UKH

This is a really interesting article on renewables I really hope it turns out to be right.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54723147

I do too, but I think the major driver of energy consumption and carbon emission is population.

Reminds me of the hype in the 1950's that  nuclear generated electricity would be "too cheap to meter".

I’m not convinced that much cheaper energy is any good in the long run.  Fast forwards a couple of centuries and every major desert will be irrigated by the output of giant desalinisation plants, there’ll be a growing salinisation crisis in the littoral kelp zones, population will have exploded and so on and so forth.

Perhaps Malthus - in the form of scarcity of power - is all that’s stopping humanity from sucking a bunch of other resources out of the planet.

Rising standards of welfare.

I thought the article was a hotchpotch 

it's absolutely true that wind power has become economical, but this is down to engineering rather than new technology

Commercial solar panels have improved now able to convert 20% of the sun's energy falling on them matching the highest tech used on satellites around 10-15 years ago when commercial panels were only 10% efficient.  panels are not going to get much more efficient and there will be no technology that can suck more energy out of the sun than falls on them naturally.   The only way to boost solar output is to cover more crop growing area with panels instead.

Filling the gaps between sunny and/or windy days is a challenge for energy storage.  The difficulties of hydrogen economy are sometimes overstated.  if you were to pump hydrogen into the national gas grid it would leak like a sieve on account of hydrogen molecules being an awful lot smaller than  than methane molecules.  A water electrolysis/fuel cell battery storage system is a lot less efficient and more expensive than the large battery systems that are started to be rolled out, but the rare materials required would be massive compared to existing demand for mobile phone and vehicle batteries which are already causing a lot of environmental damage in their extraction and refining.

Trying to draw a parallel between rapid advances in mobile phone technology and the problems of energy supply seems ridiculous; they are totally different. 

There's an awful lot of rooftop area not covered in solar-PV right now.  It's also possible to make PV power at night by radiating infra-red photons though the atmospheric window into space on a cloudless night although it's early days for practical devices.   If you could get the balance right to have one that self-cools by having high daytime emissivity in that window you'd have quite the clever widget. 

Vehicle batteries have the potential to help significantly, as does smart load shifting.

You can do a bit better by running the Sabatier reaction with CO2 and H2 to make methane and water.  Looses efficiency but then the gas no longer leaks like mad...

Rare earth usage is being reduced all the time however and I think can likely eventually be eliminated.  Aluminium will eventually replace lithium as well, and that is a lot more abundant.

They're connected in that economies of scale and newer tech makes things better, beyond that it's a frankly bizarre connection to make I agree.

For all my positivity, I don't underestimate the massive amount of work needed to deliver a carbon-free energy grid.  I think it's not a case of one solution vs another but using all of them for now...

I've carried out technical and financial evaluations for a number of clients interested in using their large flat roofs for solar PV, without feed in tariff the return is a lot less than they would get in the bank

This is true to some extent and can help balance the grid making best use of the most efficient gas fires CCGT stations but no way near enough to make up for a few winter windless days

So just use natural gas?

We will see.......

Indeed, more sophisticted chips use less power be MByte

The importance of energy efficiency is often overlooked

There's an awful lot of pitched roofs without PV as well as flat, and panels are getting ever cheaper.  One thing mobile technology has done is massively improve compact switch mode power converters which is reflected in the rise of micro-inverters for solar-PV which also helps improve the efficiency of sub-optimal roofs.

I think the big change is with full roof renewal and building renewal - so on multi-decade timescales - when new and replacement roofs are made with integrated solar-PV rather than having it bolted on with additional rails and panels.  The marginal cost of adding solar-PV this way is much, much less than of bolting it on to an existing roof which combined with future economies of scale is going to move the economics on a lot from where we are now. 

Yup, the still winter days are the killer in everything except tidal, and that doesn't work for many countries.

