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COP27 and Greenwashing

11/26/2022

Greenwashing is a term I was unfamiliar with until recently.

Greenwashing: disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image.

The COP gatherings every year along with IPCC reports on progress in climate change are the main political mechanisms to influence government policies. While the term “greenwashing” seems to be used to describe corporations making empty promises in order to look good, the term could equally apply to governments as a whole who make promises without real commitments to create the illusion of progress when there is none.

The COP conferences highlight the conflict between economic growth and climate action, particularly in the developing world. Even if the developed world could eliminate all their emissions, growth in the developing world means that emissions would continue to rise. The current wind and solar favorites in the developed world are too expensive for the developing world which is why emissions are still growing.

So COP conferences exist because of the concerns of environmentalists, but highlight the economic problems of the preferred solutions of environmentalists that make these solutions politically un-viable. Nevertheless these are still the politically correct solutions.

https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/high-level_expert_group_n7b.pdf

By Edmund Kelly

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How (not) to run a modern society on solar and wind power

10/7/2022

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This article is a comprehensive discussion of the problems with building an electricity grid based on 100% renewable wind and solar energy. The article is fact and evidence based. The authors make the case that the various approaches that could be used to make wind and solar generation compatible with today's electricity on demand grid are impractical and will ultimately fail. This makes a welcome change from the status quo, 100% renewables, media based mantra, based on wildly optimistic and unrealistic assumptions.

The authors argue that instead of trying to make wind and solar a reliable on demand generator of electricity, we should instead adapt to using electricity when it is available. As a point of comparison they point out that Europe between 1500 and 1800 made extensive use of wind energy for sailing ships and windmills, and water energy for water wheels. In that world, energy was consumed when it was available and energy use was adapted to this reality.

I concur with the analysis of the insurmountable problems of making intermittent generation an on demand resource, but I expect that adaptation of society to intermittent power would cost at least as much economic pain as mitigating intermittency. However it would work and help mitigate climate change in a sustainable way.

In contrast, Stratosolar generation eliminates or solves these intermittency problems and generates electricity compatible with today’s electricity on demand grid without the need for expensive and unrealistic transmission and storage or painful societal change to adapt to unpredictable energy supply.

By Edmund Kelly

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The clean energy "cure" only worsens the climate "disease"

7/18/2022

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This very comprehensive article takes a realistic view of our current failing attempts to tackle climate change by reducing CO2 emissions with intermittent wind and solar. The article ends with the following summary.

"In summary, keep the priority squarely on the economic upliftment of 6 billion (and counting) developing world citizens, demand no climate change mitigation action other than the establishment of gradually rising CO2 pricing around the world, and shift all targeted technology support to RD&D of new solutions and the subsequent establishment of global value chains and scale.”

I definitely agree with the targeted technology support to RD&D of new solutions. However, policies to implement carbon taxes and providing direct RD&D support have been pushed for decades without making any significant headway towards acceptance. Our experience with Stratosolar can speak directly to the lack of imagination and the inadequacy of current RD&D funding for innovative solutions.

By Edmund Kelly

https://medium.com/a-balanced-transition/climate-action-when-the-cure-becomes-worse-than-the-disease-7912e8ca51d1

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The need for speed in tackling the 1.5 degree C goal

6/18/2022

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This article admits the obvious fact that the odds of limiting the rise in global average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius are slim to none. Despite this the official party line from politicians and scientists still focuses on this goal as if it were achievable. Similarly, the politically correct scientific and political view is that wind and solar are the cheapest sources of energy. These two views are inconsistent in that if wind and solar were really cheaper than fossil fuels in delivering electricity, their adoption rate should be much higher than it is which would in turn make the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius more achievable.

As the article points out, admitting we are failing might raise the sense of urgency and spur more vigorous action. However this is unlikely. Politicians are most likely very aware how unattainable the 1.5 degree Celsius goal is. They are also aware of the political and financial constraints and at the same time want it to seem like they are accomplishing something useful.

All that politics can do is adjust the landscape for market forces to provide the solutions. This applies as much to centrally planned China as free market democracies. Until there are technical solutions that truly provide cheaper clean energy with sustainable resources and no political roadblocks, governments are already doing what fits within today’s political constraints.

