kottke.org posts about energy
In a conversation with economist Paul Krugman, climate journalist David Roberts asserts that the United States and China are going in different directions in energy, one forwards and one back.
One of the grand international stories right now — though it’s very hard when you’re in the midst of as much chaos and insanity as we are to get clear about the big narratives — is that the US is basically aligning itself as the last big petrostate. We’re going to go down with the fossil fuel ship, and China is aligning itself as the first electrostate. It is rapidly electrifying its economy, and it is dominating the technologies that enable an electrostate: batteries, EVs, etc., all that stuff. So where do you think the future lies?
All these emerging nations right now are stuck on coal. The story the US is trying to tell you is “shift to LNG. It’s cleaner than coal.” You’ll get some emission reductions. And then, basically, you’ll become dependent on our LNG. And for emerging nations, that’s an enormous 50 year investment program. They’re thinking now, “well, where is the energy situation going to be in 50 years? Do we think that fossil fuels are going to win in 50 years?” By launching this war, I think we have accelerated the process of pushing emerging nations into China’s arms and faster toward clean energy. That’s going to be the big effect of all this.
These photos by Chu Weimin show the mind-boggling scale of China’s green energy buildout.
Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
The massive buildout is happening across the country, from crowded eastern cities increasingly topped by rooftop solar panels to remote western deserts where colossal wind farms sprawl across the landscape.
Over at the Atlantic, Alan Taylor has collected a bunch of photos showing just how hard China is pushing on solar energy.
As the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind and solar power, reportedly accounting for 74 percent of all projects now under construction worldwide.
74% of all solar & wind construction projects worldwide! This pairs well with Bill McKibben’s recent article for the New Yorker, 4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment.
People are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power — which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.
In this video, Sara Saadouni explains the three passive cooling techniques used by fellow architect Diébédo Francis Kéré in designing a school building in Burkina Faso, where temperatures can be quite warm all year. The roof is especially clever.
He introduced a curved double roof that created an air gap between the first and second roof. As the heat naturally rises and escapes into the gap, the prevailing winds quickly carry it away, accelerating this process and cooling the building more efficiently.
But that’s not all. The first roof is made up of perforated ceiling slabs, allowing the heat to escape more efficiently and therefore to be quickly transported by the wind.
The other genius idea was to also curve the roof, which allowed for the Venturi effect — a phenomenon where air speeds up as it moves through the narrower sections created by the curve and therefore boosting natural ventilation.
(via the kid should see this)
When you apply power with higher-than-normal voltage to electric kids toys, they tend to move faster. When you apply 30V instead of the usual 2.5V or 5V, they move really fast:
This reminds me of when I was in grade school. Does anyone remember Stompers? They were battery-operated cars and trucks that were bigger than HotWheels and, while not remote-controlled, were able to move around under their own power. But they weren’t that speedy…maybe they could do 1-2 mph.
Anyway, some kid at school figured out that you could remove the AA battery, connect wires to the battery terminals, and then connect those wires to as many C- and D-cell batteries as you could gang together in a series. So instead of the usual 1.5V, you could pump 4.5V, 6V, 7.5V, or even 9V into those tiny cars. And boy, did they go. We could barely keep up as we raced them against each other down the halls, running behind them holding our battery packs. But the thrills were short-lived — I think the school banned them and all that current burned the tiny Stomper motors out after awhile. Fun while it lasted though! (via waxy)
In 1976, the price per watt of energy generated by solar photovoltaic was over $100. In 2019, it was less than 50 cents per watt, a price decline of 99.6%. Even since 2009, solar has declined 90% in price. So what’s behind that incredible drop? Industry played a part but the main driver was forward-thinking government policy and subsidy of solar by countries like the US, Japan, Germany, and China:
In the course of a single lifetime, solar energy has transformed from a niche technology to the cheapest way to bring clean, reliable power to billions of people around the world. But the markets that brought us these lower prices didn’t just magically appear by some invisible hand. Political leaders in countries all over the world created these markets, then subsidized them for decades to the tune of billions of dollars. “By investing that money, you got the solar to come down in costs to the point where you don’t need to subsidize it anymore.”
One of the experts in the video, Gregory Nemet, is the author of a book called How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation if you’d like to read more on the development of solar.
