Renewables Fastest-Growing Energy Sources, Feds Say (computerworld.com) 70
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Computerworld written by Lucas Mearian: By 2040, coal, natural gas and renewable energy sources will provide roughly equal shares (28%-29%) of world electricity generation -- a tremendous change from 2012, when coal provided 40% of all power generation, according to a new report. The report, International Energy Outlook 2016, was released today by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Renewables are now the world's fastest-growing energy source and are expected to increase by 2.6% per year through 2040. Hydropower and wind are the two largest contributors to the increase in world electricity generation from renewable energy sources, the report stated. Together, hydro and wind account for two-thirds of the total increase in renewable energy from 2012 to 2040. In contrast, coal is the world's slowest-growing energy source, rising by 0.6% per year through 2040. By 2030, natural gas surpasses coal to become the world's second-largest energy source after liquid fuels, the report stated. The world's energy consumption is expected to increase by 48% over the next three decades even as renewable energy sources increase. Fossil fuels will still supply more than three-quarters of the world's energy by 2030. Currently, China, the U.S. and India are the top three coal-consuming countries, making up 70% of the world's coal use. China's coal use is expected to decline as their economy slows and policies to combat air pollution and climate change become implemented. The Environmental Protection Agency's new Clean Power Plan regulations intend to dramatically lower the use of coal in the U.S. over the next three decades. "Of the world's three largest coal consumers, only India is projected to increase coal use throughout the projection period," the report stated.
Tautology (Score:1)
Wouldn't renewables be the only growing resource? Non-renewables should be dwindling over time by definition.
Re:Tautology (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, the word "always" is an approximation. Wow, that's like .. so interesting dude.
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The term "Renewable" itself is a lie. One day even the sun will stop shining. (And before, it will become really hot on earth, and the sun will swallow this planet).
Yes, in 500, 000, 000 years renewables will indeed no longer be viable. By that stage we will probably be smart enough to use an asteroid orbiting the earth every couple of hundred years to very slowly move earth's orbit away from the ever expanding sun.
For now we probably need thinking and planning in the 2-10 year timeframe.
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I agree, if we were not subsidizing wind and solar like we are we'd instead be reading about how nuclear power output is expected to double in that same time frame. From TFA:
Worldwide electricity generation from nuclear power will also almost double, from 2.3 trillion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2012 to 4.5 trillion kWh in 2040. That increase is expected to happen "as concerns about energy security and greenhouse gas emissions support the development of new nuclear generating capacity," the report said.
"Virtually all of the projected net expansion in the world's installed nuclear capacity occurs in the developing world, led by China's addition of 139 gigawatts of nuclear capacity from 2012 to 2040," the report stated.
If my math is correct that means China plans to build a new 1GW nuclear power plant every ten weeks until 2040. The USA should be able to do the same. I recall from doing the math some time ago that if the USA wants to replace all the coal and aging nuclear power plants at the rate they should be retired we'd have to build nuclear po
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You anti-government types are such hypocrites at times, it's hilarious to me that you're advocating electing a president who will be a tyrant and go against the will of the people to force nuclear power plant production on the states, while simultaneously saying we need to" knock the petty despots in DC down a peg". People like yourself are exactly why government can't get anything done.
It's the voters who don't want nuclear plants, not government. Even the ones who do admit we need nuclear don't want a p
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You anti-government types are such hypocrites at times, it's hilarious to me that you're advocating electing a president who will be a tyrant and go against the will of the people to force nuclear power plant production on the states, while simultaneously saying we need to" knock the petty despots in DC down a peg". People like yourself are exactly why government can't get anything done.
I'm actually asking that the current tyrant in the White House get replaced with someone that understands the role the federal government should play in our lives. Also, how am I preventing the government from getting anything done? I didn't vote those fuckers into office. Since I'm not protesting outside their office, or otherwise interfering with their work, I don't see how I keep them from doing the most basic government tasks like approving a budget. They seem to get all tied up in their own bureauc
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I'm actually asking that the current tyrant in the White House get replaced with someone that understands the role the federal government should play in our lives.
