The renewable energy changes and policy

Makes ethylene from carbon dioxide is stable, scalable and can be solar powered, with ethylene you can make other things like polyethylene or use it as fuel or chemical feedstock or into some other solid form. They might have a chemical plant with tanks to capture industrial levels of CO2 from other processes like cement making and turn it into plastics or just ethylene or something more useful.

KEY POINTS

• China recently reported exports of more than 5 million vehicles in 2023, topping Japan to become the top country for car exports in the world.
• Rising volume from Chinse automakers like SAIC, Dongfeng and BYD comes amid declining U.S. vehicle exports as companies like General Motors have cut international operations.
• Chinese companies are releasing new models in record times, and many are producing EVs efficiently and profitably.

"BYD has cracked a code for low-priced EVs that seemingly transcends borders: Its BYD Seagull, a tiny EV that starts at roughly $11,400, would significantly undercut U.S. EV prices at less than $15,000 even when factoring in America’s 27.5% tariff on Chinese-made vehicles.

“This is a car that scares me,” said Kristin Dziczek, automotive policy advisor for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s Detroit branch, during the organization’s Automotive Insights Symposium last week. “How are we going to cut the price of EVs in half? China’s already done it.”

Mathew Vachaparampil, CEO of auto teardown and consulting firm Caresoft Global, estimates BYD is making $1,500 off each Seagull unit sold. At worst, the company breaks even, he said".


“What’s going on in China at home? These [new energy vehicle] brands have become dominant,” Mark Wakefield, global co-leader of the automotive and industrial practice at AlixPartners, said at the Chicago Fed’s auto conference. “They were 26% [market share] a few years ago, up to more than 50% in 2022 and headed towards two-thirds by the end of the decade.”

Wealthy countries produce the most CO2 and poor counties a fraction of that, and I have no faith in programs like cookstove to do much good for the climate or the people they are trying to help. What will help is raising their standard of living and cheap Chinese solar panels and batteries will do that along with a host of other things, including responsible government. The basic problem is simple, small efficient woodstoves are really carbon neutral but need to be replaced by something better, heathier, cheaper and electric that can run off cheap solar panels and a lot of cooking is or can be done during the day. The solution must be solar and electric eventually and it must be affordable and make sense to the people using it. Their solutions are fundamentally the same as ours, but they can benefit more from the new technology than anybody else and bring sustainable electricity to off grid villages and rural districts for economical prices. Cheap solar panels and batteries will help a lot of poor people in warm countries the most and they need the least panels and batteries because of their more regular day lengths and warmer climate.

To decarbonize the world, we must also equalize it more and raise the standard of living and quality of life for billions of people globally.

Right now, no lab grown meat is not a viable thing, but there are technologies evolving in the industry that might allow it to happen. It's not these flash in the pan biotech companies you need to watch, nutrients are down to a buck or less a liter and there are several companies redesigning bioreactors for high volume food production. It's not the companies that are often in the news taste testing their products to the press, it's their industrial supply chain and specialized equipment manufactures you need to keep an eye on, the underlying costs and enabling the technology of production for the industry as a whole.


Can lab-grown meat ever go mainstream?

Venture-backed startups such as Upside Foods have promised cultivated chicken as the solution to the meat problem. But does the solution made sense? Bloomberg's Priya Anand joins Ed Ludlow and Caroline Hyde for a deep dive into this industry on "Bloomberg Technology."

They don't mention rooftop solar in the towns, suburbs and the vast urban sprawl that surrounds almost all cities. Solar panels are or will or look like traditional roofing shingles and tiles and many who will need a new roof will opt for or be forced to buy one. Then there is wind power, and often both can share the same land, since a wide spacing is required between wind turbines. Then there is the possibility of power and freshwater generation for coastal areas, a two for one with potentially extremely high efficiencies. Agricultural land for growing some crops and land for grazing can share space with solar in many cases and benefit from it. Then there is the issue of solar panel efficiency, if panels become 50% more efficient and go from 20% to 30% then only 50% of the area would be required.

If you take everything into account, urban rooftop solar, wind and increased panel efficiencies, then only a fraction of the projected land would actually be required. What if half or more of the households in America generated most of their own power for use and transportation? If most town and city municipal governments generated and stored power for their own use and street lighting as some now do to save a lot of money. Remember the more power they use the faster the payback time and for a municipality that might be a lot and they can force better deals from utilities for net metering and have government at their backs most times and most have land they can use, rooftops too.

