How California’s Ambitious New Climate Plan Could Help Speed Energy Transformation Around The World - TPM – Talking Points Memo

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#38

PG&E was driven into bankruptcy for two reasons: the Enron organized power embargos of 2000 and 2001 that forced PG&E to purchase power at insane markup, and then sign under duress 30 year contracts to purchase power at very disadvantageous rates. Although they were able to void some of those contracts, due to the republican “leadership” (governor and AG) they couldn’t void them all. Some $10 billion of power purchase contracts finally come off the books in about 2031. The second is that PG&E more or less achieved regulatory capture, and used that advantage to “invest” in stock buybacks while postponing maintenance on power lines and gas lines and accumulating variations of technical debt. That strategy blew up both figuratively and kaboomitively, resulting in the company being taken into receivership to resolve their liabilities for the people that died and property destroyed.

That does not mean the “system is on the edge”. For instance, the state has been hammered with snow this year (that’s a good thing), yet somehow one does not read about people freezing to death in the eastern parts of the state. Unlike, say, Texas. This recent photo is of a highway that leads to South Lake Tahoe:

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Storage is a solvable engineering problem. There are techniques that do not involve lithium batteries. For instance, during the power embargoes of 2000 and 2001 Oregon and British Columbia were pumping water upstream at night so they could run it through the dams’ turbines during the day, when they could sell that power to California. CA is the 4th largest economy in the world, is running a multi-year budget surplus, and has their big power company totally under their thumb due to the bankruptcy. Not to mention their inherent technical talent, quick access to capital, and employee mobility. Doesn’t mean they won’t make a moneypit hash of it (the High Speed Rail project, sigh), but if I were to bet on any state in the union pulling it off, this is the one I’d go with.

Also, please understand that when NYT writes about California, they frequently pander via concern trolling to their east coast readership.

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#39

Yeah, but that’s not making a huge dent. The EU just isn’t making enough of it it that way—and it’s not surprising, given how much it costs. Even if they weren’t prohibitively expensive, green hydrogen production is only low-emission in theory. In practice… it’s right around the same level of emissions as hydrogen produced from methane (the gray version, not the blue version that’s supposed to include carbon capture, but again runs into the problem of ‘where do you PUT the carbon?’). Nor is the infrastructure needed for a continent-wide hydrogen distribution and storage system anywhere near being ready.

And Finland, by your own link, has developed one commercially-operating sand battery. Just one. Nor does the company have a home-use version, or seem to have one planned. Besides that, you still need to generate the energy needed to heat the sand. So while it’s an interesting idea for a heat-capacitor, it’s not solving any fuel-dependency issues. Given the existence of the second law of thermodynamics, it really just creates more energy demand: because there is no such thing as a 100% energy efficient process, every step of this, from running the steam turbine to transferring the heat into the sand to circulating the air or water needed for heat extraction to transferring that heat into the end-use application… adds inefficiencies, and losses of energy.

The biggest thing that trying to effectively fight climate change is going to come down to isn’t minimizing inefficiencies or finding cleaner ways to generate power… it’s going to need seriously reducing the amount of power we use in the first place. And that… may require reducing the number of people using it. We’re not past the point of food capacity, but we may be above the population cap for safe electrical generation until we experience another massive leap forward in the physical sciences.

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#40

The EU green hydrogen target is for 2040. It will take time, for example, to implement a hydrogen grid. As we’ve seen with wind and solar, costs for generation decline over time. Indeed, by having some renewables already in place, Europe avoided the need to import about 50 billion euros worth of oil and gas during the quite chaotic first 5 months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, severely blunting Putin’s energy weapon. Given this strategic dimension, some countries want to move even faster to a hydrogen economy. Electrolysis does not necessarily involve carbon if the electricity input from a clean source (hydro, wind). Perhaps the tap water input may have some carbon in it, but I don’t live in Indiana.

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#41

The blackouts are PG&E holding the state hostage until it is indemnified for fires caused by their poorly maintained equipment. They’ve not been grid events, they’re “utility events” done at the discretion of PG&E.

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#42

And that surprises me not in the least!

I love their latest commercials about how they are undergrounding lines because “…it’s safer and less expensive in the long run.” THEN WHY DIDN’T THEY DO THIS BEFORE NOW!!!
*&^%$#@!

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#43

Yes, storage is a simple engineering project if you have a convenient dam. But when was the last significant dam built in the US?

I really doubt the US has the capacity to build nuclear plants in a reasonable time frame any longer. We now understand that good stuff happens when you can iterate quickly, and that is simply not feasible in the current regulatory environment.

We should be spending way more on researching flow batteries - that to my mind is the long-term solution to storage.

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#44

Arrendis, thank you for injecting some physics realism into what seems to be mostly a fantasy discussion. It’s mind-boggling that neither the article nor the discussion thread here mentions the word nuclear except for your one mention of it. California’s goals won’t have a prayer of seeing fruition without it, and without a lot of it. And good on ya for pointing out the hype about hydrogen, which isn’t really a fuel per se but just an energy carrier that not only requires a lot of energy to produce but is hard to store and transport unless you convert it into ammonia or some other more practical energy carrier, which of course requires even more energy.

