Love your analogy Rachel that "geopolitics in a globalised world is like playing Russian Roulette with a fully-loaded gun: the only way to get out unscathed is to drop the weapon" Great analogy!
I think it pays to remember though that the oil-producing countries are not so much in the oil business as they are in the money-making business: the day renewables present a better profit-making case than that of oil, it's history. These stranded assets will be steam-rollered by high-demand energy products that show more than an iota of moral rectitude. The stampede out of oil will inevitably happen: and those who are slow starters will get trampled in the rush. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at this COP👍
I think this understates the systemic importance of gas (+ coal). Intermittent output from renewables requires buffer, like you say, but batteries don't easily substitute for fossil power that can be turned up or down. To fully buffer with batteries you need to overbuild capacity, and its unclear we have the materials to do this at scale. I'd rather see degrowth, plus efforts to find ways to live with intermittent power, but we all know that's a difficult political lift. If that doesn't happen I think its reasonable to expect fossil fuels to be part of our grids for a (dangerously) long time. What do you think about that?
(I know you've had Simon Michaux on your show, so surely you remember all the ways in which zero-carbon renewable grids are difficult-to-fantastical. Isn't the flipside of that something like: You don't need to be a cynic to project fossil burning well into the intermediate future.)
Hi Harvey, yes, obviously I remember that. However, as the piece states, the fact that gas is still being subsidised and pushed even while batteries are a better option suggests political factors that go beyond mineral shortage: If the political drive were to factor in such a mineral shortage it would seek to decrease absolute consumption.
mineral shortage has zero to do with it. Further, there is no mineral shortage for batteries at present or in the near term. The chemistry of the lithium-ion family of batteries that leading manufacturers are using these days has eliminated cobalt and nickel and is constantly substituting out the more expensive input materials with more common, cheaper or less controversial elements simply under a profit motive.
" but batteries don't easily substitute for fossil power that can be turned up or down."
Strongly disagree with this comment. I'd call it a fallacy.
As a modeller of renewable energy grids, I'm constantly coming across this conjecture. Batteries are just one part of the storage solution matrix and they are excellent at the "buffering" you talk about. They're better than gas for FACS and ESS because their response time is measured in milliseconds rather than the minutes it takes a GT to ramp up to max power. Dozens of large batteries are being built around Australia to do just that and are already pushing GTs out of the FCAS market.
I've read Simon Michaux analysis for the Norwegian Government and some of the assumptions he made in his calculations are pretty absurd and I can only assume are made in ignorance on his part. His analysis on this is sloppy as hell, I'd love to have the time to refute him point by point some time as it seems many people take him as an authority on these matters. He's also not to informed on nuclear power and reaches false conclusions about it too.
Batteries will do the 1-4 hours of storage depth that allows us to go to 95%+ RE in Australia and most other places I would expect. We have easily enough geological material reserves to make these batteries for every nation on Earth. Other forms of storage I expect to emerge this decade are thermal energy storage at industrial locations (an extremely cheap form of storage that can convert thermal back to electrical power for less cost than the price fossil gas does it today) and potentially advanced compressed air and cryogenic air (with some support from public purse to build pilot schemes). eFuels are over hyped to the max but at a high price could do all the deep storage we need.
Check out modelling by David Osmond on how little new storage we actually need based on his scaling up of existing wind, solar and storage facilities in Australia.
Note that as other sectors of the economy decarbonise, industrial processes being the big one, transportation and buildings etc, it increases the need for electrical energy and storage of it but it reduces the proportion of storage to demand because all these sectors have the potential to time shift demand in major ways, and feed energy back into the grid wh3en it is profitable for then to do so.
Interesting! I was definitely taking Michaux as an authority; can you say more about his bad assumptions/sloppiness? I know the buffer size issue is controversial (and also a huge driver of the final conclusions of his analysis), but his reasoning there seemed prima facie persuasive. I guess here I'm wondering if Australia's abundant sunlight for much of the year is making this level of penetration more achievable than than, say, in Germany. The linked piece note that Queensland has to carry less sunny/windy regions within Australia already. (Even so this is definitely different from the more pessimistic stuff I've seen, would love to dig into the difference in assumptions here.)
Wondering also what you think about problems in the wind industry, esp offshore projects going no-bid as soon as interest rates rose, and issues like pollution/sustainability of supply chains esp. wrt solar? You really think these can be scaled up globally to the extent needed to sustain economic growth etc.? (speaking as one skeptical that we can sustain growth in the 21st century at all)
HI there. I've been away, sorry for missing your comment and question.
Don't take anybody as an authority without checking their sources. I've learned that the hard way in the reporting of climate science and climate solutions, emissions reduction pathways and so on. Even the IPCC have areas in which their communications are junk and they sometimes improve on that and sometimes they don't, certainly not soon enough.
I'd have to review his report for the Finish Government, but I still recall that his storage capacity assumption was totally absurd. I'm not going to paraphrase what he wrote, b/c I might get into hyperbola but he clearly has never modelled an energy grid in his life. It was rookie error level of thinking. Motivated no doubt by his preoccupations with energy decent, just like Nate havens who uncritically promoted Michaux's conculsions. I'm just hypothesising here, but seems to me like the peak oilers of the 1990s (I knew a bunch of them who said RE was never going to scale) are now trying to reinvent themselves as climate and ecosystems collapse specialists.
I dislike Micheal Mann's use of the term "doomers" which has a very ugly history (which I'm sure he's aware of but uses it anyhow) because he uses it to polarise a debate that is a very important set of debates to have about ecosystem collapse, climatic tipping points etc etc to then present himself as a centrists along with others who adopt his uncontroversial (read: don't scare the horses) position and reimagines themselves as being the only rational folks in the room.
He's now published a second book expanding on his doomer themes (probably subconsciously aware that he's doing exactly that which he accuses others of, having a non-nuanced conversation with himself in his Doomers book) where he talks about things he chastised and still chastises others for talking about, hysteresis, tipping points, non-linear effects in complex systems, the presence of unknown factors in climate system stability and so on. He bemoans the lack of nuanced discussion when much of what I've seen from him on Twitter is lack of nuance and a tendency to badge people as "doomer", mount some flimsy straw man argument against their concerns and then block them before they can exercise their right of reply. I also sympathise with him the he choose to take on the brain-dead conservatives and conspiracy theorists of the Climate denial industry, funded by FF and livestock producers, but also fuelled by nothing other than the deep ignorance of the uneducated and tribal nature of contemporary society in many parts of the world, USA especially.
