Energy in Nature and Society

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1. kristjanssonDec 2021
   +1 for Wallace. Basically everything in that collection and Consider the Lobster is worth reading.

   Absolutely unrelated, but I'd recommend Vaclav Smil in general - Energy in Nature and Society and Energy and Civilization are two I've read and enjoyed. A bit dry as reading material, but well-worth for his energetic perspective on human and biological systems.

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2. tuatoruOct 2022
   Yeah, my unit of analysis is the decade, sorry. Been reading Vaclav Smil too much (Energy in Nature and Society; Grand Transitions).

   There was a news item on the BBC recently about battery swap being used by taxi firms in "second tier" Chinese cities (so, only 5M - 15M inhabitants).

   That's how it starts: large fleet operators who want their vehicles earning revenue for as long as possible; then smaller fleet operators; then manufacturers sell to the public ("never worry about battery failure", with suitable horror stories like "the Tesla owner up for $20K just out of warranty". True or not).

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3. tuatoruMay 2022
   It'd be ideal to also electrify cement production, iron smelting, and fertilizer production. And other big industrial heat and power uses, and commercial and domestic heat. Then we'll have converted most uses of fossil fuels.

   That 1TW is nameplate peak production. New solar installed in good sites has a budgeted capacity factor of 0.2, declining gradually as the panels and associated equipment age.

   If loads (demand, storage) are not well matched to solar production, realised capacity factor could well be 25% lower.

   We'll want more of everything as the developing world develops and wants stuff and as demand for air conditioning grows. Vaclav Smil estimated world primary energy supply as 10 TW continuous as at 2000. since then it has near doubled with China's sudden rise. We'll probably want 50% - 100% more by 2050 as India and Nigeria develop.

   0.2 TW continuous per year (the optimistic figure) growth in solar is not fast enough, IMHO.

   1. Energy in Nature and Society, Smil V.

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4. tuatoruMay 2022
   No, I don't have specific references - you got me! :-)

   I live not far from "NZ's largest grid-connected solar power plant" (2.1 MW nameplate: feeble), and also not far from one of the larger wind farms. The solar plant is on valuable dairy land, that's true. I wish Todd would publish some figures for it, although it hasn't been operating for long.*

   When I wrote "higher-value", I had just been thinking about NZ's trade problem: it exports dried milk, red meat and a few other low-value-add bio-materials in order to buy everything else. Land is valuable to the country as a whole for its export revenue.

   I had also been re-reading Vaclav Smil's Energy in Nature and Society, in which he says the areal (per square meter) power intensity of PV production is approximately the same as the areal power consumption of cities, so we need the same order of magnitude of land that cities take up if we use PV primarily. And it can't be too erosion-prone.

   That (value/national interest) is also an issue (and this is specifically what I had been thinking about) for carbon farming conversions of hill country sheep and beef stations into Radiata monoculture plantations. Privately profitable, but probably against the national interest, and due to policy.

   > Private markets can’t make long term investments if the cost of utility scale infrastructure is dropping too fast.

   Design, legal, permitting, interconnect, civil, structural and electrical balance of system, and present value of O&M collectively dominate now,* and they are not subject to the same rate of cost decline as panels and inverters (and batteries), so overall, the cost isn't dropping super fast any more. (The PV version of Amdahl's law, perhaps.)

   * Total installed capacity of wind power seems to be at least two, possibly three orders or magnitude higher than that of PV solar in NZ. Maybe this is due to the "social licence to operate" / nimby factor, but maybe not. It does suggest that rooftop solar is a tiny niche in the ecosystem, so maybe the market structure isn't all that bad?

   * In NZ finance costs a lot too, because policy privileges residential real estate investment so greatly.

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5. tuatoruSep 2021
   That is interesting, thanks.

   If I'm reading the PDF right, it uses about 12 PJ per tonne of iron produced.

   Best current practice with coking coal is about 15 GJ per tonne.[1]

   So just a little energy efficiency improvement required.

   1. Smil, V. Energy In Nature And Society 2008, p. 283 of paperback.

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