Gas power generation is a necessary evil to balance out the variability of intermittent energy generation (i.e. wind and solar).
Hydropower isn't a feasible alternative because the easy resources have been developed.
The only alternative source of flexibility available today is demand side response.
Edit: I appreciate the down votes, as I've not explained in detail. It is a complex issue. My opinions are based on having a phd in the topic, 10+ years in control rooms, years of market operations and design, and years contributing to europe-wide risk assessment methodologies.
Maybe you're the person to answer this question then.
How can I find the price of battery storage, per kWh delivered to the customer, assuming a pure wind/solar/battery grid?
I can easily find the price per kWh of battery capacity but that's not the same thing. I'm looking for the effective levelized cost of electricity, over the lifetime of the battery, so I can compare against generation sources.
> It also does nothing to help transmission grid frequency stability and control.
they dont help grid stability via inertia of spinning masses, but PLLs and the like exist, where you can control frequencies and phases without a spinning mass.
you dont need to burn gas to have a flywheel either
Batterie prices are falling constantly and grid sized battery production has not even started. The focus was and is mobile batteries.
So expect prices to drop further.
Also yes, batteries help very much with grid stability as they can give steady power on demand anywhere. Have lots of batteries everywhere == lots of on demand grid stabilizers.
> Why do people think that residential power is the issue here?
My experience has been that the vast majority of people, even very technical people, don't really understand the energy mix required to sustain modern industrial technology. Their only experience is with their utility bill which shows them a pie-chart with a big area showing "green" so they can feel better about the state of things.
Electricity production accounts for the minority of energy usage, and residential a minority of the usage of electricity. People don't think about the energy required to send an Amazon package to their door or have fruits from South America stocking their grocery store year round, or even to create the industries that ultimately make up their paychecks each month.
The pandemic was the best view of what real energy usage changes would look like. Early pandemic was a rare moment when global energy usage dipped and that had nothing to do with the demand on the residential grid.
Many things are technically possible. Fewer things are economically practical. Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough? How much will that cost and how many years will it take? A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude. Have you actually done the math on this or are you just repeating platitudes?
> A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude.
The UK is forging ahead with large scale battery storage projects. I have not done the math, but I assume there is a sound economic case in order for these projects to receive this level of investment.
Edit: Here's some more data on revenue for battery storage in the UK [3]
Yes, I have done the math. Thing is, if you ignore the climate, coal and co is still cheaper. That's why it is still used so much.
If you factor in climate costs, things are different.
> Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough?
why is this relevant? clearly europe can also buy from outside of europe.
the nice thing about batteries is you dont need a new battery for each watt, compared to needing gas.
the simplest thing is to keep buying russian gas, and also pay ukraine to attack russia. no need to change anything or do any new buildouts whether thats batteries or in US LNG export terminals+european import terminals. those also take time where the russian fuel is readily available. the russian invasion isnt gonna last forever, so a move to US gas is wasted investment when europe can move back to Russian gas eventually anyways
Apart from the obvious advantages of cheap energy, the reason Europe bought so much Russian gas is the theory that interconnected economies don't go to war. Now that Europe considers Russia a belligerent threat even after Nordstream was completed the reintegration might not happen.
Residential energy use is the least interesting thing to think about at a grid scale. The grid actually will get more brittle and/or expensive if everyone wealthy enough to get batteries and solar gets them.
What about the manufacturing and industrial uses? Or the need for natural gas to be a feedstock?
How many batteries does it take to power a giant hyperscaler datacenter for a few days during poor weather conditions? You can’t really rely on backup generators at that usage rate as the expense (and environmental impact) gets to be crazy. Or you end up just building natural gas turbines co-located with such facilities and we are back to where we began.
this is to say, that natural gas isnt the necessary evil to account for intermittent power sources.
its a necessary evil to fully capitalize on other investments. i dont care if the hyperscaler can run their GPUs overnight. perfectly happy for them to delay their training because theyre running in daytime.
the capital owners who bought the GPUs sure care, but why should i accept their pollution in order for them to run a bit faster?
This is just another way to say you are in favor of western hemisphere degrowth.
