Wind and Solar Power Could Meet 80% of US Electricity Demand

DooKey

DooKey

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Apr 25, 2001
Messages
13,552
According to a study conducted by the University of California, Irvine; the California Institute of Technology; and the Carnegie Institution for Science, solar and wind power could reliably meet 80% of the elecricity demand in the US. Of course this comes with some caveats like the need for additional transmission lines or the construction of storage facilities. Furthermore, none of this comes cheap and the cost of renewable energy isn't trivial either. In my opinion it's just not feasible to do this now, but once costs come down I'm all for it. The study abstract is here.

The researchers said that such expansion of transmission or storage capabilities would mean very substantial – but not inconceivable – investments. They estimated that the cost of the new transmission lines required, for example, could be hundreds of billions of dollars. In comparison, storing that much electricity with today’s cheapest batteries would likely cost more than a trillion dollars, although prices are falling.
 
Sounds about right.'

Transmission is insanely expensive and has a really long permit time, especially if it's interstate.

Storage isn't cheap either.
 
Cheaper than relocating much of Miami, Houson, NYC, DC, Baltimore, LA, and more.

It can happen and it needs to happen. It's the 'mission to the moon' task of this generation. Of course investments cost money... you think the Interstate system was/is cheap?
 
This is a bit of a chicken/egg situation. Yes, this would be easier if we wait until the costs come down, but the costs won't come down as long as we keep waiting.

Besides, an analysis that only considers the financial costs is kinda missing the point: We're destroying our own environment, which is a short-sighted and profoundly stupid thing to do.
 
bugleyman said:
This is a bit of a chicken/egg situation. Yes, this would be easier if we wait until the costs come down, but the costs won't come down as long as we keep waiting.
Besides, an analysis that only considers the financial costs is kinda missing the point: We're destroying our own environment, which is a short-sighted and profoundly stupid thing to do.
Click to expand...

And mining the material to build massive batteries to store the power for use when it's not sunny or windy is also damaging to the environment.
Just as building and stringing massive power lines all over the place.
No need to rush to put these expensive solution into place, when better tech will be coming along before we could even deploy half these so called "green" solutions.


FYI: If you haven't looked outside in the past 20 years, the air quality has improved and over all pollution levels in the US have dropped significantly, even with increased energy usage.
 
Sure, if we cover the rest of the unoccupied land with solar and wind farms. That will be great for the environment :whistle:.

I don't know about you, but this looks pretty dystopian to me.
upload_2018-3-1_11-59-4.png
 
"University of California, Irvine; the California Institute of Technology; and the Carnegie Institution for Science (Washington DC)". I think I'd like to see reports from more neutral parties before even starting to debate this topic.
 
Wait, I can do this too...

This just in! I can solve the entirety of the world power transmission issues with this one simple trick! Superconductors.

I'll just gloss over the fact that the technology don't exist yetyet wh simultaneously telling everyone that they're bad people and should feel bad for using nonrenewable energy. And something something no spinning reserve something solar something something rolling blackouts in California.

Where do I publish?
 
Armenius said:
Sure, if we cover the rest of the unoccupied land with solar and wind farms. That will be great for the environment
Click to expand...

Well, covering it up will certainly excite the big-city urban planning types that want us all to live downtown in apartment towers.
 
Bird killer, insect killer -> Environmentalist will have these shutdown too. Maintenance maybe not so easy if you have hundreds of miles of circulating, noise making, tree trying to grow through them windmills. Wait just chop down the trees. Fusion man - that is the future.
 
noko said:
Bird killer, insect killer -> Environmentalist will have these shutdown too. Maintenance maybe not so easy if you have hundreds of miles of circulating, noise making, tree trying to grow through them windmills. Wait just chop down the trees. Fusion man - that is the future.
Click to expand...
Yes, but we have to get there first. I say more nuclear 5th generation reactors with fast reactors to solve the waste problem. That'll give us a few hundred years, then if we haven't solved the fusion problem we can switch to thorium reactors for another 10k years of electricity. If we're able to last that long fusion as well as other exotic energy sources should have been found and utilized.
 