So I wont call Michael a capital 'D', "doomer" but he is getting well outside his area of expertise, and I could cite my own modelling and that of dozens of other teams to show that RE and storage solutions scale and in any country they can scale affordably (often with cost savings until you get to the last few percent, and even then I think the costs are exaggerated in most modelling because it's inherent conservative and has to limit assumptions to ignore potential solutions) , is affordable not a resource drain that is significantly large given present resource drain and certainly not a deal breaker. Check out an old Amory Lovins article published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists "Clean energy and rare earths: Why not to worry", 2017.
there's endless beats about rare earths by ignorant journos and consultants drumming up private work like Michaux. and yet,
• Most wind turbines don't even use rare earths
• those few turbine designs that do use R.E.s are phasing them out due to costs and (inelastic) supply chain problems/territorial concerns
• R.E.s are not "rare" — the name stems from the fact that they usually are found in low concentrations mixed with many other elements, other R.E.s and geological compounds that the R.E. being mined must be separated from. This is costly and typically quite a toxic set of processes. There are large reserves of all the REs on every continent.
• Due to the costs, and toxic outflows from processing REs, much of this industry has set up shop in mainland China and its occupied territories. Pollution is something that can be bribed away as a political or legal problem in China, after all it only pollutes the land, water and and health occupied by a hundreds of millions of peasants, so why would a nation state emerging from a Communist Revolution have any concerns around that? China of course sees the geopolitical advantage in being the worlds biggest producer of REs and saw that opportunity decades ago. Now reserves are being booked on other continents, due to geopolitical tensions as much as anything else to do with supply chain scrutiny.
I appreciate the reply, this is valuable perspective. I constantly worry about navigating the ideological biases in all these areas, especially since I also personally dislike our civilization and the path we are on and want to live in a different kind of world, so I'm definitely biased in that way too. I'm not totally sure how discrediting it is to point out that some of these dudes are peak oilers who have rebranded as systems ecologists, although that does shine a useful light on guys like Hagens. I don't think that has to be seen as like a cynical pivot, nor is it clear to me that peak oil is even wrong per se, though they obviously did not predict the shale boom. Longer term that depends on empirical unknowns about hydrocarbon reserves and complicated unknowns about what can or can't be extracted economically/without destroying ecosystems.
I take the point about the abundance of rare earths, and I appreciate the article. I'm not convinced that it invalidates the point (or what should be the point) about extracting resources and "peak X." For REs to be abundant in the relevant sense, it needs to be available both at low cost and at scale. If extracting loads of REs causes unacceptable levels of pollution, then cheap REs depends on China's unethical practices and cannot be scaled. Whether that's true or not is obviously a complicated question (depending on what extraction techniques are possible, what is considered acceptable, etc.), but there is of course a reason why extraction in general tends to take place in the developing world where, as you say, pollution can be bribed away. (It also isn't that straight forward to supply the more mundane materials needed for electrification either. It requires mineral extraction on an unprecedented scale on anybody's assumptions).
I'd love to hear more about the battery buffer thing, maybe I need to stop parroting Michaux on that!
I do still worry about two things, as far as the possibility of long-term exponential growth: (a) the energy supply needs to grow for the economy to grow (I see no immediate reason to expect this to change without some fundamental change in what we count as "growth"; note also that all that mining will be extremely energy intensive, especially as we get into lower and lower-concentration reserves), so the renewable grid would also needs to constantly grow; (b) so far renewables haven't taken any fossil power off the grid, they've only been added on top of (independently growing) fossil primary energy.
the other thing is old as history of physical technology itself, substitution. its remarkable how many breakthroughs occur which substitute out materials and/or technologies where the social licence or costs become an existential barrier for an existing supply chain and "value" proposition. especially when these industries already have made people millionaires and billionaires.
I'm not saying that makes capitalism better than any other system of organising an economy, I'm saying that substitution of materials and chemistries are often possible where the laws of physics allow for it.
Also thermal storage. You heard it first in the comments of Critical Planet. Thermal Storage is more cost effective today than fancy pants lithium ion chemistries even with a round trip back to electrical power and the energy losses that occur. Dr Volts podcast has now interviewed the founders of three or more thermal storage startups. And the tech is old and proven, like CST which had problems using salts, so the response has been to avoid salts as the heat conduit, because there are other inexpensive material which don't corrode steal pipes!
this critique of RE and rare earths and the vectors for panic that are generated by misinformation is emblematic of the issues I have with Michaux on a broader level.
this is the summarising sentence for the 10 pages of critical minerals and other materials required for the global transition to RE and storage in the Master Plan Part 3 that Tesla recently published.
"In sum, there are no fundamental materials constraints when evaluating against 2023 USGS estimated resources. Furthermore, Resources and Reserves have historically increased – that is, when a mineral is in demand, there is more incentive to look for it and more is discovered. Annual mining, concentrating, and refining of relevant metal ores must grow to meet demand for the renewable energy economy, for which the fundamental constraints are human capital and permitting/regulatory timelines."
this is linked to in the guardian article and gets into specifics. (still has false claims about rare earths being critical to permanent magnets in wind turbines but there is plenty of detail to be found on the linked reports)
i was reading a report provided by Tesla which addressed the global demand for materials including critical minerals assuming a complete tampering out of fossil fuels in all sectors of the economy. this included the electrification of the buildings, transport and industrial processes sectors not t just stationary energy.
unfortunately several searches had failed to materialise the report. IIRC it was only published last week. as you might expect it painted a rosy picture, and i’m not suggesting anybody take Tesla’s conclusions about this at face value. always look closely at the assumptions and scooping brief.
