Doomsday glacier could give way any day now

 From Just Have A Think

Yes, the danger isn't immediate.  But when the "plug" holding the Thwaites glacier goes, it will start a process which could raise the sea level by 3 metres over the next few decades.

We've missed 1.5 degrees. Should we give up?

 No, of course not.  But maybe we should target growth in renewables infrastructure, setting targets for wind and solar and EVs and heat pumps.  These are direct targets, in order to achieve the indirect target of peaking and then reducing emissions, which will in turn lead to temperatures stopping rising.

From Just Have a Think.

The 100-hour battery is real

Intra-day storage — soaking up solar at the middle of the day to be released in the evening and overnight — is perfectly feasible using lithium-ion or sodium-ion batteries, which are getting cheaper and cheaper.  But what happens when there are prolonged spells where there is little solar, no wind, and high demand because it's cold, what the Germans have dubbed dunkelflaute (doonkel-flowta)?  For that we need long-duration storage, which I've talked about before.

One of the options for long-duration storage is the iron-air battery.  And it's now in commercial production in the US.  The video below from Just Have A Think discusses it.

The final nail in the fossil fuel coffin

 From Just Have a Think

When he describes batteries as, say, 500 MW and 2000 MWh, what that means is that the battery can produce 500 MW of electricity for 4 hours (2000/500).  MW is a measure of the output, MWh (or kWh in the case of an EV battery) in this context, is a measure of how much electricity has been stored.

We still don't have a cure for multi-day windless periods--dunkelflaute--but that may be the only place where we will still need gas peaker plants (for now).   For most of the world within 40 degrees of the equator, 8 hours of storage will be enough, as night demand is about two-thirds of average day-time demand.  This means that solar combined with 8 hours of storage will provide power 24/7.  And that's ignoring the huge capacity available with EVs.  For example, Australia has 16 million passenger vehicle and 4 million light commercial trucks.  At 40 kWh storage per EV, that totals to 800,000 MWh/ 800 GWh of stored electricity.  Obviously, only some of that is available at any given time, but even if merely one quarter is available, this would provide 200 GWh of storage.  Even before you add grid-scale batteries, which are about 23 GWh at the moment.

Kicking fossil fuel out of industry

 From Just Have a Think

Gives an interesting perspective of just how fossil fuels are used in industry, and how we can replace almost all uses with green electricity.  As so often, up-front costs are key.  And as always, a decent carbon price would encourage a more rapid transition to carbon-free industry.

There are 4 main "sectors" where we need to de-carbonise, and they each require different solutions.  The emissions from each sector are not equal, but it helps to break down the problem like this.

1.  Electricity generation.  This is, globally, the sector with the biggest share of emissions, but that varies a bit depending on the country.  The solutions here are obvious, and happening, though not as fast as is needed.
2. Transport.  A mixed bag.  Land transport is moving rapidly towards zero carbon; air and sea transport still has a long way to go.
3. Industry.  This includes steel and cement production, and chemicals and paper.  This video discusses various solutions.
4. Food.  A combination of methane emissions by grazing animals, and deforestation to produce beef.  As big as electricity generation by many analyses, but the hardest to reduce, because people have an emotional relationship with their food.  Politicians interfere at their peril, so shy away.  Yet it is abundantly clear that something will have to be done.

Arctic sea will be ice free in summer within a decade

 This will have very severe consequences.  Yet our politicians and élites continue to do nothing to stop catastrophic global warming.   One key point:  we are likely to see 2 degrees of warming within 20 years.

An excellent video. 

From Just Have A Think

The biomass furphy

 From Just Have a Think

Two quotes:

The legal mandate to record forest biomass-fired energy as contributing to the EU's renewable energy targets has had the perverse effect of creating a demand for trees to be felled in Europe or elsewhere in order to burn them for energy, thus releasing the carbon into the atmosphere which would otherwise stay locked up in the forest, and simultaneously drastically reducing the carbon sink strength of the forest ecosystems;

and: 

The scale of this operation is astounding, with a year's worth of [wood] pellets consumed by Drax representing wood mass approximately equivalent to clearcutting a forested square extending to 18 miles [29 kilometres] on each side.