The first few sentences of the abstract for this paper from the scientific journal Renewable Energy contain a twist in the middle that’s worthy of M. Night Shyamalan:
The USA is confronted with three epic-size problems: (1) the need for production of energy on a scale that meets the current and future needs of the nation, (2) the need to confront the climate crisis head-on by only producing renewable, green energy, that is 100% emission-free, and (3) the need to forever forestall the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano. This paper offers both a provable practical, novel solution, and a thought experiment, to simultaneously solve all of the above stated problems.
If you don’t know about the supervolcano lurking under Yellowstone National Park, now’s your chance to learn more. Here’s Bill Bryson from his book A Short History of Nearly Everything:
Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone’s vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across — roughly the same dimensions as the park — and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of. The pressure that such a pool of magma exerts on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone and about three hundred miles of surrounding territory about 1,700 feet higher than they would otherwise be. If it blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond imagining. According to Professor Bill McGuire of University College London, “you wouldn’t be able to get within a thousand kilometers of it” while it was erupting. The consequences that followed would be even worse.
Back to the paper. The authors are proposing to generate massive amounts of energy from the supervolcano — “well over 11 Quadrillion Watt hours of electrical energy” per year:
Through a new copper-based engineering approach on an unprecedented scale, this paper proposes a safe means to draw up the mighty energy reserve of the Yellowstone Supervolcano from within the Earth, to superheat steam for spinning turbines at sufficient speed and on a sufficient scale, in order to power the entire USA. The proposed, single, multi-redundant facility utilizes the star topology in a grid array pattern to accomplish this. Over time, bleed-off of sufficient energy could potentially forestall this Supervolcano from ever erupting again.
I mean, this actually sounds like a great idea if it could be done safely, without ruining the park and, you know, accidentally blowing shit up. As of 2016, Iceland generated 65% of its energy from geothermal sources — the US could certainly stand to lean more on geothermal.
Starting last May and continuing through at least January of this year, Joshua Spodek has cut the ultimate cord: living off of the electrical grid in perhaps the most electrically connected place in the United States: Manhattan. Spodek wrote a fascinating article about his experiment in urban off-the-grid living for Ars Technica.
Some changes that made the experiment work included reading more books, writing by hand, choosing salads over cooked foods, going out instead of staying in, and shifting work to daytime hours. At first, I considered these changes sacrifices, but looking back, I view them more as a cultural shift, a bit like when I lived overseas and couldn’t find a good bagel. Finding the local equivalent-croissants in Paris or vegetable steamed buns in Shanghai-worked better than complaining, and it expanded my world.
Whenever I was tempted to lament the sacrifices I was making, I reminded myself that people have been living in Manhattan for around 10,000 years — technology shouldn’t make me less able or resilient than them.
The one thing I couldn’t sacrifice was my pressure cooker, which was the most efficient way to cook (and my greatest single consumer of energy). A full battery charge would power the cooker to make stew good for five meals and still leave a couple of hours’ charge for my computer and phone. I used almost no other appliances. I began waking up with the sun at 5 am to avoid needing lights. My battery has a one-watt LED that sufficed for cooking and eating, so I haven’t used my floor lamp.
There are some cheats and caveats (like, it’s impossible to live in Manhattan without indirectly benefiting from all the generated energy around you) but what an intriguing experiment. (via @irwin)
Canada’s Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world, with a difference between low and high tides reaching more than 50 feet in some areas. That’s a lot of water in motion:
In a single tidal cycle of just over 12 hours, about 110 billion tons of water flows in and out of the Bay of Fundy. That sounds like a lot. To get a handle on just how much it is, it is equivalent to the combined total 24 hr flow of all the rivers of the world!
With that much flowing water, you should be able to generate a massive amount of hydroelectric power. But as Tom Scott explains in this succinct video, the problem is that there’s almost too much energy to harness — the tide is so strong that it just destroys turbines.
See also Bay of Fundy Extreme Tides Time Lapse.
For his Solar Power Series, photographer Tom Hegen aerially photographed solar power plants in France, Spain, and the US. It’s not an accident that some of these look like flowers and plants — the compact geometry to ideally capture solar power is similar in both instances.
In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in a year. Having this in mind, renewable energy sources could be the key to combating climate change.
What does transforming towards more sustainable sources of energy look like?
(via colossal)
Designer Joe Doucet’s Wind Turbine Wall is both a kinetic sculpture and a way to harness wind power to create electricity.
Wind energy has played a key role in helping national grids around the world reduce dependence on fossil fuels to generate energy, but wind turbines for the home have encountered very slow uptake due, in part, to their intrusive physicality.
