A 100% renewable grid isn't just feasible, it's already happening

[applegrove]

JOE ROMM at Think Progress

https://thinkprogress.org/a-100-percent-renewable-grid-isnt-just-feasible-its-already-happening-28ed233c76e5/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

"SNIP......



The ongoing debate around whether it’s feasible to have an electric grid running on 100 percent renewable power in the coming decades often misses a key point:  many countries and regions are already at or close to 100 percent now.

According to data compiled by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there are seven countries already at, or very, near 100 percent renewable power: Iceland (100 percent), Paraguay (100), Costa Rica (99), Norway (98.5), Austria (80), Brazil (75), and Denmark (69.4). The main renewables in these countries are hydropower, wind, geothermal, and solar.

A new international study, which debunks many myths about renewable energy, notes that many large population regions are “at or above 100%” including Germany’s Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Schleswig-Hostein regions, New Zealand’s South Island, and Denmark’s Samsø island. In Canada, both Quebec and British Columbia are at nearly 100 percent renewable power.

Last summer, China’s State-run Xinhua News Agency reported that “Qinghai Province has just run for seven straight days entirely on renewable energy … only wind, solar and hydro.” This was part of a test by the country’s State Grid Corporation to show a post-fossil-fuel future was practical.



.........SNIP"

[Exotica]

1. meanwhile, in the land of the free.........

Trump Announces Plan To Increase Levels Of Toxic Air Pollution In America

https://trofire.com/2018/01/28/trump-announces-plan-increase-levels-toxic-air-pollution-america/





2020 looms larger by the day

[NNadir]

2. Only Joe Romm could make such a delusional remark.

Maybe this asshole hasn't looked at the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere recently, which as grown by more than 50 ppm during the time he's been handing out his toxic bullshit.

[jpak]

12. The truth hurts don't it

Nuclear is done.

Renewables have won.

Yup

[hunter]

16. Nope.

Anything is possible when it's backed up by ugly hydro or "natural" gas.

Long live the fantasy.

[annabanana]

3. Seems it's only "impossible" for us.

The rest of the civilized world is making great strides.

[lindysalsagal]

4. More and more houses have solar. It's awesome.

We've got star-trek cell phones, automatic doors, now, I want dylithium crystals and a transporter machine.

[Squinch]

5. But just as we have a "Roundup is awesome

and everyone should eat it for breakfast" contingent here at DU, we also have a "solar power kills and only oil is safe!" pusher.

And you guys say no one notices DU! They send their best people to try to recruit us!

[Achilleaze]

6. republicans have blocked America from attaining sustainability

to favor their toxic oily moneybuck corporate buddies.

[FBaggins]

7. Hard to tell whether the author is ignorant or intentionally deceptive

But there doesn’t appear to be a third choice.

No... there is nowhere on earth that is 100% renewable IF we’re trying to use that to evaluate whether or not variable renewables like wind and solar can meet the electricity needs of a modern nation.

In that debate, the question is whether storage and load shifting can remove the need for “base load” plants (like gas/coal/nuclear) without sacrificing grid reliability. Large-scale hydro (and storage that relies on it) does not count as “renewable” in that conversation.

Without understanding that, we could claim to have towns (near dams) that have been “100% renewable” for several decades... but not in a way that answers the question of the feasibility of a 100% renewable grid.

[applegrove]

8. Trump could leave aluminum smelters in Quebec instead of building them in

Kentucky where they'll have to use coal to smelt instead of Quebec's hydro. It is about available choices right now.

[FBaggins]

9. I'm missing the connection

What does that have to do with the viability of 100% renewables for electricity generation?

100% hydro is great if you have sites for it, never have significant droughts, and don't mind any negative environmental impacts... but it isn't an option as a significant new source of generation or storage in most areas.

Success working with just about the oldest energy source in the world for doing work doesn't tell us anything at all about whether modern variable renewables (primarily solar/wind) can provide for our electricity needs.

[applegrove]

10. Quebec is all hydro. It has huge hydro. Aluminum smelters use a huge amount of energy.

Trump is pushing for aluminum smelters in the US. Instead he could leave aluminum production in Quebec (or build another one there owned by americans) and use hydro instead of the coal that will likely be used to feed the aluminum smelter being built in Kentucky.

[FBaggins]

11. I agree with all of that...

... what does it have to do with whether or not modern renewables can provide 100% of a nation's electricity needs?

[applegrove]

14. In the article hydro is included as a renewable. It is about the smaller choices you make

to burn coal when hydro option is available. Priorities.

[jpak]

13. Hydro Quebec is building 2000 MW of wind capacity

FYI

[NNadir]

15. There are many people in Iceland who are really, really, really pissed off with that mentality.

Saving Iceland

The first law of thermodynamics applies on a global scale, by the way. Moving aluminum manufacture to Canada will mean more dangerous fossil fuels burned in the United States.

[applegrove]

17. I don't follow.

[NNadir]

18. Try thinking this way. As of a few years ago, only 17% of the world's large rivers had not been...

...destroyed by dams, that is, 17% were free rivers.

