energy

Fascismo fissile

il vittimismo dei nucleari

il grande passato perduto e rimpianto

l’attesa della palingenesi, la prossima generazione, il reattore di IV generazione

lo stato deve fare qualcosa, ogni stato, anche se si adora il mercato lo stato deve investire perchè non si può aspettare il mercato

c’è una cospirazione contro il nucleare, la burocrazia rallenta e blocca i nuovi impianti, i nemici del nucleare diffondono fake news per fuorviare il pubblico, e allora c’è anche bisogno di un avvocato dell’atomo per denunciare il complotto dei verdi radical chic

perchè il nucleare è centralizzato, per pochi eletti e toglie la potenza elettrica alle masse. Bisogna fare prima del solare e dell’eolico, si deve arginare il socialismo energetico

è una tecnologia centralizzata, iniziatica, si deve studiare per entrare nella elite niucleare

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Carbon Budget

we can emit only 400 Gigatonnes more of CO2 to stay within 1,5 degree warming and you can check when we will run out of budget on this “clock” https://www.mcc-berlin.net/en/research/co2-budget.html

One plain climate justice definition could be “everyone gets a fair share of the budget” which Oxfam translates into: top 10% should reduce emissions by 95% to allow bottom 50% to treble their emissions, this is the current distribution of emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region.

The rigid budget also implies the longer we take to start reducing emissions the deepest cuts we will have to endure, check the “ski slope” diagram which really should prompt everybody into action now https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-15c

Desertec down under

while Desertec is going nowhere, 2 similar projects down under look to produce renewables in the desert aeras of the nortern territories and dispatfch it via HVDC to Indonesia and Singapore: Sun Cable and Pilbara’s Asia Renewable Enrgy Hub

Sun Cable is a cable from Darwin to SIngapore, it’s a ctually a s’pore startup planning to buil genertion and transmission and is alive and kicking, calim: the world’s larget solar infrastructure website https://suncable.sg/ story from Guardian in 2019

Pilbara hub is this one https://asianrehub.com/ described better here https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/asian-renewable-energy-hub-areh-pilbara/ 11 GW of which 3 to 6 will go voersears, building will start in 2023 with HVDC to Jackarta

But Pilbara is a mining regiion, iron ore and lots of renewable projects are geared toward decrbonising mines and even producing hydrogen and ammonia. Lots of announcements with HVDC links too

BTW Desertec isn’t really dead, Italy’s Terna will shortly start building a 0,5 MW interconnection to Tunisia

Will it end with a paperclip maximizer? Or a permafrost refrigerator

you know the thought experiment by Svedish philosopher Bostrom, teach an AGI to maximize paperclip production and it will fagocitate the world unless you teach him/her/it ethics, human “values” and not values

But then you discover that an oil compay want to refrigerate the ground in order to save the permafrost that thaws due to fossil emissions https://grist.org/energy/the-irony-conocophillips-plans-to-freeze-thawing-permafr

imagine how much permafrost in the norther hemisphere is foundation to roads, houses, plants, pipeline, lines. Here is a map from the good The Arctic by Dodds and Woodward

so here you have a perfect doomsday machine without having to resort to mithical AGI’s, perfect economic logic of nowadays oilmen and, executives and politicians. Pump more oil in order to keep pumping oil, pump some more to keep houses standing and roads open, fossil emissions will raise temperatures even further, ramp up oil production and keep going to 5 degrees warming, and pumop more to 10 degrees warming and then checkout what’s left of our civilization

The Permafrost Refrigerator is a thought experiment by a 1500 pound goat, not a swedish philospher, though it sounds more real than the paperclip maximizer

reading oct 14th

today IEA Global Energy Outlook 2021 I only read te executive summary and they are bullish green electrification and worried low investements, growth CO2 emissions, scenarios for 2.1 and 2.6 degrees warming in 2100

bullis, they got the accelerating adoption of EV cars and renewable propelled by low costs. New paradigm building? How far we are in Carlota Perez tech revolutions framework ?