when i get back to my main office mac i hope to relocate the report. maybe ask AI if you pay for chatGTP 4.0
« The stripping of Earth’s natural materials is already responsible for 60% of global heating impacts, including land use change, 40% of air pollution impact, and more than 90% of global water stress and land-related biodiversity loss, says the report, due to be released in February. »
i’d like to see their references on this claim. i can provide a referenced claim that farmed animal production has produced up to 84% of historical warming. it all depends how the do the accounting and categorisation for one thing. suggesting that mineral resource extraction has resulted in factors of 3 or more times the clearing of woodland and forest (the most significant drawdown sinks on Earth other than surface ocean water before the industrial period) than livestock production is curious to me. if not suspicious. i suspect they have counted all cleared land and called that a natural resource (timber or biomass) even if it was burnt to clear it (a very common way to kill forest and woodland in Australia, now exported to the world, is repeated cycles of bulldozing with chains to knock over tall trees and piling the vegetation up and burning it and the entire ground area to kill regrowth).
ref for the up to 84% of emissions claim (cf oft repeated claim that according to UNFCCC accounting rules IPCC says that 10% of present emission are due to Ag sometimes people say 14% too.
the references are in all the video descriptions for all citations made in each video. author of this series of videos is Gerard Wedderburn Bishop and he was an author of the BZE Land Use Report (LUR) which i contributed to (data visualisations, in form of maps and graphs).
The authors also had a peer reviewed paper published which summarised many of the high level points in the LUR. My involvement in publishing the final LUR in book form introduced me to the methane and land clearing issues associated livestock production. i had previously been made aware in 2012 of the methane emissions associated with fossil fuel production especially oil and gas for use in industry and buildings working on the BZE Buildings Plan.
GWP₂₀ /GWP₁₀₀ confusion (what was meant by time horizons and why it mattered) being one of the issues back then, leading to misunderstanding about the impact of methane on present day, future and historical contribution to global heating (37% of historical heating is due to anthropogenic methane emissions if you calculate from the IPCC Ch 8 Supplementary Material emission contribution to Radiative Forcing by GHG/aerosol table data).
it took enviro and climate orgs a full decade to get their heads around the imparable of methane emissions. (not to mention UNFCCC and IPCC WF3 a full decade longer to understand and “front end” methane mitigation rather than do what they had always done and “back ended” methane reduction in the second half of this better after CO₂ had been mitigated to a large extent).
i know this partly because i endured attacks from would be experts opinion makers and (non-peer reviewed) climate scientists attack groups i worked with and myself for challenging the mantra around methane. which amounted to “forget about i until we’ve dealt with CO₂ emissions which will do the heavy lifting and reduce methane emissions as a side effect also”.
the problems of substitution by electrification of all fossil fuel appliances is completely achievable with known reserves of minerals and other materials. will that stop capitalism in it's tracks, or make extractivism for RE or the many other uses that demand extraction from the stocks of natural resources on Earth (or the moon or asteroids or whatever they think of next to sell equity) which draw down on the affordably extracted resources? of course not.
But nobody is making that claim! Its a straw man fallacy (a frequently repeated one at that) to say such things.
the complete electrification of all human economy where FFs today dominate is no panacea for economic growth, population growth in areas where the ecological footprint is very high (rich people tend to have hundreds to thousands of time the ecological footprints of poor people comparing within a nation or *between* "rich" and "poor" nations… nor all the other vectors of ecosystem collapse.
But it is one of the best ways we can mitigate GHG emissions quickly, (and we could have transitioned AUsrtrlai already by now to a 95%+ RE grid if we'd been really deliberate about it but special interests own the 3 big energy retailers (known as gentailers since they own coal and gas generation including almost all of the large FF generation facilities in Australia). The regulators were captured to the nth degree. Neoliberalism is alive and well and more cancerous that at any time in history and meaning the perception that markets are always the most efficient (not most effective) way to orchestrate transition snit simple a (misleading) perception, it's taken as gospel but all vested interests, the Federal Dept of Finance and Treasury, the regulators the corporate media, (sadly) the public media (ABC and SBS) most political parties (via donor contributions) and even climate orgs have swallowed the cool aid deeply.
Here's a good podcast discussing this very point and taking (probably a bit too much) aim at people like Nate Hagen's and his post-peak-oiler crew. My views align much more with the guest, Marco Raugei of Oxford Brookes University than the host, Chris Nelder. Marco emphasis that it's a false dichotomy to talk of Doomers vs Transitionistas. I agree 100%. The host seemed to give tacit support for that before launching into "doomers" repeated times. The word "Doomer" has a very ugly history back to the commerce-minded detractors of William Vogt in the early part of the last century, through to the hate-fuelled attacks on the authors of the "Limits to Growth" who weren't so much wrong as didn't foresee the so-called Green Revolution coming, which doesn't negate much of what they did force, so much as disguise the issues under a varnish of "technological progress and advancement" which was, whatever your opinion on industrial farming technologies, an incredible set of plant breeding breakthroughs by a small handful of individual scientists who were determined as hell to get results.
I wondered what had angered the host so much about the "doomer" claims around RE until I heard his epilogue after the interview guest had left the call. Then I understood a bit better his motivation. I've also had to counter continual misinformation about renewables, storage, system costs of grid power under high RE penetrations etc for over a decade as a modeller and RE-transition advocate. Also, he once was in that camp, there's no zealot member of the new club like a convert from the opposing side I guess. So he knew their tactics and sloppy science inside out. (But I still agree with the guest, it's a false dichotomy)
(apologies Rachel for the external link, please know I subscribe to you not to your podcast not to this other podcast, though if I wasn't a self-funded activist I would subscribe to both and many more).
The author Charles C Mann (not to be confused with chastiser of Doomers, Dr Michael E. Mann see: https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-214-countering-climate-doomerism/) comes down very much on the side of the Wizards in my opinions, especially having listened to interviews with the author but it's a major work of research and reportage so I give him top marks for that.
HI there. I've been away, sorry for missing your comment and question.
Don't take anybody as an authority without checking their sources. I've learned that the hard way in the reporting of climate science and climate solutions, emissions reduction pathways and so on. Even the IPCC have areas in which their communications are junk and they sometimes improve on that and sometimes they don't, certainly not soon enough.
I'd have to review his report for the Finish Government, but I still recall that his storage capacity assumption was totally absurd. I'm not going to paraphrase what he wrote, b/c I might get into hyperbola but he clearly has never modelled an energy grid in his life. It was rookie error level of thinking. Motivated no doubt by his preoccupations with energy decent, just like Nate havens who uncritically promoted Michaux's conculsions. I'm just hypothesising here, but seems to me like the peak oilers of the 1990s (I knew a bunch of them who said RE was never going to scale) are now trying to reinvent themselves as climate and ecosystems collapse specialists.