Without industry you don’t have an economy in the long run. Replace hyperscaler with aluminum smelter or manufacturing line if you prefer. If you can’t operate those capital assets 24x7 they simply will not be built in your country.
Cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy is the foundation of wealth. Nuclear fission was likely humanities transition technology but we fumbled the ball 40 years ago so here we are.
Could you explain what you would use that we can produce in Europe and can generate electricity to fill the batteries with? The batteries cannot be produced in Europe and have very limited lifetime.
Europe has 100 days worth of natural gas storage facilities. All it needs to do is to get renewables + batteries + nuclear above ~70% or so to be able to withstand being cut off for a year. Getting to ~95% is relatively cheap and easy. 100% is hard and expensive, but they don't need 100%. If they get to 95%, that's multiple years worth of storage.
> An exercise to the reader, calculate the space and materials required to replace the average norwegian hydro reservoir with batteries.
Solution: I can't compute the space and materials, but can estimate the cost.
Norway has 1240 storage reservoirs with a total capacity of 87 TWh [1], which yields an average of 70 GWh/reservoir.
Last year, in China, a 16 GWh battery storage plant received an average bid price of $US66.3/KWh [2]. From this we can compute that a 70 GWh plant should cost $US4.65 billion.
A bit on the high side, but can battery prices fall by another order of magnitude? Then again, this is for replicating one reservoir. Replicating 1240 would be a 5 trillion dollar endeavor.
That's why I said 100% renewable was hard and expensive. A grid that gets 5-10% of its energy from natural gas, but can get 100% of it's power from nuclear + gas during a dankelflaute provides optimally cheap + secure power.
> The problem is dispatchability/flexibility, not storage. At a more complex level the issue is grid inertia and frequency response.
The easiest money I ever made was investing in natural gas infrastructure during the COVID insanity of everyone calling it dead due to renewables.
I really don’t understand the disconnect otherwise very intelligent people have on this subject. Every single person I’ve talked to in the actual industry seems to be aware of this fact and how dire things are getting. However it seems that everyone else believes that grid scale batteries are somehow going to save the day in the next decade or two.
Energy storage is energy storage. Natural gas is just a giant underground battery.
And that’s before you get to industrial uses of natural gas as a feedstock, while ignoring how much is still used for heating infrastructure and how long it would take to retrofit everything to heat pumps.
I often wonder what I’m missing, but I’m confident enough in this one to have put my money where my mouth is at least.
Agreed they are. But they want to move away from it, especially for air quality reasons. They've had a huge problem with air pollution. They are big into EVs. This means less reliance on foreign oil and cleaner air.
Nuclear is as dead as a great technology can be. A few more incremental improvements in solar and battery industry and nuclear won't be profitable even in theory, to say nothing of construction cost overruns.
Reactors are only good at providing baseload but that isn't how grids operate anymore. Renewables are too cheap, if a power plant can't drop output fast enough it is punished.
nuclear plants can cut power as quickly as any other power plant, you are just controlling steam. divert the steam from the turbine and you aren't generating power anymore.
I agree with that, I have just seen on here before that people think you can't regulate the electrical output of a nuclear plant like with more traditional ones.
Mostly because it's very expensive and slow to build, what with nuclear engineers not wanting their workplaces to be as dangerous as a construction site. Look up who invented the Maximum Credible Accident, it wasn't the environmentalists.
Completely wrong. Renewables plus battery storage and long-distance transmission lines can potentially solve the power generation problem, although we're decades away from being able to scale that up in a way that addresses base load requirements for heavy industry in an economical way. But beyond power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for the chemicals industry. Renewables won't solve that and the German chemical manufacturing industry is dying.
Many people only look at "electricity" generation when they think about renewables, but fail to recognize that that is only part of energy consumption (and a surprisingly small one at that). Globally electricity production only accounts for ~21% of energy usage, so even if we had an entirely green grid across the entire planet we still would have a long way to go as far as having sustainable energy usage.
The largest source of "renewable" energy (not just electricity) in the EU is biomass [0], which, in many cases is wood pellets shipped (using bunker fuel to power the ships of course) from North America to the EU.
Page 8 of this report [1] gives a pretty good visual of how this trend has increased over time.
Europe is basically reverting to using wood for it's primary heating fuel.