Stratosolar is a technical solution that can make solar energy a realistic, cheaper, sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. It's a one stop packaged solution with no external dependencies beyond regulatory site approvals. Because of the large scale of plants, relatively few sites need to be approved, about 100 for the US and 1000 worldwide. The small number of sites and the low environmental impact should enable very rapid deployment.

The climate problem is urgent but hoping that politicians will mandate drastic measures with severe economic consequences is naïve and foolish. Only when there is a viable alternative can politics act. This should have been the lesson learned from acid rain and ozone depletion where politics could act because viable solutions existed.

Stratosolar is a potentially viable solution that enables political action to succeed.

By Edmund Kelly

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433903-000-admitting-we-may-fail-to-hit-1-5c-can-help-us-tackle-climate-change/

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America’s clean energy is stuck.

5/31/2022

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According to this recent article in the Economist, the US clean energy investment in solar and wind generation is set to decline by at least 10% in 2022 over 2021. Despite a democrat administration and a congress that are theoretically very pro clean energy and want to supposedly invest heavily, the net effect of the administration's actions on tariffs and sanctions on China is to reduce investment while simultaneously congress cannot pass any new investment support. This not only sets back progress on achieving green energy goals, it also reduces employment by several hundred thousand jobs, severely damaging the democrat pro labor image.

The US is already a relatively low investor in clean energy, especially considering the size of its economy. Fossil fuel interests are dominant and the partisan divide ensures there is no consensus. The economist article explains the current decline is due more to internal politics within democrats than rising costs and supply chain constraints.

The politically correct consensus on solving climate change by reducing CO2 focuses on government action. There has been government action for several decades and it has achieved some limited success. However progress stalled almost a decade ago and the simplest explanation is that we have reached the limit of what government action alone can achieve.

Historically energy transitions only occur when there are significant benefits of the transition over the past status quo. The evidence is that the real cost of current wind and solar are too high for market forces to lead the transition and we have reached the political limit of government action.

Stratosolar eliminates the need to solve the intermittency problem with solar and also reduces the cost of generation by a factor of three. Overall this means that it is a dispatchable direct replacement for natural gas at a lower cost. This can be a basis for a successful energy transition in a relatively short time frame. As with current solar, the learning curve is still operating and costs can continue to fall, further accelerating the clean energy transition.

By Edmund Kelly

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BNEF latest update on clean energy investment to end of 2021 and some future scenarios to meet climate goals.

4/19/2022

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Bloomberg has broadened its focus beyond investment in renewable energy generation (shown above in yellow) to include investment in other clean energy sectors including electrified transport. As can be seen, electrified transport investment is growing fast and will soon surpass electricity generation investment.

In previous blog posts we have observed that the investment in renewable energy generation has been pretty static at around $300B/year for the last decade. This graph shows a continuation of this trend. There is a slight upward trend but it's at about the underlying rate of inflation so there is no real investment growth in renewable energy generation. As we have previously asserted, this rate of investment in renewables generation is far below what is needed to achieve climate change goals.

In the graph below, Bloomberg has quantified the increase in investment out to 2030 that is needed to meet climate change goals by 2050 for three scenarios. The green scenario is a renewable energy only solution. The gray scenario envisages carbon capture and storage (CCS) reducing the need for renewable generation. The red scenario is heavily dependent on nuclear power. The yearly investment in generation as shown has to increase approximately tenfold to decarbonize the energy sector in a timely manner.
While renewable energy generation investment has stalled, given the announced plans from almost all major auto manufacturers and the competitive threat from Tesla, the projected increased investment in electrified transport is probably achievable. The most probable scenario is the green scenario, given the negative political sentiment surrounding nuclear and CCS. However a 10X growth in investment for renewables generation is hard to see happening given current circumstances where fossil fuels are resurgent and renewables are stalled.

The data clearly shows that renewable energy investment is stalled. There are many technical and political headwinds that explain this stagnation. Stratosolar is a path that can overcome these headwinds and help achieve the green scenario with much lower investment due to its higher capacity factor and lack of a long term intermittency problem.

By Edmund Kelly

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solving the existential threat of world energy security

3/9/2022

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Current events in the Ukraine are a lesson in how a world dependent on fossil fuels is also a world formed by unstable relationships between geopolitical fossil fuels have and have nots.
There are two major geographies that are dependent on fossil fuel imports, Europe and China. China is a relatively recent but very fast growing importer of oil. There are two major exporters of oil, Russia and the middle east, dominated by Saudi Arabia. Europe has moved gradually to importing more from Russia as China has competed for oil from the middle east. Middle eastern oil is protected by the “Pax Americana” which meant that European oil used to be from a relatively secure source. Russia has proved to be other than secure and reliable.

