Nathan Iyer
@NiyerClimate
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Mostly energy focused. State modeling and federal yodeling. Views are my own, not associated with my employer.
Joined December 2019
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You don't have to guess! And when you add it up, you get emissions similar to nuclear, or about 40-80x less pollution natural gas for the same amount of energy production.
But gotta give this troll account credit, it is not the color green.
Guess how much concrete and metal is required for just one wind tower?
“green energy” is not green.
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Weird, it looks like the US is building out manufacturing capacity rapidly.
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It seems pretty clear that once EVs hit TCO parity (you are here), oil importing nations will have every incentive to shift to EVs as quickly as possible, in part due to trade balance issues.
Wow! Ethiopia is jumping to EVs & will ban importing ICE. Why? It can't afford to spend annually $5 billion on oil imports!
EVs are already ~10% of Ethiopia's auto FLEET!
Ethiopia Shows Us Just How Fast The Transition To Electric Mobility Can Happen In Africa - CleanTechnica
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Ok for the great tariff debate, I'm going to toss some heaters into the discussion:
1. China has done more than any country to REDUCE nickel and cobalt use in the EV transition by leading the LFP revolution:
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The fundamental problem with hydrogen is that the politics are great but the physics is not
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Here we go nerds, 100 H2 tweets.
Views my own, massive disclaimer, setting the timer for 2 hours so this is from the dome.
I will waffle between piping hot, interesting, and so mindboggling esoteric that only the deepest analysts could possibly find it useful.
Let's go.
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I could write a hundred tweets about hydrogen, the core audience would be like three dozen people, just waiting for an excuse and about 2 hours
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That's why we have life cycle assessments.
Wind is 10-20g CO2/kWh.
Gas is 400-500g Co2/kWh
Coal is 800-1000g CO2/kWh
"Oh no, we need to use materials" is the most annoying critique of wind/solar/nuclear/geothermal.
Concrete is the 3rd largest CO2 emitter, accounting for 4 to 8% of the world’s CO2. A typical wind turbine uses 566.89 tons of concrete. The production of 1 m³ of concrete requires 2,775 MJ of energy. Most of this energy comes from oil. 89 barrels per turbine base.
#GreenEnergy
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I know I'm going to get heat from this one, but alas its twitter.
The grid right now is a bunch of vertical hotdogs, which isn't optimal, but the sun goes East to West so the areas with more sun can't share with less sun, and the windy hotdog can't share with the others.
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Fascinating analysis by my colleague
@ashna__aggarwal
. The top 12 states that could see the most investment from the IRA are red states with currently carbon-heavy economies.
We are heading towards a collision of culture and cash.
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If we get this hydrogen thing right we will solve a huge chunk of power sector decarb. Y'all might not see it, but we have a windfall that could solve a major market issue. I'm gonna walk through why the H2 PTC is hot.
Not even gonna try to be relatable here, wonk level max.
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Two types of policy pushes:
- The tiniest incremental policy tweak, 12 years, takes 5 PhDs, every stakeholder and their mother
- Insane idea, obliterates the problem, full gas, no breaks, everyone is plastered writing it, buzzerbeater yeet into the NDAA
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$100/kWh is the threshold that rings the death toll of ICE vehicles in the developing world and fossil fuel importers globally.
This is historic, and I celebrate the engineers, govts and scientists and true f'n believers that made it happen.
April's Battery Component Price Report is out, cell prices on that low low: trending past the $100/kWh threshold 😍
Reach out for BCPR subscription details (report + raw daily time-series data):
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Every year the EPA releases a national inventory tracking all the climate pollutants produced in the US.
There are some interesting nuggets in the 860 page (oh yea) report that you probably won't read, but I did, b/c I'm crazy.
Let's dig in!
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Transportation is the bad guy in this story and nullified all other progress.
"Light duty trucks" increased by 370 MMT and bigger trucks increased by 80 MMT.
Light trucks (think pickups, SUVs, vans) got special lighter rules than passenger cars and went hog wild.
@mateosfo
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Engagement at an all time high, couldn’t be more excited for life with her!
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The hydrogen PTC is worth a lot of money. Tens, if not hundreds of billions. The choices Treasury makes will shape technology, energy markets, and global standards.
Treasury received over 191 comments - I read most of them, and wanted to highlight some excellent ones.
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Ugh ok quick thread about "additionality" and why it matters for hydrogen and the exceptions.
Wonk level high, impact level high, hot takes only.
You have been warned.
