Great article guys. You presented a lot of great points. I have little doubt that full or nearly full electrification of the economy is likely.
I have a concern that represents a different perspective that's interwoven into what you've presented. You mention "In short: electrotech economics is manufacturing economics. The more you build, the cheaper it gets."
Creating renewable energy systems and energy independence for wealthy countries and lower-cost access to energy for poorer ones is a noble goal. But as we humans increase in population and increase our consumption of material and energy-intensive goods per capita, coupled with the decreasing price of renewable energy and electrotech, doesn't that incentivize more and more use of energy and materials?
In other words, does the cheapness of electrotech incentivize its waste, requiring more and more land and materials to fulfill ever-increasing demand?
Understandably, there is no correct answer to this, but I would love to hear your thoughts as we grapple with ecological degradation in several forms.
A valid essay on Renewables but we don't see anything on what the energy source is used to manufacture the solar panels, wind mill towers and blades, electric wire, battery storage steel cabinets etc; in the first instance. Is it a base load fossil fuel power source or solar andcwind power.
Why is there no commentary on the original power source?
There's little commentary on this matter because (a) it's a statement of the bleeding obvious and (b) it's a silly distraction.
Obviously anything that is manufactured must use the energy systems in place AT THE TIME. In the absence of extraterrestrial assistance it has to be this way.
But solar and wind have very good energy payback periods and energy returns on investment, so even the first few that were manufactured entirely from dirty energy have soon paid this back and begun to provide clean energy.
The cleanness of energy improves - funnily enough exactly in line with the rising curve of clean energy production, so that each new unit was made with slightly cleaner energy than the last one.
There is no other possible way to transform an energy system. And it's working very well.
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to explain something so obvious - and I'm suspicious that you're simply trolling with a very tired and disproven "argument" - but I hat people to get the idea that questions like yours are not answered because they're too difficult to answer, rather than too obvious to bother.
A top-notch explication of a top-level issue, which is how worried should we been about the barriers to the renewable energy transition and how we best think about this transition, so bravo! Your “electrotech” perspective is spot-on. I’ve just posted about “Rewiring the energy debate,” complete with link back to your Substack, while hopefully offering my readers what could be described as a sort of “Cliff Notes” version. You can review—and grade!—the effort here: https://davidguenette.com/the-electrotech-manifesto/
In my climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet, the economic argument about the renewable energy transition is a core theme and especially in terms of the early costs of the transition in competition with entrenched fossil fuel interests. While renewable energy makes huge economic sense, too few consider the changeover period’s cost contribution to the household economy, and with your excellent definition of key benefits, one can now more confidently describe the promised land of efficiency and electrification and, yes, carbon emission reduction.
But what happens with existing fossil fuel generation infrastructure isn’t often enough discussed, and whether the fossil fuel sector's arguments of sunk investment and amortization will counter the lower energy costs of electrotech, and for how long. The battle may be best joined at new natural gas generation buildouts that seem to excite the fossil fuel folks to no end, despite the clear economic benefits of electrotech. Any and all new natural gas generation infrastructure extends the argument that there’s less need for electrotech because, well, here’s some new natural gas generators already in place and with a lifetime measured in decades. The biggest play the fossil fuel sector can make is to say, “Hey, we have this stuff in place already, so it’s cheaper to use these already built facilities than build new energy generation using electrotech.” Unfortunately, there are plenty of natural gas facility construction projects underway to do just that. Fortunately, today’s capacity to build out huge numbers of natural gas generators appears constricted.
For me, the single best counter to today’s efforts to build out more fossil fuel infrastructure is to reveal the true costs of fossil fuel use in terms of their externalities of pollution and climate change. These costs amount to somewhere near $700 billion in the U.S., each year, according to the International Monetary Fund assessments (although your mileage may vary). At least in this way, the climate change argument may prove essential to overcome fossil fuel’s entrenched interests and impressive funding and political power. Electrotech power supply is even cheaper, if the hidden costs of fossil fuels get added in.
So, please look at this issue and write another excellent Substack addressing this. I’d love to write another Cliff Notes version for that!
