Fossil Capitalism and the GND

[Estebonrober]

https://climateandcapitalism.com/20...-steam-power-and-the-roots-of-global-warming/

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/fossil-capitalism-opens-new-geological-epoch-the-anthropocene/

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...end-fossil-fuels-warning-demise-a8523856.html

https://bios.fi/bios-governance_of_economic_transition.pdf


As global society tries to move forward out of the fossil age it is important to note how we got here. The explosion of economic growth starting shortly after the birth of the steam engine is not in question. Whether you have a Marx like point of view about how the capital manipulated that invention against the working class or not isn't very relevant in my point. The reality is that it allowed explosive growth across the entire globe and birthed whole new industries in it's wake. Wealth has exploded in a way unimaginable in the previous thousand years. The world can be traversed in a day, we launch rockets almost weekly now, freight is carried around the planet in days.

As we approach the reality of climate change and the inevitability of the next recession there will be more talk about the death of fossil capitalism and the renaissance of solar, wind, and water power. We should look forward to this time period as it's potential to expand jobs, remake our cities, and bring our communities together. There is no reason we should not be able to move from fossil capitalism into solar capitalism. Contrary to many outlooks this does not need to be a move backwards in energy production. We can increase lifestyles and move towards a post scarcity world with this transition to clean energy. That is impossible on fossil fuels.

So really it is coming down to we shift our energy industry and benefit exponentially or we stick with fossil fuels and stagnate.

 

[Ajidica]

renaissance of solar, wind, and water power.

No love for unleashing the power of the atom?

 

[Estebonrober]

No love for unleashing the power of the atom?

I'm for it but the zietgiest atm seems to be against it.

Why does the change to renewable fuel change things. It is just changing the supplier.

Fossil fuels are a dead end and renewables are not, technically speaking we can keep powering up until our heart is content, with fossil capitalism it will kill the the ecosystem we rely on.

 

[Synobun]

I think it was @Arwon who educated me and showed me that nuclear isn't the best form of energy anymore compared to renewables. It was really interesting and completely changed my perspective. I still like nuclear, but I'm not sure it's a worthwhile hill to die on anymore.

 

[Estebonrober]

Fossil fuels are only a dead end because they will run out and the problems with pollution. If they were far more abundant and the pollution caould be cheaply removed there would not be a problem.

As I said it is just a change of energy suppler.

But they can't be cheaply removed and therefore are a dead end? Maybe ship the remaining coal to Mars in the future. It could use some CO2.

 

[Synobun]

Fossil fuels are only a dead end because they will run out and the problems with pollution. If they were far more abundant and the pollution caould be cheaply removed there would not be a problem.

As I said it is just a change of energy suppler.

Is this supposed to be a counter? "It's a dead end because of it being a dead end." isn't much of a point. Of course fossil fuels will run out, of course they pollute the Earth. That's the issue.

 

[Arwon]

Hi since I was tag-summoned, here's the thing I did for nuclear, just comparing how much electricity you get for a given lump of government funding if used for nuclear power or used for lots of solar panels

So let's say Australia decided to declare it will spend government money to establish a nuclear power plant. We'll assume they use Jervis Bay, the site historically intended for the purpose, because like Guam or Washington DC, Jervis Bay isn't part of a state and is instead a non-state terrritory. That means the Commonwealth can make laws for it and it's where they have the best chance of doing something constitutionally valid. We'll assume objections to the heated water destroying a reasonably pristine local marine ecosystem are ignored, and we'll assume the NSW government doesn't sue to try to protect the local tourism industry over the border. So we're just talking construction costs.

We'll use Hinkley Point as a guide. It's a 3.2 gigawatt plant, so we'll assume that's what they want to build (the Jervis Bay proposal was 500 MW, but anyway). That's currently reported to cost about 20 billion pounds before you add the subsidies it'll get through a guaranteed sale price. The Pound is in the toilet now but historically it runs at about 2 AUD to 1 Pound (I think it's about $1.70 currently) and costs are probably higher in a country with no prior expertise anyway.

