 | Storm Watch, 28 June 2010 and BP's Deepwater Oil Spill Open Thread | The Oil Drum | Drumbeat: June 29, 2010 |  |
The Fake Fire Brigade - How We Cheat Ourselves about our Energy Future - Thread 2
Posted by nate hagens on June 29, 2010 - 12:50am
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.
Resources and links
The Fake Fire Brigade - How We Cheat Ourselves about our Energy Future - Thread 2
PDF version
307 comments
The Fake Fire Brigade - How We Cheat Ourselves about our Energy Future - Thread 2
PDF version
307 comments
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
The argument that renewables are a "fake-fire-brigade" seems to amount to the complaint that they can't turn back time and prevent the house from being set on fire.
If the argument against renewables is that they will only provide a portion of the energy that we currently use, that is not a serious argument against renewables.
If the argument against renewables is that they currently subsist on the same fossil fuel infrastructure that everything else uses, that is not a serious argument against the possible existence of an infrastructure that is not fossil fuel based.
We used to see a higher number of serious posts on TOD about the EROEI of renewables, and some discussion of Liebig's law of the minimum. In my opinion, any argument that does not discuss the issues in these terms, and does not at least attempt to quantify them honestly, has no credence. This article is a failure on those criteria.
And what exactly is that? Nothing in particular is suggested. I cannot refrain from speaking frankly: that sentence is arrogant and meaningless bull@#$%.
My view on the implications of Hannes' article is that renewables in aggregate, even with declining/more costly fossil fuels won't be able to continue growth, yet our governments and institutions believe that the combination of energy sources currently promoted WILL be able to power global growth into forseeable future - the fact that this won't happen isn't discussed in polite company, but has huge implications for how we allocate resources going forward - namely that the type of demand system we have will have to change quite a bit - either in anticipation of change from 95% stock based to higher % flow based energy system or in response to when that happens on its own...
more anon.
Nate, I have three questions for you.
1) Do you think that there is anything out there that will allow the continuation of growth, that is,any growth, especially human population growth?
2) What role, if any, do see for renewables such as wind and solar as a foundational basis for a sustainable civilization. Do you even expect that some form of sustainable civilization is possible base on renewables?
3) Do you have any thoughts on how to steer collapse to a softer rather than harder landing?
I ask that last question because the conclusion that I come to from your clipped statement above is that you don't expect BAU to continue. Should those of us advocating renewables and a complete paradigm shift just shut up and go away? Well, that's actually a fourth question.
"advocating renewables and a complete paradigm shift" is sadly the Big Oxymoron in the room.
The real "complete paradigm shift" that is required is to recognise that the same useless politicians and useless political/education/selection systems that have got us into this mess are already too late to get us out of it. There isn't going to be some wonderful techno-enlightenment. I've already explained some of the reasoning further down here. The clued-up are preparing to get off the Titanic rather than theorising about last-minute redesigns of the hull!.... http://energyark.blogspot.com/
"Many are called but few are chosen (by their own self-selection process)"
F-
Not overall growth no - and mainly because we lived beyond our means for so long that oecd debt burden is albatross around neck of growth. Stable markets and stable geopolitics might allow for higher population growth though I think the UN forecast for 9+ billion will never materialize.
a)Eventually we will live off of flow based resources. The role I see now is understanding the implications of fossil fuel descent, debt overshoot, and renewable drawbacks (density, transportability, back-weighting of flows, intermittency etc) and plan a politically workable demand system around them. Actually first prepare for possibility/likelihood of currency reform and only then set up long range demand plan using renewables. Demand first - then supply - most people focus on supply first. b) yes eventually we will have a sustainable society using renewables - the catch is it won't be remotely at this high of standard of living.
Get more people studying and preparing for what a world without growth looks like - business as usual is now the utopian fantasy. I think the biggest wildcard in whats ahead is social stability - and biggest wildcard for that is expectations vs reality - the problem with USA is we think we have world by the b*lls and in reality much of it has been borrowed from periphery and future to bring to center/today - so the delta between reality and expectations, as a nation, needs to narrow. More specific will have to wait...
I have always been, and remain, an advocate of renewables. So long as people understand the implications for lower demand and possibly a different societal structure than we have now. So by all means technology, efficiency and conservation are important pieces - but the grandaddy of our situation is that growth is no longer possible - that piece needs to be understood first before the other pieces really contribute.
While I agree that demand reductions are getting to little attention, we need to acknowledge that the renewable buildout needs to be a steadily increasing thing. We can't switch horses, and leave a fledgling industry stranded, waiting for the strategy to catch up. Demand management and renewable buildout need to be pursued in parallel.
Reading the rest of your comment, I am reasurred, Nate clearly does get it. The quibble I'm having may be as much rhetorical as otherwise.
I think a great many of the people pushing renewables get it as well. The problem is that letting on about the need for demand reduction is a turnoff for the intended market. So we go for half a loaf and push renewables to a crowd that wants guiltfree BAU, not a fundamental change in lifestyle an societal organization. It will take some very large shocks before more than a couple percent of the population is ready for the whole kettle of fish. So we try to sell the part of the change that is currently saleable.
Step One in conservation and efficiency is really quite easy.
Buy the "Energy Star" product, do a little weatherstripping, install mainly CFLs (longer between changing bulbs is a selling point !), buy a higher mileage car.
Selling Step Two is more difficult, but increasing the % of people doing Step One will soften the crash just a bit. And make Step Two & Three easier sells.
Alan
Thanks, Nate, umm Dr. Hagens, that's where I thought you stood on all those points. though sometimes getting a direct response to a particular point makes it easier to cut through all the fog.
The little blue pebble in the river is us.
Which part of the "flow" is the immediately limiting one?
I also think that people have missed the very heavy reliance of renewables on the oil sector. Once the oil sector starts a major decline, the "renewables" (which are better termed the "fossil fuel extenders") will decline within a few years of oil. It may very well be that this decline is determined by the financial sector, because of debt defaults that result in major recession and declining demand for all fuels.
Another issue I see is the huge energy cost, dollar cost, and time delay implied by the infrastructure that goes with a change from any one source of energy to another energy source. Vaclav Smil, in his new book Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects, documents that energy transitions take many decades.
Renewables, at a minimum, will not be available in the timeframe needed to provide anything like the level of energy supplies that we have had to date. Smil concludes that we should set a lower goal for energy. He believes that in many decades, renewables can provide some lower level of energy supply, and we should be making plans with this in mind.
But Smil does not believe in the immanence of the peak oil threat. If transitions take many decades, and renewables are nowhere near ready, then there would seem to be a real possibility that our current system will cease to function, without any new system being in place. This is the "train running off the track" scenario that many peak oilers are concerned about.
While at this late date, we could theoretically come up with some solution (say, cheap oil from algae), even scaling this up, and getting the refinement and distribution system in place would take some years.
How we use words and language matters greatly! I think trying to define renewables as "fossil fuel extenders", which in my opinion they are not, is a big part of the problem.
Were early horseless carriages better termed as extenders for the horse and buggy?
No, they were a profound paradigm change. Auto mobiles were a completely different animal from a horse and buggy. Though it is quite understandable why they were called horseless carriages, because that was the context and frame of reference in which they came into existence so that is how people framed them.
I don't for a moment think of renewables as fossil fuel extenders nor do I think of them as substitutes intended to sustain and continue BAU. They are in my mind the foundation of a completely new paradigm. Whether or not that new paradigm can prosper on its own, or even what it will look like in a hundred years is a separate question and remains to be seen. The future probably ain't gonna be like the past.
I don't for a moment think of renewables as fossil fuel extenders nor do I think of them as substitutes intended to sustain and continue BAU. They are in my mind the foundation of a completely new paradigm. Whether or not that new paradigm can prosper on its own, or even what it will look like in a hundred years is a separate question and remains to be seen. The future probably ain't gonna be like the past.
The problem with that line of thinking is that, because of the maximum power principle, our system is already optimizing the use of renewables at the scale that is possible. Mother Nature uses solar in the most efficient way possible to maximize solar energy through primary energy producers (plants and phytoplankton). She's optimized the function over millions of years, so that she takes in the maximum that is physics-ally possible for each ecosystem. So if we start commandeering a portion of Mother Nature's use of renewable energy sources to try to do better in order to maintain even a portion of BAU, we start robbing from our own resource base, in the form of global algae biofuels, global wood biofuels, etc, etc. We can't do it without consuming the ground from under us, which folks from New Orleans are slowly discovering, just doesn't work.
Thanks, everyone, for letting me contribute to this conversation. Wherever we're headed, we're all headed there together. I am deadly serious about all of this. I don't like where the compass is pointed.
Iaato, we may not be all that far apart in our views as you might think.
When I talk about a completely new paradigm, I'm expecting it to include the realization that we can't have a successful civilization that attempts to live outside the limits of our physical system nor can we disregard the laws of thermodynamics.
I don't see any way to maintain any semblance of BAU, and most certainly not with global algae biofuels, global wood biofuels,etc..
Of course one of the implications of this new paradigm is that we will by necessity end up with a much smaller human population once fossil fuels become but a small part of our available energy sources.
Yes, sorry, FM, in my haste to get to my point, I implied that you wanted to prop up BAU. It is clear from your posts that you've got a wholistic view of our problems.
An example of my point is this. Posters yesterday implied that we could burn wood in a biofuel factory in the northeast to replace BAU. The problem is, once again, failing to take the whole system into account. If we get to the point where we're having to burn up the countryside to keep the computers running, then I can guarantee that there are people also dying from lack of heat. In that situation, we would have to burn wood in houses to keep people warm in rudimentary survival situations, rather than continue with large scale biofuel operations. Several previous pieces at TOD have covered what happens when everyone tries to heat with wood, and the numbers aren't pretty. Since we're in overshoot, we use up all of the forests in a rapid process, leaving us with Easter Island writ large.
Another current example is the use of natural gas in Anchorage. Last winter we had to permanently close down the fertilizer plant on the Kenai because during peak loads in the winter in Anchorage, the city was maxing out NG supplies out of the Cook Inlet and was in danger of brownouts. Houses come before fertilizer plants selling to Japan. And so it begins, robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The future will be disseminated, dispersed, and local, in order to take advantage of more dilute renewables, just like the plants we depend on.
edit to add to Greenish's comment below, a link:
https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/90/hedges-american-psychosis.html
It is ok if all cities and towns and manny villages have district heating networks. Then you can use larger hot water "boilers" that have good efficiency and real boilers in CHP plants that also produce electricity and it is easy to get the dust out of the smoke keeping towns clean and people healty.
This fuel switch from oil and coal to biomass and garbage is nearing completion in Sweden, oil is only used for peak heating and the coal burners are few. The next problem will be to replace garbage with more biomass wich is needed when the recycling gets more efficient, this will also happen faster if the economy shrinks.
Investing in district heating networks is a good way to invest capital for the medium and long term. I am very happy that district heating were established in a large scale the 60:s and since then has the technology been refined and made less expensive.
You bet, Magnus. Sweden is way ahead of us. We personally heat with waste wood to a wood-fired boiler with heat storage in a tank in our basement, which is then distributed to radiant floors. Our monthly gas bill midwinter was about $30. I wouldn't dare stay in Alaska without a backup source of heat. Anchorage has great opportunities for hydro, geothermal, wind and tide, and we are beginning to work on those, albeit a bit behind the curve, given the rapidly disappearing local natural gas. And people are trying solar up here, but I'm not sure that any type of solar except passive solar (even thermal) is really net up here, because energy demand surges (6X?) in winter. Longer term there is talk of a NG bullet line and larger scale hydro, but we should have started 20 years ago. I'm not sure if we're just too late, time will tell. In the meantime, I'm putting on my own O2 mask first.
We have to go forward with renewables, but the first step is to generate public interest in reductions in energy usage, and then renewables, both larger scale where warranted and lots of local, dispersed, small scale. I'm all for renewables, but only after we've educated everyone as to the cold clear reality of having to scale down. So that's why I'm here, today, talking. For the first time, perhaps due to the GOM catastrophe, there's a change in the wind and it appears that people are ready to talk.
No, she does not. Photosynthesis is many times less efficient than even consumer-grade photovoltaics. If we can figure out how to make use of hot electrons in quantum dots, our PV efficiency may exceed 60%. Mother Nature never dreamed of such improvements until Man whispered the idea in her ear.
No, we don't. If we take advantage of flows currently being lost as waste heat (much wind, solar striking roofs and pavement) we can power technological society with negligible additional impact.
We can do this. It's a question of will.
Well, maybe.
There are two kinds of "Mother Nature".
1. Little biological Mother Nature as functioning here on Earth at current global temperatures, and
Neither "Mother Nature" is an anthropomorphic being that has dreams, plans or intents. It just is.
If you do not understand that the little kind of Mother Nature (biological) operates on the basis of random chance and competition for resources, you don't understand Evolution.
Big MOTHER NATURE is the one who is going to dictate what maximum "efficiencies" mankind might extract using one technology (quantum dot photovoltaics) or the next.
"Efficiency" is not necessary for survival.
One can be very inefficient and yet still have an abundance of a given resource.
Solar energy is the number one energy input for little Mother Nature (biological on Earth), even though it is not "efficient".
I think you've missed the reams of rebuttals to this assertion over the years, but you're ideologically incapable of acknowledging them or analyzing contrary arguments on their merits.
As an example, the USA built transcontinental railroads without any significant use of oil. The only part of a wind farm which really benefits from the oil sector is the polymers which bind the fibers in the turbine blades. The rest of the system couldn't care less. You could build the power line to the site as the first step and use it to drive all the equipment and even charge the batteries of the road vehicles moving the components and heavy machinery, eliminating "the oil sector" as a factor in the construction. This isn't likely to happen, because other fuels are going to be cheaper than obsessive electrification of every last construction project in the field. The point remains that if we had to do it, we could and would do it.
All sectors depend heavily on the oil sector in two ways. The first way — as a direct contributor of energy — you've addressed. I have my doubts that we could take the system as it is now and keep all the supply chains going anything close to how they operate now with significantly less oil. The equipment in the field uses liquid fuel and it will take a while to alter it to use whatever other method you might have in mind. Perhaps in some decades we could get to the point you foresee. In the meantime, not much renewable energy will be built out.
But the other way oil affects every other sector is indirectly via the financial system. I assert that the decline of oil means the contraction of the economy and that, frankly, is going to change the whole ball game.
You may technically be correct that we can do what you say but, in my view, it will take decades to reorganize to eventually produce just a bit of renewable energy. We will not roll it out at anything like the rate it is being installed now when we are at the height of resource and credit availability.
We missed our window to build out renewables. Certainly keep building while we can because when the financial system goes the build out rate is going to decline precipitously, in my view.
The pie may shrink, but a much larger section of the pie can be devoted to building renewables (and energy efficient infrastructure).
Consumption in the USA is *SO* great that we can shrink it and still "get by" day to day and have MORE money for good investments while the GDP shrinks.
Best Hopes,
Alan
I hope so. I think contracting credit is what is going to shut the window on us but, until that happens, I say let's get as much built as we can.
Yes, this. I'll add that even in a collapsing credit market, credit for renewables will still be available. See 2008-2009 wind power growth (solar too) for solid proof. Pretty much every other renewable fits into this same category. We've seen exactly what was long foretold: when the energy crunch happens, we'll make a rapid and extensive push for a renewables buildout, even to the point of major degrowth in other economic sectors. And now that it's crunch time, guess what we are seeing?
Of course, the doomers are still saying such a buildout is impossible, and that even though we have seen strong, even unprecented, growth in these sectors, is that the numbers are still too small, and things will surely change in the future. They will continue to say so next year, as the exponential growth continues. And the year after that, and the year after that...
Hey Andre,
When it comes to posting essay's online about renewables (such as Hagens did with Kunz's article above), does it really matter whether we are arguing for renewables to be adopted because they are going to "supply anything close to what we have now"?
Maybe they just need to be adopted because a) they'll give us something as the oil is running out, and b) they reduce GHG emissions. That leaves only two pertinent questions: whether any renewable project built NOW will actually a) produce positive net energy, and b) reduce GHG emissions, over its lifetime.
Whether or not renewables will save industrial civilization, either in the short term or the long term, just isn't the conversation we should be having about them, in my opinion. Conversations on TOD notwithstanding, the world we actually live in is one in which most people still have to be convinced to even think about renewable power instead of Miley Cyrus.
oh, I don't know. We're building them out much faster now. I think it's too early to say where the window was/is and whether it's been missed already. We're not even absolutely certain if oil has peaked yet.
Exactly, Ben.
"We missed our window to build out renewables"
What then? Aandre, maybe we missed our chance to build 20 years of renewables, so we don't do what we can to build out 3? If it had been the right direction to take then, what makes them simply this 'waste of resources' now?
This is the problem with such posts, and with Gail's neverending assertions that there isn't money for it. We've got road projects all over my town. There is some money going over to Iraq and Afghanistan. I think there is a shortchanging on the courage and imagination required to find the places where money for durable renewables, passive houses, electric trains and insulation material is currently being MISspent.. or where high percentages of unemployed Americans might be given a chance to join a new Work program to rebuild America Right, this time!
We have materials, we have spare labor, there is food growing on the farms.. we need to put the real assets together, and not get hung up on the symbolic standin for assets that keeps us from moving forward by the mere suggestion of paucity. It IS possible to get out from under the hegemoney of the financial sector.
.. or to paraphrase the Economist joke. "So, we've got our imaginary can opener, but it turns out all the food on the island is in bottles, and there's just no imaginary bottle openers!"
Sorry I should have been more clear:
We have missed the window to build out renewables to continue this style of economy.
As for WastedEnergy's comment, renewable projects were cancelled in droves during the credit crisis — just like oil projects were cancelled. We managed to get the pump going again before too long but the next time I doubt that will happen.
When economies shut down, they shut down. See 1873 and 1930 for similar instances.
LOTS of durable useful infrastructure was built after 1930.
Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee, Huey Long Bridge (used 5 months of US steel production in 1933, from memory), Empire State Building, etc.
Rinse and Repeat,
Alan
Hear hear!
The argument that renewables are a "fake-fire-brigade" seems to amount to the complaint that they can't turn back time and prevent the house from being set on fire.
To clarify - and I know Hannes feels the same way because we have discussed it - it isn't renewables as a whole that are the fake fire brigade. It is those whose promoters have created such unrealistic expectations that they lull the public into a false sense of security.
If the average person hears over and over that we can replace all of our oil consumption with algal fuel or cellulosic ethanol, then they - or the politicians doling out research money - could easily conclude that we don't really have a major problem ahead. That is the fake fire brigade, and there are quite a few overhyped technologies/promoters that make up the brigade.
That is a statement I can wholeheartedly agree with!
It'd be hard to disagree with that. But the phenomenon of "promoters" owes a lot to our need to quash cognitive dissonance. In a sense, we demand them, create a niche for them, so they can do us that service.
A large majority of humans believe their social lives will not be unduly interrupted by their physical deaths. That being the case, it's perhaps unsurprising that the majority will always demand to be led into a false sense of security. Unrealistic expectations will always be the last thing to go.
Such as the unrealistic expectation that this will change.
It might be nice to extend the premise of this essay to encompass the fact that human brains work the way they work, so the paradigm of writing essays to globally affect that situation is up against hard limits. Religions of various stripe are what we have to work with.
Hi greenish,
Amen >;^)
You might like the excerpt I used in one of my responses to jeppen down thread.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6670#comment-663927
Another Pharyngula fan... I should have known they were hiding here.
Hiding?! LOL! I've been openly cross pollinating for quite some time now >;^)
say, replying to myself, I just browsed a story on the SciAm website which implies much the same...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=you-have-superpowers
So it could be that the challenge is to create a more useful class of positive illusions than those we're currently infected with.
or as I like to roll out on such occasions..