I dislike Micheal Mann's use of the term "doomers" which has a very ugly history (which I'm sure he's aware of but uses it anyhow) because he uses it to polarise a debate that is a very important set of debates to have about ecosystem collapse, climatic tipping points etc etc to then present himself as a centrists along with others who adopt his uncontroversial position and them being the only rational folks in the room. He's now published a book where he talks about things he chastised and still chastises others for talking about, hysteresis, tipping points, non-linear effects in complex systems, the presence of unknown factors in climate system stability and so on. He bemoans the lack of nuanced discussion when much of what I've seen from him on Twitter is lack of nuance and a tendency to badge people as "doomer", mount some flimsy straw man argument against their concerns and then block them before they can exercise their right of reply. I also sympathise with him the he choose to take on the brain-dead conservatives and conspiracy theorists of the Climate denial industry, funded by FF and livestock producers, but also fuelled by nothing other than the deep ignorance of the uneducated and tribal nature of contemporary society in many parts of the world, USA especially.
So I wont call Michael a capital 'D', "doomer" but he is getting well outside his area of expertise, and I could cite my own modelling and that of dozens of other teams to show that RE and storage solutions scale and in any country they can scale affordably (often with cost savings until you get to the last few percent, and even then I think the costs are exaggerated in most modelling because it's inherent conservative and has to limit assumptions to ignore potential solutions) , is affordable not a resource drain that is significantly large given present resource drain and certainly not a deal breaker. Check out an old Amory Lovins article published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists "Clean energy and rare earths: Why not to worry", 2017.
there's endless beats about rare earths by ignorant journos and consultants drumming up private work like Michaux. and yet,
• Most wind turbines don't even use rare earths
• those few turbine designs that do use R.E.s are phasing them out due to costs and (inelastic) supply chain problems/territorial concerns
• R.E.s are not "rare" — the name stems from the fact that they usually are found in low concentrations mixed with many other elements, other R.E.s and geological compounds that the R.E. being mined must be separated from. This is costly and typically quite a toxic set of processes. There are large reserves of all the REs on every continent.
• Due to the costs, and toxic outflows from processing REs, much of this industry has set up shop in mainland China and its occupied territories. Pollution is something that can be bribed away as a political or legal problem in China, after all it only pollutes the land, water and and health occupied by a hundreds of millions of peasants, so why would a nation state emerging from a Communist Revolution have any concerns around that? China of course sees the geopolitical advantage in being the worlds biggest producer of REs and saw that opportunity decades ago. Now reserves are being booked on other continents, due to geopolitical tensions as much as anything else to do with supply chain scrutiny.
I once read an English translation somebody had made of a ?40 year plan published by the CCP a couple of years ago. It broke down their plan into the characteristic 5 year periods.
Sadly fracking was targeted for major investment in the 20-40 year period. Not sure if it was domestic or in African client states but it was very central to their thinking unfortunately.
"With 125 years left of the stuff which produces 40% less emissions than coal,"
Hi Rachel, I've noted you often make this observation about burning fossil gas vs coal burning (to produce power which is where the stat comes from and its a very broad generalisation at best).
This neglects the fact that emission of methane are ~100x more potent in the near term (GWP₁₀ i.e. over ten years) than coal. The index most commonly used by IPCC and climate scientists to compare one GHG to another is GWP₁₀₀ which considers the impact after 100 years of a pulse emission of whatever GHG and compares it to a pulse of the same mass of CO₂ over 100 years.
Since many GHGs are chemically transformed in the atmosphere in much less time than 100 years, using this index effectively "discounts" (in economics usage of discount) the impact of methane for 88 of those years because after 12 years the methane has been converted by UV and complex reactions to CO₂ and water. But in the near term it's much more radiatively forcing as they call it. When IPCC started doing their work 100 years seemed (to the lead authors at least) like the time period we had to start bending GHG emissions to zero. Of course we know today that is time frame terribly inaccurate.
Robert Howarth et al have produced many papers on this issue and really alerted the world to the issues around it vis a vis Fossil Fuels. "The Bridge to Nowhere" 2012 is one of the more well known papers.
Gerard Weddeburn Bishop has produced a lot of summary reporting around methane issues and livestock production. He has a playlist of videos on the farmed production of animals and the impacts on climate here (100% recommend, this is generally not at all well understood even in climate activist circles and is actively resisted in mainstream orgs of the climate movement because it upsets their high-roller donors and political benefactors):
I worked with him on the Beyond Zero Emissions Land Use Report, 2015 which alerted me and many of my fellow activist researchers to these issues, for which I'm eternally grateful.
Thanks, Alastair. I read recently gas is nigh-on as dirty as coal. Comparing their emissions likely isn’t useful at all when we need to transition away. Thanks for bringing these other resources to my attention.
it’s worse than coal when you consider proximate tipping points and near term boiling from the GHG footprint.
but open cycle gas turbines (and reciprocating engines) can ramp hard to start up or shut down whereas coal (and nuclear) can’t ramp quickly. especially not to do so twice daily to just be dispatching to morning and dusk/evening markets where prices will remain high most of the time. so fossil gas is worse for climate but more usefully during the transition to 100% RE. (i’ve modelled this kind of transition extensively using hourly demand and weather data for years worth of data). because most grids already burn a lot of gas we don’t need more gas as coal is retired. just the same or less gas. in Australia some states like SA and WA peaked at 40% of the power mix coming from gas and we should be displacing most of that with Renewables ASAP because its cheaper tha. fossil gas and modern wind farms can have a capacity factor of 50% in the best locations for wind resources in Australia today.
Love your analogy Rachel that "geopolitics in a globalised world is like playing Russian Roulette with a fully-loaded gun: the only way to get out unscathed is to drop the weapon" Great analogy!
I think it pays to remember though that the oil-producing countries are not so much in the oil business as they are in the money-making business: the day renewables present a better profit-making case than that of oil, it's history. These stranded assets will be steam-rollered by high-demand energy products that show more than an iota of moral rectitude. The stampede out of oil will inevitably happen: and those who are slow starters will get trampled in the rush. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at this COP👍
Insightful article. Thanks for breaking down this issue.