A lot to agree with, but the characterization of "net zero puritanism" is missing the mark. You write "It also tends to downplay progress in new energy because it falls short of the ideal, immediate change needed." But the majority of those who argue that the pace of the transition is still too slow relative to what would be needed, and that effective policies are needed to accelerate it, are actually rooting for and celebrating - not downplaying - progress in new energy. I suppose what you may want to refer to instead is excessive technology pessimism ("degrowth realism"), which misunderstands the electrotech revolution as an extractive/harmful/futile affirmation of an infinite growth dogma. Tragically, this group is absolutely convinced that a controlled economic contraction is the "only way" and that the energy transition represents an obstacle rather than a solution.
We could, of course have (and may well need) both.
They're not mutually exclusive - we absolutely must have an energy transition but it would also be smart to move towards more steady state economies.
The danger is that, otherwise, we're still on an unsustainable treadmill: fossil fuel-based energy generation may be the single largest source of GHGs and environmental damage, but it's by no means the only one!
Sorry Christopher, but I simply can't understand your first paragraph. Either way, I would have thought that comparative cost and emissions intensity would be key criteria in selecting generation types. Maybe more importantly, it needs to be situational: each country, indeed each region, has different needs and different circumstances (isolation, winds, land availability, etc.) so any system needs to be intelligently and quite specifically tailored. Therefore the full range of feasible technologies should be on the table. But it's still the case that wind and solar represent excellent options in terms of emissions, cost and flexibility.
Re the SMRs, there was an interesting article recently on Substack (sorry, can't reference it, but you may well have seen it) arguing that you really only get the famous learning curve if you are mass producing at a far larger scale than will ever happen with SMRs. It would seem that, even if smaller and more, they still remain relatively "boutique" products from a construction perspective. They might be able to be substantially prefabricated in factories and transported to site, but the assembly, integration, testing, etc. would still be complex. It's also been argued that history shows that reactors went big to achieve vital economies of scale, so SMRs would tend to reverse that, with obvious negative consequences.
So, while I wouldn't oppose SMRs there are still huge challenges to make them economically viable.
With fusion, I thought there was still significant investment and activity at ITER. And I must admit to being cautious about investing vast sums into something that will almost certainly not be viable for several decades, if ever. These are the critical years to build an energy system that will allow us to maintain something like a modern civilisation without frying ourselves. While we shouldn't ignore the longer term future, surely the focus of our efforts has to be on the urgent immediate issue?
Why do you people always have massive government regulations attached to your thesis on what’s best for society? Last I checked you’re free to do whatever you want so why not just do it already?
Why do you need the rest of us to give up everything we’ve created and expect us to change our entire lives in order to make your ideas come true?
Why are you so hell bent on throwing us from our land, stealing our minerals, destroying our environment, and sending us into fourth world decadence?
And why are y’all always intruding, destroying and stealing what we’ve built when we NEVER come to your area and shit on it?
Why do you only know how to destroy and never manage to build anything of your own?
Your ideas will lead us all to hell on earth. Some part of you understands this otherwise you wouldn’t waste your time calling for government intervention on whatever it is you find so horrid about the lifestyles of your countrymen.
Very good article and I loved the detail on S curves and your definition of ‘strategic’ vs ‘plan’!
However I think there is a misconception around the importance of ‘efficiency’ if it relates to ‘energy efficiency’.
‘Efficiency’ is not an end in itself- it is just shorthand to explain that it is worthwhile to use the least energy in a process to get the desired outcome. This used to be generally correct when input ( fossil fuel) was expensive. But now in situation where variable cost of KWh approaches zero so saving input fuel is no longer as important.
What is now important is the impact of energy usage on fixed costs ie cost of impact on network infrastructure and cost of resources used by the technology.
This may radically change long term investment decisions eg still very economic to insulate a house but no longer worthwhile to invest in a heat pump as capital cost of heat pump system is very high when the cost of energy saved is very low in future.
Much better snd faster to use direct electric heating and thermal storage in an insulated house , and much faster and cheaper to achieve.
Sure, but if you use more energy you still have to build more generating machinery - even if it's clean renewables, effectively with infinite free fuel, you still have to sink resources into building them.
