Fusion, another step closer?

[Melayl]

Not every technology can be reasonably upscaled regardless of the progress, so I would not count on graphene there. Supercapacitors will most likely make their way to cars, but grid-level storage is just too many orders of magnitude beyond that.

I don't see why. If you can't make the size of individual cells large enough, just make more cells and connect them together. That's how they make large enough cells for electric vehicles right now, if my understanding is correct.

[Rydiro]

I don't see why. If you can't make the size of individual cells large enough, just make more cells and connect them together. That's how they make large enough cells for electric vehicles right now, if my understanding is correct.

I'm rather sceptical about new solutions to energy storage. They are all motivated by the wish to make a currently failed energy production (wind, solar) viable. This tends to cloud judgement in rosy colors.

Wind and solar just arent very efficient. The ratio of energy used to setup your plant to lifetime output is underwhelming.

[halfeye]

That may be technically true

That is what I am saying. Saying things that you know to be false is lying, and it's frowned upon with good reason. If someone lies about one thing, they are much more likely to lie about others.

That Picard quote about debating honestly? it doesn't give "good guys" a pass on lying.

[Squire Doodad]

That is what I am saying. Saying things that you know to be false is lying, and it's frowned upon with good reason. If someone lies about one thing, they are much more likely to lie about others.

That Picard quote about debating honestly? it doesn't give "good guys" a pass on lying.

You seem very insistent on refusing to see the forest for the trees.
Here is an article very explicit about the nature of things, about the IPCC report from the other day.
It specifically says

Thirty months: that is the very short time the world now has for global greenhouse gas emissions to finally start to fall. If not, we will miss the chance to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

That is all.

I'm rather sceptical about new solutions to energy storage. They are all motivated by the wish to make a currently failed energy production (wind, solar) viable. This tends to cloud judgement in rosy colors.

Wind and solar just arent very efficient. The ratio of energy used to setup your plant to lifetime output is underwhelming.

Wind and Solar are both quite efficient; we have hit a point where in some places, new solar plants are cheaper to make than to keep old coal plants running. From an energy perspective, solar could effectively replace I think it was about 90% of California's energy needs at a reasonable price if batteries improved.
That said they do make use of an unnerving set of rare earth metals; if we want to focus on solar and wind, we definitely need to do several of
*Make efficient recycling plants to reuse the valuable materials in solar panels and stop them from leaching if left in disrepair
*Find alternatives to our current use of rarer materials; for instance, sodium is showing promise as an alternative to lithium ion batteries as ones have been made that are acceptably effective and much easier to make/acquire materials for. However, we do need to make a full supply chain for it.
*Improve energy storage on the grid level, as you guys were saying.

I'm hearing good stuff about vanadium batteries, though I'm not sure how that's going atm.

Overall, there's a major takeaway I'm seeing here - we have the tools to save the world, we just need to use them and should have used them for the last several years.

[halfeye]

You seem very insistent on refusing to see the forest for the trees.

I am very insistent on lies not being the truth. I am saying that lying makes a person an unreliable witness, and that's bad for whatever they speak in support of.

I am very strongly opposed to pollution, and global warming is an aspect of that, I think other aspects are more important but that is a minor quibble, pollution is bad. Lying is a pollution of the truth, that's one reason I'm so against it.

[Mechalich]

Make efficient recycling plants to reuse the valuable materials in solar panels and stop them from leaching if left in disrepair

This part, at least, is very likely to occur. Industry is actually quite good at internal recycling of materials, especially metals, when it makes economic sense to do so. Photovoltaic recycling will almost certainly scale up as more and more panels reach the ends of their life cycles. This mostly hasn't happened yet, since solar panels have a 25-30 year lifespan, so the only panels up for recycling so far are those installed pre-1990s, which is a minute fraction of the total. There will probably be a major push towards solar recycling later this decade. The policy trick with regard to this is to make sure rooftop solar and other small-scale uses (ex. the tiny panels used to power things like highway cameras), don't get frozen out of the process.

[gomipile]

Another promising storage option is sodium ion batteries. Since sodium is a heavier element, the energy density of otherwise similar batteries is about half that of lithium ion. But, the cost of materials per unit of energy capacity is somewhat less, and sodium production/mining is inherently more sustainable than lithium since sodium is very abundant on the Earth's surface.

The energy density would be a problem for high performance electric vehicles, but not for grid scale storage. Since lithium ion batteries have already been used in small grid storage installations despite their flaws, sodium ion seems like a decent drop-in replacement.