I think this understates the systemic importance of gas (+ coal). Intermittent output from renewables requires buffer, like you say, but batteries don't easily substitute for fossil power that can be turned up or down. To fully buffer with batteries you need to overbuild capacity, and its unclear we have the materials to do this at scale. I'd rather see degrowth, plus efforts to find ways to live with intermittent power, but we all know that's a difficult political lift. If that doesn't happen I think its reasonable to expect fossil fuels to be part of our grids for a (dangerously) long time. What do you think about that?
(I know you've had Simon Michaux on your show, so surely you remember all the ways in which zero-carbon renewable grids are difficult-to-fantastical. Isn't the flipside of that something like: You don't need to be a cynic to project fossil burning well into the intermediate future.)
Hi Harvey, yes, obviously I remember that. However, as the piece states, the fact that gas is still being subsidised and pushed even while batteries are a better option suggests political factors that go beyond mineral shortage: If the political drive were to factor in such a mineral shortage it would seek to decrease absolute consumption.
mineral shortage has zero to do with it. Further, there is no mineral shortage for batteries at present or in the near term. The chemistry of the lithium-ion family of batteries that leading manufacturers are using these days has eliminated cobalt and nickel and is constantly substituting out the more expensive input materials with more common, cheaper or less controversial elements simply under a profit motive.
" but batteries don't easily substitute for fossil power that can be turned up or down."
Strongly disagree with this comment. I'd call it a fallacy.
As a modeller of renewable energy grids, I'm constantly coming across this conjecture. Batteries are just one part of the storage solution matrix and they are excellent at the "buffering" you talk about. They're better than gas for FACS and ESS because their response time is measured in milliseconds rather than the minutes it takes a GT to ramp up to max power. Dozens of large batteries are being built around Australia to do just that and are already pushing GTs out of the FCAS market.
I've read Simon Michaux analysis for the Norwegian Government and some of the assumptions he made in his calculations are pretty absurd and I can only assume are made in ignorance on his part. His analysis on this is sloppy as hell, I'd love to have the time to refute him point by point some time as it seems many people take him as an authority on these matters. He's also not to informed on nuclear power and reaches false conclusions about it too.
Batteries will do the 1-4 hours of storage depth that allows us to go to 95%+ RE in Australia and most other places I would expect. We have easily enough geological material reserves to make these batteries for every nation on Earth. Other forms of storage I expect to emerge this decade are thermal energy storage at industrial locations (an extremely cheap form of storage that can convert thermal back to electrical power for less cost than the price fossil gas does it today) and potentially advanced compressed air and cryogenic air (with some support from public purse to build pilot schemes). eFuels are over hyped to the max but at a high price could do all the deep storage we need.
Check out modelling by David Osmond on how little new storage we actually need based on his scaling up of existing wind, solar and storage facilities in Australia.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for-australia-is-feasible-and-affordable-with-just-a-few-hours-of-storage/?fbclid=IwAR0OC2jTC0m73nPCbbetWHW_o8t4eU08kEZppCcDqQ6MqOCkJ6BT_w43dqA
Note that as other sectors of the economy decarbonise, industrial processes being the big one, transportation and buildings etc, it increases the need for electrical energy and storage of it but it reduces the proportion of storage to demand because all these sectors have the potential to time shift demand in major ways, and feed energy back into the grid wh3en it is profitable for then to do so.
Interesting! I was definitely taking Michaux as an authority; can you say more about his bad assumptions/sloppiness? I know the buffer size issue is controversial (and also a huge driver of the final conclusions of his analysis), but his reasoning there seemed prima facie persuasive. I guess here I'm wondering if Australia's abundant sunlight for much of the year is making this level of penetration more achievable than than, say, in Germany. The linked piece note that Queensland has to carry less sunny/windy regions within Australia already. (Even so this is definitely different from the more pessimistic stuff I've seen, would love to dig into the difference in assumptions here.)
Wondering also what you think about problems in the wind industry, esp offshore projects going no-bid as soon as interest rates rose, and issues like pollution/sustainability of supply chains esp. wrt solar? You really think these can be scaled up globally to the extent needed to sustain economic growth etc.? (speaking as one skeptical that we can sustain growth in the 21st century at all)
HI there. I've been away, sorry for missing your comment and question.
Don't take anybody as an authority without checking their sources. I've learned that the hard way in the reporting of climate science and climate solutions, emissions reduction pathways and so on. Even the IPCC have areas in which their communications are junk and they sometimes improve on that and sometimes they don't, certainly not soon enough.
I'd have to review his report for the Finish Government, but I still recall that his storage capacity assumption was totally absurd. I'm not going to paraphrase what he wrote, b/c I might get into hyperbola but he clearly has never modelled an energy grid in his life. It was rookie error level of thinking. Motivated no doubt by his preoccupations with energy decent, just like Nate havens who uncritically promoted Michaux's conculsions. I'm just hypothesising here, but seems to me like the peak oilers of the 1990s (I knew a bunch of them who said RE was never going to scale) are now trying to reinvent themselves as climate and ecosystems collapse specialists.
I dislike Micheal Mann's use of the term "doomers" which has a very ugly history (which I'm sure he's aware of but uses it anyhow) because he uses it to polarise a debate that is a very important set of debates to have about ecosystem collapse, climatic tipping points etc etc to then present himself as a centrists along with others who adopt his uncontroversial (read: don't scare the horses) position and reimagines themselves as being the only rational folks in the room.
He's now published a second book expanding on his doomer themes (probably subconsciously aware that he's doing exactly that which he accuses others of, having a non-nuanced conversation with himself in his Doomers book) where he talks about things he chastised and still chastises others for talking about, hysteresis, tipping points, non-linear effects in complex systems, the presence of unknown factors in climate system stability and so on. He bemoans the lack of nuanced discussion when much of what I've seen from him on Twitter is lack of nuance and a tendency to badge people as "doomer", mount some flimsy straw man argument against their concerns and then block them before they can exercise their right of reply. I also sympathise with him the he choose to take on the brain-dead conservatives and conspiracy theorists of the Climate denial industry, funded by FF and livestock producers, but also fuelled by nothing other than the deep ignorance of the uneducated and tribal nature of contemporary society in many parts of the world, USA especially.
