In a new report, the International Energy Agency predicts that renewable electricity will grow considerably by 2030 but won't hit its goal of tripling worldwide. Among large users, only China and India are forecast to triple:
Virtually all of this growth is in solar, with about a quarter in wind. Everything else is a rounding error.
POSTSCRIPT: It's worth noting that the IEA is notoriously conservative in its forecasts, revising them upward nearly every year. So there's actually a pretty good chance that their projections are wrong and renewable electricity will meet its 3x growth goal.
You know, you have to take all statistics from China with a bushel of salt.
Just because China says they've installed X-amount of solar energy power does not mean they're using X-amount of solar energy that was installed. And the places they're installing massive solar farms means they have to build thousands of miles of transmission lines and that means huge transmission losses of energy across that distance.
Think about why there are potentially millions of empty residential units in China in ghost cities and why tens of thousands of newly build electric bicycles and vehicles are sitting in graveyards. China incentivizes building (and lying) without regard to actual demand.
And lest anyone forget, China's own government says it'll still be adding coal power plants until 2035.
If you're relying mostly on what China claims it'll build, you might be in for a horrible surprise in 2030 about the mismatch in production and use.
That seems like you're just salty.
The coal total consumed and emissions are easily seen and shown to already have peaked.
Easily seen with data from whom? From OCO-2 and OCO-3, great.
China's coal consumption has not peaked. Sinopec estimates it will peak in 2024 or 2025. Of course they predicted 2022 back in the day, so take it all with a grain of salt until it does.
World coal consumption probably has, but that is because US, UK, etc are taking coal plants offline at a faster rate than China is bringing them online.
I'm not salty.
This is a country that recently left hundreds of space debris in LEO because of a malfunctioned rocket stage. In 2007 they conducted an anti-satellite missile test that left thousands of space debris.
Local jurisdictions install fake plants and spray hillsides with green paint to mimic natural landscapes. They install solar- and wind-powered lights that actually only draw from the grid.
Recall the time when milk was deliberately contaminated with melamine to raise the testing level of protein, resulting in hundreds of thousands of children in China getting sick and 6 dying. More recently, the discovery of a widespread practice of truck drivers using the same storage tanks to transport fuel as they did with cooking oil.
This from a country that places Uighurs into "re-education camps" and claims they're not being used for slave labor despite the constant leak of evidence. US has banned solar panels made with certain components from China specifically because of this.
A country that hid its SARS-CoV-2 infections and deaths for months even while Taiwan had detected a surge of influenza-like infections. That allowed the experimentation of highly infectious diseases to be conducted in BSL-2 labs. That said it had regulated wildlife trade at wet markets.
I'm skeptical of everything China says and does.
In addition to the Chinese scandals involving melamine laced milk and pet food, there is also the use of ethylene glycol in milk, medicine and baby formula. Ethylene glycol (antifreeze) is sweet and cheaper than sugar, but also toxic.
I'm skeptical of everything China says and does.
China is a country of 1.4 billion souls. It doesn't "say" or "do" anything. Rather, individual actors in China (consumers, firms, the government, the party) say and do things. This isn't mere pedantry on my part: people are awfully fond of painting with very broad brushstrokes these days but a little bit of specificity is helpful when pointing out what you believe to be lies.
If you're relying mostly on what China claims it'll build, you might be in for a horrible surprise
While I wholeheartedly agree skepticism is warranted wrt statistical information coming out of the PRC, it's clear to me this dynamic is now frequently used as a crutch in Pavlovian fashion to cast aspersions on any and all data that might be inconvenient (mustn't say anything nice about EastAsia!). And it seems unlikely the green energies rely on PRC self-reporting. The green energy skepticism strikes me as a classic example. That is, China is simply too big in terms of its economy and that economy's integration into the global economy to engage in the degree of obfuscation alleged. Transmission lines can be viewed from space. And large Western engineering firms (Siemens, Edvance, GE etc) are involved in building out China's energy grid. It seems likely a great deal of corroborating evidence exists that would at minimum limit the degree of gaslighting the CCP could engage in on this topic. There's also the pollution factor: that, too, is readily measurable even inside China (the US Embassy, famously, publishes a widely cited AQI measurement daily). This gives us insight into the quantity of coal being used.