Now, I'll grant you that the so called "renewable energy" fantasy and its grotesque failure is resulting in the melting of icecaps, and may make new temporary rivers, but the fact is that the St. Lawrence is a thoroughly damaged river and adding more dams will mean more destruction.

America's Most Endangered Rivers

Like most so called "renewable energy" strategies, the use of hydroelectricity requires damage to huge amounts of surface area and ecosystems, and also like most, it's not especially clean or sustainable.

The destruction of the river's natural ecosystem does allow under current disgraceful mismanagement for export of electricity to the US, but without further damage to the river the amount of electricity will remain constant.

If Al smelters are relocated to Canada, the electricity shipped to the US will no longer be available but will be consumed in Canada at the smelter.

This means that in our current "renewable nirvana" we'll burn more gas here.

Is that very hard to understand?

[applegrove]

19. I understand. Doing the opposite maybe the Kentucky smelter could buy some electricity

from the northern grid. And get hydro that way. You are right hydro is not perfect. Drowned territory creates tons of methane. But once you get a dam up and running it is better than oil and coal. The dams in Quebec are far north in the Hudson and James Bays. Indigenous people get a cut. Not many people need to be relocated because it is such an underpopulated area of the world. But I hear ya.

[NNadir]

20. No matter where you squeeze a balloon, it gets thicker somewhere else.

One of the ironies of the aluminum business is that the renewable energy business consumes so much of it.

An interesting discussion of this topic escaping the delusional mind of Joe Romm, who apparently thinks that 7 = 365.24, is here:

Metals for a low-carbon society (Olivier Vidal, Bruno Goffé and Nicholas Arndt, Nature Geoscience 6, 894–896 (2013))

The authors write:

...this [renewable energy] transition will also cause much additional global demand for raw materials: for an equivalent installed capacity, solar and wind facilities require up to 15 times more concrete, 90 times more aluminium, and 50 times more iron, copper and glass than fossil fuels or nuclear energy (Supplementary Fig. 1). Yet, current production of wind and solar energy meets only about 1% of global demand, and hydroelectricity meets about 7% (ref. 2).

If one wants clean energy, one builds a nuclear plant.

If you don't give a shit about the future and are dogmatically wedded to the ridiculous idea that the future will be dominated by so called "renewable energy" (which actually was abandoned in the 19th century because most people led short miserable lives of dire poverty) you support the mining industry to build solar and wind junk that will be landfill - toxic landfill - in 20 or 30 years.

When Joe Romm was running the climate office, the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere was 370 ppm. Twenty years later it's 412 ppm.

He's a total idiot.

[applegrove]

21. Nuclear will be toxic landfill for 60,000 years.I'd go with solar. Or wind.

It is not the poverty of the people that worries you. Solar panels on the roofs of middle class homes will save money in the end. You are upset big oil or coal can't be the middleman in the energy game forever. At some point people will build geothermal, solar and wind into every new house built.

[NNadir]

22. Bullshit.

It's pretty funny how people who worry about used nuclear fuel in 60,000 years - mostly because they know nothing at all about its contents - are spectacularly uninterested in the 19,000 people who died today from air pollution and the 19,000 people who will die tomorrow from air pollution.

A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

I've been studying nuclear fuel for more than 30 years in the primary scientific literature. I pretty much know every constituent of it, it's half life, its toxicology and most importantly its use.

The people who are sitting on their asses with these "60,000 year" fantasies, seem to value a putative person that far in the future while not giving a rat's ass about the children who are alive today. They certainly don't give a shit about the kids who will be adults 20 years from now, who will have to clean up this shit semiconductor electronic waste that pretty much every damn solar cell on this planet will be in 20 - 30 years or the superfund sites from their manufacture.

And let's be clear on something, OK? A significant portion of those 19,000 people who will die today from air pollution are under 5 years old.

Since you hold this opinion about 60,000 years, maybe you can inform me about how many people died in the last half a century from used nuclear fuel. 19,000 in the last half a century?

The climate scientists Kharecha and Hansen calculated that nuclear energy saved 1.8 million lives that otherwise would have been lost to air pollution:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

It follows that anti-nuke stuff kills people.

Nuclear energy might have saved more lives, were it not for the mindless bullshit from people who know very little, nothing at all about used nuclear fuels, might have saved more were it not for the contempt for science and engineering that characterizes our country, left and right.

The solar and wind industries will never be as safe, as clean, nor as nuclear energy. Nuclear energy - the only industry people think should be perfect - is not perfect, but it doesn't have to be perfect to vastly superior to everything else.

In the last decade, 70 million people died from air pollution, more than were killed in World War II. And what do we care about? Fukushima? Chernobyl? Three Mile Island.

I would suggest that if you really, really, really, really hate nuclear energy, you are hating something you know nothing about.

I do know about it and I'm appalled by the mentality and ethics of people who oppose it.

Have a nice holiday weekend.

[Hortensis]

23. Thanks for your many contributions to discussion,

but honey and vinegar?