If other low-carbon sources, namely wind and solar PV, are to fill the shortfall in nuclear, their deployment would have to accelerate to an unprecedented level. In the past 20 years, wind and solar PV capacity has increased by about 580 gigawatts in advanced economies. But over the next 20 years, nearly five times that amount would need to be added.
This is misleading enough to make one question every "fact" stated in TFA. 20 years ago was essentially a zero point for the statistic they cite. It was less than 5 gigawatts, anyway. It grew by over 100 times in that 20 years, and it will be "unprecedented" to grow by 5 times in the next 20? (5 < 100) Is anyone at this agency numerate?
> 20 years ago was essentially a zero point for the statistic they cite. It was less than 5 gigawatts, anyway. It grew by over 100 times in that 20 years, and it will be "unprecedented" to grow by 5 times in the next 20?
Do you expect the growth rate of Google over the next 20 years will be the same as it was between 1999 and today?
As things mature you don't get the same level of exponential growth. Meanwhile the subsidies for solar are being reduced etc.
And your chart is installed capacity, not panel production capacity. The growth in panel production capacity is lower than that visual implies.
But let's suppose we could replace nuclear with solar. That doesn't really work because solar can't produce at night and adding the requirement of batteries would make the demand for daytime-only solar generation fall off significantly, but suppose we could do it. That's still not what we need -- we need the expanding solar capacity to replace coal. Every GW of nuclear it would have to replace is one more GW of coal that stays online.
There have been some efforts to make residential geothermal heat pumps price competitive in many markets. In which case, winter insolation with clouds may actually be enough to heat houses.
I would guess that we'll see far more thermal storage (refrigerators, water heaters, etc...) in households as appliances get smarter.
That's why I went with air-based heat pumps instead of geothermal. Everyone I spoke with told me that it was very risky, cost-wise, to install where I live.
Granted, geothermal might be more affordable in other geologies.
Depends on a case by case basis. You'd need a desert, the South of Spain, Greece or Texas. Just like geothermal, it's very location specific, whereas one could deploy a nuclear reactor on the Moon or Mars.
Maybe a bit nitpicking, but solar would even work better on moon and mars due to the lack of atmosphere. But yes, here on earth it is very location specific.
Was this reply intended to go here? I made no predictions. I complained about the word "unprecedented". Are you holding IEA to the same standard you're attempting to apply here? ISTM you've steelmanned their deception to the point that it no longer resembles TFA. They didn't include any of this sophistry.
Have all the factories that got us to this level of (obviously) installed capacity burned down recently? Have the investors who invested in them and the engineers who built them all died?
OK, I'll make a prediction. Solar capacity will rise to 100% of today's total capacity, and it still won't displace lots of other energy sources. Why? Because when power is cheaper and has fewer negative externalities, we'll use more of it.
If you want to be a stickler, what that actually means is that it has never happened before. Have we ever installed ~2500 GW of new photovoltaic generation capacity over a twenty year period? Of any individual generation method?
> Have all the factories that got us to this level of (obviously) installed capacity burned down recently? Have the investors who invested in them and the engineers who built them all died?
It's not just a question of supply. It's also a question of demand.
Subsidizing five times as much capacity would require five time as much government money, which may not be available. If the subsidies end, the demand curve takes a hit.
In addition to that, the fact that solar only generates during the day hasn't yet become an issue because the daytime demand is higher, so solar can currently be efficiently used to satisfy the demand differential between day and night. But once there is enough solar generating capacity to satisfy the full differential, that efficiency ends and you start having to deal with expensive energy storage or paying capital and maintenance for alternative generation which is idle and unproductive half the day, effectively requiring the cost of solar to fall lower than the alternative's fuel/operating cost only and not the total cost including capital and maintenance, because the capital and maintenance then have to be paid anyway to make the capacity available at night.
It has also been getting installed more in the locations amenable to it -- places with more sunlight, clearer skies and less expensive land. Notice that a lot of the existing capacity is in places like Arizona and not places like Seattle. But once the demand in those locations is satisfied, you have to move to places without those characteristics and you get less power at higher cost.