This phenomenon seems Europe wide, taxes, fuel, environmental regulations? If technology replaces most of them in a decade they will be protesting again, perhaps for the last time!

DIY-HP-LED said:

This phenomenon seems Europe wide, taxes, fuel, environmental regulations?

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Yes, pretty much.

Italy:

Poland:

The actual reasons vary, in France the pesticide, in Poland the cheap competition from Ukraine, Germany fuel taxes, NL nitrogen emission restrictions, water availability and use in Spain. But yes, it usually comes down to (EU) regulations.

As any other industry they have to adapt, but unlike other industries they are more united and get far more sympathy from the public. Farmers, it's like a tribe.

printer said:

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Solar panel prices are dropping, but the cheap ones are made in China. Good points about wind power and we can use it in coastal areas too like here. Solar is the cheapest form of power generation and utilities are buying panels too. The trouble is they are competing with home generated solar on the daytime duck curve and will want to get rid of net metering because home solar will cost them money. Utilities should be forced by policy to deploy more wind than solar, if appropriate and leave some for prosumers and to encourage home solar. Cities are surrounded by suburbs and industrial sprawl and can make a lot of their own rooftop power and not import so much. Batteries are getting much cheaper and there are now much better powerline conductors these days that can transmit more power on the same towers. Long distance HVDC interconnectors can move power form the west where the sun is shining to the east coast where it is setting. A smart, robust, secure, and flexible green new grid is required. Eventually with microgrids home batteries and plugged in EVs as part of it, if you opt for it in the software. It should evolve over time and needs government policy leadership and some planning.

Sativied said:

Yes, pretty much.

Italy:

Italy: Farmers protesting in major urban centres Jan. 22

Farmers' organizations demonstrating in Italy's major cities Jan. 22; localized disruptions likely.

crisis24.garda.com

Poland:

Poland: Farmers to demonstrate nationwide Jan. 24 /update 1

Farmers to conduct tractor protests across Poland Jan. 24. Heightened security, transport disruptions on major highways likely.

crisis24.garda.com

The actual reasons vary, in France the pesticide, in Poland the cheap competition from Ukraine, Germany fuel taxes, NL nitrogen emission restrictions, water availability and use in Spain. But yes, it usually comes down to (EU) regulations.

As any other industry they have to adapt, but unlike other industries they are more united and get far more sympathy from the public. Farmers, it's like a tribe.

Click to expand...

I'm still keep an eye on the industry that might end the existence of many of them, the EU would love it, green high tech and more food independence. It needs cheap renewable energy and high levels of automation to stand a chance of working though, along with new tech in bioreactors, but that is being developed and nutrient costs are falling fast.

In a decade or less the protests might be more intense, the collapse of rural land values will do that, and nobody wants to pay taxes on unproductive land, if they can and if they can't, they lose it and the farm.

printer said:

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If in 2030 the Chinese could be selling a low end cheap compact EV for $5K in North America with a 30 to 50kWh battery made in Mexico mostly by automation, what would they be able to sell a 20 or 30kWh home battery for with all the electronics, just hook up the solar panels on one end and the grid on the other. They are already selling cheap subcompact EVs in China for under $5,000USD and they want in through Mexico. By 2030 with better lighter batteries and more automation in assembly it should allow a larger car at about the same cost.

I sometimes watch this guy for entertainment. He covers that solar distillation device out of MIT in some detail, he is big on DIY demonstrations and projects to generate energy for the DIY experimenter and tinkerer.


MIT Breakthrough On Making All The Fresh Water We Need

Here is the original MIT paper for those interested. A very detailed paper that contains everything an engineer would need to know to play with the idea and improve it further. The basic idea offers many design possibilities and can scale from small to utility size and might even use mirrors and PV energy to drive water production even more.