The article says: “Electrifying most everything means not just replacing most of the state’s natural gas power plants, but also expanding total electricity production – in this case doubling total generation and quadrupling renewable generation, in just 22 years.” It seems like the geniuses that wrote that plan aren’t really all that good at basic math. According to this, renewables must already provide half of California’s electricity. But they don’t. Solar and wind provide about 25% and only intermittently. Hydro is about 6% and it’s not only pretty much all built out but is producing less in drought years, which are the majority of years lately.

The “electrify everything” concept doesn’t work out with their math either. Electricity only comprises about 20% of total energy use. So “electrifying most everything” while doubling total generation would bring that up to 40%, meaning that non-electric energy use would still be 60% of energy use. From one end to the other, the energy plan just doesn’t add up. It’s aspirational, but untethered from physical and economic reality.

As for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel that you mention in your footnote, successful recycling of spent fuel has already been amply demonstrated at US national labs, and Argonne National Laboratory has already developed a design for a commercial-scale recycling plant which would reduce the radiotoxicity of spent fuel from millennia to just a few hundred years, and that would be in an inert form (glass or ceramic) that wouldn’t leach anything out into the environment. The DOE hasn’t built it yet, but it’s only because they drag their feet on virtually anything with the N word in it.

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#45

I won’t link another Sabine Hossenfelder video here, but she has one on the practicality of nuclear power for climate mitigation if you want to search for it. She’s not anti-nuke, and in fact says in the video that she’d be fine with a nuclear waste dump in her neighborhood (all other safety factors considered).

She came away from researching the topic with the conclusion that additional nuclear plants built for climate mitigation isn’t practical, due to the extended time needed for licensing, the NIMBY issues about waste and danger (real or imagined), and the fact that non-nuclear green power will be advancing quickly in the interim while enough nuke plants are trying to get built.

If we had authoritarian regimes in every country that could just mandate quick building of nuclear power plants over public objections, it might work. In the real world, it’s probably better to focus on better batteries, wind, solar, and anything else like geothermal power.

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#46

California has a number of significantly empty dams these days. So do Nevada and Colorado, bigger ones. But more important, a water energy storage system does not have to be built on a riparian waterway. You just need a high spot next to a low spot, in a location where the input and output power transmission loss isn’t too prohibitive. And it’s california, so needs to be quakeproof lest downhill towns get wiped out.

Nukes are very reasonable when you have a strong, non-capturable regulatory environment, and MBAs making 5-20 year bonus-pursuit gambles on deferred maintenance, are put up against the wall and shot when things go south. That does not describe this country.

We should be spending way more on researching flow batteries

I have high hopes that one or more of the many battery techs under research or development will pan out and move us beyond lithium. I just don’t know which one(s), and I don’t have the bandwidth to follow them all (seems to be a new one every week).

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#47

Except the materials constraints make all renewables just impossible. And you’re talking about having to cover an area the size of South America with windmills and solar panels. A 40-year solar refurbishment schedule (generously assuming they’ll operate for that long) would mean the recycling and replacement of 1.23 million square meters of worn-out panels, every single day, rain or shine – forever.

As for materials constraints: The copper needed for IEA Green Transition scenario would be 5X total ever mined in history.

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Nuclear power plants can be built both quickly and cheaply, though that’s being demonstrated outside the USA first. As this decade progresses some small modular reactors will be built that will show beyond doubt that they can be cheap, fast, and safe. Energy density is key, and nothing comes anywhere close to nuclear power. Just as an example: Running a one-gigawatt coal-fired power plant requires a trainload of coal (~100-120 cars, over a mile long) per day. You can run a fast-neutron nuclear fission reactor for a year on one ton of depleted uranium, about two milk crates full. So two milk crates or 365 trainloads of coal. Oh, and we’ve got about a million tons of depleted uranium already out of the ground that we would be happy to use, that’s free. So that’s equivalent to 365 million trainloads of coal.

If you can look at those facts and say that wind and solar are the answer to humanity’s energy problems, then I won’t make any further attempts to pierce your delusions.

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#48

Um, yeah. Compare the current state of photovoltaic solar with an imagined future state of nuclear.

#49

My “delusions” are based on the current socio-political reality of what it would take to build out enough nuclear power quickly enough compared to rapidly advancing tech in other areas. If you have a magic wand that can change people’s minds to support nukes, that’s great.

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#50

Usually because it’s a lot more expensive in the short term. Publicly-traded corporations have a legal responsibility to maximize short-term profits for their stockholders. Without specific capitalization (ie: raising rates), most utilities don’t put their lines underground.