If you've got excess renewables in the summer and you can convert it to methane with the Sabatier reaction you can store it in the gas grid.  This only really makes sense once renewables aren't displacing CCGT and natural gas - so not now, but one day - and the gas grid storage capacity is enough that renewable > H2 > methane > storage > CCGT could have a role in the winter problems.  I think it's marginally less stupid than seasonal storage of H2 or LH2.

No fundamental problems, money being thrown at it, progress being made.  It's not here till it's here, but I'm positive.  

Then they just put more chips in and write worse software thought...    If you look at the energy used to produce a paper on an AI method in a leading journal now it's horrific.  Not just running a giant model but running it millions of times to explore the hyperparameter space.    One recent paper on solving a Rubki's cube with an AI robot was estimated to have used 2.8 GW hours of energy - https://www.wired.com/story/ai-great-things-burn-planet/

Although when you dig in to the numbers a modern EV is hellishly efficient.  But yes, improving domestic and commercial building insulation, ripping out all the sodium street lights, turning street lighting off after 12 pm like in parts of France, reducing travel with more WFH, there are many angles to improve this. 

Poverty and scarcity promotes population growth as parents need somebody to support them in old age.

Education and wealth stops population growth - see every country in history that has gone from developing to developed or from poor to wealthy.

Consumption might/will explode. Population won't.

I agree with all of that, but that's in the world as it is now.  

I agree that poverty and scarcity promotes growth, but I disagree that fundamentally education and wealth stop growth.  Right now they do, but that's a product of the world around us.

If you remove the limits that make more population growth a bad idea - by irrigating the deserts, by reclaiming Doggerland, by Antarctica and Greenland emerging from the ice, by draining the Mediterranean, by going to other planets or star systems then the levers applied to the educated, well resourced people change and population grows again.

I don't think copious clean energy at a fraction of its current cost is going to do the planet any long term favours.

To be honest I thought that article was based on little more than hope and speculation. An analogy to smart phones is very over simplistic and not apparently relevant. The article may encourage some young prospective engineers and scientists to take up work in that direction, which would be a good thing. 

Unfortunately the vast majority of articles on energy policy are written with an agenda behind them in one way or another. There is a current bbc article about the apparent liklihood of Sizewell C being given the go-ahead which gives some background/wider context on the reaspns for pursuing nuclear alongside renewables and is much more neutral and rralistic than most (in most respects.)  It's worth reading if you found this one interesting. 

With apologies to the OP, can I ask for opinions on where (which problems/areas), advances in materials science would most benefit the environment? Energy storage? Al/Fe based batteries? Catalysis? 

I want to jump ship from working on biomedical applications but don't have any grasp of which problems are actually important and which are of little relevance or have been largely solved already. There's so much PR, BS, and myth to wade through... 

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Infinite number of problems to solve.  Many combinations of those solutions could fix everything.  I'd like fusion to work.

Economic electricity storage without using rare metals end the associated environmental despoliation would solve many of the problems, particularly in allowing greater take up of renewables  but would also improve the economics of a 100% nuclear supply.  There's massive financial resources being devoted  to this already. 

Fusion is a white elephant, substantially more expensive even then nuclear fission reactors.  The science may have been largely solved but not the engineering in being able to extract energy through a wall with 10 x the temperature of the sun the other side of it 

The so called hydrogen economy is just a means of storing then distributing electrical energy, but with all the attendant problems of leakage due to very small molecules

Fusion is certainly not a white elephant.  We are going to need it eventually.  Everything is expensive until you succeed in making it cheap. 

There's so much going on with battery research in both academia and industry - reducing the amount of rare earth stuff, aluminium chemistry, increasing the number of cycles they can do without needing physically recycling etc.  This feels to me like the clearest way to make a difference - remove rare earths and lithium and everything changes, let alone if the theoretical energy density of aluminium chemistry batteries can be reached - 6,000 mile cars and electric general aviation.  That's a pipe dream - for now...

