Altering Course: Why the US may be on the cusp of an energy revolution | Hacker News Reader

Altering Course: Why the US may be on the cusp of an energy revolution

harvardmagazine.com

44 pointsozdave51 comments

I always enjoy a good energy discussion, but I'm a little dismayed when someone claims to come to the conclusion that we can have a renewable energy economy without lifestyle changes, and then doesn't deal with any of the really hard problems. National grid? Electric cars? Pfft. We already know how to do the first, and the second is closer every day. What about electric over-the-road trucks? Container ships? Jet airliners? Trains we can do. What about bulldozers and all the stuff we use to shape the earth to be the way we want it? Will we be able to use electricity to heat asphalt for road repair? For some of these things the answer is surely yes, but for a lot of stuff centrally generated and transported electric power just won't cut it. There's a staggering amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline, and part of why we are where we are as a species is because you can carry a gallon and a chainsaw five miles into the woods and clear half an acre in a day.

And then we could talk about rubber substitutes, plastic, ammonia fertilizer from natural gas, pharmaceuticals, etc., etc. That tasty carbon-rich brew is in fact the underlying basis for the entire Western way of life.

Just replacing grid electricity and cars to renewables you get us 80% there, and make that looming peak oil 5 times easier to handle. Once we get there, we can start thinking about every niche that still uses fossil fuels.

People don't need to replace all energy usage at once. Also, people can't do that, and shouldn't anyway because it's a huge risk to throw everything away and start anew.

I don't disagree, and it will happen because it has to, or we all go out of business. But the article just seemed to me to paint too rosy a picture of a painless transition to renewables without actually getting into the really hard stuff. And by that I mean the things for which we currently have no replacement, or only early concepts of what a replacement might be for fossil fuels.

> And by that I mean the things for which we currently have no replacement, or only early concepts of what a replacement might be for fossil fuels.

Can you expound on this? Biofuels will (hopefully) be used for aircraft (best case, algae produced at airports, converted into biofuels), and we can already create plastics from corn and other crops.

the NorthEast is a big user of heating oil. Tell me what i can do to replace 800 gallons of oil a year.

Solar isn't going to work either. Not enough daylight.

> the NorthEast is a big user of heating oil. Tell me what i can do to replace 800 gallons of oil a year.

Insulate your home properly.

> Solar isn't going to work either. Not enough daylight.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/feds-largest-us-offshore-...

Just asking: How much insulation do typical homes have?

> Tell me what i can do to replace 800 gallons of oil a year.

As I understand it, grid-powered geothermal heat pumps can replace a lot of it, at much greater efficiency. There's an upfront cost, sure, but I think its a fairly quick payoff even at current energy rates, much less if the externalities of fossil fuels were internalized into the rates.

>> Can you expound on this? Biofuels will (hopefully) be used for aircraft (best case, algae produced at airports, converted into biofuels), and we can already create plastics from corn and other crops.

The difference in energy density between bio- and fossil fuels is extraordinary. The very simple reason is that fossil fuels represent the concentrated results of millions of years of decaying biological material. I'm not sure there is enough accessible biomass on the planet to totally replace fossil fuels in their current applications.

The difference in energy density of bio-fuels and the most dense liquid fossil fuels can be none depending on which one you choose.

You know, ethanol is not the only bio-fuel.

I wasn't very clear, I think. Yes, you can make higher density biodiesels and there are even denser biofuels on the horizon. What I mean to say was that you can't compare the accumulated energy of a few millions of years of biomass with what you can extract from what is growing on the planet right now, even if you could turn it all into fuel. The world is currently consuming around 100 million barrels of petroleum per day. http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=5&pi...

That's not really a valid concern in a thread about niche applications.

Yes, we have a scale problem, and it must be fixed with renewables that scale, not with bio-fuels. The fact that the ones that scale are not fitted for niches is not reason to claim that we can't fulfill niches, and the fact that some niche fuels do not scale is not reason to claim that we can't get renewables at scale.

