This is only about electricity generation not overall energy usage (transportation, heating, etc) from given source. This is always misleading and gives impression that renewables cover 50% of needs already. Its so much worse - it's only around 20% in EU:
They are also very fast at electrifying everything. Especially for transportation, they built large high speed train network(runs on electricity) and are far ahead in electrifying the public transport like busses which also resulted in Chinese electric cars dominance. Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable. US, EU should just drop everything and go electric or in a few years will look like backward civilizations because China is exporting that all over the world.
>Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable
Claims like this would need to be quantified further in order to make any real predictions, but I think these sorts of predictions about future electrification may turn out to be shockingly wrong.
For example, many predict we have or will soon hit peak oil. Whereas I would wager it will continue to grow. You didn't mention global oil production, but I want to get specific. 50 years from now I think global oil production will be higher than it is today.
There is a strong desire by many for oil production to decrease and to electrify, but the incentive structure just isnt there. It's too cheap and useful and the energy demand is effectively unlimited. Im not even saying we shouldnt move away from it. Just that we wont.
Europe hit its peak oil some time ago and the peak wasn't that high. Anyway, electricity is inherently more efficient and less problematic than the chemical alternatives. I guess you can bet on chemical energy if you have plenty of it. Its just that electricity is superior in every way.
Also fossil reserves have other uses too, I also don't expect oil production going to 0 anytime soon.
Global oil numbers went horribly wrong when Russia invaded Ukraine. Prices multiplied and EU was left paying for an invasive force because it was still not %100 renewable. Considering the damage done by the oil supplier war machine, fossils are just outrageously expensive. Biggest mistake ever was to rely on fossils.
I dont understand what you are saying with this comment. They were importing before the war now they are still importing. That just shows how durable the demand is for oil.
Its not durable demand for oil, its a demand for energy and shows how bad idea is to rely on suppliers you don't control. Build enough renewable energy infrastructure and the demand for oil goes away.
The only source that could ever beat a genuinely unbounded demand, is if we somehow figure out how to tap the dark energy which is causing the universe to expand.
In the meantime however, photovoltaics would get us all of the way to a Kardashev type three civilisation; humanity is currently 0.73 on that scale, it's an exponential scale with a factor of 1e10 between each integer.
Oil isn't a binary for energy though. There's a growing need for it in other industries, from plastics to pharma to fertilizers. Moreover, oil production is currently staying high because the OPEC cartel can't simply afford to shut down well production - only scale it down very gradually and pray that no one finds out (which is impossible given that oil is sold on the spot market). On the other hand, American Big Oil is dependent on global prices - too low and drilling deep or fracking becomes infeasible for them, while high prices mean economic slowdown (due to domino effects on other industries) until OPEC bandies together to stabilize prices to reasonable levels (which is $65-75 per barrel).
Currently we're in a situation where OPEC, remembering 2014 and hell bent on diversification, is offloading record quantities of crude into the market, to ensure that American production stays infeasible.
Anything that needs oil can be produced from coal. There are estimates that liquid fuel produced from coal can compete with oil when oil cost is 80-100 USD/barrel.
The catch is that making coal liquid requires a lot of energy. If that energy comes from coal itself it is a very dirty process. But if energy comes from renewables or nuclear, it is not an issue.
In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.
So many wrong points here. The coal to liquid (CTL) process looks good on paper up until it isn't. Like you mentioned, it requires a lot of energy, energy which most countries cannot afford to divert. There's no point in using nuclear or renewables for CTL when SABIC can simply undercut you on price by 10x or more.
> There are estimates that liquid fuel produced from coal can compete with oil when oil cost is 80-100 USD/barrel.
Oil is currently at 61-65 USD per barrel, with OPEC ensuring it stays that way because even they know it's only going to fall from there. Even the 61-65 USD price point leaves a bad taste in their mouths.
> In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.
No, with renewables and storage offering cheap electricity, oil also gets cheaper!
In fact, I'd argue that CTL is something only countries with extremely abundant domestic reserves of coal can do - China, South Africa and Australia. In fact, nearly every planned CTL plant has been delayed or scrapped in the US as infeasible.