So I wont call Michael a capital 'D', "doomer" but he is getting well outside his area of expertise, and I could cite my own modelling and that of dozens of other teams to show that RE and storage solutions scale and in any country they can scale affordably (often with cost savings until you get to the last few percent, and even then I think the costs are exaggerated in most modelling because it's inherent conservative and has to limit assumptions to ignore potential solutions) , is affordable not a resource drain that is significantly large given present resource drain and certainly not a deal breaker. Check out an old Amory Lovins article published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists "Clean energy and rare earths: Why not to worry", 2017.
there's endless beats about rare earths by ignorant journos and consultants drumming up private work like Michaux. and yet,
• Most wind turbines don't even use rare earths
• those few turbine designs that do use R.E.s are phasing them out due to costs and (inelastic) supply chain problems/territorial concerns
• R.E.s are not "rare" — the name stems from the fact that they usually are found in low concentrations mixed with many other elements, other R.E.s and geological compounds that the R.E. being mined must be separated from. This is costly and typically quite a toxic set of processes. There are large reserves of all the REs on every continent.
• Due to the costs, and toxic outflows from processing REs, much of this industry has set up shop in mainland China and its occupied territories. Pollution is something that can be bribed away as a political or legal problem in China, after all it only pollutes the land, water and and health occupied by a hundreds of millions of peasants, so why would a nation state emerging from a Communist Revolution have any concerns around that? China of course sees the geopolitical advantage in being the worlds biggest producer of REs and saw that opportunity decades ago. Now reserves are being booked on other continents, due to geopolitical tensions as much as anything else to do with supply chain scrutiny.
I appreciate the reply, this is valuable perspective. I constantly worry about navigating the ideological biases in all these areas, especially since I also personally dislike our civilization and the path we are on and want to live in a different kind of world, so I'm definitely biased in that way too. I'm not totally sure how discrediting it is to point out that some of these dudes are peak oilers who have rebranded as systems ecologists, although that does shine a useful light on guys like Hagens. I don't think that has to be seen as like a cynical pivot, nor is it clear to me that peak oil is even wrong per se, though they obviously did not predict the shale boom. Longer term that depends on empirical unknowns about hydrocarbon reserves and complicated unknowns about what can or can't be extracted economically/without destroying ecosystems.
I take the point about the abundance of rare earths, and I appreciate the article. I'm not convinced that it invalidates the point (or what should be the point) about extracting resources and "peak X." For REs to be abundant in the relevant sense, it needs to be available both at low cost and at scale. If extracting loads of REs causes unacceptable levels of pollution, then cheap REs depends on China's unethical practices and cannot be scaled. Whether that's true or not is obviously a complicated question (depending on what extraction techniques are possible, what is considered acceptable, etc.), but there is of course a reason why extraction in general tends to take place in the developing world where, as you say, pollution can be bribed away. (It also isn't that straight forward to supply the more mundane materials needed for electrification either. It requires mineral extraction on an unprecedented scale on anybody's assumptions).
I'd love to hear more about the battery buffer thing, maybe I need to stop parroting Michaux on that!
I do still worry about two things, as far as the possibility of long-term exponential growth: (a) the energy supply needs to grow for the economy to grow (I see no immediate reason to expect this to change without some fundamental change in what we count as "growth"; note also that all that mining will be extremely energy intensive, especially as we get into lower and lower-concentration reserves), so the renewable grid would also needs to constantly grow; (b) so far renewables haven't taken any fossil power off the grid, they've only been added on top of (independently growing) fossil primary energy.
the other thing is old as history of physical technology itself, substitution. its remarkable how many breakthroughs occur which substitute out materials and/or technologies where the social licence or costs become an existential barrier for an existing supply chain and "value" proposition. especially when these industries already have made people millionaires and billionaires.
I'm not saying that makes capitalism better than any other system of organising an economy, I'm saying that substitution of materials and chemistries are often possible where the laws of physics allow for it.
Also thermal storage. You heard it first in the comments of Critical Planet. Thermal Storage is more cost effective today than fancy pants lithium ion chemistries even with a round trip back to electrical power and the energy losses that occur. Dr Volts podcast has now interviewed the founders of three or more thermal storage startups. And the tech is old and proven, like CST which had problems using salts, so the response has been to avoid salts as the heat conduit, because there are other inexpensive material which don't corrode steal pipes!
The Amory B Lovins piece, "Clean energy and rare earths: Why not to worry": https://thebulletin.org/2017/05/clean-energy-and-rare-earths-why-not-to-worry/#post-heading
this critique of RE and rare earths and the vectors for panic that are generated by misinformation is emblematic of the issues I have with Michaux on a broader level.
* Nate Hagens
This is likely relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/31/raw-materials-extraction-2060-un-report
He's some info I prosed to link to.
this is the summarising sentence for the 10 pages of critical minerals and other materials required for the global transition to RE and storage in the Master Plan Part 3 that Tesla recently published.
"In sum, there are no fundamental materials constraints when evaluating against 2023 USGS estimated resources. Furthermore, Resources and Reserves have historically increased – that is, when a mineral is in demand, there is more incentive to look for it and more is discovered. Annual mining, concentrating, and refining of relevant metal ores must grow to meet demand for the renewable energy economy, for which the fundamental constraints are human capital and permitting/regulatory timelines."
https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-3
this is linked to in the guardian article and gets into specifics. (still has false claims about rare earths being critical to permanent magnets in wind turbines but there is plenty of detail to be found on the linked reports)
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/raw-materials/areas-specific-interest/rare-earth-elements-permanent-magnets-and-motors_en
i was reading a report provided by Tesla which addressed the global demand for materials including critical minerals assuming a complete tampering out of fossil fuels in all sectors of the economy. this included the electrification of the buildings, transport and industrial processes sectors not t just stationary energy.
unfortunately several searches had failed to materialise the report. IIRC it was only published last week. as you might expect it painted a rosy picture, and i’m not suggesting anybody take Tesla’s conclusions about this at face value. always look closely at the assumptions and scooping brief.
