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The Fake Fire Brigade - How We Cheat Ourselves about our Energy Future
Posted by nate hagens on June 28, 2010 - 10:00am
Editor's note: Below is a guest post from Hannes Kunz, President of Institute for Integrated Economic Research (IIER). Hannes has a PhD in Economics from St. Gallen University and resides in Zurich Switzerland. IIER, is a non-profit organization that integrates research from three different areas: the financial/economic system, energy and natural resources, and human behavior. Their objective is to aid policymakers in developing strategies that result in more benign trajectories after global growth ends. Hannes is also a friend and co-author of two papers with me, (pub. pending), 'Net Energy and Time', and 'Net Energy and Variability'.
On June 15, 2010, when U.S. President Obama responded to the dramatic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico during his Oval Office speech, he not only included the list of things the government wants to do about the imminent problem, but also urged the country to "transition away from fossil fuels" and to "jump start the clean energy industry". His pledge is in line with many of his predecessors, and with other leaders around the world, who for years now have supported renewable energy technologies. This is particularly true in Europe, where installed capacity for renewables has grown significantly during the past ten years. And even the U.S. - while slow in introducing renewable electricity technologies - to date has produced a significant amount of alternative fuels primarily through the mandatory addition of ethanol to gasoline.
For many people hoping for a future with less greenhouse gases and less environmental damage this focus on renewable energies might sound like a step in the right direction; for those who want low cost energy, maybe less so. But what both sides of the discussion forget is something quite simple: an energy future without fossil fuels will eventually arrive, and there is no way to extend current energy usage patterns and delivery systems into the future. In a nutshell: our current plans will fail. Let's explore why that is.
The Fake Fire Brigade - How We Cheat Ourselves about our Energy Future
A comment to begin with: IIER is a research organization trying to neutrally assess the situation of our societies, and with that, find out what strategies work and which ones do not. By no means are we trying to promote or discourage any specific energy alternative, and we have no vested interest in anything else than stable future energy supplies. What you read below is the result of years of thorough analysis and research. When we began, we were completely neutral towards any particular solution and technology, and our only aim was to understand the implications of various energy scenarios on the future of our societies. Now, we have an opinion.
The longer straw - the future of fossil fuels (and most other resources)
The future of fossil fuels, particularly of oil, but also many other resources including water and minerals, looks problematic. People keep discussing proven reserves and whether peak oil already has arrived or not. Unfortunately, we will only be able to put this argument to rest in hindsight. But what is more important is the fact that - no matter how much additional oil we can still retrieve - future barrels will be much more difficult to extract relative to the past.
Drilling a hole in the desert and waiting for black gold to gush out is infinitely less complex than drilling a much deeper hole 5000 feet under water, as the public is now painfully beginning to understand. Many experts agree that we probably have used about 40-50% of recoverable oil. It is difficult to prove such numbers, but we may for a minute assume that this is true. For pessimists, this makes our glass half empty. For optimists, it remains half full. This has been the exact argument the energy community has been having, to little avail, so let’s play with that analogy some more: our oil reserves can be compared with a 1 mile deep glass full of our favorite drink. Getting the first sips is easy. Whenever we are thirsty, we lower a straw into the fluid and drink as much as we like. After a while, that straw might become too short, so we have to find a longer one. Not really a problem. We might even get better at making straws for a while. And so it continues.
But once we are half a mile down into this huge glass, the straw will be so long that one might need help to even hold it, and we will most likely require help to suck hard enough to make the fluid come all the way up. What has happened? We still have half of our favorite drink left, but the efforts to get to it are becoming increasingly painful, significantly diminishing the net benefit of that next sip. And so we might (have to) give up drinking long before the glass is empty, just because its too difficult to get at the fluid in a meaningful way, and because the effort of sucking eventually exceeds the benefit and joy from each sip.
The concept behind our "mile-long glass" analogy unfortunately applies to almost every raw material and energy source we are currently using. The more we have extracted, the more difficult it becomes to get to the next unit. Our organization (IIER) looks at this phenomenon using the term "Resource Return on Energy Investment" (RREI), which is based on established approaches used for Energy Returns on (Energy) Investment (EROI). It describes the amount of effort (energy) needed to get one unit of a resource we want to extract. To extract the next unit, our effort typically increases compared to the past, as we have mostly exploited the easy finds and must pursue the ones that are further away, harder to get, more difficult to secure politically, or any such combination. Over time, this increasing effort makes the production less and less useful to societies. Or to use our drinking straw example: at one point sucking out more from that glass exhausts us so much (e.g. the energy invested per sip becomes so big) that we will have to stop our effort and turn to something else, or - if there is no equivalent alternative - drink less.
When looking at RREI, almost all resources currently used in human processes show declines. Less "easy oil" means that we have to drill in hostile environments deep under the surface of oceans, lower ore grades mean that we have to move four times as much rock to extract the same amount of copper when compared to a couple of decades ago, and the depletion of groundwater sources translates to getting drinking water from desalination plants or from fossil (non-renewable) aquifers far away, at much higher energy cost.
This decline in easily extractable resources and the increased effort to retrieve them is much more important than the exact year when peak production of a particular resource actually occurs. It is today's reality, and helps explain why we are drilling at the bottom of the ocean at depths where no human being could survive for even a second.
Renewable energies - the fake fire brigade
So while some haven’t really recognized that we will soon run into serious problems from traditional fossil fuels, others are already preparing a “brighter future”, which will bring independence from coal, oil and gas, with far lower carbon dioxide emissions to boot. In many European countries, thanks to subsidies and purchasing guarantees, large amounts of renewable electricity generation capacity has been built during the last decade, and in the U.S., corn based ethanol now has a government-mandated share of up to 10% in fuel gasoline. But let us not fool ourselves: during those 10 years, despite all the relative successes, renewable energies (including hydropower) grew by far less compared to the global increase in total energy consumption. Overall, our global energy delivery system continues to be as dependent on fossil fuels as ever before, or even more so. On top of that, even those renewable technologies are mostly based on fossil fuel inputs, which are either used during the manufacturing of the equipment, or even during production and processing (e.g. biofuels).
One of IIER’s key objectives is to understand what the future of energy delivery systems will look like. We know that we will have to face a future with less and ultimately no fossil fuels. The question remains how to prepare for this eventuality. Most technological optimists believe that this challenge can be met with some combination of biofuels, renewable electricity generation technologies, electric cars, smart grids, and many other investments. However, when we examine these technologies more closely, none of these so-called “solutions” come close to providing any relief, quite the contrary.
As Robert Rapier, a well-respected energy analyst, puts it: “We are running out of traditional energy sources, which can be compared to our house being on fire. While that happens, many people linger around the burning building and pretend to be firemen, mimicking their actions, carrying some equipment, shouting commands - but actually they have no real water, no real skills, no appropriate tools. That way your house will burn to the ground because the “real” firemen never showed up, as everybody thinks there are more than enough firemen on site.” This is exactly what it is: when taking a closer look, most - almost all - of the renewable energy technologies promoted today won't solve any of our future energy problems. Let’s get into the details using two examples. Renewable electricity generation, and biofuels. In order to keep this article halfway short, we will only make the general case, but we are happy to back up our claims with hard facts.
The future of electricity – a shaky one
Today’s electricity grids are key building blocks of modern civilizations. Advanced economies depend on the reliable and discretionary delivery of power to every single socket. Our way of living, which includes the ability to read this article, wouldn’t be possible without. Unfortunately, delivering stable electricity poses a significant challenge to grid operators, as energy production and consumption in any moment need to be matched explicitly. Storage is expensive, technologically complex, and always incurs losses, which is why power grids have become the perfect example of just-in-time supply chains. Whenever there is growing demand, additional power generation capacity comes online within seconds, and likewise, falling demand leads to the immediate withdrawal of an equal amount of generation capacity.
Having access to stable power grids seems to be positively correlated with economic output as IIER's EAI (Electricity Availability Index) shows. It is based on availability (percent of population with access to electricity) and reliability (number and duration of blackouts). When looking at the chart, it becomes obvious that it seems almost impossible for a country to arrive at a per-capita GDP significantly above US$ 10'000 (2007 dollars, adjusted for purchasing power parity) in environments where electricity isn't a stable and reliable commodity. When thinking about it, this isn't so surprising, as most industrial and commercial processes require stable electricity in large quantities, and its absence simply makes many things impossible.
Right now, all our electricity delivery systems are almost fully controlled from the supply-side, i.e. no usage restrictions apply, which is why we benefit so much. Customers don’t have to pre-order a certain amount of electricity before they can turn on a machine, a computer, or start cooking, but instead just do so, mostly oblivious to the fact that someone somewhere in a grid operations center will turn on a gas turbine, or let some water flow downstream, just because we flip a switch. A preliminary analysis conducted by IIER shows that less than 10% of electricity demand can theoretically be supply-controlled without severely impacting societies. Computers, machines, air conditioners, stoves and ovens, and most other industrial and household devices are those things we want to use when we need them. But even where grid operators theoretically could shift certain electricity uses to off-peak times without disrupting our lives, this comes at the significant price of introducing a smart grid infrastructure, and new devices capable of being controlled remotely. Another fake fireman.
Thus, no matter how hard we try, electricity systems will continue to rely mostly on supply side adjustments. Today, this is manageable, because most sources are either providing steady power flows (such as coal, nuclear or run-of-river hydro power plants) or then they are mostly controllable (such as gas fired power plants or hydropower from dammed water pools). With that mix of inputs, electricity on demand becomes possible for most advanced economies. Additions of wind and solar power over the last decade introduced renewable electricity generation technologies into the grid. Those two sources have none of the above qualities: they neither provide steady flows, nor are they controllable. “No wind” means "no power", so does “no sunshine”, and even sharing across long-distances using high voltage DC (HVDC) transmission lines won’t change that fact, due to the stochastic nature of the inputs. Potentially crippling power outages will happen regularly in societies that rely on large percentages of these technologies to meet their electricity demand. With that, the current system of just-in-time electricity delivery would be replaced by one with irregular service interruptions. And yet there are plans made worldwide suggesting that we can produce 20, 30 or 50% of our future electricity consumption from those two sources. This is self-deception at best, and a lie at worst, as it is simply impossible to manage delivery systems where both inputs and outputs are largely uncontrollable, irrespective of other features added.
What is important here: we’re not talking about a future where renewable energies supplement fossil fuel based electricity systems like they do today. Given sufficient backup generation systems powered by fossil fuels, a larger penetration of renewable electricity is definitely possible, and might reduce carbon dioxide production and other externalities, albeit at a horribly high cost. However, these types of add-in systems fail to break our dependence on fossil fuels and don’t prove that we can deliver stable electricity in a world where renewable sources supply a majority of inputs into electricity grids. If that was the objective, we should be honest and just build some wind turbines and match them with gas fired generation capacity for low-wind times, instead of talking about long distance transmission, smart grids, and other technologies that despite their cost don't have the potential to secure the basic objective: stable power at any time.
Someone in the renewable electricity world would probably argue that this is where storage can play an important role. Unfortunately, again, this is more self-deception. Right now, storage that balances renewable sources comes from the flexibility of other stock-based supplies, such as natural gas and hydropower. They can be turned off when the wind blows, and turned on when it stops. The reason why this works is because renewables have such a small market share and often use much larger backup systems. Denmark for example operates its heavily wind-based electricity system with the backing of comparably huge hydro power plants in Norway and Sweden, an approach which unfortunately isn't scalable globally. Not many countries have neighbors with flexible energy generation capacity ten times their own, and that is about what is needed to buffer the huge long-term variability of renewable electricity generation.
So let’s for a minute assume that the United Kingdom - one of the world's "best" places to generate electricity from wind - runs on 20% wind power as planned in the least ambitious scenarios currently promoted, and that standby natural gas power plants become no longer available to bridge supply gaps. Some say that ELVs (electric cars) could provide the necessary storage capacity. We did the maths: the total annual output from wind in a 20% scenario for England and Wales would amount to approximately 64 TWh (20% of total current demand). After modeling a nationwide wind turbine network using the best 50 locations (we even included Scotland), we calculated the necessary storage to bridge the largest possible supply gap (e.g. when the wind doesn’t blow for a number of days) and found that Britain in 2009 would have needed 96.5 million battery operated electric cars with 40 kWh batteries each fully available for storage, e.g. no longer ready to be driven. For comparison: 28.5 million private vehicles are currently registered in the UK. The problem here is that wind patterns don't just include short term ups and downs, but instead do involve long periods with very little wind, and then long periods with a lot. Unfortunately, this pattern isn't even predictable year-over-year. Buffering those resources is not something that can be managed with storage, no matter how large. Another fake fireman.
The truth about electricity is simple, surprising and daunting: with the most promising renewable technologies - wind and solar - irrespective of expensive supplements being added, electricity systems as we know them today will not be able to operate. But instead of putting efforts towards finding real solutions, we are spending billions, likely even trillions, of dollars and Euros on technologies that cannot and will not work in the way we expect them to. Again, as a reminder: this is not an argument to defend the way we currently produce electricity, but a strong encouragement to research how we might get reliable power to our ubiquitous sockets without fossil fuels providing the major part. And for those who now suggest to go for a nuclear option: irrespective of any argument about long-term risk, this technology too has a number of downsides, among them the inability to control output according to demand, relatively high cost, and a high dependence on fossil fuels both for the construction of plants and the mining of uranium. And last, but not least, the fact that uranium too, is a non-renewable resources, subject to the fact that we will eventually arrive at the limits of meaningfully extractable material (e.g. the ones offering an attractive RREI) - particularly if we plan on scaling up nuclear power to replace other fuels.
Combustion fuels – headaches all over
The other big challenge ahead lies in fuels used for transportation and heating, mainly in oil. This is the place where scarcity is most apparent, as described above. We wouldn’t try to drill in deep water or extract oil from shales if it wasn’t for the inability to find and explore easier and cheaper sources. What this has done, at a minimum, is lifted the cost of oil to above 70 US$ a barrel, about three times its inflation-adjusted long-term average price. This is not because of speculation, as some claim, but just because it costs 60-70 US$ to extract those least attractive sources. Thus, we truly have to start thinking about alternative ways to move our cars, trucks, planes and even tractors.
The easy way out would be electric vehicles, but after reading the above paragraph on electricity, this might not be an entirely safe bet. And that doesn't even take into account the still existing technology and cost problems with battery technology.
One of the many challenges of a number of renewable energy technologies is that they are themselves heavily dependent on fossil fuel inputs. This is true for raw material extraction and manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines and other things, but even more so for many so called “green” fuels. Significant inputs to the production process of biofuels - for example of corn based ethanol - come in the form of oil (fuels, pesticides), coal (electricity) or natural gas (fertilizer). This has two consequences: first, it doesn't break our dependence from fossil fuels and second, as fossil fuels become more expensive, so do these "alternatives".
However, one of the biggest challenges of all renewable (green) fuels is their limited availability. There simply isn't enough biomass potential in any Western society to produce a sufficient amount of non-fossil combustion fuels that could meaningfully replace what fossil fuels we use.
Brazil, which is often used as the poster-child of biofuels production and use, provides a stark reminder that building an oil-independent society with biomass-based transportation fuels is nothing but a dream. In 2008, Brazil produced (and mostly consumed) approximately 163.5 million barrels of ethanol. In the same year, the country consumed 907 million barrels of crude oil. Given the lower energy content in ethanol (3.53 MBtu per barrel vs. 5.8 MBtu for oil), biofuels had a share of not more than 9.9% of the two, while crude oil provided 90.1% of the total energy in liquid fuels. So much for Brazil running on renewable biomass. But that is just the beginning: when taking into account that Brazil is an emerging economy, and one of the least densely populated countries, the problem becomes even more obvious. With approximately 0.51 BOE (barrels of oil equivalent) per capita, the U.S. produced about exactly as much biofuel per person as Brazil did (0.52 BOE/capita). The only difference was that overall consumption of oil and biofuels together was 4.6 times larger in the U.S. when compared to Brazil, and twice as large in Europe (EU-27). Europe however, has yet another handicap limiting its ability to go for biomass. It has about 3.6 times as many people per square kilometer than the U.S., and about 5 times as many as Brazil, which constrains the continent's ability to grow enough biomass for biofuels and feed all its people at the same time.
So in a nutshell, there is no such thing as a replacement for fossil liquids coming from biofuels, instead this is just one more of those fake fire brigades.
A true plan for the future – begin from the other end
All of today’s planning efforts take place based on today’s energy delivery systems. We add some renewables to the current mix and see how we can manage. When we see that this causes problems, we respond by adding highly complex and costly bells and whistles. Alternatively, we start introducing new technologies that will never be able to truly scale up, are in fact heavily dependent on fossil fuel inputs, or both. We would go so far as to say that we can safely prove that more than 90% of energy system alternatives discussed and introduced today have no potential of helping us to secure a longer term energy future.
We are thus not sure if it is a good idea to put all of society’s efforts into fixes and add-ons to today’s energy delivery and consumption systems, but instead we strongly recommend the development of approaches and technologies that radically break with a fossil fuel base. The only meaningful way of looking at the future of energy delivery and application technologies would be to build energy systems based on an assumption that renewable technologies have to provide the entire amount required by our societies, and then to reshape societies so they are in line with what and how these technologies can deliver.
Only when applying this (what is probably considered radical) view, we would be able to model a sustainable and reliable energy future. Once we have figured out how this can work, we may still consider how to make the best use of our remaining fossil fuels, but going the other way will just fool us into believing that we have solutions, until we recognize we don't. And today, to be frank, this is exactly where we are. A lot of fake firemen are standing around a fire that is right now openly breaking out.
IIER puts substantial effort into trying to understand what energy systems could work in the long run. But unfortunately, very few other people do so, which is something we want to change. Instead of spending billions or even trillions on amendments that most likely won't help, a significant portion of these investments should go into a completely new design of our energy future. Let's finally bring in the real fire brigade.
Read Part II: Revisiting the Fake Fire Brigade - General IssuesRead Part III:Biomass - A Panacea?
Read Part IV: The Biggest Part of Business as Usual - Electricity
Read Part V: Delivering Stable Electricity
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What about coal? IMHO over the next thirty years we will see a rush to mine all the coal we can get at, and to mine it at higher and higher production rates. My guess is that we will begin and then quickly go to a massive ramp up of coal-to-liquids facilities, just as the Germans did in the late nineteen thirties and just as South Africa did about forty years ago with Sasol.
With oil at $100 to $200 a barrel, investing in a CTL plant would be highly lucrative. Sasol makes a profit even at today's prices. Thus I foresee no financial limitations to financing CTL. Of course it will destroy the environment--bigtime--but that is just another cost of trying to maintain business as usual.
We will desperately grasp whatever we can to keep BAU as long as possible--maybe another thirty years.
You have forgotten climate change. The Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are melting and the rate of melt is accelerating. Sometime in the next 20 years sea level rise is going to cause somewhat of a panic (over and above all the other panics) and a moratorium may be called on the use of coal - irrespective of the consequences. Coal is the culprit and it must be left in the ground. I don't know where you stand on "clean coal". That is pure BS and will never amount to anything.
Where that leaves our species is unclear. I don't like being a doomer, but there are too many trend lines pointing in the wrong direction all at once.
Judging by your screen name you are a fellow sailor. Greetings. Methinks we are going to have to "go to weather" for quite a while. Lash everything down and prepare for an uncomfortable ride against a lee shore where most of our effort will be spent on just trying to stay off the rocks. Little forward progress will be made and there is no hope of "cutting and running". Mind you, I have lost the nautical analogy there because the original term referred to cutting the anchor line. We unfortunately are not anchored and cannot run, even as the storm intensifies. We have to go forward.
Oh, sh!t! That 30 ft wave just demasted us.
Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream...
Yesterday I went out into the Atlantic for a nice long paddle in my kayak, 15 to 20 mph gusts and 3 to 4 ft seas, good exercise and it helps to focus the mind >;^)
I have not forgotten AGW. We are still most likely to burn all the coal we can get at--and at higher and higher production rates so long as possible. Note that the Chinese are also burning more coal in recent years. The U.S. has the biggest coal reserves in the world. We may be exporting coal to China in ten or fifteen years.
In small boats I've been dismasted six times, been blown on leeward rocks once, and have capsized twice in forty-seven years of sailing. The worst experience--by far--was being blown onto the rocks; I was not skipper at the time, but all we did was save ourselves and let the boat batter itself into near destruction just north of the Berkeley Marina entrance. Earlier that night we had lost our rudder and were trying to sail rudderless for the small mouth to the Berkeley Marina.
Sometimes I think the best analogy to what is going on now is to think of society as rudderless, the wind as rising, and the rocky lee shore a quarter of a mile away--with no anchor to put out.
Rudderless? Or a bunch of people standing around the helm arguing about where to steer, whether to tack or stay the course. The skipper has no control and here in Australia we have just made him walk the plank. I agree. For what ever reason the great ship that is the human species is in danger. Mainly because there is chaos on the bridge and the ship is overloaded.
I haven't sailed for as long as you, but I have sailed my own boat from UK to Oz. Had a couple of gales, but no damage, only one lee shore (at anchor), no groundings and not too much going to weather. I am a bit of a sucker for tropical downwind sailing.
SailDog
What will help, at least somewhat, with AGW is the likelihood that our realistic accessible coal reserves are overstated.
Not so sure. As we head down the more difficult/lower quality coal grades CO2 will actually get worse on a Joule (or BTU ) per ton basis both because of the lower calorific content and the the net energy impact. Australia has just agreed to sell x billion tons of brown coal to Vietnam every year. Our coal exports are soaring and the government conveniently seems to ignore this. The responsibility for CO2 is apparently where it is used, whereas of course it impacts us all where ever it is burned. We need to take responsibility for all of the coal we dig up, which is bad enough for just the stuff we burn, but is terrible when exports are also taken into account.
My point was more that this pollyanna belief of huge coal reserves is just that, which is good in that it will limit AGW. Your point that the damage will be massive nevertheless is likely true.
Agreed re US and China, but Africa and Australia have huge reserves. I do agree with your point though. My point was that the impact of declining coal reserves will initially lead to worse AGW.
So, part of the world's energy policy should be to ask the world's people who will have to live through such massive pollution if that is ok, just so today's fat cats can continue BAU? One person one vote for all those under 40 years of age?
If you're eating a nutritious meal today (or have that option) and your personal survival isn't threatened you are one of the fat cats. Would you give up your place on the lifeboat for one not so fortunate xeroid?
I live in a western country, I am a fat cat, I am running my BAU to destruction 'cos as far as I can tell (after many thousands of hours of reading TOD etc) and despite trying hard, there is no adequate alternative for me the way my country is currently set up. Most of the people in the UK are leading a completely unsustainable lifestyle, my grandfather put me on this 'fossil fueled train heading for a cliff' after his generation finally depleted the local natural resources, for me there is no easy way of getting off, for my son - maybe - if the train slows enough.
But, other people around the world may have a different view on allowing me to carry on my BAU at their considerable expense.
I don't think there will be a catastrophic die-off. The top 10% will have some adjustments but overall they should ride this power-down intact. The folks in steerage...now that's another matter.
I am not so sure. Our (US, EU, Australia etc) lifestyle are driven by highly sophisticated markets and systems. There is little resilience as the GFC amply demonstrated. We came unstuck in our paper economy. Governments kicked the can down the road by stacking the paper system according to their own limited thought processes. The impact is that most of us think nothing is really wrong. The next few months are going to test that resilience again and all the while our energy resources are depleting. Since the onset of the GFC we have lost another 2 years trying to keep BAU on track. The "one shot" stimulus program was spent on the wrong things. It should have been spent on massive renewables, water and rail projects, but instead was blown on car companies, roads and banks. Now we are all in yet more debt our choices are orders of magnitude smaller.
As a person under 40, my vote goes for Alan's plan.
If that fails, then solar panels, sodium batteries and neighborhood gardens for everyone! I can live with 30% less electricity from dusk to dawn.
If that fails, then its windmills, waterwheels and feudalism for everyone... As a person living in an OECD country, I'll ride the powerdown on the backs of the folks in steerage...
While I think Alan's plan (or something like it) COULD work, I doubt very much that the over 40 crowd has any interest in implementing it (present company excluded, of course), and even less economic interest in it. After all, why divert 4% of GDP to solve a problem that (probably) won't effect you? (assuming 30 more years of BAU).
Heck, as someone who will be close to 60 by then (2040) and has very little desire to live past 70, its even a hard sell for me, and I (somewhat) understand the problem and implications.
I'll think about that over 70 comment on my next hike to Tennessee Beach... born in '40, still scootin'. No prospects of serious decline.
"...as someone who... has very little desire to live past 70..."
Trust me, here, youngster: Only people under 40 with little foresight ever say things like that.
I was being facetious. Being 70 NOW is probably alright if you are in decent health. (Even if you aren't, Medicare picks up the tab, so it can't be ALL bad.)
If the doomsters are correct, being 70 in a post peak world will probably NOT feature Medicare, Social Security, retirement plans, widely available antibiotics, widely available medical care, wheelchairs, dialysis machines, etc...
Even if the doomsters are incorrect, and cold fusion rides to BAU's rescue, the fiscal reality is that any and all retirement programs will have gone bankrupt long before i retire (circa 2050).
My point is; being over 70 will not be all puppy dogs and hummingbirds by the 2040s. It will be much like it has always been, a continual struggle to survive. And not a pleasant, BAU-based struggle to survive.
But that wasn't really my point. I think much of the debate about whether or not renewables can support an industrial economy is somewhat moot, because very few people understand the scale of the problem or the solutions. They will continue to be bought off with promises and platitudes until the Greeenland Ice Sheet collapses, or the Mid-east devolves into nuclear warfare between Isreal and somebody, or some pandemic kills 40% of the population, etc... Then everyone will panic, run for the lifeboats, and then I doubt anyone will have much choice about living past 70 or not.
Absolutely right Don. You think it'll be over by 2040 huh? I guess that's long enough; I'll be gone by then.
Joe
edit
Joe - We're being quite the troll this morning aren't we? If you can't be constructive then be quiet!
The production and consumption of Methanol (aka wood alcohol) can support an American style economy into the indefinite future all around the world.
A source of dirt cheap electric power can support a vibrant world wide liquid fuel industry. Such an industry can make liquid fuel out of any CO2 based source; coal, biomass, even air and hydrogen from water. Such methanol liquid fuel is a perfect energy storage method.
Proliferation resistant high temperature nuclear reactors of many different sizes can be deployed that range from small nuclear batteries to massive 200 gigawatts units that can supply the energy for Methanol liquid fuel factories in any quantities required.
Nuclear power has no inherent limitations. The waste problem can be overcome; in fact it can be used as nuclear fuel.
If the US efficiently burned its stockpile of nuclear waste (yucca mountain type) it could feed 5000 big reactors for 100 years. If the US burned its 1.5 million ton stockpile of U238 tails in the traveling wave reactor or other like proliferation safe reactor types, it would feed an additional 10,000 big reactors for another 150 years. The world inventory of spent LWR waste is much larger and can fuel the world economy for a very long time.