A lot of this battery stuff is near voodoo level surface chemistry and diffusion; the tech news website arstechnica.com has quite a few excellent articles on batteries pitched at or just below your level if you do biomedical device development (they're written a bit less specifically at people making devices, more generally an IT audience).  A lot of this is incremental work in both the chemistry and in making scalable, reliable manufacturing processes.  The later would suit people who like a challenge and who understand the importance of defined processes and aren't put off by the idea that some undocumented minor decision may actually be critical to the whole process working, and can hunt those down, evidence them and formalise them to allow more factories to be built...

I'm not a person to ask on catalysts.

Energy storage - if you include "smart grid" technologies in here like linking short- and mid-range forecasts to scheduling of intensive energy usage from households up to heavy industry and transport, this goes way beyond batteries and hauling concrete up and down mountains on robotic trains to store energy (a serious proposal).  

I'd steer clear of mainstream fusion if you want to change the world in your lifetime, rather than get paid to do undoubtedly cool research - ITER is a preposterous white elephant that isn't driving the state off the art half as much as its proponents like to claim and is so monstrously large and ridden with so many barely solvable problems that it's not going to directly result in any viable solutions in your lifetime or mine I suspect.   There are some really interesting commercial and academic developments in other reactor designs - MIT with SPARC, EMC2 with their Polywell, General Fusion with their insane steam piston driven ball of swirling molten lead providing inertial confinement and solving the problem Kevin notes about extracting power through the wall, Tri-Alpha etc. A lot of these have received significant venture and/or military funding and whilst not as well developed as ITER they at least look like something that could conceivably crank out energy at an affordable cost within a lifetime if their problems are solved - problems of which there are many...  But most of them aren't as extreme as the ones ITER has ended up with...

A less glamorous area is tech recycling - recovering rare earths effectively from electronics and batteries for example.  I don't know much about what's going on in that field.

The only thing we need fusion for is manned interstellar transport.   There's bucket loads of power sleeting down on Earth as light and then swirling around it as wind and waves.  I don't think my opinion having done some estimates is any different from that Robert Heinlein reached in 1940 when he wrote "Let There Be Light" having I think done the same estimates and having foreseen the invention of the solar-PV cell. 

I say fusion is needed for a star drive...  I'm working on a hybrid propulsion model for interstellar transport that could get a manned craft to c/10 using non-fusion technologies that are generally at TRL 3 or 4 right now.  The main problem is how to stop it at the other end...

The article is basically nonsense as it miss understands the economics and hence incentives. 
 

Virtually all renewable development so far has occurred due to government subsidies. These essentially provide a government guaranteed income source which means the assets acts a bit like a government bond. Initially this subsidiary was very generous and hence developers could sell assets (or even the rights to build assets) for a huge markup. Generally the sellers were not nice fluffy companies that wanted to change the world but instead private equity types who’d spotted a great arbitrage opportunity.

Now the subsidy’s are a lot lower but the government backing of the income stream is critical. As government bonds are at negative rates even a 4% return can make these investments attracted to organisations like pension funds. However if interest rates were to rise there would be far fewer investors interested.

If you remove the subsidies you cause two problems. Firstly the asset becomes far less interesting to long term investors as the stability is gone. Secondly the power has to be sold into the market and if you’ve built higher amounts of it - as that article recommends then it’s price will be practically zero providing no incentive for anyone to invest. This is theoretically fixable by storage but that’s a long way from being economic...

IMO forget renewables in stable countries and just build nuclear (same design 20 times so we sort out the supply chain and learning curve) if you actually care about climate change. It offers the ability to drop CO2 to near zero on energy, transport and heating without requiring too much lifestyle changes. The issue of too much power at certain times is much easier to fix as it will be predictable unlike with renewable  (eg use for aluminium smelting, high energy industrial processes etc) 

Nuclear needs greater subsidies (in the form of guaranteed long term electricity prices) than off shore wind 

That is the use I was thinking of.  Possibly not for a few hundred years.  But it could take that long.

