The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

[LP]

The Wind industry will tell you SolarPV is a filthy industry that consumes perfectly good land which could can be used for agribusiness.

The SolarPV industry will claim Wind generates lots of unrecyclable waste, kills rare birds, is a hazard for shipping and causes infrasound harm to nearby residents.

Neither Wind nor SolarPV comment on the battery industry because they need batteries or they are literally dead and buried being unrecyclable.

The Hydrogen industry will tell you batteries are filthy, short lived and consume rare resources.

Battery manufacturers will tell you hydrogen is made from coal, is highly inefficient and will consume all our drinking water.

The fossil fuel industry presents a conglomeration of all these accusations.

They all sprout lies of sorts to line their own pockets, claiming one or the other has some sort of high ground is political not technical decision!

The truth is many of the accusations have some substance in a certain limited frame of reference, which is usually a privileged perspective that is chosen to make one technology look good and the other look bad. When you stack the global benefits and costs up against each other, there is barely a difference between them other than in the marketing spin!

[LP]

I had to laugh today, as we often get dragged in these discussions at work, I sat through an extended rant from a born again EV apparatchik who spent what seemed like hours telling us how hydrogen vehicles / transport could never work. It was probably just a few minutes.

At the end he justified his position by telling us about his past experiences, back when he converted his 4WD to LPG! :

Back in the old OPEC fuel crisis days, Aussies turned to LPG for a large chunk of the vehicle network in the space of just 2 or 3 years, some of us might still be driving LPG vehicles!

If we think we can wait while 85% of the world's vehicle network converts to EV, then well and good, but it's not happening in a decade, or two decades or even three decades without a huge consumption of resources.

[Mav]

I don’t want a bait and switch. If “Turquoise Hydrogen” is economically viable to produce, let’s see a scaled up version of it working. Otherwise, we know the drill:
1. Sorry, the Turquoise bit won’t work, but now we have the infrastructure set up we might as well produce Blue Hydrogen.
2. Sorry again, but the squints have let us down on CCS and catalysis, so it makes sense to release the carbon dioxide and methane gases into the atmosphere but we’ll buy a few bogus carbon credits to keep everybody happy.

Once the producers get approvals and governments commit to subsidies and guaranteed purchases of hydrogen, we all know they’ll be allowed to rewrite the deals to make them work. We’ve seen governments refuse to hold contractors to time constraints and default provisions in rail deals and tollway constructions. Those sorts of investments are too big to fail.

[LP]

Once the producers get approvals and governments commit to subsidies and guaranteed purchases of hydrogen, we all know they’ll be allowed to rewrite the deals to make them work.

True, but then you must be fairly upset about the SolarPV industry filling warehouses full of never to be recycled redundant failed panels that didn't last the expected ROI lifetime!

And you must be furious about the SolarPV people getting massive grants, widely supported by a public expecting generous feed tariffs from providers that evaporated as the installations grew!

Now, as the range of older(old by EV standards) EVs falloff a cliff, we are starting to see old EV batteries pile up, batteries built on subsidies and sold at a premium. 10 years becomes 5 years, 300km becomes 210km, a 4hr charge is now overnight, and recycling seems to evaporate or become repurpose.

Same coin, different side, not a spec of high ground to be obtained.

Fiscal or legal or marketing smokescreens, as deadly as any desert mirage!

[Mav]

So you want to parlay deals made at the start of the push for renewable power to jump start the industry into a legitimate expectation that Turquoise Hydrogen producers should be allowed to set up speculative ventures on the government dime? Interesting position you have there …

I would have thought setting up power plants that may end up emitting copious greenhouse gases is not what we need right now. Let someone set up that sort of power plant overseas and prove that it works as intended before we invest in them over here.

We’ve already seen a blue hydrogen setting up in the Latrobe Valley and it’s releasing greenhouse gases. There’s a pie-in-the-sky promise that there’ll be a CCS system operating around 2030 and until then the plant will rely on the dubious carbon credits system to make it “green”.

[LP]

Some serious scientists exposing the myths around the anti-nuclear power debate, a long video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIQE-EUpMa8
Very clever people presenting these comments.

But note the ROI debate hinges on the longevity of SolarPV and Wind, the figures assume 10-15 year life for SolarPV at full performance, when the figures are adjusted for real world longevity and degrading performance over time the differences swiftly diminish. For example, if 10% of SolarPV panels fail within 5 years, which is about the current average, the difference to nuclear is halved. Even worse, many people are ignorant that their SolarPV is failing or degraded and keep operating an installation long after part of it should have been replaced.

[PaulP]

I've been watching Sabine for a couple of years. She's very good IMO.

[Mav]

But note the ROI debate hinges on the longevity of SolarPV and Wind, the figures assume 10-15 year life for SolarPV at full performance, when the figures are adjusted for real world longevity and degrading performance over time the differences swiftly diminish. For example, if 10% of SolarPV panels fail within 5 years, which is about the current average, the difference to nuclear is halved. Even worse, many people are ignorant that their SolarPV is failing or degraded and keep operating an installation long after part of it should have been replaced.

This is your Achilles’ heel. For the purposes of making comparisons, you regard technology as static. Even worse, you assume the performance of devices built 15-20 years ago reflect the performance of similar devices manufactured now and there’s no acknowledgement that they’ll be even better in the future.

To a degree, that’s understandable. Rosy predictions can prove to be very optimistic in retrospect, so it’s fair enough to point out that similar claims made in the past fell short. But that doesn’t excuse discounting improvements. When comparing mature power sources with rapidly improving technologies, that’s misleading. Do you agree that solar panels made today are more efficient and reliable than those made 15-20 years ago?

Certainly, that’s not a mistake the markets make. The problem for nuclear is that decisions are made not only on calculations of current RoIs but on what they’ll be as technology improves. Nuclear proponents have to show that an investment today will reap sufficient returns in years 20-70; in other words, will the investment be worthwhile if renewable energy available in that window is cheap and plentiful. It’s not as though nuclear technology will improve so dramatically in the future that the nuclear industry should be seen as developing rather than mature (save of course for nuclear fusion which would be a game changer).

Here’s a potential breakthrough in perovskite solar cells that may increase the longevity and efficiency of solar panels while reducing their costs and carbon footprint:
Once seen as fleeting, a new solar tech proves its lasting power, Princeton University.

Whether it ends up a winner isn’t the point: there is so much promising research into different approaches to renewable energy production and storage that it would be incredible if there aren’t big improvements made in the coming decades.

As a separate matter, when considering an assumption of 10-15 year’s longevity, you have to make sure you aren’t double counting. How do you know this figure doesn’t already factor in the early failure of some panels or their deterioration over time? Given claimed longevity of 20-25 years, there has already been a significant discount applied.

[PaulP]

I can't say I'd be too thrilled living close to a nuclear power plant, however irrational that may seem.

[kruddler]

I can't say I'd be too thrilled living close to a nuclear power plant, however irrational that may seem.

Thats the beauty of Australia, no shortage of land/locations.