Why do you think that? Absent some other primary power source like fusion, solar energy is the upstream producer of all the energy we currently use. Using it directly seems like the most obvious answer, especially when replacing e.g. all the earth's energy usage would only take, say, the size of Arizona
"The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 122 PW·year = 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year. In 2002 (2019), this was more energy in one hour (one hour and 25 minutes) than the world used in one year."
Saying solar is the upstream of fossil fuels is a technicality. Fossil fuels are more like a battery that’s stored millions of years of solar energy (+ the earth itself contributed a lot of energy). Solar cells are more like plants and cannot be used to replace batteries and our current battery tech can’t improve fast enough to supplant fossil fuels in the time frames needed.
Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth).
> our current battery tech can’t improve fast enough to supplant fossil fuels in the time frames needed.
I disagree. The tech itself already good enough to supplant the majority of cases, which in turn gives us more time for the things that remain (such as long-haul aircraft).
That said, I may be a little on the optimistic side about how much warming the ecosphere can take. If it's already too hot, then yes, naturally you are correct.
> Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth).
Looks to me like gas mostly replaced oil (since the late 90s); and that wind+solar is displacing nuclear (since the former became big enough to show up on a graph).
The graphs you provided show that coal and usage are still growing in absolute numbers. They're only going down in perentages. So, aside from oil (which is mostly still there), nothing was displaced.
The only significant thing we learn is that we've doubled our electricity usage since 2000. The share of low carbon electricity generation barely moved since 1985. Renewables just helped avoid it crumble due to hydro not being scalable.
If batteries were literally free today, they still wouldn't be good enough due to the cost in support electronics required to put them on the grid (which is currently about price parity with batteries per watt).
EDIT: and those electronics also degrade - a lifespan of 20 years would be reasonable at scale.
So you’re charging twice for the grid tie? Because the reason for installing batteries would be 1) to not grid-tie, or 2) to grid-tie along with a renewable energy source, which if it is a commercial site, is already grid-tied.
Unfortunately there's zero metrics from any reputable sources that would agree with you. Solar deployment is accelerating massively (0-8% of utility scale production in just a couple decades) while all nonrenewables are decelerating.
You ignore the short daylight period during the winter, when the electricity consumption is the most important.
There is no practical why to store the energy for the nights. At the end we end up with a cheap source of energy that covers only a fraction of our needs, and we have to maintain a second source of production for the rest of the time. We pay two times to keep the two system operational.
Nuclear is also cheap and doesn't have this limitation.
Nuclear is, last I checked, the same cost as the combination of PV with a sufficient number of batteries to be the backup.
And for transport we need some kind of storage system regardless (doesn't have to be batteries, but does have to exist), the scale of which is larger than needed to do anything we want with night/clouds/etc. issues with PV.
The factories to make those batteries are being built very quickly.
During the winter, the solar panel are efficient just for a couple of hours every days. Meanwhile, this is the moment of the year where the global consumption is the highest. We've yet to see a battery system able to hold enough power to balance these months of under production.
Why would you store electricity produced by Nuclear energy? You can adjust the production to match the needs.
> During the winter, the solar panel are efficient just for a couple of hours every days.
Depends where you are. If, for example, you're in the most-occupied bits of Canada, your grid connects to the south side of the USA, which gets rather more hours of sun than you do.
> We've yet to see a battery system able to hold enough power to balance these months of under production.
If you're far enough south to get as many as "a couple of hours" of sun each day in midwinter, this isn't a serious issue in most cases. Why? Because adding more PV is much cheaper than adding more batteries — when you've got 2.4 hours of sun, build a 24*n hour battery and enough PV to charge that battery in 2.4 hours, where n is some factor for "in my location, there are often n-day cloudy streaks".
But also, most places already have a decent grid (exceptions exist, Hawaii is excusable, Texas is not), the grids are not fundamentally so lossy as to break the economics here, and much better grids can be made if there's sufficient political will behind it (yes, even one that worked for Hawaii).
Uranium's energy derives from gravitational collapse, not fusion. The neutron stars whose collision produces uranium have undergone endothermic nuclear reactions; their nuclear matter (aside from its gravitational binding energy) is at a higher energy state than the initial protons and electrons.
Geothermal is most either primordial gravitational energy from the Earth's formation or energy from decay of uranium and thorium. Only decay of K-40 might be ascribed to fusion.
We can compare the fraction of the Sun's energy that has come from fusion vs. coming from gravitational collapse (that is, the release of energy as the material becomes more tightly gravitationally bound, starting from the diffuse gas cloud that formed the Sun). It's about two orders of magnitude in favor of fusion.
This is related to the historical question of the age of the Earth. Before the discovery of fusion, it was thought the Sun was powered by gravity, which put an upper limit on the age of the Sun of some tens of millions of years. This was close to Lord Kelvin's limit on the age of the Earth as modeled as a solid sphere cooling by conduction, which led him to believe both estimates were correct. As it turns out, both estimates were flawed, but for different reasons, and it was only coincidence they were similar.
That's not what I said, try reading my comment again. Also, based on the current rate of solar adoption, you're likely wrong about it never being the dominant form of energy generation.
