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There's several white papers crunching the numbers in detail, I have found the first half of Masterplan 3 to be the most concise of them.
Yes, if you want to run the world on solar cells and batteries, you need two ramp industrial capacity, hard, for at least the next decade.
But that's the thing: we have been doing exactly that for the last 5 years, successfully. We "just" have to keep adding capacity, we just need to keep the curves curving up. Capitalism will do the rest, since it's most likely cheaper (if we extrapolate current learning curves under standard conditions of the industry).
It's not as utopic as most people think. Even with current global growth rates, we actually don't need as much energy as people think (a lot of our primary energy consumption ends up as waste heat - you get that for free if you electrify everything, because efficiency).
Does this account for shifting heating loads in northern climates from combustion to electric heat pump? I think what you're talking about works for the Sun Belt, but I am not convinced that, for example, Sweden, can ever keep its citizens from freezing in winter (when it's dark most of the time, the sun is low, and frequently cloudy) without like 3-4 more orders of magnitude battery storage than currently exist. Current storage is on the order of what, grid-minutes? It's not going to adequately transfer energy from summer to winter, and I honestly don't see a viable non-carbon approach there without (1) superconductors solving the transmission problem, (2) evacuating northern latitudes (lol), or (3) nuclear and maybe wind picking up the tab all winter.
Yeah, the Nordics/Baltics are pretty much the worst case scenario for solar+batteries. But it's a bit of a global outlier, if you look at a population density map, basically all local maxima pole-wards of 55° are there. Luckily, they have lots of wind, hydro and nukes. Also, it's less than 30M people. If they keep burning some gas in winter, it's not the end of the world.
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I think that Tesla is being more than a bit optimistic on just how much ramping up can be done and how cheap it would be at scale, but even they list 10% of 2023 GDP (i.e. the output of 1 in every 10 working adults from 2023 devoted to just batteries for an entire year). For comparison, 10% of US working adults, roughly, work in all manufacturing combined.
One item to note about the waste heat figure, is that it is calculated based on the energy contained within the fossil fuel molecules that is ultimately expended as heat instead of being converted to electricity. This is setting the denominator based on fuel pulled from the ground, not as an efficiency metric of how much electricity is lost. The fair comparison for renewables would be the amount of wind/sun/hydro potential energy not converted to electricity after engaging with the PV module, wind turbine, or hydro turbine. I design solar systems as part of my job and even I think that is a dubious way to promote the technology.
That also means there is not a can of efficiency to be opened up once switching to renewables, we still need the same number of watt-hours to power cars, grids, equipment, etc. There are marginal gains to be had in some cases, sure, but if we were to wave a magic wand and eliminate that waste heat from fossil fuels, all that would mean is our fuels would last two to three times longer. Eliminating production based waste heat would not change the throughput of the systems because those are limited by quantity of plants, turbine design, transmission lines, and ultimately end-user needs.
I don't get your point.
Humanity's primary energy consumption is some number. 160 PWh per year. But most (80%+) of that is fossil fuels. Turning fossil fuel into heat is inefficient, so if we electrify everything, we don't actually need to make 160 PWh of electricity per year, less than half is enough (the power plants don't make waste heat and residential/low temperature industrial heating will be done by heat pump at 300% efficiency).
And sure, the sun is going to put much more than 160 PWh onto those solar panels. But the sun shines anyway.
The point is that a battery storage system is not hooked up to the theoretical total energy contained in fossil fuels or nuclear rods or solar irradiance, it is connected to the output of the power plants and solar fields. That output (and corresponding residential/commercial/industrial usage numbers) is what the battery needs to be sized in relation to. Heat pumps may help on the margins with that number but there are no low-hanging fruits to pick up in the world of energy usage and production.
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Again, you (and your cited paper) are running away from the issue of scale, and comparing proposal requirements versus production prospects. This is the shell game, and always will be the shell game, much as how calling renewable energy production 'cheap' is inevitably made apart from the subsidy costs and the opportunity cost impacts to other issues.
A very simple test to separate the renewable energy proposals that are solicitations for subsidies from serious engineering proposals is to check if they address issues of 'where.' Your Masterplan 3 (producer: Tesla), for example, has a section titled 'Land Area Required.' Tell me if you can spot the issue in one of its only paragraphs.
If someone cannot, this product was aimed at them. But for electrical engineering considerations, this is making a global production requirement estimate based on where already-existing projects are- not where future projects would need to be be.