So, while it is less compelling financially, it still has real value in broader environmental terms.
Either way, I'd still want to do energy return on investment - and maybe more importantly carbon return on investment - comparisons for any technology or system. And cheap, clean energy would impact the numbers going into such a calculation.
In traditional energy systems with little rebewables this would indeed have been the case, but going forward to 'Net Zero' the economies of scale and with very low marginal costs of energy and carbon, this no longer no longer holds.
So with Renewables having no carbon associated with the energy produced, and with the marginal cost of renewable energy being close to zero, the only costs that apply are for those in producing the physical assets used in the system and any embedded carbon associated with the producion of the Renewable generation and the Transmission and Distribution network associated.
Lack of energy efficiency results in extra losses at peak which add to the System Peak and this requires that the generation and Network must be able to cope with this marginally larger system peak. However there are massive economies of scale when dveloping or reinforcing existsing networks or adding to Renewable Generation so that a large increase in system capacity has very low extra costswhen taken in proportion to the amount of extra fixed asses required to add efficiency to plant using electricity at a lower level. Additionally, in any case. as both generation and networks need to be uprated substantially to cope with additional EV and Electrification of Heat, it will not be possible to avoid large changes to existing Power system, and in this context making such systems larger for the additional load imposed by extra losses from inefficiency willl be insignificant. Additionally, to cope with long periods of no sun and no wind ('dunkelflaute') there will be a need of massive amounts of standby generation as no amount of additional batteries/interconnection or load shifting will be capable of dealing with such low load periods ( i.e. massive eamounmts of extra generation will be available for extra load losses regardelss). These periods do not occur very often and even then not for long .g. > 1 week, but when they occur EU would not be able to cope using renewables e.g. possibly could store surplus H2 and then use this to generate. In Faeroe islands they wanted to go 100% renewable and couled economically do up to 95% using Wind and solar, but for the last 5% (only needed occasionally) they would have to install the same amount of plant as had been required for the first 95%, which would be physicqlly difficult to achieve (inadequate amounts of land) and economicallly unaffordable, so they used traditonal generation for the last 5% of peak.
A lot of these issues were examoned over teh last 10 yeasr by teh EU in thrir EcoDesig n Directive when considering teh economics and technical feasibility of making electrical Transformers more efficient, wand where it was found that no further improvements coudl be justified. In fact to facilitate connection of more EV, some utilities were however making transformers which coudl be loaded more heavily to as to facilitate the connection of more EV which had a much better environmental impact.
A more radical issue that has since emerged is that overloading existing network (which reduces efficiency and increases losses) has a very positive environmental impact in that it avoids the alternative of throttling back teh output of windfarms and solar. - obviously this can only work for a period as the increases in laod and generation by a factor of 2-4 will require rebuiliding the networks and operation at higher voltages, but in teh interim scuh an approach woudl offload more renewables.
I don't think you need to, or should, try to improve energy efficiency by replacing all existing technology immediately. That would obviously be counter-productive economically and in terms of "embodied" energy and carbon. But if one simply replaces old technology, when it comes to end of life, with more efficient alternatives you achieve useful progressive efficiency gains.
More importantly, it would be really helpful if we stopped wasting energy and resources on utter crap and self indulgence. Every spurious object or indulgent flight requires real energy.
And there's simply no way that, at the higher level, needing less energy fails to make the transition cheaper or easier.
Generally everyone agrees that it would be completely uneconomic to replace existing technology early, just for improved energy efficiency unless there was a massive benefit -e.g.this might occur in case of replacing a gas boiler with direct electric heating and insulation.
Increasing energy efficiency when replacing existing plant was the focus of EU EcoDesign program on electrical utility plant, and the assessment was to balance the NPV of the energy saved including the embeedded costs of carbon emissions avoided., with this being balanced against the increrased investment cost in the replacment plant required for energy efficiency. However with increased renewables there was no CO2 to offset and the value of the energy saved was very low as the marginal cost of prioduction from renewables is cliose to zero.
Furthermore the same investment in other alternative areas would produce a larger payback in terms of energy and CO2.
