US’s power grid continues to lower emissions—everything else, not so much

3 comments

1. Unless there’s some extraordinary breakthrough in energy storage we will eventually get the maximum value out of transitioning the energy grid to renewables which is easiest to think of as fuel savers. Eventually we will have enough of it that if wind is blowing and/or the sun is out we won’t be producing carbon but overnight and low wind we will still need grid scale storage solutions to completely remove carbon from the grid. It is sad to see that most of the decarbonizing happening in the grid is trading coal for natural gas, that’s just more efficient but we will need to remove the natural gas plants soon as well. I wish we would push for building pump stored hydro projects across the country as that’s the only cheap grid scale storage solution I’m aware of.

   Right now we’re going after the low hanging fruit and soon the decarbonizing gains are going to get far more challenging. For example how do you smelt iron ore and process it into steel and emit less carbon? We will need breakthroughs across hundreds of thousands of industrial and commercial processes to get back to sustainable and somehow convince the world to convert from medieval and cheap processes that are dirty to vastly more expensive processes they can’t afford. Generating electricity cleanly is easy, only 2 major breakthroughs were needed to pull that off (wind and solar) and a rollout at scale. Scale is easy to solve by just throwing money at it. Many of the other industrial problems aren’t scale related within that each process so will be several orders of magnitude more difficult to effect carbon gains.

   Transportation is also starting to show is difficult to transition to electric as well. We might be able to move small passenger cars to EV but larger vehicles like trash collection, construction equipment, etc just don’t have the energy density in batteries to make them viable. The US will need to move our global trade back to sail and move our ground logistics to mostly electric rail, both difficult projects that will take decades if we ever find the political will to even start.

2. I mean we also cut down trees and destroy algae/coral which filters CO2. It really needs to be a multiple step approach

3. As more EV batteries hit the roads and eventually outlive the car, many will become grid energy storage devices in arrays before reaching the end of life where 95% of the materials can already be reused through recycling. The faster we go EV, the sooner more batteries will be available for reuse. Plus, different forms of battery storage are also getting implemented for grid purposes. Once this happens, renewables will be a lot more effective.