Existing solar generation projects in the US are, by the nature, where it is most economical in the US to build the systems for the people they would support. A lot of that is in or near US deserts. Most of the global population does not live near within US deserts, or even within the US. Nor does most of the US population. Nor it is economical for even the US to transmit electricity 'merely' from the productive deserts to cities far away. It is considerably less economical to charge batteries on site and then physically ship them by truck or train to distant destinations, only to bring them back once drained for a recharge. Moreover, these are already occupied good sites. Additional solar panels farms will be, on average, less cost-efficient as the most cost-efficient locations are farmed first, and subsequent farms are added elsewhere.
Metaphorically, this is analogous to taking an average of output of some group of exceptionally bright students at a highly selective university producing Y amount of quality players, and then claiming that if only you only expanded the class by X, then you would have XxY output of quality papers from the university. It ignores the screening that went into the initial group selection.
What does this mean? Well, it means Masterplan 3 is deliberately underselling the solar panel production requirements- and possibly by quite a bit. Not some mere 5-10% margin, but potentially magnitudes more, depending on where the solar panels will be installed and under what policies. Germany's energiewende policy is an example of, well, extremely bad solar panel policy, not least because it chose bad places for solar generation potential. (Namely- Germany. Energiewende was a policy that started with the conclusion- build solar energy in Germany, then figure out where in Germany- rather than whether the policy should be.)
Similarly, look at where Masterplan 3 expects the increased mineral extraction to come from. These are, after all, the critical inputs for those refining investments.
If you are still looking, or haven't started looking yet, save yourself time and stop. It doesn't.
You can CTFL-F all the most relevant global producers of minerals, and none of them will show in the report, let alone an assessment of how much they can feasibly increase production. In fact, you won't even find the word 'country' in the entire report. National polities do not exist in this report, any more than funding sources, backers, or second-order effects of driving production to this proposal to the measurable detriment of others.
Heck, it doesn't even raise the issue of transmission loss between countries. It vaguely handwaves the issue on the US (the only country it addresses to any depth), and when it actually does...
Translated into plainer english- while assuming all the new power generation will be produced in places comparable to the highest cost-benefit solar generation potential, where it already does not make economic sense to transmit the generated solar power long distances, fractionally few new power lines will be created to transmit (via high voltage) the new generation to the (often distant from the high-potential areas) population centers to use it.
Translated into even plainer english- this proposal is not so much about building a new and far more capable power transmission network than already exists, but ripping out the existing one and replacing it with Something Better.
This is not a serious proposal. It does not address actual engineering problems it raises. It doesn't even have the virtue of existing to justify handing people money to try. It's primary purpose is to convince people that renewable energy in mass is cheap and affordable, and as proxy there will be increased demand for Tesla.
This is advertising to justify subsidies, not a master plan.
I don't think that's entirely fair, both the paper and I are aware of the immense scale such a project would have. Are the numbers optimistic? Perhaps. Maybe even by a factor of 2 for less ideal countries (like Germany). But not by orders of magnitude.
Fair. But look at population density maps next to solar potential maps. The vast majority of people live where it's sunny. The US is better suited in this regard than other countries (ironically, especially China has a big mismatch, the coastal cities don't have much solar potential - but the Chinese will just plop down another 10 HVDC lines across the country), but there's lots of potential globally.
Come on, not really. The country is huge. There's lots of space left in the deserts. There's lots of roofs in decently sunny areas without panels yet. There's even lots of shitty grazing land east of the desert where another solar farm wouldn't impact the rancher in any meaningful way (except make him money).
I'm an optimist here. There was a big lithium scare a few years ago. Today, lithium is about as cheap as it ever was. Capitalism is good at fixing supply problems. What minerals worry you specifically? Personally, I hope lithium battery development makes cobalt cathodes obsolete, but that's more for humanitarian reasons than actual supply problems. Other than that? If the Chinese go to war with the west, we might have to pay for rare-earth-free electric motors. But those exist for basically all applications, they're just more expensive (or bigger, which would require a redesign, which is the same thing as expensive).
The real problem with geopolitics is that we really need the Chinese factories making solar panels and batteries. Losing access to that already existing capacity would throw the west back a decade. But that's par for the course when we fight China, we actually need so much more stuff from their factories, panels and batteries aren't special in any way here.
I mean, the report suggests building 30 TW of new generation capacity. (Not running away from the scale issue...) Transmission losses are a rounding error here. So what if you lose 10% of power when you move some Spanish solar power to Germany? Just build 10% more panels in Spain.
I actually liked the fatalism of that part, the real politic of it all. Building new transmission lines is incredibly unpopular with NIMBYs and bogs you down in court for years. So don't do that. Put new transformers in your substations, and reconductor existing pylons with carbon fiber composite core high voltage cables. Those exist, at scale. You might even get some copper to recycle out of the deal.
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