when i get back to my main office mac i hope to relocate the report. maybe ask AI if you pay for chatGTP 4.0
« The stripping of Earth’s natural materials is already responsible for 60% of global heating impacts, including land use change, 40% of air pollution impact, and more than 90% of global water stress and land-related biodiversity loss, says the report, due to be released in February. »
i’d like to see their references on this claim. i can provide a referenced claim that farmed animal production has produced up to 84% of historical warming. it all depends how the do the accounting and categorisation for one thing. suggesting that mineral resource extraction has resulted in factors of 3 or more times the clearing of woodland and forest (the most significant drawdown sinks on Earth other than surface ocean water before the industrial period) than livestock production is curious to me. if not suspicious. i suspect they have counted all cleared land and called that a natural resource (timber or biomass) even if it was burnt to clear it (a very common way to kill forest and woodland in Australia, now exported to the world, is repeated cycles of bulldozing with chains to knock over tall trees and piling the vegetation up and burning it and the entire ground area to kill regrowth).
ref for the up to 84% of emissions claim (cf oft repeated claim that according to UNFCCC accounting rules IPCC says that 10% of present emission are due to Ag sometimes people say 14% too.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYRhGzlaehcVN8OIXo7P984n6QaSiCgYq
the references are in all the video descriptions for all citations made in each video. author of this series of videos is Gerard Wedderburn Bishop and he was an author of the BZE Land Use Report (LUR) which i contributed to (data visualisations, in form of maps and graphs).
The authors also had a peer reviewed paper published which summarised many of the high level points in the LUR. My involvement in publishing the final LUR in book form introduced me to the methane and land clearing issues associated livestock production. i had previously been made aware in 2012 of the methane emissions associated with fossil fuel production especially oil and gas for use in industry and buildings working on the BZE Buildings Plan.
GWP₂₀ /GWP₁₀₀ confusion (what was meant by time horizons and why it mattered) being one of the issues back then, leading to misunderstanding about the impact of methane on present day, future and historical contribution to global heating (37% of historical heating is due to anthropogenic methane emissions if you calculate from the IPCC Ch 8 Supplementary Material emission contribution to Radiative Forcing by GHG/aerosol table data).
it took enviro and climate orgs a full decade to get their heads around the imparable of methane emissions. (not to mention UNFCCC and IPCC WF3 a full decade longer to understand and “front end” methane mitigation rather than do what they had always done and “back ended” methane reduction in the second half of this better after CO₂ had been mitigated to a large extent).
i know this partly because i endured attacks from would be experts opinion makers and (non-peer reviewed) climate scientists attack groups i worked with and myself for challenging the mantra around methane. which amounted to “forget about i until we’ve dealt with CO₂ emissions which will do the heavy lifting and reduce methane emissions as a side effect also”.
the problems of substitution by electrification of all fossil fuel appliances is completely achievable with known reserves of minerals and other materials. will that stop capitalism in it's tracks, or make extractivism for RE or the many other uses that demand extraction from the stocks of natural resources on Earth (or the moon or asteroids or whatever they think of next to sell equity) which draw down on the affordably extracted resources? of course not.
But nobody is making that claim! Its a straw man fallacy (a frequently repeated one at that) to say such things.
the complete electrification of all human economy where FFs today dominate is no panacea for economic growth, population growth in areas where the ecological footprint is very high (rich people tend to have hundreds to thousands of time the ecological footprints of poor people comparing within a nation or *between* "rich" and "poor" nations… nor all the other vectors of ecosystem collapse.
But it is one of the best ways we can mitigate GHG emissions quickly, (and we could have transitioned AUsrtrlai already by now to a 95%+ RE grid if we'd been really deliberate about it but special interests own the 3 big energy retailers (known as gentailers since they own coal and gas generation including almost all of the large FF generation facilities in Australia). The regulators were captured to the nth degree. Neoliberalism is alive and well and more cancerous that at any time in history and meaning the perception that markets are always the most efficient (not most effective) way to orchestrate transition snit simple a (misleading) perception, it's taken as gospel but all vested interests, the Federal Dept of Finance and Treasury, the regulators the corporate media, (sadly) the public media (ABC and SBS) most political parties (via donor contributions) and even climate orgs have swallowed the cool aid deeply.
Here's a good podcast discussing this very point and taking (probably a bit too much) aim at people like Nate Hagen's and his post-peak-oiler crew. My views align much more with the guest, Marco Raugei of Oxford Brookes University than the host, Chris Nelder. Marco emphasis that it's a false dichotomy to talk of Doomers vs Transitionistas. I agree 100%. The host seemed to give tacit support for that before launching into "doomers" repeated times. The word "Doomer" has a very ugly history back to the commerce-minded detractors of William Vogt in the early part of the last century, through to the hate-fuelled attacks on the authors of the "Limits to Growth" who weren't so much wrong as didn't foresee the so-called Green Revolution coming, which doesn't negate much of what they did force, so much as disguise the issues under a varnish of "technological progress and advancement" which was, whatever your opinion on industrial farming technologies, an incredible set of plant breeding breakthroughs by a small handful of individual scientists who were determined as hell to get results.
I wondered what had angered the host so much about the "doomer" claims around RE until I heard his epilogue after the interview guest had left the call. Then I understood a bit better his motivation. I've also had to counter continual misinformation about renewables, storage, system costs of grid power under high RE penetrations etc for over a decade as a modeller and RE-transition advocate. Also, he once was in that camp, there's no zealot member of the new club like a convert from the opposing side I guess. So he knew their tactics and sloppy science inside out. (But I still agree with the guest, it's a false dichotomy)
https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-211-doomers-vs-transitionistas/
(apologies Rachel for the external link, please know I subscribe to you not to your podcast not to this other podcast, though if I wasn't a self-funded activist I would subscribe to both and many more).
great history of Doomers vs techno-salvationists in the book The Wizard and the Prophet (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-prophet#?ref=nav_comm).
The author Charles C Mann (not to be confused with chastiser of Doomers, Dr Michael E. Mann see: https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-214-countering-climate-doomerism/) comes down very much on the side of the Wizards in my opinions, especially having listened to interviews with the author but it's a major work of research and reportage so I give him top marks for that.
HI there. I've been away, sorry for missing your comment and question.
Don't take anybody as an authority without checking their sources. I've learned that the hard way in the reporting of climate science and climate solutions, emissions reduction pathways and so on. Even the IPCC have areas in which their communications are junk and they sometimes improve on that and sometimes they don't, certainly not soon enough.