But then you'd have now a gigantic capital outlay to convert your supply chain of chemical from using oil and gas to start using coal as a feedstock. Again, why?
Because solar energy is free, while oil and gas are scarce and expensive. This will make your oil-fueled products economically uncompetitive against Chinese products made with solar energy. Not this year, but two to five years from now.
I was under the impression that we were discussing crude as feedstock for chemicals versus coal.
I was not discussing what we would be using as the energy source.
Oil-based petrochemical chains are shorter, cleaner, and more energy-efficient. Coal-based chains substitute chemical routes via synthetic gas and methanol, with higher cost and more energy usage.
It makes sense for a country like China that is not rich in oil and has vast coal reserves, but not in the environmental sense, only in the strategical, geopolitical sense.
That's highly variable - a significantly large volume of coal mined globally is via bucket-wheel excavators / mobile strip mining machines.
That's overburden removal followed by near surface bed extraction with machines - no underground mining, underground being the mining domain that sees high injury and death rates.
Regardless, fuel from oil or fuel from coal is still fuel from dead and buried organics, from resurfaced long buried carbon products, and still introducing more CO2 into the atmosphere which is counter productive toward any goal of reducing the insulation factor of the atmosphere.
Long term if people would really like to do something with CO2 emissions then CO2 captured from atmosphere can be used for chemical processes instead of coal/oil.
Got a link to a Technical Economical Feasibility Report on this?
As in, what can practically be achieved in the real world at large within the next 25 years that can be immediately funded with a forward capital loan to break ground on a plant within 12 to 18 months and start operating within five years?
How does actual atmospheric carbon capture scale out within a useful time frame?
We've taken 150 years to emit all this carbon. Why do you think that a solution that takes more than 5 years isn't practical? I don't think the real world is actually where you're living.
> Why do you think that a solution that takes more than 5 years isn't practical?
A better question would be why do you think that is what I said or implied?
I'm well aware that in the future we will all be flying jet-ski's and teleporting to Mars, today I'm more interested in near and mid term policy, for one of many examples the recent CSIRO cost and benefits report on nuclear vs renewable strategies in Australia (what did that conclude, and will it swap policy decisions).
Given you've apparently taken the mantle of one who lives in the real world rather than the dull fantasy world I inhabit perhaps you could expand on the existing abilities and plans for carbon storage and fuel from air and contrast the achievable volumes within time frames that matter against the current and projected volumes of carbon emissions.
We're mostly all looking for a path forward in my neighborhood, a little less interested in wishful thinking about distant futures, so any pragmatic detail you can provide about next steps would be constructive.
> I don't think the real world is actually where you're living.
Cheap swipe kragen, I've previously thought you could do better.
less d3mand for oil, more demand for energy, much more to the point is the endless potential of abundent solar energy and the comming crisis caused by the end of scarcity
your grandkids will dealing meems of archiologists finding fossil fossil fuel cars
I wouldn't bet against your 50 year prediction but that's because there will always be more infrastructure to extract oil, even as the oil left to extract dwindles. My own prediction is that rates of oil extraction will continue to increase with minor fluctuations until about 2160 and then fail off a cliff.
Energy demand is unlimited, but oil isn't cheap anymore. Synfuel will eventually replace petroleum as PV gets cheaper, but also an engine to convert oil into electricity (or, almost equivalently, mechanical work) is too expensive to compete with PV when you have grid access.
Trumpism is clearly spreading… The reason China solar is booming is because of structural incentives. Solar is “dirt cheap” compared to oil/gas. That’s why Africa is importing records of it and breaking that record every next year. It’s not because it’s eco-friendly (people in Africa or Pakistan don’t know what that means), it’s because it’s more affordable.
In Tunisia, the pay-off time for a solar installation is around 4-5 years (granted we still have net-metering, so free storage). You are either ignorant or too poor to not install solar.
Exactly! Few people may care about climate or whether energy is clean, but I'd argue that for most people, the cost is more important. My friend in Shanghai owns a BYD EV. The electricity cost is equivalent to around 2 Liters of gasoline per 100 km. That’s more than 100 MPG. If he charges during the night hours when electricity costs only half, he gets 200 MPG!
