunderstood what baseload electricity demand is. It's a descriptor for a segment of market demand, defined by the minimum demand at a point in time, such that at least that quantity of generation is required from somewhere at all times.

Baseload has historically been met in many grids by fixed inflexible generators with low marginal costs of production like coal fired plants, but that's just an economics thing. Baseload can be met by any combination of generation, either fixed or variable, whatever's cheapest at that point in time.

It's not a technical requirement that a certain segment of generation has to be the same fixed inflexible sources at all times. That's just how things worked out in many grids traditionally. Often this was encouraged with measures to inflate baseload demand (ie add to demand at off peak times) to find a use for the power that was being generated regardless due to its fixed nature... Things such as cheaper electricity tariffs separately metered overnight, and controlled load water heating circuits that specifically ran then.

This "we need renewables to replicate the market behaviour of traditional baseload power plants by becoming fixed and dispatchable" thinking is a very 2010 outlook, but it turned out no we don't. That's kinda why things like solar thermal, deep geothermal and tidal power turned out to be such dead ends compared to bulk solar PV and wind and just developing the storage and demand shifting options over time. Turns out we just didn't really need that fixed base load model after all, and a variable grid future is where we're heading instead.

With the cheapest generation now being variable renewables with effectively zero marginal cost of generation, as renewables prevention rises to become predominant, a lot of the baseload demand segment of the market just ends up being met by variable sources (baseload here appears to be about the 1100 MW mark, but the minimum actual grid demand is actually more like 500 MW because a big chunk of Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday demand was met by self-supplied solar, not the grid):

(Notably, the coal generation, the traditional "baseload" there, closed down a little under a decade ago, in the face of their market share getting gobbled up by growing wind and solar. That solar and wind generation would mean there was no "base load" left over for coal a lot of the time)

As your wiki link about baseload notes, it is an outdated concept, and high renewable grids need flexibility. That variable renewable dominance makes flexibility the single most important thing for other sources to be able to operate successfully in such a market. It heavily disadvantages those inflexible sources like coal and nuclear generation because that guaranteed base load demand isn't there as a fixed market share for them any more.

 

[Arwon]

This transition is definitely playing out in New England, with distributed solar eating into the traditional baseload market segment: New England again sets record for low demand on regional power system

“The evolution of New England’s power system continues,” said Steven Gould, the ISO’s director of operations. “The previous record lasted less than a year, and this one likely won’t last long either. Each day, our system operators are seeing the clean energy transition play out in real time.”

Either the 10 GW (minimum demand including underlying non-grid demand) is baseload, and therefore the behind the meter solar is meeting a third of "baseload" on this particular day, or the baseload is the actual grid demand at a minimum 7 GW in the afternoon. Either way, there is a reduction in the "base load" market available for coal or nuclear generators to sell to.

Over time this expanding variable generation, including similar impacts from grid-connected solar plants and wind, pushes the traditional base load generators out by denying them their old market share. This will be aided in the case of New England by its existing heavy demand for imported hydro power from Quebec, as much like in South Australia above, imports from other parts of a continent-scale grid aid with flexibility in the non-VRE part of the market.

 

[EvaDK]

The interconnected electricity grid already exist between most nations in Northern Europe. Electricity is generated where the conditions & weather allow it and sent to where local electricity generation is momentarily low. It needs more capacity in the near future though.

We have days or time windows here, where the base rate of a kWh of electricity is 0 (you still pay the tariff, but the electricity itself is free), because wind & solar generate more than 100% of the domestic demand + exports.

 

[Tee Kay]

Lots of replies focus on the 'total' part and not on the 'phase out' part, which I suppose is illustrative of the reasons why that phrasing was not adopted.

No one is saying stop using fossil fuels overnight, or in a year, or ten years, or even fifty years. It's a phase out = gradual reduction with the goal of reducing to zero.

A phase out needs to be stated and agreed on as a goal even if we don't get there. We should be under no illusions that any continued use of fossil fuels is going to be part of the solution to climate change in the medium to long term.

 

[Plains-Cow]

No fossil fuels? I have no idea why anyone would want to abandon this:

 

[Arwon]

Look at that big toothy grin let's give her a treat