Of course under this approach, no nuclear fuel supply company would make any money selling nuclear fuel.
If the world can overcome its fear of nuclear power, a nuclear approach will be far cheaper in terms of capital and less costly in human terms than all the oil wars that have occurred, are occurring and will occur in the future. And such a path will create a lot more jobs in the country that take the nuclear path as compared to sending their military overseas.
War cost in the US alone will exceed 3 trillion for the Iraq war, the Afghan war is an open ended money pit. China and India will soon be in the fight spending lots of military money. At its root, today’s terrorism movement is based in oil politics.
In addition, the cost to clean the gulf will be expensive and the Gulf is just the beginning.
The extermination of all life in the world’s oceans is a real possibility.
In the long view, maybe the risks from nuclear power can be viewed as a lesser evil; just maybe???
For a broader view, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy
"The production and consumption of Methanol (aka wood alcohol) can support an American style economy into the indefinite future all around the world.
A source of dirt cheap electric power can support a vibrant world wide liquid fuel industry. Such an industry can make liquid fuel out of any CO2 based source; coal, biomass, even air and hydrogen from water. Such methanol liquid fuel is a perfect energy storage method."
Your link did not say that ????
It said
The energy needed for these reactions in order to be carbon neutral would come form renewable energy sources such as wind, hydroelectricity and solar as well as nuclear power. In effect, all of them allow free energy to be stored in easily transportable methanol, which is made immediately from hydrogen and carbon dioxide, rather than attempting to store energy in free hydrogen.
Do you still have a problem?
speaking of biomass - there's hemp, too - which can be used to make fuel, plastic, food, clothing, paper, and construction materials. it is less energy intensive to grow than cotton, and the biomass can be burned cleanly. hemp is also useful in topsoil remediation.
here a cool video of henry ford's 1941 plastic car made (partially) from hemp fibers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxlj6fgQ-ZU
I've taken the top 20 coal producers and sorted them according to size in 2009 to produce this stack. The key observations:
1) The dashed grey line shows approximately zero aggregate growth in coal production. All aggregate growth comes form the 6 big producers above that line
2) Dips in production in FSU and USA in 2009 are most likely recession induced - recovery will see production rising again in these countries
3) Coal production is rising in the top 7 producers - China - South Africa, but growth is dominated by China.
What happens to Chinese coal production will likely determine the future trajectory of global coal production and therefore CO2 emissions (oil production has been on a bumpy plateau since 2004, nat gas will likely continue to grow for a while at least).
Coal production can be affected by demand as well as supply. There are some countries like the US that started adding natural gas capacity instead of coal capacity for electricity many years ago. I am not sure all of the reasons--natural gas was cheap (at that time) and did not produce acid rain the way coal without scrubbers did. I expect a big part of the reason coal production did not grow is because there was no demand for more coal--not necessarily because it was not there.
Going forward, demand may have an affect coal production as well. The financial system depends on growth to support all the debt that is currently in place. Once debt defaults start to become a major problem, they will affect demand for all fossil fuels, including coal. So coal consumption will likely fall at not too different a time than oil, regardless of how much is in the ground.
Another reason why coal production is likely to fall with oil is because coal is very much embedded in our current infrastructure, with oil powered trains taking it to its destination, and oil allowing workers to drive to work. If oil supplies are affected, coal use is likely to fall as well.
Gail: A unit train coming out of the Powder River country is usually 3 locomotives pulling 100-110 cars, each car carrying 100 tons of coal. We may go back to steam locomotives.
Steam locos:
* have huge maintenance requirements (time and lots of skilled people) 10x of diesels
* pound the rails
* take hours to raise steam
* consume more fuel that a diesel when idle
* are very inefficient (<10%)
* aren't as easy to control (and no regenerative braking)
* have large water requirements
* are dirty.
We can electrify the rail road, add a pantograph and a bit of switch gear to any diesel-electric, and be in business taking electricity from the right-of-way when available, and firing up the diesels (which can also be run off Liquified/Compressed Natural Gas) otherwise.
I doubt you'll see coal fired steam trains in major service.
Just curious... what method of generating electricity will you be using to move the coal to the coal fired electricity generating station?
Steam loco's use one of three fuels: oil, coal or wood. Using oil defeats the petroleum use reduction model. Burning wood leads to deforestation because wood does not have a high enough energy density. And burning coal to move coal so you can burn coal in a generating station seems like circular reasoning.
Not that all three methods were not used in the past at some point. But each was replaced by the other as more energy density to move greater amounts of coal freight was required by the increasing demand for electricity.
Which is what this article was about in the first place.
I think the author was trying to argue we need to reduce our energy demand/expectations and make do with less, perhaps only allocating an uninterrupted power supply to critical infrastructure, like hospitals.
Don Sailorman -
I would agree that when (not if) things get really tight regarding oil supplies, the US will probably see some inroads by coal-to-liquid. However, I have difficulty seeing it actually replacing a major portion of our current oil consumption (approx 20 million bbl/day).
While it is true that coal-to-liquid technology has been around since well before WW II, it has always been used as a last resort when oil became unavailable. A great deal has been made of Germany's coal-to-liquid production during WW II, implying that if they can do it, why can't we? Well, most people don't realize that the fuel produced from Germany's efforts was virtually totally earmarked for the military and essential services and (if my memory serves me right) peaked at about 36 million bbl/year, or roughly 100,000 bbl/day, which is only about one two-hundredth of current US oil consumption. And Germany was going flat out trying to build coal-to-liquids plants.
Regardless of Sasol's apparent success, coal-to-liquid plants are enormously capital-intensive, and capital isn't in great abundance these days.
Then we have to face the fact that while the US has the world's largest coal reserves, it is not getting any easier or cheaper to mine, as we've gone at the easy stuff first. Thus, if we embark on a massive coal-to-liquids program, it will inevitably cause the price of coal to increase and thus the price of electricity as the demand for coal increases.
Even without taking into consideration global warming and the many inherent environmental problems associated with the mining and use of coal, coal-to-liquids would hardly be a solution, but rather a desperate last gasp at trying to prolong the use of vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. I would view this as a mal-investment of worst kind. Better to put those resources toward something that has a future, such as wind, solar, and (arguably) the next generation nuclear technology.
Hmm, towards the end of WWII, pretty much anything the Germans built was likely to be bombed...
I'm with joule:
From their trade association web site:
http://www.futurecoalfuels.org/faq.asp#9
We may build some CTL plants but not anywhere near what would be required to replace oil.
"We may build some CTL plants but not anywhere near what would be required to replace oil."
I think that is correct. The CTL plants can keep the trains running, and the river and coastal shipping traffic, and probably keep the chemicals business going (they started with coal tar, after all) but Happy Motoring, or at least Happy Long-distance Motoring is most likely done for.
Alas, poor climate, we knew ye.
Nice job, Dr. Kunz. You have summarized things in clear simple English for new readers here. The take home message is that we are going to have to drastically reduce our fossil fuel usage starting now, and it may not be voluntary.
Don, you frantically post BAU rebuttals (preferably at the beginning of comment strings) overlying any suggestion of a need to reduce our use. You are either an economist or you're in denial/bargaining, or both. Dr. Kunz has laid things out pretty clearly here.
Let me be the first realist.
The least distasteful alternative is to cut population, AND conserve drastically.
This will likely come through starvation in Africa, and forced sterilization or one-child programs in functioning states, which will be defined as states that adopt such measures instead of going rogue and just stealing resources, as has been the case so far.
It's a form of doominess, because it's impossible to prescribe such solutions in the light of 70 years of watching humans brutalize other humans to steal their resources.
I give you Iraq as example. Nigeria will also do.
I agree, Ormondotvos, that this is the most important root cause of our problems, so it is important to address it At the recent degrowth conference in Barcelona, the issue of limiting population was framed in a more positive, self-organizing manner:
"Denouncement of top-down population control measures and support of women’s reproductive rights, conscious procreation and the right to free migration while welcoming a decrease in world birth rates; "
http://www.degrowth.eu/v1/index.php?id=121
Our culture traditionally controlled local population sizes through cultural mores, which act from the bottom up rather than top down. We lost those cultural clues with our addiction to oil. We need to go back to those values inherent in our more remote history, and let Mother Nature take care of the rest.
Right of free migration?
I think this is nonsense - cultures that are in more denial will just overrun those that are trying to do the right thing.
The U.S. without illegal aliens would be a slightly less than zero population growth.
One gets this from third world advocates all the time, regarding pollution and such - blaming the 1st world but not taking any responsibility for their own cultural mores.
I agree with this assessment on a number of counts. I'd further note that the various forms of environmental degradation we unleash with imprudent, short-sighted and dirty methodologies for wringing remaining fossil fuels from the planet will ultimately undermine our chances of surviving once reality has hammered hard lessons into our heads. As I look to the future I see twin challenges ahead - 1) making appropriate transitions and 2) surviving the fallout of human folly in what remains of the age of oil. I fear the ramifications of folly more than I do the challenges of transitioning to a life that relies on sustainable forms of energy. Ultimately we, not oil or the lack thereof, may prove to be the insoluble problem. We have to make smart moves as a species, as nations, and not just as individuals or small enclaves forging insight, and therein lies the challenge.
Seems to make sense, the hardest thing, (if not impossible) is to convince the over developed world that they are addicted and the withdrawal, while being sometimes painful will eventually be beneficial.
Hopping from one resource to another and extracting all we can and acting like it's progress is just another form of self delusion. There seems to be so much fear about a low energy future, as if we would revert to the dark ages and start burning the local herbalist!!
I live a fairly low energy lifestyle, eat local, and hey my life feels simpler, less stressful and much more enjoyable..
.
A rebuttal would be quite welcome.
Although I suspect that the author is not completely wrong. Unfortunately.
I'll let Alan speak for himself and welcome his views as well.
My own view is this:
In a nutshell I think this statement from Dr.Hagens :-) sums up the problem:
OK, premise accepted with regards the future without fossil fuels! Though I'm not quite sure we have what amounts to a "PLAN" right now. So I'm not sure how something that doesn't exist could fail.
If we accept that to be a true statement as well, and I'm not sure I fully accept it as stated, it leaves only one logical conclusion. *WE NEED TO CHANGE WHAT WE EXPECT*!
Yes, but the question remains as to whether or not we have time to change our heading and keep the oil tanker from ending up on the rocks, the momentum, mass and inertia of our built infrastructure is not something we will likely be able to counteract with ease. In other words will we have a somewhat smooth transition to a post peak world based on alternatives or are we going to crash and burn and have to rebuild from scratch...
I for one would obviously like to work on finding ways to a softer landing. My neighbors as far as I can tell are pushing with all their might in the opposite direction.
We need to design much stronger negative feedback loops into any attempt at sustaining BAU! Otherwise we will suffer the consequences of the negative feedback loops that nature already has lined up for us and will certainly bring the brunt of them to bear on our pathetic attempts to ignore the heavy costs of disconnecting the governor and allowing the steam engine to rev out of control. At that point the feedback loop causes the boiler to explode! How many more GOMs are we going to allow.
And least but not least let me put in a plug for Human Population Control! If we don't get serious about that, nature will again impose its negative feedback loops!
Best hopes for serious attempts at ending BAU.,
Hey Fred;
From what you clipped..
I go into this with the assumption that renewables, efficiencies, lifestyle adjustments, reduced caloric intake, walking or biking to everything possible.. that ALL of these together will not be enough, but it's the best we've got.. So when the Chalkboard Crowd wants to base any action on some calclulation that comes up with " =enough ", I just have to smile and say, 'Don't let that desire for the perfect formula stop us from getting as much of it together today as we can.. cause it won't be as much as you want, but it'll be more than we've got now.
Great idea! Just change what we expect. All we have to do about those technologies that cannot and will not work is change our expectations. Obviously if we expect them to work then they will.
Brilliant! Why didn't I think of that?
Ron P.
Ron,
The point is that if we already know for a fact that our current mix of technologies can't and therefore won't support BAU, i.e. "WHAT WE EXPECT", then we obviously need to find a substitute for those expectations that we can realistically, both achieve and live with. In other words if a particular goal is physically unachievable, then no amount of striving for it will give the desired result. Therefore we need new and different goals.
Clear?
I understand your point. However changing expectations changes nothing. We, that is you and I and most people on this list know very well that these things cannot and will not allow business as usual. We already expect that they will not. That we, you and I, have nothing to do with Mr. Kunz's statement. He was talking about the "we" who make up the vast majority of the world. That "we" does expect that wind and solar will bail us out when fossil fuels start to decline in earnest.
There is nothing "we", you and I can do to change the expectations of the millions who expect "some other source of energy" to allow business as usual when fossil fuels decline.
We cannot change the expectations of the rest of the world.
Reading back over your posts Fred, I see a great distance in what you seem to think that "we" can do and what I believe can actually be done. If "we" could do anything, even change expectations, then we would have done it already. It is like a long freight train headed into a landslide across the tracks with not nearly enough time to stop.
We, at this point Fred, are but observes. We can certainly try to mitigate our own hard landing but there is nothing we can do to mitigate it for the rest of the world.
We are but observers.
Ron P.
We all vote with our money. If some form of energy enters the market that meets our needs and expectations at a price we can afford then the new form will dominate. Government must only regulate that energy product enough to insure that it does less damage than it does good.
No, the government needs to totally dominate the energy and pollution markets, AND stop spending on resource wars the money we need for solar and hydroelectrics.
That IS the minimum, and it might not be enough.
Time for some serious Obamaction, not just Hope.
Probably not enough, but certainly the minimum. Add population control, please.
Capitalism (along with right-libertarianism, etc.) is fundamentally incompatible with sustainability. Sustainability may well be impossible, but it certainly isn't going to happen in a world run according to "free market" rules.
Exponential Human population growth is the driver of resource depletions of every stripe. However the control of your personal reproduction is considered a fundamental human right by the left as much as the right. What kind of world will you be living in when the govt. takes control of that drive? The world is a terrifying and wonderful place.
Joe
"However the control of your personal reproduction is considered a fundamental human right by the left as much as the right."
Yes, it is. Too bad, because the consequences of considering reproduction an unlimited an uncontrolled "right" are... what we see around us.
"What kind of world will you be living in when the govt. takes control of that drive?"
If it were possible, quite likely a better world than one in which nobody controls it. Obviously.
The fiction of individual autonomy never ceases to amaze me.
The fiction of individual autonomy never ceases to amaze me.
Doesn't amaze me, but it's the nine billion pound gorilla in the room.
Dear o dear. Free market innovation gave you a computer with which to bitch about free market vaccines and cheap plentiful food that kept you alive.
Darwinian: AS in a unit train pulled by 3 locomotives of 100 cars, each car carrying 100 tons of coal trying to stop? I actually saw that very thing happen! A crane and rigging outfit pulled a truck crane in along side the railroad track of the Burlington Northern with the crane boom sticking out over the tracks with a unit coal train comin down the pike, and the operator couldn't start the crane to raise the boom! Yep! I watched the whole thing get played out to its inevitable conclusion. Crane operator frantic. Train engineers frantic. Everyone expecting the crane to start or the train to stop. The engineers on the train bailed out, as did the crane operator. It all happened in a kinda frantic, slow motion way. NO one had those expectations when they went to work that morning! I was just the truck driver hauling the tank those guys were supposed to unload!
FMagyar
Agree, what we expect is the same low price electric power when ever we want it. To change that we need a smart grid that sells power cheap when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining and increasing expensive when available power becomes more limited.
Ron,
Could you try a little harder to NOT understand what a person is actually saying?
Maybe it's that you have an 'expectation' that Fred is obstinately asking for Magical, Impossible solutions; which of course is not borne out by his well-established history as a reasonable and productive contributor to these conversations. It could be that you have to change your expectations.
Not that I have much reason to 'expect' you to miss the chance to Holler out an Absolutist Assumption whenever possible.
Jesus.
Bob
Naw, I think that Fred actually believes that there is something "we" can do to change the expectations of the rest of the world.
We cannot! Sorry to be the bearer of bad news Jokuhl.
Ron P.
Here's what you said.
"Obviously if we expect them to work then they will."
If you need to change that to still be 'right', I guess that's what you have to do.. so now, you're saying,
"I think that Fred actually believes that there is something "we" can do to change the expectations of the rest of the world." - which makes no sense, when he clearly said otherwise.
FMagyar wrote:
"*WE NEED TO CHANGE WHAT WE EXPECT*!" .. and soon afterwards..
"My neighbors as far as I can tell are pushing with all their might in the opposite direction."
You're not at all sorry to bear bad news. You LOVE to do that.. but what you're bearing is hardly news. We all know that getting this message out to an Energy Drunk world is very hard to impossible.. While you choose the Latter, and I the former. But Fred hasn't promised that we'll succeed. You are more than happy to promise that we'll fail.
Succeed at what Jokuhl? I am very curious to know what you would regard as success? I really don't think either you or Fred has given any great thought to what you would hope to achieve, if it were truly possible to achieve your desired world. What would your success look like? What would that successful world look like?
How do we extract ourselves from deep overshoot with little pain. (Knowing you would say there must be some pain.) How is it possible to maintain a population of over 7 billion, stop the current sixth extinction, (if that is indeed part of your hoped for success), when fossil fuels are in steep decline and soon to be gone completely?
And think long and hard as to what would be the consequences of your success!
I anxiously await your reply.
Ron P.
I'm currently trying to get TOD editors to allow a post by someone I know that might intelligently examine this very issue. I'm neither optimistic about solving the population overshoot problem nor about the likelihood that my friend will be allowed to post his ideas, so far the response has been quite negative.
Having said that, re:
It would have a lot more ideas like this and much much less BAU...
http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/sanjuans/isj/business/89546537.html
...and before someone tells me it requires fossil fuel to produce the solar panels and fiberglass for the shell and metal parts for gears and rubber for tiers, etc.. etc.. I know all that. It still beats not even trying, to get some of us uber consumers in the US from getting away from the Humvee model. I don't expect to convince the majority all at once. I'm willing to slowly chip away at the edges for now.
If anyone is interested I can send you the specs of my latest off grid solar powered LED boat dock. It is very similar to a system I'm exporting to a certain third world country to be used as the main source of power and lighting. It beats sitting in the dark and not being able to have a way to charge your cell phone where there is no grid at all but where people are living burning wood and fossil fuel for light.
Success would be doing better than we have done. Reducing our consumption, teaching our neighbors, trying to 'Tikkun Olam', Heal the world. Got something better to do? Oh yeah, argue with fenceposts. You don't 'feed the hungry' by feeding all of them. You feed 'somebody', you feed a few folks.. and you spread the word, and get some help if you can to feed a few more.
At the moment, Ron, I think success would be seeing you engage in a discussion where you didn't just pick one word you could snipe at, like "Expect" in the beginning of this exchange, blatantly mischaracterizing it so you can have your indignant and puerile challenges.
Now it's "success", which you take into the stratosphere again, insisting that it must mean solving extinction and overshoot and PO and whatever else you can glom onto some proposed Utopia of mine or Fred's.
No wonder you don't believe in collective action, cooperative endeavors. You have to pick things down to unprovable terms so you get to 'prove' that it's impossible.
That is a cop-out Jokuhl and you know it. I ask a question and you choose to change the subject to something else, something you felt you could answer, or insult, rather than answer the question asked. Oh well, that's about what I expected.
You know very well what my point is Jokuhl, but you just will not admit it. Reducing consumption and teaching your neighbors to do the same? Yes, damn right I have something better to do and you should also. You should concentrate on saving your own self rather than spend all your time and energy trying to save the whole damn world.
You have only a limited amount of time, energy and resources. You should spend them where they have the greatest possibility of success, not waste them trying to save the entire world. You may as well go piss in the river to try to make the water rise.
Ron P.
I answered your question with my first sentence.
In furthering that, how is 'Reducing consumption and teaching my neighbors to do the same' NOT saving my own butt? To get my own external dependencies on buying energy or food from afar reduced, and pushing my neighborhood or my city or state or country (in varying spheres of influence.. but then, I'm not doing it alone, am I? Many others are pushing for the same things..) to be moving the same direction is ALL about saving my butt and theirs. Wouldn't do to just take care of #1, if EVERYTHING around me was going to fall apart, as you so frequently predict it must.
It's a proportional effort, Ron.. but maybe that's too nuanced to suggest to you.
Fred's right. The only thing that will allow implementation of these brilliant and wonderful technological ideas is to change the minds of the mass of voters of the Greed nations (who have perfectly exhibited the main flaw of Democracy: it allows the masses to vote themselves benefits they refuse to think about paying for).
THEREFORE, the science we need FIRST is the science of human opinion, which governments and corporations are VERY good at.
Once again, the bully pulpit, with as much bully as necessary, regardless of re-electability.
Obama, I'm lookin' at you!
Let's see a crack team of cognitive scientists gleaned from academia and business.
"And last but not least let me put in a plug for Human Population Control! If we don't get serious about that, nature will again impose its negative feedback loops!"
Oh, yes. Quite.
It never ceases to amaze me how we can have these discussions with so little reference to human population, which is, quite unambiguously, the elephant in the room.
I = P x C
Where I is a notional (and probably too complex to adequately define) variable representing the impact of our human activities on the environment, the activities themselves, etc.; P is the easy one: count us; and C represents both the quantities of goods and services we consume and their characteristics, including resource inputs, embodied energy, etc.—another hard-to-define variable, but conceptually useful, I think.
It's really pretty obvious that the problems we are discussing, along with so very many others, would look much different in a world with two billion humans rather than seven billion, or ten ten billion. It seems apparent, at least to this non-specialist, that we would have more choices available.
I'd be willing to bet that human population reductions are an inevitable feature of our future. It's really only a question of how those reductions are accomplished.
There is that big "we" again. We are a big world aren't we. ;-) And just what would you propose that "we" do? Well, about one third of "we" have already tried to do something. China enacted their one child policy in 1979 when they had about 975 million people. The policy is still in effect today and their population is expected to reach 1.4 billion people late this year. The reason the population did not start to fall immediately, and is indeed still rising, is a thing called "population momentum". That is, more young people were having their one child than there were old people dying.
As late as 2006 China still had almost two births for every one death. But that is down from over three births for every death in 1985. China's population, 1969-2006
In the mid 70s Indira Gandhi tried to enforce population control in India... and failed miserably. The reason was because she did not have the dictatorial powers that the leaders of China had.
But even if a world leader did emerge that had dictatorial powers over the entire world, and instituted a one child policy, the world population would continue to rise for many years, just as it did in China. Then, in this world dictatorship, the population would start to drop after about 30 years, and slowly drop to six billion or so in about a century from now. Actually that would not help much.
But there is no "we" in existence other than the we of the entire world. And there is no hope of a one world dictator in the near future so that plan is out also.
Oh well, I guess nature will just have to take its course. And I think nature will reduce the population to a whole lot less than 6 billion a century from now.
Ron P.
'Completely' is a key word there, and I don't think it'll turn out to be Alan's contention at all. (That the author's completely wrong)
Just like the upshot of the article that pushes pretty hard for the conclusion that OIL is simply key in making renewables possible, I would contend that while there clearly ARE dependencies within the system, the trick will have to be dissecting the pieces to find what we've got that isn't Oil dependent. Even Ethanol, (which I feel is limited by water and topsoil more than oil) it could be refined with Solar thermal inputs, and it's EROEI would improve considerably..
Among other things, the author concludes this..
I would like to see some detailing of that number, because it is essentially saying that 'We shouldn't be pushing for renewables' .. it would have been very helpful to see it inclined towards a bit of the potentials they DO see in the other 10%, instead of statistically forwarding the suggestion that renewables are simply 'Hot Air'..
While I regularly support PV as a higly valuable source of Renewable Energy, the key material to renewable energy I think will turn out to be glass, possibly followed by Aluminum, Stainless Steel, Chrome or the other reflective materials, and Copper. How does Passive Solar construction and Solar Heating, Cooking, ProcessHeating and Lighting with the above materials fit into this evaluation, particularly with the just incredible volumes of scrap material we've generated and continue to generate for all of the above items?
How much must we depend on OIL in order to convert misapplied volumes of Glass, Copper and Aluminum into collectors that can very easily Heat, Light, Wash, Grow Foods and Cook..
Coming from a former actuarial analyst, what I have to say about "possible" and "probable" is that statistics are a crutch used when you have to rely on description instead of explanation.
And because statistics are horrible at explanation, they fail epically when used for predicting future successes.
And the more boondoggles there are, the faster the crash accelerates.
Full speed ahead with building bigger stone heads.
Full speed ahead with building
bigger stone headsmore complex spreadsheets.I am sick of spreadsheets. I want a bigger stone head.
The "proofs" presented are extraordinarily weak.
Look at a time period ending in 2007 with biased data#, and conclude that it cannot be built faster.
# Pumped storage losses (growing as pumped storage grows) are subtracted from hydro when they should be subtracted from coal & nukes. Solar hot water (MASSIVE growth in China) is not included in the statistics. Thus biased data for the purpose used in this article.
The article ignores efficiency gains, ignores geothermal power, ignores more hydroelectric, ignores pumped storage, ignores solar thermal for hot water & heat, ignores using HV DC.
The paper assumes something that will not occur for a century plus, *NO* fossil fuels and then uses that distance future to say the medium term (say 20 to 40 year) future (*LESS* FF) is doomed because it will not work in 2189. Quite frankly, I cannot predict the technology of 2189, although I suspect that fusion will be a solved problem by then.
Let me show an alternative that expands on current efforts (USA-centric I am afraid, every area has it's own mix of solutions).
Divert 4% of GDP from consumption to investment in long lived energy producing and energy efficient investments (a ramp up period will be required). The political will will come from a moment of panic (9/11 was wasted).
1) Rapid and immediate push for efficiency. Retrofit and new construction meets minimum German/Swedish standards (adjusted for climate). R-48 walls, etc. in Ohio to get a building permit. Push for SEER 22+ heat pumps (can be air source, best air source HP is now SEER 26). Only appliances that meet today's Energy Star are allowed to be sold. Etc. Also industrial efficiency.
1B) High Gas and aviation fuel taxes phased in.
Above will give a reduced impact from declining FF, and reduce the rate of depletion, especially of natural gas. 2050 will look like 2030 or 2035 would have w/o such measures.
2) Efficient Non-Oil Transportation is pushed very aggressively. Electrified rail trades 20 BTUs of refined diesel for 1 BTU of electricity for intercity freight. Build 5,000 miles of Light Rail, 400 miles of subway by 2021 and more after that. Make bicycling as easy and safe as possible everywhere, with a few tens of billions spent on bike paths, bike parking, public showers, etc. And incentives to build and live in walkable neighborhoods. Encourage market to abandon some Suburbia.
3) Promote MORE wind power with the following:
a) Any year that wind does not grow by 30% compounded, new incentives come into force to try and "catch up" the next year. No sudden termination of incentives, instead out years have a slow phase down so manufacturers have confidence in future market.
b) Transmission enhancements paid for by "postage stamp". Every kWh used pays towards enhanced transmission costs. Exactly how Texas is spending $4.9 billion in 4 years to build transmission for 18 GW of new wind. Just apply nationally. HV DC to spread wind and other renewables nation-wide.
c) Major incentives for pumped storage, including directing gov't owned utilities TVA & Bonneville to build massive complexes, connected by HV DC. Say 75 GW of pumped storage by 2030.