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@LimitingThe
@alex_oeh
Haha fair enough - for the record your videos were essential for some meetings on batteries that ultimately influenced the IRA which is a pretty big deal. For example, your deep dive supply chain series is one of the reasons metal sulfates were included in the refining tax credit
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One opinion I have as a climate hawk is that we need to be very clear-eyed about true value of natural gas, which does play a loadbearing role in modern society.
Because only then can we replace it without bringing the house down.
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I’m loving handbook on electricity markets. Any other good resources on grid economics? Hoping for something extremely technical and wonky. The more FERC the better. Whatcha got energy Twitter
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Ok so lets take this to a logical conclusion - LFP is at $46/kWh, Na-ion at scale is 20-30% less (you can use the same infrastructure).
Add back 50% for E&C/BoP/siting/interconnection, and we're at $50/kWh overnight (but should be sub 1 yr dev). 20-40 year lifetime.
Missed this story from last week - China's first utility-scale (10 MWh) sodium-ion battery storage plant connected to the grid in Guangxi, built by China Southern Grid.
"With these batteries, storage cost can be reduced by 20% to 30%" the company said.
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Happy IRA year folks. The story is simple enough:
Dems got one big shot.
They were constrained to spending money by "The Rules".
Solving climate change requires decarbonizing ~20 unique sectors, each with diff techs and economics. Congress threw $$ at pretty much all of them.
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5. The idea that China is winning due to "cheap labor" ignores that these are extremely high throughput, highly automated industries.
That's not the primary reason its cheap - also their debt model, the "machines that build the machines", and this:
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I think that the core unit of "clean electricity" should be grams CO2 per kWh.
I made a quick n dirty cheat sheet, open to feedback.
You can check how your grid is doing!
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@LimitingThe
@alex_oeh
Not a ton of accessible deep battery supply chain info out there tbh, your stuff was clearer and better than the DOE reports lol
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So you know how electric mobility is gonna beat the sh*t out of combustion engines in every metric?
Yea this is what the US supply chain for batteries looked like before Congress intervened.
What do you notice on the “under development” column?
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I have an amazing idea for a tax credit. Its called "reverse 45Q" (aka 45Ó). Instead of providing money for capturing and burying carbon, we instead create a reverse tax credit every time someone extracts and burns carbon.
Wonder if anyone has thought about this before...
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I’m heating up one of the most complicated hydrogen tax credit threads I can come up with. It’s gonna be straight up incomprehensible to any of y’all and you’re gonna love it.
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Huge kudos to DOE and Treasury for releasing the 45X guidance today!
Gamechanger for the adv manufacturing economy in the US!
Two things to note:
1. Tech neutral - broad inclusion to avoid artificial path dependencies
2. Great guardrails - strong limits to fraud/waste.
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@mateosfo
The big success story (reversing the transportation failure) was the electricity sector.
Coal plummeted from 50% of our mix down to 20%.
Gas rose from 10% to 37% and wind/solar rose from 0.1% to 12.5% to replace this coal.
Demand hasn't really grown since ~2005!
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.
@RogerPielkeJr
wrote a piece about wind.
He makes three points:
1. Wind power is low density
2. Wind capacity factors are limited
3. Wind power ages quickly
I think there are real critiques of wind, but these aren't the right ones!
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Admin is goated on energy policy.
They put steroids in their munchies this morning, this clean mfg guidance is rock solid. Let er rip folks
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First, over the past 30 years, the US has made... literally zero progress on emissions.
But, the population has gotten larger and the country has gotten richer.
As a result, the emissions per dollar and per person are lower than in 1990. So that's something!
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More wind and solar means less need for gas energy, but potentially more need for gas capacity (esp in the context of growing load).
And it's important to know the difference!
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The stupid thing about climate change denial is how basic the actual physics is.
Folks learned that CO2 traps heat in 1856 by filling jars full of carbon dioxide and they got hotter in the sun.
Then we put over a trillion tons into the sky and now stuff is hotter.
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There are three pillars to "bringing your own beer":
Incrementality: you bring your own beer
Deliverability: you BYOB TO the party
Time matching: you BYOB to the party when the party is happening
It's pretty straightforward for beer, and for hydrogen.
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If it takes 1 year to set up the program (e.g. each state needed to do a specific application), Then you start with the application, and devs need 1-2 years to build (grid stuff is hard rn), that's a 3 year process before the chargers are built.
Buttigieg absolutely flails here. The real question -- which Brennan should have asked -- is why private companies are managing to build so many charging stations while the U.S. government hasn't managed to build any.
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The DOE has proposed hamburger grids that could move power across the country, unlocking billions in value. They call this hamburger style grid the "Macrogrid", presumably named after the McDonalds Big Mac.