Or more to the point, Crissa:
Carbon Brief wrote last month, "The country’s 2022 national energy plan projects a 3.2GW rise in coal power capacity from 2025 to 2035.
Not a mere maybe.
We know from wind side that there are such connexion issues - overbuilds in W. China without proper long-distance connexion (particular site case that they can't hide).
So while on one hand they are building a lot, but on the other hand actual power dispatch is indeed an already documentable Potemkin Village issue in cases and what one can document, with China one has to reasonably suspect is 10x more in reality.
I guess this is good news. My understanding is that demand for electricity (data centers, bitcoin mining, plug-in electric cars, etc) is increasing faster than renewable is coming on line so non-renewable electricity production (coal and CH4) is still increasing. It would be smart to try and actually use less electricity. Toyota resisted fully electric cars for years because they'd run the numbers and found that hybrid-electric makes more sense.
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/price-wrong-brett-christophers/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFzqhBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHVLOjv4FUvsc2ND7H9eIfqdXoTTm9665itQ_mMwVtWuIppwvRWyZ0IYhDA_aem_9qaaithkv-54MsU-m0j_9w
Ironically, natural gas is usually liquified for transport over any real difference, and the carbon footprint for LNG is worse than coal.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/lng-climate-change?fbclid=IwY2xjawFzqsJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHa7cVqQBspCPMzvZ2TOgGZs78kbNemtInq7AojipExVX_BgSN_whLIT2IA_aem_lI6MKgJglOGfFLWpwloyFA
Leakage is bad, but methane expires more quickly from the atmosphere than carbon dioxide... which means if you put over time, it's not worse.
"Leakage is bad, but methane expires more quickly from the atmosphere than carbon dioxide... "
Methane degrades into carbon dioxide, so, yeah, over (long periods of) time it's not worse. But in the first 20-100 years, it's many, many times more powerful at heat trapping than CO2 is. And the next 20-100 years is where most of us plan on living our lives . . .
um. wut?
While individual methane molecules may break down faster, ongoing methane emissions maintain high atmospheric levels.
And the immediate warming effect is far more intense. And an early, sharp impact on warming is not remotely helpful because it accelerates feedback loops.
You should see the amount of leakage coming from China's coal mining operations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/01/china-methane-coal-mines-climate/
The carbon footprint for coal is the least of its problems. It is amazing if true that CH4 could contribute more to CO2 than something like C137H97O9NS for bituminous coal and C240H90O4NS for high-grade anthracite, but it's the sulfur and nitrogen compounds that make coal so much worse that LNG.
Did you read the paper? Comparing locally produced coal to long or short cruise LNG is the hallmark of an academic with an agenda. Countries that import LNG don't have local coal to use.
As many have pointed out, it is well known that methane is a far more effective greenhouse gas than CO2. Methane leakage from wells and transport to terminals in gas pipelines immediately releases methane into the atmosphere, enough to matter.
What's more, many seem to be missing the "L" in LNG. You need high pressure and you need industrial strength refrigeration to liquify natural gas, which makes it easier to transport. In effect, 7-15% of the methane is burned (releasing CO2) at the terminal simply to liquify the 85-93% that remains.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/liquefied-natural-gas.php
What's more, the LNG needs to remain very cold in transit or the pressure will increase to the point where the containment fails. Keeping the LNG cold also requires consuming energy.
More methane leaks into the atmosphere between the destination terminal and the end user. And, of course, at the end point where the methane is actually used to produce heat or run a heat engine, well, the reaction product is a CO2 molecule for every methane molecule.
The preceding is meant to point out that you have to consider more than just the end user. Yeah, sure, heating your home (for those of us who live in such a place) with a (not liquified) natural gas furnace produces less CO2 than a diesel-fired burner, and certainly less CO2 than a coal-fired burner. The problem the last 20 years is that the natural gas industry has been emphasizing the end user and ignoring the carbon footprint required to deliver that low-pressure natural gas to your house or to the local power plant.
