Fossil fuels help humans live a better life so we should increase their use.
There is no good replacement for fossil fuels that will be available in the next 40 years.
The global warming caused by 40 more years of emissions is not an existential threat.
Any threat from global warming can be mitigated by increased fossil fuel use, what he calls "climate mastery".
Replacements for fossil fuels should be developed.
The best candidates for replacing fossil fuels are nuclear and enhanced geothermal.
I think he is being misleading or is ignorant. In the next 40 years there are obvious candidates for powering a decarbonized economy. Namely solar and batteries. New Solar is rapidly becoming cheaper than existing coal generation in large areas of the world. Battery production is scaling exponentially. While nuclear is the safest power option, it is never going to be the cheapest. Its technology iteration cycle is too slow. Solar power and batteries on the other hand both have fast iteration cycles. This makes them drop in price faster than nuclear. Even if you got rid of the unnecessarily burdensome nuclear regulations, its slow development cycle means it will not beat solar in cost per unit of electricity in the next 40 years.
Nuclear power plant technology is iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational, while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage. Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5% improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor. Obviously not.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
teutonic 2yr ago·Edited 2yr ago
Solar is only cheaper based on naive LCOE measures, which are trumpeted everywhere for propaganda purposes. In terms of marginal price of electricity as demanded they are quite poor (and will get worse as electrification schemes progress due to winter heating and electric car charging being added to the grid, both of which are at their highest demand when solar is at its lowest supply).
No possible battery economics could support seasonal energy storage to allow Canada and the northern US to use solar for winter heating, when energy use more than triples at the same time that solar is producing less than 1/10th of its summer output.
Every argument I've seen for solar enabling bans of nuclear and fossil fuels has used the LCOE of solar as a flag to look "mathy," them collapsed into moralizing about The Climate Crisis in the hope that readers wouldn't ask for more details. They rarely do.
The reason solar makes nuclear non-viable is that it craters the price during summer afternoons, while spiking it on cold winter days. So cheap baseload energy doesn't pay, and everyone rushes to build gas peakers and even diesel banks for winter. Which is exactly what's happening everywhere.
Buy gas stock. Unless the ecos win so hard that they can just turn our lights and heating off to "balance demand", in which case go live in the woods.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
teutonic 2yr ago·Edited 2yr ago
That battery figure is for storage watt-hrs, and can't be compared to generation capacity in watts.
California's "250 MW Gateway Energy Storage System" has exactly 250MWh of capacity, so can operate for... Exactly one hour. Compare that to a gas peaker that can produce that output indefinitely. This can be useful for frequency and voltage regulation, and help with daily wind intermittency and the solar duck curve, but it's not any kind of solution to seasonal intermittency.
That's what I was talking about before with using nameplate and lcoe figures to avoid thinking about actual operation issues.
Notice that almost all the gas shutdowns are long-delayed decommissioning in California. The north-midwest is rapidly expanding gas generation.
I would be interested to see a dispassionate reading of the studies on decarbonizing the grid. From my limited reading major build outs of renewables are likely to continue well past 50% of the grid. The combination of increased capacity factors for renewables, national grids, and cheap storage will give us several more doublings of installed renewables. I am not sure what technology will take us to 90-100% renewable penetration. I wouldn't be surprised if some nuclear baseload is kept online to achieve a fully decarbonized grid.
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Notes -
Fossil futures seems to make several arguments.
Fossil fuels help humans live a better life so we should increase their use.
There is no good replacement for fossil fuels that will be available in the next 40 years.
The global warming caused by 40 more years of emissions is not an existential threat.
Any threat from global warming can be mitigated by increased fossil fuel use, what he calls "climate mastery".
Replacements for fossil fuels should be developed.
The best candidates for replacing fossil fuels are nuclear and enhanced geothermal.
I think he is being misleading or is ignorant. In the next 40 years there are obvious candidates for powering a decarbonized economy. Namely solar and batteries. New Solar is rapidly becoming cheaper than existing coal generation in large areas of the world. Battery production is scaling exponentially. While nuclear is the safest power option, it is never going to be the cheapest. Its technology iteration cycle is too slow. Solar power and batteries on the other hand both have fast iteration cycles. This makes them drop in price faster than nuclear. Even if you got rid of the unnecessarily burdensome nuclear regulations, its slow development cycle means it will not beat solar in cost per unit of electricity in the next 40 years.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-power-a-solution-to-climate-change/
Solar is only cheaper based on naive LCOE measures, which are trumpeted everywhere for propaganda purposes. In terms of marginal price of electricity as demanded they are quite poor (and will get worse as electrification schemes progress due to winter heating and electric car charging being added to the grid, both of which are at their highest demand when solar is at its lowest supply).
No possible battery economics could support seasonal energy storage to allow Canada and the northern US to use solar for winter heating, when energy use more than triples at the same time that solar is producing less than 1/10th of its summer output.
Every argument I've seen for solar enabling bans of nuclear and fossil fuels has used the LCOE of solar as a flag to look "mathy," them collapsed into moralizing about The Climate Crisis in the hope that readers wouldn't ask for more details. They rarely do.
The reason solar makes nuclear non-viable is that it craters the price during summer afternoons, while spiking it on cold winter days. So cheap baseload energy doesn't pay, and everyone rushes to build gas peakers and even diesel banks for winter. Which is exactly what's happening everywhere.
Buy gas stock. Unless the ecos win so hard that they can just turn our lights and heating off to "balance demand", in which case go live in the woods.
DO you have a citation for peaker plant expansion? What I read indicates that used to be the case. More recently and likely a long term trend, batteries are winning the race for rapid on rapid off energy that peaker plants used to dominate. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/us-will-see-more-new-battery-capacity-than-natural-gas-generation-in-2023/
That battery figure is for storage watt-hrs, and can't be compared to generation capacity in watts.
California's "250 MW Gateway Energy Storage System" has exactly 250MWh of capacity, so can operate for... Exactly one hour. Compare that to a gas peaker that can produce that output indefinitely. This can be useful for frequency and voltage regulation, and help with daily wind intermittency and the solar duck curve, but it's not any kind of solution to seasonal intermittency.
That's what I was talking about before with using nameplate and lcoe figures to avoid thinking about actual operation issues.
Notice that almost all the gas shutdowns are long-delayed decommissioning in California. The north-midwest is rapidly expanding gas generation.
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I would be interested to see a dispassionate reading of the studies on decarbonizing the grid. From my limited reading major build outs of renewables are likely to continue well past 50% of the grid. The combination of increased capacity factors for renewables, national grids, and cheap storage will give us several more doublings of installed renewables. I am not sure what technology will take us to 90-100% renewable penetration. I wouldn't be surprised if some nuclear baseload is kept online to achieve a fully decarbonized grid.
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