title: Future of Energy Reading List
author: Cjhandmer
contenttype: article
publication: Casey Handmer's blog
published: 2023-10-19T00:00:00
sourceurl: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/10/19/future-of-energy-reading-list/
word_count: 2727
TL;DR: The future of energy is solar+batteries+synthetics.
As of Oct 2023, the global solar deployment rate is approximately one megawatt per minute.
Over the last 2-5-10 years this has become increasingly inescapable. As of October 2023, this Nature Communications article reports some recent modeling showing most of the transition will occur by 2027.
Here follows a reading list organized by topic for people who are curious to learn more. If you have recommendations not on this list or suggestions for blog topics, let me know.
My writing
To Conquer the Primary Energy Consumption Layer of Our Entire Civilization (Apr 2025)
Solar and Batteries for Generic Use Cases (Nov 2024)
Solar Applications Are The Largest Investment Opportunity In A Century (May 2024)
Solar Will Keep Getting Cheaper, Radical Energy Abundance, and Applications (Oct 2023)
Long Live The Sun (good all round summary Apr 2021)How To Produce Green Hydrogen For $1/kg (Aug 2023)
You Should Be Working On Hardware (Aug 2023)
We Should Not Let The Earth Overheat (June 2023)
We Can Have Ecological And Energy Abundance (Feb 2024)
Energy, prosperity, and growth: earliest blog on solar vs coal(Oct 2018) and
The Unstoppable Battery Onslaught (May 2021)and
Grid Storage: Batteries Will Win (July 2023)
Build More Solar Panels (July 2022)
River-scale desalination (Nov 2022)A Vision For Water Abundance (Jan 2024)Terraforming Nevada (October 2024)
Powering AI data centers (Mar 2024)
Intermittency, utilization, solar, and batteries (Nov 2024)
Direct Current Data Centers (Jan 2026)
Synthetic fuel (Feb 2022) and more focused updates on Terraform IndustriesHow To Apply Skepticism To New Energy Tech (Apr 2023)Solar Will Crush Nuclear (Jun 2019)
Space-based Solar Power is not a good idea (Aug 2019) and part two (Sep 2019)
Ramez Naam
Mez and I agree on most of this stuff, but he’s been writing about it for much longer! We respectfully disagree (as of Oct 2023) on the need for massive grid build out.
Insanely Far Thinking Post on Solar and Synthetic Fuel (Jun 2011!!!)
Solar Plunging Below Fossil Fuels (Oct 2014)
How Far Can Solar Go (Jan 2016)
The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be the Most Disruptive Yet (Apr 2019)
Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap (May 2020)
Austin Vernon
Solar PV’s Path to Dominance (July 2021)Electrify Everything Is Slow (Sep 2021)Simple Solutions Power Solar’s Advance (Apr 2022)
Books/articles
Electrify Everything is a good summary of demand-side approaches to carbon reduction.
Alex Honnold’s reading list.
My book reviews, including a range of books of varying quality on energy.
Color me skeptical. Greenland? Solar? Don’t make me laugh. How are you supposed to run your heat pump in Nuuk in December with zero sun? How much does solar power cost to heat your house every night throughout the summer? At least with wind, there is some there year ’round.
Best guess is they ignore storage, which is by far the most expensive part of the system. Please rerun the numbers for Nuuk for 6 months of storage. If you can do that, overnight during the summer is easy!
https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/30460~29787/Comparison-of-the-Average-Weather-in-Nanortalik-and-Nuuk
LikeLiked by 1 person
Every inhabitant of Nuuk can fly a private jet every day of the year and it will make zero difference to climate change.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’m skeptical of their model. As the saying goes “all models are wrong, some are useful”, I wonder if the useful part of it is political and/or a sales job. If you look at the 2030 model, the only countries that are light blue (onshore wind) and not solar (pink) are Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Norway stands out to me because I know the vast majority (90%!) of its power is produced by hydro, which isn’t even a color on the map!
Hydro is great because it is cheap and dispatchable, it can be used as base load and/or peak power, and even be used for storage (pumped hydro). Even if solar is cheaper per MWh, it is not dispatchable, cannot be used as base load, is maybe pseudo peak (see your CA Duck Curve), and desperately needs storage to be useful for use outside of the middle of the solar day and at night.
BTW, Nuuk has hydropower to power their hypothetical heat pumps!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Please do some research – start with the energy transition show podcast – they just a a brilliant three part series on renewables including solar. It works brilliantly in the snow…… Been there for ages. Prejudice doesnt make analysis. Casey has to be nice to your hamfisted analysis, reality wont be nice!
LikeLike
You wrote some nonsesne below about Lithuim supplies. My guess is you are American and as usual dont seem to understand mining, nor have you done the research. I mean google it, mate! We are in a glut of lithuim at the moment. Once mined it can all be recycled. We have sodium batteries coming into production now. The mining industry is vast, global and professional and deliver when conditions require.