So, here's what we do.  We give subsidies to companies that plant trees, because negative emissions, and then we give subsidies companies that burn the wood to produce electricity, because carbon-neutral.  Dotty.

Battery powered flights from Washington DC to LA

From Just Have a Think 

Battery technology is developing at breath-taking speed all over the world, but China still leads the way. Now they've created batteries with such high energy density that they're using them to develop a commercial aircraft with a range of 2,000 miles - enough for most commuter flights in the US or Europe. So, has battery chemistry reached yet another previously impossible milestone?

 

As usual, a thoughtful and well-informed video.  The intense competition in batteries in China is driving innovation and cost cutting.

Is global heating accelerating?

 From Just Have a Think

See also:   

Terrifying acceleration in global heating

Will we have enough minerals for the energy transition?

 An interesting video from Just Have A Think.

The answer: prolly, yes, because we'll need less than it seems, as only one third of primary energy ends up being used.  The rest is wasted.  

And the argument that we'll need massive storage is wrong.  What we'll do instead is have excess renewable generation capacity, with the surplus output either being curtailed or used for processes that don't require 24/7 availability of electricity, such as desalination and charging EVs.  Also, energy return on energy invested is now higher for renewables than for fossil fuels. Finally, battery technology is shifting, with new technologies such as sodium-ion using readily available, cheap minerals.  Sodium-ion batteries will cost half of lithium-ion batteries.

However, there's this article which suggests that price of copper (an EV uses 4 times as much as a petrol car, mostly for wiring) is beginning a phase of secular growth.  As it happens, the price of copper has fallen since then!  Never mind, it happens to the best of us.

My take: as demand driven by the energy transition pushes up prices of certain commodities, advances in technology will create alternative ways to achieve the same goals.  An obvious example: after the price of lithium soared, research on sodium-ion batteries took off.  Now, sodium-ion batteries are commercially available and have been installed in EVs.   They're not yet as energy dense as lithium-ion batteries, but they're much cheaper.  And research continues.

If somebody had told you 70 years ago that we would use sunlight to produce electricity, they would have replied, had they even known about it, that it was so expensive that it could only be used for spacecraft.  And anyway, where were we going to get all that silicon?  Yet here we are.  I'm typing this on a laptop with the power several orders of magnitude more than the first IBM computer, using sunlight to power not just it, but also my internet connection.  Inconceivable 70 years ago.  Routine, now.

The smartest renewable rooftop system

From Just Have a Think

 A rooftop combine wind and solar system with twice the efficiency of normal rooftop solar and 6 to 10 times the efficiency of small wind turbines.  Very interesting.

 

My comments:

• Because the solar panels are bifacial and all the equipment is painted white to reflect as much of the light back up to the underside of the panels, and because the cooling wind under the panels stops the panels heating up on sunny days, the efficiency of the solar is double the norm for rooftop solar.
• The "roof" of panels and the arrangement of wind turbines focusses the air flow, making these wind turbines exceptionally efficient.  Rooftop small wind turbines are not nearly as efficient as giant turbines, making home wind turbines uneconomic.
• The LCOE  over 25 years is 8 to 12 cents per kWh.  That's more expensive than the LCOEs of utility-scale wind and solar, but this system is competing with the retail cost of electricity, not the wholesale price.  The average retail price of electricity in Europe is over $0.25 cents per kWh (including taxes); in the US it was around 11 cents/kWh in 2021, before gas prices jumped in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and in Australia, the average retail price of electricity was (US) 19 cents/kWh.  
• The Eindhoven installation provides 85% of the building's energy requirements.  If the building were 2 or 3 stories shorter, it would be 100%.
• These distributed generation facilities should benefit the residents of the building, but ownership of the machinery belongs either to the landlord of the building or to the body corporate.  This complication will have to be resolved for this to work, given the retail/wholesale price difference.
• Wind and solar together go far towards producing a stable baseload electricity output.  Adding in 4 hours of storage would make it even better.  Charging the residents' EVs when there is surplus power available would make the building and its occupants more or less independent of the grid.
• A very clever system which would be worth installing on all buildings of 4 storeys or more with flat roofs.