This is a similar situation to corn ethanol fuel for automobiles. Sure, the ethanol burns pretty cleanly. What they don't tell you is that you have to boil a hell of a lot of water to produce that ethanol, which is why so much Iowa corn is shipped to the Canadian border to take advantage of the relatively cheap natural gas there. And they burn a lotta natural gas to make that ethanol.
Less than a billion gallons of fuel ethanol a year is made in Canada. Iowa makes over 4.5 billion gallons a year.
Less than half of the water gets boiled in the distillation process. Ethanol is the low boiler, although it forms an azeotrope with the water.
"What's more, the LNG needs to remain very cold in transit or the pressure will increase to the point where the containment fails. Keeping the LNG cold also requires consuming energy."
That isn't how it works. Some of the gas evaporates and is used for the ship's engines.
Some of the newer ships do that. Most of the original LNG transports ships don't.
Some?
"Boil-off is the evaporative loss of methane due to some heat leakage through insulation and into the tanks that hold LNG. The only common tankers that cannot use boil-off methane for their fuel are slow-speed diesel vessels that instead capture and reliquefy their boil-off. These make up approximately 7% of the global fleet, although no new ones have been delivered since 2015..."
Nah, that's not it at all. Akio Toyoda let the cat out of the bag when he openly spoke a decade ago about how he detested driving a BEV because of its lack of excitement that could only come from racing with an ICE.
While Trump was president, Toyota signed onto his attempt to roll back California's zero emissions mandate and lobbied the PM and the Kokkai against zero-emissions mandates under the argument that it was necessary to save Japan's domestic auto manufacturing industry. That, even while Toyota is actually pursuing HFCs.
Anything Toyota says is propaganda in service to its self-interests of being the leader in hybrid vehicles.
Will storage also ( more than ) almost triple by then?
Given the minimal level storage is at right now, I suspect the anwer is yes.
Storage is going to have to do a lot more than triple if you want grid equivalency. And storage/distribution is looking to be where the real costs lie.
Fortunately, it is increasing much faster than tripling. US utility scale battery storage is up to 20.7 GW as of this summer, representing a roughly 10x increase in installed capacity in the past 4 years.
20-odd GW for how many hours before depletion? Still, that growth /size is, unfortunately, in the “dot com” startup range, given that total YS generating capacity is something like 1.3 TW.
I kan tipe… reely…
Yeah, but you don't need storage equal to the entire generating capacity of the US. Even if you ditched the carbon-emitting generators, a lot of what remains is not really intermittant at all (hydro, nukes, biomass, and geothermal collectively account for about a quarter of US electricity generation), and even a lot of intermittant stuff is largely co-incident with peak demand; hydro systems could probably be far better operated to complement that intermittancy than they are now, too.
So, yes, we need a lot more storage. But we don't need to install backup for all generation. And storage installation is happening very rapidly. Half of all US utility-scale battery storage was installed in the past ~18 months.
The story here is pretty good, although it needs to be better!
In principle, hydro systems can be used to fill the function of very large scale storage facilities. The total energy that can be generated by a hydro system can be computed very simply. It's total water flow into the reservoir multiplied by the height of the dam (multiplied, of course, by a constant appropriate to the units you're using). That energy can be taken out at a constant rate. On the other hand, if the dam is equipped with generators that can generate peak power higher than the sustainable power, the dam can then be used as a "peaker"; cut back the amount of hydro power generated when the less reliable sources are producing lots of power and increase the amount of hydro power to fill in the gaps when the sun has set and the wind has died down. It should also be possible to "double up" by putting floating solar cell farms on the reservoir; that reduces evaporative losses and gives immediate access to the dam's transmission infrastructure to move large amounts of power.
As far as I know nothing like this has been done yet, but it seems so obvious that I presume it will be done.
