Approval of interracial marriage in the USA

 From a tweet by Ramez Naam

Approval of interracial marriage in the US. Stunning how it's changed in 3 generations. From today's @future_crunch newsletter

 

A fascinating interview with futurist Ramez Naam

 From Noahpinion

When I want to know what the future is going to be like, I go ask Ramez Naam. Over the years, his spyglass has seemed to peer just a little farther into the future than other people’s.

My favorite example: In 2011 he wrote a guest post for Scientific American entitled “Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore's law apply to solar cells?” that alerted the world to the startling, consistent, and seemingly unstoppable cost declines for solar energy. This came at a time when almost everyone in public discourse still thought of solar as an unworkably expensive pipe dream. But Ramez (or “Mez”, to his friends) was right. Over the next decade, his prediction became conventional wisdom, not just for solar but for batteries as well. The resulting explosion in solar installation and electric vehicles has utterly changed scientists’ outlook for climate change — catastrophe may still strike, but the most apocalyptic scenarios now look distinctly unlikely. This isn’t Mez’ doing, of course, but he saw it before others did.

Why is Mez so good at predicting the future of technology? Part of it is his personal experience — as a Microsoft engineer, he led the teams working on a number of core software products. But he’s a dreamer as well as a doer — his science fiction series, the Nexus trilogy, deserves to be among the classics of the cyberpunk genre. He has also written two nonfiction futurist books, More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement and The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. Readers of my blog will notice that biological enhancement and sustainable/renewable technology are two of the things I’m most excited about. Well, it’s because I read Ramez Naam.

In this email interview, Mez and I discuss a lot of things related to the future of technology — how to get off oil and gas and weaken Vladimir Putin’s regime, how to decarbonize the U.S. rapidly, what technologies to be optimistic about, and how to get involved building the techno-optimist future. As always, I learned a lot.

I won't reproduce the whole interview here, so I strongly urge you to read it, especially the first question and answer, which shows how Putin's invasion of Ukraine will greatly accelerate not just the European transition away from fossil fuels, but the global transition via learning curve effects.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Insanely cheap energy

 A fascinating history about the Australian Professor--"the father of PV solar"--and his Chinese assistant, who made solar cells happen,

[From The Guardian]

In the year 2000, the International Energy Agency made a prediction that would come back to haunt it: by 2020, the world would have installed a grand total of 18 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity. Seven years later, the forecast would be proven spectacularly wrong when roughly 18 gigawatts of solar capacity were installed in a single year alone. [Nearly 127 GW was add in 2020]

Ever since the agency was founded in 1974 to measure the world’s energy systems and anticipate changes, the yearly World Energy Outlook has been a must-read document for policymakers the world over.

Over the last two decades, however, the IEA has consistently failed to see the massive growth in renewable energy coming. Not only has the organisation underestimated the take-up of solar and wind, but it has massively overstated the demand for coal and oil.

Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis at BloombergNEF, says that, in fairness to the IEA, it wasn’t alone.

“When I got this job in 2005, I thought maybe one day solar will supply 1% of the world’s electricity. Now it’s 3%. Our official forecast is that it will be 23% by 2050, but that’s completely underestimated,” Chase says.

“I see it as the limits of modelling. Most energy system models are, or were, set up to model minor changes to an energy system that is run on fossil fuel or nuclear. Every time you double producing capacity, you reduce the cost of PV solar by 28%.

“We’ve got to the point where solar is the cheapest source of energy in the world in most places. This means we’ve been trying to model a situation where the grid looks totally different today.”

This rapid radical reduction in the price of PV solar is a story about Chinese industrial might backed by American capital, fanned by European political sensibilities and made possible largely thanks to the pioneering work of an Australian research team.

The deep history begins with a succession of US presidents and the quest for energy independence. First was Richard Nixon, who in November 1973 announced Project Independence to wean the US off Middle Eastern oil. Then came Jimmy Carter, who declared the energy transition the “moral equivalent of war” in April 1977 and pumped billions of dollars into renewable energy research, which came to a screeching halt when Ronald Reagan came to power.

But by then, interest had been piqued in Australia.