If we go by your comment, where is 80% renewable energy going to come from? Current renewable energy production in US by most liberal standards is not even 10%. That is after all these years and spending billions of dollars.

On the side note obum in his commencement speech told coast guard (below), in his words, so no one thinks that I made it up, as it is that ridiculous. And this comes out of Harvard today. Surprise? May be not.

His Coast Guard commencement speech "So I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security. And make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country. So we need to act and we need to act now."

Except we don't need to stop burning fuel, right? We just need to stop using it for net energy.

With enough "free" electricity we can "buy" fuels via carbon sequestration, and you can run your (somewhat pricier) camp stove as much as you want.

Or you can turn electricity and air and water into hydrocarbons only slightly less efficiently than you can turn electricity and water into hydrogen. This'll give you oil at something like $300 or $400 a barrel at current electricity prices. Which is to say that it's really energy that's the problem.

Energy is not the problem. Enough sunlight hits earth every 5 minutes to power the entire world for a year. Energy storage and energy density are the problems.

And energy transportation.

Yes, agreed. That can be solved with transmission lines, we just need to start building them.

Curious. Could we build transmission lines over existing freight tracks across the US? And have them serve double-duty? Both transporting power up top at very high voltages, and down below providing traction power to locomotives?

I saw another post in an HN thread today - it reminded me that sending electricity by wire over long distances is costly - you use something like 1% of the electrical load for every kilometer you send it.

With that kind of efficiency, I'm wondering how much energy it would take to ship a container of batteries across the country - how many kWh could you store in 45,000 lbs of lithium? That might be explosive or otherwise prohibitive, so what about 45,000 lbs of nickel cadmium?

Maybe we've been looking at energy transmission backwards, and we should be shipping it the way we ship everything else? And if we put the container on your train, it could power the train too.

Yes, but that is the equivalent of surveying a flooded city and declaring that the water isn't the problem, it's location is. The reality is that our society depends on expending massive quantities of energy to do work, and we've been wallowing in extraordinarily energy dense, stable, transportable happy juice for almost almost 150 years. It took 4+ billion years to make the stuff, and by all accounts we've used a good portion of it in a century and a half. It's like putting sugar next to an anthill. Fun times for the ants until the sugar is gone.

I realize this doesn't really address the core of your comment, but I heard an interesting argument that aircraft will never become electric because lose fuel weight as they fly. This is a huge efficiency gain over carrying a battery the entire way.

That said, maybe biofuel (algae?) can replace fossil fuels for aircraft.

Almost comically, at the same exact time the pronouncement has been: 'we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters' - we are in fact on the cusp of vast, important technology revolution everywhere you look. Peter Thiel lamented at exactly the wrong time; his statement will, fittingly, coincide with a new epoch of forward progress.

- Robotics everywhere

- Virtual reality

- Stem-cell tech, organ growing, a leap forward in drug breakthroughs (eg Sovaldi)

- Transportation (self-driving, electric, hyperloop)

- Energy (rapid solar & wind build-out, rapidly falling battery costs)

- Artificial intelligence

- Nanotech & materials

- Indoor farming

- Drone tech, which will soon touch everyone and every thing in some form

He also understate the importance of those 140 characters by a huge margin. All that progress would take much longer without the Internet.

Wasn't that statement in reference to Silicon Valley? Sure some of it is coming from there, but a lot of it is not.

Not just Silicon Valley. It's part of his broad argument that we're seeing a slow down in the rate of progress and innovation (specifically the sort that benefits society), that we're stagnating.

I've been wondering if that these are all coming to a cusp, not soley because of some tech driven revolution, but because there's a shift of who controls investments, in turn driven by a generational changeover in business/industry leadership. (baby boomers are retiring...)

I read Thiel's argument more like a cultural criticism than the lack of talented inventors coming up with great things.

Being engineer myself, I believe it's impossible to be a good or sane one without being optimistic. However we always must be aware of the broader society and HN does not represent it.

