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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: 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.