Strateachery reads Carlota Perez https://stratechery.com/2021/the-death-and-birth-of-technological-revolutions/

New York State, EVs, renewables and the grid, ain’t smart won’t be enough https://www.washingtonpost.com/s/business/2021/10/13/electric-vehicles-grid-upgrade/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWJpZCI6IjM5MjQ4OTAyIiwicmVhc29uIjoiZ2lmdCIsIm5iZiI6MTYzNDE0NjQ2MiwiaXNzIjoic3Vic2NyaXB0aW9ucyIsImV4cCI6MTYzNTM1NjA2MiwiaWF0IjoxNjM0MTQ2NDYyLCJqdGkiOiI4NWEyY2VmYS00MjI4LTRkNTItOWFiYy02ZTI0MGI1YmMxMmMiLCJ1cmwiOiJodHRwczovL3d3dy53YXNoaW5ndG9ucG9zdC5jb20vYnVzaW5lc3MvMjAyMS8xMC8xMy9lbGVjdHJpYy12ZWhpY2xlcy1ncmlkLXVwZ3JhZGUvIn0.KpuLcTRIjF1ry7Rn8Vlc_0Y6hyezg9k1tHRBZzItp8Q&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nextdraft&fbclid=IwAR04zPt5ZvWep9HkeMaS5fPmgXjxM617KlSuQaXEO92UjYSTJCu3CNCbWnA

HVDC lines in China

feature article by IIIE Spectrum on China’s buildup of HVDC lines in the past decade, 18,000 km of lines, the longest over 2,000 km long China’s Ambitious Plan to Build the World’s Biggest Supergrid

Why is it so difficult to build new electric lines in the US? because you must ask permission to all sorts of agencies in every state. And if you want to build an oil pipiline? Just ask the The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC- So during Obama’s presidency only two of the seven lines (no HVDC) were built, meanwhile in 10 years over 100,000 miles of gas pipelines were laid

oh, it shows in the energy mix, renewables are growing but natural gas is the superstar

I am pretty sure we get the same situation in Europe, eruope-wide gas pipes network is probably better developed and more robust than electricity, I have to check, in the meanwhile here’s the gas pipelines. (form reasearchgate somewhere)

one is brought to believe that the oilman is a natural born cosmopolitam while the electricity man is a localist, jealously guarding its home turf. But hopefully this is going to change

China’s HVDC father dreamed of global electric grid, at some point HDVC links were parte of the China Road and Belt initiative ( I always tend to write Bridge and Tunnel, funny)

BTW I think all belongs to a presentation by Albert Pinto https://twitter.com/70sBachchan/status/1420479694877638664

Renewables, more like Internet than Oil&Gas

Renewable energy behaves more like Telecom/Internet than Oil&Gas, economics-wise, taking into account sourcing and transportation.

Oil&Gas is about exploration, find an oil field and your paramount problem is shipping the oil to the market, provided there is a market. Imagine the Dutch who just discovered an oil field in Sumatra in 1885, with no clear market nearby, how could they feel stranded.

So you fret finding buyers, then booking rail carts to the refinery, sold what is in demand and dump the rest into streams. At early times, you could sell kerosene for light and throw away the exploding part od oil. Over time internal combustion engines are developed and most of oil used. Gas used to be vented, but a market developed there too. Today all oil is used, unless there’s a glut then it stays aboard ships around the world, which is the cheapest stockage, as we learned in 2020.

Wind&Solar, you need not discover them, there are maps and no need to dig a hole in the ground. Rather you have to study government papers to find money buried in there for sustainable projects, but that’s another story.

The story is that the economics of solar and wind is now competitive and so it should be a case of “build it and we will fill it” and the best way to promote renewables in the world would be building power lines from most productive areas to markets, according to forecast consumption.

Sun and wind is there for us, To be clear, if Europe builds direct current power lines going into sahara states, should it expects those pipes to be filled wiht renewable electricity which has found a market ? Smart money would move to north afrcia and build capacity, like in the end some smart money thought it could profit from Sumatra oil and built refineries nearby.

So the global renewable energy build-up should look very much like the global broadband buildup at the turn of the century when most undersea cable would be laid (but demand took time to materailize and the bandwidth glut le to a few telecomm companies, while the slack was picked up by internet players like google etc, dark fiber).

So my question, why are we not building those power lines ? The technolgy is called High Voltage Direct Current Transmmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current, isn’t it ready from prime time ? Are we waiting to develop a business case for it ? Or we need first figure out how to fit it in our geopolitics ? China has already proposed those links as part of Belt and Roads so now you know. Still, if the econommics of renewable production are right, why don’t we create the market for the would be producer of the world ?

Let’s built it and they will fill it.

Le energie rinnovabili non sono come il settore Oil&Gas, somigliano piuttosto a Telecom/Internet, tutto dipende da dove si trovano.

Il petrolio lo trovi in giacimenti, quando hai il giacimento hai il problema di portarlo al compratore. Nei tempi eroici Rockfeller monopolizzò vagoni ferroviari e oleodotti in USA . Immaginatevi invece gli olandesi che nel 1885 trovano il petrolio a Sumatra e non c’è ancora un mercato in Asia, nemmeno una raffineria nè un compratore.