3d) Promote geothermal, but overbuild generation so geothermal can be cycled to match gaps in load vs. renewable generation.
3e) Economical build-out of new nukes. 6 to 8 completed by 2020, 8 to 10 by 2027, and then speed up from there.
And some money left over from the 4% of GDP (JUST 4% !) that needs to be invested in the front end (later stages pay for themselves in a macro-economic sense).
Such a program (even without additional steps like building 30 GW more hydro in Canada, etc.) will allow the USA (plus Canada) to function fairly effectively with reduced fossil fuels that can be rationally expected in 2020, 2030, 2040 and 2050.
My crystal ball begins to cloud at the 50 year mark. New technologies will appear by then and "change the game", plus many other factors. None-the-less a 2050 society and economy that operate on 7% of the fossil fuels it used in 2010 is well prepared to make the next step.
Time prevents a more detailed argument.
Alan
"c) Major incentives for pumped storage, including directing gov't owned utilities TVA & Bonneville to build massive complexes, connected by HV DC. Say 75 GW of pumped storage by 2030."
I believe that the US is probably one of the most blessed countries with potential for pumped storage, expecially in the mountain areas of the east and west. The mountains that are being leveled to access coal could easily be used for building pumped storage instead (often 500 to 1000' drop from top to valley). Many areas of northen New Mexico and Arizona have wind potential next to mesas having 500' to 1000' vertical drop. Same goes for Columbia River and Snake River basins in northwest US. Sure pumped storage cost money but the facilites are low maintenance and can last for many decades before needing any capital input.
Spot on, Alan, this article truly has a number of weak points and unsupported assertions;
1. "No sun" - if the author refers to non-daylight hours, then he needs to be better informed. There exists already energy storage of solar power in the form of molten salts, so that solar power can be provided during non-daylight hours, up to a 70% annual capacity factor.
2. The author seems to dismiss HVDC offhand with a vague wave to 'stochastic nature'. Such non-evidence is meaningless. A network of HVDC transmission lines would indeed provide electricity transport of wind (or other) power from areas that have it to areas that are temporarily lull.
The author also left out additional hydropower, geothermal power, and a host of other sources. The higher assumptions above assume some level of smart grid capability and natural gas-fired backup, which would drastically slow down the depletion rate of natural gas.
Another very weak line of reasoning ("Let's just keep BAU!"). Our ancient power grids are going to need investment regardless, so we might as well do it with 21st century technology rather than 70 year old technology. And it's not just grid operators shifting electricity to off-peak times, it consumers doing so as well. Real-time pricing with forecasting can allow consumers to determine when and how much they would want to consume based on pricing and their preferences.
Unsupported assertion.
False dichotomy. We can (and should) do both to reduce natural gas depletion rates.
Wildly unsupported assertion.
Where are these 50 locations? Why were they chosen? What amount of installed capacity at each was modelled? What were the interconnection assumptions? Specifically, what were the Smart Grid assumptions?
Will,
there are a lot of "(wildly) unsupported assertions" in our post, and a lot of things "left out", particularly because it already now is too long. I am happy to document you offline with what is needed to support our claims, and then have the result posted in the form of a debate later.
Hannes
Most articles post references to supporting documentation in the article itself. All that was posted in this article was a link to a comedy skit.
Provide the information now here so that all can evaluate the veracity of the claims. To withhold would confirm the suspicions of quite a few engineers and scientists based on a myriad of comments already submitted.
In other words, play catch up by showing us your findings, assumptions, and algorithms here in the comments, or expect that your conclusions will continue to be considered groundless.
Agree. This was the problematic statement I found.
Well that looks like an assertion with nothing to back it up.
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/06/wind-variability-in-germany.html
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/05/wind-energy-dispersion-analysis...
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/04/wind-dispersion-and-renewable-h...
Wind energy is very predictable, just not in the sense that people are used to. We need new ways of thinking about things. Clear the deck and let some people who have innovative paradigms lead the way. Why can't TOD post that article that Alan has tried to submit?
One key problem is that most of our research simply hasn't been done before, and many papers (as the one mentioned by Nate Hagens in his intro) are just being reviewed. And it is rather difficult to post a 25 page scientific paper here.
But I can offer some insight into wind variability. The chart we plot in the post is based on our simulation for Britain (pardon my simplification, 2/3 of my family has a British passport and can't find the right words most of the time). The same can also be done for Denmark. There, we are lucky to have 10 years of hourly electricity data available, including wind. Equally, we have detailed 20 minute level wind data for Spain for the last 3 years.
We don't argue that there isn't a general seasonality for wind (more in winter, less in summer) and equally solar (the reverse). What we did is measure this output against real demand patterns, which are very predictable in aggregate.
And what we find there is that in various years, cumulative oversupply and undersupply (as shown in Figure 5) come in extremely different shapes. Let's specifically look at West Denmark (a separate region in the Danish grid and operating on 25% wind): In 2006, the largest cumulative power gap (see Fig. 5 in our post for the concept) occurred in October, in 2007 it took place in December (but only going to 13% the size of the previous year), in 2008 it was October again (rather small this time with 8.1% of the 2006 gap), whereas in 2009 it occurred in August and was large once more, reaching 64% of the record gap in 2006. That is what we mean with "unpredictable year over year".
We have also tried to shift the start date of our cumulative measuring to a "better place" in time (e.g. not starting on January 1), but to no avail. What works in one year doesn't in the next.
This all might sound a little complicated, which is what it is. That's why I offered to make some of those cases offline and later post the outcome on TOD again. We do open source research and don't have anything to hide.
Do the autocorrelations of wind energy and you may find that it matches the physical prediction based on entropy very well.
That is the point of my analysis.
So to recast the arguments, don't say that wind is not cooperating with us. Instead say that we must cooperate with the wind.
That is my point about thinking differently. It may not work, but we don't have a lot of other choices.
I would say that this is exactly the case we are trying to make: "The only meaningful way of looking at the future of energy delivery and application technologies would be to build energy systems based on an assumption that renewable technologies have to provide the entire amount required by our societies, and then to reshape societies so they are in line with what and how these technologies can deliver."
an assumption that renewable technologies have to provide the entire amount required by our societies
Since 100% renewables and 0% fossil fuels (what of nuclear ?) will *NOT* be an issue for over a century (say the year 2185), you are "jumping the gun" by over a century. Not an issue worth seriously considering at this time (after all, fusion may be practical in 2091).
The real world questions are how to 1) use less energy, hopefully to do the same useful and needful work# and 2) how to shift the balance towards more renewables and less carbon emitting fuels.
You work might be adapted towards the real questions, but I find your framing uninteresting because *NO* fossil fuels will not be an issue for "as far as the eye can see".
Best Hopes for Adapting the Research,
Alan
# Much of US consumption is for unneeded purposes that appear to actually harm the population. Having children walk or bicycle to school would be a socially positive thing (health, less obesity) as one relevant example. We do *NOT* need for them to take electric cars to school.
"# Much of US consumption is for unneeded purposes that appear to actually harm the population. Having children walk or bicycle to school would be a socially positive thing (health, less obesity) as one relevant example. We do *NOT* need for them to take electric cars to school."
Absolutely right- US energy per capita usage is 2X Europe or Japan - primarily because of
auto addiction and lack of frequent and convenient public transit or long-distance rail.
In 2008 public transit ridership soared 17% with $4 per gallon gasoline with NO
service increase whatsoever. Since then it has dropped due to service cuts in over
150 cities across the US (see http://t4america.org )
IF the US followed James Kunstler, Lester Brown, Michael Moore and many other peoples
suggestion to first RUN the trains and buses, then to connect them with shuttles,
provide access to those train stations with sufficient parking or shuttles to get there
we could easily cut oil usage 20% in a year.
Note that most trains light rail systems are ALREADY electric!
After that just run sidings in transition to extra sets of tracks, run local/express
services, then start running tracks down 4 lane highways and we can go even further.
What is NOT feasible by any stretch of the imagination is continuing to run the US
auto addiction.
"# Much of US consumption is for unneeded purposes that appear to actually harm the population. Having children walk or bicycle to school would be a socially positive thing (health, less obesity) as one relevant example. We do *NOT* need for them to take electric cars to school."
Absolutely right- US energy per capita usage is 2X Europe or Japan - primarily because of
auto addiction and lack of frequent and convenient public transit or long-distance rail.
In 2008 public transit ridership soared 17% with $4 per gallon gasoline with NO
service increase whatsoever. Since then it has dropped due to service cuts in over
150 cities across the US (see http://t4america.org )
IF the US followed James Kunstler, Lester Brown, Michael Moore and many other peoples
suggestion to first RUN the trains and buses, then to connect them with shuttles,
provide access to those train stations with sufficient parking or shuttles to get there
we could easily cut oil usage 20% in a year.
Note that most trains light rail systems are ALREADY electric!
After that just run sidings in transition to extra sets of tracks, run local/express
services, then start running tracks down 4 lane highways and we can go even further.
What is NOT feasible by any stretch of the imagination is continuing to run the US
auto addiction.
In many respects, the wrong question.
With access to Norwegian & Swedish hydro, new pumped storage (Scotland for example), HV DC links to Spain and new wind farms in Poland, Swiss pumped storage & hydro, French nuclear, etc. and some residual natural gas (or electro-synthesized methanol or ammonia) for gap filling, the variability that you study has far less meaning or impact.
Your problem has relatively little impact.
My link to a map of the proposed North Sea & Baltic HV DC grids is now dead :-(, but I am sure that you are aware of these plans.
Alan
Alan, why not hold off on these airy dismissals of other people's carefully calculated conclusions until the data and methods are available for inspection. He's run the numbers; you haven't.
I have run the numbers.
pdf warning
http://www.millenniuminstitute.net/resources/elibrary/papers/Transportat...
And there is more than this.
Alan
Very interesting looking paper. However, its scope is somewhat different than the study of power system dynamic stability in the face of renewable generation that the OP was talking about.
Stability of grids with increasing renewables is an interest of mine, and I am aware of some of the complex issues with reactive power, spinning reserve, etc. but that was a tertiary concern of this article.
The primary assumption is that *NO* fossil fuels will be available in the foreseeable future. Start with a bad assumption and folly follows.
Alan
PS: I am unsure of who you speak of as "OP".
Will,
Thats a bit aggressive.
I've been working closely with Hannes and have invited him many times to write something for TOD. Many of the topics we work on, especially the big picture analyses, aren't easily coverable in short readable posts.
I've asked Hannes to assimilate the questions/comments/issues that came up here and address them in a follow up post so he can have a week or two to locate links/data/ etc.
After writing some papers with him I can attest he's pretty careful with analyses/claims. 'groundless' doesn't even enter the conversation.
Will,
Thats a bit aggressive.
I've been working closely with Hannes and have invited him many times to write something for TOD. Many of the topics we work on, especially the big picture analyses, aren't easily coverable in short readable posts.
I've asked Hannes to assimilate the questions/comments/issues that came up here and address them in a follow up post so he can have a week or two to locate links/data/ etc. (He agreed to do this)
After writing some papers with him I can attest he's pretty careful with analyses/claims. 'groundless' doesn't even enter the conversation.
Nate
Your collaboration with Hannes is not an excuse to bitch-slap people around for merrily stating their opinions.
Smokey, I think Will was the one doing the bitch-slapping. A lot of others are also trying to bitch-slap Nate and Hannes around. Do you think they had a good excuse?
Ron P.
I do but that’s not my point. Many times did I see ‘collaborates’ doing everything to kill the concurrent ideas. In my eyes, that’s the #1 reason that we’re when we are today – the best ideas are killed so that weak ones could survive. Nate’s rant is nothing else but to protect his, Hanneses (who elses?) positions. At least, I do see it that way. Ideas are to be nurtured and not assassinated.
smokeemifugotem, you've got it backwards. I took Nate's tone to be calm and measured.
Will,
Thats a bit aggressive.
I've been working closely with Hannes and have invited him many times to write something for TOD. Many of the topics we work on, especially the big picture analyses, aren't easily coverable in short readable posts.
I've asked Hannes to assimilate the questions/comments/issues that came up here and address them in a follow up post so he can have a week or two to locate links/data/ etc. (He agreed to do this)
After writing some papers with him I can attest he's pretty careful with analyses/claims. 'groundless' doesn't even enter the conversation.
What we have here is another article that tries to address some real technical issues with a bit of hand-waving, and perhaps misapplied intuition. If the author does not have any remarkable new insight or has not included references to back up the claims, of course it will get some criticism.
There are troves of collected data associated just with windpower alone and getting discussions going on this can provoke some good ideas. Lots of the deeper analysis is counter-intuitive so it needs to be hashed out in front of an audience. We have a lot more tech-savvy people reading TOD recently, so give it a try. You may lose some readers, but gain some others.
Aggressive? Perhaps. Many bald assumptions, though. More in email.
Unsubstantiated not groundless, otherwise you'd be doing what your accusing the author of doing, ie, having no verifiable support data.
Good ideas and solid analysis all around Alan, A+. Can we call this our new energy Marshall Plan? I like it better than the Space Program (too pie-in-the-sky) and Manhattan Project (too violent) analogies.
I agree WastedEnergy, but who can we get to bomb us back to the stone age, invade, then loan us the money to rebuild?
Alan,
thank you for your comments.
First of all: As much as we would have loved to include 2008 and 2009 data for renewable generation, it's not yet available. What I would guess from all the data I have: In 2009 the picture changes, but that isn't a reversal in trend, but due to the economic crisis which has reduced overall energy consumption.
As for the other aspects, I am happy to accept that some of your suggestions have merit, however, in broader societal context, there are big hurdles (political decision-making and human behavior coming first).
As suggested in my response to Will, our post is not able to cover all areas and make all the points, as it would have become way too long. But I would be happy to document you offline with what is needed to support all our claims, and then have the result posted in the form of a debate later.
How does that sound?
Hannes
ATM, I am reading one of several 8 Mb drafts from a "well known international organization" dealing with some of the same issues and preparing a make a proposal for a "well known national organization" that wants a plan to get the USA off oil ASAP as much as possible.
So my time is too limited ATM. Perhaps in a few days.
However, I have edited an internal eMail I sent with names redacted. ANY COMMENTS ARE MOST WELCOME
Long Term Strategy
My goal is simple, but ambitious and very, very difficult. It is to influence positive change, specifically to limit the carbon emissions and oil use of the United States. Keeping us from becoming a 3rd World economy is a secondary goal (for me).
Minor or even moderate change may happen when the United States is comfortable and "doing well". However, a significant, major change is going to require a major, and very likely enduring, crisis. Post-Peak Oil is likely to be the source of that.
"US Energy policy has only two modes; complacency and panic" from our first Secretary of Energy.
Today, with "uncomfortable complacency" (we sense something is wrong, but "we" are not yet motivated to change), we can start to do the right things. It is important to build skills and experience for a major effort later. And any small work done now will make the future tasks easier.
Even more important is to figure out just what are the right things to do, and in what order of priority.
When panic arrives, as it will, SOMETHING will be done on a crash basis. Our goal should be to direct that panic driven effort towards the best possible set of solutions.
I see a high profile efforts by AA and BB as necessary, but not sufficient for the task before us.
They can help define what needs to be done, but I am unsure that, in the moment of panic, that these plans will be chosen over other plans (such as Pickens, corn ethanol, etc.).
IMHO, what "we" need to do, as we sense panic about to arrive, is re-clothe earlier work into a more impressive, higher visibility plan with many more important stake holders.
One example is that BB, General Electric and CC approach the Dept. of Energy and request an official US Gov't plan. For each option examined, a major corporation or organization will agree to supply technical expertise on that option.
"New" solutions sell better than "old" solutions (just human nature), and to have the best plan adapted it must appear to be new (even if it is just a retreaded BB plan).
"Official" plans sell better than unofficial, especially to those that routinely defer to authority.
Plans with many diverse stakeholders sell better than those pushed by one point of view by one organization.
"Something for everyone" (GDP, environment, national security, etc.) sells better than a plan that focuses on only one goal.
"Our Group" and the BB can do the "heavy lifting" now, defining numerous good options and refining the model. We can push this, with the AA plan, and get people used to the idea of modeling policy alternatives. Hopefully, we can redirect some funding and public support and make real, if too small, changes.
But the underlying reality is that in order to transform the way our society functions, the BB model needs to be seen as a "dress rehearsal", a vital and important step, for another greater report that will be "new" when panic hits !
I have spent over a decade considering this future, and this is the best way forward that I can see.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Pretty vague, actually.
"In 2009 the picture changes, but that isn't a reversal in trend, but due to the economic crisis which has reduced overall energy consumption."
And this economic crisis is just temporary? No trend there?
Hannes is right, drilling down into more detail regarding net energy is unnecessary in this case, and prevents us from viewing from the larger scale from which this problem should be viewed. In your arguments, Alan, you isolate small details of the whole and thus lose the big picture. This is a classic example of how people bargain.
Alan, I understand that you’ve had a very rough summer and immense losses. Again, I am very sorry. But it strikes me as very ironic that someone from New Orleans is proposing solutions to maintain BAU. Listen to yourself again, please.
Such a program (even without additional steps like building 30 GW more hydro in Canada, etc.) will allow the USA (plus Canada) to function fairly effectively with reduced fossil fuels that can be rationally expected in 2020, 2030, 2040 and 2050. My crystal ball begins to cloud at the 50 year mark. New technologies will appear by then and "change the game", plus many other factors. None-the-less a 2050 society and economy that operate on 7% of the fossil fuels it used in 2010 is well prepared to make the next step.
I have just one question for you, Alan. Just how many Gulf of Mexicos do we have left in us?
To all of the bargainers for BAU who rebut this very good summary of where we stand, I would ask you to examine your own fears about change and our probable future, first, before you start arguing with the rationalizations at a very low level of detail. There is no point in rebutting each small detail, because, as Einstein said, these problems cannot be solved with the thinking that created them. And the thinking that created our problems was one more improvement of technology at a time to improve the volume of fossil fuels extracted from the earth. You are proposing more of the same. Hannes' simple explanation is all of the detail that we need at this point. All of the rest is just grieving.
And I will repeat myself; if those of you arguing these issues did not see the changes of the past decade, then something is wrong with the mental model you use to construct your world view. I view our economy as within the environment, with the entire supplied by changing proportions of renewable flows and nonrenewable stocks and storages. . Below is an elegant explanation by Gunther.
http://www.holon.se/folke/kurs/logexp/logexp_en.shtml
The storage tank is starting to make noises as the pipe sucks air at the bottom, as Hannes said. Think about it.
Talking to myself again--it's amazing how I can shut down a conversation. So much for ice cream socials.
C'mon, bring it, boys, you "BAU-what cognitive dissonance?" crowd. Just how many Gulf of Mexicos do we have left in us?
"...it's amazing how I can shut down a conversation."
I've noticed. Dem dere denialists are really good at denial.
Keep stirring, Iaato.
Some times the best response to personal and ad hominem insults is no response.
Alan
Yes, Alan, sometimes, it is. But I don't think that's what's going on here.
We need to really distinguish between processes that happen to use oil today, because that's the only game in town.. and those that truly have to do so.
With that distinction clearly developed for specific applications, we can start to forecast what it takes to make and continue making various Alternative Energy Systems.
For example, what part of manufacturing Power Transistors, Rectifiers and other key Semiconductors is SPECIFICALLY reliant only on OIL? The Correlation of their supply chains being oil-based is not necessarily a Causation.
I do realize that the whole Industrial system is supported with this high-energy lubricant on all sides, and that with that falling tide, we'll see all sorts of things that are no longer backed up by the assumptions of our world it has helped to foster. But to take it beyond such general denials, we have the opportunity to suss out what DOES stand without it. (ie, what level of High Strength Metals and Precision Bearings can be made without an overarching oil infrastructure? What about with 'moderate' Petroleum Access.. ie, Expensive Lubricants and Solvents, but not fuel.. ??)
and Finally, with some of those 'beyond oil' materials, techniques and options in hand, we are very likely VERY dependent upon our current access to Fossil Fuels to be able to prime that pump sufficiently to build out enough that we can 'Thread the Needle' and get (some fraction of us) through to the other side. (and I am not willing to get into a debate on 'which fraction'.. that's a distraction from the question I'm trying to pose here)
Bob
"We need to really distinguish between processes that happen to use oil today, because that's the only game in town.. and those that truly have to do so."
The oil-discretionary nature of these processes doesn't make them less essential to our economies, and as Gail is want to point out, transitioning to non-oil alternatives where possible will itself be energy and investment intensive. Lack of investment and credit (and plain old societal stuborness) are already stalling/hindering many inovations away from oil. I see a train wreck between peak capitol and peak need-to-transition. The necessity to change won't be able to compete with petroleum based inertia and capitol. We are far too invested in a petroleum economy. Very little wiggle room left.
The point of the line you quoted was to start looking at which aspects of life today we can 'reasonably predict' will be possible in other situations, without that much Oil, really just in order to devise plans for investing in those routes which we feel we can support 'Afterwords'.. like manufacturing Glass and Copper, as I mentioned elsewhere on this thread.
It's not supposed to be a cure-all, just a way to forge a path through the thicket towards what we hope will reveal a clearing up there someplace.
Yes, the investments will be very hard to make.. but I have to ignore my own 'Money/Poverty' anxieties, and lean on Heinlein's line "Money is the Bugaboo of Small Minds.." (From 'The moon is a harsh Mistress'.. a great Resource Constraints Sci-Fi story)
As with 'Rebuilding Railways.. or Paying for Education, or Eating a proper diet, or Finding Time to Spend with our Kids' .. Sure, 'We just can't pull it off right now' is always the catch.. but we have to do it just the same.
"'We just can't pull it off right now' is always the catch.."
As I've posted before, unfortunately, I see no real indication that there is any effective "we", not nationally, not globally (which is what will be required). As I've been expecting, I see an increasing "Us and Them" mentality, as history would predict.
In terms of mitigation or meaningful change, any concepts I have of "we" have become much more local. Regarding the downsides (AGW, resource depletion, famine, environment, etc), "we" still very much applies.
Amen to that.
The economic system linking countries is in such disarray right now, I can't see how it can adapt to an actual decline in energy use (a possibility presently hidden from common consciousness.)
When BAU is widely accepted as impossible to maintain, people will go nuts. How far off can that be?
Paul
Why then have Denmark, northern Germany, and other regions with 20%+ wind power penetration not experienced these blackouts?
The reason is that we can still depend on many of the same methods we have ALWAYS used to balance supply against demand in the electricity market. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has written extensively on this question and shown that the idea that power sources must be "base loading" to be usable has little to no real factual basis. The idea that renewables cannot be integrated and that storage and backup systems are impossible has been largely perpetuated by the industries that benefit from not only the current energy paradigm, but also...the existing backup and storage systems we have in place! i.e. the fossil fuel and nuclear industries.
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2010-04_keepingthelightson
No matter how many times the myth is repeated that it is impossible to integrate wind and solar into the grid, these claims are continually proven wrong...and many of the backup systems supposedly needed for renewable generation are in fact ALREADY in place! Why? To account for the potentially catastrophic sudden loss of thousands of megawatts from forced coal and nuclear plant outages, perhaps?
http://wastedenergy.net/2010/06/27/intermittency-revisited/
Now, none of this is intended to suggest the transition will be automatic and come easy, and I agree we shouldn't delude ourselves into believing it will be. I agree that many of the proposed "solutions" to our energy crisis such as biofuels and nuclear power have shown themselves to be chimeras. But that doesn't mean the only option we have going forward is an energy crash. Were variable-output renewables to be implemented on a large scale, we might still be dependent on traditional load balancing methods such as gas-fired peaker plants for at least the foreseeable future, but they would be run far less often than they are today, conserving fuel, saving costs over the long run, and potentially avoiding a significant share of the fossil energy crash.
There are limits to growth and even to sustaining the lifestyle we are used to, to be sure, but among the largest limits are our own imagination and our refusal to adopt new paradigms on either the supply or demand side of the equation...note that Lovins, one of the fiercest critics of the claims made re: these limitations of renewables, also says that our first (and by far most cost-effective) priority should be Negawatts...i.e. curtailment and efficient end use.
You missed reading this bit from the article:
I suspect strongly that neither you nor Amory Lovins have worked in a real-life grid-control centre. Yes, multiple windfarms over vastly separated areas will improve the statistical odds. But you can't bet the whole system against those odds, without lots of guaranteed reserve from gas/coal/nuclear.
Exactly. I believe that it was Xeroid who, back in December, showed us that for a period of 4 days there was not a bit of wind blowing in the UK and off-shore. In effect there was precisely no electricity being generated by wind at a time of year when demand for sparks was highest.
I have no problem with wind turbines per se. I actually think they look quite attractive, and one must acknowledge that they do produce some electricity. However it really is 'castle in the sky' thinking to believe that the UK could ever get 20% of our sparks continuously from wind. Yes, let's have them as part of the mix, but for politicians to tell us that our current way of life can be assured from turbines is nonsense. We will be required to change our patterns of electricity use.
Oh, no doubt if people are saying 20% continuously or any amount continuously is feasible, then that is not realistic, but that is also very different from saying wind is impossible to integrate (say, with base loading renewables over the long run) and I think any reasonable observer would say that "we will be required to change our patterns of electricity use," which is why, as I mentioned previously, Lovins says (and I agree) that negawatts are the first priority. Please don't take my comments as meaning "with just wind, we'll be able to entirely replace our existing energy infrastructure without any demand-side changes." But the flip side of that coin is that demand-side changes without investment in renewables also gets us nowhere over the long term.
And it is true that the more wind farms are integrated over more geographic area, the more the variability will statistically approach the average capacity factor and the less backup or storage is required as a proportion of total wind power. I seem to recall this being part of a 2008 DOE study too, if I remember correctly...
I agree about the negawatts. Let's do as many of these as we possibly can.
But
Which renewables would these be? Hydro is pretty much maxed out. Energy storage in the necessary amounts to give reliable baseload is nowhere near feasible yet. We're talking about gigawatt-days and weeks! Have you done the sums and considered the practical cost implications?
Generation-3+ nuclear is going to give us a FAR better return on our increasingly scarce capital.
Hydro, biomass, solid waste...geothermal where it is available. U.S. has around 30 GW of pumped-storage capacity now and could easily add more if it were valued, as it would be with a renewables build.
The problem with nuclear is that its economics do not work and have not for some time. Operating costs are lower than fossil plants but the capital required for new capacity is many times renewables, and the lead times and risks of delays and cost overruns are too high to attract investors (even with huge subsidies).
Straightforward hydro is mostly gone. Building more has high impact.
Biomass has already been dealt with in the original article.
Solid waste can certainly provide a few percent.
Geothermal is inherently limited and deteriorates over time.