"Scott for scientific method, Amundsen for speed and efficiency but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton." [Attributed to Raymond Priestly but appears in essence elsewhere including in Cherry-Garrard's Worst Journey in the World
http://www.antarctic-circle.org/quotes.htm
Was it merely 'high hopes', or just his approach to life.. and in any case, would anything else have gotten them through?
Back when TOD regualars were asked to list several recommended books they felt relevant to "peak oil", one of mine was "Endurance", about Shackleton's voyage. Flat-out amazing, and inspiring.
I nominate this as most profound comment of the thread..
We also have fear, including panic, to work with.
Anticipating and managing the future panic response is developing into the core of my implementation strategy. First, get "head space" and create a meme with promises of good things while pre-positioning the best set of solutions as the default panic response.
I tried to get Nate involved in a discussion about this, but he deferred, citing other commitments.
There is a meeting tomorrow at 1 AM that is a crucial stepping stone in this process. A serious plan by a significant organization with resources (financial, political & other) to get the USA off oil ASAP as much as possible.
Best Hopes,
Alan
I predict that the coming hard times will bring forth new religions and new (or revived old) political parties. In particular, I can guess at a return of William Pelley's Silvershirt movement--good old fashioned American fascism modeled on that of Mussolini's Fascist party.
Mainline churches are losing membership and financial support. They will be replaced by extremist sects and cults that become successful and institutionalized.
Sounds like an opportunity.
Apologies, but this doesn't sound like a prediction. It sounds like Current Events.
Yes, but can you write that as an equation? Fat chance...
That I could agree with. The message from the article is tad ambiguous, however, and appears to say that renewables cannot be a future energy source. I'd be happy to hear this clarified.
Gail brings us back down to Earth with her reference to the concept of "What happens to any manufacturing, renewables or otherwise, during proactive or reactive powerdown?" Perhaps this is what Hannes meant...
Robert;
I understand the effect you're describing, how it could be de-energizing the motivation for working towards effective solutions by saying that there are solutions in the works..
and yet, I feel that the phrasing the Hannes and Gail above are regularly using are far more guilty of undermining the efforts that are now simply imperative that we forge ahead with, in order to establish enough of a fraction of our power supply from the useful renewables that we have some backup energy coming in if/when a serious decline in FF hits.
Continually demeaning things like Solar Heating by using technical and misleading phrases like 'Low Grade Heat'.. without clarifying that we are using high-grade fuels throughout our world simply to use in 'low-grade' applications.. is using language in a way that clearly sends people the message today that these alternatives are unhelpful, insufficient and somehow counter-productive.
I have to cry foul at this.. even if it's being done innocently and with the best intentions, I feel that such rhetoric is directly undermining the important role that these simple but highly effective tools should be playing in our energy future.
Gail Writes:
Which renewables? How much energy? Of course the timeframe is inadequate.. we keep getting told "Don't start those things now.. they Take Too Long!"
So to paraphrase your closing line,
"If the average person hears over and over that 'Renewables' don't really work, take too long, cost too much, and all of them are just 'Fossil Fuels in disquise'.. how much incentive will these folks have to look seriously and soon towards the ones in that category that WILL help them and us all?"
I put my own assumption in there.. and to detail it again, I can see no overwhelming dependence that Solar Cooking, Lighting and Heating have on Oil, just because the ones being built today, like everything built today, is soaking in it.
Surely, aspects of Big Wind and solar PV need a mining/refining industry and transportation in place, and these have a more complex relationship to oil, but I have yet to be convinced that it is a Tango that depends on the dance partner of Oil exclusively and in perpetuity .
To put it more succinctly, "If not renewables, then what? If not now, when?"
Best,
Bob Fiske
Excellent points, Bob.
I've seen the diversions (or cognitive dissonance) you're talking about... in person. Perhaps because I am a fact-centered person, I have trouble believing that anyone could be deceived about the essentials of the problems ordeals we face... yet I see many people, including editors of TOD (who censor my words and refuse to return them to me) exclaiming things I know to be questionable at best and probably false. The subjugation of facts to dogma here at TOD by the people in charge are one of the most depressing things I have ever seen.
There is a little joke at the end of a recent NYT article about incompetency and those who are too incompetent to know they are incompetent.
It goes like this (short version):
Before they leave, He tells them how horrible and painful the world outside is going to be.
But then as a parting gift He says: "I kind of feel sorry for you as a species (homo saps) and all that you are going to face. So here is my last gift to you: self-deception. This way you will never know how bad you've got it."
I can accept that we have countless wild headgames just as a regular part of our functioning..
And yet ultimately, how much must we hold of acting because others are deluded? If folks (to bring it back to the head topic) are getting complacent, or Remaining Complacent with the misapprehension that all the talk about ethanol and windmills lets them off the hook, I think it's reasonable to expect they will get their next wakeup call before too long.
The 'shhh, don't tell them solar works, cause they'll think there's no problem now..' carries about the same logic as 'don't be nice to children you don't know, cause then they'll develop an unnatural trust in strangers' .. It might actually be better for society to have people growing up in it that can learn to make their own distinctions..
Of course, Hannes concluded another post in here just recently which included the comment that 'that we spend a lot of money we don't have on things that don't work.' .. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6670#comment-664408
Wind and Solar surely DO work, but we have to learn how to work WITH them, and not treat them like some 'Dumb Animal' that we can manage with the right set of whips and chains, and otherwise throw them in the ditch.. or like some bottomless tank of 'Engine Elixir' that gives us all the candy we've ever dreamed of. Storage is a serious issue, DSM, SSM(if that's a real TLA) and other variants have to be worked out.. any our expectation of uninterruptible power might well be one of the issues to be revisited.. whether we 'accept' such compromises or not.
Those "others" own the banks, the money, the means of production.
Those "others" want one and one thing only: maximized profits.
Maximized profits come to those who drill and suck when oil is at $80/bbl and higher.
Big profits do not come to those who use windmills to tilt at the problem.
Dunning–Kruger is supposed to be funny?
Glory Hallelujah! So that's how we got religion, now that's funny!
Could you please give some specific examples to illustrate your statements in your two last sentences?
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5447
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5480
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5480#comment-511165
This blog was very interesting when it was predominately heavily evidence-based work by, for example, SS, RR, JB, and EM. I didn't agree with all of their conclusions (and said as much), but it was clear that the authors were basing those conclusions in large part on the evidence they'd accumulated, and that's always worthy of respect and discussion.
Unfortunately, there appears to have been notably less of this evidence-based work after the bursting of the oil price bubble in 2008 quelched a lot of the "peak is now" fever. In the absence of a strong evidence-based focus, the tone of the stories appeared to shift more and more towards the subjective and even the insular. Article comments have always exhibited a strong streak of "here's what I believe, and anyone who disagrees just doesn't 'get it'", but that closed mindset appeared to creep more and more into the articles themselves.
There are still plenty of good articles - for example, the tech talks - but there no longer appears to be nearly as much in the way of well-researched and largely-unbiased research and analysis on oil. In their place, to a large extent, are often opinion pieces which are, unfortunately, too frequently heavily biased and poorly backed up by available evidence. Too often these articles read like the conclusion was written first, and any evidence presented was only scrounged up to illustrate that predetermined conclusion; unfortunately, Gail's articles in particular seem to have this tendency.
That's not to say the blog can't function like that - there's plenty of room on the internet for people who prefer opinion and advocacy rather than fact and evidence. It changes who the blog appeals to, though, and changes the potential influence it can have.
In my opinion, humble though it may be, this change has seriously undermined the value of The Oil Drum. Intensity of belief is no substitute for evidence.
Thanks Pitt. Once again you've spoken for me, too.
We are on that giant "undulating plateau" of the peak production plot.
And since the confluence of too many things going wrong all at once hasn't hit yet (i.e. a bad hurricane season, technical difficulties in the hard to get to places, etc.) we're sort of like the man/woman dropping past the 50th floor of the Empire State Building in slow motion and saying, "Gee this isn't as bad as I imagined it would be!"
The technical numbers do come out in each month's oil watch.
Nobody is yet spotting the start of the permanent decline.
Therefore we all sigh with relief and say,
"Gee this isn't as bad as I imagined it would be!"
At last year's ASPO convention, I witnessed a TOD editor respond with an outburst of "YOU CAN'T DO IT" in response to what had been mostly factual discussion.
Apparently, "YOU CAN'T" extends to not letting me have the analysis in numerous censored replies to Michael Dittmar returned to me. Coming from those people, I have learned to interpret those words as "you musn't" or "I won't let you"—not unlike an abusive spouse trying to prevent the other from leaving.
And if the average person hears - even once - that renewables are "fake", he may very well delay or refuse to adopt them, even if he has the means to do so, and the motivation to change his habits.
With all respect Robert, you can't convince me that using the term "fake-fire-brigade" to refer to renewables in general is responsible, unless you really believe that the net energy of all renewables is negative, which I'm pretty sure you don't.
If you follow RR's blog, you'd know that the Fake Fire Brigade includes people like Vinod Khosla and his spectacular flop, Range Fuels. I would include the ADM front Renewable Fuels Association.
My comment was aimed primarily at Hannes Kunz, and only at Robert in-so-far as he is defending Kunz article here. I generally respect Robert's writing as nuanced and objective, not something I can say about the key-post above.
I can relate to this "fake fire brigade" analogy since my father was the Fire Chief of a Volunteer Fire Brigade. He and his fellow fire chiefs used to sit around and talk about how their biggest problem was preventing their men from doing something stupid.
A case in point was when the County Office building caught fire. The men were there with axes ready to chop down the front door and charge in with fire hoses to put it out.
My father blocked their way and said, "NO! STOP! Don't do it!."
He had them crack a window open about 2 inches, stuck a fire nozzle through, and turned on the water. He timed it with a stopwatch and when they had put in exactly the right amount of water, they shut it off and closed the window.
They waited an hour, and when they opened the front door, the fire was out and all the water had evaporated. All the County had to do was replace the charred woodwork and furniture, put in new carpets, and repaint the walls.
My father said, "They had a superheated atmosphere in that building, and a fire that was starved of oxygen. If they opened the door and charged in, the fire would have gotten oxygen and flashed over, the interior would have gone up like a bomb, some of them would have been injured or killed, and the building would have burned to the ground. On the other hand, if you put in exactly the right amount of water, the water all flashes to steam, the steam puts out the fire, and at the end of it all you have no fire and no water damage." (He used to take all the Fire Chief courses and read all the materials on the subject.)
I guess the moral of this story is that you have to know what you are doing fighting fires, and the same applies to energy problems. A bad solution is worse than no solution at all.
A bad solution is worse than no solution at all.
Exactly, and a point I have made many times. When those with the false/bad solutions cause potentially better solutions to be unnoticed/undervalued, then that bad "fire brigade" should have stayed home.
We work with what we have in place and what we can build.
If Texas of 2030 has 72 GW of wind turbines installed, 40% of homes with solar hot water, 19 GW of solar PV and HV DC connection to 5 GW of pumped storage in Arkansas plus another 1 GW at home, and 14 GW of nukes, they can face a decline in natural gas and serious post-Peak Oil better than if they had none of the above, which is what Hannes appears to promote.
Sometimes bad fire brigades are better than none at all.
Alan
To be truthful, Texas would have 1.9 TW of capacity; 72 TW is for the world's land and near-shore.
That's still something we'd be better off with than without.
That's a sweet analogy, RMG. We need to shut down the oxygen to the system, and take one of the superheating variables out of the equation. It takes a threesome to superheat; remove one, and you may not have to burn the entire building down. My other question for everyone, then, is this.
If you could turn off the tap today to shut down or close off most of the fossil fuels today, would you do it?
Perhaps we need to see a few nations collapse and the collateral damage to see the necessity of regulating our own behavior. However, the parts of our brains that motivate our activities have evolved over many millions of years of ruthless competition and are not readily amenable to rationality that contravenes our natural impulses--Dopamine
Because of this problem, I would--maybe just leave a little trickle. And for those of you who will inevitably suggest that its a good thing that I'm not queen, I suggest to you that the real queen, Mother Nature, has got it covered.
Here's the button. Do we push it?
A lot at stake, and while the button is metaphoric, is isn't necessarily unreal.
And it will eventually push itself.
A world in the balance.
Just push it... on your screen, right now, for practice.
And then, think about how to build that button....
I think I have gotten closer to mastering the button part recently, however connecting the button to the circuits, levers and gears that will produce a useful workable outcome as opposed to a destructive uncontrolled explosion is taking me a little bit longer...
I didn't push it, Greenish.
There are still things to be done with the artificial light that's on, before I head into the dark.
(But I DO encourage people to try it with their master breakers in the fusebox sometimes. Have an ENERGY FAST as a Summer Solstice party with friends, or something, and see what you notice missing when the power is off. Keep a notebook handy!)
Bob
Well, at the moment I'm using fossil energy too. Heck, I'm largely made of it.
But if the only choices were an immediate halt, versus a long grinding coal-burning future, it would be hard to make a reasonable case for destroying the world and its carrying capacity in the service of short-term comfort.
If the button could be made, it should be.
greenish, unfortunately many people don't care about diachronic competition, taking from future generations even if its their own children. Magical thinking is always available on tap, a bit like when no could imagine the banks failing. Human nature under estimates the complexity and time needed and over estimates the skills needed!
and just as unfortunately, we find people still trying to boil this problem down into 'Now or Never?' as the choice.
'Push that button'.. or 'Get all the cars off the road, NOW!' or, 'Change the entire Paradigm from the ground up' .. They all sound good and forceful, but how much more magical can thinking get? Yay! Extremists are Strong, compromisers are weak! The complicated middle roads are just 'buying time to keep burning FF', they're 'BAU lite' .. well sorry, but this thing don't turn on a dime. If you really want change, it'll come as a collection of many many increments and lots of hard work.
In reality, the changes we need to make will take planning and preparation, they will take energy, probably mainly FF energy, and they will be fighting a LOT of inertia.. so a Middle Choice (or several steps in a Range) are what we need to consider here.
The button doesn't exist. A bouncing ball just won't suddenly stop. It bounces lower and lower and slower before rolling to a stop. I think FF based economic activity will be the same. The dissipative systems will bounce slowly (I think you can see this bouncing going on in the pages of Bloomberg and other financial news). The transition to solar flows (renewables) will happen at the same time, also slowly. I would like to see people not using cars but that is not going to happen.
In case I wasn't clear, I was trying to say pretty much what you did.. tried to place those initial statements as what the other was saying. But boy, am I tired..
For the same reason you should take a box of dynamite away from a 4 year old?
If I could push a button to add $3/gallon to US petroleum taxes, I'd push it without hesitation.
Walks up to button and pushes it 10 times!
Looks over at folks who say we can't afford renewables and with evil grin asks would you like me to push it another ten?!
But, but, but, you'll destroy the economy!
What's it gonna be your failed idea of an economy? Or more Oil spills and global warming?
We can't do this, who's going to finance all the new infrastructure?!
The bank of ingenuity and F'n necessity! Either that or the same bank that financed Tutankamon's pyramid...
BTW, in case you haven't been paying attention, the shreds of the FF economy are getting more and more frayed by the minute!
Listen up now! Cracks whip! lines up all the economists, lawyers, bankers and other lazy parasitic SOBs harnesses them to the big flatbed with the wind turbines on top, "*MUSH*!!!"
Well maybe we'll need to find a better word than "MUSH" that might only work for dogs pulling sleds in the snow... Wonders how to write "MUSH" in Hieroglyphics. Queries, the "BIG DIGITAL BRAIN".
Un F'n Beleivable what you can find with Google... It just never ceases to amaze me!!! Here ya go!
HAL! HAL, are you screwing around with the thermostat again?
No, because realistically the renewables cannot fill up the gap. They don't scale sufficiently well. I wouldn't want to create a disaster. My intention is to prevent one. Disaster is not inevitable, just as fires are not inevitable. If you know how to prevent one, you can, but I have the feeling that many people do not know how to do that, even though they think they do. They want to fight fires without knowing how.
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!) burn something. 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.
I think your assessment is a bit too harsh, but I agree with your conclusions. I think the end result of the analysis is too pessimistic. Even "catastrophic" power outages will cause, at worst, a loss of power for a few days, and only when wind stops blowing "across entire continents," which does not seem like a terribly likely event. And even then, so what? You lose power, big whoop. Remember what you did when you were a kid and that happened? You spent time with your family, went for walks, played board games, played with your pets. You know, TALKED TO EACH OTHER and APPRECIATED EACH OTHER. Something we could stand to revisit today. Whatever happened to the idea of community? No power for a few days the end of civilization? Laughable.
And I don't think we have to get there. We do have resources we can tap into. #1 is creativity and #2 is willpower.
And #3 is wind, the most scaleable renewable today, and other renewables are coming up too. Wind WILL get us most of the way there - the market has already declared it to be so, and we can demand it too. Just because no energy source has seen sustained 40% annual growth does NOT, NOT NOT, mean it is impossible. Just look how badly it whallops nuclear with far lower subsidies, it is laughable. And it shows that market prowess combined with political willpower can advance a technology much more rapidly than it might appear, until one looks at trends. Now, trends. Aangel cites oil's 7% growth rate during the early 20th century as the upper limit. Why is that so for wind and other renewables? We didn't have any political will or collective action to bring high growth rates for oil production into being, so why use that as the upper limit for a scenario where we can and, if we all work at it, will?
#4 - sustainable biomass, including substitute fuels from gasification rather than fermentation. You know, high-EROI proven technology. #5 - Hydropower, including energy storage. #6 - geothermal - available in more places than we seem to realize and available on demand. #7 is electrified transport, already PROVEN technology, which makes me wonder why people seem so worried about giving up their cars. Hell, you'll be HAPPIER without one. Ever consider what a hassle it is to pay for and maintain? #8 solar, both PV for peak shaving and grid-independent power and over the long term, solar thermal with energy storage for load balancing.
Next up, next-gen resources like waves, ocean thermal, and yes, even nuclear.
The list goes on. Declaring the entire renewable energy project a failure is something premature, and not just because of some sense of false hope we feel compelled to maintain.
We have the technology, we CAN rebuild it.
A fresh start (and morning in Europe). I would like to briefly respond do some of the rather clear statements made here.
Yes, that is true. I make propaganda for a sense of reality, paid for by my (and a few other people's) interest for keeping societies stable, as we don't want to be lulled into a feeling of "we have solutions", while in fact we don't.
Robert and I steal from each other: http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2010/06/17/setting-the-ethanol-recor...
and uses that example to declare them all worthless." That is not what we are trying. We were using examples to avoid writing 10'000 words or more. But unfortunately, biomass - even the one with better EROIs than corn ethanol - is not scalable to cover even a fraction of today's fossil fuel demand. Given the conversion efficiency of photosynthesis for solar radiation, and the competition with food and other ecosystem services, we don't see those things, even if they can provide some energy meaningfully, as contributors to a Business as Usual scenario, which is what we critisize.
Comparing today with the arrival of coal in the 17th (or even 18th) is theoretically a strong argument, because it suggests some future blindness. But - I think - with a weak point. The EROI of coal was far greater than the one of wind back then, and non-intermittent. Our case is that the future doesn't provide those "next better technologies", at least not that we would see them. And somehow, there even is some irony in the fact that back then a (very stable and robust) application of wind was replaced with fossil fuels, and now, a very fragile approach (feeding into inherently unstable grids) using the same wind should suddenly provide a good replacement for the former.
We don't argue the theoretical potential of solar-based inputs onto our planet (wind is solar, too). We argue that irrespective of size, wind comes as a flow and we humans have grown accustomed to using energy stocks (e.g. fossil fuels), and now try to desperately fit flows into that pattern. This is the only thing we say will fail, not that we shouldn't use nature's powers as energy sources.
