The Death Of Fossil Fuels

[lpm]

It's not a free market. It's monopoly with the government faking a cargo-cult market.

So all this theorising is pointless.

[bjn]

Interesting article on the electrification of heating.

https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-t ... n-of-heat/

[bjn]

Solar roll outs continue to accelerate. In the first four months of this year China rolled out over 48GWp of solar, YoY that’s 37% more than last year’s installation. China alone is now installing 3GWp per week, globally it is now meant to be close to 1GWp installed per day.

https://taiyangnews.info/markets/china- ... ippets-12/

[jimbob]

Solar roll outs continue to accelerate. In the first four months of this year China rolled out over 48GWp of solar, YoY that’s 37% more than last year’s installation. China alone is now installing 3GWp per week, globally it is now meant to be close to 1GWp installed per day.

https://taiyangnews.info/markets/china- ... ippets-12/

That's about the peak demand for the UK every two months.
According to Google

[IvanV]

Solar roll outs continue to accelerate. In the first four months of this year China rolled out over 48GWp of solar, YoY that’s 37% more than last year’s installation. China alone is now installing 3GWp per week, globally it is now meant to be close to 1GWp installed per day.

https://taiyangnews.info/markets/china- ... ippets-12/

That's about the peak demand for the UK every two months.
According to Google

GWp is the peak output of the solar cells, when they are perfectly illuminated, which almost never happens. It's the name-plate capacity on the physical equipment, but doesn't tell you how much electricity they are likely to produce in a given location.

So you get some very impressive looking numbers for the nameplate capacity of intermittent generators, but the actual electricity they can produce on average is a lot less.

55 GW is about the hourly peak electricity demand in the UK, consistent with your 2 months. But 55GWp of solar cells in the UK would average about 6GW output over the year. In China, being at a lower latitude, and probably rather less cloudy on average than the UK, I would imagine it might be about double that, but would depend upon precisely where they were located. I don't know to what extent aircon has become sufficiently common in China that they might have peak electricity demand on hot sunny days, like in parts of the US.

[bjn]

Capacity factors vary by climate and geography, I believe the UK has and average capacity factor for solar of around 11%, but that’s from the Shetland all the way to the Scillies. In the South it is something closer to 20%.

A capacity factor is the proportion of electricity you actually generate vs running it at its theoretical peak for 24 hours a day, 364 days a year. On dim days and in the morning solar is going to be generating less than at noon in mid summer, but it is still generating. If the cost of your intermittent generation is sufficiently cheap, overbuilding it so that you get more on the dim days is a strategy. This does mean you over generate on the sunny days, which you can just curtail or dump into some form of storage. That’s all predicated on being cheap enough.

Talking of which. Looks like perovskite solar cells are going to be a thing soon. The first gen will by hybrid cells, layers on silicon cells, the numbers I’ve seen show them generating about a third more than standard silicon alone. The extra cost is meant to be marginal.

[bjn]

Linky for perovskites...

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/05/22/ne ... -solar-go/

and

https://www.q-cells.eu/about-q-cells/pr ... 30517.html

[bjn]

India getting cold feet for coal…

The Indian government will not consider any proposals for new coal plants for the next five years and focus on growing its renewables sector, according to an updated national electricity plan released Wednesday evening.

https://apnews.com/article/india-coal-p ... ce=Twitter

[El Pollo Diablo]

Just saved myself £75 by switching from economy 7 to a flat rate. Nice.

[FlammableFlower]

Toyota are making claims about solid-state batteries.

If their claims stack up this will be big, but I'd currently file under marketing hype until there's some proper evidence.

[IvanV]

Capacity factors vary by climate and geography, I believe the UK has and average capacity factor for solar of around 11%, but that’s from the Shetland all the way to the Scillies. In the South it is something closer to 20%.

