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Electrify Everything, eat more Plants and stay mostly on the Ground

Illustration: Anja Suter The New Year is a time for resolutions and pledges to do better in the future. But even in the new year, climate change will remain with us, with all its complex and often frustrating challenges. Without complex graphs, figures, and models, we will try to develop a a qualitative intuition for what are the most effective levers towards carbon neutrality. Which means, we are looking for simple recommendations which in most cases would unconditionally have a positive impact on the climate: “Electrify everything, eat more plants, and stay mostly on the ground.” If there is anything like silver bullet in the fight against climate change, then electrification with renewable power might come close. Electric alternatives to burning fossil fuels exist for many key energy services from transportation, heating/cooling of buildings to powering industrial and commercial processes. They are typically not only several times more efficient, but often also of higher quality an...
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Help, My AI Agent is an A#%hole!

I know we shouldn't anthropomorphize computers, because they don't like that... Working with the latest generation of agentic AI tools, I have found it increasingly difficult to maintain emotional detachment and not respond to frustrations in ways that remind me of the iconic printer scene from the movie Office Space. From my experience with using AI copilots or coding agents integrated into modern software development environments, " vibe coding " can feel a bit like pair programming with an entity that is extremely quick-witted, book-smart, but also infuriatingly overconfident, bullshitting pathologically and occasionally exhibiting other sociopathic tendencies. Reading the " Murderbot Diary " series has helped me to better cope with AI constructs that appears to have learned how to fake empathy from watching too many bad TV shows or spending way too much time on the internet. I know this is all a projection in my head, but imagining my new "partner...
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The Case of Switzerland - the Benefits of Stored Hydro Power

Switzerland has few natural resources besides mountains. In terms of energy this means a significant potential for electricity production from   hydro-power   including about  8.8 TWh   (ca. 15% of annual demand) of seasonal storage in the form of large artificial lakes behind large dams.  Contrary to pumped hydro storage (e.g the  Nant de Drance  or  Linth-Limmern  plants ) which is more typically associated with energy storage, conventional stored hydro power stations in the alps can typically accumulate water in an artificial lake from melting snow and rain during spring and summer and can delay generating electricity to whenever needed, typically in the winter. By extending the previous optimization model , we can see the impact of stored hydropower as a source of flexibility and dispatchable power generation on the cost-optimal system configuration: We are assuming a production cost of 70 Euro / MWh for up to 8.8 TWh per year at a namepl...
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Renewable Energy System Cost - Summary of Observations

 The decarbonization of our energy usage might be one of the most important engineering challenge of our times. Over the last few years, I have been particularly interested in what it would take to build an electric power system primarily on the basis of wind and solar generation and how much it would cost.  Based on reading some papers on the topic and doing some back of the envelope calculations, these is a summary of some observations and conclusions I have come to: The most relevant metric to evaluate the cost efficiency electricity production is the weighted production cost of a combination of technologies which can satisfy a particular load profile at all times. We could call this average system unit production cost or as it has recently been coined in this paper : LCOLC (Levelized Cost of Load Coverage). While the traditional unit production costs (LCOE) can be simply added up, LCOLC requires the use of an LP-solver . For my own calculations, I have mostly assumed a cos...
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The Last 30% - How to Displace Coal & Gas from the Grid

When it comes to the design of a low-carbon grid on the basis of variable renewable generation plus storage, we have speculated  what on optimal all-inclusive system cost could be , based on today's technology cost. We have also estimated that in an optimal combination,  scaling up wind & solar alone could typically carry about 70% or more of the actual load for most European countries . In many parts of the world, we already see significant investments in wind and solar generation, increasingly complemented by batteries for grid stability and  intra-day arbitrage. However the assumed H2 based long duration storage remains at this time mostly in the domain of research. The reason is that fossil fuel plants powered by natural gas or coal are currently too cheap to be displaced from the role of fully dispatchable flexibility provider of last resort. What would it take to displace fossil fuels entirely from the grid? It is unlikely that low-carbon long-duration sto...
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A Tale of Two Low-Carbon Grids

Among advocates of low-carbon energy production there are often competing views on how the power grid of the future should look like. Some countries like France have a strategy that is heavily based on nuclear power to decarbonize the energy system, while other countries like Germany or Switzerland have a strategy that explicitly excludes the construction of new nuclear plants focusing instead on a combination of variable renewable energy sources like wind, water and sun. Both require additional sources of flexible dispatchable power generation to exactly match supply and demand at any time. Assuming we were to build a new low carbon power grid to cover Germany's current electricity consumption, how much would the refusal to include nuclear generation in the mix actually cost? For this augment our p revious simulation/optimization scenario with a fictitious 100% capacity factor baseload generator, operating a different costs to see how the optimal mix would change: For the cost e...
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Renewable Energy System Cost - the Right Mix Matters

Assuming we could build a power grid that is mostly powered by solar, wind and storage, how much would it cost and how much more would it cost if we did it in deliberately sub-optimal ways? To answer this question, we are using the configuration from a  previous system cost optimization , based on a combination of wind and solar generation, backed by a hybrid storage in order to cover 100% of the hourly load. The hybrid storage consists of Li-ion style batteries for fast and efficient short duration storage combined with inefficient but cheap hydrogen underground storage.  The goal of this new simulation is to see how much the system cost increases if any of the production and/or storage technologies are removed from the optimal mix. As an example, we are using current hourly load and Wind/PV generation forecast for the Germany bidding zone from the  ENTSO-E transparency platform . Then we use a linear program to scale up the current production levels and add storage conf...
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Why Nuclear Technology Makes me Nervous

I have mostly tried to avoid thinking much or having an opinion about nuclear power. This has been made easy by its minor and stagnating role in the global energy system. But the idea of a nuclear renaissance is now competing for attention and funding in the low carbon energy debate and is becoming harder to ignore. This post is an attempt at sorting my own thoughts on the topic in particular in anticipation of a heated political debate on he future role of nuclear power in Switzerland . Not being an expert in nuclear technology, my opinions are based on the application of general engineering principles and best practices as well as some experience in building high-availability systems. While nuclear reactors might be among the systems that are most obsessively engineered and operated for safety, nothing is ever 100% safe. Whoever promises otherwise is either lying or lacks imagination. There is a general rule in engineering -  that whatever can go wrong will eventually ...
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