Impacts upstream on generation are only relevant if the optional investment in energy efficiciency changed the investment in energy upstream - however if the generation upstream has to increase dramatically in any case, then there are no savings in upstream generation arising from minor savings downstream.
Avoiding unnecessary use of fossil fuels (which does have a significant impact on costs and CO2) is clearly worthwhile as is effective design to reduce capital costs - this may also produce energy efficiency as a by product, but not one that woudl be paid for by itself.
e.g. an existing electrical transformer in a small package substation - typically 11m3 - can give a power output of 630kVA. If this needs to be uprated to a higher power this is not physically possible in the same physical size unless copper windings are used and design is for high temp operation, in which case same substation trafo could be uprated to about 1MW. When not used at peak this trafo will be significantly more efficienct but this is a by product - the value of the energy saved is insignifcant and would not pay for the extra investment cost. However the ability to increase the power output (typically to allow EV connection) on the same site easily pays all the extra costs - the efficiency increase is just a byproduct.
In fact when the transformer is loaded to 1MW and has high electrical losses the overall system is operating at it's best - EV Charging is allowing fossil fuel cars to be reduced, and not restricting output from the trafo means that upstream windfarms are not constrained off the system.
Apologies for the overdetailed response but this area is one in which I have been interested in for the last few years and the changes in economic and technical assessment of investments for Net Zero is very important!
Well-presented argument. As someone famously said, the stone age didn't end because the world ran out of stone. But literally not a word about nuclear (small/large/fusion). There's nothing intrinsically electric about wind and solar. A tendentious omission?
To be fair, there's equally nothing intrinsically electric about using nuclear fission to boil a big kettle.
Nuclear undoubtedly has a place in the transition, particularly in countries with existing nuclear industries. But it seems stuck at about nine percent of global total energy and, though it is beginning to grow a bit once more, it's not doing so any faster than growing total energy demand. So it looks likely to remain around 10 percent for the foreseeable future - which will probably turn out to be the key period of energy system transformation.
We looked at the possibility of nuclear in Australia recently and it was just too expensive and slow - particularly as all our existing (and rather old) coal plants will have retired well before nuclear could have been constructed.
And nobody has really yet solved the waste storage problem.
Now, SMRs may yet actually be built and turn out to be competitive. If so, the question could always be revisited and SMRs added later. They would probably be quite good for something like an aluminium smelter, for example.
Equally, the Chinese may yet come up with a workable thorium reactor (I wouldn't put much past them these days!). Again, the question could then be revisited.
And, of course, one of these next-twenty-years fusion might yet work.
But at this stage it's hard to see nuclear as being anything other then a useful but modest component within a primarily renewables-driven transformation.
Hi Felix. The point about wind and solar not being intrinsically electric is that they don't earn preference, relative to your electrification project, for being something they're not.
I like the idea of SMRs. Essentially smaller than the full-size reactors, so more susceptible to technical improvement through the production/development cycle. Also local, so not as grid-dependent. And, as you say, nicely suited to individual plant consumption.
Fusion has great potential. I would say that an approach of wait and see has already failed! I am referring to the closure of the Culham lab. There should have been uproar about this from all concerned with the energy future. In its absence, the rationale that the Culham plant was old tech was allowed to go uncontested. There was plenty of research that could have been done there on ancillary techology, such as materials development for the walls. The closure will delay the overall project, with time being of the essence.
Wind has potential downsides. Scale-up at the farm level is affected by turbulence blow-out. Wind disturbance can affect the environment. How much energy is there in the winds relative to the amount one might wish to extract? If it's appreciable, what are the feedback effects? Have the calculations been done on these matters?
It should also be noted that the output benefit of solar conversion would be directly opposed by the possible use of aerosols or particulates to reflect sunlight.
Another little-mentioned factor is that green energy production could (in principle) grow to a point at which green-consequent increase in energy generated outweighed increased radiative escape due to decarbonisation. (Admittedly, your electrification project is not directly about decarbonisation.)
So my conclusion would be that a holistic approach is needed.
Great article guys. You presented a lot of great points. I have little doubt that full or nearly full electrification of the economy is likely.
