The most audacious vision for geothermal is to drill six miles or more underground where temperatures exceed 750 degrees Fahrenheit. At that point, water goes supercritical and can hold five to 10 times as much energy as normal steam. If it works, experts say, “superhot” geothermal could provide cheap, abundant clean energy anywhere.
Folks in Finland recently tried exactly that, drilling 2 holes 6.4 km deep in Otaniemi, Vantaa. Unfortunately their fracking attempts failed and sufficient flow could not be established between the two wells. Also, temperature at the bottom was 120 C, not enough to get supercritical water (374 C is required). They donated the boreholes to scientific use, someone will try again and try better…
Once the “how” can be sorted out, it should be usable anywhere on Earth, not just volcanic regions. :) But it’s not easy.
Canberra is moving toward full electrification. It’s been renewables (with offsets I think) since 2019. Hopefully more cities make the choice to grids with energy storage to reduce load on old coal and gas plants.
I think the problem with just looking at Canberra is that it can dump or import from NSW and the other parts of the grid, similar to SA, though on a smaller scale.
This looks at the entire network to see what is feasible, without being able to shunt excess generation or import from other networks.
yea, there is nothing record about the number mentionned above. But journalists need clicks to get food on the table :/
edit:
The EU installed a record 56 GW of solar capacity in 2023, well above the 40 GW added in 2022, SolarPower Europe said on Tuesday as it released its 2023-2027 market outlook. This year is the third in a row in which the European solar market has experienced at least 40% growth. The expectations are for a slower expansion of 11% in 2024, when annual installations are seen to reach 62 GW
rudimentary (biaised and prone to error) back of a napkin math:
This is good news of course, but natural gas is often a by-product of oil mining, and if it can’t be sold it has to be flared off. So if there is little demand for it, then we also need to urgently reduce the demand for oil based products.
Interesting, as a Vermonter this is the first I’ve heard of this proposal, and I’m pleasantly surprised with GMP’s plan. I live somewhat out in the boonies, and experience power outages at least a few times every year, sometimes lasting a couple days, with one particularly bad winter storm leaving us without power for over a week (the old wood stove really came in handy then). I’d absolutely love to have a battery installed, if they ever offer it to me.
I think people do not realize that there is a huge bonus for the first country to unlock the “negative price energy peak” achievement.
There are some businesses that will only be possible in these conditions and they will flock to the first country with it. Generating hydrogen seems like the most straightforward one, but there are also bio-ethanol processes that require some energy to be profitable.
We see intermittency as a curse, but I think we overestimate the difficulty to adapt to an intermittent schedule and we underestimate the advantage of having time spans with free energy, especially when they happen during the day.
Yes, right now we don’t see this effect because the obvious thing to do is to sell it to your neighbor so they can temporarily shut down coal or gas plants. That effect will kick in when your neighbors can’t do that anymore (e.g. because they also switched to the same type of intermittent power) and there won’t be any easy way to cash out on additional electricity. We are not there yet.
China’s solar industry is operating at a 93.6% annual growth rate, looked at through the 12-month rolling average – or if you compare the first six months of 2023 to H1 2022, then the pace of installations has more than doubled, accelerating 154%
German nuclear plants are laid out to provide electricity. However the push for geothermal is meant for heating homes, which geothermal has many massive advantages in.
So techniques developed to deep drill for oil can be repurposed to drill for geothermal energy? That’s a tiny silver lining. I imagine, as we run out of oil, the drilling companies will start lobbying really aggressively for geothermal in order to keep in business.
And at least geothermal counters all the complaining about “solar panels don’t work at night” and so on. The Earth’s internal temperature doesn’t change much 😆
Are we talking just nameplate capacity or including the energy storage needs in the price? It's not really apples to apples unless you compare the costs of running each 24/7
Fun fact, That "thousands of years" of storage is entirely a man made limitation.
95% of nuclear waste is unspent fuel. That's the source of the "thousands of years" waiting for the more energetic parts of the unspent fuel to decay.
There are a couple of nasty decay side products that last a long time in there, but those can also be fed into a reactor to be burned away. That's about 1% of waste. (mostly plutonium)
Pretty much everything else, the remaining ~4% or so of waste, is only really super dangerous for about 60-90 years, and only radioactive for about 300.
Another fun fact, a lot of that 4% is actually valuable in various industry, including nuclear medicine.
Sadly, Jimmy Carter signed a ban on refining waste, and then got it incorporated into some international agreements. He thought we would just bury the waste again, it came out of the Earth, it could go back in until we were ready to refine it and move on. Sadly, Nymbyism killed that plan.
Okay, some basic physics here, to make thorium useful, you have to convert it to uranium (specifically uranium-234)
That's how a molten salt reactor functions, they use a seed of fissile material to breed the thorium into protactinium, which then decays into uranium.
