Climate Change Thread

[Montmorency]

"Can someone explain to me why so many European governments have basically refused to look beyond oil, gas, coal, and anything else combustible in favor of wind, solar, geo, hydro?"

Nuclear - a strange confluence between the anti-nuclear movement and the watermelons of european politics.
Gas (Shale) - the watermelons of european politics would rather import brown coal than sully themsleves extracting lower-carbon fracking products.
Wind - it is widely deployed in many viable places, but obviously the baseload problem.
Solar - it is widely used, but we have a population density problem that reduces opportunity compared to the States.
Geo - there aren't that many places where its viable, most of europe's interior and periphery is geologically ancient/dead.
Hydro - again, there aren't that many sites where it is viable, tho companies like Rheenergise are looking to expand this with clever methods.

I wish Samurai were still around. This is an issue of long-term choices in development and energy strategy over decades. Wind, solar, and hydro are still far underutilized compared to their native (regional) potential - I do understand Switzerland and Portugal have different profiles - and geo has always been overlooked, particularly in the form of Enhanced and Advanced Geothermal Systems (artificial wells), which are not some exotic technology: the Netherlands already uses them to power its high-tech and ultra-productive greenhouses, and Germany and France have experimented at small scale. This is a different technology than accessing magma circulation at the crust. We go deeper. All of Europe could in not-distant principle utilize wells economically at 2 to 10 kilometers' depth, and this alone would substitute for all existing natural gas needs.

Geothermal technology in energy markets remains at the developmental stage of still being almost wholly reliant on direct state subsidy, providing a good comparison point to wind and solar, which have become economical in their own right in just the past five years. We really should have aimed to arrive at the current stage no later than 2010, to reap the benefits by 2020.

Instead *much* - there is incredible variation, or even mixed records, between and within countries - of Europe persistently reaches around for anything it can burn, burn. Always something to burn in the Eastern European backyard. This is a durable political choice in the search for market stability and a comprehensively-failed one. We should all be angry about it. Frankly, the 2010s OPEC production glut, plus the short-lived fracking boom in the US/Ukraine (halted by the first war), were the greatest tricks the fossil fuel industry could have played at such a critical juncture, besides all the lying and corruption and skulduggery.

One would also smirk at the notion of space constraint for solar or wind relative to the very finite space occupied by the remnants of the primeval European forest. European lifestyles can't run on old-growth wood.

[I realize I'm not being completely fair to Europe, since the worm does turn: Germany has already reached 50% renewables in power consumption, and this year unveiled a target of 100% by 2035. But the point is long-standing, and biomass remains a dead end under the rubric of renewables.]

obviously the baseload problem.

This is really not so much of a problem anymore, and could have been much less of one with that, you know, concerted investment over decades undergirded by the premise that we can't burn our way to paradise.

I read that EU currently has about 1 terawatt of generation capacity installed, of which a quarter is already wind capacity alone (although this figure might include UK?). As of last year 20% of the Earth's energy mix was wind or solar. When's it time to stop farting around?

Not to mention the major problem with solar, wind, and hydro is the inability to 'store' or scale power on demand. Hydro with the current droughts certainly showed a major limitation. Geothermal should be a huge industry and I find it kinda bonkers that Italy isn't tapping in all around Mount Etna and Vesuvius to route/sell power to everyone north of them.

Solar and Wind can generate MWs of excess power if done right but where to store it for periods of reduced sun and wind?

As of 2021 more than 20% of all electricity generation on the planet was wind/solar. A fifth. There's no reason we couldn't have been on track for 50% or more by 2020 - we just didn't prioritize it since 1990. A target of 90+% renewable could have been complemented by a mix of nuclear and load-following gas for the final transition atop a basic storage framework.

As I was getting at above, by now speaking of baseload power as an unsolved or unsolvable problem is no better than treating nuclear waste storage as such. The baseload concept of an always-generating source targeted to a predetermined minimum supply of power is becoming obsolete. Even if we don't consider nuclear, we need:

1. Geographically-distributed overcapacity in solar/wind.
2. Mid-load (load following) or dispatchable generation (can include final transitional gas)
3. Energy sinks during periods of overproduction to manage peak load (either grid batteries or uneconomically-high-input industry or infra that operates only intermittently)

And as ACIN once said, the appetite for nuclear is best reframed in terms of a post-transition expansion fuel to maximize potential energy supply well beyond concurrent demand patterns. Excess energy, especially from "free" sources like most renewables, is good. Cheap and bountiful energy is good for civilization, and cheap energy carries far fewer externalities and perverse incentives when it is non-combustive by source.

Anyone who tells ya this hasn't been achievable already is a dirry liar. The current absence of such an arrangement at scale is just a failure of policy and politics, and not an optional one like colonizing Jupiter's moons or what-have-you.

If Europe had viewed energy dependency as a National Security matter which it clearly is and invested some of the Defence billions into it - and frankly investment would still help - things would be done... quicker.

Good summary. The US Department of Defense has been publishing for a few years already that energy independence is a national security concern. I know this is always a better sales pitch in the US than in Europe, but maybe it will find more rhetorical purchase with European publics now.

Why we give billions to NASA / ESA etc to get nicer piccies of something light years away rather than cheaper, cleaner power I do not know. Tech should be retasked to use in pace rather than pretending that by spending a vast sum of money in space we might get some things we can retask to earth.

You're neglecting that the very well-documented trickle effects of space tech research apply to energy storage? That's like one of the fundamental obstacles anything leaving the atmosphere for a good spell has to overcome. The reapplication of space research is not a pretense, it's the historical norm and the source of countless technologies in everyday use, big and small. There has probably never been investment with a higher return rate than public space programs. A few tens of billions annually for some of the greatest returns on investment of all time. We could have easily afforded even more tens of billions both for space programs and for clean energy development, both with concrete long-term targets - we just didn't want to in the age of Pangloss (global neoliberalism).

Now everything is accountable to acceleration during this decade.

[Montmorency]

NASA asteroid deflection test livestreamed at this very moment of posting:




Internet comment:

The probe masses 500 kg and the asteroid maybe 2 billion kg, so it won't get moved much (maybe 0.4 mm/s), but it should change the orbital period by 10 minutes. That's why they're going to a binary asteroid pair - the period change is the only way to see the effect.

This mission also tries out some other cool tech:
- Solar panels with little mirrors on them to reflect more light onto the cells, called the Transformational Solar Array. 3X less weight for the same power! It actually unrolls in space.
- Electronics built in a radiation-hardened FPGA that can implement any circuits at all. They built a big camera onto it, DRACO, that will guide it right into the middle of the asteroid. They can actually modify the electronics in-flight. This will useful for all space tech.
- An ion rocket that uses xenon as a fuel, that gives you far more thrust for a given weight.

This is what NASA is for - PR for American tech!