It was never our intent to only look at electric cars as storage, but instead to show the disproportion of storage need when truly relying on flow-based energy inputs to manage a steady supply. In order to buffer 1 kWe of wind power capacity (which usually runs at 20-25% average capacity ), we need between 160-200 kWh worth of storage. No matter what we try, this is just too big to afford, as it is - even when using the cheapest possible technologies - a multiple of the direct cost of wind power.
One more comment to the growth of renewable electricity generation. - A common mistake made when looking at growth of renewable electricity generation - is to look at peak generation capacity, e.g. maximum theoretical output. We prefer to look at production, and this is usually low (between 15 and 25% of peak capacity for wind, and below 15% for solar).
Those shares of individual uses are probably correct, but they omit two things: First of all, they relate to residential electricity use, which only represents about 37% of total electricity consumption (EIA, 2008 data). The rest is going to commercial and industrial application, which are far less flexible - without impacting total productivity and output. So if the 14/14/9 percent are correct - I didn't check - the above shares would amount to 14% of total electricity consumption.
Second, 14% in air-conditioning doesn't mean that 14% will be flexible, neither will be 14% of refrigeration, but probably a maximum of 10-30% of those uses. The final objective of cooling (no matter if it is goods or humans) still is to keep the ambient temperature almost stable, which limits the ability to shift. Plus: everything aimed at storing heat or cold will incur losses and infrastructure cost.
that is precicesly the argument we are making. Renewables don't just produce a few hours of imbalances, but instead days and weeks of imbalances (see Fig. 5 of our Britain model). That's where all storage fails.
This is the toughest one to argue, because we're talking about potential future designs of reactors, where as many enthusiasts exist as there are pessimists (with a degree in the respective field). Yes, there are many ideas for generation IV or V reactors, and theoretically, they might have some merit. However, what is currently operating or under construction in the gen II and III arena, doesn't look too promising to us. For a number of reasons, I try to avoid the "nuclear" debate if I don't have 4 hours to talk.... (my bad to put it into the post).
I still don't buy it. Wind and other renewables today have a much higher EROI than fossil fuels. Intermittency is not damning to any of the technologies, it is merely a technical challenge costing at most a few cents per KWH to resolve.
I think it IS future-blindness, plain and simple. There are alternatives, as many of the commenters here have laid out. What is missing is the political willpower to enact them.
I would tend to disagree with the "better EROI". Coal still might be somewhere around 50:1, while a recent wind meta-study arrived at 19.2:1. But that is misleading.
When looking at our energy delivery systems, your "technical challenge" needs to be subtracted from the theoretical EROI, because what ultimately matters is not a kWh produced somewhere offshore in the middle of the night, but a reliably delivered kWh into our human ecosystem. To accomplish that, the cost is much more than "a few cents per KWh", unless you use fossil fuels.
Nate mentioned the two papers we both wrote together looking at "Net energy and time", and "Net energy and variability". These papers were eye-openers for both of us, as we suddenly realized that all renewable energy flows pose almost insurmountable hurdles for keeping our energy patterns going when we have to switch from mostly stocks (fossil fuels) to flows (renewables). Should you be interested, we are happy to provide a pre-read.
And one last, more philosophical comment: I sit on the board of an NGO advocating behavioral changes due to looming climate change, and have always been an advocate for renewable energy, and still am. The only thing I question is that we try to fool ourselves into false hopes of keeping what we are used to.
The fact that I get the most heat from people who defend wind is almost ironic to me, under that pretext. The reason why we are so skeptical by now is just because we have done our research without just copying what other people wrote, but instead done some heavy modeling ourselves, of which you get a glimpse in our post. As I wrote before, and repeat here - we are happy to share everything we do, and invite everybody to discuss.
The 19.2 figure for wind seems very low. I am poking around to find it but I recall recently seeing analysis that it was around 40:1. If one of the other commenters here has this figure handy that would be helpful to see. And I think also if you are going to include the externality of any additional smart grid infrastructure, etc. that must be built for wind (keeping in mind that a lot of this is happening anyway) then I think it is only fair to include climate change mitigation-related activities in the EROI analysis for coal. Moving millions of people away from islands and shorelines sounds pretty energy-intensive to me.
In any case, to me it sounds like the worst case scenario pointed out in the article is that we have some blackouts. I doubt most of the folks here are really after "keeping what we are used to," we were more worried about how we were going to feed 7+ billion people going forward, and things of that nature. A blackout every once in a while is hardly an apocalyptic doom scenario. The issue here is with intermittency rather than with scaling; I see no resource limitation that would prevent renewables from eventually providing the bulk of our electric power, with wind, the most easily scaleable, as the backbone of the system. There is no inherent physical limitation that would prevent you from having an equal amount of power available even to what we have today; the only issue raised here is that we might not have it 100% of the time. I think that is a scenario we can live with and learn to adapt to. And of course we both recognize the value of efficiency and curtailment (negawatts) in making the supply and demand ends meet even if an energy scarcity scenario is approaching.
I would definitely be interested in reading the net energy papers you reference. If you don't wish to post them in there entirety here you can send them to me: [jeremy.abramowitz] [at] [gmail] [dot] [com] (just spam-protecting e-mail address, I'm sure you can figure it out).
Maybe to those of us who recognize that BAU is not in the cards for our future. However, I know way too many folks who see themselves as being "green" and assume BAU will indeed continue, we just need to substitute "something else" for fossil fuels. They haven't even gotten to the issue of carrying capacity because they believe that problem will also be solved by technology or "something." Tell them they have to endure blackouts on occasion because the wind quit blowing and the stored energy has to be managed, and they will not be happy at all. If there is no hope of BAU they may indeed see this as the apocalypse.
What this article points up for me is the effort that needs to be made to change our behaviors and expectations. Even if commercial and industrial use of electricity is hit the hardest there will be fallout to the society at large. We aren't ready and we aren't working on getting ready.
Perhaps the number you should be looking at isn't the current cost/kwh, but how that cost is changing over time. Clearly PV will become the "Crazy Eddie" of energy supplies in a few short years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
How ironic that the most abundant form of energy will soon become the cheapest. A Doomers worst nightmare come true.
So the bottom line is that we will soon have far fewer energy slaves and that many of them will no longer show up at our beck and call.
How humbling, no wonder our egos do not want to accept this.
I would like to see more than a glimpse of the modeling that you do. We can certainly do a better job hashing over the details of a model or of analyzing data than we can building hardware or conducting experiments in this kind of forum. Sounds trite but it is true.
Hannes,
Allow me to introduce myself. Beyond my name, I believe I'm living somewhat the way you are suggesting in your conclusion, though even I can make many more changes. I designed my passive solar house, which is largely powered by PV. I now take a bus to work (as opposed to 50% carpool, 50% telecommute) and in two years will be taking local rail (when it completes) to my office. Our yard is 95% fruit/nut trees or shrubs/vines and we have a large bountiful garden (with a grain plot). A major news affiliate came out to do a segment on our approach - http://www.wusa9.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=72750&catid=158
So you can see, I'm not a proponent of BAU, walk the walk, and am actively calling for changes.
I'll start with your conclusion first;
That is an extraordinary claim, for which extraordinary evidence is required. You've only really talked about the UK alternatives and their perceived shortcomings, so perhaps you mean to focus only on UK energy future problems. Your comments, however, seem to span at least the commonwealth nations and the US, without supporting evidence. This is why you've received so much pushback.
In a sense, that's what I'm doing now personally, though do not have the benefit of further demand side response features from my utility yet.
Reshaping societies is easy to say, very hard to do. First, you have to give people reasons for them to change. Then you have to give them a vision of what that change will look like. Both of those steps can run smack into the high stone wall of denial in a society where comfort and mobility is equated to standard of living, not to mention the current culture of energy addiction. If people are expected to living within sustainable energy means and you don't know what the sustainable energy source is yet, then starting with that which exists begins that journey.
My personal opinion on our future (US) energy mix of the future is;
- Wind 20%
- Nuclear 25%
- Hydro 15%
- Solar 20% (includes space and hot water heating)
- Geothermal 10% (see this MIT report)
- Natural Gas 10% (primarily
But supply is only 1/2 the picture. Our demand can be greatly reduced through efficiency and conservation.
For building energy use (residential, commercial, and industrial), many technologies and design techniques can be used now to dramatically reduce energy consumption in new building. Retrofits can also significantly reduce energy use in existing buildings.
- The Oil Drum | Advice to President Obama: Grasping the Building Energy Bull by the Horns
Transportation is another major energy consumption sector, and there are no simple answers there on how to get people out of cars, though the alternatives are gaining ground these days;
- Mass transit, with rail being easiest to electrify
- Vanpool/carpool, still relies on oil, though EV/PHEV can change that to a degree
- Cycling is now more attractive with electric boost options
- Walking is another mode likely to be employed by those in walkable communities (also gaining ground) and those employing mass transit
Electricity generation can be highly distributed with a smart grid of long distance HVDC bulk transmission lines. For example, where I reside in Virginia, US, I could take advantage of wind from the Atlantic, the Appalachian Mountains, the Great Lakes, even the prairies. I can take advantage of hydropower/storage in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and even Canada. I can utilize my existing solar PV and passive solar heating. I can draw from nuclear plants in Virginia, as well as high efficiency gas combined cycle plants here as well. Those in the western US will have slightly different mixes, as wind and solar are more abundant and consistent there, and geothermal is plentiful
Electricity consumption can be adjusted to supply, as you have noted before, though gave little consideration. Commercial and industrial buildings already employ demand response measure, some with their own power generation to offset high grid demand times (or dips in supply). Algal biodiesel generation holds promise for a more sustainable industrial response to potential infrequent dips in the energy mix I noted above.
A potentially broad lifestyle change needed to greatly reduce demand can be found in Europe and is spreading to the rest of the developed world;
Transition Initiatives - you'll likely find some of what you were proposing.
Now on to more direct response to some of your feedback;
But you must take into consideration other renewables as well that help to even out peaks and valleys from any one. While the UK may be limited, other nations have large resources of solar, hydropower/storage, geothermal, wave power, etc. For example, Australia and New Zealand have enormous solar potential (and remember my link that showed molten salt storage provides an annual capacity now of 70% vs. the 25% of daylight-only operation). Canada has massive hydro and wind resources. The US has a mix of all the above. All of these nations (and most of Europe) have extensive geothermal power resources. So again, don't gauge the potential of renewables based on what is available in the UK.
That's why we can use a number of renewable energy sources and storage to help levelize these flows, with nuclear as baseload and natural gas as gap-fillers. Add to this demand response from residential, commercial, and industrial consumers.
You have taken one or two examples and extrapolated the rest of the world to them (excluding demand response and long distance HVDC), which is why you are getting so much pushback.
What are your sources on solar capacity? Solar power can be provided during non-daylight hours, up to a 70% annual capacity factor.
Wind actual capacity in the US is much higher than you state, I wonder if you mean "credit capacity value" instead;
For a deeper examination of the data in the US, see Determining the Capacity Value of Wind: An Updated Survey of Methods and Implementation< NREL, 2008
So while you have a start to an analysis, there is still a long way to go and many other locations to consider before you can reach any conclusions for areas outside of the UK.
One simply can't say "We must get off fossil fuels, renewables can't do it, so magic will happen" and not expect profuse feedback.
I would like to take some more time to provide some answers to all your points - today isn't good for that. That's one of the reasons why Nate and I suggested to take a more technical discussion offline and bring the results back in a more structured way.
But let me try to resolve a confusion about "installed capacity" and "capacity factor" that seems to have entered our discussion: The solar panels on my roof (about 100 sqm) have a specific rating, to be precise: 11.156 kWp. (kWp stands for the peak output they can deliver under ideal circumstances, at ideal temperatures). The same is true for wind turbines, if a turbine is rated with 2 MW, that is the maximum amount it can deliver when the wind blows accordingly. A coal or nuclear power plant also gets rated at a specific capacity (say 1.2 GW), describing the peak output in a similar way.
What now gets measured and put into "installed capacity" statistics, is exactly that number, irrespective of the fact that the renewable technologies don't deliver that "peak" for most of the time, but instead only for short periods. On average, they deliver far less. For wind, the output to theoretical capacity (peak x 365d x 24h) in 2007(the last we have, from IEA) show the following: U.S. 23.6%, Germany 18.3%, Denmark 23.8%, Spain 20.4%).
With my photovoltaic panels, it's the same. Where I live, they produce about 1'000kWh per kWp and year, which is about 11.4% of total maximum theoretical capacity. I know this does not make any sense, as there is no sun during the night, but that's how new renewable capacity usually is measured in statistics.
And with the pumped storage and hydroelectric capabilities of Switzerland, your 11 MWh annual production should make you home self sufficient and a slight energy producer, with power available 24/7 (from France late at night).
If you buy an electric car, then you may need to add a few panels.
Best Hopes for seeing the possible,
Alan
Alan,
this is exactly why I struggle. I well know the production curve of my solar panels. And in Switzerland, with almost 60% hydro, we can deal with some of my erratic output, but for most places, this isn't the case. The amount of storage is so huge that it simply takes too much to provide it for wind or solar. (Fig 5 shows how that looks for wind). No storage technology can cover that, only existing stocks (e.g. fossil fuels or hydro).
As for changing my statement about what renewables have to provide: I don't think I do. The only thing I say is that we should look at the future from a "how can we do without fossil fuels" perspective, and then use what is left of FF (and we can still afford to use) to make things work better. I just don't like the approach of incrementally adding renewables to current energy delivery systems without understanding that there are limits.
Hannes,
Do you have the equivalent of a figure 5 for the 10 major wind producing regions of the US? The solar potential of the US Southwest? The solar potential of Australia and New Zealand? You are again forgetting about solar thermal power plants with molten salt storage.
And don't forget about geothermal baseload power as well (read the MIT Report!);
I don't think any of us do either, which is why there are intense efforts underway to study, design, and implement various aspects of the "Smart Grid", from long range transmission to demand side management. Increasing building and vehicle efficiencies are complementary steps. More certainly can be done, but denial, addiction, and inertia are tremendously large hurdles to leap over all at once.
Pumped storage can cover daily and weekly cycles well enough almost everywhere with HV DC. It just cannot cover seasonal shifts well without storage reservoirs the size of Lake Winnipeg (24,500 km2 and used as such by Manitoba Hydro) or the Great Lakes. Issues that I have thought about BTW.
I just don't like the approach of incrementally adding renewables to current energy delivery systems without understanding that there are limits.
I understand quite well the limits of renewable power, as well as you do. But I do not then call them "False Firemen" or "wasted investments of trillions" and then discourage any investment in them at all, resulting in a faster burning of fossil fuels and a harder crash.
The only thing I say is that we should look at the future from a "how can we do without fossil fuels" perspective
A very bad approach ! Perhaps useful in an academic ivory tower when contemplating the late 22nd century. Bad because it discards solutions that use 1.5% of current carbon emissions simply becasue of that 1.5% (I am referring to a plan that I wrote up for the Florida grid of 2035).
There is value to incremental planning. Texas is now investing almost $5 billion in transmission improvements that will allow an additional 18 GW of remote wind to be added to their "island" grid, ERCOT. A good thing IMO. A waste of money according to your article.
Texas needs to be thinking about pumped storage, solar PV and water heating, conservation & efficiency, more nuclear plants and batch industrial processes IMO. But they do not need to be making hard plans today about a 100% renewable society.
I noted that you did not mention nuclear power, which is another key part of the puzzle in getting off FF.
Alan
The people on the shores of Lake Winnipeg are not all that thrilled at their lake being used as a hydroelectric storage reservoir. The lake level goes up and down depending on the demands from people in the U.S., not what they would like. Sometimes it's flooding their basements, and sometimes it's a long distance to drag the boat to the lake.
Locally here in the Canadian Rockies the priorities are different. Kayakers take priority over American consumers and the electric utility turns the river on and off depending on when the kayakers want to run it. (Fortunately, the tourists think this is some kind of natural wilderness, rather than a managed playground for people like me, and believe all these things happen naturally.)
Here in Alberta there are lots of companies lined up to build new wind generators, but the transmission lines are overloaded and losing energy because they're running hot. However, there are plans to build new transmission lines to rectify this (I know some of the planners.) It is a good deal because 1) there are areas which are ideal for wind power (the wind always blows there), and other areas where there is hydro power to cover the shortfalls if the wind fails to blow in the always-windy areas. There is also a lot of natural gas, and natural gas units are great for backup power.
However, in Alberta, we are awash in energy resources. We have oil, gas, coal, hydro, wind, you name it. Our priority is to sell oil to the U.S. because it is expensive, and use everything else ourselves because it is cheaper. The problem for other areas is that they don't have as many options, and in many areas it is a serious problem.
Renewables like wind power are good if you can back them up with sources like hydro or natural gas that you can turn on and off at will. If you don't have backup, then you will have a problem managing the system. Most places don't have enough flexibility to operate with more than a small proportion of renewables.
So if you haven't got that backup for your wind, are you saying you won't take the wind, either?
Think about being in Peshawar or Baghdad these days. Would a couple solar panels that only helped run and charge things during the Sunny Daytime hours be preferable to wondering how many hours of grid power they'll be giving you next month?
I'm saying that if you have sufficient backup generation for your wind generators, that wind power is a good choice. My concern is that people have promoted wind power without worrying about backup generation for when the wind does not blow. If you do not have the backup, then wind is a poor choice.
I was in Nepal when the capital of Kathmandu was having blackouts 8 hours per day (I believe their now up to 12 hours per day). The shops and restaurants all had gasoline and diesel generators, when the real solution was for the Nepalese government to build a few giant hydroelectric plants in the mountains. In fact, companies from India and other countries would be happy to build a few giant hydroelectric plants for them if they could have most of the power from them. The problem was that the Nepalese authorities were just not sufficiently in tune with the problem to rubber-stamp the solution. In fact, they did not seem capable of doing anything at all other than fighting among themselves.
On the other hand, in nearby Bhutan the government had swung a deal with Indian companies to build a 1000 MW hydropower plant, and they had three others planned on the same river downstream from it. Bhutan doesn't need anything near this amount of electricity, so most of it went to India, and the money from India paid for free health care and education for the Bhutanese. The difference in the well-being of the people was just stunning. They talk about Gross National Happiness but the rapidly rising electricity revenues and free government services do contribute to a lot to the cheery grins on the people's faces.
There are storage technologies that can deal with intermittent power generation. The VRB-ESS system has many successful installations in place:
http://www.pdenergy.com/
These are not points that require an instant answer. Take a few weeks to assimilate other responses as well and publish the follow-up you had mentioned. I would ask that you remain open to drawing conclusions based on ALL of the data in it's proper context (i.e, current performance or better as technologies/techniques improve).
Check the IEA reference you're relying upon; is it current installation performance, or is it blending in installations pre-2000? The data I gave for the US 2004-2005 installs shows onshore wind actual capacity at just above 35%, due to higher turbines, better wind data, better micro-siting, etc. To base future projections on anything but the most current equipment and techniques would give one a misleading perspective.
With regard to solar capacity factor, you need to understand the different types of solar power generation. You obviously understand PV, though solar thermal generation has been enjoying a resurgence (pre-recession, anyway) and has a capacity factor that is based on the energy it can store over time. Hence, a simple formula that divides peak solar insolation by time is non-applicable; one must look at the relatively steady generating power over time, as the molten salt levelizes most of the peaks and valleys, depending upon a number of design factors. For example, a solar thermal plant rated at 50MW might have what you refer to as a higher theoretical capacity, but the plant is operated to provide a more steady, levelized output. I've used NREL's Solar Advisor Module on some simulations, and recommend it to your engineering staff that is performing the energy modeling.