I have a concern that represents a different perspective that's interwoven into what you've presented. You mention "In short: electrotech economics is manufacturing economics. The more you build, the cheaper it gets."
Creating renewable energy systems and energy independence for wealthy countries and lower-cost access to energy for poorer ones is a noble goal. But as we humans increase in population and increase our consumption of material and energy-intensive goods per capita, coupled with the decreasing price of renewable energy and electrotech, doesn't that incentivize more and more use of energy and materials?
In other words, does the cheapness of electrotech incentivize its waste, requiring more and more land and materials to fulfill ever-increasing demand?
Understandably, there is no correct answer to this, but I would love to hear your thoughts as we grapple with ecological degradation in several forms.
Thank you!
Yes, that's my one reservation too!
One of the most insightful posts I’ve read on the transition in years, thank you!
A valid essay on Renewables but we don't see anything on what the energy source is used to manufacture the solar panels, wind mill towers and blades, electric wire, battery storage steel cabinets etc; in the first instance. Is it a base load fossil fuel power source or solar andcwind power.
Why is there no commentary on the original power source?
There's little commentary on this matter because (a) it's a statement of the bleeding obvious and (b) it's a silly distraction.
Obviously anything that is manufactured must use the energy systems in place AT THE TIME. In the absence of extraterrestrial assistance it has to be this way.
But solar and wind have very good energy payback periods and energy returns on investment, so even the first few that were manufactured entirely from dirty energy have soon paid this back and begun to provide clean energy.
The cleanness of energy improves - funnily enough exactly in line with the rising curve of clean energy production, so that each new unit was made with slightly cleaner energy than the last one.
There is no other possible way to transform an energy system. And it's working very well.
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to explain something so obvious - and I'm suspicious that you're simply trolling with a very tired and disproven "argument" - but I hat people to get the idea that questions like yours are not answered because they're too difficult to answer, rather than too obvious to bother.
A top-notch explication of a top-level issue, which is how worried should we been about the barriers to the renewable energy transition and how we best think about this transition, so bravo! Your “electrotech” perspective is spot-on. I’ve just posted about “Rewiring the energy debate,” complete with link back to your Substack, while hopefully offering my readers what could be described as a sort of “Cliff Notes” version. You can review—and grade!—the effort here: https://davidguenette.com/the-electrotech-manifesto/
In my climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet, the economic argument about the renewable energy transition is a core theme and especially in terms of the early costs of the transition in competition with entrenched fossil fuel interests. While renewable energy makes huge economic sense, too few consider the changeover period’s cost contribution to the household economy, and with your excellent definition of key benefits, one can now more confidently describe the promised land of efficiency and electrification and, yes, carbon emission reduction.
But what happens with existing fossil fuel generation infrastructure isn’t often enough discussed, and whether the fossil fuel sector's arguments of sunk investment and amortization will counter the lower energy costs of electrotech, and for how long. The battle may be best joined at new natural gas generation buildouts that seem to excite the fossil fuel folks to no end, despite the clear economic benefits of electrotech. Any and all new natural gas generation infrastructure extends the argument that there’s less need for electrotech because, well, here’s some new natural gas generators already in place and with a lifetime measured in decades. The biggest play the fossil fuel sector can make is to say, “Hey, we have this stuff in place already, so it’s cheaper to use these already built facilities than build new energy generation using electrotech.” Unfortunately, there are plenty of natural gas facility construction projects underway to do just that. Fortunately, today’s capacity to build out huge numbers of natural gas generators appears constricted.
For me, the single best counter to today’s efforts to build out more fossil fuel infrastructure is to reveal the true costs of fossil fuel use in terms of their externalities of pollution and climate change. These costs amount to somewhere near $700 billion in the U.S., each year, according to the International Monetary Fund assessments (although your mileage may vary). At least in this way, the climate change argument may prove essential to overcome fossil fuel’s entrenched interests and impressive funding and political power. Electrotech power supply is even cheaper, if the hidden costs of fossil fuels get added in.
So, please look at this issue and write another excellent Substack addressing this. I’d love to write another Cliff Notes version for that!