Despite massive subsidies over many years, California's proportion of renewables remains stuck around 10%.
With a non-hysterical media and regulatory environment, nuclear economics work just fine. Areva in France made a nett profit of 743 million euros in 2007 on total sales of 11.9 billion. Germany has recently announced their intention to windfall tax their nuclear generators of
2.3m2.3bn euros per year because they've been doing so well without carbon taxes.Which country are you referring to hydro as "mostly gone"?
Algal biomass was not dealt with adequately in the original article.
Geothermal inherently limited? How so? Read this MIT report on US geothermal potential, which your statement is at odds with.
California's subsidies pale in comparison to Federal subsidies of coal, oil, gas, and nuclear.
Hydro is mostly gone in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Big hydro seems mostly gone in the USA. Great that Canada seems so happy to do massive hydro in this day and age.
Algal biomass, supplied with 10%-enriched CO2 air and plenty of sunlight, could produce biodiesel at an energy rate of 4 watts per square metre of pond area, averaged over the year. This is somewhat worse than a solar PV farm, and is in the form of burnable fuel rather than electricity. It also neglects the energy needed to circulate the fluids and refine the algal ooze into usable fuel, which in a test system described in a paper by Ron Putt, Auburn University, 2007 resulted in a net consumption of energy.
Thank you for the link to the geothermal energy report from MIT. It took a bit of digging to find usable numbers rather than optimistic assertions. The most readily usable part is Fig 1.2 on page 1-13 (I tried to save the image but failed), the Geothermal map, which indicates a geothermal energy flux of about 40 - 150 milliwatts per sq.m depending where you are. You have to admit that's not a very high energy density! Calculate how much area would be needed for 1 GW - you won't like the answer. Of course, you can drill down about 30,000 ft to where it's nice and hot, pump in water and get some steam, in effect "mining" the heat, but that exceeds the natural heat flux and pretty soon the surrounding rock has cooled off so you have to dig another hole. Surely not a sustainable approach. If you strike lucky (or unlucky) with a magma reservoir things could be more interesting.
Regarding subsidies, these were US national figures for 2007. As you see, it depends whether you think absolute numbers or subsidy per unit. Source: Energy Information Administration, Forms EIA-906, "Power Plant Report;" Form EIA-920, "Combined Heat and Power Plant Report;" October 2006-September 2007.
It's not obvious whether this includes state-local subsidies in California etc, or whether those are extra.
Straightforward hydro is mostly gone.
Manitoba is actively marketing 4 GW, Labrador 3 GW (with more possible), Quebec has potential for 25 GW more, BC has some more left as well.
We can get more from Niagara Falls by just giving the tourists less to look at.
Due to licensing requirements & costs, the US has few hydropower plants <25 MW and VERY few <5 MW. LOTS of untapped small hydro potential in the USA.
Kentucky and West Virginia have LOTS of mountains and enough rain for streams but cheap coal has kept small hydro out as one good example.
Alan
I'll be interested in the EIR's on those projects.
Ahem...speaking from my own location:
Here in the eastern half of the U.S. we have a LOT of woody biomass we could be using. Biomass CHP and wood for home heating, especially in district energy systems, where we can construct them, could displace a LOT of industrial and domestic fuel, and probably a good chunk of the 51.4% of my most recent electric bill that came from coal. Speaking of electric power my typical bill runs around $10 a month, by the way, and I don't think I am living a terribly austere life, so negawatts are definitely a very realistic way of making the supply and demand ends meet...granted it will be higher this month because I finally had to turn on the AC a few times with the 100 degree heat we have been having in Washington lately. But the point being, just being conscious and unplugging/turning things off will get you far. Once we get that right, I'm pretty confident those combustible renewables can knock out a good chunk of the base load.
A prerequisite scaling up negawatts is of course that people actually take conservation seriously, and the only way to do that is probably to hit them really hard where it seems to hurt Americans most: in the wallet. Not necessarily easy when so many apartment dwellers, for example, have utilities included in their rent and no real incentive to cut their demand...
"Here in the eastern half of the U.S. we have a LOT of woody biomass we could be using."
Would that be woody biomass surplus to the ecosystem?
Yes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_rotation_coppice
Entirely sustainable.
You need to expand your understanding of the terms "ecosystem" and "sustainable."
Hint: It is not sustainable for a single species to endlessly appropriate more and more net primary production.
Well...for one thing, there are quite a few invasive species over here we could start with, and we don't want sustained in the first place. Norway Maple comes to mind...chop 'em ALL down (right now people are still landscaping with more though). Bamboo is invasive also. Using invasives for biomass energy would definitely increase biodiversity and allow native ecosystems to recover.
As for the longer term, once we hopefully have dealt with those, there are many species that can be coppiced and grown in rotation. Sustainable forestry also involves clearing out some trees, as they will grow in too dense otherwise and not reach the appropriate size. These smaller trees can be used for sustainable energy, all you really remove from the system in wood is carbon.
So I guess my definition of "sustainable" would be "first harvest invasives, then use a variety of different native coppiced crops within appropriate bounds and harvest wood as a component of already-established sustainable forestry practices." Don't think ever-expanding appropriation by one species has to come into the picture. Considering the way plantation forestry is practiced still in many places today (I grew up in Georgia and pine plantations are all over that state) shifting to sustainable biomass forestry could actually be a significant improvement for the ecosystem.
So...perhaps it is not I who needs to expand my understanding of sustainability, but you who needs to read up more on sustainable forestry and direct-fired biomass! Hint: it ain't the same as ethanol, and it doesn't mean "cut down zero trees."
"So...perhaps it is not I who needs to expand my understanding of sustainability, but you who needs to read up more on sustainable forestry and direct-fired biomass!"
Well, let's explore. Start here: Do you believe that our energy crunch is soluble, given anything like the present human population and trends, by means of renewables or anything else?
Gotta run, but I'll check for responses later.
Maybe. We certainly haven't tried yet. Soluble perhaps in the sense of a soft landing, not in the sense of continuing everything to which we are accustomed. As it pertains to the question of wood power, 50 MW or smaller power plants might be feasible in quite a few places. That doesn't do much to replace gigawatt-plus coal behemoths, though. There are certainly quite a few questions to be resolved aside from how to generate electricity, though. The hardest part seems to be decoupling transportation and the food system from dependence on cheap petroleum.
OK. Pretty good answer. You seem more optimistic than I am, but I agree that we have exerted far too little effort.
I'm pretty sure that conservation/reduction of consumption, along with population management are the only strategies likely to have long-term beneficial results on a planetary scale. And I'm quite aware how difficult it will be to take measures to implement such strategies—so difficult that it may well be impossible.
I'm not opposed to efforts to deal locally with energy issues, such as your coppicing ideas. I just very much doubt that, taken together, all such efforts can have much impact on the big picture.
And my concern about net primary production remains. By the best measures of which I'm aware, we humans, a single species, are appropriating at least 20-25% of terrestrial NPP. That's just huge. Please see:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Global_human_appropriation_of_net_primary...
The appropriation of the earth for one species (ours) concerns me a great deal as well. Just look at what we did to the north Atlantic fishery...
As for biomass, I agree with you that it is far from a cure-all, but I do see it contributing to part of the solution where it can be done in a manner that is low-impact and based on locally available resources. I see it as one very small part of a solution to a very big problem, of which precious few grasp the true scale. Energy in our society is very much "out of sight, out of mind," at least until the scum hits the reef, which helps to explain all the NIMBYism we find against renewable energy development.
I'm optimistic in the sense that I see a lot of potential energy from a variety of different sources and the potential for vast improvements in efficiency and cutting back on waste, very little of which has seen serious action to this point. So we have still yet to claim the low-hanging fruit; should we do that and still face energy scarcity, which may very well end up being the case, then we may have to go the hard route of involuntary population control, etc. The biggest problem I see with that outcome, though, is that I don't see it happening without some kind of eugenics and elite control. I'd rather change people's mindsets to get them to voluntarily consume less and reproduce at sustainable rates, i.e. making ecological thinking mainstream. As big as our problems are now, I don't see eco-fascism as being any more desirable of an outcome, especially when one considers the particulars of how it would be implemented. It's a scary thought either way.
Perhaps pricing externalities better, so that people are more likely to make reasonable choices in this area, is a good way to turn a voluntary altruism into something more motivated by unenlightened self-interest. That seems to be the only thing people understand, at least where I come from. Such an approach could at least be a stepping stone between business-as-usual and measures such as population control. Unfortunately, I don't see even modest price increases to account for climate change and the like as being politically palatable right now, which throws a big wrench into a lot of potential solutions. We love to have our cake and eat it too: everyone seems to want alternative energy, but not in our backyards and not for more than $3 a gallon!
As a society, we have an enormous collective action problem on our hands, and leaders who are not up to the challenge of moving past narrow and entrenched interests.
"The hardest part seems to be decoupling transportation and the food system from dependence on cheap petroleum."
There's the rub with biomass. Harvesting,processing and transporting millions of tons of biostuff requires lots of liquid fuels, so we're stuck with petroleum or need to efficiently convert much of your biomass to......what?
I think another direction to look for 'Load Balancing' is Essentially Smartgrid-type DSM, and end-use appliances that have a storage component to them. I'm thinking Residential and Small Business, but there will be industrial parallels to these as well.
Two that come to mind are Hot Water Heaters that could respond to Grid-price signals, perhaps. This would encourage installing bigger and better insulated Hot Water tanks, possibly even sized for home-heating as well as domestic water use.. and another variation might be (I don't know the materials limits) creating Refrigeration and Freezer (and A/C?) equipment that can store the compressed refrigerant (volume dependant upon what you choose to install), just running the compressor ideally when there's a surplus and the prices are down.
These of course mirror the Vehicle to Grid application as well..
Make Hay while the Wind Blows!
Spot on, Bob. Domestic water heaters with anti-scald mixing valves, electric thermal storage space heating systems and ice making central chillers are three good candidates.
Osram Sylvania recently launched its PowerSHED line of high efficiency demand response electronic ballasts. At times of critical stress, the utility can signal these ballasts to cut their energy demand by 33 per cent. Thus, the ubiquitous 3-lamp T8 troffer that normally draws 74-watts falls to 50-watts. An office complex the size of Toronto's TD Centre could theoretically have over 70,000 of these fixtures, so the load reduction potential in this case is 1.7 MW.
Cheers,
Paul
WastedEnergy -
I agree with all of that. The point I am making, and have been making as loudly as I can to as many people as I can reach, is that the British energy policy (such that it is a cogent 'policy') is complete and utter fantasy.
First of all, the previous government committed to cut total carbon emissions by 80% by 2050.
Second, the current coalition government has endorsed the Renewables Obligation - British electricity suppliers will be required to source 15.4% of all sparks from renewables from 2015.
Third, the current energy secretary, Chris Huhne, wants as much as half of all sparks to come from wind!!
Fourth, David Cameron has just pledged to 'maintain strong economic growth' at the G20.
Fifth, the population of the UK is set to rise from 62 million to 70 million souls by 2030.
Can anyone spot the fantasy in all of this? It is sheer lunacy on an epic scale.
Now why, I wonder, is that such a difficult concept to grasp?
Say I live in a house with unlimited access to running water, if I want to take long showers every day at 2:00 AM and at 2:00 PM, no problem.
As time goes by the region where I live suffers a massive long term drought and I have just enough water for drinking and a pail full left over at the end of the week.
Is it that hard to imagine that whether or not I like the idea, I will only be taking a sponge bath maybe every other day?
Here in the States, we have thousands of gas-fired plants we overbuilt in the 1990's and early 2000's that can serve load balancing needs in addition to the ability to spread the variability of wind over a greater geographic area, the world's most extensive offshore wind resource, and vast potential for pumped-storage hydropower including seawater-based, which is the scaleable storage option nobody ever seems to mention when discussing how scaling up batteries, etc. is not viable. There is also a tremendous amount of hydropower available now in the U.S. and more coming in the future from Canada. The central point of my argument is that nuclear and coal are not as reliable as people make them out to be, and so much backup, storage, and spinning reserve is required already, contrary to the idea that it is only wind and solar that make these things necessary. The blackout of 2003 in the northeast US is a good example, the output of nuclear plants fell off dramatically due to the time needed to restart reactors after an emergency shutdown, even for plants that were functioning fine.
This approach might not work everywhere, but that is no reason to discount its viability in those places where it can work. And you are correct that I am not a grid operator, however I have not seen much from the operators themselves to back up the statement that wind and solar cannot be integrated. Most of that talk seems to be coming from the fossil fuel and nuclear industries, at least from what I have seen so far. Lovins' point is based largely on his own discussions with European grid operators. Anyway, cross out "Denmark and northern Germany" and replace them with "Minnesota and Iowa" if you like.
Thank you for your comments, let me try to respond with some specific data.
Yes, it is true that we are capable of adding (for example) wind power to the grid and then under-use NG power plants. However, this only works as long as we already have them sitting around. As soon as we have to rebuild them (and unfortunately, they don't live as long as we would wish for), we will build a lot of underused capacity, which adds cost, energy use, carbon emissions (both for the construction and operation) into the mix.
Our case isn't about the ability to add some wind into current delivery systems during a certain period of time - which might even be useful. Instead, we argue that it makes no sense to pretend that we can ever transition away from fossil fuels in that world we build, irrespective of the bells and whistles added.
A few numbers: As we prefer data over theoretical models, we've simulated large grid situations (even across all of Europe) to test the feasibility of the concepts we challenge. For wind, no matter how hard we try combining, we need approximately 160-200 kWh of backup capacity for each kWe of wind peak capacity (which, on average delivers between 200-250W due to a capacity factor of 20-25% experienced in most good wind locations). So in a nutshell, storage needs to be able to bridge huge gaps, which, as the article said, only work in conjunction with stock based delivery systems nearby, which by the way have to be huge. This all works fine as long as tiny Denmark goes for large amounts of wind. But little (or no) further.
Then, quickly to the argument of reserve capacity for plant failures. These typically amount to probably around 2-3% of peak demand in a large interconnection system, e.g. are able to cover a number of big plants to fail. Now when the wind stops blowing (and it does, even across entire continents), not only 2-3% are missing, but suddenly 20%, 30% or whatever share of wind has been installed. So that is additional generation capacity that needs to stand by (non-spinning, mostly), but still incurs cost for construction and maintenance. And no matter what, only fossil fuels can deliver that right now, as hydro isn't scalable.
As the article says - this is the result of years of analysis and research, which wasn't intended to "kill" any particular technology. I am happy to provide more information and details on everything we claim, please contact us through our website.
This is more or less what happened with the 2003 blackout as a huge amount of nuclear capacity was lost all at once. I am very curious to see the bit about wind not blowing across entire continents...I will check out your website for more information on this matter, if this is true then we may have to get used to rolling blackouts and the like once fossil fuels become far more scarce and unreliable than they are now for backup. Under such a scenario, I don't really see any technology that could guarantee grid reliability, so perhaps the best thing is to load up on renewables so at least we have power when the resource is available, as opposed to nothing at all - and as you say, give people a clear picture of what to expect (difficult for politicians).
In any case, catastrophic power failure is a risk with any technology, including today's base loading plants - neither wind nor fossil fuels nor nuclear is a panacea, as you accurately pointed out. That doesn't necessarily mean collapse of society but it might mean eventually we have to give up the expectation of 24/7/365 power, as is starting to happen now in the UK.
Hardly, NG plants are relatively inexpensive to build and have very small footprints. Using them to balance out high penetrations of wind and solar would significantly reduce carbon emissions.
We will eventually have to, so this statement is puzzling.
What were your demand management assumptions? Smart grid assumptions? And please respond here, don't try to deflect by vague promises of responding offline.
So you are saying that the UK only has 2-3% spinning reserve at any given time?
For the real reason, see the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark
Sure, 20% of Denmark's electricity is wind, but the other 80% is imported coal and oil.
When the wind stops blowing in Denmark, they can just call up Norway and ask for more power. The Norwegians just say say, "Ya! Ve have more power! How much can you afford?" And Norway, 99% of whose electricity is hydroelectric, dumps enough water through the turbines to cover Denmark's shortfall.
The thing about hydro electricity is that you can store energy in the reservoirs until you need it, and you can spin the turbines up from zero to full power in less than 60 seconds, whenever you need to.
The thing about Denmark wind power is that Denmark pays a premium for hydroelectricity it imports, while the wind power it exports is often considerably cheaper - in fact it sometimes exports at a negative price. It has to pay Norway and Sweden to use its wind power.
Here are some relevant calculations I did to approximate how many wind turbines and how much area it would take to meet the worlds energy demand of 4 x 10^20 Joules/yr. I assumed a nameplate rating of 2MW per turbine, 33% utilization factor, 200 ft minimum spacing and $1.2 x 10^6 installed cost per MW. I calculate we need 18 x 10^6 turbines occupying 28,000 square miles at a cost $14.7 x 10^12. The cost is 164% of US GNP. The area required is almost the size of South Carolina. The US has 7,612 miles of cost. At 200 ft spacing and, it would take 100 US coastlines to install the turbines one row deep.
That is a lot of unsightly wind turbines taking up a lot of space. Could 18 million wind turbines be installed in time to save our way of life? Even if they were all installed right now, could we maintain them?
So 1) why are we limited to 1 row deep of 2-MW turbines (which, by the way, is smaller than most offshore turbines will likely be over the long run, by a factor of probably 2.5 or so) along the U.S. coastline to solve the *world's* energy needs, and 2) why does wind have to provide 100% of our energy consumption when we also have hydro, solar, biomass, geothermal, tidal...not to mention negawatts?
The claim that wind turbines are "unsightly" is also entirely subjective and a rather silly reason to reject the technology in my view. Do we really wish to tell future generations, "sorry, we could have dealt with the energy crisis but the solution was just too ugly" ???
i think they are beautiful
hopefully they drop some property value in places so i can buy a house near some
Interesting study. Doubt it is completely flakey considering the govt. involvement.
www.offshorevaluation.org
Your usage of real numbers injects a welcome dose of reality. Your minimum spacing is however insufficient. A modern 2.2MW-nameplate rating wind turbine is 110m (350ft) high to its top rotor tip. Recommended spacing to avoid wind-shadow effects is approximately 5 times the height, viz. of the order of 1500 ft. Total energy extracted turns out to be proportional to area covered by the windfarm rather than the size of the individual turbines.
You're not even trying.
First, subtract the amount of electrical energy we simply waste. How much SHOULD that demand profile entail?
Second, subtract all the electricity used for heating that could be supplied by direct Solar Heat. It does work well enough here in Maine, but start with Phoenix, Vegas and Santa Barbara, (Johannesburg, Mumbai, Cairo and Buenos Aires) and work out from there.
Third, put a kilowatt of PV onto every, say 6 squares (100') of applicable rooftop, and a concordant amount of Solar Heating Equipment. (Sun-facing, unshaded roof in a reasonably sunny region)
Now how many Wind Turbines gets built?
If you treat any one of these BB's like it is supposed to supplant everything in this wasteful setup we've got, of COURSE it'll look ridiculous. What are you trying to prove?
The thing is, thermal or PV solar also have similar area demands to wind to extract comparable amounts of energy. Sure you can balance one against the other, and there is low-grade heat that can be obtained directly from solar instead of electricity. But you're still talking about factors of the order of 50-300 times compared to the area used by conventional power generation.
This is just silly. Land use footprint is not an important criterion for selecting a power generating technology, and even if it were, nuclear would not be preferred because you have to consider not just the space occupied by the plant itself, but also exclusion zones, uranium mining, waste disposal, etc.
We could, in theory (though perhaps not realistically), satisfy the entire power demand of the U.S. with just rooftop PV, which has zero footprint. And the literature on wind's land use (which, I'll note, comes almost exclusively from nuclear industry associations) almost universally includes the land or sea in between turbines as being used, when in fact the turbines themselves occupy very little space relative to the size of the wind farm, and there is little to no reason why they would preclude the space in between being used for other purposes, as it almost always is, for grazing, crops, etc. I'll note too that even if wind power excluded cropping, royalties from wind power exceed revenues from crops, so one could argue it is a better use of the land from an economic standpoint.
In any case, if footprint were a reason to reject an energy source we would have stopped using coal long ago.
Before I try and answer your points, allow me to recommend a really helpful book:
Sustainable Energy - without the hot air
It's aimed at the UK, but the laws of maths and physics are international, and even apply to the US of A.
Read it and be Wise.
It is when you are laboring under a handicap of 200x the area for similar energy, and non-despatchable energy at that. You'll find that there are a few people with other ideas of what they might like to have, or not have, on the land when you're trying to cover it with hundreds or thousands of square miles of wind farms.
And, uranium mining land use is miniscule compared to equivalent mining area for the same energy of coal, by a factor of, I dunno, 10,000. A lot, anyway.
You're darn tootin' it's not realistic. I assume by "power demand" you mean "electricity demand". Back-of-the-envelope calculation: generously allow each man, woman and child 10 sq m of expensive 20% efficient panels. This gives an average 24/365 over the year of about 220 watts for southern UK. But USA is sunnier on average, let's say 300W. OK, a significant piece of a person's domestic electricity consumption. But don't forget the losses in the inverter and the charge/discharge of the storage batteries. You've still got to heat and cool the house, and cook the food, and, no, we *don't* all live in an Amory Lovins. Then there's commercial and industrial electricity use. This ignores the non-electric energy needs for personal transport, energy content of goods etc etc.
Windfarmers in Texas are being paid to NOT run their turbines when wind supply exceeds demand. With such perverse subsidies, no wonder the revenues are OK.
Before you recommend books, please read the myriad studies that have already been done on the question. I've seen the sort of work that comes in the vein you have recommended and a lot of it is unsupported and also does not take into account studies by DOE and independent analysts. I challenge you to provide a single case where land use requirements have foreclosed a power generation option.
I notice you do not seem to have a response to the land use footprint of the nuclear option you support nor the status quo footprint of coal, nor the fact that wind turbines occupy a tiny footprint on wind farms that makes them in no way exclusive with other uses of the land. The point about PV is meant to illustrate that even low-energy-density power sources do not take up nearly as much space as you say, and wind has a higher energy density than PV.
As for uranium mining, this is actually kind of a big deal already...not so much for land use reasons per se, but because it is highly polluting, the extremely shady historical relationship with indigenous people around the world, health risks to miners, and proliferation risks. Australia is the world's largest exporter of uranium for power generation and I imagine there would be tremendous opposition to expanding its mining operations - considerable opposition exists already.
The reason wind farms in Texas and some other places get paid as you say (and the point is hugely overblown, by nuclear supporters mostly) is that coal and nuclear plants cannot quickly move output up and down to match demand, and so when demand falls below the level they provide it is coal and nuclear that supply power rather than renewables. Pretty screwed up merit order if you ask me.
You have to understand the doomer mindset. They start with the preconceived notion that nothing will work. And then come up with scenarios that fit their preconceived notions. PV, LED, EV, geothermal, Nuclear, etc. are all dismissed as science fiction. Even though these mature technologies are growing exponentially. Germany is already at 20% renewable. Parts of Spain are 100% renewable now, even though renewable mandates have been around for just a few years. What is fiction is the notion that oil supplies have peaked. There's at least 1,000 years of oil left in the ground. Ace will be busy revising his graph for many years to come.
There may be 1000 years of tar sands, heavy oil and oil shales, but I doubt we can sustain something that looks like our present situation on those resources. As I see it, peak oil expresses itself as extreme environmental destruction, already seen in tar sands production, as well as very high/volatile prices. These may all be technically feasible to extract but whether society as we know it can be sustained without cheap, easy oil (or some viable alternative like electrified transport) is highly doubtful.
No, no, no, no, you simply do not understand. The doomer mindset says that it is already too late. That we are already deep, deep into overshoot and that there is nothing that can reverse overshoot... without unacceptable misery, pain and suffering.
All the things you mentioned will work! It is that they will make little difference in the grand scheme of things. They will not reverse overshoot. They will not stop the sixth great extinction... already in progress. They will not stop the rape of the earth.
Oh, sorry. I did not mean to respond to someone who had not a clue in the world to anything...
Again, sorry.
Ron P.
Yes, it's much better to listen to the delusional predicitions of Matt Simmons, Colin Campbell and your own "ace" of The Oil Drum.
http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p237/1ace11/WorldCC200704.jpg
Funny how "peak oil" predictions always turn out to be wrong isn't it?
How is peak oil wrong? Production has been flat since 2005 and the number of fields expected to come online doesn't look to be capable of replacing declines from larger conventional fields. This one looks like an open and shut case to me.
Better go back and look at that graph again - it's way off. And go back and check out Simmons' prediction of running out of natural gas in 2003. Or running out of gasoline in 2007. Or having the price go up further in 2008 when in fact the price went down. Or Campbell's prediction of peak oil every year for the past 20 years. A theory that's always been proved wrong is not a very good theory. Perhaps it's best to get answers from someone who's actually in the business and knows what he's talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjG3HRUYVo
Uhhhhhh he is kind of the head of one of the largest private oil companies in the world and has a damn good reason to lie. And that is not talking as someone who thinks peak oil is happening or near to happen, but as someone who doesn't think the head of Exxon Mobil is as honest as a truckstop whore breaking into peoples cars to steal enough change to support their meth habit. And if you polled most people on planet earth they would be have a hard time disagreeing.
(deleted)
(deleted)
proud of you Andre
If only there was a delete button for consumption.
There are two delete buttons for consumption. We have one and Mother has the other. We can't bring ourselves to push ours, but she can—and hers is the mother of all delete buttons.
lol
Usually I'm pretty good at stopping the baser instincts from showing themselves but that time it got to the keyboard.
We all go through phases where we do little but retract statements made previously. Mayhaps this gives us hope for the future of humanity.
You have to understand the cornucopian mindset. They start with the preconcieved notion that enthusiasm will make any harebrained idea work. And then come up with scenarios to generate enthusiasm. PV, LED, EV, geothermal, Nuclear, etc. have already solved all of our problems, if only enough enthusiasm can be generated. But wait, why are we even considering alternate energy sources? There is at least 1000 years of oil left in the ground.
Why consider alternative energy? Because it's cleaner, cheaper, and more abundant. This is why the percentage of alternative energy is increasing in countries around the world. This is also very bad news for doomers.
Right! Alternative energy is already up to four tenths of one percent! The chart and text below is from an earlier thread on TOD. And keep in mind this is for the entire world not just the USA. Ron P.
The chart below shows that global primary energy production is running at about 11,000 million tonnes oil equivalent (MMTOE) per year and that the 50 MMTOE provided by renewables is barely significant - it is the skinny red line marked by the big red arrow.
World primary energy production 1970 - 2009. In 2009, fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) accounted for 87.5% of the energy we used. Wind, solar and geothermal combined accounted for 0.4%.
TOD graphs aren't always accurate. For example:
http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p237/1ace11/WorldCC200704.jpg
Where I live the renewable percentage is 19% now with 70% planned by 2030. Of course doomers think the world will end long before then. lol
Cr5, you are mixing apples and oranges. I showed a graph from today's data. You responded with a graph of a prediction made in 2007. The former is history, the latter is a prediction of the future. Predictions are inaccurate far more then they are correct but the hard data is not a prediction and it does not lie. If you don't know the difference between a prediction and hard data then there is no hope for you.