So for convenience we'll call it $40 billion Australian dollars to get 3.2 GW of shiny new fission generation capacity. That'll generate power nearly all the time, give or take faults, inadequate demand, and grid issues. The record capacity factor for nuclear power is about 92%, so we'll assume a 90% capacity factor. If you get power from a 3.2 GW plant 90% of the time that's about 22,500 GWh per year of delicious emissions free power, every year, once it starts generating.

How long will that take? As I said, nuclear plants can take ten years to get running. Hinkley Point was approved in 2010, a license granted in 2012, and is expected to be operational in 2025. That's 15 years total, but let's be generous and assume it takes ten years from today even though we'd be building a regulatory regime and expertise from scratch.So here's how that looks in annual GWh generation terms:

How much solar power does $40 billion get you? The cost per watt of getting a solar panel system installed on your roof is about $1.50 per watt for a 3 kW system, cheaper for larger ones, more expensive for smaller ones. Manufacturing costs are now like 50 cents per watt so a lot of the costs are actual installation. However we're probably looking at more than just household rooftops so let's look at bigger commercial scale systems where the average cost is about $1.20 per watt. However that excludes some extra site costs but includes the renewable energy certificate subsidy whose value depends on the market price of the certificates. But let's go with that $1.20 per watt figure.

For $40 billion, then, it's plausible to install 33 GW worth of solar panels. Australia installed 1.3 GW of solar power in 2017, but with larger projects should install about 3.5GW in 2018. So let's assume a 2.5 GW per year installation rate from a sustained rollout of different scale systems.

How much energy does a gigawatt of solar get you? It all depends on where they're installed and whatnot, as astute people are fond of pointing out, the sun doesn't always shine. The capacity factor of solar is much lower than nuclear power. Average daily production from a 1kW system might be about 4kWh which is well below the 24 kWh you could get if it generated all day. It's about a 16.6% capacity factor I think - roughly 1/6th.

At that rate, 2.5GW will give us 10 GWh per day or about 2650 GWh per year. A lot less than a nuclear power plant!

But that much keeps being added every year. Every year for 13 years in this plan we're adding 2.5 GW of solar panels, until we've added 33 GW at that cost of $40 billion by early in year 14. That means we've basically got all the solar up and running by the time the nuclear plant starts running (fingers crossed the nuclear plant is on time tho). Nuclear power keeps going at a constant rate, while the degradation rate of solar panels is about 0.5% of output per year for modern panels.

Putting the installation rate and degradation rates together, here's annual generation:

So spending $40 billion on solar gets a massive head start, but after many decades spending $40 billion nuclear might catch up if it doesn't get decommissioned. In that time though, we've obtained a massively higher volume of electricity from the panels, something which the nuclear power is never likely to catch up with. Here's cumulative lifetime output:

I should note I'm being very very generous in assuming the cost of the solar panels doesn't drop further in the next decade, but then on the other hand I also haven't added the cost of batteries which are in the early stages of totally changing how grids will work. Currently, at a household install, batteries will roughly double the cost per kW, but that's coming down fairly quickly, and as more householders go self-sufficient the actual need for grid power diminishes.

At utility scales, matching installations with storage 1:1 is much less of a concern given the grid has lots of participants. The balance of load is therefore partly or wholly met by other flexible sources in a price based centralised dispatch process, so you're looking at a smaller ratio of storage to installed generation (since the coal plant was closed, with up to 50% wind generation, South Australia's market fills the gaps with imports, gas and is starting down the battery storage path).

Australia's annual electricity consumption in the national grid covering 5 of 6 states is a bit under 200 TWh per year, so our solar panels in 13 years would be meeting 1/5th of that demand at a near-zero marginal cost. That will of course lead to significant shifts in the rest of the market. You'd probably see gas and hydro expanding or maintaining their market shares, at the expense of coal which is too fixed and inflexible to exploit the sporadic peak price periods created by intermittent renewable generation. The market opportunities for utility scale batteries would start to become very attractive.

But if the question is what use of a big clump of government funding gives you the most electricity to play with out of nuclear power and solar panels, then the smart spend is on the panels.

Not really an argument to decommission existing nuclear capacity early, but certainly for the majority of countries which don't have any nuclear power sector currently, it's pretty apparent where the path is.