Extreme salt-resisting multistage solar distillation with thermohaline convection

That solar still might be cheap to make and be composed of a thin carbon or graphene black solar collector sheet and a thin layer of flowing salt water under it with the PTFE membrane on the bottom. Multiple condenser stages can be made from nothing more than thin aluminum foil separating the stages and cold seawater and the multiple condenser stages can made from tin foil and plastic by automation as a single unit. The condensation stages might be separated from the evaporation cell too and the moist air moved to another location by pipes. It might use tracking mirrors to concentrate 2X or 4X the solar power onto the evaporation section and extend its hours of operation.

This offers many possibilities for producing fresh water economically on a large scale.

Now here is a neat idea that can use recycled plastic too, it allows you to grow rice on ponds and swampy land. Such a system could be automated to plant the rice seedlings and even drag the mature plants through processing automatically. Here it is done manually, but in many places in the southern United States it can turn useless land into productive land and a good-sized shallow pond might be turned into a highly automated rice farm with low labor costs, you just move the rafts or plastic belt of plants through the automatic seedling planter and then the harvester when you are done Make them 1 or 2 meter wide continuous strips and fill the pond.

North American natives harvested wild rice by filling a canoe with rice while beating the plants with the paddles. The beauty of this idea is you can use cheap or even free land or shallow bodies of water that are not used for any other purpose and with a facility on shore or even using portable equipment can have a highly automated rice farm with low labor costs. If you owned the land or leased the land from the government, you could customize the pond a bit for your purposes with a tractor or backhoe. I believe there is a rice shortage and prices are high, labor costs are the biggest factor in doing anything in America and these days solar energy would be cheap to run the show. Labor would be focused on seedling production and growing them for machine planting in the custom plastic trays that are linked, or it could be a flexible belt. How much is a couple of hundred tons of rice worth anyway.

In thinking about that new solar distillation method from MIT after looking through the paper, I can see how they might be cheap and easy to build even on a large scale. One might just grade land to the right angle on a south facing slope and place large flat collectors on it. Water vapor could be forced with blowers to a separate condenser that used a heat pump and seawater to condense the vapor and preheat the water going into the cells. The real secret sauce is the hydrophobic membrane that doesn't let salt water through but allows water vapor. It sits at the bottom of a thin sheet of flowing seawater sandwiched under the black solar absorbing panel on top of the cell. The angle of repose prevents the salt from accumulating and can be adjustable to a degree in an active as opposed to a passive system, it still uses the thermohaline convection method, but with an active system using pumps the flow rate can be adjusted.

Likewise, the cell might have solar power concentrated on it by mirrors and some experimentation and iterative development might get the freshwater production rate much higher than 10 liters and hour per square meter. The system can be driven with PV power on site and since it only operates in the daytime, it can be easily powered by PV solar. It is the incredible efficiency of converting sunlight into fresh water, ease of construction, durability, economy and multitude of design possibilities that will capture the interest of those who have been working in this field for decades. I would expect to see them quickly developed and deployed with lots of middle east capital and interest. Dubi is nice, but it has huge very expensive fossil fueled desalination plants, now every city in the middle east can have more water than Dubi for dirt cheap, interest should be intense and seems to be, the paper was only published a few months ago and is creating a stir in some circles.

The paper contains a lot of information with links to additional data, a gold mine for engineers looking to use this design or variations of it. I don't think they patented anything so it should be a free for all.

The globe generated about 1310.02TWh of solar recently. If solar panel capacity continues to almost double every year, then we should soon reach a Terawatt of panel production per year by the end of this year. If annual solar panel production continues to increase and if efficiencies increase too, then we could be annually producing over 2 terawatts worth of solar panels globally in a couple of more years after that. In addition to that there will be wind turbines too and HVDC interconnectors between regions. The solar panels and roofing products will be deployed by homes, business and utilities. Batteries are falling in price with mass production too.