I flat don't believe you. Where do you live? How about a URL showing some data to support your claim? Even in Brazil where renewables are perhaps the highest in the world the percentage is only 9.9 percent. (From the text above by Hannes Kunz.)
Perhaps you live on a small island where there are few cars and everyone walks to work or wherever. But even there you are dependent on stuff from the outside world where ships and plans, powered by fossil fuel, deliver stuff to you. I do not believe there is anywhere on earth where renewables provide 19 percent of their total energy use.
And as Hannes points out above, where you live depends on how much renewable fuel you can produce. Brazil has a lot of space where they can grow sugar cane. England, as an example, does not have that luxury.
Ron P.
In 2006, Brazil's energy mix was 38% renewable (plus 2% nuclear). Page down to see graph.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/Brazil/Background.html
Best hopes,
Alan
Okay, this is my fault. I wasn't counting hydroelectric. I had biofuels and liquid fuel in mind. Sorry, that was a lapse on my part.
I would bet that that is the highest percentage of biomass liquid fuel in the world.
There is an absolute limit as to how much power hydro can supply. And it cannot be turned into liquid fuel.
Ron P.
Electro-synthesis of methanol & ammonia are two fuels possible with LOTS of cheap electricity.
Brazil has not emphasized smaller hydro yet, it is developing Amazonia and when potential imports from Bolivia and Peru are considered, there is still room to grow hydropower.
Best Hopes for Brazil,
Alan
I alos noted that Venezuela was 24% hydro in 2007.
Alan, as you may know I have a very personal interest in Brazil, I was born there and have a large part of my extended family living there. While there may indeed be room for hydro power growth in Brazil, it isn't always as benign a source of power as it might appear at first glance.
Flooding vast areas of rain forest ecosystems can have multiple negative side effects, not the least of which is loss of rain forest habitat and methane production from the decomposition of all the submerged biomass. Then there is the issue of if you build it (energy production) they will come (economic and population growth).
http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/node/5236
At the very least I would say that my own feelings about hydro power in the Amazon region are mixed. Especially since I know the region first hand from having worked there. I would like to see as much of it remain unspoiled as possible. Growth, in my opinion isn't something we should be striving for at any and all costs.
The oil spill in the GOM is an ecological catastrophe the result of a perfect storm of circumstance. I personally have reason to believe that building massive hydroelectric plants in the Amazon is akin to a deliberate engineering of a catastrophe of equal magnitude. I would like to invoke the precautionary principle in this case.
Please, I don't want to get into an argument with someone who, like me, clearly cares deeply about the way the world is going. We ought to be on the same side. My only plea is like the book's author's: that actual numbers and measurements, and conformance to physical reality trump speculation and wishful thinking. Whatever solutions we come up with, have to add up. I have nothing in principle against wind or solar; my point is that their low energy density necessarily mean that they are only ever going to be able to play a small part.
But did you actually look at the book? You should do so before incorrectly pronouncing it unsupported. It's chock-full of references to, as you put it, "myriad studies which have already been done on this question". It's also a fun read, if you don't mind some simple arithmetic. Using the UK as an example, the author sets a goal of "UK gets sustainable energy by 2050, OK, so what could we do to get there?" He looks at all the various options, and comes up with five different possible scenarios. All of them require hard choices and more or less drastic changes. Obviously the answers will come out differently depending on country, but the approach is universal.
Regarding the land use footprint of a nuclear power station, let's fire up Google Maps and take a peek at Sizewell on the UK Suffolk coast. The site contains the now-decommissioned Sizewell A, and an American style PWR, Sizewell B, about 1.2GWe (1200MWe), which has been running happily at about 90% load factor since 1995. The scale rulers on the map indicate that the site is pretty close to 1 sq km (100 hectares). Similarly, we can cruise over to Finland, and look at the Olkiluoto site, where reactor 3, also about 1200MWe is under construction. The area per GWe is very similar to that of Sizewell. So that's ONE (1) sq.km per performing GWe, close enough.
To this we of course have to add the land use for mining and refining the uranium yellowcake. I don't have exact figures for mining area, but compared to say, coal, the energy density of uranium and thorium is FAR higher. Get this, the trace amounts of natural thorium and uranium in a lump of coal (about 40 parts per million), if completely fissioned, release MORE energy than the coal itself releases by combustion! A Generation 2 or 3 reactor can only use 0.7% or 1.6% of this energy before the fuel is spent; nevertheless you will appreciate that in terms of tons mined you need FAR less than if you were going the coal route. And the next-generation IFR and LFTR reactors both promise close to 100% burnup and/or use of spent Generation 2/3 fuel (so-called "nuclear waste") rendering the ore resource problem moot.
Storage of spent nuclear fuel, is dry-cask on power station site, until such time as it is able to be reprocessed for Gen 3+/Gen 4 reactors. So, no extra area required for this.
Long-term geological storage of reprocesssing waste fraction will be needed. The amounts of this from an IFR or LFTR will be of the order of 100kg per GW-year. Miniscule compared to the permanently toxic wastes from coal ash.
Uranium mine land disputes are no different in principle to those of any other type of mining. And when one looks into the disgusting cocktail of toxins left behind in coal tailings, uranium looks really clean.
Let us now compare this to the surface area required for solar and wind to produce a similar amount of energy as Sizewell B does in one year: 1 GW-yr. Allow me to repeat an earlier comment:
For solar PV stations, take for example the Solarpark in Muhlhausen, Bavaria. Expected output averaged over 24 hours, 365 days is 0.7MW. Its area is 25 hectares. Scaling this up to 1000MWe is a factor of 1000/0.7 = 1429, giving a required area of 1429 x 25 / 100 = 357 sq km!
The sun-tracking Serpa Solar thermal plant in Portugal is expected to do a bit better, averaging 2.3MW and taking 60 hectares. Scaling this up to 1000MW gives (1000/2.3) x 60/100 = 261 sq km per performing GWe.
A wind farm with a mean wind speed of 6m/s (an over-estimate for most of the UK) is expected to produce 2.2 W/sq.m. = 22 kW/hectare = 2.2MW/sq km. This is comparable to the area for a Serpa-Solar type solution. Of course, land between those 1500-odd 2MW wind turbines could be used for agriculture. (But you know, those towers are huge. The Siemens 2.3MW turbines used in the Westwind project in Wellington NZ are 350 ft high from ground level to top of rotor. Each of the foundations alone takes 48 tons of steel and 370 cu metres of concrete! The tower components needed a 400-ton crane to lift them into place.)
None of these solar/wind solutions include the necessary energy storage to make their output fully dispatchable (available on demand). Storage losses will require a corresponding expansion in the surface area plus the storage itself.
So I hope you now see why solar and wind are at such an area disadvantage compared to nuclear. The area goes up by literally hundreds of times. And don't tell me there's not arguments and NIMBY-driven cancellations of proposed wind farms - many have been shelved for such reasons here in the UK. Just small ones, let alone a project covering 200 sq km.
Regards,
Simon
NIMBYism isn't the same as land use. There is plenty of NIMBY opposition to nuclear plants too, of course. If it were up to me, I'd say "OK, we won't build anything in your back yard, and you won't get any electricity." Rather than get into a debate about the relative merits of nuclear power I'll just leave it at "land use isn't really the issue."
I'll give your book a whirl though. Just have a long reading list right now I still have to get to =P
With all the solar applications that can be mounted on Existing Rooftops and Dual-use areas (Parking, Storage Lots, Brownfield sites, etc) your expansion is far smaller, besides the advantages of having power directly connected so many end-use sites, reducing the need for additional transmission or transportation out to the 'last mile'..
And of course the main reason for this site. 'Conventional' might soon become UNconventional. The Shower you save might be your own.
Britain includes Wales already!
[...]
I should hope so too seeing as how Scotland is also part of Britain.
We won't change until all of the profit that can be wrung out of fossil fuels IS wrung out. Prudence, sustainability, environmental health and/or the human condition aren't factors. We'd sooner kill millions of people in our military meat grinder than to leave one penny of oil money on the table. The politics of greed trumps ethics, technological limitations, or environmental prudence. The only thing preventing us from changing is the lack of political will.
I tend to agree. Humans are an extremely resourceful bunch – given that there’s enough money pumped into research no problem is unsolvable.
And even when it's wrung out, people will still be arguing over whether that has actually occurred. Like a cargo cult waiting for more stuff to drop from the sky - if only we pray hard enough!
Some of us need to go ahead and plan anyway....
What is keeping us from changing is a strong evolutionary tendency for sociopathic behavior. This tendency seems hard wired into us.
We are at the point where we evolve around this or we will crash and burn
Is this an assertion? Or is it proven? Because personality disorder diagnosis is notoriously difficult to "prove" and evolutionary psychology is a bunch of theories in search of ... I hate to say it, tenure.
In that we cannot really prove anything, it is an assertion. Personality disorders are difficult to prove mainly because of the arbitrary nature of where to draw the line. We all have sociopathic tendencies, being labeled a sociopath is dependent on how we define "enough tendencies".
We can have a long discussion, interesting likely, about the merits of evolutionary psychology but the value of sociopathic tendencies to the furthering genetic material seems self-evident.
thanks for finding the glitch. Fixed. But Scotland is mentioned on purpose, because it's not part of National Grid's network and thus not part of the consumption calculation, but can (and will) provide a lot of wind power to England and Wales (sic!)
But are they "True Scotsmen"?
Ducks and scurries away through the underbrush...
Well, to be picky, Scotland is part of "Great Britain," and of the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland," but "Britain" technically refers only to England and Wales.
One point is quite clear, especially from the last figure. The US should dramatically lower their per capita energy needs. If it managed to drop it around the EU numbers, then the US would probably need 10 million barrels/day less oil.
better start ripping up those suburbs then, and maybe even build a compact rail network...
Nonsense.
There I fixed it for you.
WE: Heh! Heh!
I talked to a workmate two weeks ago. Earlier in his life he worked for the Southern Company in the SE U.S., working electrical distribution and load balancing and so forth...he claimed that the strong preference for operators was to run nuke plants at what was perceived to be the ideal level and let them ride...that changing power output on a frequent, demand-following basis was rather difficult and not done.
Truth in advertising...I am NOT a civilian nuke engineer, so I don't know these things., but I could do some research after work today.
So, would you please, at your convenience, elaborate on 'Nonsense'?
Read this:
http://www.cessa.eu.com/sd_papers/wp/wp2/0203_Pouret_Nuttall.pdf
Quote from conclusion:
What's the breakdown of the various types in existence? For the ones that can load follow, are they being used that way?
aangel -
Of the 19 nuclear power stations in the UK, only 10 are still in operation (the other 9 are being decommissioned).
Of the 10 currently operating only one, Sizewell B, is a PWR but I would be very surprised if it is being operated to load-follow at the moment.
However, if the new nuclear plants do get around to being build (and it is far from certain they will ever get off the drawing board due to the firmly anti-nuke energy secretary and colossal costs involved) there is no reason that they could not be built to load-follow.
Great, thanks.
Curious what the situation is here in the U.S. We have 104 plants, likely all of the "old" designs.
According to your referenced article (still unpublished study with no date),on page 11 the authors note that the main reason nuclear power plants do not load follow is because of high operation and investment costs. In other words the power plants are not economical to run at lower than name plate (near max load) capacity. As cost of uranium fuel for nuclear plant increases the economics of load following may get worse due to the efficiency being lower at partial load.
The French claim to load follow with their nukes. They do *NOT* (in any meaningful way that the term "load follow" is used).
In a previous series of posts, I used EdF hour by hour data over a ten day period to prove that French nukes are incapable of load following. There was some fluctuation (a few %) but the 2nd highest nuke hour of 24 would be the 2nd lowest load hour of 24, the peak demand hour would be the 4th lowest nuke generation hour and so forth.
A detailed look at French claims shows that only nukes with a fresh fuel load are capable of load following (and that is questionable claim).
So I believe that your source is wrong.
Alan
Plus we have a fairly standard statement about uranium availability, which seems at odds with previous explorations of the issue on this site.
Generation IV breeder reactor technology is by far the most promising new technology capable of replacing fossil fuel. Breeder reactors can be built to follow load automatically and they are meltdown proof as overheating causes the rate of fission to slowdown. Since all of the energy in the fuel source is released in breeder reactors, nuclear fuel is inexhaustible in a time frame that is worthy of consideration. Bear in mind that on an atom for atom basis nuclear fuel is 50 million times more energy rich than coal. It has been shown that uranium can be extracted from sea water at an affordable cost. Since 30,000 tonnes of uranium erodes into our oceans each year, 30,000 gigawatts of power can be tapped annually without lowering the concentration of uranium in the seas or mining any additional uranium from the ground. In addition fertile thorium which is also reactor fuel is believed to be three times more abundant than uranium in the earth’s mantle. There is growing interest in smaller size breeders that can be factory built and delivered to site by train of truck for setup in weeks or months rather than years. Since they operate at near ambient pressure no billion dollar dome or 1000 ton reactor vessel is needed.
No mention of the concern about waste product (plutonium) being bomb making material for terrorists. Please elaborate on this possible reason the US has not persued breeder reactors.
The details of nuclear power are complicated and it is not easy to reach a level of knowledge needed to fully appreciate it. This is why most people do not thrust nuclear power. But nuclear power is capable of complete control and utilization.
The US discourages pure plutonium separation in the breeding process, but pure plutonium separation is not required or even useful to breed and burn uranium transuranics.
I favor the consumption of the current stockpile of nuclear wastes which have been produced by light water reactors by 70 years of that technology. There is also wastes from the world’s nuclear weapons that can add to the energy picture.
Those sources of nuclear power from such waste will last for 200 years at least and burning them will make the world a cleaner and safer place.
There is so much cheap uranium around that such an energy source is not yet seen as a requirement since under this approach, no nuclear fuel supply company would make any money selling nuclear fuel.
As well as (at least) one of the most-toxic substances known—a substance for which there is already, apparently, an active black market.
That market is for Russian weapon grade plutonium from its old decommissioned nukes that the US is trying to burn in light water reactors as fast as it can.
It takes a special reactor to make that stuff and it has nothing to do with commercial nuclear power. They are now adding thorium to nuclear fuel. This produces lots of U232 which makes transuranic waste diversion easy to detect and deadly.
U232 is the most toxic stuff around but it goes away after 1000 years. It is great stuff for making nuclear waste self protecting until it can be burnt.
I'd be curious to see a peer reviewed paper on the technical and economic viability of breeder reactors, if in fact the safety issues have been resolved as you say.
See a French study
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/02/55/18/PDF/democrite-00021905.pdf
Molten Salt Reactors and Possible Scenarios for Future Nuclear Power Deployment
I got this reference from this site:
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/
Thank you for the link, I will check it out. I believe it could work in theory but as always I am skeptical of the economics of nuclear power, especially given our current economic situation.
I think it was Ralph Nader who called plutonium the most toxic substance on earth. That was a big lie. Plutonium is a heavy metal. Heavy metals possess chemical toxicity and some more than others. Mercury is more toxic than lead. The chemical toxicity of plutonium is more like lead than mercury. As to radio toxicity it has a rather low specific activity which is related to its long 24,000 year half life. It is an alpha emitter. Its radiation does not penetrate human skin. Radium with a much high specific activity of alpha emission is much more dangerous than plutonium. In the sense that a gun shot victim died of lead poisoning, one could say that a bomb victim died of plutonium poisoning.
The US and for that matter the rest of the world has not turned to breeder reactors because the cost of uranium is so low that it is more economical to make power with once through reactors. The US, however, did at one time operate a breeder reactor. In fact we had a generation VI breeder near completion in the 1990s when President Clinton bowing to strong pressure from members of congress representing coal states as well as John Kerry and other environmentalists pulled the plug. The result is that other countries are now ahead in this technology. The Russians have operated the BN 600 breeder for 30 years. They claim that it has been the most reliable reactor of their entire fleet. Next year they plan to start their up-dated version, the BN 800. They apparently have sold two BN 800s to China. China is looking to bring them on line in 2015 with plans for a score more coming during the 2020s. Japan has a breeder ready to start and India plans to bring one line next year.
Argon’s IFR does all reprocessing on site. Plutonium never leaves the reactor facility and with on-going reprocessing, it is all fissioned to fission products that are considered safe after 500 years. I would prefer the LFTR which breeds with thermal neutrons so much less fuel is needed to maintain the chain reaction. The LFTR type reactor for domestic power production was the preference of two Manhattan project Nobel laureates, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller. No significant plutonium is formed and the breeding ratio is small so little extra uranium is formed. Also a daughter product produces a wicked gamma making it extremely difficult to successfully use in a bomb.
The only way to prevent more CO2 accumulation is to find a cheaper energy source than coal. The work on this type molten salt reactor at ORNL in the 1960s suggests that molten salt technology might just do that. The pressure put on President Clinton would demonstrate that breeder technology was feared by the coal industry too.
Load following work really well in LFTR (molten salt) and in pebble bed reactors.
"Also a daughter product produces a wicked gamma making it extremely difficult to successfully use in a bomb."
Well, except for a dirty bomb.
There is a debate going on about how deadly to make the nuclear fuel/waste. Some say it should kill terrorists in days, some say in hours, some say in seconds. Given enough U232, a dirty bomb will be impossible to make. It’s like making a bomb out of newly erupted highly radioactive lava but more far more dangerous.
"Some say it should kill terrorists in days, some say in hours, some say in seconds."
Only the narrowest, most reductionist thinking could possibly result in even having such a discussion. Madness.
People that buy guns (for self protection) think about “stopping power” all the time. Or are you a pacifist; do you want the bad guys to have their way with you? If so, don’t complain about dirty bombs, It’s not consistent. Make up your mind!
Ok, I admit we have added those lines about nuclear at the last minute. Nonetheless, we stand by our statement. Here is some more detail:
Load-following ability of nuclear: Many people (particularly the French) have tried and given up, as it not only did cause more trouble with their operations (and more risk). Also, they figured that thermal efficiency was going down and that the rods burned down very irregularly, causing higher fuel use. So today, if you look at the French grid operator's output, nuclear provides a very solid straight line day-in and day-out (and through the night). It probably becomes more obvious when looking at the methods France has chosen instead - to sell off their night surpluses to Switzerland at almost zero cost, and buy back peak capacity during the day at 10-15 cents. This confirms that there must be severe downsides to any load-following approach.
Uranium reserves: We don't make a case for U-238 shortages anytime soon. But as with everything else, there are limits, which will be reached eventually, and more quickly particularly when we try to ramp up from today's 14 or 15% of total global consumption to something much higher. So together with the high fossil-fuel dependence of mining and infrastructure, we might see problems rather sooner than later.
Again, we're not making a case for or against nuclear: it definitely may bridge some gaps, if we're ready to accept the cost and the risks.
Before you start talking about nuclear power, you should do extensive research.
Don’t limit your thinking to light water reactor (LWR) technology. LWR technology uses less than 1% of the energy content of its uranium fuel. Other nuclear technologies burn nuclear fuel to a 99.9% efficiency.
There is so much cheap uranium around that such an energy efficient approach is not profitable. Under this efficient approach, no nuclear fuel supply company would make any money selling nuclear fuel.
Don’t forget about thorium, that burns too and there is a lot of it around; maybe a 1,000,000 years worth just to get started.
Load following is easy with a liquid fueled nuclear reactor or a solid fueled deuterium or hydrogen moderated reactor. Such reactors are self controlling based on load and do not need control rods.
Nuclear risks… get real! Compared to fossil fuels, with its associated wars, spills and pollution, it is safe, unlimited, and totally effective
I *WILL* limit my thinking to 3rd Generation LWRs. They are the ONLY reactor type that can be built in quantity in the USA from now till 2030+.
The rest lack experience, proven designs, have safety questions, etc. etc.
Alan
No problem!
Just don’t complain about the waste (slightly used fuel!) from these LWR reactors and please don’t bury it. When the new Gen IV reactors are funded, we could use all that hardly used fuel for the next 1000 years. Bill Gates wants that 1.5 million tons (and counting) of depleted U238 for his traveling wave reactor. Bill also wants to save the world as we know it with his reactor.
You know he is a humanitarian and also wants to be a multi-trillionaire.
Troubling aspect of the "smartest of smart money" like Bill Gates is the attribute we call "focus" in an elevated few, but would call narrow-minded in less successful but equally intelligent/determined souls.
Were Bill Gates to partner with such a man as Christopher C. Swan (Suntrain Transportation Corporation) and read companion book: "ELECTRIC WATER" (New Society Press,2007) the world EIOIR challenge would change dramatically. Alan from big spill has "nailed it" in most of his writings: well put earlier above, with inclusion of some 5000+ miles of electric interurban rail lines, + 400 strategic subway route miles in the decade. -Respectfully added, rehab of US dormant agricultural rail branch lines, and 100's more strategic rail lines to be upgraded as trucking shrinks in the thrall of motor fuel rationing.
Bill Gates is not the man of the hour this time around unless he can become rail savvy along with wanting to be on stage with the next BIG THING... Woe is us, denizens of the peanut gallery & aware of the emergency, watching the power and wealth cherry picking the last fruit before the neighborhood gets too dangerous to hang around. Steve Winn builds casinos in far places, others play with trips to the edge of space.
Sun Tzu is not on reading list of these wealthy Americans... China, however, has read the Master Of Strategy, primer of how a poor and backward nation can use trade & trinkets to prevail over intimidating and better endowed economic rivals. The willing transfer of manufacturing capacity, now supplemented by ability to hack their way past the delays of R & D (see Clarke's "CYBERWARFARE") makes China the role model for wannabe empire-builders.
Renewable infrastructure manufacturing supremacy is now the theme at Chinaland. Under the radar, but part of the lesson, is massive railway engineering, substantial capacity and extensions of the railway mode, with growing links to renewable energy generation. Even the oil patch nations have quietly added significant electric railway service to supplement (eventually replacing) aviation trips to Mecca. In North America, it seems some new faces with vision and bank balance will become part of the railway expansion so critical to maintaining Societal & Commercial Cohesion and the Union of States.
See rail prospectus at ASPO articles 374 & 1037, and map details at spv.co.uk. -Keep 'Em Rolling-
Interesting. Of course, there are both technical, and political reasons to 'avoid' load follow.
So an excuse would be a nice thing to have, to keep income up!.
Be interesting to know who is paying the deltas here, as many electricity markets have substantial margins, and the middle-level traders, make more money than the generators themselves!
Thanks, an interesting article.
It is clear that our consumption requirements of FF on a day to day basis and the possibilities for green energy sources to produce it, are not comparable in quantities of energy units( GWh or barrels of Oil) used and made available.
As stated:
To put this noble objective of IIER in a more realistic perspective, it might be of interest to note, as we all know that FF are mostly used for running mechanical machines and heating buildings with often not to high efficiencies. Improving efficiency a few points is equivalent to an enormous amount of FF not consumed per day.
It is here that we find to day many industrial research activities making progress which IMHO will help to design for a new energy future. It will be evolutionary not revolutionary.
why do i think this is going isbest thread on here since i joined ?
Like its analogy this article is half right and half wrong.
Renewables could produce far more electricity than they do now, supported by fossil backup--just as they do now. If they supplied 25% of our electricity, fossil based electricity resources would last 33% longer. At current rates of consumption coal based electricity with renewables could last another century and marginally slow the growth of CO2.
Similarly, a combination of renewable cellulosic ethanol (or R^2's green gasoline) and superefficient hybrid cars/EV could preserve a greatly reduced semblence of US car culture, IMO.
Where the article is leading is the need to reduce energy consumption as much as possible first--the mantra of the Passive House movement, where retrofit is not generally considered an option.
I suspect the author will be annoyed that I have let the cat out of his bag, but this the Oil Drum and we're not exactly a bunch of newbies here.
Bring on your 'revolution', you think-tankers!
At the recent rate of new build housing in the UK, it would take 500 years to rebuild all UK housing to Passivehaus standard.
Retrofit insulation is the only game in town.
I grew up in a cold Victorian period house with minimal heating. I survived. When we can no longer afford to import natural gas to heat our houses to summer temperatures throughout, year round, we will go back to being cold, 6 months of the year, as the British have always done before. We will adapt. Except for those who die younger than they would otherwise have done so.
Quite right RalphW!
It is amazing how soft we have become over the last 30 years. I remember having minimal heating at school. We all wondered around in a dozen sweaters, hats and gloves. And after sport we had communal cold baths. Can you imagine the outcry now if the P.E. teacher made 10 year old lads share the same bath with water only slightly above freezing? And if anyone complained they would be flogged.
Ahhh, the halcyon days of childhood!
Since the Victorian period clothing has improved significantly. Modern synthetic fibers provide high insulation with light weight. Although they are made from oil, they don't require very much oil to produce. Plus, you can now drink wine at the proper traditional "room temperature".
I agree, renewables can indeed extend the life of fossil fuels. But if this is the purpose, we don't need to build supergrids, smart grids and many other things. In this case, we can simply add wind and keep enough fossil backup capacity nearby. However, this isn't a transition, this is simply buying some time.
Also, the calculation isn't that simple. Over time, we need to rebuild the fossil backup capacity, which adds cost and energy use (mostly fossil). The higher the share of renewables, the bigger that "wasted" portion becomes, reducing the benefit.
As for conservation, this is definitely an option, and a very feasible one. Unfortunately, it has some side effects. We distinguish two very different approaches:
- Using less: This means a reduction of use by lowering the standards of living (using a bike, heating less, flying less, etc.). The consequence of that is, unfortunately, a negative feedback effect on another system that already hurts - the one hoping for economic growth. The side effects are quite unpleasant, as with less economic output, we're running a serious risk of not meeting our financial expectations
- Technology: High-tech aimed at using less often isn't such a wonderful solution, as it shifts a significant portion of the cost and energy use to the beginning of the life-cycle, not always leading to huge net energy gains from cradle to grave of a particular technology. Thus, by consuming less fuel, part or all of the energy might instead just be in the technology, and often even produced in places where almost all the inputs produce carbon dioxide. On top of that, humans have (non-financial) discount rates which often stand against paying more upfront. Many times, investments in energy efficiency in buildings (Switzerland, where we are located is a great example for that) only happen if they are tax-deductible, e.g. where the government picks up part of the tab.
If we divert, say, 4% of GDP from consumption to wise investments, WE WILL CONSUME LESS. But we can have a "good economy" by investing more and consuming less.
Yes, a different economy, but one with low unemployment, a balanced budget, perhaps a larger "lower middle class" and fewer poor.
In 1998, the Swiss voted to invest 31 billion CHf in improved railroads, with 15 billion for the TransAlp tunnels (from memory). Has this investment hurt the Swiss economy ?
Swiss utilities are in the midst of building 12,000 MW of pumped storage (buy French nuke and German wind power cheap at 3 AM and sell it back at 6 PM for 5x the price). Has this hurt the Swiss economy ?