[Squire Doodad]

Another promising storage option is sodium ion batteries. Since sodium is a heavier element, the energy density of otherwise similar batteries is about half that of lithium ion. But, the cost of materials per unit of energy capacity is somewhat less, and sodium production/mining is inherently more sustainable than lithium since sodium is very abundant on the Earth's surface.

The energy density would be a problem for high performance electric vehicles, but not for grid scale storage. Since lithium ion batteries have already been used in small grid storage installations despite their flaws, sodium ion seems like a decent drop-in replacement.

Yeah, I can see future lithium ion battery production being reserved for heavier duty situations and sodium ion becoming the main battery for casual consumer use.

For small grid storage, sodium ion batteries do seem feasible, however, for bigger situations like big cities you'd need something larger scale. This is why people talk about redox battery systems. For instance, this article from WIRED covers the viability of vanadium batteries. It does seem that while vanadium batteries are more efficient when handling the at times unpredictable nature of renewables, it will need a big supply chain built around it, which may take some time. Nonetheless, it can be plausibly mined from carnotite in Colorado.

[Rydiro]

Overall, there's a major takeaway I'm seeing here - we have the tools to save the world, we just need to use them and should have used them for the last several years.

I don't think we have the tools. If we did, they would be in use. Large scale energy storage being one major problem. Lifetime efficiency (iirc 1:2 to 1:3) is another.

[Squire Doodad]

I don't think we have the tools. If we did, they would be in use. Large scale energy storage being one major problem. Lifetime efficiency (iirc 1:2 to 1:3) is another.

Energy policy is mixed heavily into politics and the economics of big industries. Putting said tools into use involves shattering the profit margins of fossil fuel industries, or at least making them shift into renewables (like BP is doing).
We very much do have the tools, and if there was a concerted global effort I have no doubt that we could stop climate change without overwhelming difficulty. Even if each country took on individual efforts to fix it, each being reasonably efficient but not working with more than their closest allies, that would do a lot.
That there are geopolitical and industrial forces that complicate such an effort doesn't mean this is physically impossible from a resource perspective.

[Bohandas]

Energy policy is mixed heavily into politics and the economics of big industries. Putting said tools into use involves shattering the profit margins of fossil fuel industries

Indeed. There are some very rich and very unscrupulous people out there with a vested interest in ensuring that things don't get fixed.

[Mechalich]

Energy policy is mixed heavily into politics and the economics of big industries. Putting said tools into use involves shattering the profit margins of fossil fuel industries, or at least making them shift into renewables (like BP is doing).
We very much do have the tools, and if there was a concerted global effort I have no doubt that we could stop climate change without overwhelming difficulty. Even if each country took on individual efforts to fix it, each being reasonably efficient but not working with more than their closest allies, that would do a lot.
That there are geopolitical and industrial forces that complicate such an effort doesn't mean this is physically impossible from a resource perspective.

We definitely have the tools when it comes to power generation, and as far as nuclear fission goes we've arguably had the tools since the 1960s. Other sectors are somewhat more nebulous. Transport, for example, is only just on the cusp of full electrification - viable electric automobiles are available, but full-size trucks and industrial vehicles are just starting to come out, and electric planes remain in the early concept stage. Certain other industries, particularly the production of concrete and certain metals, require extremely high-energy reactions that will struggle to produce carbon neutrality. And even beyond that, greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere from non-industrial sources such as land use changes, animal husbandry, and melting permafrost. Eventually it will be necessary to turn the Earth's CO2 budget negative in order to stabilize the climate. The chemistry for that is currently at the 'test plant' stage in several locations around the world, but long-term storage remains tenuous. Admittedly, a strong role for nuclear generation helps to minimize all these problems.

[warty goblin]

The genuinely galling thing is considering how much farther along we could be had we thrown significant resources at decarbonization thirty years ago. And how much less urgent the problem would be, given the cumulative effects of applying those technologies as they came online over the last three decades.

[Radar]

One of interesting ways of dealing with CO2 in the atmosphere would be artificial photosynthesis. On experimental level it looks pretty good, but I do not know of any commercially viable solution so far, but there are somewhat promising project being developed.

[Rydiro]

Indeed. There are some very rich and very unscrupulous people out there with a vested interest in ensuring that things don't get fixed.

I mean you can blame a conspiracy for that. I'm from Germany, where renewable energies have been heavily governmentally invested in for the last 20 years.
It still doesn't work, dependancy on gas went up. Unconveniently, Russia is the largest supplier atm.
If there had been easy solutions someone in the last 20 years could have made LOTS of money with them.

