[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by Azure

I appreciate your effort in this thread to talk about these issues, but posts like this are why its quite obvious that your perspective on this issue is simply not based in reality.



Countries are pouring billions into coal simply because they have NO otheralternative. Natural gas is not readily available, especially in China, whereas coal is abundant and cheap. China is building out renewables faster than any country on earth, and it is LITERALLY not capable of replacing coal. How that is not clear to the anti-fossil fuel crowd is beyond me.

You keep posting nonsense in a very patronizing way like everyone just isn't as up to speed as you. It's pretty irritating. Nobody appreciates posts that patronizingly say "I appreciate your efforts" and "congrats" like you're the authority here. Give me a break.


Many countries pivoted to coal recently because they married themselves to natural gas to decrease emissions, then Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe bought all the LNG. What choice do they have? Wind and solar are being built at max speed because they're a new market that hasn't scaled enough. It's super quick and easy to build a new coal or gas power plant because we've built them for decades. Read almost every country's roadmap to carbon neutrality. It's right there.

The emission reduction process was simply.

Short term, replace coal with natural gas. The US did this and cut their overall emissions 20% since 2005.

This is literally what everyone did! That's why we're in this mess now. Everyone needs more natural gas because they shuttered coal. The plan all along was to switch coal for gas while building out renewables to the max capacity. Then Europe had 40% of their gas supply suddenly withdrawn and.... here we are with gas prices that have been 10x their usual and even less affordable for India and China

Medium term build out proven renewable sources. Solar, wind, etc. Obviously this technology is getting better, but it is STILL not capable of providing even close to our baseload power needs.

This is the plan. Yes, wind and solar cannot do it alone as they are intermittent. I've never met anyone who thought the sun always shines and the wind always blows. There isn't a person involved in the energy transition anywhere that thinks it can. Why do people keep trotting this out as if they think they've outsmarted the experts and now it changes a single long term strategy anyone is looking at? Also, "baseload" power is going to be changing a lot over the coming decades due to batteries, smart meters/virtual power plants, rooftop solar, time of use electricity rates, etc. That's not to say intermittent renewables will do all the heavy lifting, but they can supply a few orders of magnitude more than they do currently without "omg! What about the baseload"

Long-term focus on nuclear, including SMR and other technologies that are clean and long-lasting, and are capable of providing base load capacity regardless of weather. Something renewables cannot do.

Yes. We'll need more than intermittent renewables unless storage has been figured out. I'm agnostic on nuclear as I see it's value for baseload, but it's incredibly capital intensive and investments are rare due to all the cost overruns and delays. I think there's maybe 30 projects in the pipeline by 2030. That'll need to increase a lot. I'm hoping for more exciting breakthroughs in geothermal (some coming from Alberta!), but it's too early to tell yet. Inter-ties will go a long way too

Longer-longer term, focus on high capacity energy storage & grid improvements.

There's tons of work being done on this.

Worth noting there are 4 main classes of grid energy storage (lots of ambiguity and disagreement on classifications)

1) frequency modulation - keeps the power steady from second to second, minute to minute - these are largely now solved

2) short term - 4 hours or less. The lithium ion technology for this is already established and maturing, though there's still lots of innovation and cost decreases coming with scalability, newer chemistries, flow batteries, etc.

3) long term - a few days worth for when the wind isn't blowing out the sun isn't shining. Lithium ion will probably never be cheap enough, but there's a ton of interesting innovation here including hydrogen, pumped CO2 storage, sand heat batteries, and tons more

4) seasonal storage is difficult. Where hydro exists, that'll help. It's more of an issue the further you get from the equator, but then there's also more hydro possibilities. This is a problem that is very unique in every place you look. In some places we may always rely on burning something, but hopefully something renewable

I'm not sure what part of the process you think we're at, but it is quite clear we cannot move past the first stage.



Next year we will be in a worse position in terms of worldwide emissions rates from coal burning than at any point in the last 15 years. 1 step forward, 10 steps back. 100% due to the anti-fossil fuel morons who spent the last 10-15 years making bloody sure natural gas gets as LITTLE support as possible.



Pretty sure you are part of that crowd. Congrats. Nothing like allowing delusional fantasies turn into actual policy decisions which end up coming back to screw us over.

This kind of crap is unnecessary