Meanwhile just because you have the existing supply doesn't mean you have the existing supply. You need the price to fall to the level that it becomes economical to generate power even for use at night in Seattle, but that price may be lower than the price that customers in Asia and South America would pay, so even if the supply exists, it ends up going somewhere else first.
All this to say that extrapolating from an exponential curve is generally wrong sooner or later, and frequently sooner.
> Solar capacity will rise to 100% of today's total capacity, and it still won't displace lots of other energy sources. Why? Because when power is cheaper and has fewer negative externalities, we'll use more of it.
If it becomes genuinely cheaper even in northern cities and even with the cost of energy storage, it will displace lots of other energy sources and we'll use more of it. But that's still speculation that may or may not ever actually happen. And maybe it does, but it's still justifiable to be prepared if it doesn't.
Have we ever installed ~2500 GW of new photovoltaic generation capacity over a twenty year period? Of any individual generation method?
According to "The Shift Project" [0], we added over 1700 GW of fossil fuel generation between 1994 and 2014. Since less than 900 GW was added between 1980 and 2000, that was also "unprecedented", if we're using this weak definition of that word. We can expect any twenty-year period for any generation mode other than maybe dried-dung burning to be unprecedented in that sense. 1700 is still in the same ballpark for a smaller population with less economic development than we can expect twenty years from now.
It's also a question of demand.
OK, sure, maybe we won't need that much power. Maybe we'll need more. Maybe we'll need it earlier or later. Let's try to remember the discussion we're having, though. TFA is crying about the fate of nuclear. One of their cries is that nuclear is the only generation mode that can control greenhouse gases. In order to ignore the elephants called "solar" and "wind", they have to pretend that the growth in those generation modes will soon slow down massively. You don't save that ridiculous pretense by wondering about demand. The demand level is part of the premise of their whole ridiculous argument. If demand ends up being less, then we won't need as much solar and wind power.
You can't overtake oil without spending a comparable amount on developing renewables. While it isn't quite there yet, soon renewables will be a bigger business than oil. That's impressive, and it makes the kind of growth needed to replace nuclear power plausible.
The main reason for the current inflection point is that the cost per unit energy for solar/wind has dropped precipitously (and continues to drop), while the cost/energy for most fossil fuels is growing rapidly (natural gas is an exception, due to new fracking tech). And nuclear is such a massive long-term capital investment in a rapidly developing energy picture that the risk profile is really bad, even if a new plant operates perfectly with no problems for its entire planned lifespan. Nobody wants to be the one who decided to build a nuclear plant for X dollars/gigawatt (most of that cost up-front), only to have solar going for .5X before the new plant is even operational.
And it's not just the cost of solar/wind that's dropping... it's the cost of short-term energy storage, by way of batteries/thermal/hydro/etc. Nuclear plants are base-load power, good for long-term stable output rather than quick spikes up and down. But short-term storage allows solar/wind to act as baseline as well, capturing more when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and dumping it from storage when needed.
Committing to expensive nuclear power plants now, with this much disruption going on, is a good way for a utility to go bankrupt twenty, thirty years from now.
Yes and it's interesting to quote the rest of that paragraph, which ends up arguing that clean energy transitions "would end up hurting consumers through higher electricity bills."[1]
The use of the term "hurting" here is a tell. Yeah, you know, maybe fixing the planet will require a mobilization on the scale of going to war and result in higher prices. That's not hurting people; that's helping our children live on a planet free of nuclear waste and climate disaster.
[1] "Such a drastic increase in renewable power generation would create serious challenges in integrating the new sources into the broader energy system. Clean energy transitions in advanced economies would also require $1.6 trillion in additional investment over the same period, which would end up hurting consumers through higher electricity bills."
Haha, this may be the first time in history that nuclear enthusiasts have pretended to give a damn about ratepayers. I'd bet that most of their "$1.6 trillion" figure comes from decommissioning dangerous nuclear plants. We've already spent that money, assholes...