[factotum]

One of interesting ways of dealing with CO2 in the atmosphere would be artificial photosynthesis. On experimental level it looks pretty good, but I do not know of any commercially viable solution so far, but there are somewhat promising project being developed.

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

[Mechalich]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

Trees - to store carbon as wood, and grasses to store carbon in soil are certainly useful and important strategies, but they are limited by geography. Ultimately it will probably be necessary to put large quantities of carbon back into the ground (or possibly deep in ocean basins where it can be subducted back into the ground). This isn't really possible with gigantic piles of lumber or even huge quantities of algal slurry. Chemical capture of carbon in a form that can be effectively pumped back into rock is therefore useful. There are several different processes in development for direct carbon capture from the atmosphere and even some test plants - Iceland has one - but nothing on anything like the viable scale or efficiency necessary to really tackle the problem. Artificial photosynthesis is an intriguing option in this space because it would ideally drastically reduce the energy costs involved in ripping the carbon from the air (ideally it would generate energy, but that's probably unreasonable), which is currently very costly.

One thing Direct Carbon Capture does argue for is building as much renewable power generation as possible, since any excess energy could be used for this purpose.

[Radar]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

Quite a few reasons actually:
1. Efficiency of carbon capture
Natural photosynthesis might be currently more efficient, but the plants use most of the produced sugar to sustain themselves, so over the whole daily cycle there is not that much carbon actually turned into something else. Furthermore, natural processing of dead wood also puts a lot of carbon back into the atmosphere. Overally, forests do not really produce all that much oxygen netto, so their efficiency at capturing carbon is equally low. Most of the oxygen we breath comes from algae.
2. Scalability
You can mass-produce photosynthesis cells. Can you just as easily deploy a forest where you need it? Artificial cells could be used in any environment, plants not so much.
3. Choosing the product
Plants mostly give you wood, while artificial photosynthesis can be used to produce many different substances depending on your needs. For example, they could produce ethylene which is a substrate for various everyday materials. Ethanol is also an option along with possibly many other organic compounds. Especially interesting are those that we currently get from crude oil.

[NichG]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

As temperatures rise, so does the rate and spread of forest fires, so leaning too heavily on trees would strengthen that feedback... Not to say it's a bad idea to plant trees, especially in places with low rates/spreads of fires, but having a diverse set of options should increase the robustness of the approach.

[Vahnavoi]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

People are planting trees as we speak - artificial photosynthesis is something we're hoping to develop while doing that.

[gomipile]

Regarding artificial photosynthesis vs trees and other plants:

Some of the arguments against trees seem to assume we'd be using a single species of tree. Different trees prefer different climate and terrain, so one could probably cover quite a lot of otherwise unused ground by picking appropriate forestry strategies.

Also, sure, mass produced artificial photosynthesis cells could be deployed anywhere there's enough sun. But with plants a lot of the required infrastructure for installation is already present in the form of dirt. There are even plants that can grow quite happily without topsoil, and in so doing create new topsoil.

So, for the production of useful materials. I'd imaging that genetically engineered plants would be a lot less labor intensive to produce and deploy than artificial photosynthesis cells. Not to mention that there a fair number of unmodified crops that produce durable materials, some of which we could be using a lot more of. Hemp is vastly under-produced in the USA, for example.

Also, I'd agree that it's not either/or. I'm sure if artificial photosynthesis cells become inexpensive and useful, that we'll still want to expand our carbon capturing crop area alongside them.

[Lord Torath]

Regarding the artificial photosynthesis vs trees, I'll go with: both, please!

In other news, Stanford has solar panels that can also generate electricity at night through thermo-electric generators incorporated into the panels:
Solar panels that can generate electricity at night have been developed at Stanford.

[Fat Rooster]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

Not a silly question at all. The problem is that trees are incredibly busy, and mostly not at making wood. They make wood because they need some of it, but the vast majority of their energy goes into other things, such as fighting off insects, or bacteria, or creating fire suppressants, and probably dozens more things an actual expert could talk about. Even compared to algae, trees are not great at sequestering carbon. The biggest advantage of trees is that we don't need to do anything more for them, but that only really matters in fairly inaccessible and otherwise useless areas. The majority of the land is now exploited to some extent, so we would want to achieve more in the same area than trees can currently achieve, at the cost of a bit more labour.

Artificial photosynthesis is the idea of trying to harness that individual process, which nature has refined for a billion and a half years, while stripping away all the baggage that comes with it. This could potentially be orders of magnitude more efficient at producing useful products than existing lifeforms, due to us subverting 90% of the problems they would otherwise face.

I guess the short answer is that trees are not good enough to dig us out of the hole we have gotten ourselves into, so we have to create something better*. Sure that couldn't possibly go wrong.