One could see that even with projected future electricity demand, by 2030 we will be well on our way to meeting our electricity requirements from renewables and existing hydro and nuclear plants. Light transportation will be electric, increasing grid demand and displacing oil demand and other modes of heavy land transportation will become electrified too as batteries improve. A lot of short haul aviation will be electric maybe cutting our total global carbon emissions from civil aviation from 2% to 1%

What is the global manufacturing capacity of solar cells?
Between 2022 and 2023, the global PV module manufacturing capacity has increased from 358GW to 640GW, highlighting the enhanced global demand for solar.Oct 30, 2023
New paradigms of global solar supply chain - IEEFA

How much electricity is consumed in the world?
approximately 25,500 terawatt-hours

The world's electricity consumption has continuously grown over the past half a century, reaching approximately 25,500 terawatt-hours in 2022.Sep 19, 2023
Global electricity consumption 1980-2022 - Statista

Yearly solar generation by continent[

Rethinking Energy -- 100% Solar, Wind and Batteries Is Just The Beginning

Fearless Icelanders to Drill Into Magma Chamber

I don’t like places where hot stuff bubbles out of the ground, but Icelanders have no such issues. They’re now almost ready to start a new experiment that will drill right into a magma chamber. How do they know that this will not accidentally create a volcano? Let’s have a look.

Change, how it happens, how long it takes and its impact
If anybody watched the Tony Seba videos or looked at the RethinkX think tank reports online and then looked at the solar water generator from MIT, they might see a transformation for many poor people of the world. All countries want energy independence and solar, wind and batteries can do it for most, if not all. Those in the tropical zones of 30 degrees north or south of the equator should benefit the most and most quickly. In such areas solar recharged cars will soon be possible that can get enough of their energy for daily use from the sun, better batteries and solar panels make this possible, free transportation in the tropics. People living in these regions need the least amount of solar power and battery storage and stationary batteries should get much cheaper. Global mass production is ramping up, the battery factories are sprouting everywhere.

The new water distillation method from MIT I posted about earlier is immensely important and might be combined with solar PV for co-generation of power and fresh water. It might be a classic engineering trade off, more electricity and less water or the other way around, or those distillation cells might just make water. Combining solar distillation with PV generation is possible though and the overall efficiency of the cells would be enormous, 20% used to make electricity and the heat used to distill fresh water. It can also be scaled from small village sized to Utility sized for large cities.

We are building solar PV installations of millions of square meters now, imagine if they also generated 10 liters of fresh water per square meter per hour? Every million square meters of collecting area could generate 10 million liters of water per hour, perhaps as much as 100 million liters a day. Unlike electricity water can be stored easily and accumulated in vast quantities. If it is cloudy and the system does not work, it is also likely raining too, think monsoon...

Cities could build facilities on the coast or a few kilometers from it where land is cheaper in desert coastal areas. The whole operation is PV powered along with solar distillation and need not be co-generating but can be powered from onsite PV. It only works in the daytime so not much battery storage is required. If sited properly, solar covered canals and pipelines can move fresh water vast distances by gravity alone. Use PV power to pump fresh water up coastal mountains and let gravity do the work to move it inland. If solar panels covered the canals, the system could deliver both cheap fresh water and electricity too.

Take a moment and imagine the implications and promise of such systems, the business opportunities too, for it is business that brings science and technology to fruition and use. Conventional solar distillation companies and those that use reverse osmosis are out of business, and had better adapt or die, and I mean fast! It will transform cities in the more equatorial and temperate dry zones all along the Mediterranean, the red sea, the Gulf, India and islands all over the world. It should also happen fast, a classic transformation and S curve of adoption over the next 15 years and will also follow classic cost curves as innovation happens.

Another thing this device can do is the final stage of sewage treatment to remove salts and further impurities for recycling or to use for plants and an urban tree canopy to cool things down and vastly improve quality of life. Many cities will look a lot different in 20 years if they plant urban forests and have plentiful water. Cheap water and electricity equal a good life in many warm dry countries and even homeowners can use gray water for gardens.

Add this into the many other technological changes coming rapidly in the next decade and converging like AI, robotics and biotechnology, and you can see a big transformation for many of the world's countries and populations with a vastly improved quality of life and standard of living. Places like India Africa and a host of others will be impacted the most and life for them will be transformed the most. Cheap or free energy combined with emerging technology changes everything. Technological change is accelerating every year and the efforts in most fields of science and engineering are global now and involve thousands of people from multiple professional disciplines Everybody is connected by the internet and news and education travels fast, the internet is an accelerator of technological change.

Maybe someone in India likes that MIT solar distillation idea and read the paper, being an engineer and a clever fellow, he might go to work on the idea and make it better while selling it to rich Arabs and making his fortune. That's really how change happens, he will be competing in a Darwinian race to the market place and someone else might have a better plan or simply be a better businessman.