It's a prerequisite. But we actually need to make the policy decisions to stop using fossils, otherwise we'll just burn it all in addition to using renewables and look pretty bad in the history books for bringing about the climate apocalypse.
The hard part is extrapolated alignment, and I don't think there's a good solution to this. Large groups of humans are good at this, eventually (even if they tend to ignore their findings about morality for hundreds, or thousands, of years, even past the point where over half the local population knows, understands, and believes those findings), but individual humans are pretty bad at moral philosophy. (Simone Weil was one of the better ones, but even she thought it was more important to Do Important Stuff (i.e., get in the way of more competent resistance fighters) than to act in a supporting role.)
Of course, the Less Wrongians have extremely flawed ideas about extrapolated alignment (e.g. Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks that "coherent extrapolated volition" is a coherent concept that one might be able to implement, given incredible magical powers), and OpenAI's twisted parody of their ideas is even worse. But it's thanks to the Less Wrongians' writings that I know their ideas are flawed (and that OpenAI's marketing copy is cynical lies / cult propaganda). "Coherent extrapolated volition" is the kind of idea I would've come up with myself, eventually, and (unlike Eliezer Yudkowsky, who identified some flaws almost immediately) I would probably have become too enamoured with it to have any sensible thoughts afterwards. Perhaps the difficulty (impossibility) of actually trying to build the thing would've snapped me out of it, but I really don't know.
Anyway: extrapolated alignment is out (for now, and perhaps forever). But it's easy enough to make a "do what I mean" machine that augments human intelligence, if you can say all the things it's supposed to do. And that accounts for the majority of what we need AI systems to do: for most of what people use ChatGPT for nowadays, we already had expert systems that do a vastly better job (they just weren't collected together into one toolsuite).
Expert systems are plenty useful. For example, content moderation: an expert system can interpret and handle the common cases, leaving only the tricky cases for humans to deal with. (It takes a bit of thought to come up with the rules, but after the dozenth handling of the same issue, you've probably got a decent understanding of what it is that is the same – perhaps good enough to teach to the computer.)
Expert systems let you "do things that don't scale", at scale, without any loss of accuracy, and that is simply magical. They don't have initiative, and can't make their own decisions, but is it ever useful for a computer to make decisions? They cannot be held accountable, so I think we shouldn't be letting them, even before considering questions of competence.
Zvi's an AI-doomer, so he sees the endgame as AI becoming smart enough that they don't need us anymore and then killing us to take our stuff, but your scenario is also pretty bad.
Speaking in generalities, some source of "doom" are really covert marketing, where Thing X is so amazing and magical that nobody can risk not investing in it, paying attention to it, or constantly talking with their friends about it.
I don’t think you can really accuse the lesswrong crowd of being in it to hype up OpenAI.
They don’t profit from it (well at least the current doom crowd), they have been saying that this is super-risky since “forever” (15 years), they strongly argue against e.g. OpenAI going private … I really don’t understand where this whole strand of thinking of hidden ulteriour motives for AI doomers comes from, AFAIK there was never a single clear case where this happened (and the arc of people invested in AI is they they become less of a doomer the more financially entangled they become with AI, see Elon or Altman).
It's so common for people to throw out those accusations, despite zero evidence from the lesswrong crowd, because they need explanations that are way more comforting than facing down the scary implication that lesswrong "doomers" are right.
One thought path leads to business-as-usual comfort, happily motivated by trillions of $ in market cap and VC.
The other is dread.
It makes sense why people take the easy road. We're still battling climate change denialism after all.
They could be be playing into such a narrative, even though they have different motivations.
Certainly Altman has had a few moments where he is saying "this stuff is getting so good it is society-scale dangerous". His motivations are to create FOMO with investors and users, and to try to form the regulatory landscape in their favor.
I just don't understand the line of reasoning at all. It sounds to me like postulating that oil executives have started admitting climate change is real in order to create FOMO. Investors and users live in society, why would they fear missing out on destroying it?
> like postulating that oil executives have started admitting climate change is real
The subtext isn't "our product has bad side-effects and can be avoided with known alternatives", but more like: "Our product's core benefit is too awesome at what it does; If we don't pursue it then someone less-enlightened will do it anyway; Whether you love it or hate it the only way to influence the outcome is to support us."