Business that operate in efficient buildings have to pay less for utilities. Does this hurt Swiss businesses ? The same for many Swiss workers.
Best Hopes for the Swiss,
Alan
From what I have seen, efficient end use technology generally costs around $0.01-0.03 per KWH saved, generally toward the lower end of that range, which helps explain why the energy intensity per $ of GDP has been dropping. If there is data that shows energy efficiency as being expensive, I would love to see it. Moreover, NPV with a high discount rate is not a particularly good technique for valuing energy technologies for a long term transition, and will likely (hopefully) be changed out for analysis that places less of a disproportionate emphasis on up-front costs in a world of declining supplies and rising costs of fossil fuels.
I can provide studies to this effect later, have to head out for now but I can dig 'em up when I get back.
Our cost per kW of demand reduction generally runs in the range of $1,000.00 or less. The customer file I have open on my screen is fairly representative... the cost for this particular retrofit is $20,745.34, including taxes, and the projected demand and energy savings are 22.92 kW and 119,006 kWh/year respectively. Amortized over ten years, the cost per kWh saved is 1.74-cents.
The school year has ended and tomorrow morning I'll be auditing the first two of several schools we'll be upgrading on behalf of the local board. Based on our past experience, a two man crew can retrofit one average size school per week and we'll bag 100,000 to 120,000 kWh/year for our efforts. We have eight weeks of unrestricted access and hopefully two or three teams we can dedicate for the full duration.
Cheers,
Paul
The storage/demand issue with the renewables could change with battery systems that don't exist yet. Using a large enough grid(and current grids are already large) could have the effect of
smoothing out intermittency and smart metering the effect of load shifting(in fact the digital revolution makes this easier). Altogether, these could make renewables practical. Getting this system to work could take 50 years or 100 years or never but you offer no 'proof' that it is impossible. Building a generation of big renewables will do no harm in the next century where fossil backup will predominate and the potential is huge. A huge wind turbine can be relocated anywhere there is wind.
Conservation/energy reduction is a requirement for any transition, the greater the reduction the easier the transition. It's true transitioning is quite bad for economic growth models, but if you accept the inevitability of energy/resource limits why live based on past expectations of growth?
In the French Revolution, the Year One was proclaimed . You must look at a 'intellectual' break with the past.
Economists (like other theologians) must make a leap of faith away from their growth 'models'and reject BAU-style political rhetoric.
April 20, 2010 CE (The Day The Rig Blew Up) becomes 1/1/1 AOE (After Oil Era)
You smile a bit I think.
Why should the idea of revolution be the property of tea party reactionaries dressed in wigs and tricorne hats and Randian loons?
If slow evolution isn't going to help us make it, we need to crank up the rhetoric and to stop soft pedaling the situation.
After Oil sounds good to me.
I wonder the effects of a "war on planned obsolescence." The sneaky sort where products are not just designed to last their actual technical efficiency lifetime, but designed to break, wear out, and degrade so to force the consumer to replace them.
Situations where the plastic packaging is stronger than the part inside, fabrics deliberately weakened to wear out faster, products made of weak laminates that de-bond, plastic parts chrome-plated to look like metal but fail in use shortly, and packaging materials in general. Motors with unserviceable bearings designed to wear out.
I don't see how consuming and discarding packaging materials improves my life. I also don't see how middle- and upper-class U.S. habit of throwing away twice as much food as needed to eat helps life style.
It seems extraordinary to me that people can still disregard their externalities claim that fossile fuels are cheap, especially with this spill going on. Of course renewables haven't gained more in the face of the massive subsidies fossil fuels receive. Add the huge cost of spills, climate change, ocean acidification, respiratory diseases, mercury poisoning, a military capable of securing supplies to the price at the pump and see what the market does.
Hi wrb,
re: "claim that fossil fuels are cheap"
Good point.
I think the idea, though, on the part of Hannes, et al, is not to disregard externalities - (that are many in number and absolutely critical)...rather, I'd put it this way:
First, we have the natural eco-systems in which humans, so far, are still existing (however far in overshoot the species no doubt is).
Then, we have the "human organization" systems, to which the terms "economics," "economies," "capital", and "finance" and such things are applied. It's in that sense (only) that FF are cheap.
There are really two different components (at least), to an analysis that asks 1) Can X be done? and 2) If so, how?
One is technical, of sorts. The other involves the human organization systems (such as finance) that currently provide the "means" for tangible projects - (eg., delivery of huge amounts of FF to their respective machines) - to operate.
Right now, the "means" system is facilitating this usage.
I think that's all they meant.
Call me gullible if you like, but I'm going to accept this post's argument as pretty good. For it seems to me that no matter how much you want to quibble and no matter how many wind farms we put up and hydro stations we construct and how many other alternate kinds of energy and storage and so on we come up with, we're left with maintenance. That may sound simplistic, but I think of roads. Roads to wind farms - just to build and maintain them. Vehicles to get there - in order to maintain them. Maintenance machinery. All that stuff. And to all the power-related types of machinery and the buildings needed, for power plants, etc. I'm no technical person, but I live in a small city. And I look at how roads appear to be deteriorating. And I wonder how in the heck we can all continue to drive one day - even in this one small city - if roads aren't maintained. Or rebuilt.
So, accepting the argument of the post, together with the important statement that to make the article brief enough, only energy has been taken as one thing that will be in short supply (so we have to put in food and water etc. etc.), and accepting - as I do - the need to CHANGE PEOPLE, I am fascinated with the challenge and the necessity actually of trying to get humans to pay attention, to face coming shortages, and to plan for the future. And that's where I, as a psychologist, come in. Not that I have the answers, but if we remain at the stage of quibbling with how or when we'll run out of "power as usual" - then we're wasting valuable time in considering how to get people living simpler lives. Because, in just my little community, even if the water continues to flow (as it comes from a nearby larger city) or the power continues to flow (as it comes from the power plant, wherever that is), if the roads aren't maintained well enough, how in the heck can I even get out of my driveway?
Again, call me naive.... but our community is asking: Where are voters willing to cut back? We've cut back on library hours. We've cut back on snow removal. We've closed a fire house. (Yes!!! I kid you not!) And the nice concrete streets that were there 23 years ago, when I moved in, are now mostly black top - eroding blacktop, I might add.
To me the need to steer our society to simpler ways of living is just so clear. The need to stop the madness of everyone believing in their petroleum-based pastimes and toys and 4 or 5 autos for every family and TV's in every room - ok, I'm exaggerating. But honestly I see a need for a type of spiritual revolution going on - in order to make these changes. And frankly, should that happen and we find we have extra energy - well, how would that be a bad thing? If we plan and make changes and find ways to slow down our insane, stressful, wasteful ways of living... that will good for us even in terms of our mental health, I'd like to assert, so let's get cracking!
I agree with you... There is no possible way for us to continue consuming at our current rate, regardless of whether consumption is being fueled by oil and coal, or wind and solar. We need to take a long, hard look at our lifestyles and start paring down. Not just for our environmental future, but for our sanity as well!
You hit the nail on the head TheraP
You have also identified THE most difficult problem in the world to address. US!
We have met the enemy. And they is us!
What we need is a vaccine for affluenza! Unfortunately the folks who need it the most won't want to be inoculated, because they will think that only other people get affluenza.
Actually, the people who need it most think affluenza is a virtue, rather than a disease.
Edit: Too many commas.
TheraP: you have indeed hit the nail on the head. Simple is best. It comes down to our pot holes and our water and how much work we want to do in order to maintain our lifestyle. Geez. I like all the amenities, but I live pretty simple. I know how to get a lot of things done with very little resource. Lived on jackrabbits one winter when I was a young man. And ducks. Dont recommend that for anyone. Had to do what had to be done. Am quite capable of living an irresponsible and extravagant lifestyle, but things just come too hard to waste, I guess. We need people to know about nuclear physics, and reactors and how to mine coal, and how to drill for oil, and how to harness wind energy. What we seem to be lacking is a mindset of practicality. A revolution is a change. Yes? Let's get cracking on being more practical, conserve what we have been given, and do what needs be done. It's all about believing what living is, aint it? INMHO simple is best.
Here's another idea:
When you go to persuade people, mostly they're not going to be swayed by statistics and charts and all the fancy lingo and acronyms we might throw around here at TOD. So we need to think of people outside the "green" educated bunch some of us belong to. For example, the Fundies. Now, I'm no fan of the right wing, but if we could get Fundies thinking about living simpler lives, shunning affluence, driving smaller cars, living in smaller, more energy efficient houses, giving up gas-guzzling toys and pastimes, that's a huge bunch of people right there. If we could get them doing that as a "virtue" - even a religious virtue, well then we've accomplished something positive, even if it's not what would sway us personally. Many groups might decide to walk down parallel roads, each believing their road is the True Road. And even if they've chosen the road for very different reasons, who cares? As long as we convince them that the goals are worth it - from within their value system, their personal or faith-based or ethical or political or scientific position. There does not have to be ONE reason or one way to do this or one right answer. It's simply a matter of finding persuasive carrots (and by the way, much better than sticks) to dangle in front of many groups, using many ways of thinking, many value systems.
Why argue over the small stuff, when we can simply accept that there are some goals many people would find worth pursuing, goals which can be stated in very different ways, to appeal to different audiences? But which would get millions moving in similar directions.
Think about it....
TheraP:
If you're so smart and persuasive, why don't you try running for political office? Go ahead, give it a shot. I dare you.
You'll probably soon find that being a philosopher king isn't all that it's made out to be.
Humans are organic and live in an organic world. Everything we do really does have its origins, its basis, in the wild. Food, sex, feel pleasure, avoid pain, get power, see our kin doing well...these are human motivations, and they can't be controlled.
I'm neither a green nor a fundie, so I don't really know if I'm being relevant. But every now and then while perusing TOD discussions, which I enjoy doing because of the high level of discourse, I see a post like this, and just feel like responding.
Human nature is not an easy thing to accept.
It’s clear, oil is enabling society to advance. So the best solution is to develop better ways of extracting oil and make oil more readily available. At the same time do serious R&D until a real solution is found.
Until a better or equal form of energy is found, dummying down society’s use of oil will do what? Make the wheels of advancement turn backwards.
But if the "advance" is dependent on something finite, then we are advancing toward a cliff!
In my view it is necessary to consider the finite nature of this project. And our direction. Better to change direction altogether. Why march toward a cliff?
No one knows how much oil is inside the earth. There might be more oil than salt water. All we know is it's now harder to get. So while traveling towards the cliff, spend resources on real R&D and figure out how to make a hang glider.
Driving your car backwards doesn't take miles OFF the odometer..
Changing course will teach us all sorts of new tricks, and the challenge itself will be a way to grow and get smarter, even if some people think that direction is 'Backwards' (or Dumb).
And therein lies a very large part of the problem. The whole world, well most of the world anyway, expect a real solution to be found. We will find a solution to the population problem. We will find a solution to the problems of falling water tables, of rivers going dry, of species becoming extinct, of desertification, of global warming and of course we will find a real solution to the fossil fuel decline problem. We will find another source of energy.
Of course we will. It must be so because the world expects it to happen.
Ron P.
Nicely done. Good food for thought.
The other point to contend with is that there simply isn't the time to ramp up renewables and maintain this level of energy use. The fastest energy transition we have yet experienced was ~7% continuously for a century as we moved to oil. Given its low install base now, increasing wind at that rate would mean it represents just 5% of world energy supply by 2050.
In comparison:
And for coal and natural gas:
And coal won't grow forever:
The bottom line is that the various renewable energy plans in existence would require a global growth rate that would exceed the fastest growth rate we have yet experienced, that of the oil boom. In other words, they are not grounded in reality.
These and other important points will be published soon in an article in Energy Policy "Growth rates of global energy systems and future outlooks" by the good folks at Uppsala University's Global Energy Systems Group.
aangel -
I particularly agree with you when it comes to off-shore and deep off-shore wind turbines. This things take a long, long time to build and install compared to on-shore turbines.
Either way, since they take up so much area and require building very long transmission lines, siting the millions of wind turbines — whether onshore or offshore — will not be a quick task.
I don't think even a moderately strong case can be made for wind getting close to the average ~7% growth rate of oil for 50 years. With all due respect to Alan, I doubt the growth rates that he is advocating are very likely at all for very much longer ("Any year that wind does not grow by 30% compounded"). I wish I could reproduce more of the paper I reference but I've obtained permission only to quote small bits of it.
The other elements of his plan deserve a lot of attention, though. And even the wind portion does, but the wind part needs to be bracketed by some historic data to make it more realistic, in my mind.
I kept looking for the promised "opinion", but all I found was more home run thinking. No "opinion" about where the home run will come from, just whining that none of the things discussed will produced the desperately sought home run. Its really depressing how few people are even thinking about winning this game with balls and singles. A slow and steady grind is just soooo boring! Who wants to participate in or even watch something like that? Home runs! Glory to the magic bullet! If we can't have our magic bullet/touch down/home run, heck, its not even worth getting off the couch!
Some demand control, some wind, some solar, some biofuels, some hydro, some nuclear, yes even some petroleum. Good lord, its like watching paint dry! And who wants that when we can dream of magic bullets. And unicorns! With sparkles!
Your wish is my command:
That, by the way, is the elusive "Zero Point Energy Unicorn." It visits this temporal plane only briefly and I happened to be ready with a camera in the fields of Switzerland.
;-)
Yeah, but free range IPUs aren't much use, unless you know how to harness them for work...
BTW, the EROEI is infinite.
In the Maxtrix, people were grown and farmed because humans output electrical energy. I’ll add this as another alternative.
Might as well add giant hamster wheel while we are at it.
Hi WE,
"Lazy girls need not apply" - speaking only for myself, of course. :)
Or, another way to say it: conserving energy in a unit and somewhat autonomous system may - (at times) - be at odds w. contributing energy to the larger system.
I think you'd have to put in some EROEI numbers with your submission.
Figure 4 and the following quote appear to get causality wrong:
The reason that countries with low GDP per capita have low electricity availability is that there is a very limited market for electricity and very low ability to pay. Further, availability to households and businesses and the reliability of supply (which seem to have been combined) would vary widely within countries. For example, a shoe factory being run for a global company is likely to have a very reliable electrical supply, even if it means installing its own backup generators.
Reliable Electric Power for Developing Countries is a pdf report by the IEEE Humanitarian Technology Challenge that describes the situation in developing countries and outlines some possible solutions to provide electricity more widely.
It says that 1.6 billion people currently live without electricity. Apparently the number of people without electricity was fairly constant between 1900 and the present.
The requirements for a rural village are fairly modest -- up to about 5 KWatts are needed if the village has a hospital with lights and instruments to run.
Fossil fuel powered generators are one proposed solution, but current generators can be improved upon to operate more efficiently from a variety of fuels. They must also operate efficiently while following the load.
Another proposed solution is a solar kiosk where people can charge their batteries.
An important comment, I find. That was the first hypothesis we tested. In this case, the chicken-and-egg question can - as we think - be resolved quite easily, by testing in which directions we find the outliers. In case your assumption was correct, there should be countries with low electricity availability that still are quite rich (measured in per capita output). However, they do not exist.
On the other hand, rather poor countries exist with almost 100% electricity available, which leads to the conclusion that the correlation is unidirectional, or in other words: You don't have to be rich to have stable electricity, but you need stable electricity to become rich.
Some of the countries with low GDP per capita and high availability of electricity may have subsidized the latter, as did the US through the Rural Electrification Act. The political element was expressed by Lenin as “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”
Aside from possible exceptions such as Qatar and South Africa it does appear that highly available and stable electrical supply is a necessary but not sufficient condition for high GDP.
On the other hand, the existing generation and distribution facilities have never been designed with a communications mechanism to automatically shed load when generation capacity is unavailable. Today there is load shedding when utilities request building operators to reduce load, typically by an email or phone call. Building management can then reduce lighting and HVAC, typically by 1/3 in order to relieve stress on the utility's systems. In more severe cases, the data center UPS can be brought on line and commercial power not used for servers and similar equipment.
Given advances in automated controls for building operations and for control of other processes, there should be a considerable opportunity to better match load to available generation.
Even when he says nothing, people stop to listen.
I'm a new member and have been reading this article and comments for an hour or so. I'm very impressed with TOD and the contributors.
I don't have a degree, unless you count my GED and I'm not an expert in anything except cleaning. LOL! I'm a widow, have 5 grown children and am doing the best I can with what I have.
IMHO I agree with the article. I just don't see how wind and solar can handle the energy needs for the masses. I too think the wind turbines (or whatever they are called) are beautiful but it would take so many.
Being on a fixed income I was forced to do without a lot of stuff, energy consumption being one of them. Most people don't want to do "without" and until people are forced into using less of everything it's a losing battle.
There are a lot of very smart people in the world (some are on TOD). I don't have any ideas on how to solve the energy problem but I think it's going to take thinking outside the box on this one guys.
Thanks for listening...
Welcome, camel. You are one more person paying attention! That matters. Never forget it! :-)
Welcome aboard !
There are solutions, and being on a fixed income reduces your ability to become more efficient. Later I will give some low and no cost ways to save a bit.
Best Hopes :-)
Alan
Hi Camel;
You're right. Windpower won't do it. Not by a long shot. Particularly based on 'The energy needs for the masses'. We have to redefine what we actually need, as opposed to 'The lifestyle to which we have grown accustomed..' as divorce courts seem to put it.
But as it was said above somewhere, it's simply one of the options we do have at this point. If the ship is sinking and there aren't enough lifeboats, doesn't it make sense to create some floats out of whatever we can find?
I guess the Keypost's question is 'Do Solar Panels float?' does Ethanol, Wind, Hydro, Biodiesel etc... some of them might actually be buoyant, others might have key components that are, and other parts (Carbonfiber Laminated Blades??) that need to have substitutes created for them, to become buoyant in a "$500/barrel future"
Well.. what if you had some steel deckplates from your sinking ocean liner, and were able to use ship's heavy equipment to form them into deep enough bowls to use them as extra lifeboats? The flat steel on its own doesn't float, and you couldn't possibly form more of them once you're in lifeboats.. but do you make them now? Would they get a few more of you to shore? The analogy breaks up at that point.. but the question is, 'do we use oil to build tools to try to carry us through, and how do we determine which tools are worth building?'
You raised 5 kids. I bet you're an expert in a lot of things.. not the least of which would be 'doing the best you can with what you have'..
Bob
Yes, camel, I was thinking along similar lines, that everything would work out fine if the engineers and intellectuals here on TOD were put in charge of things. But we live in democracies which are up to their necks in debt, so the politicians and the accountants set the priorities, and they are only interested in votes and money. Directly or indirectly, the decisions about the future of energy policy will come down to Joe Public.
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2332885785/
I'd very much like to see some support for this point. AFAIK the grid varies in Voltage and frequency. When the frequency drops the kinetic energy of the running turbines is released and buffers the short term increase in demand. Moreover the voltage will drop and thus the consumption of many loads. Voltage may vary up to about 5% plus or minus and this will cause an equal plus or minus in any load without a digitally controlled PSU. (e.g. ligthbulbs, motors, heaters, etc) So the grid can be mismatched a couple of percent. But I'm no scientist so please do explain and substantiate this claim.
IMHO 10% is a very significant amount. But I'd still very much like to see that analysis because I believe this number to be significantly higher. Heating Ventilation and Cooling are things that can be very easily demand controlled. Especially in a modern well insulated building switching the heating or cooling off doesn't have any significant impact for hours. Moreover heat and cold are two things that can be buffered on a medium term very easily: it's called a boiler. The same goes for refrigerators and freezers using latent heat. In industry the potential is even bigger. I can very well imagine aluminum smelters planning their production according wind predictions because of the low spot prices for electricity associated, making it (very) economic to do so. This is a very energy intensive industry, making it highly likely, but it could well become economic for other industries as well (e.g. negative electricity pricing in Denmark during high wind periods).
False. It's being proven in many countries, but let’s look at one of the largest and most rapidly expanding countries: Germany. A highly industrialized country with a base load of 50GW and a daily peak at about 80GW. It currently does about 18% renewable electricity. It doesn't have any significant problems and renewables are still growing exponentially each year. The BEE (German renewable energies office) had the Fraunhoffer institute do research into the effects of the expected growth in renewables between then (2007) and 2020. During 2007 the absolute minimum provided by renewables was 6.8GW (on a 50GW base load) and in 2020 the absolute minimum is expected to be 10.8GW or 19% of the load. Also they found that in 2020 with a 47% share of renewables the required base load will drop 36GW and the require middle-load will increase 4GW and peak-capacity will increase 9GW.
This means that by 2020 they can switch off all their Nuclear and Lignite plants:
http://www.transparency.eex.com/en/Voluntary%20Commitment%20of%20the%20M...
Summary: http://www.bee-ev.de/_downloads/publikationen/studien/2010/100119_BEE_IW...
Full report: http://www.bee-ev.de/_downloads/publikationen/studien/2010/100119_BEE_IW...
And the UK is an island, so an almost worst case scenario for exporting and importing. Moreover if there wasn't any back-up gas available, how would they manage without the renewables? Using renewables would obviously be the lesser of the two evils!
And any country that has added any significant amount of renewables hasn’t found any significant problem.
I wonder where this has been the case?
AFAIK renewables is the only option we do have. Other than continuing BAU and waiting for a very big crash or our environment to be completely FUBAR.
A few extra comments:
- The tolerance to supply-/demand imbalances for Western style power grids is approximately 0.5%, before all the alarms go off and load shedding begins. Theoretically, it can take up to 1%, but that would probably already translate to a senior grid manager getting a lot of heat. Look at the ENTSOE website (European Grid Management company) for some input on that one: http://www.entsoe.eu/index.php?id=108, we can also provide some papers. So it's a fraction of the 5% you claim.
- On the 10%, this is the maximum, already including some flexibility in cooling/heating of buildings, but we are still working on the details there to put an exact number to it
- Germany: Did only about 16.1% of its electricity from renewables in 2009, and only about 7.5% from wind and solar, and have built a lot of natural gas capacity lately. This is not something we challenge, we challenge the assumption that 20% are feasible without all that stuff. There simply is no country with large amounts of renewables, except for tiny little exceptions (like Denmark).
- The UK as an island: Technically true, but more land mass available within sight. And a connection to Norway would be absolutely possible using HVDC, and is even planned. However, Norway has by far not enough hydro capacity to provide the required buffer for British wind at >20% penetration.
- A 0.5% tolerance is still substantial and gives way more headroom then the article suggests.
- I hope you keep me informed on your research into load management. I mentioned HVAC because the article explicitly states that cooling is something you can not load manage. This is something which you now contradict by saying it is included in the 10%.
- Germany did 16.1% in 2009. But with the current growth I'm pretty sure that's 18% or more by now. (the mentioned article talks about 47% in 2020, so that's an additional 30% in 10years or a 3% per year linear growth rate.)
Also Germany has been building renewable power stations on a large scale for about 10 years now. The additional 9GW off peak power and 4GW of middle power will be required between 2007 and 2020, so that's 13 years. This fits very well into the normal lifecycle of power plants. Actually the report was issued because of a discussion whether or not it will be necessary to increase the lifetime and permits of the current nuclear reactors beyond the design lifetime to meet the future electricity demands. The reports states that it is unnecessary to increase those permits and that any further investment in base load capacity is not deemed economic. Because of the renewables it will not be necessary for Germany to replace current base load capacity as it reaches end of life, but rather to partially replace them with peak capacity plants and some middle load plants. To me this only says one thing: Large scale renewables make base load obsolete and require relatively small amounts of peak capacity plants instead thereby reducing total fossil fuel capacity needed very significantly and saving a very large portion of the otherwise needed fossil fuels.
Off course there are countries with very large shares of renewables. Norway for example has 99% hydro and I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be counted as renewable. Other examples are Austria and Switzerland. They're less interesting possible, because they've been doing that for about 100 years now.
- Britain still is a bad example, because unlike most other large and developed countries it has very little interconnection capacity. I believe it currently has 1GW with France and another 1GW with the Netherlands is being built as we speak (called BritNed). Germany in 2004 had an import capacity of 16GW and could export 18GW (see mentioned article), but I know of several projects to increase this capacity. This is roughly 20% of the peak demand.
At this time I’m more inclined to follow this case study done by a very respectable research institution with a great deal of experience rather than this study of a hypothetical scenario above.
I would still very much like you to comment on that study and clarify why you contradict?
(The case study: http://www.bee-ev.de/_downloads/publikationen/studien/2010/100119_BEE_IW...)
" AFAIK the grid varies in Voltage and frequency. When the frequency drops the kinetic energy of the running turbines is released and buffers the short term increase in demand...."
The variance from 60 hz (US) frequency is very slight due to demand changes. The frequency may drop to 59.8 hz on greater demand, but to have frequency drops of 2 to 4 hz will cause severe problems for many users, especially those that are running electric motors. Electric motors that are not designed for variable frequency (most motors are not) can overheat and burn out from such drops in frequency. Much more likely variance is the drop in voltage, which has its own set of problems.
check out mit professor dan nocera's presentation on his technology - personalized energy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTtmU2lD97o
he claims he can power the whole planet from 1 olympic sized swimming pool of water.
Sounds great
Now all we need is to get solar panels on everyones roof to power the technology.
ok - lets do it!
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/jfk-space.htm
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Hi, first timer here. Interesting article but Britain does not exist as a country or administrative unit. The country is collectively known as The United Kingdom (UK) consisting of England, Wales, Scotland, Isle of Man, Channel Islands and Northern Ireland.
Although devolution of administrative powers is occuring the National Grid transmission network (NG) can be considered to cover the mainland (England, Wales and Scotland) but there is limited carrying capacity between the North (Scotland) and the South (England and Wales) due to the need to string cable on tall, very high voltage, pylons which would travel across some very rural areas which are currently considered to be too important to have such an environmental impact.
The mainland is connected to France for import/export of electricity so the grid could be considered as connected to mainland Europe although the effective transmission distances would not make it that efficent to transfer power from hydro such as Norway. It does mean the French nuclear capacity can be tapped as baseload,
The UK governments considered approach is diversity of supply with no one form of generation being predominant and open market pricing should mean the more efficent renewables gain share. Solar PV is only a realistic option for the south and with the advent of FITs strong uptake is likely once the supply of inverters gets sorted. The investment return on SPV means companies are offering to fit panels free to suitable households in return for the tariff - you get to keep the electicity generated.
Wind generation is mainly offshore due to 'nimby'(not in my back yard) enviromental issues but the array's currently schedule are based on farms of 5MW+ turbines. Scotland has alot of potential around Shetland but as noted delivery to the demand consumers involves long distances plus Scotland has plenty of hydro capacity so the economics and power losses of long distance transmission may strangle development in the short term.
What's missing for all the comments is the most reliable, predictable, renewable - sea tides. Tide mills used to be a feature of many towns and village with access to the sea or a tidal river. They can generate enough electricity for a small village for low investment and usually have been built by daming a river/creek so that you get the river flow plus the inward and outward tide. Not as good as hydro as the tidal range in most areas is quite low - until you look at the river Severn between Wales and England which has a range of 48ft and a very high gross flow. Some form of barriage and generation capacity will be built someday and it's estimated that this single element will generate 5% of the current UK mainland demand.