As Russia has grown militarily aggressive it is clear that the European gamble on a stable interdependent relationship with Russia has proven to be a bad choice. Europe has finally recognized this and is now in a mad scramble to reduce its dependency on Russian oil (and gas). Unfortunately the world supply of oil and gas is not very elastic and switching suppliers is going to be very costly. Increasing the emphasis on renewable energy as an alternative is going to accelerate the realization of how expensive and slow this path is.

Already fossil fuel suppliers around the world are starting to increase supply and there are pressures building to keep and grow nuclear power. European renewables will face growing competition despite political support. Northern Europe has a geography that is bad for solar energy, particularly in winter.

The European need for a reliable source of energy will badly impact their goal for clean renewable energy to fight climate change. In an ideal world there would be an affordable renewable energy alternative, that now that there is political will for fast change, could be quickly deployed.

Stratosolar provides a clean and affordable renewable energy solution for Europe and the world.
Affordable energy from solar energy that has no geographical constraint can make the world far more politically stable as well as helping solve the growing climate crisis. It avoids the technological and political risks of the other contenders like existing alternative energy sources, and nuclear fission and fusion.

By Edmund Kelly

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Grid Resiliency

2/20/2022

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Grid resiliency is increasingly a topic of discussion, largely because of very public large scale power disruptions that seem to be becoming more common. This recent article in the Wall Street Journal is an example. While the increasing amount of intermittent wind and solar generation are contributors to this decreased resiliency, given their still relatively low percentage of generation this is not the full story. The decline of coal and the accompanying rise in natural gas is the biggest change in electricity generation over the last decade. This has been accompanied by an increasingly deregulated industry where responsibility for resiliency is not clearly delineated.

It turns out that natural gas is dependent on its own distribution network of storage and gas pipelines which have different attributes from the coal distribution and storage network it has replaced. As was demonstrated in Texas in 2021, the gas network needs to be designed to handle freezing temperatures and is dependent on the electricity network to power parts of its infrastructure. The lesson is that big changes in the grid take time to stabilize and the current de centralized deregulated approach only reacts to structural problems after they are apparent, and does not anticipate.

This should be a lesson for what is to become as wind and solar grow and coal and nuclear continue to decline. This will be a far more consequential change with far bigger problems to solve. It is easy to anticipate that the grid will become far less resilient very quickly. There will be an inevitable backlash when reality sinks in.

By Edmund Kelly

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-power-grid-is-increasingly-unreliable-11645196772

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Reliability of wind and solar power worldwide

1/11/2022

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This peer reviewed article was published in Nature communications on October 21, 2021, titled “Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power worldwide”. It uses global databases for wind and solar energy resource availability on an hourly basis over 39 years and over a fine grained geographical grid to model the potential reliability of various mixes of wind, solar, storage over large geographical areas that assume the transmission system can connect supply with demand. As such it does not try to estimate the economics, just reliability.

The analysis is pretty comprehensive and covers a wide range of options. The options that produce the highest reliability have excess generation of 1.5X to 3X, have 12 hours of storage and cover continent wide geographical areas. No area achieves 100% reliability though reliability in the high 90% range is achievable for all geographies. This still leaves some long duration outages everywhere.

This analysis can be regarded as optimistic as it only covers 39 years of data. A simple analysis of California shows that there are very bad events that only occur once in 100 years or more. It also assumes perfect long distance transmission and a control system that always connects available supply with demand. The article discusses this and assumes some backup from non intermittent sources like geothermal, fuel synthesis, hydro etc. will be necessary.

Say the shortfall is 1%. That does not mean that the backup generation capacity is 1% of generation capacity. It means that backup generation capacity approaching 100% of capacity is necessary for 1% of the time. So along with a very expensive wind and solar based electricity generation system, a large and expensive backup generation system is needed as well.

This analysis shows that the true cost of using intermittent energy sources is not the direct cost of generation but the costs of trying to make them reliable by mitigating the effects of long duration intermittency. Stratosolar's big benefit is it has NO long duration intermittency and so does not have to incur the costs of excess generation capacity or long distance transmission that far exceed the costs of generation alone.