There always was some societal resistance to technological change. Socrates hated books, for example. But take anti-vaccers. This is a group of people who reject an undeniably proven and extremely beneficial to society advancement, because they don't trust doctors and scientists.

Or take GMOs. In Europe some countries have banned growing of them and it seems to be because of popular pressure. So if you are a talented crop geneticist you are out of luck. And if you do work in the field of your interest, you probably do at the eviil Monsanto. Because they are the only ones that are big and rich enough to enable them to lobby politicians to stay in business.

We should be optimistic of future, but look at the broader culture. After all art does capture the zeitgeist and one of the most popular album of the year 2014 was titled - 1989... (music's nice though)

Good points, but people are right to be skeptical. Often the technology can be very damaging, from lead (in paint and in the atmosphere) to asbestos to industrial accidents to partially hydrogenated fats to climate change, tech has created a lot of suffering and usually that cost is mostly externalized on the victims.

I don't reject all tech, but we can't realistically want people, especially those without the resources to understand it for themslves, to just trust the engineers and scientists.

The issue with renewables has always been cost, not theoretical efficiency limits. I recall computing (and then finding that others had computed on the Internet) that a 50x100mi array of solar panels in the Arizona desert could power the U.S. with energy left over, and that was at efficiency levels of a decade ago.

I talked to a couple founders at this year's startup school that said that solar was poised to reach grid parity with coal this year, i.e. without tax subsidies it would become cheaper to install solar panels than to buy that electricity from the electric company over the life of the panels. Pretty exciting times, if true.

No the issue with renewables is storage.

Did you factor in the transmission losses to move the electricity from the Arizona desert to the rest of the US?

You don't have to put it all in AZ, though I'm not sure what the efficiency impact would be. The AZ concept is a thought experiment to demonstrate a simple capability, not a fully engineered solution.

Nothing goes over my head, my reflexes are too fast.

Also, night time.

That's only about 5% if we build HVDC lines.

Well, it could power the U.S. if transportation weren't an issue. I worked with the Wind Energy Project Group several years back at the TU Delft and when I asked why the US didn't just exploit its huge reserves of wind and solar energy available, say in the Midwest, an engineer who worked there with me thumbed through some books and came up with some ballpark statistic, which I think was something like "1% power loss per hundred km" or so -- basically it meant that this was potentially feasible for powering Chicago with a wind farm in Iowa, or possibly even getting energy from Canada to New York City, the rest of the possibilities were far more limited. Maybe someone on HN is an actual engineer for one of these power companies and can give a more reliable figure?

Solar grid parity would definitely be pretty awesome. Do you know whether the gains come from better efficiencies, or from cheaper manufacture? In any case, I'd caution HN on that: don't expect an immediate turn-over. It's sort of like how poor people are constrained by their food budgets to eat an obesity-inducing diet: solar power works well if you can buffer the more-up-front costs (investment, maintenance, the volatility in the electric bill induced by weather) with your budget in exchange for the long-term payoff, but that's just a really hard sell to people who are in the middle and lower-middle class.

I'm going off a handful (~3-4) conversations with people in the industry, but my impression is that a large portion of the cost reductions come from economies of scale, particularly being driven by early-adopter industrial customers.

The big problem with solar is that you need a large up-front R&D and tooling/manufacturing investment before you can produce any working installations at all. Amortized over a small production run, this isn't cost effective enough to get any companies off the ground. But the tax subsidies that the government poured into the industry were enough to make it cost effective enough to bring on some early industrial companies like Google profitably. The profits from industrial customers can then be used to subsidize early-adopter consumer R&D, which at sufficient scale operates profitably on a unit-installation basis, which can then be used to fund mass-market adoption. Positive feedback cycle, where eventually a tipping point is reached and solar takes over.

