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February 24 - February 26, 2022
But aiming only for what is politically possible is the art of limiting ambition before you begin.
I support technologies that pass the “Is it ready and does it work?” test.
Our future on this planet is in jeopardy. Billionaires may dream of escaping to Mars, but the rest of us . . . we have to stay and fight.
It’s now time for end-game decarbonization, which means never producing or purchasing machines or technologies that rely
on burning fossil fuels ever again.
vehicles. Likewise, we need every corporation purchasing a power plant to choose solar instead of natural gas and wind instead of coal. Fortunately, we are further along with this project than you might expect. In 2018, 66% of new power plants globally were renewables or carbon free!19 But while this is good, it is not quite enough—across the board we now need adoption rates of 100%.
While that sounds dramatic, it doesn’t mean you have to run out to buy a new EV today. It means that the next time you need to retire a car or any other machine, it should be replaced with one that doesn’t emit CO2. When your car finally dies, you should replace it with an electric one.
the next engine will be electric, even for that old jalopy.
A 100% adoption rate is only achieved by mandate—and robust financial incentives to back it up.
no amount of hope in free-market solutions can change the fact that it is now too late to rely on the free market to act fast enough. We need to call the plumbers (and electricians, and engineers, and manufacturers) to fix our infrastructure now.
Where Will We Get All That Electricity? There are enough renewable resources to easily meet global energy demands. Solar and wind will be the biggest suppliers. Hydroelectricity is critical, especially as a giant battery. Biofuels matter, especially for things like air travel, but they won’t solve every problem. Nuclear, while not strictly necessary, is very useful. Our land-use patterns are crucial to success.
Today, the US grid delivers, on average, 450 gigawatts (GW) of electricity. If we electrify nearly everything, as I described in the previous chapter, we’ll need 1,500–1,800 GW. That’s a lot. If we use solar alone, that’s more than we can fit on all of our rooftops, and more than we can erect over our parking spaces (see figure 7.1). If we added wind turbines in all of the corn fields in America, that would supply about half of what we need.
That’s about 15 quads (293 TWh) per year against our current annual energy use of 100 quads. This implies that 45-50 quads will be enough if it is in electric form rather than burning of fuels
The amount of solar radiation that makes it through our atmosphere and into our earth systems is 85,000 terawatts.
The US uses approximately 20% of that, 3.5–4 TW of primary energy.
This “ground-source” geothermal heat can be harvested year-round by a technology called heat pumps to keep buildings at an even temperature.
Confusingly also called “geothermal energy” is the energy that is a closer relative of geysers, volcanoes, and hot springs. These types of geothermal energy are not derived from solar, but from remnant heat left over from the formation of the earth, with a little heat generated from radioactive decay thrown in for good measure.
Mark Jacobson of Stanford University,4 along with his colleagues, proposed that the world could run 100% on water, wind and solar (WWS).5
lawsuit. I believe history will side with Jacobson, and we’ll be able to do this with WWS technology—and others agree with me.9
Jacobson may be too anti-nuclear, but his critics are too anti-future.
To power all of America on solar, for example, would require about 1% of the land area dedicated to solar collection—about the same area we currently dedicate to roads or rooftops (see figure 7.1).
As we’ve seen, to electrify everything in the US, we’ll need to generate around 1,500–1,800 GW. To generate all of that with solar would take about 15 million acres of solar panels.
To harness the same amount of energy with wind power alone would take around 100 million acres planted with wind turbines. For reference, the area of all US land is about 2.4 billion acres.
Let’s first look at solar. In table 7.1, I present the acreage of all rooftops, roads, and parking spaces in the US—all places where we could install solar panels.
cells. It’s better to think about putting solar panels in highway medians and lofting panels over roads and parking spots.
There is a camp of environmentalists that believe we’ll power the world with distributed (rooftop or community) solar, but the numbers tell a simple story that we’ll need all of the distributed energy we can harness, and we’ll need industrial installations of solar and wind as well.
Idle cropland is ideal for turbines (and perhaps for generating income for farmers). We also have massive amounts of grassland pasture and range that are similarly suitable for wind turbines. If we set aside land used for urban areas, transportation, defense and industry, rural parks and wildlife, and forests, we still have about 390 million acres we could use for wind turbines.
There can be no “not in my backyard” with solar and wind energy.
The approximately 60 nuclear facilities and 100 reactors in the US already provide roughly 20% (about 100 GW) of all our delivered electricity (around 450 GW.)
My longtime friend, the wonderful thinker and author George Dyson (son of physicist Freeman Dyson), poses the question of what humans would do if energy were so cheap that we could move mountains on a whim. I worry we would dominate nature in a way that would make the world awful (think about the consequences of fusion-powered bulldozers).
It’s also buried in old ways of doing things, like the state-sponsored utility monopoly, which gives low interest rates to big projects instead of to consumers who need to swap their gas heaters for solar and heat pumps.
The real test, given the urgency of our climate situation, should be, “Is it ready to go to scale today?”
Renewables are intermittent sources of energy, but they complement one another. Everything that can store energy should store energy. Every end use of energy that can be shifted to when the sun is shining or wind is blowing, should be shifted. By electrifying sectors that were previously not electrified, it becomes easier to balance the grid. We’ll need to share electricity with our neighbors and borrow it back from our friends. We’ll also need to expand long-distance transmission infrastructure to send electricity across state lines. Just as with fossil-fuel infrastructure, there are big cost
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This type of battery is thermal energy storage, where instead of storing electricity directly, it is converted to heat (or cold) in our refrigerators or HVAC systems. In this future, where we’ll have excess (solar) energy in the middle of the day, it is critical to store that away to keep our refrigerators cold and homes warm overnight. This is not radical, nor is it expensive—people already run water heaters when electricity is cheap and store the hot water for later use.
There are already companies that sell ice-storage systems for air conditioning. We could freeze the water when energy is cheap, and use that coldness at the hotter times of day when electricity is more expensive.
These waste biofuels are a resource equivalent to about 10% of our current
Storage is not the only pathway to matching supply and demand, and it alone is not enough. Two other techniques are demand-response, and over-capacity, and both will likely be cheaper than batteries.
So here’s a crazy idea: given that wind- and solar-generated electricity are now the cheapest energy sources at about 2–4¢/kWh, instead of fretting about decreased supply during the winter, let’s just design the system to meet that winter minimum, and have an oversupply and overcapacity the rest of the year. I’m not the only person thinking about this not really so radical idea.
It should be our goal to enable a similarly decentralized electrical network protocol that allows the rapid movement of “packets” of electricity between billions of connected loads and uses them
We could get to a point at which we can truly share, at scale, all of the demand-response possibilities, and all of the storage and battery opportunities in all of our homes and vehicles. Small amounts of storage everywhere add up to the giant battery we need.
We need a grid that treats everyone connected to it as both a supply and a demand, a load shifter and a battery.
My original degree was in materials science and metallurgy, and my first industrial jobs were in aluminum smelters, steel blast furnaces, and rolling mills. Apart from apathy, there is no reason to believe we can’t massively reduce the energy use of industries like these while also fixing a huge number of other environmental problems associated with how we make things.
The 6,544 tons of stuff the US takes from the natural world each year is 20 tons per person. Funnily enough, this is without even counting the CO2. When we burn those 1,936 million tons of fossil fuels they mix with oxygen to create CO2—around 6,700 million tons of the stuff. If we counted CO2 as one of the things we manufactured, it would, astoundingly, weigh more than everything else we push around combined!