David Guenette
A lot to agree with, but the characterization of "net zero puritanism" is missing the mark. You write "It also tends to downplay progress in new energy because it falls short of the ideal, immediate change needed." But the majority of those who argue that the pace of the transition is still too slow relative to what would be needed, and that effective policies are needed to accelerate it, are actually rooting for and celebrating - not downplaying - progress in new energy. I suppose what you may want to refer to instead is excessive technology pessimism ("degrowth realism"), which misunderstands the electrotech revolution as an extractive/harmful/futile affirmation of an infinite growth dogma. Tragically, this group is absolutely convinced that a controlled economic contraction is the "only way" and that the energy transition represents an obstacle rather than a solution.
We could, of course have (and may well need) both.
They're not mutually exclusive - we absolutely must have an energy transition but it would also be smart to move towards more steady state economies.
The danger is that, otherwise, we're still on an unsustainable treadmill: fossil fuel-based energy generation may be the single largest source of GHGs and environmental damage, but it's by no means the only one!
Spectacular article!
Sorry Christopher, but I simply can't understand your first paragraph. Either way, I would have thought that comparative cost and emissions intensity would be key criteria in selecting generation types. Maybe more importantly, it needs to be situational: each country, indeed each region, has different needs and different circumstances (isolation, winds, land availability, etc.) so any system needs to be intelligently and quite specifically tailored. Therefore the full range of feasible technologies should be on the table. But it's still the case that wind and solar represent excellent options in terms of emissions, cost and flexibility.
Re the SMRs, there was an interesting article recently on Substack (sorry, can't reference it, but you may well have seen it) arguing that you really only get the famous learning curve if you are mass producing at a far larger scale than will ever happen with SMRs. It would seem that, even if smaller and more, they still remain relatively "boutique" products from a construction perspective. They might be able to be substantially prefabricated in factories and transported to site, but the assembly, integration, testing, etc. would still be complex. It's also been argued that history shows that reactors went big to achieve vital economies of scale, so SMRs would tend to reverse that, with obvious negative consequences.
So, while I wouldn't oppose SMRs there are still huge challenges to make them economically viable.
With fusion, I thought there was still significant investment and activity at ITER. And I must admit to being cautious about investing vast sums into something that will almost certainly not be viable for several decades, if ever. These are the critical years to build an energy system that will allow us to maintain something like a modern civilisation without frying ourselves. While we shouldn't ignore the longer term future, surely the focus of our efforts has to be on the urgent immediate issue?
Why do you people always have massive government regulations attached to your thesis on what’s best for society? Last I checked you’re free to do whatever you want so why not just do it already?
Why do you need the rest of us to give up everything we’ve created and expect us to change our entire lives in order to make your ideas come true?
Why are you so hell bent on throwing us from our land, stealing our minerals, destroying our environment, and sending us into fourth world decadence?
And why are y’all always intruding, destroying and stealing what we’ve built when we NEVER come to your area and shit on it?
Why do you only know how to destroy and never manage to build anything of your own?
Your ideas will lead us all to hell on earth. Some part of you understands this otherwise you wouldn’t waste your time calling for government intervention on whatever it is you find so horrid about the lifestyles of your countrymen.
Anthony Walsh, Engineer
Very good article and I loved the detail on S curves and your definition of ‘strategic’ vs ‘plan’!
However I think there is a misconception around the importance of ‘efficiency’ if it relates to ‘energy efficiency’.
‘Efficiency’ is not an end in itself- it is just shorthand to explain that it is worthwhile to use the least energy in a process to get the desired outcome. This used to be generally correct when input ( fossil fuel) was expensive. But now in situation where variable cost of KWh approaches zero so saving input fuel is no longer as important.
What is now important is the impact of energy usage on fixed costs ie cost of impact on network infrastructure and cost of resources used by the technology.
This may radically change long term investment decisions eg still very economic to insulate a house but no longer worthwhile to invest in a heat pump as capital cost of heat pump system is very high when the cost of energy saved is very low in future.
Much better snd faster to use direct electric heating and thermal storage in an insulated house , and much faster and cheaper to achieve.
Cheers,
Tony
Sure, but if you use more energy you still have to build more generating machinery - even if it's clean renewables, effectively with infinite free fuel, you still have to sink resources into building them.