Please provide all of the formulas, data, assumptions, and topologies you employ with your future response, so that we can understand the conclusions you've made.
An excellent post !
I like the analysis and only have some "2nd order" nits to pick.
Best Hopes for Realistic Analysis,
Alan
"so magic will happen."
And here it is.
And here
andhere
Magic breaking out everywhere!!
Don't you just love it.
May I rock your flying boat a bit? I don't think you really grasp the profound and fundamental paradigm shift that needs to occur, and is actually occurring right now to allow living in a renewable and sustainable energy civilization. I just don't get the impression that most people understand that as monumental as these shifts are they are happening and will continue to do so. To be clear I'm not talking about just the technological progress but rather the psychological and cultural change. Imagine you are piloting the Solar Impulse and your batteries are fully charged, but you need to fly it through the night with enough reserve power and altitude to be in a position to recharge your batteries tomorrow, This ain't like flying your daddy's flying Oldsmobile! You need to think in a completely new way or you will crash!
http://www.solarimpulse.com/en/documents/challenge.php?lang=en&group=cha...
To me the most important thing that Solar Impulse team are doing, beyond their incredible technological acheivements, is to turn all the old ways of thinking about powered flight upside down and out the window. They are at the forefront of a paradigm change in the way we think about energy use and storage. To me they embody the essence of the way we must all learn to husband and live with our limited energy budgets in a sustainable way.
Compare this new way of thinking to the thinking that went into the design and construction of Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose... http://www.sprucegoose.org/aircraft_artifacts/exhibits.html
It is a paradigm which in my mind is the equivalent of Tyranasaurus Rex before the extinction of the dinosaurs. The people working with renewable energy are the equivalent of the furry little energetically efficient endothermic mamals that filled the new ecological niches that were created by the demise of the dinosaurs.
The idea that renewables can or should be able to maintain BAU or the Spruce Goose way of life will be slowly extinguished.
Best hopes for the furry mammals who are flying the Solar Impulse today!
Disclaimer: I am a partner in a Solar Energy start up.
I'm going to take time I don't have this morning to write a timely response.
Then you should welcome any relevant facts you missed in your analysis.
I didn't mention biomass even once, but since you keep dragging it back into the discussion I'll go into it.
Agreed: it is impossible to take the flow of biomass and use it to replace our flows of coal, oil and gas. However, aside from aviation there is no energy end-use which needs them. We need carbon for metallurgy and to make e.g. polymers; aside from that, electricity substitutes for almost everything.
Once you have replaced the bulk of chemical fuels with electricity, biomass can become a stock. It can be torrefied or pyrolized to storable forms, and then banked for months or years.
8 and a half DAYS of batteries? This is another example of the fallacy of composition. You picked the worst of the options, find it won't work, then use that to dismiss the entire idea.
Compressed-air storage systems in planning are aiming at 50 hours of storage (2 days), but the storage reservoirs could be scaled up at modest cost; that could get you to 200 hours. Another alternative is to use biomass stocks as the bridge from 50 hours to 200 hours. 150 hours at 36 GW = 5400 GW-hr. At 22 GJ/ton and 50% conversion efficiency, 1.8 million tons of torrefied biomass would produce 5400 GW-hr of electricity. A quick search finds that Britain generates over 300 million tons of organic waste per year. It is clearly feasible to bridge several 150-hour gaps each year using existing biomass sources in Britain.
If the political process forces bad siting in Britain and Europe, that's for the political process to fix. Capacity factor of new wind farms in the USA is around 35%, though I understand this has been dropping because transmission lines from the best territory are saturated.
I used residential as an example. Air conditioning and other cooling represents a very large fraction of commercial and industrial electric consumption also. It has already been noted that frozen-goods warehouses in Europe can be used as "cold batteries" without any new equipment whatsoever.
Belied by examples. Engineer for it and it can be done; to give one example, ice storage can be retrofitted to existing A/C systems. If the cooling system can run hours to tens of hours with only circulating fans and water pumps, it slashes the need to store electricity.
Which can be made up from other things, which cannot be ignored in any fair treatment of the issue.
There is enough cheap uranium and thorium to run the current crop of LWRs through their design lives. (Lightbridge's fuel will stretch uranium supplies several times even in current reactors.) As for the future, projecting what we'll do beyond 40 years is impossible. 40 years saw commercial nuclear power in the USA grow from a few small pilot-scale reactors to about 20% of the nation's generation, and it started less than 20 years from the first experimental chain reaction. The MSR/LFTR and IFR technologies have been held up not by feasibility, but by politics; they could be restarted today, and IMHO we are way overdue.
I am out of time to steal from work. I will be back this evening.
I understand this has been dropping because transmission lines from the best territory are saturated.
Texas chose "Scenario 2, 18,456 MW of new wind transmission, $4.93 billion" and is building it out now.
http://www.ercot.com/news/press_releases/2008/nr04-02-08
This plan covers only new wind exported from the Panhandle and West Texas to "population centers" and not North Texas and coastal Texas, both of which are close to population centers.
Given the installed capacity (~10 GW from memory), the local demand in the Panhandle and West Texas, plus North and coastal Texas wind farms and that wind turbines can accept wasting 1% or 2% of their generation due to lack of transmission, I can see over 40 GW of wind installed in Texas before Scenario 3 or 4 will be needed.
All "false firemen" and a waste of money.
Alan
I guess they could have built another nuke for that $5 billion instead. That would be an investment in energy instead of in mitigating wind problems.
Let's have a race and see if the overages and holdups on building those Transmission corridors have a prayer of keeping pace with the overruns and unexpected delays of the reactor.
Also, how many specialized replacement/maintenance materials does that Reactor need to have access to for the next 40 years or so? How stable is the fuel supply and price? How transparent are the owners if there is any question about safety failures or compliance?
I don't really care about scenarios in which we cannot keep our reactors going. (Once built, they aren't that complicated, actually.) If we can't, then we are likely dead anyway.
We're dead without Nuclear. Ok.
Are you intentionally misunderstanding?
We're not dead without nuclear, but if we can't do nuclear, we have been killed and nothing matters anyway.
Oscar Madison: 'MURRAY, I don't have time to unravel your logic!'
Supporting almost any renewable on the list is technically far easier than the materials, money, infrastructure, political system and skills needed to manage Fission, and it can generally be assembled flexibly in small or large batches, making financing, maintenance and expanding capacity far more accessible to communities and nations of widely divergent sizes and means.
"..but if we can't do Nuclear, we have been killed and nothing matters anyway." Go get an ice cream. Be happy.
No, it's actually 40-50 days of battery (assuming a high average output of 25% of nameplate capacity), and something near that worst case comes back a couple of times every year. This is the case for Britain, Spain, and Denmark, which are the places where we have enough data to check the case. Unfortunately, we were - despite searching long and hard - unable to find enough reliable data for the U.S. (neither for real wind electricity production in aggregate, nor for hourly wind data that hasn't been modified already) - if anybody can provide it, we can re-run our models with U.S. data within days.
By all means, let's look at Figure 5. Here it is again.
Several elements are immediately obvious to the careful observer:
If you start from the lowest point in August, here's what the storage curve would look like:
That 5.5 TWh figure is put into perspective by my calculation that a 5.4 TWh deficit could be managed by making and storing 1.8 million tons of torrefied biomass. My quick search turned up individual municipalities handling 300,000 tons or more of green waste per year and tens of millions of tons total.
The cumulative deficit isn't as important as the rate. The total energy to be banked determines the size of the storage, but the rate determines the size of the powerplants. Figuring that it's more important how fast you have to take things out, I drew a line from the minor peak in late May to the secondary valley in July.
This looks to be about 3.6 TWh over roughly 50 days. That's an average rate of 3600 GWh / 1200 hr = 3 GW. This is a fairly small amount of power, about 3 major powerplants worth. Gas-turbine powerplants, even with gasifiers for biomass, shouldn't cost more than a couple dollars a watt; the cost would be on the order of $3-5 billion. On the scale of most nations' import fuel bills, this is pocket change.
So, to sum up:
That appears to cover all the cases. The costs appear to be within reason, and the savings from e.g. eliminating petroleum imports using EVs could pay for quite a bit.
And now that I've spent the better part of my evening drawing graphs to try to clarify these muddy issues, I'm going to try to read what everyone else has said today.
Thank you for looking in more detail at one of the core statements we made, which was: "Storage is not feasible for wind". This particular graph wasn't aimed at making a case that we cannot balance stochastic inputs, but as a case against trying to store these imbalances, as this does not work. More below.
1a). The starting point in January is indeed arbitrary. However, we did the same for Denmark and Spain, where we have multiple years of real-time hourly (DK) or 20 minute interval (E) data. After chaining multiple years, which we did for Denmark, we tried to start at multiple points in the first year and always, over time, arrived at the same result: For each kW installed capacity of wind you would need 160-200 kWh of storage capacity, which translates to about 40-50 days of supply (depending on capacity factor).
1b) The assumption of having to supply 20% of demand was made based on the need to provide input according to our human demand systems. If we plot the deltas against a flat line of a constant 20% steady supply, the result does not really change. Wind is stochastic both against demand and against a flat line. Actually, for Denmark, it gets slightly worse when looking at a flat line, as winds in summer are stronger throughout the day.
2) We don't consider 5.5 TWh "only", for storage systems, this is quite large, it represents 8.5% of total annual output of wind electricity.
3) This is correct. However, if we need to provide storage, this slow accumulation of surpluses and deficits actually makes things worse, as storage losses usually increase over time for most technologies. What the graph shows is a "chronical" deficit building up over a long period.
This is exactly the point we are trying to make. In order to bridge those large deficits, we need stock based electricity generation capacity. And yes, biomass could work for that. For biomass, we just would like to offer a word of caution: Many already plan to use biomass for covering peak demand in electricity generation, and others want to create transportation fuels from it. And now we add a third application. Ultimately, there simply isn't enough biomass for all those uses.
Correct. This drives home our point once more, that we need stock-based supply into our electricity system, and natural gas is currently the best option for balancing other things. The point we were trying to make was a completely different one: That we shouldn't even try to spend money on storage, as this won't get us what we hope for - stability in meeting our demand.
- wind usually doesn't create millisecond to minute-problems, so this is (thank god) an issue we simply don't need to solve. Even over shorter periods, we see multiple days with strong wind and multiple days with low winds across large areas (we modeled a pan-European wind based electricity system including the North (DK and Northern Germany), Britain and Spain based on real-time hourly data and found enough of those periods to scare us)
- see above - the fluctuations often don't really involve tens of hours, but multiple days
- we covered that above, no argument here, except for availability issues for biomass for everything
We appreciate that our relatively bold claim gets so much attention and scrutiny. When we wrote what we wrote, we had two options: to either make a very general statement about the problem (It's not in one single technology!) and try to show with some examples that we have done our homework. Or to just focus on one technology alone and try to drive that point home. The latter would have defeated the purpose of alerting people about the imminent problem that we don't have solutions even though everybody claims this is the case, and that we spend a lot of money we don't have on things that don't work. This approach now puts us at risk of being called out. This is fine, we invited it. And it helps the effort.
I will stop responding to individual comments at this point in time, because I have a better offer to make: Whoever is interested in understanding what we have done and why we have come to those conclusions, is invited to get in touch with us. We work "open source", e.g. all our models, calculations and arguments are being made available to people who are interested in understanding what we have to say. Ideally, this will lead to one or more new TOD posts providing more clarity on many of the open questions raised. What we will do in any case is answer the plethora of important questions raised in the comments. But ultimately our point is to convince more people to work like we do - to have a systemic view instead of focusing on small parts of the problem.
Another overarching misstatement.
"Storage is not feasible for wind"
Pumped storage works just fine for daily and weekly variations between supply and demand.
Seasonal variations are a tougher nut to crack, but I pointed to one partially built out example and other ways of coping. But these previously pointed out facts dispute the dogma and are hence discarded.
Lake Winnipeg (24,500 km2) is currently used as a multiple GW (and TWh) storage reservoir. In can be economically modified to offset a good fraction of the summer lull in North American wind.
The seasonal fluctuation from spring to summer for the Great Lakes could also be managed to offset the seasonal wind variations (although writing the EIS would be difficult !).
There is annual lull in wind during the summer. A fact in most places except those with seabreezes (where wind increases during the summer, reliable morning and evening breezes).
The immediate solution that springs to mind is solar PV (Spring/summer max, winter minimum fits nicely with wind) coupled with FF back-up and the previous noted pumped storage. (Yes, we will have SOME fossil fuels, enough for occasional gap filling).
And any bio-fuels that can be stored up (examples: bark & other scraps from lumbermills, bagasse from sugar mills) could be burned (mainly) in the summer months, preferably from dusk to dawn (to compliment solar PV and minimize the reliance on pumped storage).
Alan
A few counter-counterpoints:
I am all for taking a systemic view of problems, but when that "view" is phrased entirely in negatives (misleading ones, at that), it suggests that dispassionate analysis has taken a back seat to an agenda.
A few more points:
But the grid as a whole does need to solve them. Creating a grid's worth of spare capacity (a large EV fleet with V2G) lasting even 5 minutes yields tremendous resilience; major power lines could trip off and come back without anyone noticing. Today, such an event causes at least momentary blackouts. A grid with such resources isn't equal to today's, it's much better.
Note that we don't even need a Smart Grid to do some of these things; an EV could respond to changes in voltage and phase at its charging outlet and automatically switch modes within 1 cycle.
I would love to look at your data to see if certain assumptions, such as a "bank" of 50 or 100 hours of average demand (quite feasible with CAES) make these issues manageable or even trivial.
I took a look at the IIER site and was very disappointed. There is nothing posted there on this particular topic beyond the text of the article above. There are no further graphs, no links to other resources, no references to the models or data used.
IIER does not appear to have the open-source philosophy.
While preparing our response post to address many of the comments, criticisms and questions raised by the readers, we came across a misstatement that we felt should be addressed: the graph we used (Figure 5) was a cumulative expression of the NET STORAGE CAPACITY REQUIREMENT (taking credit for storing wind during periods of excess production). This graph did not tally the total gaps to be bridged. Below is how that would look like, e.g. this is what stock based fuels (biomass or natural gas, as suggested in the comments) would have to provide, if no storage is present (which is the norm).
As you can now see the cumulative backup requirement is more than 19 TWh.
As long as Im overriding the decision to save comments for a second post with this correction, let me provide some analysis on pumped hydropower. First, a review of the concept: A pumped hydro situation consists of two basins with an elevation difference. When there is excess capacity, water gets pumped from the lower basin to the upper, which then runs down again to the lower, generating electricity at times of gaps. Please forgive me if I use metric units, in our full response we will include imperial too.
The theoretical kinetic energy of 1 m3 (1000 liters) of water flowing down 100m is 272Watt-hours. Assuming a loss of 30% from pumping up and running the generator turbine (70% total round-trip efficiency), those 1000 liters of water are able to generate about 190 Wh. Thus two reservoirs that are 1 km long and 1km wide and 40m deep can theoretically store 7.6 GWh (if both can be fully emptied without problems).
We assume that we want to store 90 kWh per kWh of installed wind capacity, e.g. half of the empirically measured long-term gap, which is between 160-200 kWh per kWe of wind energy
Thus, we would need 360 kWh worth of storage capacity per expected kWh of wind output (assuming a 25% capacity factor).
The above two reservoirs, which are already fairly large, will thus be able to serve about 21 MW of wind to cover the mentioned 50% of the long term gap
To us, that doesn't sound like an economically feasible option.
(70% total round-trip efficiency)
Bath County Pumped Storage has operating (real world) cycle efficiency of 81%. Raccoon Mountain has cycle efficiency of slightly over 80%. I got this data first hand from their engineers. Bath County at a HydroVision confernce, Raccoon Mt on-site.
http://www.dom.com/about/stations/hydro/bath-county-pumped-storage-stati...
http://www.tva.gov/sites/raccoonmt.htm
To us, that doesn't sound like an economically feasible option.
Both of these GW+ class pumped storage units are economic and comparable near by sites, almost as good, were evaluated before these sites were selected.
those 1000 liters of water (100 m head) are able to generate about 190 Wh
PLEASE get your engineering straight !
And what of Lake Winnipeg (24,500 km2) ?
Alan
P = ρhrgk, where P is Power in watts, ρ is the density of water (~1000 kg/m3), h is height in meters, r is flow rate in cubic meters per second, g is acceleration due to gravity of 9.8 m/s2, and k is a coefficient of efficiency
Let us assume pure water, density = 1000 kg/m3
h = 100 meters
r = 1 m3/sec (all in one second, this is the slightly tricky part)
g = 9.8 m/sec2
k = 0.95 (reasonable for good pumped storage design with large penstocks)
P = 1 x 100 x 1 x 9.8 x 0.95 = 931,000 watts for 1 second.
To transform to Watt-hour we divide by 3,600 for 259 Wh or 0.259 kWh.
Yes, it takes more energy to push the water up. At Bath County, 0.259/0.81 = .319 kWh (transforming losses included).
Alan
It's good to see all the talk about hydro storage, my favorite world-saving move. But people, do keep in mind that solar thermal (another favorite of mine) works great, is proven, and sure is scalable to any size anyone would want, as has been tediously discussed often and in depth for decades by such people as the europeans looking at the sahara.
One little observation on storage, an obvious one. Take a look at the world map of insolation, and note where we have a combination of very high solar flux, right next to the sea, with lots of places to put the high reservoir. My quick glance says the gulf of california, and the red sea are great places for huge solar thermal/storage plants, within HVDC range of populations, and easy transportation of the needed ins and outs of energy factories capable of running a civilization of needs.
Now, does anyone quarrel with the size of the sea as an pumped hydro source/sink?
Ditto for the sun as energy source. Big enough? Durable enough?
PS I am NOT advocating BAU. It makes me sick. It's easy for the USA to knock off at least 2/3 of its insane energy usage right now, with no pain to anybody but the people who do nothing but push paper for a living.
PPS. Good to see EP back making people nervous, and, yes, I did get that little stirling thing working great but the $ people are still making timid excuses.
the $ people feel that they can make the big bucks in pumping out no-cost viral software.
how can a slow mo' Stirling compete?
Just leave poor Lake Winnipeg alone. It may be huge in areal extent, but it averages only 12 metres deep, and the area around it is flat as a billiard table. The lakeshore property owners are already upset that Manitoba Hydro is keeping the lake level higher than they would like to see. It probably has the biggest algae problem of any lake in the world, and using it as a hydroelectric reservoir makes this problem worse rather than better.
If you need more electricity, Manitoba Hydro could probably put another 5000 megawatts on the Nelson River, for which Lake Winnipeg is the storage reservoir. I'm sure they would be thrilled if someone wanted to buy it, because Manitoba has no need for that much electricity.
However, that 5000 megawatts could be used as backup for days when the wind didn't blow in the U.S. Midwest.
19 TWh would require about 6.3 million tons of torrefied biomass if conversion efficiency is 50%. Per the Times of London, Britain landfills about 4.5 million tons of wood waste alone each year. This is in the ballpark.
As you mention, "no storage" is the norm. However, norms can change. Switzerland builds pumped-storage systems to profit from arbitrage on French nuclear power. Britain might convert some of its empty natural gas wells to compressed-air storage (burning something in the extracted air to oxidize the residual methane); come to think of it, purifying landfill gas and re-injecting it in those old fields for storage is another arbitrage possibility. It would be fascinating to project the change in fuel stocks required as the amount of storage varies over a range of 0 to 100 hours.
I look forward to seeing your models (which I hope I won't have to run Windows to use).
hannes, I definitley for one would like to see you do a few more posts. For me what you've highlighted is a culture that even at TOD, for some, is so embedded in their way of thinking, that they can't see what this post is pointing to, a complete culture change of how we use energy and mechanims of transition.
