Alarming Report from McKinsey on the Grid-Mix in Years To Come
Here’s a report from consulting giant McKinsey that suggests fossil fuels will continue to dominate the grid mix in 2040, because they will remain the cheapest and most reliable energy resources.
The report correctly points to developments in nuclear energy as potential game-changers, but it ignores at least two important things:
• Wind is already incredibly inexpensive, and is becoming more so each year. Power purchase agreements in certain parts of the US are being signed $0.02/kWh, about half the cost of generating a kWh from coal. The cost of wind is still falling, but the costs of running coal plants is rising. Now, obviously, wind is a variable resource, but a) it’s hard to imagine a world in a decade or two in which the energy storage issue hasn’t been adequately addressed, and b) the more wind we have, the less variable the resource, since the fact that the wind isn’t blowing in a certain place increases the probability that it’s blowing in another.
• More importantly, the report doesn’t contemplate the cost of the status quo in terms of human health and environmental damage. Similar to the above, it’s hard to imagine a world in which these issues continue to be ignored. The rate of increase in average temperature of the Earth in the temperate latitudes is such that one must move north (or south in the southern hemisphere) 10 meters per day to maintain a constant level of warmness. Vast areas of arable land are turning into deserts each year. The oceans are rising at a rate that this planet has not seen in thousands of years. There are huge costs associated with these phenomena that will soon be captured in our thinking, and thus our pricing of greenhouse gas emissions.
I would also add that the future always looks like the past–until it looks like something else entirely.
There you have it, straight from your favorite prognosticator, the Great Shieldsini.
Any energy source shoul be clean now. It makes no sense to compare clean vs dirty energy, we hope the Paris agreement will start to change things, with regulations for clean power only, if you want use coal or oil or natural gas, they must filter and capture pollution at the exhaust pipe. Then cost will vary very much and solar and wind will be much cheaper, even with storage.
The problem is that the proposed ways to sequester CO2 have not been shown capable of keeping it sequestered forever. It is too likely to escape at some time in the future. NOx, Hg, and other things perhaps can be dealt with, but not CO2.
We need balance ASAP
Quality Of Life Clean Air Green Energy Performance
Upfront Savings Any Size buildings retrofits and conversionsincentives and inducement s for all better choice Edward T Hall PE. RIP.Heat The Body By Wire Not By Fire Not The Air.
Hi Craig,
I read the piece a few hours ago. It sounded like something published by someone with a stake in the status quo.
Regarding your comment about the cost of wind, sounds like time to take away the PTC.
Regards,
Hi Craig,
With increasing CO2 levels because of fossil fuels, is there not a possibility of increase in vegetation due to abundance of CO2 which plants require? Is all climate change attributable to Carbon di oxide green house?
Regards
Re: your first question, the rising levels of CO2 actually do have a small salubrious effect on plant growth, but that’s totally overwhelmed by its negative effect on global temperatures.
Re: you second question, no, there are other greenhouse gases, e.g., methane, and potentially many other causes as well.
GRID is the problem. Distributed energy has less global warming without the resistance heating of wires and related warming of air surrounding it..
Have seen the NASA’s city lights map – it is still sending shortwave radiation back into atmosphere like the sun does – including from countries which have close to 60% of their energy from Renewables.
What will we bebles saying in 40 to 60 years to come – when there is more atmospheric heating from the renewables
Probably renewables do not cause atmospheric heating. Consider wind power, for example. The wind generators extract wind energy from the atmosphere and convert it into electricity. If the wind generators were not there, the wind would instead convert its energy into heat as it struck solid objects. So the effect of wind generators on atmospheric temperature is neutral.
Thanks for this. You are correct, of course.
I think so.
I was going to continue and do a similar analysis on solar power but stopped when I realized that it would be much more complicated. The effect of solar power on atmospheric warming would depend on its location. If the collectors were located on a highly reflective surface it would probably result in atmospheric warming. On the other hand, if the collectors were located on a surface that absorbed 100% of the sun’s energy it would not result in atmospheric warming. Probably it wouldn’t much matter because the percentage of the earth’s surface that would be covered with solar collectors would be tiny.
so is the biomass/ fossil fuel burning – biomass is conversion of CO2 + H2O by photochemical reaction along with intermediates [ash formers] taking the heat from sun and storing it..in ground.. when the biomass is burnt the reverse reaction releases energy back to where it came from and thus neutral… all these have a time difference and interim storage of energy.
When it comes to air pollution and CO2 it might be aerosols, soot particles, sulfur dioxide, in the pacific etc that are causing issues currently blamed on co2 induced global warming. I just read an article mentioning that airborne nutrients feed bacteria in the pacific and thus reduce oxygen levels in the deeper parts. Could this issue be helping to kill off the reefs near Australia? This is currently being blamed on global warming. Most of this airborne pollution seems to be coming from China. Are there political problems with dealing with this?