Every approach to decarbonizing the energy sector comes with its share of costs and benefits: renewables are cheap and clean, but require enormous amounts of land and are not always available when power is needed.
At 25:xx when Amory Lovins explains the fastest way to get to zero, I invite you to check out his TEDx talk. See especially around the 20 minute mark of that video https://youtu.be/u-Kq89M0t18?t=1184 Note he says we can get off "oil and coal" (so he anchors getting off fossil fuels in your mind) but, then, of course, gas stays in the picture, and quite a bit of it, as you will see from the infographic at 19:51.
Note that the "efficiency" is mostly from the switch from primary energy to final forms of electricity. As you see the y axis is in Quads, which is quadrillion btu, a measure of heat that is measured when we burn fossils for energy. Of course a lot of that goes away when you switch to measuring the electricity delivered as opposed to the heat generated. Note to everyone: We need to normalize showing that electricity delivered rather than the primary energy. The goal is an electrified world, let's use electric metrics. I propose GWyr for state and national scale. TWh is what people often use. But why list the hours when we're looking at a year of energy use? You wouldn't give your age in hours, you use years. Keep the numbers tidy. (And don't get me started on Princeton's "exajoules" for their pathways. Way to be arcane academics stuck in primary energy metrics). Anyway, where was I? Oh yes.
So, with the "efficiency" gain from not burning gas for your car, but instead going to electric, and going to heat pumps instead of burning a lot of stuff... now you're down to about 50 Quads in Amory's graph. Converting that to electricity gets you to the afore-estimated 1500-2000 GWyr demand. (This is another pet peeve, that we haven't anchored the national demand in every environmental conversation. So when I bring it up, people bring up Amory and say - Oh no, it must be half that, with efficiency - and I have to show them this thing and say, NO, his efficiency brings you to that number I'm working with. People, we need to get these key endgame numbers ANCHORED. Fix this conversation in some key parameters. Otherwise people wiggle all over and handwave away every problem instead of facing it.)
Anyway, whatever it is, Amory Lovins has what looks like 1/3 of the end number coming from natural gas. 2/3 renewables. That's the Amory Lovins plan. No nuclear, but keep that gas pumping! Yay, fracking. Does keeping gas get you to zero carbon?
And Finally - the thing everyone mentions, but doesn't really gaze deeply into: how much land use is required to supply that 2/3 of renewable energy? Has Amory mapped it out for the good people of America? A graph with lovely colors is one thing. It would make a nice pillow. The map of solar farms in your neighborhood (and all the millions of neighborhoods across the USA that will be required) is quite another and bring out your neighbor's pitchforks. Show us your #FirstGigawattDown
At 12:4x when Dan Kammen says, "there's about 425 nuclear power plants around the world, for context about 100 of them are in the US...provide 20% of our electricity" - if you really want to supply some context, begin with the endgame in mind. Estimates/TEDTalks suggest that, in order to fully decarbonize the world, we're going to need about 120 PWh of electricity. Which is about 13,700 GWyr. One GWyr is about one of those nuclear reactors. So...425 down, 13,275 to go. Alternatively, One GWyr is about 50-70 square miles of land covered in solar panels. Getting your power plant up & running, down, on the ground, is the real game here. #FirstGigawattDown #NIMBYCoefficient #FullExternalities More info on the PWh estimate: https://twitter.com/Footprint2Wings/status/1466569173883142149 And a great video on the First Gigawatt Down concept: https://youtu.be/8--VSh0JUT0
To decarbonize the US (not the whole world), estimates are ~1500 to 2000 GWyr, so... 100 down, 1400 to go. Or 1400 x 50-70 square miles for full solar. Or...let's see. Offshore wind. Any update to that 2012 article which said you could power the east coast with 144000 offshore turbines? 5MW each, so that's 720 GW, but 40% capacity factor gives you 288, let's round up to 300! And east coast is about 2000 miles long, so, 72 wind turbines per mile down the entire east coast for 300 GWyr, and you still need to come up with 1200 more GWyr... People need to see the ground game and the end game and the real, impending permit and land use negotiations. All this other stuff is interesting, but tends to dance around the real, and easily illuminated ground game. #FirstGigawattDown #NIMBYCoefficient #ClimateSolutionsNegotiation #GroundGame
At 25:xx when Amory Lovins explains the fastest way to get to zero, I invite you to check out his TEDx talk. See especially around the 20 minute mark of that video https://youtu.be/u-Kq89M0t18?t=1184 Note he says we can get off "oil and coal" (so he anchors getting off fossil fuels in your mind) but, then, of course, gas stays in the picture, and quite a bit of it, as you will see from the infographic at 19:51.