Hope you get round to giving this hornets nest another good kick.
The most recent example of my objection to fission power is currently swirling around the Gulf of Mexico.
Not that there isn't a lot of energy in fisson. Not that there's a shortage of trans-lead isotopes. It's that humans do not have the attention span to operate a fission reactor safely. Period. Safety protocols will be ignored and eventually forgotten. Imbeciles will be placed in control of them. The tendency to do this is universal.
Two hundred years from now, the DWH oil release will not be remembered at all. The damage will have washed away with the tides and wind, the tarballs oxidized away completely. But the landscape will still be littered with the radioactive rusting hulks of any fission reactors we build. When did Three Mile Island stop being radioactive? Or Hanford? Or Chernobyl?
We, humanity, must end population growth, bring prosperity to all nations and all peoples, combat global warming and withstand Peak Oil. We must do this within our own life times, or at least within our children's. It's a fairly narrow window of opportunity and a lot to do. If we succeed, humanity may live forever. If we fail, our grandchildren may be the last human generation.
Nuclear is our best hope to provide the energy necessary for success. To succeed, I'm willing to accept (but don't expect) numerous nuclear core meltdowns and numerous radioactive releases. Chernobyl may cause 10,000 lives lost according to pessimistic estimates. But that many die each day in global traffic!
We are talking about the fate of humanity here. So why are you worried about some tens of thousands of lives and some local contamination?
Solar is in fact our best hope -- unfortunately it isn't popular with the centralizers / globalizers because it doesn't proved the sort of revenue stream they have gotten used to. No one can claim ownership of the Sun (though a few have tried, e.g. the Aztecs)
Solar with NaS batteries for night. Keeps ya comfy and warm/cool and enough to run your computer and a small car for local trips :-)
As for the population thing, yeah, we need to address that as well.
I insist that nuclear is our best hope. Intermittent sources + storage likely can't adequately and economically power the human civilization. What you say about "revenue streams" is partly correct. We need to be as efficient as possible to further human prosperity and to replace ff quickly. But it isn't just the "centralizers/globalizers" that need this. We all do.
Nuclear has it's place, but it is not needed in large areas of the world.
Solar has problems in Iceland (latitude 60 N) during the winter, but hydro and geothermal are good options. Too many volcanoes and earthquakes to find a good nuke site.
Alan
The problem isn't the large areas, but the large populations. Iceland has 300,000 inhabitants. The 20 largest cities of the world all have more than 10 million inhabitants.
Obviously it can't power the civilization we have now!
There is nothing that says we need to continue with the current model. Why not figure out a way to have a civilization that does just fine with intermittent sources of energy and storage. Quit trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. Were going to need some round pegs, let's get to work building and testing a few...we know some of those round pegs are going to break so we are going to need a lot of different versions. Maybe some of the old square ones can be whittled round. But we got to stop trying to work with the square ones!
That may sound wise, but as I said, we need all of humanity to prosper. That's the only good way to stop population growth, wars and pollution. That says we need to continue with the current model. You may want to reshape society to use round pegs, but that's just overhead we can't afford when square pegs works better for us and we need to do what works best for us right now.
Yeah, Square pegs are working real well for us! See GOM! No external costs there...
That may sound nice but it is neither true nor feasible especially since you don't even want to invest in transitioning to lower EROEI (round) pegs. Let the die off begin!
Yes, square pegs are working real well for us. We prosper and grow. I don't know what GOM is, sorry.
It isn't true that we need all of humanity to prosper? Explain? No, I don't want to invest in low EROEI pegs if I can keep using the better ones (such as nuclear).
Sorry for the use of the acronym GOM stands for Gulf of Mexico.
Ok but I suspect you probably won't like my frame of reference...
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/06/sunday_sacrilege_so_alone.php...
In a way, I agree with that quote. Life is meaningless and there is no grand design. OTOH, I like humanity, I think tech and scientific progress is cool and I get a bit upset when people suffer unnecessarily. I want to live for as long as possible and I want to see and experience where BAU and science takes us.
I'm not interested in self suffiency nor in "preparing for doom". I'm not interested in being one of a few that survive the apocalypse and live on in a low tech society. That's not my life and that future, to me, would make life and humanity rather pointless. So I advocate ways of doing things that maximize our chances of sustaining BAU and progress through this critical time period. While some of you seem to try to maximize the chances that some remnant of humanity will survive an apocalypse.
Hey we're on the same page there, no disagreement. I'm Brazilian by birth and just enjoyed watching Spain beat Portugal with my son. Spain won 1 nil. I felt sorry for the Portugues they palyed their hearts out! BTW the last time I watched TV was during the last world cup, four years ago!
This mind set I don't understand.
First, to be clear, I think it is possible to at least envision a future civilization with a good quality of life that is not based on the current consumerist and ecologically unsustainable fossil fuel model we have now. Actually I imagine it could be a much higher quality of life.
Second, I don't buy into the premise that sustaining BAU in any form is either possible or desirable. As for being a survivor, I've managed to hang on in a few very critical situations. I'm not afraid to lose everything I have, even my life if necessary, to give my son his chance at decent future. I certainly can't predict that future nor assume I myself will live to see it.
I'm not interested in self sufficiency and survival either if it means living alone in a cave somewhere. I think we can do better than that, I may go down with the ship but as long as I can I will fight to steer it away from the rocks. That's all any of us can do.
But I can't accept not trying at all and just sitting in first class listening to the band while drinking a fine cognac knowing that we have hit an iceberg and multiple compartments have been breached and we are taking on water. I think it is my duty to at least help some of the women and children into the lifeboats. Even if I know for a fact that there aren't enough lifeboats for all of us.
Cheers!
I agree with Jeppen that culture and cultural development is a lare part of what makes ones life worth living. I find meaning in the advancement of science and technology and actually making the world a better place to live in with knowledge, infrastructure, other forms of capital and deeper understaning of reality instead of mindless repeating of old religious tomes.
You may imagine that, and it may even be correct, but it flies in the face of current evidence.
Then you are probably unaware of the enormous human progress BAU brings us. I don't blame you, though. Mostly media brings us negative drama, because that's what sells. But the progress is, as I said, enormous, due to capitalism, trade and consumerism. All over the world, poverty diminishes. Education and life spans are improving all the time. The population growth is abating. Women enjoys more freedom. Health care is improving. Mobile phones are everywhere, revolutionizing communication and information, especially in poor countries. Energy efficiency is improving all the time. Many types of pollution is diminishing. There are less conflicts and wars. And so on.
With a few more generations of the same, the world and humanity will be in really, really good shape, contrary to common narratives.
Here we obviously differ. As I see it, my life and that of my children are tied to BAU. I would certainly struggle on in the face of collapse, but before such a collapse, I'll always feel the scenario is so bad that it is meaningless to plan for. It would be like a chess player wasting valuable time to ponder what he'll do if he loses his queen with no compensation.
Yes, let's steer humanity away from the rocks. Let's not plan for our family's Crusoe life.
Sure, after a crash it is. But I would trade the life boats against a lower probability of crash.
No, I'm acutely aware of the enormous human progress that BAU (cheap fossil fuels) has provided, after all I'm sitting in front of my laptop drinking coffee and typing these words.
I agree that the media sells us negative drama, entertainment, in lieu of real information or news.
What it also does is very effectively sell the idea that BAU is good and that it can continue ad infinitum, now that is what really flies in the face of current evidence...
Though I don't really think I have a snowball's chance on the north pole of convincing you otherwise.
Your mind is completely taken over by the meme of:
Even though the spectral analysis of light bouncing off the walls is clearly showing complete absorption you continue to see all the colors of the rainbow... Either your mind has been infected by the meme I just mentioned or you are seeing imaginary stars because you have been hit upside the head by the two by four of denial.
Please don't take my comment above as condescending or an attempt to insult you, It is the exact opposite, I'm hoping against hope that I can reach your rational faculties and innoculate you against that exact meme, so that you might be willing to critically examine the evidence and come to your conclusion on your own. Right now you are operating from the premise BAU can go on forever and are trying to find every possible argument to support your forgone conclusion.
Best hopes that you stop to critically examine the evidence and see where it leads you.
Cheers!
You are aware of the progress that BAU has provided? Then how come you stated in the previous comment that "BAU in any form" isn't "desirable"? A+B => evil FMagyar?
Actually, I think it is quite likely that we can sustain BAU past PO and I don't see much else stopping us either. And that is after critical examination of the evidence! And yes, you do come off as condescending, but that's ok.
Though, evil, I may be, what I said was:
Do you perceive the subtle but very distinct difference between what I actually said and what you say I said? BTW, that still amply allows for the possibility that I'm both well aware of the progress that BAU has provided and I still appreciate and take advantage of said progress. However I don't support the premise that we should be kidding ourselves that it can or will continue.
Hey, you win some, you lose some.
No, I don't perceive the difference, and I don't think there is one, as far as logic and language are concerned. However, I do accept that you didn't mean what you wrote.
OK, last try. What we have now is what I call BAU, I even like BAU and admit that I desire BAU.
I would love for it to continue if that were physically possible. Unfortunately it isn't possible.
Now, whether you agree with me or not, as to what I'm telling you, I'm saying, is actually what I am saying... Well what can I say?
What I'm saying is, based on my reading of the evidence, BAU can't continue therefore it won't continue. I'll even accept that you think it can, fine, we disagree.
I, at least, conclude that it is pointless to invest more energy in trying to keep it going.
I do not find doing pointless things to be desirable.
Therefore I said: "I don't buy into the premise that sustaining BAU in any form is either possible or desirable.
Do see the difference between say trying to keep a brain dead individual's organs functioning through extraordinary artificial means as being qualitatively different from desiring that the individual be alive?
I'm saying it's time to pull the plug and have a funeral, not that I won't miss and mourn the dearly departed or appreciate my inheritance as long as it might last.
Furthermore I think it's time to concentrate on supporting whatever viable offspring BAU may have spawned while alive.
It's time to move on...
I agree that the population bomb will defuse by itself if we can assist the developing nations of the world get abundant emission free energy. Energy is the driver of economies. With energy comes industrialization. The products of industrialization are goods. Goods to improve the living standard at home and goods for trade abroad. All nations benefit from energy assistance to the third world.
Industrialization leads to urbanization. Women enter the urban workforce. They have new found freedom. They no longer need bear large families to do the farm work; women opt for small families. The urbanization trend is well established. Today about one half the human population live in urban centers. Stewart Brand predicts that by mid century 80% will be urbanites and the human population will have peaked with a human birthrate on the planet below replacement. I see the threat of climate change as the biggest obstacle to maintaining a temporary population overshot above a long term sustainable level. Our best hope for an abundant emission free energy source, is smaller factory built advanced generation nuclear fission reactors technology. Our LWRs can not replace fossil fuels fast enough or at affordable prices.
Of course it will. It's called die-off and it will happen whether or not we can assist developing nations of the world. Nature has a way of taking care of these things.
Energy and Human Evolution
Ron P.
“It's that humans do not have the attention span to operate a fission reactor safely. Period. Safety protocols will be ignored and eventually forgotten. Imbeciles will be placed in control of them. The tendency to do this is universal.”
The art of reactor design has come a long way since the 50’s. There are some reactor designs that are inherently safe and self controlling; yes idiot proof. You can start them up and they will run themselves for 40 years without the need for anybody to touch them.
The original Hyperion nuclear battery design is one example. You just bury it in the ground and it takes care of itself like a battery for up to 10 years.
There are a number of such reactor designs but they are not being deployed because they are either not profitable being so economical and/or are too far from the current light water reactor paradigm.
There is a big difference between “we can’t do it” and “we won’t do it” because “we won’t do it” can be changed in an instant.
When did Three Mile Island stop being radioactive? Or Hanford? Or Chernobyl?
200 years from now DWH may be forgotten, but to the extant that the Gulf has shifted to an alternative biologic state, the consequences shall remain. eg a lost year class of blufin tuna is a possibility - and whether we like it or not that will contribute to the long term health of that particular species - add a little chaos theory and a new future awaits -
Three Mile Island had no real environmental consequences, only political and social.
Hanford, hopefully, was a consequence of WW2 and the cold war, and will never occur again.
Chernobyl has no parallel in Western LWR design. No containment dome, wrongly designed core with a dangerously high void coefficient (which is illegal in the US).
All these nuclear events pale in comparison to the real impact of our coal power plants.
My two cents about "wind isn't reliable (enough)".
Sez who? I'm echoing the "where's the references?" line.
I'd be willing to believe a completely doomerish scenario if there were some referenced/verifiable facts.
But I ain't seein' it. And I just came from a PV conference - growth in an economically depressed year - again!
Also sunburned - so a bit snarly.
side note: Alan - a map for HVDC is on the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
Back to wind: recent article in Proceedings of the National Academy:
Electric power from offshore wind via synoptic-scale interconnection
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/16/7240
The EIA 2008 electricity year in review - renewables are the biggest source of new capacity additions:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html
Photovoltaics has grown about 35% annually for the last decade or so - put that in your spreadsheet and iterate.
http://seia.org/galleries/default-file/2009%20Solar%20Industry%20Year%20...
re:
http://electricitystorage.org/tech/technologies_comparisons_percyclecost...
Hawaii has 30 something cent a kw-hr electricity on some islands - what's a few cents/kw-hr for storage?
If/when the opportunity cost of not having power gets high enough, people will install PV with batteries - that's 20+ year old well-proven technology.
"technologically complex"? Batteries? Compared to what? a wrench?
"incurs losses: - so does a transmission line.
Hannes - try again...
BAU ain't gonna continue, but unreasonable and unreferenced doom ain't doing it for me.
There's referenced verifiable facts under your very own nose, in the refs you gave, that compared to conventional generation, wind is unreliable.
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/16/7240/F6.large.jpg
This shows the capacity factor of the proposed full-interconnected Atlantic Transmission Grid which pools the outputs of the coastal windfarms together.
As we can see, the CF varies from about 0.8 down to near zero. It can bump along at 0.05 - 0.3 for a week or so. Completely at the whim of the Weather Man.
Compare this to a pool of gas or nuclear. Available at 0.9+, on demand, day and night.
And you suggest batteries. You need to be able to store a high-wind week's output to be able to output it during a low wind week such as the one in the plot. Have you done a few sums to calculate what a 1 GW-week storage battery would look like, and how much it would cost? Even with pumped storage, that's a huge amount. "A few cents a kWh for storage"? I don't think so.
Low wind output timeframes are when gas turbines can be engaged (instead of running gas turbines most or all of the time).
First, a straw man. Just burn some natural gas in a combined cycle generator a few times/year. Or coal if you have to. Unlike Hannes, I am satisfied with a 97% renewable grid.
A north-south connection is "sub-optimal" (another :straw man ?) and would not be my choice at all.
Connecting mid-continent winds with Atlantic coast would be better. Two different and almost isolated weather systems. The wind is blowing somewhere from Manitoba to Texas almost all the time except mid-summer, it is less then. Add substantial solar PV over a couple of time zones would help even more (and give mid-summer power).
lake Winnipeg (24,500 km2) is already used as storage by Manitoba Hydro, with plans for over 8 GW generation from it (11 GW ? memory), Throttling Lake Winnipeg down for a week could store a lot of power at little cost (Manitoba Hydro is looking for a market for 4 GW of new hydro and will need to build lines anyway. Just reverse them).
Alan
97%? Nice dream. When wind penetration goes above 20%, you'll start to get stranded wind when there is good wind and low demand. And you'll still be at almost nothing from wind more than "a few times/year".
Wind is a small-scale fuel saver for large-scale NG and coal. The thought of NG being a small-scale intermittency-rescue for large-scale wind is simply ludicrous.
The thought of NG being a small-scale intermittency-rescue for large-scale wind is simply ludicrous.
Just add HV DC transmission and pumped storage and solar PV for the summer doldrums.
Alan
HVDC isn't enough. Solar PV is a niche luxury item, not a large-scale energy producer. With enough pumped storage, you can balance anything, of course, but I don't see how it could get economically built to a scale that would help wind penetration very much.
Not if things like the Iowa Stored Energy Park or General Compression catch on.
Aside from areas like the Cascades it doesn't rain a lot more than it rains, yet hydropower is valued for being available on a moment's notice. The difference between a million acre-feet of water behind a dam and a billion SCF of compressed air in a deep sandstone is that the air is invisible.
When we design a system like this we have to balance out the tradeoffs. There will be nonvanishing probability that some periods will have challengingly low amounts of power available. So there is a cost associated with mandatory shutdowns/vacations for factories that must occasionally shut down. That has to be compared to the cost of adding another KWhr of storage, and a decision made. How much to pay/charge for 100% reliable power? How much to pay for 99% reliable? How much to pay for 90% reliable? How much to pay for 50% reliable? Given an appropriate pricing structure for the different catagories of reliability you will have customers for all of the above categories. Accepting some level of downtime (or operation at reduced capacity) is a problem in system optimization.
Yes, it would have in May... which happens to be a period of little demand for the major electric loads, heating and air conditioning. But look at November! The AVERAGE capacity factor appears to be about 0.5, and the lulls only last about a day. Add 50 hours of CAES to the system and use e.g. space heat and DHW systems as dump loads when everything else is full, and you'd have 100% reliable carbon-free electricity for the entire month.
It would be very interesting to see what October, December and Jan-Mar look like.
But you just did fool yourself ?
Given renewables apply mainly to Electricity, I'll focus on that.
Renewable energies added more GW than others, in many countries, and certainly many more than peak-oil alternatives.
More important, is their growth in both Added GW/Year, and GW/M$.
ie China's juggernaut Coal growth, should not eclipse others efforts.
This is circular logic. Spain has already proven you CAN produce over 50% using wind, but the argument seems to confuse peaks, and areas-under-curves. Sure, peak deliveries will be variable, but the point is the total displaced power can add up to quite large percentages.
That displaced power, lowers the total budgets of the non-favored alternatives, and buys time.
Sure some plant is underutilized, but that's true of all grids, given the variable daily and seasonal loads anyway.
All this buys valuable time, and as renewables drive down their price curves, they will then start to expand by adding storage, for example.
The time lines here, are not that long, when you run the numbers.
On the present strong growths, Wind/Solar power is going to need to start to switch modes to what makes replacement sense, in maybe just 10-15 years.
ie it will need to actually SLOW growth, after that time, or it will outpace the sensible retirement rates for other choices.
That's NOT really that far off, and planners should start modeling for the switch, from penetration, to deciding what retirement ceilings to apply. In parallel with this, will be storage solutions.
Yes, Transport is a rather different chestnut.
First of all, I would like to clarify that we never look at generation capacity when measuring growth in renewable energy, but at outputs. Using installed capacity can be very misleading when accounting for wind and solar, as their aggregate outputs (their capacity factors) are low in comparison to other generation technologies. On aggregate level of a country, wind doesn't exceed 15-25% of potential max output, while for example nuclear runs at >90%. Our comparison is always looking at outputs, not at (theoretical) nameplate capacity.
The fact that we in the West can afford to add more renewables is also because we simply have exported many of our heavy energy uses to other places, which makes us look better on paper. China doesn't build new coal power plants to satisfy local demand, it does so because we keep importing their stuff, which we have ceased producing.
And I agree that in 2009, there was hardly any fossil fuel capacity added to grids in Western societies, and I would think that this might even be true worldwide. I would even go as far as to say that 2009 was the first year where renewable outputs still grew, while fossil fuel based outputs shrank. Now does this change our argument? Not really, for two key reasons:
- renewable generation capacity was mostly installed based on long-term government programs, of which some were even ramped up due to stimulus programs during the crisis
- in many places, renewables have a purchase guarantee, so even if demand shrinks, they can sell at a preferred rate into grids. That way, other generation technologies are pushed aside in a downturn.