"people in Africa or Pakistan don’t know what [eco-friendly] means".
My word. I can't speak for Pakistan, but the good folk in Africa know damned well the value of their environment.
For example the objections to Shell's planned seismic oil exploration of the coast of South Africa is vehemently opposed - on largely environmental reasons - by local residents. They have obtained an injunction and are now opposing it in their constitutional court.
No only do they understand ecology, they seem to have a firm grasp of law as well.
Why you would imagine that a billion people don't know that they depend on the environment is something for the mirror.
> but the good folk in Africa know damned well the value of their environment.
I guess I was just exaggerating for effect.
> For example the objections to Shell's planned seismic oil exploration of the coast of South Africa is vehemently opposed - on largely environmental reasons - by local residents. They have obtained an injunction and are now opposing it in their constitutional court.
Same thing in central Tunisia, though without courts; people just scared off the multi-nationals into leaving. Shale gas is very dangerous in populated areas and Tunisia has a quite a bit of it. But it's not really worth to extract expect for the people doing the extracting.
China is probably doing it for geo-political purposes (ie: if there is no oil, I can still move people with trains). They are ready to take a financial hit for that safety net. Europe is in a similar predicament but even the Russian war didn’t seem to teach them a lesson?
Trains also enjoy great economies of scale, so once you have high ridership and an extensive network, you aren't taking a financial hit anymore. For medium distances, like 300–3000km, trains also provide speeds that passengers can't get any other way, because they avoid the huge overhead of going through an airport. It's an investment, not an expense.
But China has also electrified a lot of its cars and trucks, and continues to do so rapidly.
However, electrical solutions are often more efficient, so this can be misleading because a transition means you're getting a large amount "for free" as a result of the improved efficiency.
Instead of moving your car from oil to solar, you're moving the car from oil to electricity, and then electricity is fungible so you don't care that it was made with a solar array - but the efficiency win was from going to electricity.
You have to distinguish between transportation (electricity and oil) and source of energy (only oil).
To have electricity you would need to invest at once in both generation, transport (the grids are not enough), storage and change in use (replace cars with electric ones). Your return will depend as well on the technology developed and none of the above fields is stable yet.
I am a fan of going electric, even if only for more sovereignty, but it is not as simple as "electricity is more efficient".
You have to be especially careful when comparing oil/gasoline vs solar/electric through. Oil has an especially well developed infrastructure for it being drilled, refined, delivered and stored. Electricity on the scale to power all transportation does not, so there are large short-term costs.
In terms of effeciency, you don't replace a billion BTU's of oil with the same amount of electricity, what you want is locomation. Only about 25% of oil's energy ends up spinning the wheels, compared to 85% of energy using an electric powertrain.
In rich countries the electrical grid only needs to roughly double to power all transportation. The US did that in the 01960s, and China did it in the 02010s and probably will have done it again this decade.
This is why I genuinely suggest PV cells mounted into the bodywork of EVs. They'll "only" add 10-20 miles per (good weather) day depending on the specifics, but this is a significant fraction of the (mean) miles driven per day per vehicle, which means the necessary grid upgrades are much smaller.
Almost all those cars still need to be charged, the weather won't always be good, people don't generally choose to leave their cars parked in direct sun if they can help it, etc. — but as a systematic reduction in impact over the entire power grid, it's non-trivial.
The grids is minimally impacted by EV’s. A great deal of charging happens at night when there’s vast excess capacity in generation and transmission. Even if you assume it’s split 24/7 each car only uses roughly 500 watts averaged throughout a year.
More importantly if 100% of new cars went electric it’d still take 25 years to finish so it’s a rounding error to grid operators outside of a trivial number of substations for fast chargers. As crazy as it sounds when you include training LLM’s are using more electricity than every EV combined.
> The grids is minimally impacted by EV’s. A great deal of charging happens at night when there’s vast excess capacity in generation and transmission.
In this context, solar power, charging at night is the exact opposite of a good idea; if anything, you want the power to leave the cars at night to run everything else.