Which, of course, is exactly why the Obama administration has expanded the scope of federal loan guarantees towards nuclear power construction projects... because he's anti-Nuclear.
It's not the government that's preventing nuclear construction. Private developers (aka "The free market") don't want to spend the billions of dollars necessary to build them. They can barely be assed to spend the money to maintain the ones they have!
There is a grand total of SIX power plants currently seeking regulatory approval
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I'm actually asking that the current tyrant in the White House get replaced with someone that understands the role the federal government should play in our lives. Also, how am I preventing the government from getting anything done? I didn't vote those fuckers into office. Since I'm not protesting outside their office, or otherwise interfering with their work, I don't see how I keep them from doing the most basic government tasks like approving a budget. They seem to get all tied up in their own bureaucracy on their own without my help.
Also, it's precisely because they can't seem to get things done that I believe that the states should take the federal government down a peg. If the states weren't held hostage by the federal government to do things like funding public schools then their failure to pass a budget would not lead to the firing of teachers. It would also prevent the federal government from telling public schools that they have to let boys use the girls locker room.
You prevent government from getting anything done because you demand a tyrant in office when it's a candidate that you approve of but when it's not suddenly you want states to go their own way. You're a hypocrite and an obstructionist.
Also, to address your off-topic comments, the federal government pays states for school from it's own budget, not the states. The state's inability to manage their own money has nothing to do with funding the schools and a lot more to do with cutting corporate taxes to the b
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Re: Tautology (Score:1)
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Obama will destroy any form of energy that does not require government subsides for crony corporations to exist.
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I doubt Obama had anything to do with the decision to remove those 4 dams on the Klamath River. The owner of the dams, Pacific Power and Light (or whatever it's called nowadays) reached the point of needing to relicense the dams and the cost of adding the necessary fish passage equipment far exceeded any value the dams had to the company so they wanted to tear them down in order to no longer be responsible for them. They are all rather small and don't produce that much power so not much was lost in terms
Obligatory XKCD... (Score:1)
Fastest Growing [xkcd.com]
EVERYONE says (Score:3)
"Renewables Fastest-Growing Energy Sources, Feds Say"
No, everyone says this. And has for years. Ok, in the US things were upset by the NG expansion, but everyone knew that would only last so long. And outside the US this has been true since about 2010.
With wind at $1.50 and PV not much more than that, and PPA's for PV at 3 cents/kWh and wind at 4 to 5, nothing else can compete. And those are subsidized prices.
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Wind and PV subsidies are set to taper out and end by ~2020-2024. Both subsidies drop every year until they end. Installed price only needs to fall a little more and they will still be cheaper than the cheapest oldest dirtiest coal power plant.
Nothing else can even come close to the price they are selling 20 year purchase agreements at. In fact wind is probably cheaper at this point without subsidy as generator prices fell nearly 20% last year. Everyone who pay any intention to investing news has known this
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The social effects are impressive too. Energy production is being democratized. Individuals or small groups can buy PV and turbines with guaranteed returns on their investment and freedom from the energy market, which is many countries has badly broken.
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She says she will destroy the coal industry
She will say whatever she needs to say to get elected, then she will do whatever she's paid to do. Just like every other politician you have.
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The coal industry needs to be destroyed. I'm sorry that will put a lot of coal miners out of work, but are we supposed to feed our kids coal dust because a few hillbillies can't move to where the jobs are?
I'm sure the asbestos miners, DDT manufacturers and the guys who bury cans of toxic waste under schoolyards all really wanted to keep their jobs too, but you know the rest of us felt moving on was for the best.
We've got to get off fossil fuels faster (Score:3)
than this projection says we will.
Around 60% fossil fuel electricity generation in 2040, as is forecast, is way too much, considering that we need to get the whole energy economy, including transportation, heating, industry, etc. which this report doesn't cover, off fossil fuels almost completely by mid-century or so, to keep a chance of managing global warming.
We need technology and economy tipping points, in between now and 2050, so that the rate of change accelerates very rapidly. Government policy should be aimed at expediting those tipping points and rapid transitions to a fundamentally new energy technology mix.
