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2016 was the third year in a row that global carbon emissions remained stable, even as the overall economy grew. Although 32.1 Gigatonnes of emissions is certainly not good news for future climates, there is some cause for optimism within the numbers, as some major economies saw their emissions drop. And controlling emissions didn't come at the expense of the world's finances, as preliminary estimates show that the global economy grew by over three percent.
[...] China was one of those countries, starting up five new reactors to increase its nuclear capacity by 25 percent. Nuclear combined with renewables to handle two-thirds of the country's rising demand. China also shifted some of its fossil fuel use from coal to natural gas. The net result was a drop in emissions of about one percent, even as demand grew by over five percent (and the economy grew by nearly seven percent). Gas still represents a small fraction of China's energy economy, so there's the potential for further displacement of coal.
In the US, the process of shifting from coal to natural gas is already well advanced. Coal use was down by 11 percent last year, the IEA estimates, allowing natural gas to displace it as the US' largest single source of energy. This, along with booming renewables, allowed the US to drop its carbon emissions by three percent in 2016. That takes emissions to levels not seen since 1992, even though the economy is now 80 percent larger than it was then.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/global-carbon-emissions-continue-to-stabilize-us-has-3-drop/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday March 22 2017, @06:20PM (14 children)
Solar works fine as baseload too, IF you do thermal storage rather than all this silly PV stuff. If you have enough heliostats and a big enough salt tank, you could theoretically keep the thing generating power through even a week straight of overcast.
The problem is more one of politics than technology; decentralization, as you rightfully pointed out, would mean a lot of greedheads lose a lot of money, and Cthulhu forbid *that* ever happens, right? -_-
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @06:27PM (1 child)
And a bunch of heliostats combined with a big salt tank don't count as centralized?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 24 2017, @02:44AM
Oh, they do. Sorry, I should have written in the other half of what I was thinking there, which is along the lines of "politics is the art of the possible." The greedheads own the grid, so the grid isn't going anywhere. So we, for now at least, have to work within the system. Maybe we can all go totally decentralized someday, but if we want a chance at all in the future, we need to make sure there *is* a future...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Wednesday March 22 2017, @06:28PM (6 children)
If the problem of politics is solved we can use Nuclear+Breeder reactors and the problem of waste is 99% solved. Or we could just do fussion.
Or hell then we just build a space elevator and power the US fully on solar.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday March 22 2017, @10:46PM (3 children)
I'm intrigued! Pray tell how a stick stuck in the ground, rotating together with Earth, get's to "US fully on solar"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Wednesday March 22 2017, @11:43PM (2 children)
http://www.space.com/25120-pillar-to-the-sky-book-william-forstchen.html [space.com]
Space elevators are magick 100 billion dollar sticks that make energy rain. Getting closer and closer to the carbon nanofiber threads that would be needed.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 23 2017, @01:30AM (1 child)
Mmmm... I see: not only the nanofibers are missing, but also superconductivity. Missing the latter, one may try to beam the energy down by microwaves. Umm.. Die another day?
Speaking of Die another day... The stick's not gonna happen soon. Letting aside the materials (we'll get there eventually, will be harder with religious nuts cutting R&D budgets), the international tension nowadays is high enough** and a $100B is quite a hard structure to defend. Especially if its distal end gets militarized, which I reckon is very likely to happen to a US-controlled stick.
** China grumbles at the deployment of a THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea. Also China was banned from space collaboration with US.
Russia is testing NATO-s periphery: remember Ukraine? (even now I wonder who was the moron who decided stirring/arming Syrian rebels would be a good idea? Of course Russia wasn't going to like its strategic military bases there being dismantled).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Thursday March 23 2017, @05:48AM
Not going to disagree with you on any of that. Stipulation a few points up was about our options if politics were not hindering progress.
I guess regardles of anything, ITER is moving forward quite well, and the developments of that German Wendelstein-7 reactor are quite cool too.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday March 24 2017, @11:09PM (1 child)
Skip the space elevator and build a launch loop [wikipedia.org] instead. It is viable with decades old technology technology and still cheap enough (10bn to 30bn usd to build, and 3usd to 300usd per kg per launch when operating at full capacity) to make SPS affordable
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Friday March 24 2017, @11:27PM
Why not both? The launch loop would be good for resource transfer between here and the moon and for building a space elevator.
Space elevator is nice because of all the power that can be provided by bolting on solar panals.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday March 22 2017, @07:28PM (3 children)
It can't be *that* silly, if it was a major factor in cutting CO2 emissions by 3%. I mean, we're not even close to maxing out the capacity for PV, and it's having a significant positive impact, and we know exactly how to keep doing that for quite a while. Maybe that ultimately only solves 10% of the problem or something, but that's better than not, and there aren't any "theoretically" parts involved here.
And yes, there is definitely some pro-nuclear astroturfing going on. Nuclear power companies have been trying to be seen as part of the solution to climate change since at least the 2015 Paris climate summit, even though there's little to no evidence in their favor.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday March 22 2017, @09:11PM (2 children)
I don't quite get why all new projects are still light-water reactors with solid fuel though. Those have crappy efficiency.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday March 22 2017, @09:34PM (1 child)
Because companies made more equipment for those reactors than was actually needed, and they're trying to unload it? That's my guess, anyways.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @04:21AM
Its not equipment, its industry infrastructure.
We have tons of manufacturing experience, tons of domain knowledge, tons of testing, tons of operations, etc with those kinds of designs.
We have basically none of that for any other kind of design. That's a huge sunk cost that would have to be replaced if we started building new designs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @06:21AM
Solar works fine in overcast. You can find various videos of people debunking this with practical experiments you can carry out. It's not optimal, but it's also not like you're suddenly on life support because a cloud moves in. A study a few years back from NASA on the best energy source for Mars (keeping in mind the important balance of energy:mass and energy:volume) ended up being solar, even after accounting for the massive dust storms on Mars which dwarf overcast days on Earth in terms of ostensible impact.
In any case I think you're missing the big picture of the idea. It's not about having sparse large groupings of solar farms, but rather ubiquitous small groupings of solar. As the obvious example every single sky facing roof there is should have solar panels on it, every road should have cells underlying it, etc. These could in turn would be supplemented by farms but the whole system would be more of a reciprocating than dependent nature. The idea of using high voltage direct current is to transmit power through areas with surplus to those with a deficit. The reason I mentioned the numbers was to let people realize by themselves something. The circumference of the Earth is about 40k km so that's 20km for an arc from one side of the planet to the other. HVDC has a loss rate of about 3.5% per 1k km. That means, even with present technology, we can actually send electricity all the way around the earth with a 70% loss. That's a huge and unacceptable loss in present day terms - in a world where solar can be scaled up practically to no end with minimal overhead, that ratio works fine. And again these are things that we can expect technology to help us improve. Batteries, or other forms of local storage, can work as a fail-safe (as they already do today) in cases where for some reason their is a disruption in the power. For instance after California experienced numerous black outs as a result of a natural gas leak upsetting their energy production, they turned to batteries to ensure they have an emergency backup.