A capacity factor is the proportion of electricity you actually generate vs running it at its theoretical peak for 24 hours a day, 364 days a year. On dim days and in the morning solar is going to be generating less than at noon in mid summer, but it is still generating. If the cost of your intermittent generation is sufficiently cheap, overbuilding it so that you get more on the dim days is a strategy. This does mean you over generate on the sunny days, which you can just curtail or dump into some form of storage. That’s all predicated on being cheap enough.

Talking of which. Looks like perovskite solar cells are going to be a thing soon. The first gen will by hybrid cells, layers on silicon cells, the numbers I’ve seen show them generating about a third more than standard silicon alone. The extra cost is meant to be marginal.

You can't get 20% in France let alone southern England. Even Corsica is only 19%.

Sadly even in SW England, the highest, the practical capacity factor is only 11.4%. Government data is based on what people record as generating. So maybe in theory it can be a bit better than these real-world averages if you have perfect orientation, no shading, clean your panels, etc.

And London is actually below average. But maybe that's due to practical siting issues in a big city, pollution, etc.

[Grumble]

Toyota are making claims about solid-state batteries.

If their claims stack up this will be big, but I'd currently file under marketing hype until there's some proper evidence.

They’ve been making claims about the next big thing with solid state batteries for years now, seemingly as an excuse to not make EVs right now. The word “believes” features in that article at a crucial point as well. I’ll believe it when I see it. At some point someone will make a solid state battery that will outperform everything else, but whether it will do it cost effectively is another question.

[bjn]

I listened to a podcast that covered a paper on enhanced geothermal energy. Standard geothermal is limited in than you need three things, hot rocks, natural fractures and water. However there is a lot more impermeable rock with suitable temperatures which can’t be used. To get around that you drill 2 holes into the hotness, frack the rock between them, pump water down one, steam comes out the other, use that to drive a turbine, and pump it down again.

It’s been tried experimentally a few times in the past, but was found to be difficult and uneconomic. However, fracking technology has come on a long way since, and peeps are trying it again. The paper above has modelled how you can use the fractures as an energy storage medium. Rather than running the plant as close to 100% capacity as you can, instead when energy is plentiful from other sources, you shut off the stream outlet, but keep pumping more water into the fractures. Because the rock is impermeable, your water gets heated and stays down there. When energy is scarce you open the taps and generate more than steady flow operation. This requires bigger turbines, energy to inject the water and more fracking, but a significant cost is drilling the holes in the first place, which will be the same. All in all, you get better utility from the system as you supply energy at times of expensive electricity and little or none at times of cheap energy. They estimate 60% better returns in a market with high VRE penetration. This is with 100 hours of storage.

May work in practice, it may not. If it does, it could be a significant contribution.

Even the UK sits on hot granite even if we have no geysers. There are two experimental enhanced geothermal plants in Cornwall being built, though they aren’t planning on doing the storage bit as fair as I am aware. The Redruth project seems to be fracked and partly reliant on natural fractures, so may not be suitable for storage.

So enhanced geothermal generation now seems to a commercially viable thing. A pair of wells were drilled in Nevada by Fervo and linked by fracking. They were able to generate 3.5MW over the duration of the initial testing period and see no technical barriers to them being able to deploy this commercially at scale. A paper has been published on the project. They believe that they can scale readily because it is all off the shelf tech from the oil and gas industry, and that they benefit from being able to replicate the well drilling process near identically so having a good learning curve, same as gas and oil fracking has had.

From the conclusions section of the paper…

Having successfully completed the drilling, completion, andwell construction phase of the project, we have demonstrated thatcurrently no technical barriers exist to developing horizontal wellgeothermal drilling programs in high-temperature, hard rock set-tings. The project was completed using drilling and completionstools and technology that already commonly exist in the indus-try. Reservoir simulation forecasts and history matching wereable to replicate key reservoir response observations, indicatingthat physics-based modeling can effectively be used to evaluatereservoir performance of horizontal well geothermal systems

Volts’s most recent episode talks to the CEO of Fervo in the most recent pod.