 

[Ajidica]

@Arwon, is there a reason you are using Hinkley Point as a benchmark for nuclear power? I haven't kept up on it, but last I heard the cost overruns were largely due to a terrible public-private investment deal, land fights due to overlapping jurisdictions, and a whole bunch of weird stuff with the Chinese. Conversely, the French are able to build nuclear plants at a much lower cost.

Further, how does the solar vs nuclear comparison hold up in areas that don't get much sun for a lot of the year? (I haven't seen the sun for the last week.) While I know a lot of discussion has occurred on high-tech grids and massive battery banks to in effect transfer solar generated electricity from places with sun to places without sun, does that take into account the large amount of CO2, environmental degradation, and other nasty substances emitted into the environment in making the rare earth based batteries and high-tech grids?

 

[Estebonrober]

So what. You think changing the power source to renewables will change the economy but you have not stated why. Why is it not just a change of supplier, oil and coal will go out of business be replaced by manufacturing of solar panels and wind generators. But that does not fundamentally change the economy, it is just incremental.



The issue is how the economy will be changed not the fact that fossil fuels cause pollution.

It takes the constraints of fossil fuel production off the economy. We are no longer bound to the production and pollution of the energy source, the limit becomes our ability to use the sun as the primary energy source. This allows continued growth in the economy instead of stagnation. It's all in the first post. I'm not sure how I'm not making that clear.

 

[Arwon]

@Arwon, is there a reason you are using Hinkley Point as a benchmark for nuclear power? I haven't kept up on it, but last I heard the cost overruns were largely due to a terrible public-private investment deal, land fights due to overlapping jurisdictions, and a whole bunch of weird stuff with the Chinese. Conversely, the French are able to build nuclear plants at a much lower cost.

Further, how does the solar vs nuclear comparison hold up in areas that don't get much sun for a lot of the year? (I haven't seen the sun for the last week.) While I know a lot of discussion has occurred on high-tech grids and massive battery banks to in effect transfer solar generated electricity from places with sun to places without sun, does that take into account the large amount of CO2, environmental degradation, and other nasty substances emitted into the environment in making the rare earth based batteries and high-tech grids?

Aside from there being plenty of English language sources on the British plant, Australia with a Britain-derived common law legal system and a Westminster political system is gonna be institutionally most similar to the UK (except for the whole federalism factor complicating matters). That said, nuclear power plants are notorious for overshooting their initial construction timeframes and costs except in very specific circumstances of the same people repeatedly building the same design, so you'd wanna assume any initial quote is at least going to increase by at least like 50% in both timeline and cost.

As far as weather goes, Germany is doing a roaring solar transition, their solar capacity factors look to be about 12% rather than our 16%, so you can probably knock about a quarter off the orange line in my chart for the drearier temperate parts of the world. Remember, though, that there's likely good wind resources to use instead, for a start. And in the European synchronous grid there's places like Spain and Italy that will have higher solar capacity factors, and it's probably a good idea to increase their interconnection levels with Europe's grid. While household rooftop solar PV is good to put in many places, it makes sense to put the larger utility-scale solar plants and the wind turbines in the places where they produce more electricity, obviously.

Australia, too, has a spectrum of sunshine duration across its wide area grid (the eastern and southern part of the country). Melbourne has less sunshine than Barcelona or Rome, Sydney has less sunshine than Marseille or Madrid. Across grids covering wider areas there's a better chance for a mix of renewable sources to contribute predictably and smooth each other out.

The embedded CO2-e payback time for solar panels is about 2 years (energy payback is 1) and for wind turbines is about 3 months AFAIK.

 

[Estebonrober]

And it places the constraints of renewable fuel production on the economy. You have not shown how it will fundamentally change the economy other than a change in supplier.

What constraint on the renewable production? Are we talking logistics of implementing it in the next ten years? I'm not talking in the immediate I'm talking in the long term. I think you need to be more specific about what you want from me. This post is about long term energy production for the US and the rest of the planet. It's not about cost ratios of the moment. From my point of view the constraints from the renewable fuel production on the economy is non-existent, that being a fundamental point of switching.