The solar cell was invented when Russell Shoemaker Ohl, a researcher in Bell Labs, noticed in 1940 that a cracked silicon sample produced a current when exposed to light. However, little improvement had been made until the contribution of Martin Green, a young engineering professor working out of the University of New South Wales.

Born in Brisbane, Green had spent some time in Canada as a researcher before circling back home in 1974. A year later he had started a PV solar research group working out of a small university laboratory built with unwanted equipment scrounged from big American engineering firms.

His first experiments, alongside a single PhD student, involved looking for ways to increase the voltage on early solar cells.

“Pretty soon, we started beating all these groups in the US in terms of the voltage we could get,” Green says. “Nasa had a project that had six contractors working on it. We beat them all.”

Not long after, Green and his team began to raise their ambitions. Having boosted the voltage, the next step was building better quality cells. Their early efforts broke the world efficiency record in 1983 – a habit the team would continue for 30 of the next 38 years.

In the very early years of the industry, the received wisdom had been that a 20% conversion rate marked the hard limit of what was possible from PV solar cells. Green, however, disagreed in a paper published in 1984.A year later, his team built the first cell that pushed past that limit, and in 1989 built the first full solar panel capable of running at 20% efficiency.

It was a moment that opened up what was possible from the industry, and the new upper limit was “set” at 25% – another barrier Green and his team would smash in 2008. In 2015, they built the world’s most efficient solar cell, achieving a 40.6% conversion rate using focused light reflected off a mirror.

Out of this whirlwind of activity, the Chinese solar industry would be born largely thanks to an ambitious physicist named Zhengrong Shi.

Born in 1963 on Yangzhong Island, Shi had earned his master’s degree and come to Australia a year before the Tiananmen Square protests. He had spotted a flyer advertising a research fellowship and talked Green into bringing him on as a PhD student in 1989.

Shi would finish his PhD in just two and a half years – a record that still stands today. By the time he became Dr Shi, he had so impressed Green that he stayed on as a researcher.

With time, the university was increasingly looking to commercialise its world-leading solar cell technology and struck up a partnership with Pacific Power in 1995. The government utility sank $47m into a new company called Pacific Solar. A factory was set up in the Sydney suburb of Botany and Shi was made the deputy director of research and development where he quickly earned a reputation for resourcefulness and precision.

“Zhengrong basically ran the company,” Green says.

Shi stuck it out for a few years but in November 2000, he was made an offer. At a dinner held at his home, four officials from the Chinese province of Jiangsu suggested the 37-year-old researcher and Australian citizen return to China and build his own factory there. After some consideration, Shi agreed and ended up settling in the small city of Wuxi where he founded SunTech with $6m in startup funding from the municipal government.

Shi’s arrival caused a stir. The ability to cheaply build conventional PV solar panels with 17% efficiency was far beyond what his competitors were capable of.

“That was a shock to them,” Shi says. “When they saw we were making solar cells of large area and high efficiencies they said, ‘Wow.’

“The first reaction was: that’s the future. Everybody said that’s the future. But they also said it was one step too early. What they meant was that there was no market for it yet. In China at the time, if you mentioned solar, people thought of solar hot water.”

All that would change when Germany passed new laws encouraging the uptake of solar power. Quickly it became clear there was a massive global demand and the world’s manufacturers were struggling to keep up with supply.

Spying an opportunity for investment, a consortium that included Actis Capital and Goldman Sachs came knocking to pitch Shi on taking the company public. When the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005, it raised $420m and made Shi an instant billionaire. A year later he would be worth an estimated $3bn and crowned the richest man in China, earning him the moniker “the Sun King”.

Having shown the way, the Chinese PV solar industry began a massive expansion. SunTech alone boosted its production capacity from 60 megawatts to 500MW, and then to 1 gigawatt in 2009. The company grew so fast, its supplies of glass, polysilicon and electronic systems needed to build its panels came under strain, forcing it to invest heavily in local supply chains.

As with the rest of China, the rate of technological development in the PV solar business makes for an industry that builds itself up one day, tears itself down the next, and then remakes itself again the day after. With razor-thin margins and cut-throat competition, everyone is always one step away from falling.