* better at a certain job; removing CO2. No universals assumed.


Edit: Only just realised how many people had already answered. Still, initial point stands. Definitely an important question.

[Mechalich]

Not a silly question at all. The problem is that trees are incredibly busy, and mostly not at making wood. They make wood because they need some of it, but the vast majority of their energy goes into other things, such as fighting off insects, or bacteria, or creating fire suppressants, and probably dozens more things an actual expert could talk about. Even compared to algae, trees are not great at sequestering carbon.

Trees can be a highly effective carbon sink, but it depends on how they're deployed. It is possible to manage timber for carbon sequestration, but this is generally not done. The ideal scenario is production of a fast-growing species that within 20-30 years of growth is suitable for use in structural timber and is then converted to building materials that last 200-300 years. We now have construction techniques using wood, such as CLT (cross-laminated timber) and related methods, that allow for the safe construction of mid-sized buildings and even skyscrapers in the 200-300 ft. range. Buildings produced in this way can be a carbon sink, which is significant given that traditional concrete+steel building production is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Proper utilization of wood as a resource is one of the many tools in the overall emissions reduction toolset, but not one broadly implemented at this time.

[Ibrinar]

I mean you can blame a conspiracy for that. I'm from Germany, where renewable energies have been heavily governmentally invested in for the last 20 years.
It still doesn't work, dependancy on gas went up. Unconveniently, Russia is the largest supplier atm.
If there had been easy solutions someone in the last 20 years could have made LOTS of money with them.

What brought you to that conclusion? It is working though it would be better if it worked far faster but not working seems baseless. Gas, while there are currently problems with who we are buying it from and it needs to be replaced too, was preferred because it is cleaner than coal and quite flexible. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/c...e?country=~DEU as you can see gas as a contributor is relatively stable the last two decades while Coal and Oil were reduced. Co2 is down https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/p...e&country=~DEU 30% compared to 1990 . And the price of renewable energy production has fallen while the percentage has risen considerably. If we were at this point 20 years ago I would be downright optimistic.

[Rydiro]

What brought you to that conclusion? It is working though it would be better if it worked far faster but not working seems baseless. Gas, while there are currently problems with who we are buying it from and it needs to be replaced too, was preferred because it is cleaner than coal and quite flexible. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/c...e?country=~DEU as you can see gas as a contributor is relatively stable the last two decades while Coal and Oil were reduced. Co2 is down https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/p...e&country=~DEU 30% compared to 1990 . And the price of renewable energy production has fallen while the percentage has risen considerably. If we were at this point 20 years ago I would be downright optimistic.

Not working in several dimensions.

1. Economically
While other energy production has been subsidized too, "green" energy has been driving prices. Germany has about 50% higher prices than France, that mostly relies on nuclear power. Prices have already driven power-dependant industries away, eg smelters.

2. Production capacity/backup systems
On a cloudy and windless day, there is no production. There are no storage solutions available of any meaningful size. That means a completely redundant system (usually fossile) has to be kept ready for these days. You can't just go a few days without power. The costs of these backups are often conveniently ignored. So its not working on its own.

Couldn't find good numbers on lifetime energy cost to lifetime energy output ratio. I suspect this ratio isn't all that great either.

[Dragonus45]

Yeah. The solutions for storing nuclear waste aren't optimal, but at least there are solutions and the waste isn;t just floating around in the atmosphere like with fossil fuels

And honestly there is so little of it and it's so much less dangerous then things like coal ash like from the Kingston that I wouldn't care if it was just something we had to stick in a box forever. That it can still have real use after the fact just makes it that much better.

[Maelstrom]

Greenwalds Law reworked, looks like, when operation, fusion reactors could create even more energy than previously thought:

https://www.livescience.com/fusion-r...uce-more-power

[Cikomyr2]

Greenwalds Law reworked, looks like, when operation, fusion reactors could create even more energy than previously thought:

https://www.livescience.com/fusion-r...uce-more-power

Ill settle for "sustainable net positive energy generation has been achieved".

Learning that the previously determined density limit on the deuterium was wrong can be a game changer indeed.

[Quizatzhaderac]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

If you turn an acre of desert into a forest, you've taken carbon out of the atmosphere.

Leaving a forest alone doesn't change the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

If we manage to afforest the entire Sahara and Gobi desserts (which are things people are actually trying), that'll offset several years of CO2 emissions, but not all of it. It's also uncertain how much dessert can be afforested. Some, certainly, as trees have complicated pro-tree affects of climate, but how much and how quickly it can be done is uncertain.