Invece oggi, negli anni pioneristici delle rinnovabili, tutti vogliono avere più rinnovabili e meno co2 nel proprio kix energetico, non se ne producono abbastanza, nonostante le sovvenzioni. Ma tutti dicono che ormai gli economics di solare ed olico sono giusti, sono i migliori, LCOE più basso e allora perchè non crescono più velocemente. Una modesta proposta, costruiamo una o più linee HVDC verso i paese del Sahara e vediamo se le riempono di elettricità rinnovabile

le linee HDVC sono linee a corrente continua ottimali per il trasporto su lunghe distanze oltre, gli 800 km. Se ne potrebbero stendere tante sul fondo dei mari come all’inizio del secolo, in pieno di boom internet, si stendevano migliaia di km di fibra ottica su cui far passare il traffico internet. Sulle prime, tropa fibra, molti fallimenti e fibra rimasta spenta. Ma col tempo, ce l’avete costruita e noi l’abbiamo riempita, Google et al. hanno comprato dark fiber per anni e non hanno più smesso

Possiamo ripetere l’impresa con le linee elettriche, facendo partire un boom di investimenti in rinnovabili nei paesi più dotati di sole e vento ?

post-scarcity energy scenario

“With our current battery technology of about 100 Wh/kg and $100/kWh, 30 TWh of battery storage for load-shifting would cost US$3 trillion. The global energy market turns over this much every year”

“those batteries would weigh 300 million tonnes and fill 15 million twenty-foot cargo containers. A decade-long installation program at 2020 prices would cost about 1.5 percent of global GDP”

“Generating 100 percent of our energy from solar panels would consume less than 0.5 percent of Earth’s land. Uninhabited deserts take up 33 percent of the Earth’s land. Agriculture uses 11 percent. Roads and roofs in urban areas are 1 percent”

“As of 2020, solar energy was so cheap—even excluding curtailment—that you could synthesize hydrocarbons from captured CO2 for about as much as it costs to drill and refine. Prometheus Fuels,”

“What else might we do with stupendously cheap electricity? Thermodynamically intensive devices such as heat pumps and electrochemical devices such as smelting aluminium or magnesium will recycle everything. By reverse-osmosis, they will desalinate enough water to refill rivers parched by global warming. They will power air conditioning, data center cooling, antimatter synthesis, and zero-impact mining using hard rock tunnel boring machines far beneath the surface”

Also, why is solar in so much steepr trajectory than nuclear ? Product cycles in solar con last as little as 6 months and the rate of learning gets exponential. Nuclear, on the other hand, in 75 years of it history is having trouble to roll-out its 3rd generation reactors

form here, I am happy to read something so optimistic, I have a few things to check by myself https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/long-live-the-sun

Net Zero EU

2 reports:

EU Commission https://ec.europa.eu/clima/sites/default/files/docs/pages/com_2018_733_analysis_in_support_en_0.pdf

and McKinsey https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/Sustainability/Our%20Insights/How%20the%20European%20Union%20could%20achieve%20net%20zero%20emissions%20at%20net%20zero%20cost/Net-zero-Europe-vF.pdf?shouldIndex=false

and Adam Tooze on Social Europe https://www.socialeurope.eu/europes-decarbonisation-challenge-wir-schaffen-das

from Tooze:

between now and 2050, almost half the necessary investment will not meet standard investment criteria

need to mobilise €4.9 trillion in subsidies over 30 years. That is the amount of profit taxpayers would need to offer investors to get them interested in the energy transition—€365 for every man, woman and child in the EU27, every year for 30 years.

Total GDP of the EU27 in 2019 was shy of €14 trillion. Overall investment runs to about 22 per cent of GDP. McKinsey suggests that, to achieve net zero by 2050, the EU needs to invest every year about 5.8 per cent of GDP in the energy transition

a carbon price of €100 per ton 80 per cent of the necessary investment could be justified on commercial grounds.

EU’s regular budget is capped at 1 per cent of GDP

NextGenerationEU programme is a step in the right direction, but the €32 billion per annum it allocates to climate spending over the next seven years is far too small

Both modelling exercises predict that a carbon-neutral economy by 2050 will offer more jobs than the fossil-fuel-addicted status quo

Europe’s neighbours in north Africa are obvious clean-energy partners.

As McKinsey remarks en passant, reaching net-zero may require 18 million workers to be reskilled by 2050 but this is small beer by comparison with the 100 million it expects to need retraining already by 2030, on account of what it euphemistically refers to as ‘automation’.