Around 2012 the world market was flooded with solar panels, sending the price plummeting through the floor, leaving SunTech vulnerable. Already under intense financial pressure, disaster struck when an internal investigation found a takeover bid it had launched had been guaranteed by €560m in fake German government bonds.

Upon discovering the bonds didn’t exist, Shi was removed as CEO of his company and a year later SunTech would file for bankruptcy protection when it couldn’t repay a $541m loan that fell due in March 2013.

Whatever befell SunTech later, the Macquarie University emeritus professor John Mathews says the company played a pivotal role in changing both China and the world forever.

In a quirk of history, what had begun as an American drive to wean itself off oil was eventually taken up by China, which made solar power dirt cheap in the process.

“The Chinese approach to renewables is all about energy security,” Mathews says. “At the scale from which they’re building new industries, they would need colossal imports of conventional fossil fuels, which would cripple them economically.

“They can get around that problem, which is a geopolitical obstacle, by manufacturing their own energy equipment.”

Today Green and Shi keep in touch. Both are working on new projects. Shi is overseeing a new company while 72-year-old Green is looking for new innovations to explore.

One such innovation is the stackable solar cell. Though still a niche technology very much in the early stages, the basic idea is to lay a material over a solar cell in order to boost its power output.

“We think a 40% module, rather than the 22% you can do nowadays with PERC, is what the industry will be doing once we perfect this stacking approach,” Green says. “We’re just trying to find a new cell that will have all the qualities of silicon that we can stack on top of silicon.

“The International Energy Agency now says solar is providing the cheapest energy the world has ever seen. But we’re headed towards a future of insanely cheap energy.

“It’s a fundamentally different world we’re moving into.”

After WWII, the Texas Interstate Trade Commission kept the price of oil low.  Together with Keynesianism and pent-up demand from the war years, this led to an unprecedented surge of stable, low-inflation growth, ending only with the first oil crisi in 1973.

The "insanely cheap" energy that solar panels and cheap batteries are going to bring us will usher in a new period of stable, high growth--if we don't blow it.   Cheap energy will allow cost-effective water desalination and purification; cheap factory-grown food; cheap industrial processes, and so on.  Combined with Starlink (and one day, its competitors) this will lead to insanely cheap and fast internet, everywhere in the world.  Add to that the technological forcing function of cheap space flight, and we could see a period of rapid technological, economic and social advance.  

As an aside, many think that the 21st century will be China's.  I think it will be Africa's because of that continent huge advantage in solar.  Already the data show a steady improvement in Africa's growth rate.  Insanely cheap energy will accentuate that.

If we avoid the disaster of global heating--and cheap solar will be instrumental in that--and we don't go to war, the 2020s and 2030s could be a time of unprecedented advance.

Source: Ramez Naam

Ramez Naam on renewables

A Twitter thread by Ramez Naam

Here's a THREAD about divestment (and why it's driven mostly by economics, not good citizenship), theories of change in climate / energy, and the power of tapping into self-interested economic motivations among corporates, banks, and investers.  Ready? Here we go.

Last year I gave a talk for a sovereign wealth  fund in Asia. In addition to their CEO and leadership team, they were also hosting the CEO and top executives of a bank with hundreds of billions under management - a bank that was, at the time, lending to coal projects. 

This talk, to be clear, was a very big deal by my standards. I frequently talk to groups of CEOs, corporate execs, bankers, and investors. But the money under management in the room was pretty staggering - and I viewed it as a huge opportunity to have an impact.

Before my talk, the CEO of said multi-hundred-billion-dollar bank asked to meet. I told him the thesis of my talk: That building clean energy would soon be cheaper than *operating* existing coal & even gas generation. You can see that argument here. 

The CEO of this bank was visibly agitated upon hearing my argument. "What about these coal projects we're lending billions to now?" he asked. "They're bad loans," I replied. "They're high risk of default. You shouldn't be making them." 

After the CEO conversation, I gave my talk, which made an economic argument for this disruption, based on the learning curves for solar, wind, & storage, & assessments made by utilities (NIPSCO), think tanks (CarbonTracker), & analysts (McKinsey). All of which find the same.

I went home, unsure if I'd made any impact at all. (As is frequently the case, you only find out later.)