However it really would be dead useful now if enough clever tricks could be found to get round the enormous difficulties. 

"I'd steer clear of mainstream fusion if you want to change the world in your lifetime"

If you work on "advances in materials science" normally the best you can expect, is to see where the results of your work is heading.  I couldn't even cope with 5 to 10 year development cycles, and changed to working on simpler and faster product designs that made use of others long term research instead.

I think fusion for star travel is a simpler problem - unlike power generation, you don't have to capture enough energy from the reaction to exceed break even, you just have to let it blast out of the rocket bell into the great beyond.  A hybrid drive using of electrical power from a compact fission reactor to trigger fusion in some pelletised reactor with a rocket bell on works nicely as a model - with more than 10x as much power being released from the fusion stage as the fission stage.

I think that comment would apply quite well to a lot of the work in battery development.  This is partly why I'm so positive about the next ten years of battery development - the pipeline may be long (in time) but it's also stuffed to the gunwales with interesting work.  

Yes.  But it is also needed to power any colonies outside of a solar system.

Research is rewarding.   But making the end product is more fun.

In the current system yes - that wouldn’t be true if you wanted to build a zero CO2 energy system as no one has solved the storage bit yet.

This is true but we can be much more efficient with our consumption. We can reuse more waste heat for example and this could be hugely beneficial. 

I'd not be quite so negative as this; I think we should be funding fusion in case it works.  My reading of the situation is that the plasma physics problems of magnetic confinement are basically solved (inertial confinement seems to me to be just a job creation programme for underemployed weapons physicists) - the issues now being (as mentioned by others) essentially the materials science of getting a material system that can stand the heat and neutron flux, and working out how to get a lithium breeding blanket to produce tritium with 100% efficiency.  I'd be surprised if we got to a working prototype of a power reactor before 2040 at the earliest.  But it's worth trying, and the materials science would have useful applications in a next generation fission reactor, running at a high enough temperature to generate hydrogen from process heat.  

The work going on over small, modular reactors is interesting.  That could make for some big changes for fission.

I agree; but I think we state funds should be funding a much broader church than one giant tokamak and other tokamaks whose research feeds directly in to it.   There are some other devices being RCUK and ERC funded in the UK/Europe but they're all in the same vein.

The materials sciences problems with the wall lining and in particular the diverter region as not to be under-estimated; moving to such a giant fusion volume to overcome confinement problems really punishes the wall lining as power is O(R^3) but exits over a wall of O(R^2).  If tokomak's do end up making it viably I'd be amazed if it's ITER like rather than a more compact tokamak or spheromak using much higher confinement currents from a more modern superconducting architecture.  Even then the leakage due to the field's radial asymmetry is punishing; hence the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator from which some are expecting great things - as with the new breed of recent, compact superconducting designs (the Oxford company, SPARC etc), the design and realisation of this just wasn't conceivable when the behemoth that is ITER was set down its unstoppable path. 

I'm firmly convinced that we're not ready to anoint one particular design to go to the advanced prototype stage that ITER is now at.

Still, funding ITER leads to a lot of money, talent and training/education in the field and that spills over to the other designs; this was always the intent from Bussard when he founded the US Tokamak program, using it as a vehicle to draw political support and funding together against bogeyman of then-Soviet leadership.  But I'm far from convinced that it should now get the lions share of the funding.  We don't need giant concrete pads and whole administration buildings being built in Cadarache, we need to back every horse until we get one that overcomes the fundamental scale problems at the heart of ITER - it's too big, the wall fluxes and diverter fluxes are too high and it's basically impossible to see something of that scale reaching commercial viability against near-term solar-PV developments let alone those on the timescale of DEMO.  

I'm not sure the people working on ELM quenching would say the problems are entirely sorted; it's not beyond possible that ITER is going to shit a brick and jump half a meter off the ground at some point...  There are different confinement modes the core can operate in, and there's still a lot being learnt I think about stable high-Beta operation in Tokamaks.   I've been wondering if part of Tokamak Energy's confidence comes from models around ELM formation in the very high field gradients at the edge of such a compact reactor; perhaps this quenches ELMs before they spread... 