Designed to be as aesthetically pleasing as it is functional, this “kinetic wall” is made up of an array of rotary blades that spin individually, driving a mini generator that creates electricity. The electricity is utilized in the home or business, can be stored in a wall-mounted battery, or can even be fed back into the national grid to provide revenue for the owner.
Here’s the wall in action:
From a writeup of the project in Fast Company:
Doucet has built a prototype for a single spinning rod and run simulations based on that. The average annual electricity consumption for an American home uses a little over 10,000 kilowatt-hours per year. One of these walls would be enough. But where Doucet sees true potential is in larger-scale commercial buildings and even cities. “Instead of the typical retaining walls along roads and freeways, you’d have an array of these,” says Doucet, who says he’s in conversation with several manufacturers to help him bring the product to market. “With the added wind boost from trucks, our highways could take care of all our energy needs.”
(thx, michael)
In this short video from TED-Ed, we learn how Iceland extracts nearly emissions-free geothermal energy from the Earth (hint: volcanoes) but also how harnessing geothermal energy with heat pumps is something that can be done around the world. (via the kid should see this)
Using a small quantity of tritium (a radioactive isotope of hydrogen) and a pair of solar panels, Ian Charnas built a nuclear powered portable game system (a knock-off Game Boy) that is capable of playing Tetris. The tritium puts out an incredibly small amount of energy, so the system uses tiny but incredibly efficient batteries that were able to power the game for an hour after charging for two months.
If you’re interested, Charnas is raffling the nuclear game system to benefit Chernobyl Children International. (via @pomeranian99)
Writing in the New Yorker and citing a report by Carbon Tracker Initiative, Bill McKibben provides some hope that we can address the climate crisis.
Titled “The Sky’s the Limit,” it begins by declaring that “solar and wind potential is far higher than that of fossil fuels and can meet global energy demand many times over.” Taken by itself, that’s not a very bold claim: scientists have long noted that the sun directs more energy to the Earth in an hour than humans use in a year. But, until very recently, it was too expensive to capture that power. That’s what has shifted — and so quickly and so dramatically that most of the world’s politicians are now living on a different planet than the one we actually inhabit. On the actual Earth, circa 2021, the report reads, “with current technology and in a subset of available locations we can capture at least 6,700 PWh p.a. [petawatt-hours per year] from solar and wind, which is more than 100 times global energy demand.” And this will not require covering the globe with solar arrays: “The land required for solar panels alone to provide all global energy is 450,000 km2, 0.3% of the global land area of 149 million km2. That is less than the land required for fossil fuels today, which in the US alone is 126,000 km2, 1.3% of the country.” These are the kinds of numbers that reshape your understanding of the future.
But world governments will need to invest in renewable energy sooner rather than later and fossil fuel companies will fight tooth and nail to slow the transition to renewables. If they win in slow-walking the response to the climate crisis, as McKibben puts it, “no one will have an ice cap in the Arctic, either, and everyone who lives near a coast will be figuring out where on earth to go”.
This new video from Kurzgesagt takes a look at the possible role of nuclear energy in helping to curb the effects of our climate emergency.
Do we need nuclear energy to stop climate change? More and more voices from science, environmental activists and the press have been saying so in recent years — but this comes as a shock to those who are fighting against nuclear energy and the problems that come with it. So who is right? Well — it is complicated.
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow wrote about climate change activists who are embracing nuclear energy for the New Yorker back in February.
In the course of years, Hoff grew increasingly comfortable at the plant. She switched roles, working in the control room and then as a procedure writer, and got to know the workforce — mostly older, avuncular men. She began to believe that nuclear power was a safe, potent source of clean energy with numerous advantages over other sources. For instance, nuclear reactors generate huge amounts of energy on a small footprint: Diablo Canyon, which accounts for roughly nine per cent of the electricity produced in California, occupies fewer than six hundred acres. It can generate energy at all hours and, unlike solar and wind power, does not depend on particular weather conditions to operate. Hoff was especially struck by the fact that nuclear-power generation does not emit carbon dioxide or the other air pollutants associated with fossil fuels. Eventually, she began to think that fears of nuclear energy were not just misguided but dangerous. Her job no longer seemed to be in tension with her environmentalist views. Instead, it felt like an expression of her deepest values.
For more reading on the topic, check out Kurzgesagt’s list of source materials used to make their video.
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