So, while it is less compelling financially, it still has real value in broader environmental terms.
Either way, I'd still want to do energy return on investment - and maybe more importantly carbon return on investment - comparisons for any technology or system. And cheap, clean energy would impact the numbers going into such a calculation.
Hi Felix,
In traditional energy systems with little rebewables this would indeed have been the case, but going forward to 'Net Zero' the economies of scale and with very low marginal costs of energy and carbon, this no longer no longer holds.
So with Renewables having no carbon associated with the energy produced, and with the marginal cost of renewable energy being close to zero, the only costs that apply are for those in producing the physical assets used in the system and any embedded carbon associated with the producion of the Renewable generation and the Transmission and Distribution network associated.
Lack of energy efficiency results in extra losses at peak which add to the System Peak and this requires that the generation and Network must be able to cope with this marginally larger system peak. However there are massive economies of scale when dveloping or reinforcing existsing networks or adding to Renewable Generation so that a large increase in system capacity has very low extra costswhen taken in proportion to the amount of extra fixed asses required to add efficiency to plant using electricity at a lower level. Additionally, in any case. as both generation and networks need to be uprated substantially to cope with additional EV and Electrification of Heat, it will not be possible to avoid large changes to existing Power system, and in this context making such systems larger for the additional load imposed by extra losses from inefficiency willl be insignificant. Additionally, to cope with long periods of no sun and no wind ('dunkelflaute') there will be a need of massive amounts of standby generation as no amount of additional batteries/interconnection or load shifting will be capable of dealing with such low load periods ( i.e. massive eamounmts of extra generation will be available for extra load losses regardelss). These periods do not occur very often and even then not for long .g. > 1 week, but when they occur EU would not be able to cope using renewables e.g. possibly could store surplus H2 and then use this to generate. In Faeroe islands they wanted to go 100% renewable and couled economically do up to 95% using Wind and solar, but for the last 5% (only needed occasionally) they would have to install the same amount of plant as had been required for the first 95%, which would be physicqlly difficult to achieve (inadequate amounts of land) and economicallly unaffordable, so they used traditonal generation for the last 5% of peak.
A lot of these issues were examoned over teh last 10 yeasr by teh EU in thrir EcoDesig n Directive when considering teh economics and technical feasibility of making electrical Transformers more efficient, wand where it was found that no further improvements coudl be justified. In fact to facilitate connection of more EV, some utilities were however making transformers which coudl be loaded more heavily to as to facilitate the connection of more EV which had a much better environmental impact.
A more radical issue that has since emerged is that overloading existing network (which reduces efficiency and increases losses) has a very positive environmental impact in that it avoids the alternative of throttling back teh output of windfarms and solar. - obviously this can only work for a period as the increases in laod and generation by a factor of 2-4 will require rebuiliding the networks and operation at higher voltages, but in teh interim scuh an approach woudl offload more renewables.
I don't think you need to, or should, try to improve energy efficiency by replacing all existing technology immediately. That would obviously be counter-productive economically and in terms of "embodied" energy and carbon. But if one simply replaces old technology, when it comes to end of life, with more efficient alternatives you achieve useful progressive efficiency gains.
More importantly, it would be really helpful if we stopped wasting energy and resources on utter crap and self indulgence. Every spurious object or indulgent flight requires real energy.
And there's simply no way that, at the higher level, needing less energy fails to make the transition cheaper or easier.
Generally everyone agrees that it would be completely uneconomic to replace existing technology early, just for improved energy efficiency unless there was a massive benefit -e.g.this might occur in case of replacing a gas boiler with direct electric heating and insulation.
Increasing energy efficiency when replacing existing plant was the focus of EU EcoDesign program on electrical utility plant, and the assessment was to balance the NPV of the energy saved including the embeedded costs of carbon emissions avoided., with this being balanced against the increrased investment cost in the replacment plant required for energy efficiency. However with increased renewables there was no CO2 to offset and the value of the energy saved was very low as the marginal cost of prioduction from renewables is cliose to zero.
Furthermore the same investment in other alternative areas would produce a larger payback in terms of energy and CO2.