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Transmission Impossible 4: Climate Crisis
@JigarShahDC
@RobGramlichDC
@benserrurier
@christiantfong
@mendell_russell
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If you take your marginal corn field and turn it into solar, you'll make at least 5x more money per acre.
If things get droughty, landowners should really consider this option. The corn people hate solar because it's better than corn, but sometimes cash is king, not corn.
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Preparing for a conference on hydrogen, so going to mix it up - quick thread about batteries and the US industrial strategy to date!
The US Government ultimately wants "energy security" for its batteries - autos, military, grid resilience, electronics; its a critical tech!
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@mateosfo
Animal burps, aka "enteric fermentation", beat out the entire nat gas system in terms of methane emissions, I didn't know that!
Burps / trash / poop emits more methane than the oil and gas industry according to the EPA.
However, O&G methane leaks could be very underreported...
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Yo ppl who write these hydrogen roadmaps. Instead of trying to say "lets do one bajillion hydrogens", what about a report that says "here's the least amount of hydrogen we could do, and still get to zero emissions". That would be neat!
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Hot (uneducated) take: the fact that trawlers hate offshore wind (due to the anchors) is probably a pretty good sign. This could create pockets of ocean that can't be obliterated by nets, offering sanctuaries for sea floor habitats.
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Climate change is bad folks. We should try to stop it. We have a really nice temperature band going here.
If we are smart and use the state and markets well, we can pretty much fully solve it at breakeven prices and additional growth in about 40 years.
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2. The US is heading towards battery independence thanks to the IRA/IIJA.
Below is the North American supply chain with 900 GWh/yr demand in 2030.
Bit gaps are in graphite (anode) + electrolyte : low margin, low complexity industries.
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@MLiebreich
The H2 ladder is a hugely important concept - the idea that there are places where hydrogen is useful and necessary, and places where it is likely an extraordinary waste of energy.
Knowing the difference is crucial.
But even the top stuff will be capex intensive.
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The industrial sectors that remain after the IRA dust settles:
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My final note before I go on vacation. "Hydrogen using curtailed renewables" and "running electrolyzers 24/7" are very silly extremes.
1. Curtailment is super rare, you can't run a project off it. Variable projects will likely use the entire output of wind/solar plants.
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You can still do stuff like "cow pasture/range/feed/horses/goats/ethanol" in the land in between. Which is most of US land!
It's pretty dang close to the lowest direct use of land per MW, especially with larger turbines!
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Three steps for a hit tweet on Energy Twitter:
1. Agency acronym: especially FERC / LPO
2. The name of an ISO/RTO
3. Another random acronym that only appears in grad level grid engineering textbooks.
Explain nothing.
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4. The US needs to compete, and the political (and xenophobic) opposition to Chinese companies building factories on American soil is self defeating.
Even Trump agrees:
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The Rotterdam hydrogen summit has been fascinating so far. Hundreds of thousands of square feet of booths, weird pipes, business models, and national strategies.
As
@gnievchenko
mentioned, the lack of offtakers definitely is clear, but that is primarily a policy variable imo.
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Digging into the sectoral data, you can see that electricity emissions have plummeted, transportation emissions have increased, and the rest is mostly flat.
We have experienced deindustrialization which has pulled down industry emissions too.
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I do think that the climate community should ramp up our work on reliability, which means investing in power system expertise.
I think the "blackouts/ sky is falling" crowd is gaining momentum and has enough seeds of truth where its worth tackling head on.
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Ok industry decarb. You're thinking steel, cement, refineries, and glass.
But what about solving the ozone hole?
Industry emissions have been flat, but that has obscured huge changes. Since 1990, chems/metals has collapsed, and it was replaced 1:1 by refrigerants!
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You know when you're concerned about an existential crisis, but then another, faster existential crisis pops up. And then they start merging into some transmogified megacrisis and you start laughing bc wtf make it stop
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"The neoliberals taught us three things: governments are incompetent, markets are inefficient, and the commons are tragic. And yet... "
-
@70sBachchan
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From time to time, its nice to get a sense of scale to understand how different policies balance out.
The admin is not messing around!
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Hey folks, I'm going to do a thread on this later but wanted to share that our team just finished a major launch that I'm extremely proud of on state-level decarbonization modeling.
We built and calibrated economy-wide macro-energy system models for 48 states!
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3. The tariffs enable more investments for things like the battery supply chain grants, LPO mfg loans, 48C mfg loans, and private capital crowd in.
US investment isn't over yet.
After CATL reduced battery prices by 50% in ONE YEAR, yea maybe folks should be worried.