Combined with Stratosolar’s 3X capacity factor advantage, the absence of these extra costs mean that Stratosolar's overall cost advantage over ground intermittent wind and solar is in the region of 5X to 10X cheaper. This means that synthetic fuels made using Stratosolar electricity will be 5X to 10X cheaper and provide an affordable source of seasonal storage and transportation fuels.

Hopefully analysis like that from this paper will bring some sanity to the 100% renewables debate and open up discussion of alternatives that can achieve the reliability of power generation that is essential to modern economies.

By Edmund Kelly

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Sustainability and Stratosolar

12/27/2021

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The amount of resources required to build renewable sources of energy is substantial. Comparing ground Solar PV and Stratosolar, there are several areas where Stratosolar requires far fewer resources including glass, steel, mass for storage, and land.

Glass: Conventional PV panels use glass for protection from corrosion, primarily from water. Stratosolar is situated where there is no water in any form, which simplifies the protection problem considerably. Stratosolar panels use no glass and weigh 2kg/m2 or less. Glass for conventional PV panels weighs about 10 kg/m2 and panel total weight approaches 20 kg/m2.

Today’s PV production is about 200 GW/year and uses about 10 million tons of glass. Scaled up to 2 TW/year to meet a 2050 deadline for net zero CO2 would mean 100 million tons of glass per year. Today's annual glass production is about 200 million tons of which about 100 million tons is for flat glass. Glass production will need to expand rapidly as will the supply of sand and energy to make the glass. To reiterate, Stratosolar needs no glass.

Steel: today's PV uses steel for supporting structures, about the same weight as glass or about 100 million tons of steel per year. Stratosolar needs no steel.

Energy storage: Ground based energy storage is mostly focused on battery and gravity energy storage technologies. Energy storage comes down to Wh/kg. Batteries range from about 200 Wh/kg for Lithium ion to less than 50 Wh/kg for various long duration storage technologies like flow batteries. Ground based gravity storage is about 0.3 Wh/kg. Stratosolar gravity storage is about 50 Wh/kg. If we estimate mass for storage based on daily storage of 10 hours for an annual addition of 1TW of electricity generation, or 10TWh/year of storage, this results in the following annual demand.

Ground gravity storage: 40 billion tons of rock, dirt concrete or water.
Stratosolar gravity storage: 200 million tons of water.
Battery storage: 50 million tons to 200 million tons of chemicals.

Because it does not have long duration intermittency to deal with, the stratosolar mass is the complete solution whereas ground PV will need a combination of more storage, excess generation and long distance transmission, all of which add a need for more resources.

Land: This is perhaps the most constraining resource for ground PV, mostly because of political constraints. Most estimates lowball the need by ignoring the increased demand from an all electric economy and the added demand from economic growth over 30 years.
Ground PV needs relatively flat land and panels have to be spaced to limit shading. Averaged over all geographies PV generates about 10W of electricity per meter squared (10 W/m2). For 1 TW of new electricity generation this adds up to about 100,000 km2 of land per year, or a total of 3 million km2 over 30 years. The total land mass for the US, Europe and China is about 10 million km2 each. Much of this is mountains and hills or remote deserts. Each of these geographies would need to find flat land near urban areas approaching 1 million square km or build more than 100,000 km of new high voltage transmission lines to remote deserts.
Stratosolar only directly affects a little land for the tethers and an assembly area. There would be an urban exclusion zone for the area beneath the array, which could be built over mountains or coastal waters. Arrays would be few, perhaps 100 for the US and 1,000 worldwide and would be positioned perhaps 200km from urban areas, minimizing the need for long distance transmission.

Stratosolar drastically reduces the need for material resources and precious land and is far more sustainable than current intermittent energy sources.

By Edmund Kelly

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<<Previous

COP27 and Greenwashing

How (not) to run a modern society on solar and wind power

The clean energy "cure" only worsens the climate "disease"

The need for speed in tackling the 1.5 degree C goal

America’s clean energy is stuck.

BNEF latest update on clean energy investment to end of 2021 and some future scenarios to meet climate goals.

solving the existential threat of world energy security

Grid Resiliency

Reliability of wind and solar power worldwide

Sustainability and Stratosolar

Ed Kelly

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