Once you have the u-234, you can use it to breed the thorium, but you do need that seed of either u-235 or plutonium.
As for u-235 and u-238, well, those are full of harvestable energy as well. U-235 is what we burn in reactors because u-238 is fertile, not fissile. U-238 breeds up to p-239, which can explode if you know what you're doing, but can also be burned in a reactor for massive amounts of power.
We have the technology to do all of this right now. It's not 10-20 years out, it's today. What we don't have is an easy way to overcome decades of oil company anti-nuclear propaganda.
Safe storage of nuclear waste hasn’t been an issue for decades. You see it comes from this place called the ground, and goes back into this place called the ground. I know, it’s like science fiction.
It is comparing the cost of nuclear fuel to generate a kWh of electricity vs the cost of a solar to generate a kWh of electricity in what is a great location.
So it excludes the entire construction cost of the nuclear plant as well as operating the nuclear plant. It also excludes any sort of storage costs for running the grid with solar. However we are talking about the UAE for solar, so cloudy days without sunshine are basicly not a thing. So you really only need a nights worth of batterie storage. Most consumption happens during the day, so we are talking maybe a third of total generation would need to be stored. So for a MWh of daily use and $333/kWh. Given that you need 333.3kWh of storage, which costs $111,000 total.
Since this is only fuel costs thou and the nuclear plant has to be built as well, which is not included in fuel costs. So lets look at what 1MWh a day would cost in terms of nuclear power plant. Olkiluoto3 was just finished for $12billion for 1,600MW or $312,500 for a MWh per day.
So in this case you are basicly betting that a nuclear power plant lasts three times longer then the battery storage and battery storage costs are not falling, which is propably not going to be the case. Also a bunch of technologies do not care too much about when they get power. If you for example have super cheap electrolysis to produce hydrogen during the day, that is an intressting use case. Also grids propably have more then just one power source, so stuff like wind power, hydro and so forth might also be options in some grids and solar prices are falling over time.
electricity is cool, but its not the only source of energy used in the country: fuel is also a source of energy and needs to be replaced. The amount of electricity consumed in France is about 470 Twh, and the amount of Joules used overall is equivalent to 1500 Twh, per year.
To be clear: you only need to replace the final energy from the fuel, not the primary energy. That’s a big deal, because it reduces the amount you need to replace sharply.
gasoline is 100 time more energy dense than electricity, thus even inefficiencies at 70% for IC engines, gasoline would still be more dense somehow. But there is alot of geopolotics and environement issues involved with fuel. The problem of energy density needs to be resolved for electricity so it would be more convenient to use, even at the industrial scale, which is a major carbon emitter.
The issue is that ICs just suck badly. So badly that carrying around half a ton of batteries still makes EVs much more efficent. that is not even looking at how petrol is made, which btw also requires electricity.
but heavier cars ruin the road structure. Highways need an alternative for bitumen, and overall electrify the production of road components, including steel and concrete.
Yep, road where goes with the square of vehicle weight. A singe semi truck is far more damaging than a hundred cars, and bikes don’t do damage period.
As for EVs, while they are often heavier than ICE’s, it’s only by a few percent, and less impactful than the vehicle obesity epidemic we’ve seen here in the US in the last decade.
It makes some sense to use electric or biofuel trucks to move goods for short distances as well as the distance between a facility and an distribution yard, but for long distance I fully agree that we called them multi modal containers for a reason. You can move a container from truck to electric train in seconds, and indeed we already do that for anything that has to travel by ship anyway.
Moving goods vast distances over land extremely cheaply and with zero carbon emissions is a problem that was solved long ago with overhead electrified rail, and it’s amazing to see the lengths we here in North America will go to avoid investing in it.
Moving goods vast distances over land extremely cheaply and with zero carbon emissions is a problem that was solved long ago with overhead electrified rail, and it’s amazing to see the lengths we here in North America will go to avoid investing in it.
i hope that this falls in the same line but in Germany they rather tow double trailers (40 tons) on the Autobahn (highway) instead of shipping by rail (which is maybe slower) while destroying highways in the process (always Baustelle: road works), and costing the taxpayer money to be repaired. So shipping companies like Hermes® would trick the taxpayer into competitve shipping prices and fast shipping but is in fact stealing tax money from him/her indirectly. Same day delivery is a disaster to nature. Why can’t people be patient about their goods being shipped 3-4 days later than usual? the logic beats me really :/
Actually better than that: I already have the batteries and the inverter and just need to get some solar panels to install (next year sometime) and then it will run almost completely on locally produced renewable energy.
Right now it is still on local grid power, but that is mostly geothermal and wind (at least 60% on average).
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