So the oil-executive version would be something like "worrying" that petrochemical success will quickly bankrupt every other power-generation or energy-storage system overnight, causing economic disruption, and that eventually it will make mankind too satisfied and too comfortable so that it falls into existential torpor... But at least DinoCo™ has a What If It's Too Awesome working group to study the issue while there's still time before our inevitable corporate win of All The Things.
Why would the oil executive benefit from saying that if it's not true? Wouldn't it be better for his stock price to say that disruption will be limited, and the DinoCo takeover will usher in a golden age like Amazon has for shopping? If anything, that's my criticism of the guy; as OpenAI revenue has risen, he's become much more vocal about the benefits of AI and much more confident that the risks and costs are solvable.
If enough people believe it is true and act on this belief, it will become true (to a larger degree, at least). There is a massive shift of the direction of money happening right now, away from workers into "AI" (LLM based systems). The more of that shift can be produced now, the stronger the AI companies will be in the future. Because they need massive capital investments in compute, engineering investments in efficiency, and to reach economies of scale, to be able to really compete with human-based workforce.
Yeah it's partly a "this is the inevitable winning team" - join before it is too late. The earlier the better! There are some parallels to how MLM and ponzi schemes are sold.
One of the ways it can work is that people may reject the most extreme case (say end of humans beings in control), but accept some milder version (most jobs will be done by AI, or most jobs will be AI assisted). The fear of an extreme can cause people to rationalize the "milder" outcome - independently of whether there are good arguments for that outcome, or even whether the outcome is desirable, or better than status quo.
The investor class are not dependent on wages, so their livelihoods are not at stake. Same with big corporate partners, they are hoping to improve competitiveness by having fewer employees and CEO take a bonus for that.
Regular users in fear of their jobs may act on that, in hope that they can reskill and transition by being AI savvy.
I do not agree with the argument they make, but I understand what they are are playing at, and that unfortunately it can be effective.
Another aspect is for distraction. OpenAI for example have had periods where they talked a lot on existential risk (humanity is doomed due to AI overloads, yadda yadda). This can serve as a very useful distraction to avoid talk about more plausible risks in the foreseeable future - such as massive concentrations of wealth, increased inequality, large amounts of unemployment, large scale personalized psychological manipulation, etc.
I'm hoping that's intended as: "That group exists, but for clarity I want to say the lesswrong crowd aren't part of it", as opposed to my initial reading of: "Your 'generality' is a false covert accusation, you cad."
"major security risks" as in Terminator style robot overlords, or (to me more likely) they enable people to develop exploits more easily? Anyway I fail to see how it makes much difference if the models are open or closed, since the barrier to entry to creating new models is not that large (as in, any competent large company or nation state can do it easily), and even if they were all closed source, anyone who has the weights can run up as many copies as they want.
Definitely a risk, and already happening, but I presume mostly closed source AIs are used for this? Like, people using the ChatGPT APIs to generate spam; or Grok just doing its normal thing. Don't see how the open vs closed debate has much to do with it.
You can't see how a hosted private model (that can monitor usage and adapt mechanisms to that) has a different risk profile than an open weight model (that is unmonitorable and becomes more and more runnable on more and more hardware every month)?
One can become more controlled and wrangle in the edge-cases, and the other has exploding edges.
You can have your politics around the value of open source models, but I find it hard to argue that there aren't MUCH higher risks with the lack of containment of open weights models
You're making several optimistic assumptions: The first is that closed source companies are interested in controlling the risk of using their technology. This is obviously wrong: Facebook didn't care its main platform enabled literal genocide. xAI doesn't care about the outputs of their model being truthful.
The other assumption is that nefarious actors will care about any of this. They'll use what's available, or make their own models, or maybe even steal models (if China had an incredible AI, don't you think other countries would be trying to steal the weights?). Bad actors don't care about moral positions, strangely enough.
Governments are able to regulate companies like OpenAI and impose penalties for allowing their customers to abuse their APIs, but are unable to do so if Russia's Internet Research Agency is running the exact same models on domestic Russian servers to interfere in US elections.
Of course, the US is a captured state now and so the current US Government has no problem with Russian election interference so long as it benefits them