LikeLike
Hey Casey – any update to your thinking now that there has been so much interest over the past year in fusion? Or same conclusion?
LikeLike
I hope it can work. But it requires a few steps 1) Work 2) Be manufacturable 3) Be cheaper than solar. That’s a big ask.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As to replying to a 2019 post, I just found Casey’s blog here (Love your SLS criticism and SpaceX discussion posts especially!)
There have been a couple of milestone breakthroughs this past few years. For example, Dec 5 2022 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved a ‘scientific energy breakeven’.
LikeLike
Well, European universities are making renewable seasonal heat storage which TOC is cheaper then natural gas furnace or heat pump. Hyper scalable, decentralized, simple, today.
By using 100+ year old technology of
stripping oxygen from iron rust by hydrogen from PV/wind connected electrolyzers in summer. in situ without compressing, storage nor transport of a hydrogen !
to generate highly reactive iron which will be stored until winter
and by mixing it with water to release hydrogen in winter to heat home by directly burning it or by using it for PEM fuel cells.
3-4 times higher energy capacity then gasoline. and “reactant” – iron is non toxic, reusable indefinitely in situ.
ETH Zurich is building prototype which will heat university campus and University of Eindhoven is already providing process heat to brewery and are in process of building other plants.
That technology was used 100+ years ago to reduce iron, for steel production, which another startup is in process of building pilot plant providing 1 million tons of raw Fe per year. And again, it is using hydrogen, because in Europe we do have big caverns left after natural gas extraction which are used for storage, today already, but for russian natural gas. so in future those caverns will be storing hydrogen generated in summer.
By using primitive cheap electrolyzers anyone can make that device DIY, really. And again its TOC is cheaper then natural gas furnace or heat pump.
LikeLike
That process is highly inefficient, and will almost certainly never be commercially practical. There’s a Swiss start-up named Iron Energy which is trying to commercialize it. They will fail.
Iron is not “highly reactive.” It does not have “3-4 times higher energy capacity than gasoline.” It has only about 1/6-th of the energy capacity of gasoline.
The oxidation of 1 gram of iron releases only about 7.38 kJ of energy. The oxidation (burning) of one gram of gasoline releases about 45 kJ of energy.
Do you know how thermite works? It uses iron oxide to provide oxygen to oxidize aluminum, and the process is VERY energetic. That’s because oxidation of aluminum releases a LOT of energy, compared to oxidation of iron.
Also, hydrogen gas is difficult to store and transport. It leaks from containers that are perfectly adequate for storing CH4 (methane), because H2 molecules are only 1/9-th as large as CH4 molecules. Also, hydrogen tends to cause “hydrogen embrittlement” of metals.
Also, from what I’ve read, to generate hydrogen gas from iron and water the water must be in the form of steam, the generation of which uses some of the stored energy. The result is that you’re generating
hothydrogen, which exacerbates the problems with storing and transporting it.LikeLike
This information is very incomplete at best, or more realistically, outright incorrect. Solar panels are getting cheaper, sure. But once a significant fraction of total generation is solar and wind, storage and grid stability become prohibitively expensive. For countries like The Netherlands and Germany, with fairly high fractions of solar and wind, this has not just been expensive but simply impossible with current technology.
So yes sure, it will be cheaper to build massive solar farms. It will be extremely expensive, however, to actually bring that power anywhere, or to store it for use at night. Disappointing clickbait.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Use batteries to store power.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Li-ion batteries? No, no, no–we need them for cars and other vehicles! Maybe when we have mined enough high energy density lithium for that purpose, we can use it for something that doesn’t need to move.
Sure, use a battery to load shift a solar plant from noon to six PM in the summer (and from noon to six AM in the winter), but for longer storage, you will want a cheaper source, which for the foreseeable future is still pumped hydro.
LikeLike
Casey, there is no battery technology in existence or in prospect which could possibly store enough energy to solve the wind & solar “intermittency” problem.
California used 278,338 GWh of electricity in 2024. Its Moss Landing “world’s largest battery” was planned to have a laughable 0.58 GWh of storage…
…until it failed:
https://www.montereycountyweekly.com/blogs/newsblog/moss-landing-battery-plant-down-indefinitely-after-second-incident-in-5-months/articlefd119cb6-8ec6-11ec-882f-db4faf6c0495.html
…and then failed again:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/moss-landing-fire-battery-storage-industry-lithium/741283/
LikeLike
Battery production is increasing about 30% yoy and cost is falling by a similar amount. It’s not hard to see which way the trend line is going, even if your cherry picked example failed.
LikeLike
You need to do your research before speaking. The disappointment is your low value response in a technical and economic field. Check out https://ember-energy.org/. When you are done check out Lazards and their cost estimates. Technically the problems (except synthetics) are solved. Economics us wehat matters – solar – battery combinations are noiw cost competitive if not cheaper than grid options. Nothing else is beating them in the cost game and as casey says they are getting cheaper. The real question is what is your pre-judgement and where is your fact base for this ‘analysis’. SAD.