1 month to the day later, I read in the news that this bank had announced a no-new-coal-financing policy. 

Later in the year, I was back in Asia, and got to talk briefly to both the bank CEO and their head of sustainability.  The bank CEO grudgingly said "The economic argument in your talk is what we were missing. That decided us."  

The head of sustainability for the bank told me that he'd spent the last several years making a good-corporate-citizen argument for divesting from coal, and it was the economic argument - that coal is now a terrible investment - that actually swayed the CEO. 

There is a lot of energy around divestment these days.  @davidfickling argues - correctly - that equity investment (selling fossil fuel stocks) makes little difference. But cutting off project finance from banks can make a major difference. ( https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-19/debt-investors-are-cutting-off-financing-for-fossil-fuels )

The place where I disagree slightly from David is that most of the divestment thus far hasn't been driven by moral issues. The heads of fossil fuel funders aren't dumb. They know climate change is real. Divestment is mostly driven by economics. 

The lesson from that is that, if you want to close the spigot of debt financing:1. Keep driving clean energy cheaper. 2. Communicate the future cost trends - based on actual learning rates, not conservative IEA forecasts - to these funders. 

Finally, all of this is admittedly anecdotal. But I've seen it first hand three times: That bank in Asia, one of the largest banks in Africa, and a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure fund that is now starving its fossil fuel investments. That's enough to see a pattern. 

Finally finally, I hope you'll forgive what may sound like bragging. I'm just a messenger. The real credit goes to everyone who's driven down the cost of clean energy, storage, and EVs. My goal here is to share what I've seen work, and to encourage others to give it a shot. 

Even in Oil & Gas, if those companies saw a way to make as much money in renewables & EVs - or truly believed that their current investments were at risk, you'd see their businesses shift quickly to investing in clean energy and EVs,

Three more thoughts :1. This is why I fly. A lot. These talks just have far less impact not there in person. (I pay to remove the carbon emissions from my flights via http://nori.com)2. The same economic argument is now viable with electric vehicles & soon with oil.3. But unfortunately, the economic disruption argument is very distant with industrial emissions & for agriculture / deforestation, absent strong policy in those sectors. 

Economics are on path to disrupt fossil electricity and most oil consumption. But not industry or ag.

My comments:

1. Note that the chart only extends to 2022, the data 2019-2022 are from signed contracts, i.e., are NOT forecasts.  If we pushed it further out, and forecast continuing declines, renewables wouldn't just be at the bottom of the range of fossil fuel costs—they would be below them.  Everywhere.
2. Coal is finished, and gas won't last much longer.  Outside the USA, gas isn't cheaper than coal, though it has the advantage of being cleaner-burning than coal, so when fossil-fuel power stations are shuttered, coal will go first.  If you lend or invest in coal (mines/power stations/transport) you are going to lose your money. 
3. CSP (concentrated solar power) is cheaper than I thought.  I believed that the learning curve with CSP was over, but it doesn't look like it.  Once again, in the chart, that's signed contracts, not projections/forecasts.  Remember that CSP comes with 10 hours of storage, making it very close to baseload.  
4. Yes, it's true than in agriculture, iron & steel, air transport, and sea transport, there are no cost advantages is going fossil-free.  But, there weren't in electricity generation or EVs either.  And the reason these technologies are now cheaper is because they were initially subsidised, while fossil fuel generation was regulated, and this allowed these new technologies to move down the learning curve.  I have no doubt that a carbon tax imposed on these sectors will create similar learning curves and costs will drop.  Also, at the beginning, wind and solar were ten times as expensive as coal, whereas with iron & steel, cement, sea and transport, the new green alternatives are only twice as expensive as the polluting alternatives. 

Wind and solar complementary

In my previous post I calculated the costs of wind and solar with various kinds of storage or "firming" added.  In practice, though, wind and solar are complementary, day-by-day and over the seasons: there is more wind when solar is reduced.  So the amounts of storage I included will be more than is needed, and will provide substantial redundancy.

These charts come from a presentation by Ramez Naam in South Africa. Because they are screendumps from the video, they're not as clear as I'd like.