Um. Let's do some arithmetic. Raising 1 kg (or equivalently, 1 L) of water 100 m stores one kilojoule. So to store 1 kWh of energy, you need to raise 3,600 kg (or 3,600 L or 3.6 m^3) of water 100 m. Gravity is weak. I'll leave the rest of the exercise to you, but believe me, the idea has been considered. And abandoned as impractical.
Major hydro dams have reservoirs that hold hundreds of cubic kilometers of water behind them. They store A LOT of energy, enough energy that the reservoirs are typically filled with the spring freshet and then can generate thousands of megawatts throughout the rest of the year by releasing far more water than flows in.
I refer, of course, to hydro dams and reservoirs in regions that see large winter snow packs. In warmer areas, the details are different but the result remains the same; reservoirs store literally months worth of energy.
Oh, certainly they do. And they take advantage of the existing topography, which is just about all tapped out at this point. Your scheme requires that artificial topographies be created. Do the math.
I did not suggest building new dams or creating new reservoirs. I'm suggesting that the existing hydro plants be switched from base load to peak load. This would require addition of more generators to existing power plants, generators that could conveniently and quickly be brought on line or taken off line as demand dictates.
This wouldn't solve the storage problem. Which you explicitly mentioned. Also, that power has already been reserved.
Since you said GW and not GWh, I'm guessing that this is just the standard four hours, i.e., less than 83 GWh. So no, this really translates into something rather less than 3x the increase. Modulo where you live and time of year, of course.
I'm just going by the energy information agency:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63025#
It's entirely possible that these are, on average, 4-hour batteries, yes. The point isn't that they are at this or that level of energy storage, just that the installation rate is phenomenal. This market basically did not exist as recently as 4-5 years ago, and is experiencing astonishing growth.
Maybe that will level off, but I doubt it. Battery tech doesn't require any over-the-horizon sort of engineering development, and utility batteries can be even simpler and made from more common materials than EV batteries, so we can expect costs to fall as the industry scales.
As a qualitative statement that's true as far as it goes. But if you run the numbers, you'll boggle at the amount of storage needed; comes to around 1,000 TWh. And of course, don't forget to budget for power lines, transmission towers, etc. as well as negotiating right-of-way permitting. Oh, and did I mention that you'll need those thousand TWh of storage maybe once or twice a year? That's a ceiling; you might need it only once every two or three years. This isn't a simple scaling up of some user's solar-and-battery installation in Southern California.
Having to design to the tail rather than the average is a bitch isn’t it.
Indeed. But Americans will insist on their creature comforts. I should know, I'm one of them. Growing up with no electricity and no running water was _not_ fun.
There is probably 10 times that storage capacity in the US right now in the form of batteries in EVs.
yes, most of those can not be used for grid services. Today. But if they are not being used as such in 2030, we have missed huge opportunity
And those (many) which cannot be used today also will not be used in 2030. What might, might, be different would be new-build EVs and their batteries.
There are good opportunities for vehicle-to-grid with larger EVs (electric schoolbuses, for example). And many current EV batteries can and will--after their owners buy new cars or decide that an 80% charge retention isn't good enough for a mobile use--be bundled together and used as utility scale storage.
Sooo ..... You're going to charge up your BEV overnight _and_ use it as a storage device? Something's a little off, can't quite put my finger on it ...
Long-distance Transmission and upgrade distribution.
Then storage
Grid capacity overall for load balancing as well as frequency services that are not mechanically provided by wind or solar, and is an added.
All this is significant constraint and needs much more attention than only installation.
Utility scale storage pricing as well can only really advance on movement beyond the lithium battery
With now finding four ways of installing solar that has a positive impact upon agricultural land use, I don't see the limit.
Turns out if you use solar panels above shade hoops you grow more berries and tender vegetables. On top of that, you reduce storm damage as panels are hail resistant and shade netting is not.
If panels are on 4' tall frames, grazing isn't reduced; the grass grows just as strongly.
If the panels are held vertically in rows, it has no impact upon row cropping and has an inverted curve for the duck curve. More at evenings
And lastly, just leaving the panels on the ground with no paving increases bee health and numbers while reducing pest insect growth because diversity increases. Not to mention doesn't impact water infiltration!