I'd have to review his report for the Finish Government, but I still recall that his storage capacity assumption was totally absurd. I'm not going to paraphrase what he wrote, b/c I might get into hyperbola but he clearly has never modelled an energy grid in his life. It was rookie error level of thinking. Motivated no doubt by his preoccupations with energy decent, just like Nate havens who uncritically promoted Michaux's conculsions. I'm just hypothesising here, but seems to me like the peak oilers of the 1990s (I knew a bunch of them who said RE was never going to scale) are now trying to reinvent themselves as climate and ecosystems collapse specialists.
I dislike Micheal Mann's use of the term "doomers" which has a very ugly history (which I'm sure he's aware of but uses it anyhow) because he uses it to polarise a debate that is a very important set of debates to have about ecosystem collapse, climatic tipping points etc etc to then present himself as a centrists along with others who adopt his uncontroversial position and them being the only rational folks in the room. He's now published a book where he talks about things he chastised and still chastises others for talking about, hysteresis, tipping points, non-linear effects in complex systems, the presence of unknown factors in climate system stability and so on. He bemoans the lack of nuanced discussion when much of what I've seen from him on Twitter is lack of nuance and a tendency to badge people as "doomer", mount some flimsy straw man argument against their concerns and then block them before they can exercise their right of reply. I also sympathise with him the he choose to take on the brain-dead conservatives and conspiracy theorists of the Climate denial industry, funded by FF and livestock producers, but also fuelled by nothing other than the deep ignorance of the uneducated and tribal nature of contemporary society in many parts of the world, USA especially.
So I wont call Michael a capital 'D', "doomer" but he is getting well outside his area of expertise, and I could cite my own modelling and that of dozens of other teams to show that RE and storage solutions scale and in any country they can scale affordably (often with cost savings until you get to the last few percent, and even then I think the costs are exaggerated in most modelling because it's inherent conservative and has to limit assumptions to ignore potential solutions) , is affordable not a resource drain that is significantly large given present resource drain and certainly not a deal breaker. Check out an old Amory Lovins article published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists "Clean energy and rare earths: Why not to worry", 2017.
there's endless beats about rare earths by ignorant journos and consultants drumming up private work like Michaux. and yet,
• Most wind turbines don't even use rare earths
• those few turbine designs that do use R.E.s are phasing them out due to costs and (inelastic) supply chain problems/territorial concerns
• R.E.s are not "rare" — the name stems from the fact that they usually are found in low concentrations mixed with many other elements, other R.E.s and geological compounds that the R.E. being mined must be separated from. This is costly and typically quite a toxic set of processes. There are large reserves of all the REs on every continent.
• Due to the costs, and toxic outflows from processing REs, much of this industry has set up shop in mainland China and its occupied territories. Pollution is something that can be bribed away as a political or legal problem in China, after all it only pollutes the land, water and and health occupied by a hundreds of millions of peasants, so why would a nation state emerging from a Communist Revolution have any concerns around that? China of course sees the geopolitical advantage in being the worlds biggest producer of REs and saw that opportunity decades ago. Now reserves are being booked on other continents, due to geopolitical tensions as much as anything else to do with supply chain scrutiny.
I once read an English translation somebody had made of a ?40 year plan published by the CCP a couple of years ago. It broke down their plan into the characteristic 5 year periods.
Sadly fracking was targeted for major investment in the 20-40 year period. Not sure if it was domestic or in African client states but it was very central to their thinking unfortunately.
"With 125 years left of the stuff which produces 40% less emissions than coal,"
Hi Rachel, I've noted you often make this observation about burning fossil gas vs coal burning (to produce power which is where the stat comes from and its a very broad generalisation at best).
This neglects the fact that emission of methane are ~100x more potent in the near term (GWP₁₀ i.e. over ten years) than coal. The index most commonly used by IPCC and climate scientists to compare one GHG to another is GWP₁₀₀ which considers the impact after 100 years of a pulse emission of whatever GHG and compares it to a pulse of the same mass of CO₂ over 100 years.
Since many GHGs are chemically transformed in the atmosphere in much less time than 100 years, using this index effectively "discounts" (in economics usage of discount) the impact of methane for 88 of those years because after 12 years the methane has been converted by UV and complex reactions to CO₂ and water. But in the near term it's much more radiatively forcing as they call it. When IPCC started doing their work 100 years seemed (to the lead authors at least) like the time period we had to start bending GHG emissions to zero. Of course we know today that is time frame terribly inaccurate.
Robert Howarth et al have produced many papers on this issue and really alerted the world to the issues around it vis a vis Fossil Fuels. "The Bridge to Nowhere" 2012 is one of the more well known papers.
Gerard Weddeburn Bishop has produced a lot of summary reporting around methane issues and livestock production. He has a playlist of videos on the farmed production of animals and the impacts on climate here (100% recommend, this is generally not at all well understood even in climate activist circles and is actively resisted in mainstream orgs of the climate movement because it upsets their high-roller donors and political benefactors):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYjVNRmqu4Q&list=PLYRhGzlaehcVN8OIXo7P984n6QaSiCgYq
I worked with him on the Beyond Zero Emissions Land Use Report, 2015 which alerted me and many of my fellow activist researchers to these issues, for which I'm eternally grateful.
Thanks, Alastair. I read recently gas is nigh-on as dirty as coal. Comparing their emissions likely isn’t useful at all when we need to transition away. Thanks for bringing these other resources to my attention.
it’s worse than coal when you consider proximate tipping points and near term boiling from the GHG footprint.
but open cycle gas turbines (and reciprocating engines) can ramp hard to start up or shut down whereas coal (and nuclear) can’t ramp quickly. especially not to do so twice daily to just be dispatching to morning and dusk/evening markets where prices will remain high most of the time. so fossil gas is worse for climate but more usefully during the transition to 100% RE. (i’ve modelled this kind of transition extensively using hourly demand and weather data for years worth of data). because most grids already burn a lot of gas we don’t need more gas as coal is retired. just the same or less gas. in Australia some states like SA and WA peaked at 40% of the power mix coming from gas and we should be displacing most of that with Renewables ASAP because its cheaper tha. fossil gas and modern wind farms can have a capacity factor of 50% in the best locations for wind resources in Australia today.
the US has plenty to trade besides fossil fuels, weapons systems and military hardware that burn fossil fuels for example.