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My own suspicion is that this survey greatly overestimates the growth rate of electrical power generation and greatly underestimates the deployment rate of renewables.
The economics of renewables are extremely compelling. A wind farm or utility-scale PV array can go from a proposal to actually generating electricity and revenue in six months. Coal plants take more like five years, and even NG plants take about two years. Couple that with the fact that you can partially finish a wind farm and still generat
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The power plants I've toured typically have multiple boilers and turbines under one roof. A partially completed plant is likely capable of producing power so long as there is at least one boiler and one turbine.
I recall one power plant had two boilers, only one operating as the other was quite old and kept only as a last resort backup. I recall it had four turbines and room for one more. Three turbines produced electricity while the fourth produced chilled water for the site. A portion of the steam was
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Far too small - nukes are about a lot of heat and big turbines. That's how they can be viable with a high capital cost and long construction time. Thermal power solutions such as nukes perform better at very large scales. A large turbine will have the steam go through in three or more passes to extract most of the energy out of the steam and that's only possible if you have a LOT of steam hitting the turbine. S
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Far too small - nukes are about a lot of heat and big turbines.
I was referring to a talk on small modular reactors, the whole point was to make them small. The idea is that by making them small enough to be mass produced on an assembly line and trucking them to the power plant site the price should be much lower than conventional nuclear and competitive with any other energy source.
Turbines on the 200MW scale are also small enough to move by truck. These were also chosen based on price, they give the most output per dollar. They may not be as efficient as larger tur
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Where small reactors such as pebble bed are used the idea is to have several of them in series or parallel heating up steam for each turbine.
So are the 650MW ones. I did some work at a plant with 240MW turbines. It was built in the 1960s. It has since been demolished for being inefficient.
No such thing - you order one and wait a few years. If you have your construction s
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> I also believe that we are close to hitting the limits on wind and solar as well, if we have not already.
Not really. The limiting factors are almost exclusively financial, and costs are continuing to drop as production ramps up.
> I have been following the development of PV solar for some time now and while we see many claims of more efficient PV cells they rarely or never make it to market because of cost.
The PV market is not limited much at all by efficiency thing; most panels are 15-20% efficient
Re:We've got to get off fossil fuels faster (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree, we should move away from fossil fuels. I just believe the path is nuclear power.
Anyone that says we shouldn't build nuclear power plants because of Chernobyl and Fukushima should realize that they are saying we shouldn't build the next Tesla because the Ford Pinto was a death trap. We haven't built nuclear power plants like those for 40 years, this is doubly so for Chernobyl because that was built from stolen plans, with a known flaw, by people that didn't give a shit. We have new designs that simply cannot melt down.
Solar power is worthless, it costs too much and provides power only when the sun shines. Wind is cheap but unreliable, I think it has a place in our mix of power sources but a small part of the mix. A large part, as much as 80%, should be nuclear.
One reason why we keep using these old nuclear power plants is because we need the power and the current regulatory environment effectively bars new construction. If we want to retire these old nuclear power plants then we need new ones to replace them. Replacing them with wind and solar is somewhere between exceedingly expensive and physically impossible.
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Very interesting world you live in. The formerly Russian turbine engineer I worked with a few years ago that had worked on that type of plant would disagree.
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The comparison holds because old nuclear reactors use solid fuels while new ones use liquid fuels. They are both nuclear reactors but like the Tesla and the Pinto the way they are built and run is quite different and yet both are called cars.
Old reactors like Chernobyl run on a uranium-plutonium cycle. LFTR runs on a thorium-uranium cycle. Chernobyl used steam turbines while LFTR uses gas turbines. Chernobyl used water as a coolant, LFTR uses molten salts. I could go on. There are so many things that
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I knew this would happen, bad mouthing nuclear power based on old designs rather than looking at what people are actually proposing. Some examples:
Heat pollution of waterways in many designs cannot be ignored.
New reactors are air cooled, they just don't heat up waterways.