B00nie said:
Wind and solar power is a complete hoax. They produce electricity when it's least needed and provide no power when it's most needed. It's so called 'disturbance electricity' forcing power companies to run backup power plants (on coal mostly).
Click to expand...

LOL. You should tell all the people living off grid that their solar power system is a hoax. I'm sure they'll be glad you gave them a heads up.

Meanwhile, the best way to improve battery technology -- which is how we address match generation and demand -- is to invest in it...
 
Montu said:
According to a study conducted by the University of California, Irvine; the California Institute of Technology; and the Carnegie Institution for Science, solar and wind power could reliably meet 80% of the elecricity demand in the US. Of course this comes with some caveats like the need for additional transmission lines or the construction of storage facilities. Furthermore, none of this comes cheap and the cost of renewable energy isn't trivial either. In my opinion it's just not feasible to do this now, but once costs come down I'm all for it. The study abstract is here.

The researchers said that such expansion of transmission or storage capabilities would mean very substantial – but not inconceivable – investments. They estimated that the cost of the new transmission lines required, for example, could be hundreds of billions of dollars. In comparison, storing that much electricity with today’s cheapest batteries would likely cost more than a trillion dollars, although prices are falling.
Click to expand...

For about 8 hours a day ;)
 
bugleyman said:
Hmmm...if only Earth were a globe.
Click to expand...

That requires global transmisison of power and internetworked grids. We have three seperate grids here in the US alone that are carefully balanced. Let alone trying to standardized between say the US and China. Do you really think its a good idea to give another country that level of control over our power grid?

TFA even says it would take "a continental-scale transmission network or facilities that could store 12 hours’ worth of the nation’s electricity demand" just to meet 80% and "meeting 100 percent of electricity demand with only solar and wind energy would require storing several weeks’ worth of electricity to compensate for the natural variability of these two resources, the researchers said."
 
Armenius said:
Sure, if we cover the rest of the unoccupied land with solar and wind farms. That will be great for the environment :whistle:.

I don't know about you, but this looks pretty dystopian to me.
View attachment 55993
Click to expand...

That many windmills would chop up lots of birds.

Maybe we could solve 2 problems at once.
Hire some of the homeless to collect the birds killed by the windmills, and others to cook them up to feed the rest.
 
Yeah - nukes. Supplemented by distributed rooftop solar and powerwall-type batteries to lessen the centralized need.

Screw wind. Ugly, takes up tons of space, even MORE variable than solar.
 
Simple solution: magnetize the moon, wrap superconducting cables around the earth, from pole to pole, energize them with some lightning, and you've just kickstarted the (rare) Earth generator. Have the anode on one pole and the cathode on the other. Bob's your uncle. Power for everyone, for everthing, forever.

Or until the drag pulls the moon down. That'll suck. But it'll be years away and we can solve that, then. Forward!
 
I doubt that centralized solar and wind farms are the future.

Once solar panel efficiency gets up over 40% and prices drop, nobody will have asphalt shingles on their roofs anymore, they will have solar "shingles". People will have battery storage to charge their cars at night and to supply their home's evening electrical demands. Industry will buy power off of the residential homes and the residential power grid will power businesses during the day. (Those businesses that don't have enough solar capacity on their buildings for all of their needs.) For industrial parks, there will still be natural gas demand generators to augment the residential solar supply.

It makes perfect sense. The infrastructure (power grid) is already in place.

The solar shingles will also have a benefit in that they will help pay for your house through the sale of excess electricity.

Just my $0.02.

BP
 
c3k said:
Simple solution: magnetize the moon, wrap superconducting cables around the earth, from pole to pole, energize them with some lightning, and you've just kickstarted the (rare) Earth generator. Have the anode on one pole and the cathode on the other. Bob's your uncle. Power for everyone, for everthing, forever.

Or until the drag pulls the moon down. That'll suck. But it'll be years away and we can solve that, then. Forward!
Click to expand...