Wales has also become one of the pumped storage centres (mainly has it's close to demand and has mountains). Wales presents significant micro hydro (included in FITs) and additional tidal although nothing to match the Severn Bore.
Wasting resources is a big issue and the aim is to have 100% smart metering by 2020. This will mean that demand management will be applied to household as well as industry which makes the reliable renewables the baseload and the unreliable ones (wind/SPV) are used if available otherwise the demand is 'managed' aka switched off.
Living on the UK mainland I can see that the projection of demand being reduced by 75% in order to sustain a viable national supply is going to be necessary. This means that the 5% tidal actually becomes 20% with hydro making up much of the remaining baseload. I think it safe to say the Nuclear and Coal generation is off the table for good now although gas power might remain for sometime.
This then leaves the issue of remote locations and the islands which are not connected to the NG. The Channel Islands are close to France (lets not go to deep into that) so connection to Europe is possible (might already have been done). The Isle of Man is well situated and may even figure in a proposed undersea transmission line to get power down from the Northern wind farms. Northern Island will have to rely on measures taken by Ireland. The Northern Scottish Islands have small populations and are quite well located to access remaining North Sea gas.
For me Solar PV will yield 1700KW per annum, roughly 35% of my current household usage and so the future looks okish (at the projected 75% reduction by reduced wastage/consumption) providing the national reliable renewal infrastructure is built. Grid tied Solar PV means I export surplus when the sun shines and import otherwise.
As to transportation once oil leaves the party I think we can forget having enough 'cheap' electricity to be able to waste of personal transportation. It's a matter of when not if the cars get recyled into something useful - it's going to hurt some but 10 million Lithium battery units are not going to be practical to source (the BMW Mini EV needs 5,000 LP cells for just one car!). Plenty of false firemans about (Hydrogen, Compressed Air to mention a few).
Great place TOD - opens your eyes to the future.
UKTony -
Errr, no actually, you could not be more wrong! The Channel Islands and Isle of Man are not part of the United Kingdom. They are however Crown Dependencies.
Hate to be picky, but facts is facts!
HAcland,
Accepting the error over the status of Manx and Channel Islands but I suspect they should not be excluded from any UK wide energy security review.
The main point, as somebody else has posted, is UK has access to tidal resources plus offshore wind. The lack of commentary over UK tidal renewable was my main reason for posting plus the current imbalance in transmission capacity between energy rich North (Scotland) and energy hungry South.
Physics problem relevant to the straw analogy.
http://littleshop.physics.colostate.edu/docs/CMMAP/tenthings/SuperlongSt...
This is a very interesting paper, however, it is another "misses the forest for the trees" discussion. All of the talk about "energy" are plans for moving the chairs on the Titanic. The bottom line is that there are too many people in a "closed" environment. No matter how we re-arrange the deck chairs, the excessive and expanding human population is providing the mechanism for the negative feed back which, at this point in time, seems to be dramatic climate change.
If all energy supplies are linked through the financial system, and we end up spiraling down pretty quickly, then carbon dioxide emissions are likely to drop much more rapidly than models suggest. Exactly what that does to climate in the future is an open question.
The number of people alive 50 or 100 years from now is also an open question. If it is much lower than now, while there may be a change in climate, the impact on the people alive at that time is likely to be different from now. For instance, if there are no longer big cities along the coast line, a rise in sea level will be less significant.
all energy supplies are linked through the financial system
They are NOT though !
Proof - During the German hyperinflation (and the Hungarian one & recent Zimbabwe one), German hydroelectric plants kept producing electricity (and Hungarian ones and Zimbabwe is linked below).
http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=zw&product=hydro&graph=pro...
Drought vs. wet years account for most of the variation.
One should expect the same from wind turbines and solar PV. Despite not being paid for several months during the California electrical crisis, wind farms kept producing electricity in exchange for IOUs.
So, if you are concerned about financial collapse, building as much renewable power as fast as possible is one very good preparation.
Unlike coal, oil and natural gas plants that shut down a few days after not being paid.
Alan
Dear Alan and Gail,
Thanks, both of you, for this exchange.
I feel this is an absolutely critical juncture to take a look at, in more depth, and I (for one) would really like to see a collaboration.
As I tried to outline in my previous post, (re: at least two systems: eco ones and humans-ways-of-organizing-themselves-AKA"finance" ones)...
The "finance" system, which is Gail's area of interest, has its own realities and rules-of-the-game(s).
It seems to me that a logical objection to your argument, Alan, is that the systems link at some point, even if that is "down the road." And, at this point, you'd get a "failure."
The thing to look at is to see if there's a way to expand or build upon this resilience factor you (Alan) have identified.
I'm just asking the question.
When one looks at hydroelectric projects in North Korea, Albania during their decades of isolation, Afghanistan (killing or chasing away the staff did stop production at some dams, but others continued with fence wire wrapped in rubber from tires for some repairs), post-Soviet Russia and other examples, there will be quite a long delay between financial turmoil and collapse of hydroelectric production.
Hard to think what will stop solar PV production. Failure to clean dust and bird droppings will reduce production, but will not stop it.
Best Hopes for Seeing the Possible,
Alan
Sorry Alan, denying that there is a link between the financial system and our energy system by selecting a couple instances where the system continued on cruise control for a while is, in my view, willfully denying the obvious.
Of course the two systems are connected. They are in fact connected in both directions.
The financial system enables energy production (new plants to be built, new transmission lines to be run, miners to be paid to extract coal from underground, financial markets that muster capital for deep sea oil rigs, etc.). The energy system puts a difficult-to-identify but nonetheless real limit to how much money the world economy can support, determines how large the material flows in an economy can be, etc. There are many more linkages; those are just the ones at the top of my head.
Just try to get any of your projects accomplished without capital. It's as close to impossible as something can be.
You weaken your credibility when you say things like that. It's up to you whether you dig the hole deeper....
If energy is the true basis for all economic activity and real wealth, then it should make sense to invest in systems that will continue to produce energy without a need to depend on the continually diminishing EROEI of fossil fuels.
You can live within your means off a small income from interest but if you squander the principal, once it is gone you've got nothing.
Yeah, it takes a lot of hard work and investment to get that million dollars in the bank and you won't be able to live like a millionaire off the interest from that but you should be able to live.
If you owned a stock that was continually losing value wouldn't you cash it in while you could, for something that you knew would give you at least a small but steady return for the long term?
OT, Hahahahah! I just saw this. http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/in-the-lap-of-luxury-on-doomsday...
Never mind I just give up!
What if we figured at what average yearly income level a sustainable society could be maintained with the planets current population. Assuming income level reflects resource consumption where does that put us.
Sure there are logical issues with such a simplistic analysis but a ballpark number might be enlightening.
Wild guess, $2000 assuming even income distribution.
What is worrying to me is that world population was slightly under 1 billion in 1800 before fossil fuels became prevalent. There are 6.8 billion of us now.
If it turns out that the 6.8 billion of us now can only live at 1/7 the standard of living that was available in 1800, we are in terrible shape.
And that's not even accounting for all the ecosystems we have destroyed or made less resilient in the course of that wanton abuse of fossil fuels, the loss of soil fertility thanks to a hundred years of mechanized agriculture, or the learning curve of redeploying the more basic technologies and relearning the skills that will be needed to adapt to such a world.
The post-fossil carrying capacity could very well end up being well below that 1 billion level.
Peak Population is the important curve and as with Peak Oil, will only be known in retrospect. The "tipping point" likely occurred in the 1800s and became irreversible when the Polar ice and Arctic Tundra began to melt. IIRC James Lovelock predicted an 80% population reduction over the next 100 years.
>Their objective is to aid policymakers in developing strategies
i.e. they're a bunch of socialists?
>Instead of spending billions or even trillions on amendments that most likely won't help, a significant portion of these investments should go into a completely new design of our energy future
In other words, IIER knows best how other people's money should be spent.
>IIER puts substantial effort into trying to understand what energy systems could work in the long run. But unfortunately, very few other people do so...
And those entrepeneurs and speculators who risk their own fortunes every day are all a bunch of lazy idiots.
>As Robert Rapier, a well-respected energy analyst, puts it: “We are running out of traditional energy sources
And yet the price of oil remains modest. Measured against gold, oil is actually getting cheaper.
Dear Dr. Acula (nice pun)
Nate's attribution might be a little misleading. No, we try to help societies at getting a grasp on what can be done for the future. Policymakers are just one of our audiences, as they (whether we like it or not) are mostly in control of larger decisions. No complex society works without a government, at least I wouldn't know any example from history. And: If it weren't for government subsidies, no non-fossil energy technology (including nuclear) would have made any significant inroads into our lives.
If it comes to the people risking their own fortunes, I truly respect them. I am also risking my own fortune doing what I am doing with IIER, and don't expect a financial profit from that, but instead the satisfaction of having done something that isn't done too well yet. Hence I have a simple question: Why can't they take these risks for something that truly moves us forward? And if we get governments to push the current subsidies that way, everybody might be better off in the end.
>And: If it weren't for government subsidies, no non-fossil energy technology (including nuclear) would have made any significant inroads into our lives.
You're considering that which is seen - the technology that was created with the subsidies. But you're neglecting that which is not seen - the goods and services that would have been created had the money not been taken and then spent by the government.
>Why can't they [entrepeneurs] take these risks for something that truly moves us forward?
An entrepeneur seeks profit by catering to the demands of consumers. He has to take into account various factors like risk, capital expenditures, interest rates, and potential revenue. It may be that the price of oil - which through the action of speculators, already takes into account anticipated future scarcity - remains modest and signals to the entrepeneur that massive investment in risky alternatives is at this time is unwise. An entrepeneur cannot simply invest in technology for its own sake or because it feels good to do. Those entrepeneurs who invest their money unwisely will receive financial losses. Eventually they will lose their fortunes and be put in a position where they can no longer hurt others through their bad decisions.
Another part of the problem is the government hampering the market. For example, consider taxation: the taxes the government imposes on a gallon of gasoline is many times more than the the profit that the "greedy" oil executives make. If the entrepeneurs do not have the money, because someone else took it, they will not be able to invest it. In addition to taxation, there are countless additional issues like antitrust legislation, which prevents entrepeneurs from freely investing. Laws against collusion prevent entrepeneurs from peacefully cooperating. Laws against price "fixing" prevent people from selling goods at prices they choose. Minimum wage laws prevent two people from freely exchanging a certain amount of labor for a certain amount of money. At every step, the peaceful entrepeneur is hindered by the government's interventions.
>And if we get governments to push the current subsidies that way, everybody might be better off in the end.
Or, we could be worse. Governments are not omniscient. It is hard to believe that even a benevolent government can spend other people's money more wisely than entrepeneurs who risk their own fortunes. And when the governmnent is driven by incestuous politics, it becomes that much worse.
I would be most interested in the technology options you mention that never got enough attention, as we are conducting a thorough review of all potential future energy sources regarding feasibility, EROI, contributions to society, etc.
We consider it absolutely possible that we have missed out on something potentially big. Our work is work in progress, not static, and input is highly welcome.
The US uses upwards of 85 million tons of paper each year. This has an energy value of more than 1 Quad per year. Additionally, paper manufacture is one of the most energy intensive industries and probably accounts for about 4 Quads/year of industrial energy use.
A reduction in paper usage of 50% could reduce energy use in the US by at least 2 or 3%.
Paper is produced from trees grown on a relatively small acreage, primarily in the Southeast.
Trees in the US are widely grown and now cover areas such as New England to a great extent. These recovered woodlands as well as the trees growing in city and suburban settings are poorly tended from a forestry viewpoint, and they are often left standing past maturity until they decay and fall, often with damaging effects during ice storms, hurricanes, etc.
Proper harvesting of overcrowded, old, and dying trees across the US landscape would probably yield another percent or two.
So proper use of wood for energy instead of paper can probably satisfy 3 or 4 % of US energy requirements.
I don't think the problem seen by some posters above is that you have missed a new source of energy. I think it is that you, like many similar studies, focus on energy supply and what should be done.
In a market economy, you get a clearer picture when you focus on demand and what will happen. You say that it is becoming more and more expensive to access our resources. If I use supply as a variable dependent on demand and price (not cost), then I can turn your statement around and say that supply can always be increased by increasing the price. And that's what actually happens although the resource may no longer be used at that higher price if cheaper alternatives are available, at least for some of the uses.
If we take just one scenario where oil goes to, say, $500.00 per barrel, as it surely will eventually, we can see what will happen. At that price, oil is not in short supply but is more expensive than alternative forms of energy, such as, for example, electricity. I agree completely that the "alternative" forms of energy can't supply this extra demand but conventional production will have very little difficulty. In the short term, gas turbines will take up the slack but longer term nuclear and coal plants will be built, with regulations making them as safe and clean as possible, if governments do their job.
More and more of us will drive small, electric cars and live in smaller houses heated by electricity. We will spend more on energy since electricity will have gone up in price as well (massive investments in new power plants and distribution networks will have to be financed)but it will still be cheaper than oil. At this point we will probably have passed "peak oil" since demand at that price is likely to be down but there will still be plenty of oil for applications where other forms of energy don't work, such as planes, heavy transport and industrial processes. These things will just cost a lot more.
The trouble with your approach is that it gets sidetracked with arguments about "green" energy forms which have neither a technical nor market basis but are only being installed because governments are paying the bill. As long as we have a market economy, demand and price will always trump this kind of nonsense eventually and, focusing on these variables lets us see more clearly what is likely to happen.
New nuclear power plants in the USA get *SEVERAL TIMES* the subsidy of wind turbines.
Result: massive wind farms are going up and two new nukes in Georgia, where the rate payers "pay as you go" for them as they are built, regardless of delays or cost overruns (beyond the federal gov't 100% cost overrun protection for new nukes).
Burning coal permanently# alters the climate. A fact not reflected in electric bills.
Alan
# at least for 1,000 years
As a native Georgian, I'll add that it's not even clear those two new nuclear plants will even get built. And you're right about the financing, it has been a huge political firestorm the whole way. Meanwhile, the state "leaders" are opposing construction offshore wind farms on the state's coast, under the presumption that the state would be "better served" by biomass and solar, when in fact it is nothing but politicians bought and paid for by Georgia Power/Southern Company. They have made promises for biomass power multiple times and backed out every time. Instead they are building several massive new coal plants and of course stand to profit considerably from the new subsidized nuclear plants at the expense of Georgia ratepayers and federal taxpayers via the loan guarantees, should they ever actually happen.
http://www.ajc.com/news/why-isnt-georgia-joining-559389.html?cxtype=rss_...
Politics in this state is like watching a baby repeatedly run into a brick wall.
Hello, Dr. A,
This reminds me of the quintessential libertarian argument (even though you're not saying "no role for gov"). (Actually, maybe you are.) In either case...
Here's the catch, as I see it:
Argument:
1) Assumption: (Seems true from what I understand):
The entire industrial and global FF infrastructure was itself put in place via the mechanism of large-scale government and governments-making-possible projects, which have the result of the current ubiquitous use of FF.
Specifically among these are the following: Gov-backed military means of securing both resources and markets for same - (we can call this "security for entrepreneurs on their own terms"); legal and taxation policies that supported large-scale "entrepreneurs", AKA corporations; the direct government funding and building of large-scale infrastructure projects such as roads, the electrical grid, etc.
2) The "no gov" - or, even, as I prefer to think of it more generally as "no large-scale projects" - might be and, perhaps, we can go so far as to say would have been, a *much* better path.
3) Giant Catch: This path is *not* the one humans took, though. (W. some rare exception.)
So, then, the issue becomes: how to deal with this large-scale dependency?
The large-scale dependency that actually exists in the real world?
In other words, how to deal with this and how to deal with this in a way that minimizes the spectre of large-scale human suffering?
Is it possible to do?
On what scale?
Or, put it this way: The "government" you refer to was and is one aspect of a large-scale undertaking.
(BTW, how I sometimes think of it is this: gov can serve the function of preventing the sharks from eating each other. i.e., gov actually supports business and corporate interests via, for eg., the legal system, whereby corps sue each other. But I digress...)
The point is: how can a change of this scale be undertaken?
By what means of organization?
re: "Governments are not omniscient."
Businesses aren't. Corporations aren't. Armies aren't. Entrepreneurs aren't.
And neither is some invisible hand or morality of punishing risk after it's taken. Or, some way that consequences as a "law of nature" is really omniscient, either. It just is.
That doesn't really work either, as it results - or can and often does result - in massive negative consequences of failure that extend beyond the capacity of the original risk-taker to make right. (As we currently see w. BP.)
“For example, consider taxation: the taxes the government imposes on a gallon of gasoline is many times more than the the profit that the "greedy" oil executives make. If the entrepeneurs do not have the money, because someone else took it, they will not be able to invest it.”
_______________
That’s America’s oil they’re pulling out of the ground. You think we shouldn’t get a cut? You actually think prices would go down one penny at the pump without taxation? Any commodity sells at a price the market will bear. The market, as has been proven, will pay $4/gal., regardless of who gets the money.
Government is not the root of all evil — the love of money is.
Corporate fascism, it is bewildering how some people think this is the answer to all our ills.
Kind of what I was trying to say. :) (a little different, perhaps).
We can take "the problem" of how to deal with large-scale infrastructure and dependency as something distinct - (for purpose of analysis) - from the large-scale-organization-backed-by-force that put it in place.
This might be useful.
Two other resources to look at for overviews of World energy problems. One, pretty overwhelming and depressing by Saul Griffith, a MacArthur fellow engineer; the other, the most hopeful talk on energy you will ever hear, by Ed Moses from NIF, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs working on laser induced Fusion Energy.
Saul Griffith's talk on the Terawatt World, is about how much energy the world uses (about 16 TW) and how would we devise a new energy mix to limit Carbon emissions to 450ppm by 2050. It's also about personal responsibility in the new energy future.
The short version is here:
http://legacy.poptech.org/blog/?s=saul+griffith
A longer version given at the Long Now Foundation (LNF)with Q&A was presented in January 2009. It's available here:
http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recalculated
Here is Stewart Brand's excellent synopsis of that talk.
Engineer Griffith said he was going to make the connection between personal actions and global climate change. To do that he's been analyzing his own life in extreme detail to figure out exactly how much energy he uses and what changes might reduce the load. In 2007, when he started, he was consuming about 18,000 watts, like most Americans.
The energy budget of the average person in the world is about 2,200 watts. Some 90 percent of the carbon dioxide overload in the atmosphere was put there by the US, USSR (of old), China, Germany, Japan, and Britain. The rich countries have the most work to do.
What would it take to level off the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (ppm)? That level supposedly would keep global warming just barely manageable at an increase of 2 degrees Celsius. There still would be massive loss of species, 100 million climate refugees, and other major stresses. The carbon dioxide level right now is 385 ppm, rising fast. Before industrialization it was 296 ppm. America's leading climatologist, James Hanson, says we must lower the carbon dioxide level to 350 ppm if we want to keep the world we evolved in.
The world currently runs on about 16 terawatts (trillion watts) of energy, most of it burning fossil fuels. To level off at 450 ppm of carbon dioxide, we will have to reduce the fossil fuel burning to 3 terawatts and produce all the rest with renewable energy, and we have to do it in 25 years or it's too late. Currently about half a terrawatt comes from clean hydropower and one terrawatt from clean nuclear. That leaves 11.5 terawatts to generate from new clean sources.
That would mean the following. (Here I'm drawing on notes and extrapolations I've written up previously from discussion with Griffith):
"Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That's about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it's 30 percent efficient all told, we'll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Half a terawatt of biofuels? Something like one Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 15,250 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That's a 300-foot-diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build 3 100-megawatt steam turbines every day-1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That's a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week-52 a year, times 25."
In other words, the land area dedicated to renewable energy ("Renewistan") would occupy a space about the size of Australia to keep the carbon dioxide level at 450 ppm. To get to Hanson's goal of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide, fossil fuel burning would have to be cut to ZERO, which means another 3 terawatts would have to come from renewables, expanding the size of Renewistan further by 26 percent.
Meanwhile for individuals, to stay at the world's energy budget at 16 terawatts, while many of the poorest in the world might raise their standard of living to 2,200 watts, everyone now above that level would have to drop down to it. Griffith determined that most of his energy use was coming from air travel, car travel, and the embodied energy of his stuff, along with his diet. Now he drives the speed limit (no one has passed him in six months), seldom flies, eats meat only once a week, bikes a lot, and buys almost nothing. He's healthier, eats better, has more time with his family, and the stuff he has he cherishes.
Can the world actually build Renewistan? Griffth said it's not like the Manhattan Project, it's like the whole of World War II, only with all the antagonists on the same side this time. It's damn near impossible, but it is necessary. And the world has to decide to do it.
Griffith's audience was strangely exhilarated by the prospect.
--Stewart Brand
Ed Moses, the director of NIF gave a recent talk at the LNF that was positively hopeful even when you look at how critical the next 20-30 years are to getting us off of Carbon energies which as TOD so clearly points out are a dwindling resource in an energy hungry world.
Moses' talk at the LNF is not yet available at www.Fora.tv but it will probably be online in a week or two.
Here is Brand's synopsis of that encouraging talk. One point not stressed enough. Fusion energy is very different than Fission energy. It does not produce decayed particles with gamma ray radiation, only neutrons. Neutrons will excite materials to become radioactive, but depending on the kind of materials used to enclose the reactor, this radioactivity has very short half lives. Bottom line: Fusion does not have the serious long lasting waste radiation problems that Fission does. It is much more manageable. It is impossible to "weaponize" nuclear fusion reactors. Let's hope NIF can pull off the first hot test this summer!
Imminent Fusion Power - Ed Moses at LNF 6/16/02010
All the light we see from the sky, Moses pointed out, comes from fusion power burning hydrogen, the commonest element in the universe---3/4 of all mass. A byproduct of the cosmic fusion is the star-stuff that we and the Earth are made of.
On Earth, 4 billion years of life accumulated geological hydrocarbons, which civilization is now burning at a rate of 10 million years' worth per year. In 1900, 98% of the world's energy came from burning carbon. By 1970, that was down to 90%, but it has not decreased since. It has to decrease some time, because there is only so much coal, oil, and gas. During this century every single existing power plant (except some hydro) will age and have to be replaced, and world energy demand is expected to triple by 2100.
To head off climate change, fossil fuel combustion has to end by about 2050. The crucial period for conversion to something better is between 2030 and 2050. The ideal new power source would be: affordable; clean; non-geopolitical; using inexhaustible fuel and existing infrastructure; capable of rapid development and evolution. Moses' candidate is the "laser inertial fusion engine"---acronym LIFE---being developed at Lawrence Livermore.
The question, Moses said, is "Can we build a miniature Sun on Earth?" The recipe involves a peppercorn-size target of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium heated to 200 million degrees Fahrenheit for a couple billionths of a second. To get that micro-blast of heat, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) uses lasers---coherent light---at a massive scale. Laser engineer Moses notes that photons are perfect for the job: "no mass, no charge, just energy."
Moses ran a dramatic video showing how a shot at the NIF works. 20-foot-long slugs of amplified coherent light (10 nanoseconds) travel 1,500 yards and converge simultaneously through 192 beams on the tiny target, compressing and heating it to fusion ignition, with a yield of energy 10 to 100 times of what goes into it. Successful early test shots suggest that the NIF will achieve the first ignition within the next few months, and that shot will be heard round the world.
To get a working prototype of a fusion power plant may take 10 years. It will require an engine that runs at about 600 rpm---like an idling car. Targets need to be fired at a rate of 10 per second into the laser flashes. The energy is collected by molten salt at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and then heats the usual steam-turbine tea kettle to generate electricity. The engine could operate at the scale of a standard 1-gigawatt coal or nuclear plant, or it could be scaled down to 250 megawatts or up to 3 gigawatts. The supply of several million targets a year can be manufactured for under 50 cents apiece with the volume and precision that Lego blocks currently are. Moses said that 1 liter of heavy water will yield the energy of 2 million gallons of gas.
Fusion power, like nuclear fission power, would cost less per kilowatt hour than wind (and far less than solar), yet would be less capital intensive than fission. For the constant baseload power no carbon is involved, no waste stream, no possibility of meltdown or weaponization, and there is no such thing as peak hydrogen.
--Stewart Brand
If energy were removed as a limiting factor on our species, if we mastered fusion say, would we carry on destroying the planet anyway? Fusion powered chainnsaws and fourwheelers ripping up the biosphere, for example.
Your first question is troubling. What is the real Nature of Humans? Can we work cooperatively or are we just a cancer on the Planet? Our intelligence and creativity could have serious evolutionary downsides. The Horseshoe crab ain't too bright but it has been around about 430 million years. There is no guarantee that humans are the chosen ones.
If we don't solve the coming energy crunch, I'm sure the desperate struggle for energy/power will bring out the worst in us. It already has. If we can find a way around this tipping point, maybe our better nature will have a chance to show through..
The possible miniaturization of Fusion energy down to the size to power a chain saw or even to power cars is probably a couple of centuries off if it could ever be possible. Not too worried about that.
https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/nif/about.php
https://lasers.llnl.gov/
Agreed, limitless power would be a complete disaster for the planet (and thus us).
We have not demonstrated the maturity to use what has effectively been limitless power now (the fossil fuel bonanza). I see no indication that our collective maturity level will suddenly rise to the occasion.
In any case, fusion power is fun to think about but I'm quite certain it's never going to be an issue. Even if a prototype is available in ten years (they haven't met any of their other dates so why should we trust this one?), scaling it to full production will take more decades, if it's even possible in the crisis situation I foresee. Plus, there is a very real chance something unforeseen knocks it out of contention before it reaches maturity (similar to what happened to hydrogen, though I would say that the problems with hydrogen were plain to see well in advance).
>if we mastered fusion say, would we carry on destroying the planet anyway?
Part of the planet is "destroyed"? i.e. you're saying the Earth is in danger of disintegrating?
>Fusion powered chainnsaws and fourwheelers ripping up the biosphere, for example.
Sounds like fun. Of course if that bothers you, then you can always forbid such activity occuring on your property. And if pollution impinges on your property or person, then file a civil suit. The threat of seizure and liquidation will terrify any polluter, no matter how big and powerful they are. (But of course, if you live in Iraq and someone dumps loads of depleted uranium dust on you, then you are kind of out of luck.)
Hi DA,
re: And if pollution impinges on your property or person, then file a civil suit.
But this requires:
1) Personal capital (funds) to hire an attorney.
2) Functioning and non-corrupt legal system.
re: "you're saying the Earth is in danger of disintegrating?"
Just the part(s) that support humans.
Since when is the levelized cost of wind power greater than nuclear? If you want an apples to apples comparison, don't compare operating costs of existing nuclear plants to building new wind farms...there's a reason even with massive subsidies new nuclear buildout is stalled out. The reason is that it's damn expensive.