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The IRA is going to be a slow burn, 3-4 years of building capacity, and then an unprecedented boom.
We're going to see some meh near-term deployment and we cannot forget the elephant (GOP) in the room.
But keep the faith and do the work, and we will exceed your wildest dreams
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6. The idea that the "administration doesn't care about climate change" b/c they put tariffs on Chinese overcapacity is ridiculous, you would have to be completely out of the loop to believe this.
Spicy, but wrong on the numbers by a lot.
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In conclusion - this is a complex policy issue that plays a small role in the context of a much larger strategy.
To judge the entire strategy based on a small piece (e.g. tariffs) misses the broader story. Its worth understanding, even if you may not agree.
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My family has been fighting for clean energy my entire life, and it's the honor of a lifetime to stand in front of the White House as the president signed historic climate legislation that we helped draft.
The day before my 25th birthday, the clean energy golden age begins. LFG
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@mateosfo
The Senate actually signed the US up to a treaty that would reduce this by around 85% by 2035. Last Congress absolutely balled out on climate, but this wasn't widely reported.
Some think this global treaty alone will reduce warming by up to 0.5C!
…
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EVs sales are clearly slowing down if you go through time backwards.
This is bad for Biden, who goes through time forwards.
.
@ENERGY
: US plug-in electric vehicle sales were 9.1% of all light-duty vehicle sales in 2023, up from 6.8% in 2022:
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Major climate win today!
Huge permitting reform news:
The Bureau of Land Management is giving geothermal energy exploration a categorical exclusion from environmental review under NEPA.
If you care about clean energy abundance, this is a massive win.
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CCL is lowkey the only sophisticated climate game in town with a grassroots funnel in literally hundreds of communities. No lie I got my start with them, and so did my mum. Credit where credit is due, they put in work
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Really funny to me that this guy nailed the entire hydrogen debate in a personal blog 5 months before the IRA even passed and it remains the gold standard:
This was pre-Princeton study, pre-EU final rules, some companies are really just ahead
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Low key there are certain Congressional staffers who are the equivalent of a 10x engineer but for policy
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Ok big idea hear me out:
You know how everyone says you need to "overbuild renewables" to achieve high penetrations? What if instead we built a bunch of renewables for dispatchable loads (H2, DAC, syn-fuel, thermal heat) that just shut off when the grid gets tight?
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Right now the big problem in climate is big lines to get access to big lines
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A single solar panel can do as much physical work as person daily.
Just one. This would blow the minds of our ancestors!
Solar can unlock unfathomable prosperity and dynamism if we, like the Luddites, have the vision to imagine a world where we all get a slice of that power.
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What are industries that could emerge with insane amounts (think unlimited) of fairly cheap ($40-50/MWh) power?
I'm thinking - synthetic molecules from the atmosphere, compute, direct air carbon capture (terraforming), high purity recycling, water purification.
What else?
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The story of the battery belt and the resurgence in US mfg is tied to this credit, and the guidance clarifies and accelerates the work.
Also, the inclusion of thermal batteries is a historic moment for the work of decarbonizing industrial heat.
More to come soon!
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I think it’s possible to reduce emissions by 50% without anyone noticing
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Welcome to the tipping point boys and girls, please keep your hands and feet in the vehicle at all times, it's going to be a bumpy ride!
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@mateosfo
The industrial story is kinda wild.
So we solved the ozone hole (yay), but the stuff we replaced the bad stuff turns out to be a potent greenhouse gas (boo).
That masks the huge reduction in metal/chemical emissions we've seen (deindustrialization).
But...
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The hydrogen "leaked" guidance is promising - clearly the administration is thinking about the right guardrails and allowing grid-connected projects.
Likely this will come out in the messy middle.
We won't know where all the cards land til the full thing is released!
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8. The US could still f*ck it up and our firms could be lazy and do a terrible job with this transition.
The industrial discipline aspect here comes from the new tailpipe rules and a pretty clear message that this is the bridge, here are the tools you need.
Evolve or perish.
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WSJ Editorial Board - “industrial policy creates more losers than winners”
So do markets, and ping pong tournaments, and pretty much anything competitive.
The better question imo is did the winners on net achieve the goals of the industrial policy as a portfolio.
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I could write a hundred tweets about hydrogen, the core audience would be like three dozen people, just waiting for an excuse and about 2 hours
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To conclude-
A lot has changed over the last 30 years, but emissions ended up where they started.
However, Biden's massive energy and climate investments, tech cost declines and innovation, and a new industrial renaissance could tell a very different story in our next chapter.
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