Electricity is already beating oil for lots of low temperature applications (e.g. home heating and cooling) because heat pumps are so much more efficient than burning fuel.
That chart is misleading in the other direction, it’s comparing energy released by burning fossil fuels not useful work preformed.
A solar powered EV goes a lot further per unit energy working with electricity than per unit energy of gasoline. Heat pumps are vastly efficient using electricity than even the most efficient natural gas furnace. It’s actually more efficient to use natural gas to make electricity to then use a heat pump than it is to run natural gas to people’s homes.
.... and is that the maximum percentage of renewables 54% ? what is the minimum daily percentage? There should be a measure what is the maximum percentage over a month? to see how renewable system handles outages of renewables ( ie no solor or wind ? and storage is the sole supply? How long can storage supply the needed power is the next question ? The needed storage and transmission changes are hard and expensive.
Yes, because you can't just increase capacity with solar. It has to be backed up by base power. Add 10% solar? OK now you need 10% from natural gas, nuclear, oil, etc. You need to add both solar and something durable then you can just use the solar until you cant.
Look what happened in Portugal when it got cloudy.
This comment is always so strange to me - do you really, seriously believe that the people setting up the grids never thought about dunkelflaute? And I don't mean that in an attacking way, I'm genuinely curious about your thoughts there.
Like, yes, we're aware. At least in the german south we have the opposite problem right now. We are getting negative electricity prices (you get paid for taking some) more often because we have more electricity than we can use due to solar, at least during the day. Proper power storage is being built at this very moment all over the country.
Aside from dunkelflaute, the wind is statistically stronger when solar power generation is low, so at night and when it's super cloudy. And dunkelflaute is a couple days to weeks per year. (german perspective, don't know enough about the other countries' grids)
Regarding that problem in portugal, you misunderstood something there. The big 2025 power outage wasn't caused by clouds, it was an combination of localized blackouts and a sudden power _surge_ which caused a cascading failure which couldn't be stabilized by the conventional power plants even though on paper they had the capacity. How did you get the idea it had anything to do with "cloudy" weather?
RE "... dunkelflaute is a couple days to weeks per year..."
My guess is its VERY expensive to build the needed storage so the supply reliability matches the current reliability 99.99%? ? ( in my area there has never been any unintended power outages for several years ) Which is why its never been done?
Then again maybe people will be more tolerant of the situation. I've always though smart meters could always have a "mode" to reduce everyone's max demand to a small amount ...like a few hundred watts ...too help handle extended periods of dunkelflaute
Open cycle gas turbines are the perfect low CAPEX high OPEX backup. They are what we currently use to manage the once a year winter storm.
Force them to run on decarbonized fuels like ammonia, hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels (with decarbonized inputs) when even the backup needs to be decarbonized.
People setting up the grids answer to politicians. They do what they can within the constraints given by public policy. If public policy is completely idiotic, like the one in germany, there's no much they can do other than try to duct tape whatever they can.
Electricity demand is elastic, and electricity is dynamically priced. Plenty of industries are able and willing to reduce their consumption to avoid paying 100x more than usual, or even get paid to reduce their consumption.
A data center with backup generators can easily switch from grid power to generator power. If you're installing those generators for redundancy reasons anyway, why not make some extra bucks by signing a first-load-to-shed contract with the power company?
Yes, but not for the vast majority of industrial energy consumption, because of the outsized consumption of electric arc furnaces and a few other things like that.
Yes, that is certainly true of aluminum smelters, but precisely because they are so energy-intensive, their capital cost is a smaller contributor to the cost of their product than, say, a pharmaceuticals plant or a machine shop.
Steel EAFs cannot be run continuously, no matter how much capital efficiency you might hope to gain by doing so. It's inherently a batch process.
Continuous flow process plants like oil refineries are also very energy-intensive, but on the other extreme from things like an EAF, are very tricky to ramp up and down. But most of their energy usage is thermal at relatively moderate temperatures, which is much easier to store than the high-exergy energy needed for things like EAFs, aluminum pots, and data centers.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...