[Grumble]

I’m looking forward to listening to that, might skip ahead in my queue. The potential is huge, especially if you can locate the wells on the site of an existing power station.
One possible problem here in the U.K. is that when we’ve closed coal fired power stations we have demolished them entirely. If there are some where the turbine hall and grid connections are still around then it would make sense to keep them around, even if the turbines themselves are replaced.

[Grumble]

Always worth paying attention to Sabine Hossenfelder for a sceptical viewpoint - not negative on it but she does point out some pitfalls, including that it’s not automatically low carbon
https://youtu.be/yLxFfdbR6Ws

[dyqik]

Nothing is automatically low carbon. You have to be careful in supply chains and side effects of deployment for that to be true.

[bjn]

Always worth paying attention to Sabine Hossenfelder for a sceptical viewpoint - not negative on it but she does point out some pitfalls, including that it’s not automatically low carbon
https://youtu.be/yLxFfdbR6Ws

Link gives me an ad for youtube music.

[bjn]

I’m looking forward to listening to that, might skip ahead in my queue. The potential is huge, especially if you can locate the wells on the site of an existing power station.
One possible problem here in the U.K. is that when we’ve closed coal fired power stations we have demolished them entirely. If there are some where the turbine hall and grid connections are still around then it would make sense to keep them around, even if the turbines themselves are replaced.

Because they can drill horizontally you can have one location on the surface service multiple wells, minimising surface infrastructure, and possibly reusing existing infrastructure if it sits above or nearby an exploitable hot rock formation.

[bjn]

Always worth paying attention to Sabine Hossenfelder for a sceptical viewpoint - not negative on it but she does point out some pitfalls, including that it’s not automatically low carbon
https://youtu.be/yLxFfdbR6Ws

Found a video and skimmed it, she talks about trad geothermal not enhanced.

[bjn]

Always worth paying attention to Sabine Hossenfelder for a sceptical viewpoint - not negative on it but she does point out some pitfalls, including that it’s not automatically low carbon
https://youtu.be/yLxFfdbR6Ws

Found a video and skimmed it, she talks about trad geothermal not enhanced.

Sorry, she does touch on it.

However, the excess CO2 emissions she mentions are from trad geothermal, not enhanced.

[dyqik]

I’m looking forward to listening to that, might skip ahead in my queue. The potential is huge, especially if you can locate the wells on the site of an existing power station.
One possible problem here in the U.K. is that when we’ve closed coal fired power stations we have demolished them entirely. If there are some where the turbine hall and grid connections are still around then it would make sense to keep them around, even if the turbines themselves are replaced.

Decommissioned nuclear plants might be a better bet for having buildings still around.

[Grumble]

Always worth paying attention to Sabine Hossenfelder for a sceptical viewpoint - not negative on it but she does point out some pitfalls, including that it’s not automatically low carbon
https://youtu.be/yLxFfdbR6Ws

Link gives me an ad for youtube music.

https://youtu.be/l6UGpaKnkS0

Does this one work?

Always worth paying attention to Sabine Hossenfelder for a sceptical viewpoint - not negative on it but she does point out some pitfalls, including that it’s not automatically low carbon
https://youtu.be/yLxFfdbR6Ws

Found a video and skimmed it, she talks about trad geothermal not enhanced.

Sorry, she does touch on it.

However, the excess CO2 emissions she mentions are from trad geothermal, not enhanced.

True, but drilling into the ground anywhere can lead to gases trapped in the ground being released, so good understanding of the geology and exploration drilling is required whatever flavour of geothermal is proposed.

[bjn]

AIUI enhanced geothermal generally targets hard rock, so tends to have less not rock stuff in there than sedimentary etc… But it will all depend on the exact geology.

[bolo]

The House Science Committee will be holding a hearing on geothermal energy on Wednesday (at 2pm Washington time). One of the witnesses will be from Fervo Energy, the company bjn mentioned upthread. More details here.

[bjn]

Dickhead. How long before these new wells become stranded assets?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ate-crisis