The first chart shows renewables output in California on an average day.  Note how wind is strong during the night and solar during the day, just like it is in Queensland.  Typically, demand peaks during the day and into the evening, so storage would only be needed from 5 pm to say 10 pm.  5 hours, compared with the 10 to 12 hours I calculated.

In Germany, there's more wind in winter, compensating for less sunlight.  It's not perfect compensation: the total for wind and solar still fluctuates from month to month, so some storage, probably power-to-gas will be needed.  An alternative is HVDC (high voltage DC) lines to Denmark and the North Sea (windier) and Italy (sunnier) to cover any shortfalls.  To provide redundancy (i.e., over capacity) prolly both should be used.

Even with the substantial storage I added in to the costs of renewables, they are still cheaper than coal.  And with diversified supply, both by type and geographically, even less storage may be needed than the 10 to 12 hours I used.  This means the costs of renewables are even lower, and their advantage over coal greater.   Over the next 5 years, the only thing stopping the rapid transition of coal-based grids to renewables will be vested interests, not economics nor technology.

How much land for solar?

The latest rather feeble tactic I've seen from a denialist is to assert that we can't switch to renewables because they'd take up too much land.  It's nonsense of course.

From Ramez Naam

We’ll probably never power the world entirely on solar, but if we did, it would take a rather small fraction of the world’s land area: Less than 1 percent of the Earth’s land area to provide for current electricity needs.

The second to last column tells us that, weighted by how much electricity they actually produce, large solar PV facilities need 3.4 acres of total space (panels + buildings + roads + everything else) for each Gwh of electricity they produce. 

That leads to an output estimate of 0.294 Gwh / year / acre, and virtually the same total area, around 50,000 square kilometers in the US, or 0.6% of the continental US’s land area.   

[....] 

So, consider that: 

1. The built environment in the US (buildings, roads, parking lots, etc..) covered an estimated 83,337 square kilometers in 2009, or roughly 166% of the area estimated above. (Likely this area would not be as efficiently used, of course. But it could make a significant dent.) 

2. Idled cropland in the US, not currently being used, totaled 37.2 million acres in 2007, or roughly 150,000 square kilometers, roughly three times the area needed. 

3. “National Defense and Industrial” lands in the US (which includes military bases, department of energy facilities, and related, but NOT civilian factories, powerplants, coal mines, etc..) totaled 23 million acres in 2007, or roughly 93,000 square kilometers, nearly twice the area needed to meet US electricity demand via solar. Presumably much of that land is actively in use, but it gives a sense of the scale. 

4. Coal mines have disturbed an estimated 8.4 million acres of land in the US. That works out to around 34,000 square kilometers, not too far off for the estimate from solar, and doesn’t include the space for coal power plants. And coal currently produces around only 40% of US electricity and hasn’t been above 60% in decades. To scale coal to 100% of US electricity would have required far more land than is required to meet that same demand via solar. Other analysis says the same: Counting the size of coal mines and their output, solar has a smaller land footprint per unit of energy than coal. 

And the solar estimate of ~50,000 square kilometers, of course, is with solar systems already deployed. It doesn’t take into account the possibility of future systems with higher efficiencies that could reduce the land footprint needed.

Read more here.

It's a bit more complicated with wind farms.  According to this piece from NREL (doing for wind what this piece did for solar):

Excluding several outliers, the average value for the total project area was about 34 ± 22 hectares/MW, equal to a capacity density of 3.0 ± 1.7 MW/km2.

This implies an output of  about 3.1 GWh/acre/year from a wind farm.  But unlike solar farms, farming can continue on the ground even as the turbines turn overhead.  If you read the NREL article in full, you'll see the problems they had estimating actual land use, and their calcs are correct only if you assume the land can't be used for anything else.  This snippet from this article about UK wind farms says:

A standard wind farm of 20 turbines will extend over an area of about 1 square kilometre, but only 1% of the land is used for the turbines, electrical infrastructure and access roads. The rest of the land can be used for farming or natural habitat.

My guess is, if you allow for the fact that most of the land in a wind farm has two uses, once again, even if we were to get 100% of power from wind farms, it would still only take about the same as solar: under one percent of land area.

Moral of the story: no, we will not be constrained by the availability of land from switching to renewables.