I agree on laser inertial confinement and Z-pinch inertial confinement; the new molten lead approach from General Fusion isn't related to the weapons labs trying to keep their physics and engineering teams going.   If you have't seen a picture of their device it's worth a google.  It's insane. 

I'm hopeful that P-B11 fusion will one day be possible in a polywell-like device; with this there's no thermodynamic losses as the power comes out almost entirely as high energy beta particles which can be directly captured in an electrical circuit with the ionisation grid around the penning trap, giving 99%+ conversion efficiency...  La la land for now but not shown to be impossible...

Still need to get the human R number below 1.

I agree that progress is much more likely in something like a compact tokamak than ITER, which (apart from anything else) has been a case study in how not to run an international collaboration.

There are big gulfs between what the laws of physics don't actually forbid, what is in the realm of engineering possibility, and what might actually happen... (as I used to argue, without much success, in the days when I spent too much time talking to Eric Drexler and his acolytes).

Grey Goo!  It's going to change/transform/end the world!  The reality is turning out a bit more mundane 30 years on isn't it...  I doubt the wild claims and subsequent failure to deliver did Drexler's career any harm; I notice that Kevin Warwick is now a DVC somewhere.   Not bad for sticking a bog standard doggie microchip in your arm and claiming to be a cyborg.

Yes, the gulf on P-B11 fusion is very large indeed.

Drexler has ended up in Oxford, with Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg, in their "Future of Humanity Institute".  I'm not sure he's exactly prospered, but I think there's generally been a few Silicon Valley billionaire types ready to bail him out when he needed it.

It pays the wages I would think. A Venn diagram of their research interests and discussions and scenarios explored in classic science fiction looks a bit close to an 'O'...

That there is. One of the (meta)-problems being which problems to solve... Fusion would be fantastic but honestly, it's too big and too gnarly for me. I want to tackle (real) problems where there are reasonable odds of tangible success/progress. 

Thanks Kevin, that’s very helpful. Until your comment I was unaware of the environmental impact of rare-earth mining but it sounds awful. I guess there’s an argument for developing more benign extraction methods. But that kind of work is always a bit of a Faustian bargain and, conversely, obviating rare earth mining AND enhancing renewable uptake would be a double whammy/no-brainer! I’ve been leery of energy storage R&D because my electrochemistry is mediocre but perhaps I should bite the battery…

Thank you for the considered and detailed response wintertree. That’s exactly the kind of steerage I was hoping to get: unmet needs that are somewhat feasible to solve – I don’t fancy 30 years of plugging away at fusion with no pay off.

I actually love surface chemistry (I do nanomineral synthesis), but find battery research intimidating because (a) electrochemistry, and (b) they are fairly complicated devices. I probably need to just knuckle down to get the basics and then work out a niche I can hop into.

Lower activation energy problems/solutions (eg the article linked below) are appealing, but I don’t want to waste time solving trivialities. Career-focus seems to be an optimisation problem with fruit size and hanging height as the variables...

Tech recycling/recovery is an excellent thought. I shall do some digging.

Cheers again!

W.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666386420302368#bib33

Aye absolutely, is it harder than V Diff? 

Scottish VS

👍

I'd say Northumberland VS with a hangover in the snow.  You know you can do it, but actually doing it is a bloody nightmare.

I've never climbed in Northumberland but I have woken up with a hangover after a night passed out in a field in the snow in Scotland, near hypothermic. Managed to get home and live to tell the tale. 

3D printing materials and processes for everything including houses to lock up carbon.  Strong, long life, watertight.  Print by drone.

We need all we can get when bitcoin uses 55.48 TWh/yr https://www.cbeci.org/ and to solve Rubicks cube using AI 2.8 GWh.