LikeLike
Batteries? Hardly.
Do the math on input and output. You need a LOT more batteries. Cobalt-mining children are DYING.
Solar and batteries do NOT address serious grid voltage fluctuations. So now add in extensive capacitor banks everywhere to try and stabilize the grid.
But wait! A really bad day on the grid and even your capacitors melt down. You’ll need large-mass spinning inertia (like a big, utility-sized turbine-generator) to soak up that voltage swing and keep the grid connected. Can’t get that from ANY renewable.
Anywhere that renewables are the primary electricity source, you’ll find everyone of means has a backup fuel-fired generator. Because a renewable grid is NOT a reliable grid.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The world is powered mainly by fossil fuels, even in China, which produces the vast majority of the world’s solar panels.
China is bringing on line an average of about two new coal-fired power plants per week. Coal is by far the largest (and fastest-growing) energy source in China. Oil is #2. Natural gas is #3. Hydro is #4. Look at the graph:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-sub-energy-source?country=~CHN
The claim that renewable energy is cheaper than dispatchable fossil fuels & nuclear is a lie from the wind & solar propaganda mill. It’s an attempt to confuse people by conflating low VALUE (the low prices fetched by renewable energy) with COST.
For wind and solar, the value is low, not the cost. The cost is very high.
Dispatchable electricity fetches high prices because it’s available when it’s needed: i.e., when prices are high. Often when prices are high it’s because wind and solar are not available.
Those high prices are the COST of wind and solar energy deployment. The more wind and solar are deployed, the higher the costs will be when the wind stops and the sun doesn’t shine.
That happens a lot. Remember: wind is driven by solar energy, so it should come as no surprise that the wind often dies as the sun goes down—just as people are getting home from work, plugging in their EVs, and turning on their stoves.
That’s why the countries with the greatest reliance on wind and solar energy have by far the highest energy costs, and the faster wind and solar are deployed the faster electricity prices rise.
But it could be worse. If pricey fossil-fueled dispatchable “peaker” power was not available, then reliance on wind and solar would mean freezing in the dark on windless winter nights.
That’s the “intermittency” problem. No amount of subsidies and incentives can solve that fundamental problem with wind and solar energy. There is no battery technology in existence or in prospect which can solve it, either. Even Bill Gates understands that:
That’s why, in the long term, the future of energy is nuclear, and in the short and medium term it is fossil fuels.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think Bill is wrong about that.
LikeLike
Casey, I think you could be a true advocate for an honest re-evaluation of where we’re going with electricity, but between Dave and myself, we have to get you to see reality.
I’m approaching this discussion from a grid reliability perspective, because poor reliability ultimately equals dead people, and I think we can agree we don’t want that.
Grid reliability became an electric industry issue after the 2003 Northeast blackout. You can get a quick summary here:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-five-years-later/
I was an Engineering Director for a major power company during the time that we were working to comply with the new NERC Reliability Standards, and even helped in their writing. This effort changed the industry, and it forced everyone on the grid at the time to focus on making sure reliability was forefront. We went so far as to designate “NERC Champions” in every generating station, and performed self-audits to ensure compliance. This was in the period of 2005-2010, and continues to this day.
Since then, regulators have become enamored with renewable power, courtesy of bought-and-paid-for politicians, and have started bending the rules in favor of renewables. So as a result, these renewables don’t have to participate in the grid-strengthening requirements of the NERC Standards.
Which is fine, as long as you have significant conventional assets on the grid to soak up the instabilities, outages, and all-too-common interruption events. But when pols push the renewables too far, to the point of eliminating the large generators from the grid (like CA, NY, and IL), we’re headed right back to where we were in 2003.
When I started in the business in the ’80s, the buzzword was “fuel diversity”. Which meant coal, gas or oil, and nuclear. That way, if any one technology was impacted by some external event, the rest of the grid could cover for the loss of capacity.
I’ll say that the diversity requirement is still in play, but instead of “fuel diversity”, it needs to be “reliability diversity”. Renewables can have a seat at the table, but we NEED those big spinning hunks of steel in the utility-sized generators.
At least, until solar installations start REQUIRING either storage (batteries, ugh) or contracts with conventional generators to cover shortages, along with grid-forming inverters (which are hardly used yet) to mitigate grid swings.
In the meantime, we’re gonna kill people with renewables. You can help by understanding this and advocating for a more-balanced approach to grid energy supplies. Willing to help if you want it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The way I see it, the future wants mostly solar and batteries, the markets are pushing in that direction, and regulatory over-complication just steepens the arbitrage in their favor. There’s a similar principle at play for uncooperative objects falling into black holes, or bugs trying to escape from spider webs.
LikeLike