#51

Yup. And I’ll be shocked if they meet that target. But moreover, emissions need to drop by 2030. Every time these plans come out, they shift the target date, kick the can further down the road. That’s why we’re not on target to hit the 1.5 degree rise that everyone swore up and down they’d make, back in 2015. At the time, they were talking about curbing emissions by 2025. Then 2030. 2035. Now it’s 2040.

This is the language of prophecy, not science. Climate change activists and politicians latch onto the newest results of buzzword bingo as if science isn’t an incremental process that takes decades, and then they make confident predictions. They might as well be declaring when the Rapture will happen.

Greening energy production will take a very long time, it will only slowly gain in efficiency, and every single one of those ‘green’ solutions has its own negative environmental impacts. Reduce usage. When possible—not ‘when convenient’, mind you, when possible—use mass transit. When the distance isn’t so much, and weather allows, ride a bike. Or give yourself an extra hour, and walk it. Turn off lights if you’re not in the room. Hell, keep doors closed and minimize how much of the house you need to heat. Turn off the cable box, ffs, don’t just turn off the TV.

And all that’s just a drop in the goddamned bucket. Get the trains onto electric power. Air travel and freight need to get hyperefficient (NASA and Boeing are working on a new wing design to reduce fuel use by 30%, so that’s a help, but it won’t be ready for a long time). Oceanic shipping needs to get more efficient—and we probably need to accept a much longer shipping time on most things.

Funny story: once upon a time, all oceanic travel was powered by renewables! Work’s being done to get back to that, though. It’s happening all the way from smaller, local routes to transoceanic container ships. Take a look at the credit on that last article’s header. That’s not a render. That’s a photo.

So work is being done… but it’s not cheap, and it’s not being done quickly. That smaller cargo ship they’re touting, Ceiba, carries 250 tons of cargo. Some of the big diesel container ships haul 165,000 tons. That’s a big difference. And it’s going to take a lot of time, and a lot of money, to make that change.

That’s true, it doesn’t. But wind is intermittent—that’s one of the drawbacks—and that’s one of the reasons the in-practice numbers for so-called ‘green hydrogen’ go back up: in order to be reliable, you have to supplement that wind power from someplace, and guess what that usually means.

As for hydroelectric… there are places where it’s definitely a solid choice. The Northeast, for example. Niagra isn’t going to have any problems generating power any time soon. Out west, though?

Lake Powell’s already at the ‘we may not be able to generate power soon’ point. Once that happens, once the turbines stop and the water’s only trickling out the gates, those shortages travel down the Colorado River pretty quick. Lake Mead’s already at record lows, despite heavy snow-fall. At current rates, the Hoover Dam stops generating power pretty much by 2030.

Including the power it currently sends to California, and partly upon which, I am absolutely positive this ‘ambitious new climate plan’ depends.

In addition to the power, the southwest needs to shut off the damned taps. agricultural water use rules haven’t changed in a long, long time, and they are no longer sufficient to maintain the water supply—if they ever were.

Getting through this is gonna take, at best, a massive amount of inconvenience. At worst… a massive amount of suffering, and death.

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#52

Yup. And she’s right on the lag-time for building new nuke plants. I think her nuke video, though, overestimated the advance of ‘green’ power—it came before she did the one on hydrogen and started looking into the environmental problems w/offshore wind, for example.

In the real world, it’s probably better to keep trying absolutely everything we can… and get ready for all of it to utterly fail. Find yourself some land in northern Ontario. Just make sure you’re high enough to not worry about Hudson Bay.

Edit: Oh… and get some guns, because other folks will be looking to take that land, too.

#53

I thought Public Utilities were guaranteed a specific profit percentage, enabling a safe, consistent investment. When a public utility maximizes profit, they are taking money from, essentially, taxpayers and handing it to their investors as a GIFT (and bonuses to themselves!). Take your guaranteed profit, and use the rest of the money to improve service, safety and reliability and if there’s no more savings to be had, lower the damned rates.

#54

But you do need water, so likely is built on or very near a river.

I talked to a guy who knows about this stuff. He commented that even the simplest planned improvement or change to a nuclear plant has to go through an extensive review process, so everything takes forever.

#55

Um, depleted uranium is depleted - it’s what’s left over after you’ve enriched uranium for bombs and fuel. So not a good source for fuel at all.

#56

I’m talking about a high/low pair of adjacent reservoirs with a turbine and pump in between so water energy storage can smooth out the supply from those renewables that have time of day peaks supply issues that may not line up with demand peaks. One can build that anywhere the local real estate situation permits. What does that have to do with nuclear?

#57

Nothing - that was in response to a different post suggesting we can do nuclear quickly. Sorry for any confusion.

I’d suggest there aren’t that many good spots near water with two suitable reservoirs at different heights. And then we’d get some “environmentalist” suing to block it on some tenuous grounds.

There’s a different version been suggested where you have a bunch of cranes that assemble large very heavy concrete beams into a tall vertical structure to store energy and then lower them to generate it. Can be built anywhere.

And here’s a proposal for a very big (multiple GWH) system:

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