And likely precious little the rest of the day.
In fact indeed - the trade offs are still being explored and piloted, and what was just asserted is superficial Lefty green clickbait journalist rendering of a still unclear set parameters as specific crops have trade-offs (berry varities, available insolation / shade) - by specfici climate zones (and latitude).
The specific needs, trade off and specific needs on crops (and how one can achieve both good crop RoI and Energy RoI is in relatively early stage of being worked through).
The AgriVoltaics potential is a real one and merits signficant
The potential on elevated panels with intercropping is significantly interesting and in my non-USA professional financing we are looking at early stage agrivoltaics systems but the reality is that the engineering - agronomics balance here is still in process of being clarified.
On other hand Floating Voltaics is much clearer - co-location on artificial bodies as like resoveroirs has really intteresting potenital particulalry in my Med context (and California for you, I asuppose Western states broadly).
Like our reservoirs are going to still have water in them… 🙂
They will - your West is not turning into the Sahara. (altough oddly the Sahara may be turning towards your west with signs of a long term shift, but that is speculative)
This is far too simplistic and frankly superficial LEfty Greeny hope publication in the Lefty Green circles over-extrapolating from actual real state.
Agrivoltaics have substantial potential however it is not simple and there is significant research to achieve specific crop balance.
What you wrote is hope, it is not yet proper engineering and scale deployment.
This will be a path but the "turns out" is journalistic superficialiam.
Kevin, when you say "It's worth noting that the IEA is notoriously conservative in its forecasts, revising them upward nearly every year." you are seriously understating the inaccuracy of their predictions.
They are not "notoriously conservative", they are "notoriously wildly wrong". They consistently pretend that the growth of solar will be linear rather than exponential. Their predictions have no credibility whatsoever.
Yah, everybody in the industry has noticed that whatever the IEA predicts about solar, you need to double it to get in the ballpark of reality. And that may be true of grid-scale battery storage as well.
Given the “Baghdad” battery’s age and that the Prius has been out for 20+ years, we’ve been at battery technology a long time and seem to have little to show for it. Other than hybrids, batts for EVs are too expensive for the middle class car buyer who needs to go more than a couple hundred miles, then wait 30 minutes to recharge. Ditto for batts to power his home.
I’m not a QAnon fan, but I wonder about the huge financial incentive for Big Oil/natural gas to pay Big Battery “not to try too hard”. just sayin
No, batteries are genuinely hard, by which I mean batteries that have to withstand road shocks, extremes of heat and cold, etc. But the fundamental advantage of gasoline (which truly is a science-fictional fuel) is that it doesn't have to cart around it's own oxidizer. It gets it free, from the air, with no preprocessing required at all.
Conspiracy mongering nonsense the idea "big oil" is paying to hold back batteries - or more precisely Batteries for Transport / e-mobility as it is a completely separate subject from fixed storage.
E-mobility needs signifcant energy density per mass and good on mother-nature (aka fundamental physics), liquid hydrocarbons are very high energy to mass ratio.
Batteries have to seek resolution on
1) energy-mass density (so as not to be absurdly heavy to render transportation function impracticable)
2) chemistry stability to meet the goals - which are in fundamental physical tension with each other - of long-life and quick discharge and recharge
3) stability to not explode and burn at unfortunate moments from usage sttress including movement and temperature cycling.
4) do the above with a storage size to meet needs of large objects (i.e. cars, trucks)
This is very hard to do. And at certain sizes may be impossible to do via battery rather than liquid fuel.
Vast amounts are being investested in battery technologies and exploration of new chemistries, but such is very challenging - first to ID and then the issue of scaling
Internet bros tend to vastly underestimate how much time actual physical industry and physical infra needs.
So no possibility of a $4 trillion oil industry buying up patents of promising battery research.
Just conspiracy mongering. Right.
The naive analysis based on Solar's growth for last 20 years is that it grows by ~20-25% per year. Tripling within 6 years is easily within that growth rate.