Should we get back to growth (which I doubt - but this another topic of IIER), I would be ready to bet that on a global scale, we will see the pattern of 1981 - 2007 re-emerge. If we don't see growth come back, we might soon have problems to fund more subsidies into renewables.
On aggregate level of a country, wind doesn't exceed 15-25% of potential max output, while for example nuclear runs at >90%.
Factually untrue.
Only a few nations have nuke capacity factors of 90.1% or greater. Quite a few in the 80%s, a number in the 70% and I have seen 60% (Mexico, Bulgaria from memory).
And wind does better than 25% in a number of nations (USA & NZ come to mind). Your calculations may be off becasue you use year end capacity #s and annual production (a common trick of anti-wind types). This counts as zero production for ten months from a WT erected on November 1st. Given the growth rates in wind generation, this distortion is significant !
Alan
As Engineer-poet said, the potential of nuclear is nearly infinite. But the Swiss author makes valid points about the need for a basic energy source. The only possibility is nuclear. But very advanced nuclear: high temperature reactors, breeders, etc. To dispose once and for all of waste (even from hospitals), fusion-fission reactors have to be developed; the science exists, the technology has just to be slapped together.
Whereas the science and tech mix of pure fusion is not clear, be it only because the walls may not be able to stand the thermonuclear fire. In a fusion-fission reactor, this drawback becomes what is exploited.
I find this article to be rather poorly written and lacking in supporting evidence. The use of emotive and hyperbolic language is unhelpful. For example, the statement;
"Drilling a hole in the desert and waiting for black gold to gush out is infinitely less complex than drilling a much deeper hole",
is false. It is not infinitely less complex.
The claim that no human could survive "for even a second" seems unlikely. Do you really have evidence that a human could not survive for 1 second, or even 1.2 seconds?
This statement "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.", is a logical fallacy of the "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" type.
Why is the UK one of the world's "best" places to produce wind power? Supporting data please. And why say "we even include Scotland"? Scotland is part of the UK, obviously it would be included.
I have to accept your judgment, however, I am glad nobody ever tested how long a human can survive under a few tons of pressure.
On a more important note - regarding the correlation between electricity availability and GDP per capita:
Yours 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 (among other things, of course).
On the UK: Scotland today has its own power grid, but for our models, we assumed that it would deliver into the more densely populated areas in the South, thus making the approach more favorable for wind. On wind quality, this is what I found (often used): http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/renewable-energy-resources/euro...
Hannes has in my personal estimation done a great job of making a his general point about the scalability of renewals,GIVEN the constraints of time and space.
The commenting audience here can be divided for purposes of convenience into three groups;the engineering sort, the true believers in renewables, and the true believers in doom and gloom.
The engineering sort seem to be mostly incapable of reading an article intended for a generalist audience as anything other than a blueprint.
The engineering subsort of true believers in renewables don't seem to have even the faintest conception of either the down in the dirt nature of the human beast or the utterly implacable "nature" of exponential functions as applied to human affairs.
This is not to say that they don't have valid arguments, technically;but they seem to think they can herd cats.
I could herd my pet cat quite effectively, when she wanted to be herded that is :-)
Alan
Hi Alan,
On days when I 'm feeling optimistic, I'm in your camp;of all the authors I have read, you make the the most sense from an optimist's point of view-with a GREAT DEAL of luck or good fortune,your vision of the future could come to pass, no doubt.
I fear however as a realist that things are moving too fast and that too many bad short terms decisions will be made, derailing your trains before the tracks are fully laid.
The problem with the luck is that in order to make the transition successfully, it must be more or less continious for the duration.I could sail my little fishing boat across the Atlantic if I didn't hit any rough weather anywhere along the way;but one modest little gale would sink my boat without a doubt.
One major disruption of the economy is apt to derail any forced transition to renewables as such resources as are available will be diverted to critical short term needs.
The great ship sustainability can be sunk by a single torpedo , so to speak, before she makes port.
Now if the plateau of the peak ff enery age is lasts long enough, and the early part of the down slope is not too steep, it may be that change can come about more gradually than I expect, and that the public in general will learn to accept energy constraints as a matter of course.
The real question in my mind is whether we can last long enough to put your vision into effect.
My seat of the pants estimate is that we won't.
Eating the seed corn has always been a problem. The future belongs to people with the discipline needed to get there.
Hi Alan,
On days when I 'm feeling optimistic, I'm in your camp;of all the authors I have read, you make the the most sense from an optimist's point of view-with a GREAT DEAL of luck or good fortune,your vision of the future could come to pass, no doubt.
I fear however as a realist that things are moving too fast and that too many bad short terms decisions will be made, derailing your trains before the tracks are fully laid.
The problem with the luck is that in order to make the transition successfully, it must be more or less continious for the duration.I could sail my little fishing boat across the Atlantic if I didn't hit any rough weather anywhere along the way;but one modest little gale would sink my boat without a doubt.
One major disruption of the economy is apt to derail any forced transition to renewables as such resources as are available will be diverted to critical short term needs.
The great ship sustainability can be sunk by a single torpedo , so to speak, before she makes port.
Now if the plateau of the peak ff enery age is lasts long enough, and the early part of the down slope is not too steep, it may be that change can come about more gradually than I expect, and that the public in general will learn to accept energy constraints as a matter of course.
The real question in my mind is whether we can last long enough to put your vision into effect.
My seat of the pants estimate is that we won't.
The surest way to fail is to fail to try.
I am not sure I understand or agree with the concept that must be non-stop.
More later.
Alan
There is so far as I know any reason the process of transitioning to renewables must be nonstop in principle;and certainly if the transition is successful, it will proceed with some jerky starts and stops and occasional reverses and lulls or dead spots.
What I am afraid of is that an economic or security crisis will result in our putting off making the necessary long term investments in order to look after immediate short term needs to such an extent that the long term investments are abandoned, never to be funded.In short, we may pass a tipping point such that recovery is impossible insofar as funding renewables and efficiency are concerned.
The good ship transition need not depart from the old world of BAU and sail directly to the new world of renewables.Detours and ports of call are to be expected.
But she might sink anywhere along the way.
I realize that we will end up with a "sub-optimal" solution, given our social, political and economic choices. The question is just how sub-optimal ? My goal is as "minimally sub-optimal" as possible (see the internal eMail).
Calling the best available building blocks "false firemen" and a "waste of trillions in investments" is a path leading to the greatest possible social disruption and die-off.
In the comments, Hannes & Nate may give more reasonable and nuanced caveats, but their titles and provocative statements (untrue BTW) still stand above any equivocation.
Alan
This is my concern about the Article as well. The fineprint can't undo what is already skewed in the Framing of the title.
Precisely. There's evidence of a mindset which sees the problem not as the risk of failure, but the risk of success. Closing off the avenues of thought is essential to avoid success.
I think OFM gets it in one.
I've been following these arguments for 40-some years, WRT general population and environmental issues, and for 15, intensively, WRT PO and the permanent energy crunch. The positions and proclivities of participants are so familiar that I sometimes feel as if I could write the script for tomorrow's argument from my memories of yesterday's.
Hannes, in the OP, makes a carefully-constructed and reasoned argument. It is quite clear that he and his colleagues have done their homework, that they are willing to share their data, models and analysis—and defend them. What's more, his assertions are consistent with what we know about the history of energy resource development, and with the realities of our political and economic environment and of human behavior.
In short, the original post was an excellent summary of the likely truth of our predicament. Even as I read it, I could hear the crackling of the coming firestorm. And sure enough...
Poster after poster attacked the OP with religious zeal; misconstruing Hannes' position as opposed to the development of renewables; attempting to argue away the limitations of his or her favorite alternative by pushing theoretical maximums or possible future designs; in some cases, recognizing that consumption must be reduced and growth brought under control, but failing, utterly, to face the fact that doing so is entirely at odds with our capitalist system, our notions of individual liberty, our political reality and the habits and expectations of the populace.
Iaato is angry and frustrated and speaks in a way that reflects that. S/he is widely ignored (because, Alan suggests, of that style), but I think s/he makes a key point: Much of the techno-cheerleading I see in this thread seems very much like denial and bargaining, with a thin film of science slightly obscuring its real nature.
If you're going to call the objections 'Religious Zealotry' , which is of course the great and terrible invalidator in reasoned discussions, you need to show your math a little more.
"Willing to share their data" was one of the key challenges I've heard to this report, as was the question of Framing it and drawing pointed conclusions with the Big Brush, and then putting the nuance and grey areas into the body of it, without really letting them tarnish the certainty of the BOLDFACE statements..
"If you're going to call the objections 'Religious Zealotry'..."
Let's try to be more careful about quotations and semantics, jokuhl. I spoke of "attack[ing] the OP with religious zeal"—which characterizes the manner and tone of the attack, rather than any specific objections themselves.
Frankly, I think that arguing the math WRT any one of the relatively rosy scenarios presented in contrast to the OP is a fool's errand; the promoters all want to used best-case numbers and projected futures without regard to politics and economics. We wouldn't be able to agree on a set of assumptions.
Perhaps unfortunately, we don't have math that allows us to quantify the political, social and behavioral elements that loom so large here. Nevertheless, we have significant history, knowledge and experience to guide us in our expectations. Taken together, those elements provide little basis for optimism.
"'Willing to share their data' was one of the key challenges I've heard to this report..."
Well, what has actually happened, I think, is that multiple posters have asked for or demanded data and Hannes has repeatedly agreed to share. I don't have any reason to believe he won't do that and I expect to see said data, in comprehensible and accessible format, in the not-too-distant future. If it isn't forthcoming, that will be a different matter.
"Nevertheless, we have significant history, knowledge and experience to guide us in our expectations. Taken together, those elements provide little basis for optimism."
You can call that reasoned, but it seems to me you're simply staking your own philosophical position, and the OP happened to agree with it.
A series of statements like the OP above have been too broad in their terms to provide as little backing detail as they did. Promises for future data put them in the same arena as STEORN, or SPACE-BASED SOLAR.
Please, They should come back with their spreadsheet or on it.
More like, the engineering sort can't read a piece written sans proper caveats without getting their dander up.
There is a process for killing pathogens in bivalves which is very interesting. They are placed in an extremely strong pressure vessel and subjected to high pressure for a relatively brief time. When returned to atmospheric pressure, the pathogens (and bivalves) are dead... and the shells are shucked. The molecular bonds between the tendon and shell are broken by the process.
At extremely high pressure, the properties of both water and proteins change. This appears to cause many proteins to fold differently, denaturing them (and not incidentally killing any organism which depends on them functioning properly). So no, I don't think Mr. Kunz is being hyperbolic here.
Well, I'm still waiting for someone to answer my question, after almost 400 responses. How many Gulf of Mexicos are we wiling to lose? It appears that I may be waiting until the cows come home, since, unless I'm mistaken, no one made the connection and mentioned the GOM in that entire sorry thread (I don't want to go back and read it again, once was enough.) TOD has had a large influx of new readers, due to this catastrophe, and its link to our energy future. How can we spend 12 hours rabidly discussing types of energy for the future while ignoring the sinks; the catastrophic damage that is occurring as it requires more and more effort to get less and less energy? It smacks of a significant blind spot. Even if we found the magic pony that provided all of our energy and needs, we'd still have the entropic waste to deal with that's killing the planet, unless you would like a magic pony for that, too. I can only imagine that we are unwilling to reduce energy consumption first, in order to prevent further damage to the earth, before we attempt to fill even part of the fossil fuel gap? Pedal to the metal, full tilt to the wall? How many GOMs is it going to take? G'night.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6641#comment-663135
So far as I know, there is only one GOM.
On a more serious note, I think the reason nobody has discussed it is that it is getting attention elsewhere, there are other problems to work on at the same time, and to be honest there is not much new to say on it and there are other threads covering the new developments. But you are certainly correct to point out that we need to be taking into account both catastrophic (e.g., a nasty nasty gusher) and steady BAU (e.g., climate change) pollution in our assessment of the costs and benefits of energy sources. I'd bet my bottom dollar that both the author and most of the commenters here would agree with that. It is important to keep that in perspective, such as when we find ourselves comparing renewables to coal on the basis of EROI and cost alone. I am not aware of any major air spills or solar mine collapses recently.
Both have mining and production/construction pollution issues.
OK, but compared to what?
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/06/fracking-in-pennsylv...
Compared to our energy status quo, we are talking orders of magnitude less damage to ourselves and to the environment. That is the core reason to prefer renewable energy. The context is important. I'd rather take my chances with a blackout here and there.
I see no option but to live a very low energy very simple way of life. Population issues likely make even this unrealistic.
Do I walk my talk, no. One person cannot do it alone, and I too have ego/other issues about giving up all my energy slaves. It's like a drug addition, I know it's bad by I cannot figure out how to get off it.
Wind and solar are likely our best options from a list of bad choices.
You mean this cow? I think you are going to be waiting for a long long long time...
What's another GOM or two or three in the big picture? humans are the root cause of the biggest extinction event since the end of the Cretaceous!
If humans managed to cause the extinction of the sea cow back in 1794 and we are now in 2010, you do the math how many species have gone extinct since then and how many more extinctions will our ecosystems be able to handle and continue functioning. BTW we only have knowledge of about 15,000 species that live in the GOM... There are a lot of unknown unkowns out there. Undersea plumes of oil nothwithstanding.
What's the one thing that ties together Peak Oil, the GOM oil spill and the sixth extinction, now well under way you may ask?
We need to get serious about controlling human population! End of Story! The only way to do that is to change the way we think and not be afraid to gore some very sacred cows... (pun intended)
Having said all that, I still think that transitioning to renewables and a more ecologically based sustainable model is the only best hope we may still have.
Cheers!
The human population needs not be controlled if the humans live in reasonably modern urban or semi-urban societies. Like Iran or better.
The "renewable" property add nothing of value to energy. Nuclear energy is just as good as renewable energy, and more environmentally sound than most renewables.
The population growth rate of Iran is 1.32%, slightly higher than for the entire world which is 1.17%.
But your point is that the human population needs not be controlled if... if... if.
My dad used to say: "Wouldn't it be a wonderful if everyone were honest." But everyone is not honest Dad. And all women are not empowered, well educated, or live modern urban or semi-urban societies.
Ron P.
Edit: Wanna have some fun? Go here: World Population Growth Rate then click on other countries and compare them to the world. You get the population growth rate from 1960 to the present. You can mouse-over any point and get the growth rate for any year between 1960 and 2008.
The population rate of Iran (much like most other countries) grows because a wide base of the population pyramid is transforming into a column (or an inverse pyramid). Iran has a fertility rate of 1.78 children per woman! Down from 6 children per woman in 1986!!!
Wanna have some fun? Go to gapminder, choose total fertility rate and play it from the 1970-ies and forward.
My point is that the population "problem" is solving itself all over the world due to prosperity advances. We need a little more of the same (capitalism/democracy/trade).
I have thrashed this straw for forty years, but I will say it again. You do not control human nature. Sure, a dictator, or a committee of dictators, like in China, can force birth control. So is that the only hope, a world dictatorship?
Change the way people think! Yeah, that's the ticket. Just nullify the desire to have sex. Just nullify a woman's desire to nurture a child. You can't change human nature. Oh I said that already didn't I. But that's the #@%&*% flipping point! It simply cannot be done.
Nothing short of an iron fist dictating reproductive behavior will work. And even then it cannot stop population growth for decades due to population momentum, that is more couples having one child than old people dying. 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.
Yes that just might postpone the collapse for a decade or so. (Please read Dopamine's post below.) That will give us much more time to rape and pillage the planed a little more, drive more species into extinction and create a larger population so that when the collapse does come the suffering and misery will be much worse.
Ron P.
Japan and Italy are going to reach negative population growth very humanely. Russia not so much.
Alan
"Sure, a dictator, or a committee of dictators, like in China, can force birth control. So is that the only hope, a world dictatorship?"
Perhaps not a world dictatorship, but the only hope probably includes fairly authoritarian societies with strict limits on reproduction. As you point out, even this approach could not overcome built-in momentum.
For those who find an authoritarian approach unthinkable, I would suggest that it may turn out to be unavoidable—and that the alternatives may be even more unattractive.
You'd be wrong. While you talk, this is sorting itself out except in some really backwards authoritarian countries. The solution is making these less so.
Specifics? Evidence?
Well, here is data. Just play and see how it is developing. Drag a bit back and forth between the 70-ies and now. Look at the continents. Envision that trend continuing for a decade or two more.
I think everyone who has been paying attention to these matters knows where the trends are taking us: to a world population of 9-10 billion around mid-century.
I certainly don't think that's a sustainable population—probably not at any standard of living/consumption level and certainly not at ones that most humans would find attractive. "Not sustainable" necessarily means that reduction is inevitable. How reduction is achieved, how it looks and feels, will be the critical questions.
Also, since you seem to take comfort from the reductions in growth rates, please note the very large contributions to those reductions that are attributable to the authoritarian efforts of the Chinese state and the less Draconian, but very aggressive, policies of the Indian government.
Finally, note that U.S. fertility rates have increased rather substantially over the past three decades. And Mother really can't afford our kids.
First, I think that's a sustainable population at good standards of living. Second, the population may very well drop from there. Third, the Chinese efforts of fertility reductions WERE visible before, when China's fertility trend was better than comparable countries. Now, China is mainstream Asian. Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, China and South Korea lies where they can be expected to lie w/ regard to GDP/capita. India has never stood out, it has always followed the general trend.
Last, sure, US fertility rates have increased a bit from a low in 1980, but it should depend to some extent on the fertility of recent immigrants, and at 2.08 it is not above replacement level.
Realistically, the world is approaching zero population growth. It is just not approaching it fast enough for some people.
In reality it was something of a temporary transition between a world in which population was controlled by higher death rates, and one in which it is controlled by lower birth rates.
However, for most countries of the word, the problem is under control. For those countries where it is not under control, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will handle it - the higher death rate option will prevail.
Had AIDS been only a little more communicable, global population growth would have stopped.
Previously, epidemics have reduced population by 33% (Black Death) to 95% (smallpox, measles, etc. among Native Americans after they were "discovered" by Europeans).
The Black Death appears to have helped, or at least not impeded, the Renaissance. The epidemics among Native Americans appear to have significantly disrupted their societies.
Not exactly correct. World population growth rate in 2007 was 1.17 percent. World population growth rate in 2008 was 1.17 percent, exactly the same as the year before. At that approach rate we will reach zero population growth rate in about... never.
World Population Growth Rate
Of course we will eventually reach zero population growth. In fact we will reach negative population growth a whole lot sooner than most people expect. And it will not be pretty.
Ron P.
I agree. Fossil fuel is special. There is a distorted value system at play here. The general public will accept the death of an ocean or accept a multimillion ton coal ash flood 50 feet deep over a wide swath of country side. But they want to close down a Vermont nuclear plant for a tritium spill no bigger than lights a wrist watch dial; the tritium has never left the confines of the reactor property an no one has been exposed. Go figure!!!
Ausgang, you raise an interesting point. I think that the general public, in their bones, know the emergy value of each of these types of renewable and nonrenewable energy. If one correlated emergy value to public tolerance of degradation of sinks due to each one, you would probably find a very high correlation.
Kalliergo, the issue of population needs to be faced, and my thinking is that the optimal way to make it palatable is to promote the positives and let Mother take care of the negatives, since she's going to do so anyway. I repeat myself, from the Degrowth conference:
"13. 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/
"...the issue of population needs to be faced, and my thinking is that the optimal way to make it palatable is to promote the positives and let Mother take care of the negatives, since she's going to do so anyway."