As for fusion, it will be 20 more years before we figure it out, much like it was 20 more years in 1990, 20 more years in 1970, 20 more years in 1950...
Hello, first time post here as I'm not an 'oil guy'. The story caught my attention: I've encountered the IIER before and thus am interested in what their say is. I work at a big energy consulting firm mainly giving advice to incubent companies, so you see and hear a lot about the way their 'logic' works.
As for smart grids: The industry is generally aware that this is only a way of shifting peaks a little. The article states that it is seen as 'the holy grail', I guess that is mainly by politicians and PR people then. The main force driving research into smart-grids are distribution companies, who, in Europe, see it as a nescesary thing when applications like the electric car begin to take off. For example, while an average household supply may have a maximum capacity of around 15kW, a street typically only has a 50kW connection. A typical electric car might charge with 10kW, so you only need 5 cars to take up all the capacity. Calculations of a 50% penetration of electric cars show that if you were to keep the distibution grid conventional you would need around 6 times as much of capacity. So even though electric cars might not form a great share in total electrity demand (or supply, as indicated in the article) they would have a big impact on a conventional grid due to their high peak load. Generation companies and large customers at this moment are not the parties pushing smart-grids.
Another thing is that nuclear power is actually more scaleable than commonly known. Nuclear power plants are able to scale up and down faster than coal plants. This however is not something which is advertised by the industry since only a fraction of a nuclear power plants running costs are for fuel. In such a case sub-optimal running of a plant almost immediately means you're losing money.
I question that nukes can ramp up or down as rapidly as coal plants.
Admittedly, there are design differences between individual plants. the thickness of steam turbine blades is one).
Roughly 100 minutes from cold start to 90% power for a coal fired plant (last 10% another 15 or so minutes). Nukes take better part of a day.
On shut-down, with "old" fuel, the decay of short half life radioisotopes has to be taken into consideration. They generate significant heat for several hours after nuclear reactions have been shut down. Not an issue with coal fired plants.
Alan
Alan - Your question is a good one, one of millions.
NIF is a research facility trying to do proof of concept design. They've done a lot of test shots, a couple of hundred, but none yet with the real deuterium/tritium target. They hope to do the first real test in August.
Here is a short simplified graphic video of how NIF works.
https://lasers.llnl.gov/multimedia/video_gallery/mov/beamline_ride.mov
There are a million engineering problems to solve before LIFE - Laser Inertial Fusion Engine will come to be, but they are already working on designs. Moses showed concept video of how it is hoped that LIFE will work. It is wildly complex, but doesn't look to be outside of engineering/manufacturing capabilities.
From what I saw I would guess that there will be a lot of prep time to make sure a Laser Fusion reactor would be ready to "turn on", but in order to work at all it has to process 10 targets/sec, or it wouldn't work. Think of it like a light switch. If everything is connected right, flip the switch and voila, light. It would take some amount of time to fully heat up the molten salt transfer system, but I would hazard a guess that there is no reason for a LIFE plant to take longer to ramp up to full output than a Coal fired plant. The "nuke" plant you are thinking about is a fission facility that requires a lot of careful ramping up of the core to make sure nothing is going wrong. Fusion is really entirely different than Fission.
BIG DISCLAIMER: I don't know shit about Nuclear Physics in general and even less about Fusion Nuclear Physics.. just reporting what I saw..:-))
I read through it and while moving to alternative energy as technology advances is a great idea what they do not cover is that the US Gov via Enviromental rules have place millions of miles of land with proven enegry resources off limits to development.
If we could drill in wilderness areas we would have plenty of oil till technology catches up and we can do alternative energy effectivly.
"If we could drill in wilderness areas we would have plenty of oil till technology catches up and we can do alternative energy effectively."
Presuming that to be true (it is not), if we could drill in wilderness areas, we would then have less wilderness. If you don't understand the value of wilderness, or the extent to which we have already destroyed it, you simply don't get it, at all.
Yeah, we need more scenic wilderness areas like Fall River, MA.
http://www.mindfully.org/Water/2008/Wild-Scenic-LNG9jul08.htm
Judging from the last winter, I think you’ve successfully cooled the planet. Thanks for all your hard work. Global warming is officially over. Now go make up something else so you can save the world again.
Yup. The planet hasn't warmed since May, 2010.
NASA: Easily the hottest spring — and Jan-May — in temperature record
Plus another record 12-month global temperature
June 10, 2010
Last month tied May 1998 as the hottest on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-May on record [click on figure to enlarge].
http://climateprogress.org/2010/06/10/nasa-hottest-spring-on-record/#mor...
Add to this the fact that we are in a solar minimum.
The footprint of development of natural resources is very small compaired to the volume of land that has been taken out of use. Policies of permanent offlimits of wilderness areas will drive the cost of gas and energy sky high. And it will NOT be because there is no oil... but because politicians have made it unavailable.
Those who support such policies will make all of us pay more at the pump.
Blame who you like, but this dream that some bounty of oil would magically inspire us to build out the tech to replace it has already been disproven a few times over.
Time to tough it out, pal. and it'll definitely cost plenty. You can thank us greenies later, when you realize it was the right thing to do.
Bob
If we could drill in wilderness areas we would have plenty of oil ...
You simply do *NOT* know what you are talking about.
ANWR has a 1 in 20 chance of having 1 million b/day. The SUV boom added 1 Million b/day to US demand. Total US demand is about 19 million b/day with imports of roughly 11 million b/day.
*IF* we get quite lucky with ANWR, where are the next ten ANWRs ?
Hint: they are not there.
Let's save ANWR to fuel farm tractors.
Alan
We civilized humans seem intent on running experiments that may have disastrous and irreversible consequences to ourselves. Lets see how many trees we can cut down on Easter Island and still have the trees regenerate so we can build more boats. Ooops. Lets see how much we can irrigate land without ruining the soil Salinization is a problem that irrigated agriculture has had since the first large human civilizations in Mesopotamia. The fall of the ancient civilization in the fertile crescent is attributed to both waterlogging and soil salinization (Rhoades 1990).http://www.earlham.edu/~biol/desert/irrigation.htm Despite that lesson we are repeating it in the Amnerican Southwest. See same link. Lets see how far down we can fish the Cod before we deplete the great cod fishery in Newfoundland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing#Consequences. Yet we are on track to depleting the whole ocean.
So now lets see if we can keep first world BAU going by building a humoungous lot of windmills and solar panels. Lets see if that alters weather patterns in any way. Won't know until we build them. Beyond all the reasons that this excellent article gives as to why these just won't give us BAU, I think these need to be considered. All the wind and all the solar energy hitting the planet are doing something. They are part of LAU (life as usual). We do not know what expropriating large amounts will do and cannot know until we try it.
OTOH we do know that humans can live with less energy - not as many as today but 10,000 years of agricultural humans and several hundred thousand years of hunter-gatherer humans lived without our current BAU. In fact over 1/2 the people now alive live without beginning to approach our BAU. This we know. The problem is that having become rich we believe we can live no other way when in fact the truth is that we can. People driving solo can actually survive by carpooling and even using public transport or bicycles. The discussions of these matters regularly resolves around people stating that a life style they don't want to live is impossible to live. That attitude will make the crash much more difficult.
I remember a PBS show about people who had been prisoners in Japanese prison camps. Needless to say they never wanted that lifestyle. One man said that new prisoners would balk at eating potatoes that had worms in them. He told them, if they didn't they would die. Then with a twitch of a smile he said that some refused and well they died.
The one choice that makes sense for the planet it just to say party over, where are the people who can teach us the old skills. (hint: some are the peasant farmers of the world who still know how to feed themselves while permaculutural gurus make money teaching and writing) How can we power down? But us first world addicts will spin hopeful solutions as we continue our experiments on the planet itself in the hope that some magic will keep us from the inevitable.
Its about time that somebody looks into the new potential energy source that is controlled aneutronic thermonuclear fusion using the Z-Machine currently being developed at the Sandia Labs, which has a very high EROEI...
The Z-Machine energy output could be readily plugged in the existing electrical grids.
JB
Noticed you did not post a URL Jonathan. So I googled it and found at Wikipedia:
So actual fusion power from this machine has not yet been taken into account. But that just might happen in 8 to 10 years from now. So in 8 to 10 years they may have a pilot plant. And perhaps after 8 to 10 more years we just might know whether or not fusion power is viable or not. Then in another 8 to 10 years... who knows?
So fusion power will be here perhaps 30 to 50 years from now. Twenty years ago it was only 20 years in the future. It seems to be sliding further and further into the future as we enter the future when it was supposed to have already happened.
Ron P.
So what is your solution? A carbon tax? (i.e. a consumption tax on fossil fuels) Glenn Beck and the Republicans have much of the nation convinced that is not the answer. And the irony of libertarians who preach in favor of consumption taxes instead of income taxes, but then are against a carbon tax. Whatever your solution, how do you get past the propaganda that runs wild in out politics.
Should we all be heavily backing Enhanced Geothermal Energy?
Extractable Enhanced Geothermal energy is 2,000 to 20,000 times all forms of energy used in the US in 2005, according to MIT / Government panel ( http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geothermal_energy.pdf page 18 point 2 http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/geothermal.html )
Enhanced geothermal is when you drill into hot rocks and pipe water (or some other fluid) down to the heat then back up to a generating plant on the surface. It does not require existing geysers and hot springs to be implemented. It can therefore be implemented in many areas of the US (similarly elsewhere in the and world).
Put another way, take every scrap of energy used in the USA, coal, oil, wind, solar and switch it all over to enhanced geothermal and you have only used 0.05% to 0.005% of the available enhanced geothermal energy right under our feet in the US. http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geothermal_energy.pdf page 28, 65, 74)
Ramp up our energy use, add some good old American ingenuity, have a national imperative (like going to the moon in 10 years) and we could progressively make everything we need from CO2, water and rocks, with enhanced geothermal energy.
Enhanced geothermal does need development research, the MIT study suggested 1 billion over 10 years.
Enhanced geothermal needs the backing of the public to give it the necessary push to make it happen. Other lobby interests could likely resist and derail enhanced geothermal, trying to keep us on oil, coal etc.
Enhanced geothermal is an ideal energy source, good for millions of years, very very low pollution and it's "base load", the best kind of energy running day and night.
Additionally, some coal and nuclear electric plants could be partly or fully converted to enhanced geothermal in a progressive manner, first providing part of the heat and later switching to fully geothermal.
Given the oil industry's ability to drill deep into hot areas and then drill sideways to and hit a pipe drilled in the opposite direction, one can could likely avoid fracturing the ground to capture the geothermal heat from many many locations. Fracturing can cause earth quakes and movements, mostly small but disturbing to the locals. These "quakes" have caused a couple of enhanced geothermal demonstration plants to be abandoned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_geothermal_system
With all the enhanced geothermal power available and smarts we could make liquid fuels from CO2 and water.
Now is the time to act and it's up to you and me to make it happen in any creative way we can.
(we could vote with out pocket, insist on buying only enhanced geothermal electricity)
-----
While still in the experimental stages and far from certain to solve energy scarcity, advanced geothermal is absolutely something we should be pouring billions upon billions of research dollars into right about now. We got nothin' to lose.
Same goes for tidal power. And waves. And ocean thermal. And I'd like it if the DOE biomass program did more than just fund cellulosic ethanol research too - maybe some gasification for substitute fuels rather than fermentation? Since, you know, it actually works.
And we should legalize cannabis so that biomass hemp and hempseed oil can be produced at reasonable cost for an energy crop, as a byproduct of production of high-value pharmaceuticals, which is why requiring low THC content for commercial hemp and the arduous DEA certification process are only obstacles to the crop's viability, driven by dinosaurs who will only accept production if there is no chance some kid somewhere might, god forbid, get high from it.
That we have outlawed potentially our best energy crop while adding yet another corn subsidy in the form of ethanol blending requirements and the Renewable Fuel Standard is beyond insane, and not just for the reason that it makes the energy products too expensive.
So nothing works, in the end, goodbye electricity. That's what I got from this article.
And then everybody screeches, but we could do this, we do that.
And then all the arguments back and forth, why the other's idea won't work.
I did a lot of scrolling. There are certain duos and trios here who just love to attack each other endlessly. If I see certain names come up one right after the other, I just roll my eyes and scroll until that part of the thread is passed.
But back to the subject at hand. No electric. Has anybody here even tried it? I'm not talking about a few days of outage because of a storm, or a couple days for some greenie publicity stunt. I'm talking about a full, annual cycle. You cannot discover the full experience without both summer and winter included.
I have done it. Four years, from mid 1986 to mid 1990.
Seriously, people. Don't be afraid. It's not that bad. You get used to it after awhile. It's amazing, humans are really adaptable. So after four years, what did I miss most?
Right off the bat, hot showers. But there are other ways to do hot water.
Second, heat at the flip of a switch. Oh, the luxury. But there are other ways to heat the house, too. They just take longer.
And third, music. The stereo. There's a big difference between listening to a commercial radio station on a solar power radio, and listening to your favorite music, commercial free, at night.
And that's it. Everything else was, for me, just a matter of getting used to the different way, and then it was fine. We didn't have running water either, and you get used to dumping a 5 gallon bucket in the toilet tank to flush it, or warming water on the wood stove to wash the dishes or your hair.
The big thing I noticed was that everything slowed down. It takes time to build a fire and heat the house, or build fire and cook, or build fire and can vegetables, or build fire and heat water. Is slowing down such a bad thing? I hate the supercharged speed expected from everyone for BAU these days.
Those electric-free years taught me to not miss television, and I have never looked back. Television really is a wasteland; you don't realize how much advertising you're being constantly blasted with until you silence it.
The other annoyance that never stopped being an annoyance was excess heat in summer while cooking. Cooking on a wood stove inside the house in July is a pain in the ass. This is what made me begin the long journey of learning acceptance. It's a hard, even painful, lesson. But there are some things you just can't do anything about. Sweating like a pig while standing over a blazing stove in summer because you simply don't have any other way to cook is one of them. Acceptance helps, a lot. It simply is, and you go on from there.
Earlier in my life, I went through a two year period with no cars, only bicycles. I had a car, but could not afford the gas and maintenance. But I did have electric. Then I had the four years with no electric, but we did have cars, and used them to get to the nearest town 35 miles away about once a week. Sometime in the future, I expect I will have to combine both those experiences, and have both no car and no electric. I worry about it because my body is in much much worse shape now. Riding a bike for miles, or chopping wood, or hauling 5 gallon buckets of water, are going to be very hard and very painful for me now. But I do not fear the change itself, only whether my sicker, weaker body can be forced to the necessary activity.
But I feel bad for people who are afraid of the change itself, and get all freaked out. I wish I could reassure folks that they will find a way, even if it's not so easy as the way that came before.
Hi VTech,
Suggest write up your experiences as a guest post for "Campfire."
Perhaps with more details - and some photos?
"But I feel bad for people who are afraid of the change itself, and get all freaked out."
This is the issue. All the "tech talk" above is purely internet based mental masturbation. Of course we have alternative energy options and with Alan from Big Easy's plan it is 100% certain we could have a softish landing, but telling 6.5 billion people that their future is one of LESS of everything, their lifestyle WILL change to a fraction of what they are used to, their children will NOT have it as good as them, there won't be more good jobs, they can't have a big happy family, etc. etc. This is what all the doom is about. When these FACTS become widely understood the population will become VERY angry and violent. They will literally have nothing left to lose and will lose it.
SO yes you should "feel bad" in fact you should be afraid, although I hate spreading fear but here you go.
"The other annoyance that never stopped being an annoyance was excess heat in summer while cooking. Cooking on a wood stove inside the house in July is a pain in the ass."
It's called a summer kitchen. I put one on the end of our wood shed as an after-thought, a sort of screen porch about 20 feet from the house kitchen door. It's 10'x12' and I ran water and installed a gray water drain for a sink, mainly for canning and processing. I also put a chase in the roof for a wood stove. Used mainly for storage during most of the year.
We had very limited electricity for over 13 years.
electricity to ....pump water
No ..... refrigeration , cooling , hot showers , TV ,computer , lights ,
grew our food
open fire for ...cooking , hot water in tub to clean clothes , saunas
Dear Hannes and Nate,
Thanks for this article, and to others, for the discussion.
re: "This decline in easily extractable resources and the increased effort to retrieve them is much more important than the exact year when peak production of a particular resource actually occurs."
The "easy" and "increased effort" aspect of our collective situation is absolutely critical. (We are talking about energy, after all.)
You outline an often-misunderstood and/or ignored concept.
I'd avoid comparisons of significance, though, because the "peak" timing of a resource matters as well, especially if one accepts the idea of deliberately re-directing any of the following: efforts, financial capital, resource "capital." How much of the particular resource do we have left to do what with? (In other words.)
re: "The only meaningful way of looking at the future of energy delivery and application technologies would be to build energy systems based on an assumption that renewable technologies have to provide the entire amount required by our societies, and then to reshape societies so they are in line with what and how these technologies can deliver."
Great approach.
I'd just add: there are really two questions here. (Or, two assumptions.)
The assumption that "renewable technologies" "have to"...the first part of this assumption is really a different form of the Q: "Are renewables really renewable, and, if so, to what extent?"
It seems to me this premise/question is hasn't been answered, at least that I've seen.
Then, part two, is: can we have industrial society that's based upon these renewables? If so, how and what to do to get there?
This overlaps with the big question of sustainability and steady-state economies (right?)
re: From Alan:
"The paper assumes something that will not occur for a century plus, *NO* fossil fuels and then uses that distance future to say the medium term (say 20 to 40 year) future (*LESS* FF) is doomed because it will not work in 2189."
This is why I bring up the point above that both timing of current resource max use and looking at "what else" - both (three) are important.
Alan, another issue also seems to be availability of FF - to whom? Or, if for person/community/country X, FF are not available, then it may as well be 2189. (i.e., one's survival is local.)
From Jokuhl Bob:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6641#comment-662879
"We need to really distinguish between processes that happen to use oil today, because that's the only game in town.. and those that truly have to do so."
This appears to me to be a complementary question to the article and one that could be answered by analysis.
From Ghung:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6641#comment-662991
"As I've posted before, unfortunately, I see no real indication that there is any effective "we", not nationally, not globally (which is what will be required)."
I know what you mean, Ghung. At the same time, in a sense, I maintain that there has in the past been someone(s) who set the direction for the rest of "we."
The auto infrastructure: roads, salaries that could support auto payments, etc.
That's part of my thinking about why it seems the NAS study idea is a good one. It really doesn't have to be "everyone" - it has to be someone(s). Who? www.oildepletion.wordpress.com
One could argue that there is a huge, current effective "we" - the global youth chatting on their collective cell phones. (Some quite local.) Effective, in the sense that the companies are making money, right?
From Anton:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6641#comment-662982
"The bottom line is that the various renewable energy plans in existence would require a global growth rate that would exceed the fastest growth rate we have yet experienced, that of the oil boom. In other words, they are not grounded in reality."
This is an extremely interesting point, about the growth rate.
I'd say, though, on the level of just logic, this is not an argument for physical or organization impossibility. (lack of reality.)
It would just be new in an historical sense.
The Oil Drum is really a great place. They should force administration & all congress men and women to read the threads at least 1 hour a day.
Thought I'd throw this CO2 to fuel technology into the mix http://www.carbonsciences.com/
No one has mentioned US building it's own space station and developing some type of a sun light to energy pellet technology. These pellets could be be used as a feed stock for new types of electrical generators that run on the high capacity pellets. I know it sounds crazy but you never know.
Thanks all for this great article and discussion. It is a brain teaser to say the least.
Dave
I apologize if I missed them but I haven't seen any reference to rates.
Generally The Oil Drum emphasizes that its just as much the size of the straw as it is the size of the glass.
You can have an infinite supply of food but if you don't get an adequate amount to eat every day, you starve.
Similarly BAU must have an adequate amount of energy each day or it starves and we all suffer greatly.
If BAU changed so that it required less each day, it would take longer to exhaust our resources and we would have longer to adapt to declining energy supplies.
With that in mind I am suggesting that increasing the durability and repairability of the things that BAU produces would be a help.
Government taxation of non-durable and non-repairable goods would, in my mind, have a beneficial societal effect. The benefit would be particularly noticeable with repairability because of the number of people who would be employed repairing things Anyone remember cobblers, tailors and appliance repair people? it would be nice to see them again.
Nothing new or technological or particularly difficult required to make at least this change and it would surely make a contribution to slowing the rate of entropy increase.
JP
I did but it didn't get much traction today. (Search for my comment above that starts with "Nicely done.") Most renewable energy plans that "save the day" require the transition to renewable energy to be at a rate that has never been seen in history. Not impossible, but not likely either, especially as we continue to spiral down the financial drain.
Alex has no forward speed -
NHC
7:00 PM CDT Mon Jun 28
Location: 20.6°N 91.6°W
Max sustained: 60 mph
Moving: Stationary
Min pressure: 990 mb
Water Vapor loop -
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/HURRLOOPS/huwvloop.html
Almost directly over the Ixtoc I in the Bay of Campeche of the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 km (62 mi) northwest of Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche in waters 50 m (160 ft) deep.
Steven King couldn't write this story.
The water temp at Rockport , Texas tonight :
91.4 F degrees
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/dsdt/cwtg/wgof.html
The buoy northeast of Alex in the Bay of Campeche
Station 42055
NDBC
Location: 22.017N 94.046W
Conditions as of:
Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:50:00 UTC
Winds: NNE (20°) at 17.5 kt gusting to 21.4 kt
Significant Wave Height: 7.2 ft
Dominant Wave Period: 9 sec
Mean Wave Direction: ESE (108°)
Atmospheric Pressure: 29.58 in and rising
Air Temperature: 83.7 F
Dew Point: 77.4 F
Water Temperature: 85.3 F
Air Temperature: 83.7 F
Dew Point: 77.4 F
Water Temperature: 85.3 F
Mind boggling set of numbers right here. Lot of BTU's on the move at this buoy.
Of all the fallacies of logic used by propagandists, the fallacy of composition is the one they seem to love the most. Guest poster Hannes Kunz is, I fear, a propagandist.
Kunz starts at the top of the section titled "Renewable energies - the fake fire brigade" (stealing RR's phrase). He lumps all "renewable" energy supplies (some of which are not renewable, as RR himself has explained at length) together, then picks the worst (corn ethanol) and uses that example to declare them all worthless.
That's simply not a valid argument. If I thought it was accidental I'd be giving him the benefit of the doubt, but he does it over and over again.
Of all the invalid premises for arguments, this is one of the more sophisticated. But I can point to history for a similar argument. If we go back to the 16th or 17th century, there was a time when coal was just barely being tapped, but the Industrial Revolution was already taking off with inventions like water-powered woolen and cotton mills. Suppose some N-times-great ancestor of Kunz had said this:
A. Wind and water power supply most of our non-muscle power.
B. Over the last 10 years, coal supplied less than the growth in wind and water power.
Therefore,
C. Coal will never amount to anything.
Of course, the conclusion C is invalid. What matters is the size of the resource and the rate at which it can be produced, and people were just getting started with coal.
The argument is no more valid when Kunz uses it today. It is especially invalid when he illogically (and I'll bet deliberately, and thus dishonestly) lumps together highly limited and fossil-dependent products like corn ethanol with massive resources like wind, solar and nuclear. There is no comparing these things. For instance, the wind energy potential of the top 5 states in the continental USA (TX, KS, NE, SD, MT) is more than 20 petawatt-hours per year. This is an average of about 2.3 terawatts, which is greater than the ~2 TW of electricity consumed by the world in 2005.
It's not like the USA is special. The world's land and near-shore wind-power potential has been calculated to be 72 terawatts (Archer and Jacobson, cited here). And Kunz's straw-man of electric cars as the only storage devices is easily knocked down; the intermittency problem is getting some interest, and advances in technology.
(General Compression is very interesting. The company claims a response time of less than 6 seconds to demand changes, and rapid cycling from compression to expansion. With that kind of technology, it might find markets in grid regulation services as well as energy storage.)
But let's follow Kunz over to demand-side management. He writes:
Is that true? Not even remotely. Of the US domestic electric consumption of 2001, some 14% went to air-conditioning and refrigerators... each (electric water heating is another 9 percent). Energy for these is easily stored as hot water, ice or frozen brine. Making the refrigerator coast overnight or storing several day's worth of hot showers or A/C needs when a front blows through are technically simple things to do. The reason they aren't done is flat-rate billing, and utility regulators which have historically given a fixed return on investment. Wave money in front of people if they buy the 21st century Icier Box which does rate arbitrage automagically, and that will change.
I should mention here Kunz' figure of "28.5 million private vehicles are currently registered in the UK." If these were Chevy Volt-equivalents with only 8.8 kWh of usable storage and 240 V 13 A (3.1 kW) connections to the grid, they would comprise a potential 88 GW of controllable demand and 250 GWh of storage. If the electric energy consumption of Britain is 320 TWh/yr, that's an average of 36.5 GW; the EVs couldn't store even one days-worth of energy, but they could even out some mighty big imbalances for hours on end. Compressed air could start up in minutes and go for perhaps a couple of days. For the long-term stuff, you might have to (gasp!) use fuel. Two days is plenty of time to crank up plants burning whatever, and if the long-term lulls aren't that frequent the total fuel required won't be much.
But let's change the subject to nuclear power, which Kunz characterizes as [1] uncontrollable, [2] high-cost, [3] dependent upon fossil fuels, and [4] with a limited supply of fuel. Aside from noting that he's been reading too much of both Dittmar and Storm and Smith, all of these are easily rebuttable:
That last deserves some analysis. Enriched uranium is what the USA's fleet of light-water reactors runs on. But that's not the only kind of reactor we've ever built; we could build them again. A company called Advanced Reactor Concepts is pushing a sodium-cooled fast breeder which can run 20 years without refueling. It takes an initial load of fuel enriched to 14-17% U-235 (it would take less if the load was plutonium or U-233). Even if there isn't enough enrichment capacity to make that fuel, that's not a problem; we have FBR fuel to spare. While there is only a limited amount of ex-PWR plutonium in the USA for such purposes (about 0.8% of roughly 50,000 tons of SNF), there is a great deal of ex-weapons plutonium which could be denatured (de-weaponized) into that stream and then destroyed once and for all.
How much energy is that? At about 0.8 tons per GW-yr, the 50,000 tons of SNF in US storage would yield over 60,000 GW-yr of power. The USA's electric power consumption is about 450 GW; 60,000 GW/yr / 450 GW = 133 years of power from spent fuel alone. When that runs out, the entire mass of depleted uranium tailings from 60 years of fuel enrichment is ready to go too; that adds perhaps 700 years. Even at a substantial growth rate, that's still over 100 years of demand without mining a single ounce of new uranium. And with so much more energy from a pound of uranium, mining the oceans is economically attractive.
Uranium isn't the end of the story, though. The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor breeds thorium-232 to uranium-233. Thorium is about 4x as abundant as uranium.
Will Kunz add these wildcards to his analysis? He hasn't thus far. If he's more honest than Michael Dittmar, his tune is about to change.