 

[Arwon]

That said, the impacts on the rest of the economy of the power sector totally changing structure shouldn't be that big, you'd think. Less margin being extracted by generators, yeah, but that's just a bigger "Kodak can't charge you to produce pictures for you" situation.

 

[Estebonrober]

Solar panels are not made out of sunlight and wind turbines are not made out of wind. Stuff still has to be mined to produce them.
Hopefully one day we will be able to replace the mining but that also applies to the pollution from fossil fuel.

Sure but in that sense the constraint is pretty damn high compared to the fossil fuel ecological one we are facing now not to mention the diminishing roi on fossil fuel extraction now. Also it feels like you are playing devil's advocate here, are you?

 

[Arwon]

There's a few metals used for Solar PV that I think will need to expand their economically active extraction (ie, there's gonna be economic strain on current reserves, rather than physical scarcity of the actual resource) for its expected contribution in future decades. But much less of an issue for wind turbines. That's just from what I found looking for research on material constraints just now.

 

[innonimatu]

@Arwon, is there a reason you are using Hinkley Point as a benchmark for nuclear power? I haven't kept up on it, but last I heard the cost overruns were largely due to a terrible public-private investment deal, land fights due to overlapping jurisdictions, and a whole bunch of weird stuff with the Chinese. Conversely, the French are able to build nuclear plants at a much lower cost.

Not really, building Olkiluoto bankrupted Areva. Together with Flamanville in France, that has cost US$ 13 billion so far and is still not finished.

But against renewables, they have subsidies that I fear do not show up in the numbers that apparently prove they are now cheaper that other forms of energy production.

 

[Synobun]

Surely you can foresee a drastic difference in resource consumption rate between the two scenarios of continuing to use fossil fuels for everything and switching to using fossil fuels to manufacture renewable energy sources.

 

[Hrothbern]

I think nano layer solar cells will be developed to needing hardly any (rare) minerals at all.
like for example (between many other known and unknown example):

Researchers at MIT are studying solar cells made from single molecule thick sheets of graphene and materials such as molybdenum diselenide. They are predicting that this type of solar cells could produce up to 1000 times as much more power for a given weigh of material than conventional solar cells. They have completed computer modeling and are working on building the solar cells.
http://www.understandingnano.com/solarcells.html

Batteries need (so far) lots of rare minerals. IDK whether we can expect breakthroughs there on theoretical ground.
But if not so Hydrogen for storage is an ultimate solution needing no rare minerals.

So whatever the scarcity issues of a transition phase, they will not last.

Note:
Fossil caused also geopolitical and economical/financial issues:
Not only all the wars and shady effects starting in the Middle East.
But also the economy of scale effects on Corporate involved and the asymmetry of big money flows from asymmetries in demand and supply of geographical locations.
Same happens to a degree with rare earthes etc.

Once renewable energy is also produced without being dependent on a limited set of sources (of minerals, knowhow, scale of manufacturing) from other countries, these negative influences on our economies are gone. And some less room for big global finance negatives.

 

[Arwon]

The idea that more electricity will transform economies seems a bit suspect given that there are places with huge surpluses of available power currently, and they mostly just use the low prices to smelt aluminium and run servers.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Honestly I think itæs too late
environmental destruction has begun, and the only way I see to stop it is to stop private enterprise entierly and shut off all fossil plants and make air travel illegal

 

[Estebonrober]

I am not playing devil's advocate I just think you are wrong about how transformative the increased of renewables will be compared with the introduction of the steam engine 250 years ago. I think renewables will be less transformative than the introduction of the internal combustion engine.

Fossil fuels are running out but there are also a limited amount of minerals to make solar panels etc. I am sure we will get better at finding, extracting and using both.

Renewables will not produce unlimited electricity because we will run out of the materials to build solar etc and we do not want to dam every river.

Renewables should replace fossil fuels for nearly all uses to combat climate change but that does not transform the economy as I said above it is just a change of supplier.

I agree with the point that it won’t be as revolutionary. Although the nature of meta materials and biological engineering being that they could potentially be much more revolutionary.

It does change the economy because as it stands mowed it is doomed.