I'd believe 90% of current capacity, but it won't get to that portion of total capacity. Solar isn't perfect for every situation. Even so, when energy is cheaper with fewer negative externalities, we'll use more of it.
> their deployment would have to accelerate to an __unprecedented__ level
Parent comments point is that the 5x growth is not unprecedentedly fast compared to the past 20 years, its unprecedentedly slow compared to the past 20 years. Contrary to what the quote claims, and in line with projections from the past, the solar business would have to seriously slow down to miss the 5x milestone.
Why is it likely to be a hilarious underestimate? That seems like a statement that needs some support. Graphs don't go up forever; growth curves level off; growth gets harder the bigger you get. Linear growth forever should not be the default assumption for any energy technology, even one that is growing fast now.
But why does the curve level off? Supply and demand. Assuming that renewable energy is superior to fossil fuel from both environmental and cost perspective (it is, or soon will be), then it can reasonably be expected to grow until all fossil-based sources have been displaced, and it is no longer profitable to build more capacity.
Because people want cheap, cleaner electricity and we haven't used up all that much space yet. Manufacturing capacity is still growing, the rest of the industry is still growing, it's not likely that there will be a year in the next 20 where global installations are smaller than this year.
Depends if you are looking at it as growing linearly or exponentially. You can make an argument solar is growing exponentially, doubling ever so often, at the moment.
No, it has not taken off exponentially yet in the way the Tony Seba video demonstrates with a picture of 5th Ave in NYC in the year 1900 where there are lots of horses used for transportation, and only one car, compared with a picture of the same street in 1913, where the street is full of cars, and there is only one horse to be found.
There's the formal definition of "exponential", and then there is "exponential" in the sense of completely disruptive and transformative as in the example Tony Seba gives. I am referring to the latter.
One of the comments there points it out: The government keeps passing subsidies for solar that nominally expire, then renewing them again before they expire. Then the government's models assume the subsidies expire when the law says they will rather than getting renewed time and again.
Going from 5-580 is much easier than going from 580->2500. Just ask anyone how hard it was to make their first 100,000, million, billion, etc. Using multiples is actually oversimplifying the issue (i.e. "to make a hundred dollars, you just have to make $10 10 times, so making $1000 from $100 should be just as easy")
Not that I would necessarily know, but I always heard that the first million was the hardest? You seem to be arguing in support of my point? That is, switch out "first million dollars" for "first 580 gigawatts".
It's hard in the beginning, because of research and development. After that, you got the technology side covered, you got the processes side covered, all you need is to build and install.
Making the first mobile phones was hard. Making another million mobile phones today: not that hard. Especially if you make a million more of an established model.
No, that's not how it works. Every growth process has limits. Solar has much more limits than mobile phones: land, resources (phones are tiny compared to solar panels), labour (not just production, but also placing the panels and maintaining them)... I reckon if we treat solar panels like mobile phones (throw away every 1.5 years) we won't get far...
Limits only matter when we at least start getting close to reaching those. There is enough land, labor and resources for lots of solar panels while most of us in the western world already have a smartphone and seem to replace them less often due to a seemingly slower tech cycle.
I'm not convinced, solar is only now becoming cost competitive, that means for most of this period it was more expensive than its competitors. Now its getting into the realms of being the cheapest option, so why would growth be harder to come by?
Oversimplifying maybe but renewables are passing the tipping point of being the cheapest energy source without needing subsidies which will make things easier.
This is misleading enough to make one question every "fact" stated in TFA. 20 years ago was essentially a zero point for the statistic they cite. It was less than 5 gigawatts, anyway. It grew by over 100 times in that 20 years, and it will be "unprecedented" to grow by 5 times in the next 20? (5 < 100) Is anyone at this agency numerate?
Don't believe me, take a look at the charts here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Sure those don't include wind, but when you find those charts they will look the same. Anyway wind isn't growing as fast as solar.