Impacts upstream on generation are only relevant if the optional investment in energy efficiciency changed the investment in energy upstream - however if the generation upstream has to increase dramatically in any case, then there are no savings in upstream generation arising from minor savings downstream.
Avoiding unnecessary use of fossil fuels (which does have a significant impact on costs and CO2) is clearly worthwhile as is effective design to reduce capital costs - this may also produce energy efficiency as a by product, but not one that woudl be paid for by itself.
e.g. an existing electrical transformer in a small package substation - typically 11m3 - can give a power output of 630kVA. If this needs to be uprated to a higher power this is not physically possible in the same physical size unless copper windings are used and design is for high temp operation, in which case same substation trafo could be uprated to about 1MW. When not used at peak this trafo will be significantly more efficienct but this is a by product - the value of the energy saved is insignifcant and would not pay for the extra investment cost. However the ability to increase the power output (typically to allow EV connection) on the same site easily pays all the extra costs - the efficiency increase is just a byproduct.
In fact when the transformer is loaded to 1MW and has high electrical losses the overall system is operating at it's best - EV Charging is allowing fossil fuel cars to be reduced, and not restricting output from the trafo means that upstream windfarms are not constrained off the system.
Apologies for the overdetailed response but this area is one in which I have been interested in for the last few years and the changes in economic and technical assessment of investments for Net Zero is very important!
Thanks for helping us zoom out
ut. Meanwhile my province Manitoba is burning ( zooming in)
Well-presented argument. As someone famously said, the stone age didn't end because the world ran out of stone. But literally not a word about nuclear (small/large/fusion). There's nothing intrinsically electric about wind and solar. A tendentious omission?
To be fair, there's equally nothing intrinsically electric about using nuclear fission to boil a big kettle.
Nuclear undoubtedly has a place in the transition, particularly in countries with existing nuclear industries. But it seems stuck at about nine percent of global total energy and, though it is beginning to grow a bit once more, it's not doing so any faster than growing total energy demand. So it looks likely to remain around 10 percent for the foreseeable future - which will probably turn out to be the key period of energy system transformation.
We looked at the possibility of nuclear in Australia recently and it was just too expensive and slow - particularly as all our existing (and rather old) coal plants will have retired well before nuclear could have been constructed.
And nobody has really yet solved the waste storage problem.
Now, SMRs may yet actually be built and turn out to be competitive. If so, the question could always be revisited and SMRs added later. They would probably be quite good for something like an aluminium smelter, for example.
Equally, the Chinese may yet come up with a workable thorium reactor (I wouldn't put much past them these days!). Again, the question could then be revisited.
And, of course, one of these next-twenty-years fusion might yet work.
But at this stage it's hard to see nuclear as being anything other then a useful but modest component within a primarily renewables-driven transformation.
Hi Felix. The point about wind and solar not being intrinsically electric is that they don't earn preference, relative to your electrification project, for being something they're not.
I like the idea of SMRs. Essentially smaller than the full-size reactors, so more susceptible to technical improvement through the production/development cycle. Also local, so not as grid-dependent. And, as you say, nicely suited to individual plant consumption.
Fusion has great potential. I would say that an approach of wait and see has already failed! I am referring to the closure of the Culham lab. There should have been uproar about this from all concerned with the energy future. In its absence, the rationale that the Culham plant was old tech was allowed to go uncontested. There was plenty of research that could have been done there on ancillary techology, such as materials development for the walls. The closure will delay the overall project, with time being of the essence.
Wind has potential downsides. Scale-up at the farm level is affected by turbulence blow-out. Wind disturbance can affect the environment. How much energy is there in the winds relative to the amount one might wish to extract? If it's appreciable, what are the feedback effects? Have the calculations been done on these matters?
It should also be noted that the output benefit of solar conversion would be directly opposed by the possible use of aerosols or particulates to reflect sunlight.
Another little-mentioned factor is that green energy production could (in principle) grow to a point at which green-consequent increase in energy generated outweighed increased radiative escape due to decarbonisation. (Admittedly, your electrification project is not directly about decarbonisation.)
So my conclusion would be that a holistic approach is needed.