By 2045, the earth will be covered by solar panels so we will start tiling Mars.
According to projections, the Dyson Sphere should be completed by 2117. Exponential curves are a hell of a drug.
> I don't trust the exponential trends to not be secret sigmoids past that point.
The thing is that predicting the cap is as important as predicting the inflection point. 100% solar (or renewables) isn't possible without other technologies which are much less developed, consumer pattern changes which have yet to emerge and grid investments which are not priced in current PV deployment.
Batteries get developed anyway due to EVs. Replacing all 283 M motor vehicles in the US with Teslas would require enough batteries for about 40 hours of storage of the average power flow on the US grid.
How much coal will we need to burn in order to make all of those PV cells? How many mountain tops removed to get the raw materials?
Nobody ever provides an honest answer to those questions.
This isn't a binary versus issue. If you have to ramp up coal burning and natural habitat destruction to produce the needed PV cells then you also need to stop endless-growth profit seeking manufacturing wholesale.
Versus burning fossil fuels that need to be mined, refined, and shipped for nonrenewables? You think the materials needed to build turbines for a fossil fuel plant just magically appear? How much coal do you think is burned to facilitate a kWh of solar production versus a kWh of coal power generation?
> How much coal will we need to burn in order to make all of those PV cells? How many mountain tops removed to get the raw materials?
Zero.
PV pays back it's own energy cost in a matter of months to single-digit years, even in the worst cases that's still enough to support the current exponential.
And the raw material are not found only in mountains, the main component by mass being — famously — what sand is made from.
Today, coal generates over 60% of the electricity used for global solar PV manufacturing, [...].
This is largely because PV production is concentrated in China – mainly in the provinces of Xinjiang and Jiangsu where coal accounts for more than 75% of the annual power supply and benefits from favourable government tariffs.
that said:
Continuous innovation led by China has halved the emissions intensity of solar PV manufacturing since 2011.
This is the result of more efficient use of materials and energy – and greater low-carbon electricity production.
Despite these improvements, absolute carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from solar PV manufacturing have almost quadrupled worldwide since 2011 as production in China has expanded.
and there's a bit of a bottleneck:
Based on manufacturing capacity under construction, China’s share of global polysilicon, ingot and wafer production will soon reach almost 95%.
Today, China’s Xinjiang province accounts for 40% global polysilicon manufacturing. Moreover, one out of every seven panels produced worldwide is manufactured by a single facility.
This level of concentration in any global supply chain would represent a considerable vulnerability; solar PV is no exception.
We're talking billions of tonnes of raw materials here to meet decadal global demands, and it simply isn't just sand (and remember that really good sand is a resource in demand also):
Solar PV’s demand for critical minerals will increase rapidly in a pathway to net zero emissions.
The production of many key minerals used in PV is highly concentrated, with China playing a dominant role.
Despite improvements in using materials more efficiently, the PV industry’s demand for minerals is set to expand significantly.
In the IEA’s Roadmap to Net Zero Emissions by 2050, for instance, demand for silver for solar PV manufacturing in 2030 could exceed 30% of total global silver production in 2020 – up from about 10% today.
This rapid growth, combined with long lead times for mining projects, increases the risk of supply and demand mismatches, which can lead to cost increases and supply shortages.
Most of the silicon needed to produce solar cells is mined from regions with significant reserves of high-purity quartz.
The mining of quartz typically involves several methods depending on the nature and location of the deposit. Here are the common methods used:
- Open Pit Mining: This is the most common method for mining quartz. It involves the removal of large amounts of soil and rock to access the quartz deposits. This method is used when the quartz is found close to the surface. Heavy machinery such as excavators and bulldozers are used to remove the overburden (the soil and rock overlaying the quartz).
- Hard Rock Mining: In cases where quartz is found in veins within rock formations, hard rock mining methods are employed. This involves drilling and blasting to break up the rock and access the quartz veins. The material is then transported to the surface for processing.
- Underground Mining: If the quartz deposits are located deep underground, underground mining techniques are used. Miners create tunnels and shafts to reach the deposits. This method is more labor-intensive and expensive than open pit mining but is necessary for accessing deep deposits.
- Placer Mining: This method is less common for quartz but can be used in riverbeds and stream deposits where quartz particles have been eroded and deposited. It involves washing and sifting through gravel and sediment to extract the quartz.
Open pit mining and hard rock mining can cause significant land disturbance and environmental degradation, including deforestation, habitat destruction, and soil erosion. Proper environmental management practices and reclamation efforts are essential to mitigate these impacts.
We aren't talking about sand.
The production of the current global output of solar cells require from somewhere between 8-10 million metric tons of coal annually.
Voyager doesn't use solar power since its incredibly faint as you get further from the Sun. It uses the heat from the decay of radioactive plutonium to generate electricity.
Why do you think that? Absent some other primary power source like fusion, solar energy is the upstream producer of all the energy we currently use. Using it directly seems like the most obvious answer, especially when replacing e.g. all the earth's energy usage would only take, say, the size of Arizona