Sure and while we are at it lets just launch all of the trash into the sun. No more garbage!
 
Such a grid would be very unreliable. Right now we
1_rick said:
Are you suggesting transferring electricity across the globe? The transmission losses alone would be staggering.
Click to expand...
Not only that, but even if we somehow solved that problem, every subgrid would not only have to produce enough power to support current demand, but also recharge storage devices and/or provide power to other subgrids that don't currently produce enough power. Essentially we would have to overbuild power generation by at least a factor of 4, but probably more like 8 or 10 in order to have a stable grid based mostly on wind and solar. That's a lot of solar and wind farms. Far more than this study envisions. And even then, providing stable frequency control across a world wide grid like this would be very, very difficult. Just very minor differences would cause cascading failures which would knock whole subrids off the main grid. Brownouts and outright blackouts would become commonplace. I don't think our energy intensive technological society would work in such a scenario.
 
nutzo said:
That many windmills would chop up lots of birds.

Maybe we could solve 2 problems at once.
Hire some of the homeless to collect the birds killed by the windmills, and others to cook them up to feed the rest.
Click to expand...
Height and max speed of the windmill matters alot into how many birds it's going to strike down. But that varies by area quite a bit. There also might be something to increase visibility but i don't remember anything looking into that seriously
 
Armenius said:
Sure, if we cover the rest of the unoccupied land with solar and wind farms. That will be great for the environment :whistle:.

I don't know about you, but this looks pretty dystopian to me.
View attachment 55993
Click to expand...
Oh yea, I would rather have this over those windmills any day. But can you do me a favor and have nuclear plants built near your home? That would great. No reason really.

nuclear-power-plant.jpg
 
Lockheed Martin is still on track with their Compact Fusion project.

Keep note at the 2:30 mark where they talk about this being drop in compatible with gas and subsequently coal furnaces and that they have already partnered with "one of those companies". Chinese owned State Grid is a massive backer of this project.
 
1_rick said:
Are you suggesting transferring electricity across the globe? The transmission losses alone would be staggering.
Click to expand...

I'm suggesting that you're being glib, and responding in kind.

As it happens, I appreciate that one cannot zip electricity across the globe cheaply or efficiently. But we can (and do) sell electricity across time zones, which alone would expand the window of usable energy beyond the aforementioned 8 hours. Though really, batteries are probably a more practical solution for the foreseeable future.

Fossil fuels are finite. That means transition to renewable energy isn't optional, and in my opinion, the sooner we get serious, the better.
 
Last edited:
kju1 said:
I am going to guess modern plants wont be quite like that...
Click to expand...
And I'm guessing wind power won't be sitting in the middle of a flat land, but instead far off a coast somewhere. Generally where wind is windier. Turns out water generates more wind than dry land.

FloatingWindTurbines.jpg.653x0_q80_crop-smart.jpg
 
PaulP said:
Such a grid would be very unreliable. Right now we

Not only that, but even if we somehow solved that problem, every subgrid would not only have to produce enough power to support current demand, but also recharge storage devices and/or provide power to other subgrids that don't currently produce enough power. Essentially we would have to overbuild power generation by at least a factor of 4, but probably more like 8 or 10 in order to have a stable grid based mostly on wind and solar. That's a lot of solar and wind farms. Far more than this study envisions. And even then, providing stable frequency control across a world wide grid like this would be very, very difficult. Just very minor differences would cause cascading failures which would knock whole subrids off the main grid. Brownouts and outright blackouts would become commonplace. I don't think our energy intensive technological society would work in such a scenario.
Click to expand...

Yeah, then our society needs to change. Better to do so on our terms...while we still can.
 
Last edited:
DukenukemX said:
And I'm guessing wind power won't be sitting in the middle of a flat land, but instead far off a coast somewhere. Generally where wind is windier. Turns out water generates more wind than dry land.

FloatingWindTurbines.jpg.653x0_q80_crop-smart.jpg
Click to expand...
Looks like a seagull chopping yard! Talk about a blight on otherwise quiet body of water
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top