As for getting it out to consumers: that's what financial arrangements are for. A friend of mine (in cloudy Massachusetts) has an interesting deal where he rents the solar panels from a company that basically charges him a flat fee < his electric bill, and guarantees a certain power output regardless of weather conditions (so they'll pay his electric bill if the panels don't generate what they say they'll generate). The company owns the panels, books any tax subsidies, pays for installation, and has the freedom to upgrade & reinstall as newer models come on the market. As a result, it's zero risk for him, and the company presumably has the industry knowledge and economies of scale to manage their risk appropriately. They could, for example, swap out his 1st gen panels as newer models come on the market and then send them to a sunnier location where they'd perform fine.

It is almost all from cost of manufacturing. The one statistic that explains the solar boom and articles like this is that by 2017 solar panels should drop 40% in price per kw/hr. If they are at grid parity now, what will 40% do?

That is just in the next 2 years. In fact depending on where people live, at a certain point solar will make more sense than investing in the stock market (although of course this will even out at some point as electricity cost becomes essentially the cost of solar in the area around you).

Electricity costs vary considerably and solar is already at or better than grid-parity in a lot of places (e.g. Hawaii, Germany). Grid-parity is obviously a goal but does anyone think the current price of electricity contains the fully-loaded cost of carbon pollution and related externalities? Suppose you price carbon at $22 a ton. This is an order of magnitude less than the cost suggested by a team at Stanford. The result would be to drive up the average rate to about 15 cents per KWh. At that price, solar is better than grid-parity almost everywhere (on average etc). Whether that makes it a good investment is a different issue.

It seems silly to compare to coal because coal benefits from an enormous external subsidy: the coal power industry dumps its waste products into the atmosphere at no cost to itself.

The US is already in the midst of an energy revolution, just not the renewable one in question. Fracking has changed the game and pushed the US into being the largest oil producer in the world.

Hopefully fracking's cheap oil won't push the renewables timetable too much farther down the road.

Most fracking expansion in the US has come to a screeching halt due to Saudi Arabia's production rate (which they're using to try to kill fracking). This is only prolonging the oil pain though, as the capital expenditures have already been made and the wells established.

You'll see consolidation in the tight oil space over the next year as company's default on their (excessive) debt, and wells come back online as the price of oil heads back up to $100/barrel (futures markets are already predicting ~$70/barrel by the end of the year).

So you'll see these erratic price movements in the oil market (death throes?) while this transition to electrification continues; renewables investments aren't directly affected by the price of oil due to them not directly competing with oil (oil = vehicles/airplanes/trucks, renewables = electricity market).

That's not accurate. US oil production is up 10% over this time last year. Most fracking expansion has come to a halt, not fracking itself. The vast fracking production gains have not been reversed. And above $60 to $65, expansion will pick up (which has already begun; along with EOG announcing it will pick up at about $65).

Production is currently running near recent record highs:

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WC...

Thanks for correcting me. I've updated my post.

Also: "Half of U.S. Fracking Companies Will Be Dead or Sold This Year"

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-22/half-of-u-...

The Economist touched on this last week, it's a good read:

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21648622...

Spending went way down, but so far US oil production is actually up.

You're a bit behind current affairs.

Nope. Check the numbers, the US production is up even with the slump in prices caused by all the extra supply. Rig counts are down, exploration is down, but production is up.

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21648622...

My Canadian contacts in the fields say otherwise (the ones that aren't laid off...), but I can see how if the exploration is down the number of workers would be reduced as well as when the rig counts are down, hard to square that with production being up but I guess that's possible too if you exploit fewer rigs. The boom has definitely halted though and there is no sign of it resuming any time soon, also there are more and better organized actions against the environmental impact of fracking.

It looks like we killed it. Here's a text-only cache/mirror from Google:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SmNdAIe...

After reading the DC power travels better than AC power, I was skeptical. After a bit of googling I found this article:

http://theenergycollective.com/rogerrethinker/204396/ac-vers...

Its a really good read about how DC power does indeed travel a lot better, especially under sea or under ground. The problem with DC power is that DC/DC transformers are still expensive, and not as efficient as AC/AC transformers.

Also, breakers are more difficult for DC.

But yes, DC does have its advantages. Power through wires scaling with r^2 versus r, no RMS losses, no phase issues, no capacitance losses.

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