Pretty much all fuel comes from decommissioned warheads - This won't last forever.
New reactors use thorium as fuel, a fuel that is abundant and worthless for weapons.
The rest of your rant gets into politics that I don't want to bother with right now. New reactors like LFTR do not operate like the old reactors do, so therefore your claims about cost, waste, decommissioning, and "e
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> Solar power is worthless, it costs too much and provides power only when the sun shines.
A solar plant in Chile would disagree. It's half PV and half solar-thermal, and provides round-the-clock power. The thermal part heats a working fluid via curved trough mirrors. The hot fluid is stored in a tank until night, when it's used to boil water and turn a turbine. As far as cost, the world is installing 65 GW of solar this year because it's cost effective, not because it costs too much.
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> A large part, as much as 80%, should be nuclear.
On most grids, it's a surprisingly bad idea to have that much nuclear in the mix.
The reason is demand-side variation; if you have to reduce the output of your reactor, the cost of the energy has gone up- for example a nuclear reactor running at half power is making electricity at twice the cost/kWh; and it wasn't cheap electricity to start with; nuclear power is never cheap.
With 80% you'd pretty much always have to daily be turning down your nukes due to
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Cars will move very fast once affordable (to your average consumer) electric vehicles get here. Hell an upper middle class priced Model 3 has as many orders as the top selling sedan in the US (talk about scaring the daylights out of Toyota, there was news the other day that Toyota is going to cancel the Mirari and go electric because of the Model 3). In fact it's going to be hard for the power companies to keep up honestly. They are building the power generation side, the consumption side is going to get th
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The biggest hurdle to dropping fossil fuel consumption is going to be sea based shipping and airplanes. Collectively they make up about 20% of energy use. Those are the ones I'm worried about.
What about long haul trucking? Electric vehicles are fine for short commutes but they cannot deliver goods cross country.
I hear people claim that we can electrify trains but I have my doubts. A diesel electric train is very efficient and can run in all kinds of weather that might threaten an electrified track. Also, what are the capital costs and maintenance costs of electrifying a rail road track? A city wide train system can get away with electric tracks because usage is high, track lengths fairly sho
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What about long haul trucking? Electric vehicles are fine for short commutes but they cannot deliver goods cross country.
I think you can replace the big fuel tanks you see on the side of long haul trucks with big battery packs that can be easily exchanged at a truck stop. As long as the trucks can get ~500 miles of of a battery pack that should be workable.
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More objectively speaking, with scientific backing, it would be more accurate to say that those who still oppose green initiatives, at this late date, are going to be judged criminally insane by history.
Re: We've got to get off fossil fuels faster (Score:1)
Re: We've got to get off fossil fuels faster (Score:1)
So, if subsidization of renewable energy, (Score:2)
when combined with constraints on non-renewable energy, were to be as projected in the study (i.e., per present policies), by 2040 fossil fuel and nuclear might constitute only about ...
(wait for it)...
83% of the world energy usage.
That is, by 2040, renewables might then manage to constitute a whopping 16-17% of world energy usage, skyrocking up from some 13% in 2016, under their assumptions.
The authors of the study do not even attempt to estimate the likelihood of those assumptions, which is prudent consid
In other words -- (Score:1)
Corrected title: "Renewable energy sources still insignificant, least regulated."
Another fossil fuel PR release (Score:1)
These are the same guys that predicted, in 2015, that there would be an installed base of 1000 electric vehicles with over 200 mile range in 2040. In 2015 there were already over 100,000.
Basically, you can just ignore anything that comes out of the EIA. They aren't even trying to make their lies make sense any more.
Aging plants age, news at 11. (Score:2)
A base load power plant has a design life of around 50 years, so on a constant GW basis 60% of coal capacity to be retired, which would put coal around 24%. Given the investment in coal over the past decade (re-powering plants), 28-29% basically just means they don't expect any new. Coal plants to be built.
A much more interesting question would be what percentage of generation would be de-centralized renewables.
Any opinions on thorium? (Score:2)
Seems to me that thorium has more potential than wind or solar.
Any opinions?