Note that the "efficiency" is mostly from the switch from primary energy to final forms of electricity. As you see the y axis is in Quads, which is quadrillion btu, a measure of heat that is measured when we burn fossils for energy. Of course a lot of that goes away when you switch to measuring the electricity delivered as opposed to the heat generated. Note to everyone: We need to normalize showing that electricity delivered rather than the primary energy. The goal is an electrified world, let's use electric metrics. I propose GWyr for state and national scale. TWh is what people often use. But why list the hours when we're looking at a year of energy use? You wouldn't give your age in hours, you use years. Keep the numbers tidy. (And don't get me started on Princeton's "exajoules" for their pathways. Way to be arcane academics stuck in primary energy metrics). Anyway, where was I? Oh yes.
So, with the "efficiency" gain from not burning gas for your car, but instead going to electric, and going to heat pumps instead of burning a lot of stuff... now you're down to about 50 Quads in Amory's graph. Converting that to electricity gets you to the afore-estimated 1500-2000 GWyr demand. (This is another pet peeve, that we haven't anchored the national demand in every environmental conversation. So when I bring it up, people bring up Amory and say - Oh no, it must be half that, with efficiency - and I have to show them this thing and say, NO, his efficiency brings you to that number I'm working with. People, we need to get these key endgame numbers ANCHORED. Fix this conversation in some key parameters. Otherwise people wiggle all over and handwave away every problem instead of facing it.)
Anyway, whatever it is, Amory Lovins has what looks like 1/3 of the end number coming from natural gas. 2/3 renewables. That's the Amory Lovins plan. No nuclear, but keep that gas pumping! Yay, fracking. Does keeping gas get you to zero carbon?
And Finally - the thing everyone mentions, but doesn't really gaze deeply into: how much land use is required to supply that 2/3 of renewable energy? Has Amory mapped it out for the good people of America? A graph with lovely colors is one thing. It would make a nice pillow. The map of solar farms in your neighborhood (and all the millions of neighborhoods across the USA that will be required) is quite another and bring out your neighbor's pitchforks. Show us your #FirstGigawattDown
At 12:4x when Dan Kammen says, "there's about 425 nuclear power plants around the world, for context about 100 of them are in the US...provide 20% of our electricity" - if you really want to supply some context, begin with the endgame in mind. Estimates/TEDTalks suggest that, in order to fully decarbonize the world, we're going to need about 120 PWh of electricity. Which is about 13,700 GWyr. One GWyr is about one of those nuclear reactors. So...425 down, 13,275 to go. Alternatively, One GWyr is about 50-70 square miles of land covered in solar panels. Getting your power plant up & running, down, on the ground, is the real game here. #FirstGigawattDown #NIMBYCoefficient #FullExternalities More info on the PWh estimate: https://twitter.com/Footprint2Wings/status/1466569173883142149 And a great video on the First Gigawatt Down concept: https://youtu.be/8--VSh0JUT0
To decarbonize the US (not the whole world), estimates are ~1500 to 2000 GWyr, so... 100 down, 1400 to go. Or 1400 x 50-70 square miles for full solar. Or...let's see. Offshore wind. Any update to that 2012 article which said you could power the east coast with 144000 offshore turbines? 5MW each, so that's 720 GW, but 40% capacity factor gives you 288, let's round up to 300! And east coast is about 2000 miles long, so, 72 wind turbines per mile down the entire east coast for 300 GWyr, and you still need to come up with 1200 more GWyr... People need to see the ground game and the end game and the real, impending permit and land use negotiations. All this other stuff is interesting, but tends to dance around the real, and easily illuminated ground game. #FirstGigawattDown #NIMBYCoefficient #ClimateSolutionsNegotiation #GroundGame