Yes, she is, probably in ways that will be quite unpalatable for humans.
I certainly agree that "promot[ing] the positives" would be an optimal approach. Having watched the concept utterly fail to gain traction for decades, and knowing that it is incompatible with our prevailing system of global industrial capitalism, I am more than a little skeptical about possible success.
Of course, we do have some evidence that relative affluence and security can lead to voluntary reductions in rates of reproduction. To that end, I'd be pleased to consider massive redistributions of wealth.
PDF: http://www.mindfully.org/WTO/2006/Household-Wealth-Gap5dec06.htm
Failing that, it seems likely that our options will be authoritarianism and/or Mad Max, depending upon local tendencies and preferences.
Growth matters. Redistribution matters little.
Wealth is not as interesting as income and consumption. Income and consumption is much more evenly distributed.
Iaato, you are excited in breathless anticipation of the doomers dream fulfilled. You await the culling of the human herd as your just reward for general public stupidity. You know that the only option that may prevent the collapse of the global population is nuclear power and you fight hard against it in your fantasy of lebensraum; to live free astride a depopulated world.
Splendid euphemism.
News from Australia.
I heard a politician say out loud on the radio that "sustainable growth" is an oxymoron.
Could the ship be turning?
Isn't an oxy moron a moron with lots of ox like qualities?
Then again Julia Gillard, the new Prime Minister of Australia, is unmarried…has a boyfriend and doesn't believe in god! Maybe they finally put something good in Austarlia's water!
Alan made a key critical commentary (back in the "first issue" of this article) beginning with "The "proofs" presented are extraordinarily weak."
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6641#comment-662985.
It then went on to say we could do x, y, z.
Some or many of Alan's knowledgeable critiques would be sound IF two key assumptions were not false.
His first false assumption is that technical possibility is sufficient. But in the real world, only the politically possible is going to happen. Just about all of Alan's proposals are not going to happen for political reasons. Even in my locality, all I have achieved by carefully challenging the "sustainable growth" mantra is that all the politicians and their supporters now view me as one of the Evil Forces of Darkness.
Even within Alan's assumption-sphere of techno-politics-fiction, he makes a further error in the assumption that oil supply is not going to fall to zero (or as near zero as matters) for many decades. The reason why oil supply will fall to effectively-zero long before it "has to" has been explained on this page already (by Jokuhl I think). The same reasoning applies to coal mining which was a stupendously unpleasant occupation even before coal grades plummeted over the years, and requires massive investment as well as 'slave' worker willingness in a context that people will be struggling just to stay fed.
Most of the expert discussion appearing in these comments is wasted because it fails to move on from these key false assumptions. For these reasons I am very much more concurrent with Hannes' position than are most here.
I said "fossil fuels", not oil, would be available for a century. And the redacted eMail shows some knowledge of the political process.
Alan
My apology for misrepresenting your statement. But my own reckoning is your correcting point doesn't change much in practice; I was thinking, as I guess you too were, of above-zero supplies of any fuel to power transport systems and the rest of the globo-system in a BAU manner (if not by BAU means).
Not clear what the eMail is you refer to; please clarify thanks.
The redacted eMail is in the first version of this article.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6641#comment-663105
And I did *NOT* say that there would be enough FF for BAU, I just do not accept that there will be zero. Just enough to supplement some gaps in renewables.
Alan
Thanks, Some interesting thoughts in the redacted email, but a key phrase appears to be "when panic arrives". Which, as the only commenter said, is "pretty vague". Panic buying of fuel or food? Panic selling of worthless assets? Panic dumping of crashing currencies? Global, national, subnational?
And in what context this panic?
One thing to be sure is that when the/a panic arrives, people will not be very rational or cooperative, but rather me-firstish. Options will already be heavily constrained by the preceding overextension of short-termism. Confidence in any authority will be patchy, though I guess there'll be many who look for a 'saviour' at such a time.
My own bets are on a concept that the soundest way to prepare for such a panic is rather than have a plan to supply to one or more doomed authorities to follow, instead have a plan already operationalised for one's own group(s of cooperative friends, along the lines of lifeboats or EnergyArks as per http://energyark.blogspot.com/.
As for the idea that oil/coal/gas supply can still be continuing in some much smaller way in 100 yrs time, I'd like to see any supporting concept from some of the industry experts here of quite where and how such a reduced industry could function. My suspicion is that societies will be too poor to use sources other than local wind, water, solar, and biomass. Just read some of HO's posts here and then explain how you could gradually scale down that sort of thing.
Panic as in "US Energy Policy has only two modes; complacency and panic".
Panic as in economic policy in 1930, energy policy in 1973 and 1979, military policy at the beginning of 1942, 9/11/01, etc.
A point where society still functions, but significant changes in how it functions are very much on the table.
I hope that helps.
Best hopes for Good Responses when "we" do respond,
Alan
Huh - My brain has only two modes; half-working, and intermittently working as in the current heatwave here.
I've previously stated my thoughts of governments - whether in complacency mode or panic mode they operate with utter incompetence, with a key delusion that politics and economics are what controls physics, chemistry, biology, etc, rather than (largely) the other way round. They're still all bleating on about their hopes of restoring sustainable growth. The chances of the politicians and "intellectuals" ever sufficiently understanding even the most basic concepts looks to me to be zilch.
Your judgment of governments is just BS !!
Magnus Redin, who posts here, is the Energy and Environmental technocrat that analyzes policy options for the Moderate Party in Sweden, currently the largest party in the governing coalition.
France is alos doing almost *ALL* the right things, although a bit too slowly. But it is relatively easy to speed up existing projects and programs when a crisis appears.
Just because US conservatives are incompetent to govern, does not mean that everyone is.
Alan
Ok, I wasn't speaking from a position of any profound analysis of all the world's politicians and advisors. And I appreciate your mention of Magnus. But even in Sweden and France I question whether the governments there have recognised the folly of considering getting back to increasing GDP as being an important goal, and the fallaciousness of the concept of sustainable growth. Even if they have (which I'm not rating very likely), that still leaves a lot of other governments still singing to the old hymn sheets.
In the uk we have John Hemming MP who told me about peak oil five years ago and who subsequently founded the all-party peak oil group in parliament, but its impact on the political scene is invisible. Even his own LibDem party still chant the same Canutian mantras.
The new government in the UK certainly seems to have picked the negative growth option.
It appears that the strategy of some is to grow as long as they can, and then just increase vacation time to allocate the smaller GDP. Early retirement seems less likely ATM.
Alan
Sorry if I was a just a bit intemperate.
There are historical examples of good and effective governmental actions. Simply assuming that possibility away significantly decreases our options and makes doom more likely.
The surest way to fail is to fail to try :-)
Alan
At current rates, the Powder River Basin will not be depleted by 2110. Many thin seams of coal can be mined if safety is not such a concern, and labor was cheaper.
Also many coal seams can be gasified. Add to this the emerging technology of shale gas fractionation.
And there is no good reason to suppose a universal decline of technology. A number of islands will remain with fully functioning, if altered, technological civilizations. Some candidates are Scandinavia, Brazil, Germany-France-Switzerland et al, a reduced population Japan#, the remnants of China, etc.
They can, and will, sell to those areas whose industries have declined/stop functioning.
Alan
# Drop life expectancy by 8 years due to less resources caring for the elderly and still lower birth rates, and about 100 million by 2050 is foreseeable, with a massive, well built infrastructure around. Lower populations after that. Perhaps impoverished in several areas, but a functioning industrial society,
So maybe there will remain a sort of non-deep coal-using society in the Powder River Basin area. In-situ gasification of coal I would suspect to be too high-tech to function before long.
Did China sell much to Britain/Europe when the latter was in its Dark Ages?; somehow I think the answer is nothing at all.
No good reason to suppose a universal decline of tech? I and others have already spelled out reasons to reckon there is liable to be something of a collapse of the fragile global system. This has already been discussed quite a bit on TOD and thereabouts. These errors (as I see them) are important and warrant proper rebuttal but I don't have the time to do that rebutting as of here and now. Hopefully some other time.....
Many of the old Roman roads remained in service during the Dark Ages. The technology required to run electrified railroads evolved in the late 1880s, and FF railroads @ 1830.
There is the Trans-Siberian RR and China is building 3 overlapping routes from China to the EU.
So keeping crucial RRs open seems to be a distinct possibility.
The most likely "island of technology" is Scandinavia and they can build all parts of a railroad.
Alan
The "fossil fuel" crisis is not really about fossil fuels, it is about oil.
Oil production has probably peaked, or is close to it, but it will not fall to zero rapidly. It will approach zero asymptotically over the next 100-200 years. It will never reach zero.
Natural gas and coal have not peaked and will not decline nearly as fast. There is a lot more natural gas and coal in the world than people realize, and as oil reserves decline, the other fossil fuels will start to fill the gap.
The depletion problems with coal and gas are similar to those with oil. Witness the wanton destruction of mountaintop removal coal mining and fracking. It's not all about the peak.
RMG, from Drumbeat june 29:
Not only is gas shortage threatening oilproduction, it's also ELM in action for gas. If you believe that gas will fill the gap, it has to come from those huge amounts of unconventional gas, which I think is a pipedream.
Is this some sort of misunderstanding? Surely they don't inject valuable natural gas to keep up the oil pressure in their oil fields? I though they used nitrogen, carbon dioxide or water.
Why would it be stupid to inject valuble natural gas to keep the preassure up in oilfields? The gas is not lost, it can be recovered after the oil as if the oil well were a gas well. But I dont know the criteria for when the operators use natural gas in this way, or fresh water, or salty water, or nitrogen, or carbon dioxide or a combination but I do know that the natural gas often is recoverable.
I would not be surprised if it is more efficient to use some natural gas to power natural gas pumps to preassurise oil fields and then recover the natural gas some decades later then to use more natural gas for electricity for running a nitrogen separation plant and then compress the nitrogen and inject it.
Now the thing is, I have had 35 years experience in the oil industry. When I see something like that, my first question is, "What is going wrong with their oilfields?"
I had a similar question some years ago when Mexico started injecting nitrogen into their biggest oilfield, Cantarell. Of course, now we have the answer - production at Cantarell has collapsed in recent years. They had basically run out of oil and were disguising the fact by using nitrogen injection to maintain production rates.
Something similar may be happening in this case. However, the problem would actually be a shortage of oil, not gas. There's still lots of natural gas, it's just that they are using it to maintain oil production while the oil layer gets thinner and thinner.
When the oil layer gets too thin on an oil field like this, the efficient thing is to blow down the gas cap - produce all the gas plus a lot of extra oil in a very short period of time, before water can flood in and cut off the remaining oil and gas. It's a very efficient way to end production, but that's the end of the oil field. You plug all the oil wells with concrete and walk away from them.
However, when I said there was a lot more natural gas in the world than people realize, I was referring to unassociated gas and stranded gas - gas not found in association with oil, and gas with no local markets and no pipelines out. There is an awful lot of unassociated and stranded gas in the world that has historically had no market.
RMG, can you give a little more information ? For example, which countries have so much to become a possible gas-exporter or increase their exports ? Though transition to gas will be 'a little' late when starting on oildecline.
The world's largest natural gas reserves are in Russia. Iran has the second largest reserves. Qatar, which most people have never heard of, has the third largest reserves. Turkmenistan is fourth. Most of the natural gas reserves in these countries are stranded by lack of pipelines.
Most of Russia's natural gas is in Siberia. Russia would love to export this gas, but the obvious pipeline route out is across the Bering Strait to Alaska and across Canada to the lower 48 states. However, Alaska has enormous stranded gas reserves of its own (The largest gas plant in the United States is in Northern Alaska, but all it does is reinject the produced gas back into the oil fields). Canada has lots of stranded gas in its own northern territories. Their domestic gas would get priority over Russian gas if any pipeline was built.
Indonesia, despite the fact it is now a net oil importer, is the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas. Malaysia also has become a huge LNG exporter. Algeria is the largest LNG exporter in Africa, and Quatar is the largest LNG exporter in the Middle East.
Australia, Russia, Norway, and Egypt are also exporting a lot of LNG these days. Iran, Yemen, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Peru are potential future LNG exporters. These countries have major gas reserves which are stranded because there are no pipelines out to populated areas, but they could export it via LNG terminals if the price was high enough.
There's lots and lots of natural gas in the world, but the biggest issue is the inability to transport it to markets.
But isn't the remaining coal in the wrong places and of much lower energy per ton of rock removed? It's very different from 2 centuries ago when the canals were built from Birmingham to the Black Country coalmines which are now useless empty wastelands.
"And as oil reserves decline".... won't it become increasingly difficult to access the more remote and lower erori sources, such that threshold cutoff points are reached long before the hypothesised endless asymptote gets much developed?
I would like to point out that the amount of known proven mineable uranium ore is equal to at least six times the energy that was in all the world's oil reserviors before the industrial revolution. And that's using our current inefficient pressurized light water reactor design. Yes, there are safety and proliferation issues. But nukes will serve for hundreds of years.
In the longer term the challenge is to find efficient cost effective ways to store the energy from sunlight and wind. As has been pointed out so often, liquid fuel for transportation is a particular problem.
One possible answer is already known. Up until WWII, most ammonia in Europe was produced by electrolysis of water, followed by nitrogen fixation via the Haber-Bosch process. The electricity and high temperatures required for these processes can be produced by wind power and/or focused sunlight. Ammonia can be stored as a liquid at room temperature and 114 PSIG. Combustion of ammonia produces 1267 kJ/mol of heat. Granted, that is not much compared to gasoline. However the combustion products are nitrogen and water - the same materials it was made from. It's true that maintaining combustion of ammonia can be difficult but the reaction will go, it does produce heat, and the end products are totally non polluting.
Research into clean diesels has produced other possible ammonia storage solutions as well.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TFK-4J021WV-7...
"A high-density ammonia storage/delivery system based on Mg(NH3)6Cl2 for SCR–DeNOx in vehicles"
Dr Kunz does a nice job of stating the problem. However, his comments would be a lot more valuable if he also offered a solution or two.
Wow!
This post sure sparked some passion! I haven't seen a debate like this here for a while... maybe everyone was building up a head of steam (hah! geothermal, I hope) and you got the blast, Hannes. Well done for persevering!
I have to say I incline to Alan from Big Easy's views. We won't "run out" (fall below one percent of current consumption) of fossil fuels for at least a hundred years; in the mean time, we know of allocation methods to direct them where needed. Electrical intermittency is not a problem either. many large industrial consumers already receive a discount for having an interruptible supply, and the option could be exercised.
The "energy problem" is technically solvable, and I give huge kudos to Alan for working to make it politically solvable, too. Political will has always been the problem, because the solution is a lot of little actions. Politicians want big monuments to themselves--power stations, dams, etc.--and there is not much opportunity for anything like that in a real solution. Imagine the brass plaques: "Governor Brown laid the first batt for this ceiling insulation on July 27, 2010."
I look forward to seeing the summaries of both Nate and Hanne's work, and Alan's. Just the 200-page summary and bibliography will do, I don't need to see the full document. ;-)
[By the way, Alan: I didn't see your question answered. "OP" is internet-speak for "original poster" or "original post": in this case, either Hannes, if the person is meant, or the article by Hannes, posted by Nate.]
"We won't "run out" (fall below one percent of current consumption) of fossil fuels for at least a hundred years; in the mean time, we know of allocation methods to direct them where needed."
There is the equitable allocation method of rationing or the inequitable allocation methods of the price system and taxing. I suspect as fossil fuel resources decline we will use one of the later in which case, for most people, it wont be directed to where they need it.
gregvp's remark about nuclear heat being cheap enough to throw away, leads me to a question concerning global warming in relation to "sustainable" energy resources:
Apart from running out, an other problem with fossil energy is that it results in extra CO2 in our atmosphere which, theory dictates, makes that warmth cannot leave earth by radiating into the rest of the universe, as a consequence too much of it stays with us and leads to global warming.
The thing is, though, that it is a specific form of energy that is not able to radiate into the universe, not just any form of energy. Could it be that by using solar radiation based energy we would in the end turn out to be transforming an energyform that would otherwise be reflected back into space (sunlight), via the wished for energy form (for instance movement of my car), in a final form of energy (heat) that still cannot leave us in large enough amounts to stop global warming?
If we would compare plugging the drain in the kitchen sink to producing CO2 and opening the tab to producing heat, opening the tab such that it produces more water than even an unplugged drain can take, would still get you a wet floor..
And wouldn't throwing away nuclear heat or any other heat resulting from transformation of an other energy form, be just doing that?
What can really be called "sustainable"?!?
That was mine, actually.
Dissipating energy on Earth's surface (whether emitted from stores or converted to heat instead of reflected) increases the temperature slightly. The difference between direct human energy consumption and the effect of GHGs on heat loss is enormous; human energy use equals about 41 minutes of annual solar input per YEAR. We could double or halve our heat generation without making an appreciable difference outside of cities. GHGs, however, affect the entire world.
On the recent growth of wind and solar I suggest they were made an offer too good to refuse. Perhaps to balance the scales nuclear should now get feed-in tariffs and wind power should get military research contracts. I suggest the existing system had enough flexibility with peaking plant and interconnectors to accommodate intermittent generation. In looking at installation data you should also multiply by capacity factors. It might show less gas fired generation installed than nameplate wind power in the same period. However that gas plant could be working a lot harder.
If storage is the next big thing then let the subsidies go directly to storage (CAES, flow batteries etc) and no direct subsidies at all to wind and solar. No feed-in tariffs, green certificates or production tax credits. Then we'll see if renewables keep growing without direct taxpayer help.
Thanks for your nice article, Hannes ... and welcome to the TOD grind mill.
Hannes made a few important observations that are quite obvious but are often ignored. Not every form of energy is the same as any other. In particular, as far as electricity generation is concerned, we must distinguish between a plant that puts out a fixed about of electric power 24/7, such as a nuclear power plant under normal operating conditions, and an electric power plant that delivers electricity on demand, such as a hydro-electric power plant feeding off a reservoir lake.
In practice, we need both types, but the requirements differ. The continuous plant is useful to cover the base load, i.e., the minimum amount of electric power ever used, whereas the on-demand power plant is useful for covering the peaks.
The entire energy delivered by an on-demand power plant needs to be buffered, i.e., stored, if we wish to guarantee service 24/7. Thus, it is not sufficient to talk about our electricity generation capacity. We must also talk about our energy storage capacity. In the case of the hydro-electric power plant, the stored energy is the potential energy of the water in the reservoir lake.
If we were to use always the exact same amount of electric power, we could provide that power using power stations of the first kind only, and in that case, we would not need any electric energy storage capacity at all. Yet, this is not the case. Electricity consumption varies quite a bit over the course of a day.
What France currently does makes a lot of sense. They can cover more than the base load using nuclear power by selling their surplus power during periods of low demand to Switzerland. Switzerland uses that power to run pumps that pump water uphill into our storage lakes. During times of high energy demand, France buys back electricity from Switzerland at a much higher rate. Switzerland then opens the sluices and lets the water flow down into the turbines again, producing electricity.
The intermediate storage of electric power in the form of potential energy is not perfect. Roughly 30% of the electric energy is lost by pumping the water first uphill and then letting it flow down again.
Wind power and solar electric (PV) power are indeed neither continuous nor controllable. This makes these sources of electric power of a lower quality, because they increase the demand for intermediate energy storage. PV is even a bit worse than wind, because there is always some wind somewhere, i.e., some of the wind power can be used to meet base load demands, whereas the sun does not shine anywhere within the region of a power grid during the night, and there are many regions on this planet, where cloud cover prevents the use of PV power during the winter months.
For this reason, if we were to cover our entire energy needs by PV power, we would need an unrealistically large energy storage capacity.
Hannes is correct to point out that a huge increase of non-buffered PV power, i.e., photovoltaic panels placed on most roofs in a region that are all connected to the grid without local batteries, will indeed lead to a grid that is unreliable and that breaks down frequently. Of course, if and when this happens, the consumers, at least in wealthy countries, will react to the situation by installing battery backup, not to make themselves entirely independent of the grid, but to bridge the power outages, i.e., some additional buffer capacity will be created by the end users.
Also, not all solar power plants have the same shortcomings. For example, concentrated solar power (CSP) plants are mostly solar thermal plants, i.e., the solar radiation is concentrated on an area to heat up some industrial oil, and the generated heat is then used in a conventional thermal power plant to produce electricity. Thus, CSP plants inherently buffer the energy in the form of heat, and heat can be stored quite a bit more easily than electricity.
If the CSP plant is built somewhere in the Sahara desert, it is well suited to meet base load demands. In the Sahara, the sun shines reliably every day, and it is thus sufficient to be able to store enough heat to cover the next night.
This is basically a repeat of a post I made soon before a previous thread was closed.
There is a critical threshold of energy flow, all of which is dependent on oil, below which the system cannot maintain itself and abruptly shuts down. This is how people collapse (die) from lack of food nutrients, water, or oxygen. This is how your car runs out of gas or your power goes out. In each case, there are still resources available, but they become inaccessible to the damaged/depleted infrastructure.
When someone starves to death, the body still contains plenty of energy sources, but they can't be accessed. When a car runs out of gas, there's still gas at the station and a few fumes in the tank, but they can't be accessed.
I'm going to use a harsh example here to illustrate this. Picture a girl underwater, drowning. She's not dead yet, and there is plenty of oxygen in the water which she can't access, and oxygen at the surface which she can't access. She then loses consciousness and her heart stops. But she's still not dead yet, because only the system has stopped. The hundreds of billions of individual living cells that make up her body, heart, lungs, brain, they are all still alive and clamoring for resources from the system, which has stopped.
But what's this? The Coast Guard to the rescue! They yank her out of the water and on the deck of their ship they perform CPR, supplying oxygen and exogenous blood-pumping energy through chest compressions. The billions of individual living cells are now supplied with the blood and oxygen they need and the system, the body, springs back to life.
In order to access those resources, someone else has to NOT be in collapse mode in order to "save" you. We can't perform CPR on ourselves. And it isn't that one day that just the oil will simply run out. When the system shuts down, everything "runs out" or becomes inaccessible.
This collapse is the die-off part of overshoot and die-off. If there is a part of this process that we are exempt from, please, someone, speak up.
As for "other societies" being able to live on less oil, well, that's talking about people who lived in different social structures and under different physical dependencies, and different life experiences. When suggested that those low-energy processes employed by those humans might be exchangeable with today's humans, the assumption is that the human brain is some sort of magic box which can change ex-nihilo. No, the brain is a physical construct which changes physically and measurably in response to stimulus, repetition, and culture.
Human brains will always be the stumbling blocks to getting any "solutions" in place. To understand about brains in general, read "The Brain That Changes Itself", by Dr. Norman Doidge. It talks about the physical changes that manifest in brain plasticity, and how the brain continually re-wires itself throughout life. To understand what to next do about your own brain, check out "Mastery" by George Leonard. And to understand what to do about other people's brains and behavior, I recommend "Influence: Science and Practice" by Robert Cialdini.
Here in the midwest we are experiencing deadly heat waves.
I am in bed with heat stroke due to overexertion yesterday.
Temps are hitting 99 and heat indexes over 100 consistently.And this has been going on for weeks now.
So what do people who live in cities and have few shade trees? Or methods of cooling off other than air conditioners? What do they do when the electricity fails either by brownouts or other reasons? They die is what they do.
The bodies core temperature must be regulated and sweat does that but if the outside temp is beyond the bodies core tem;(98.6) they will die.
Deaths are currently occurring in some places already. AGW is being to exert itself.
Another posted up top gave a 'Big Whoop' for when the electric goes out. He is sadly wrong and doesn't even have a clue.
Part of the midwest were subjected to very extreme weather events a few years ago. Massive ice storms left many without power for weeks.
Thinking that 'someone will do something' is wrong headed. No one will be there. No one will do anything. You will face reality. The cities are vast heat traps and out in the country the woodlands are rapidly being decimated.
Wake up people. Its here and happening now.
I assume you are referring to my 'big whoop.' Not to dismiss your concern out of hand, but there are other ways besides AC of regulating body temperature too. Taking a dip in the ol' river comes to mind; too bad we are fracking that river up real bad and may be foreclosing that option for ourselves (along with creating more than just a handful of other problems there). Shaded houses can be 10-15 degrees cooler than ambient temperature, which can provide some respite during these heat waves as well. The point was more about getting used to relying on these and other creative methods, rather than assuming the AC will always be there for us.
If anything this underscores the point that the sacrifices will not be as great as we might anticipate. Remember we still expect to do renewables buildout with storage and backup; the point is just that it might not be available 100% of the time. It would still be a very unlikely event to lose power for weeks on end, and even today we deal with worse. So the point is, yes we can adapt, but first we have to accept that we need to adapt.
Well, first of all, if they don't have shade trees, they should plant shade trees. I had a 100-year old two-story Victorian house on a 25x95 foot lot, and I grew half a dozen trees that each got to be wider than the lot and more than twice as high as the house. In fact, as the trees grew bigger, I had to keep cutting some of them down for firewood. It turned into a forestry management exercise. All it requires is water, fertilizer, and lots of time. Actually, not that much time because some trees can grow unbelievable fast if you treat them right.
The trees were my natural air-conditioning system. In the summer they blocked out the sun and shaded the whole house, including the roof. In the winter they dropped their leaves and allowed the sun to flood through the big south windows.
In my current house, which is actually in a forest, I have a nice open space with big windows on the east side which allows me to watch the sunrise (the great thing about retiring is that you can get up as early as you want.) On the south side I have a big roof overhang (about 6 feet) that blocks the sun in summer, but allows it through the windows in winter; and I also have numerous deciduous trees that leaf out in summer but allow the sun through in winter. On the west side I have lots of evergreens that block the sun in summer, and in winter the sun doesn't reach there anyway so I cut them down and feed them into the fireplace. It's all a nature management exercise.
I designed the house myself, by the way, and I can calculate sun angles and heat losses/gains, so all this is set up to work without air conditioning. It's not rocket science, but most architects seem to resist the concepts. They are more focused on how it looks, which I don't care about.
I knew some people who lived in Mexico, where it got really hot. They didn't think it was very hot in Mexico because their 100-year-old house had thick adobe walls which transmitted the heat very slowly. The heat took about 12 hours to penetrate, and by that time the sun had gone down. It took the walls all night to cool down again, by which time the sun was back up again. In traditional style it had no exterior windows, but it had a large central courtyard shaded by a huge tree. It had a marble floor, so when it got really hot (say 130 F), they would just strip down to shorts and T-shirts and lie around on the cool stones doing nothing.
It was all very pleasant, given the Mexican tradition of a noontime siesta. When it is too hot to work, you just find a shady spot and sleep until it is cooler. Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, as Noël Coward wrote while driving from Hanoi to Saigon.
Unfortunately, when they decided to build an American-style house, because it is more modern, I suppose, they discovered that Mexico is very hot in summer and air conditioning is very expensive. They hadn't realize that previously. You should avoid that style of house in hot places.
In southern Texas I met a number of people who didn't like air conditioning at all because they liked to be really, really hot. They felt that after you acclimatized to the hot weather, if you kept going back and forth to a cool interior, you would probably get sick, so it was best to just stay hot all the time. Others recommended what they called a "swamp cooler", which you can build yourself for about $100 worth of parts from a hardware store.
Please elaborate on the swamp cooler. You've piqued my interest.
The Swamp Cooler is more accurately known as an Evaporative Cooler. Here's a Wikipedia article on the subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler
And furthermore,
The Arabs also had some interesting ways of cooling their houses, as did the Indians and numerous other people living it hot places. Just because people want to live in a conventional American house with an energy-sucking air conditioner doesn't mean it's the only way to live in a hot climate.
Nice, sounds an awful lot like what our bodies are evolved to do also!
Check out the Coolerado. It's a swamp cooler with added finesse.
Just a few thoughts to add... My "swamp cooler" is a large metal wire shelf unit (the style that seems to be ubiquitous these days, like halogen lamps were in the 90's), which I wheel into the middle of the living room to dry my clothes on, sometimes pointing a fan on it to circulate more air, sometimes not. The wire grid provides plenty of room to hang or lay things, and I can store unused clothespins by clipping them upside down almost anywhere on the thing. This used to be my "entertainment center" so there was already a huge gap between two of the shelves to accommodate the ungodly 30 some inch CRT TV I used to have, which means there's plenty of vertical space for clothes to dry on hangers. Works great here during the Montana summers.
Another option I tried a few times was to lean the dish rack up against a box fan, with strips of cloth hanging down into a pan of water. It didn't do all that much and was rather precarious so I don't do that anymore. :)
For the commenter up above looking for general ways to deal with heat, I use "space blankets" ($3-4 each for roughly 5'x8' of mylar, in the camping section) in the windows. I cut them down to fit over the glass and affix them with some packing tape folded over on itself to make it "double stick." (I haven't tried "actual" double stick tape because I suspect the ultra thin tape edge would be harder to remove; the folded tape has nice round edges that don't require a fingernail to get a hold of it.) One small piece in each corner does the trick. I used Elmer's glue at first but found that it's impossible to remove the mylar without destroying it and the glue has to be scraped off later. Should have seen that coming! The packing tape works great because it's easy to detach and fold the mylar up a bit if I want to get more full sunlight on a cooler day, and it's easy to remove, roll up, store and reuse the next summer. It holds up pretty well, although be prepared to see your greasy/sweaty fingerprints back lit by the sun if you're not diligent! Many of the mylar pieces I'm using are on their third season. Some folks use aluminum foil; I like mylar because it allows some light in so the place isn't a cave. Plus, you can still see out the window. It's like a big pair of sunglasses over the window. Since the mylar is affixed directly to the glass, it doesn't interfere with opening the windows at night suck in the cooler night air. I don't even bother with mini-blinds, just leave them up all summer.
As indicated by others, the drier the air the better for evaporative cooling. But the mylar will work anywhere.
P.S. Not all of the wire racks come with wheels (mine didn't), but they usually have feet that screw into the bottom of the legs so you can adjust the height and/or keep it level (or plumb, depending on how you're looking at it). I unscrewed one of the feet and took it down to the hardware store when I found swivel wheels with the same thread attachment.
Yes. We must have what we want, even if it poisons us.
Truer words were never spoken — by a junkie.
The defeatism in this article is overwhelming.
As if we have no options.
How true, we have/had? an option but we do not want to go there; therefore the defeatism.
Live simply so that others can simply live...
At least this was an option...
Here's a link to an interesting study of (historical mainly) wind-powered factories
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/10/history-of-industrial-windmills.html
What I understand Hannes saying is that "the future will be like it used to be"... In other words the current habit of taking for granted immediate and effectively infinite electricity availability is inevitably going to end. We will return to like a "more primitive" time when you had to think ahead - stoke up the fire a few hours before bath time perhaps. Or wait for the wind to blow before grinding the corn.
I grew up on a farm which was not connected to the grid. If you turned on the toaster you had to turn off the hot water. If there was sawmilling going on there was no electricity for the day. So I must say that the "problems" of intermittency don't hold any real fear for me.
Of course, many people have come to expect that it's "their right" to have continuous access to unfettered electricity. So it is in reality a political and social challenge - one way or another people will need to get used to intermittent power. It will either happen in a planned (and perhaps co-operative) way, or in an unplanned (and probably chaotic) way. Take your pick.
Thank you for sharing this very interesting link.
Upon further consideration, I am agreeing with your assessment and find myself agreeing more and more with Hannes. I think that the reason I, and many other commenters, found ourselves resisting his conclusions is that we misinterpreted them as "renewables cannot provide 100% of what we are used to, therefore they are not worth it." I think he would say the opposite but that the emphasis is indeed on adjusting expectations. I still think there is considerable room for debate over how difficult it will be to overcome the challenges of intermittency, etc. But the larger point is more "renewables cannot provide 100% of what we are used to, therefore we face these challenges in the first place, which we have not yet confronted." With that, I'll agree 100%. We have come to the end of the era of outsourcing our energy supply and need to get used to the idea of drastically cutting back, whether we have substantial renewables infrastructure in place or not. And that our leaders continue to insist we can have our cake and eat it too, that the transition to a renewable economy will be painless, that we will not have to make any sacrifices. It is almost heartbreaking but I think there is some truth in the idea that others, perhaps less energy-aware than those who read TOD, *will* use this as a reason to give up, once they see that even relatively small personal sacrifice (like going without electricity for a few days or so) might be involved. They will laugh at us chasing windmills and go back to fiddling while the planet burns. There are so many people out there willing to trade the entire climate, and all the other problems of fossil fuel dependence, just to avoid a tiny sacrifice. It is maddening. No wonder there is such resistance.
For many of us here, we find it difficult to be told that in addition to convincing our neighbors of the necessity of a buildout of renewables, we must now also convince them that the transition from fossil fuels requires a fundamental reassessment of our attitudes. We'd rather be technocrats than activists, in many cases, and we are being told that our job must include both now. I still think the case can be made based on fossil fuel supply issues and pollution/externalities, but now these harms must be weighed against both the costs/challenges of the buildout itself AND the fact that we may be dealing with significantly lower-quality energy sources. In other words, the task is bigger than we care to admit. Are we up to it?
Thank you. I can confirm that this is exactly what I want to say: We keep fooling ourselves believing that we can keep our current energy delivery and usage patterns when we (have to) shift away from stock based fossil fuels.
I am 100% for renewables, as they (and sooner than in 100 years) will have to provide a large portion of our energy needs.
renewables ... will have to provide a large portion of our energy needs.
That appears to be in contradiction of the title of this article and your position. Renewables will have to provide ALL of our energy needs.
Do you agree with me and now retract/change your position ?
Alan
Alan, in far less than 100 years, renewables will have to provide 100 percent of the energy for many nations, but not all. On the other hand some nations will likely have some oil for far more than 100 years.
When world oil production has dropped by 40 to 50 percent, or somewhere in that neighborhood, oil exporting nations will start to take a long and hard look at their own personal oil supply. Most all will start exporting a lot less oil and many will stop exporting all together. From then on exports will start to drop dramatically until they soon stop altogether.
Globalization, for all intents and purposes, will be over.
Nations like the USA, Great Britain, China and some others, will have to get by on a lot less oil. Others like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela will have plenty of oil for their own personal use. But nations like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and even many European nations will have to get by on no oil at all.
One more point: Horizontal and MRC Wells have changed the peak oil profile. In about 1990 horizontal wells, some with as much as 3 kilometers of horizontal reservoir contact, came into widespread use. By 2003 there had been about 52,000 horizontal wells drilled. This was a great boom to all those giant tired old reservoirs out there. Instead of having a bell shaped production profile as vertical wells would deliver, they will produce at near maximum level almost up until the end of their production lives. Then their production will drop off dramatically.
That fact, and hoarding among most producing nations, will cause the oil production profile to look far more like a sharks fin than a bell curve. A gradual drop off in production would allow for some mitigation to the problem. Unfortunately the drop off will be far more sudden than most expect.
Ron P.
Coal, natural gas and even peat, lignite, tar sands and oil shale are fossil fuels. And I stated that we might run out of fossil fuels, not oil, by 2184.
I do not expect a coal-less and natural gas free world in 2110. Oil for lubricants and petrochemicals (supplemented by bio-plastics) should still be available.
Alan
Alan, you have to think a little about how the world would look like in 2110 (and much earlier) if Darwinian's scenario develops.
As one who thinks there is much more carbon out there than most at TOD, I think 2184 is too far out there.
I assume that under BAU carbon will be used as fuel(coal and unconventional oil) thru 2100 at roughly the rate they are now.
The best way to recover carbon is to geologically sequester CO2 (CCS) it in concentrated form where it can be converted to plastics,etc. using less energy (atmospheric harvesting) assuming fusion or something else comes along.
I believe you're right (and the climate will be the worse for it). Even coal which cannot be mined is now open to production via in-situ gasification. Linc Energy has just run a test of a fuel cell running on hydrogen from in-situ generated syngas. Too deep, too steep, too thick or too thin may no longer be problems; if we can drill through it, we may well be able to gasify it.
Nonsense. There will always be oil available internationally to countries like Japan. Suppose a country produces just enough oil for its own use, but little food (and has no other exports). So the country's options are to:
1. Use the oil it produces internally--but starve to death
2. Ration internal oil use--and export the rest to buy food
Do you really think it will choose to starve to death?
Saying that oil will always be available anywhere is the very epitome of nonsense. Always is a long time.
And the rest of your post is nonsense as well. All oil producing nations do not have to export oil in order to feed themselves. The world's largest oil producer, Russia, is a perfect example. Hell, the US does not export oil and we are not starving to death. True, we import oil but that's the point isn't it.
Have you ever heard of the Export Land Model? Many current exporting nations will soon not be able to export oil. Great Britain is at that critical crossover point right now. Indonesia was there a few years ago. They were once an OPEC member now they import a lot of their oil. And they had no choice in the matter.
Only a few desert countries must export oil to feed their populace. Saudi, for example. But they will soon have a lot less oil to export. And eventually they will have none. No, they will not "choose" to starve. They will simply have no choice in the matter.
But from statement I guess you are one of those abiotic oil folks and believe oil will always be available because it continues to bubble up from the center of the earth. I am not surprised, we get all kinds here.
Ron P.
Oil will always be available, just not necessarily in the quantities than importers want to have. Global production will approach zero asymptotically, but it will never reach zero.
And oil will always be available at a sufficiently high price. For instance, Canada is currently exporting more oil to the United States than it consumes itself. This will probably increase in future until exports are several times domestic consumption.
In fact, Canada will quite happily reduce its own oil consumption so the U.S. can consume more. This is because Canada is awash in energy and has many more alternatives than the U.S. does. It supplies 20% of U.S. oil imports, 80% of U.S. natural gas imports, 33% of U.S. uranium imports and nearly 100% of U.S. electricity imports.
However, Canadians drive smaller cars than Americans, and use public transit 2 or 3 times as much. This is so we can export more oil to the U.S. As long as Americans can pay for it in hard currency, we will use less so they can use more. If not, we'll sell it to the Chinese.
Oil WILL always be available. Not because there is an unlimited supply, but because there is no limit to how high the price can rise. Of course oil at $10,000 per barrel will make filling up your car very expensive, but the gas will be there if you have the money to pay for it.
Let's unpick the first fallacy here by starting with the last fallacy. There IS a limit to how high the price can rise. That's because it is limited by what people can afford, and that will be in the context that they are much poorer, struggling to feed themselves in the future. Some will fantasise that there will be some elite of vastly richer people surviving in this context. But there 'might' just be the same problem that the French and Russian aristocracy encountered.
In the context of vanishing numbers of people with the ability to fund the supply infrastructure (tech and human), that supply system will degrade. And you can't run just a bit of a deepwater horizon, or just a bit of a refinery, or just a bit of a university geology dept. At some point, long before you reach single percents, the system collapses. Institutions are notorious for their talent for coping with growth, and their hopelessnes in the face of contraction. For these reasons I reckon the point will soon come when oil is firmly a thing of the past. The coming recovery will be one involving cartwheels and anvils!
Question a lot of things... http://energyark.blogspot.com/
Thank you for noticing this.
There is a substantial part of TOD (Gail included) which seems to believe that industrial civilization must end in order to save the planet; they look at the BAUers and say "these people have to go at any cost". To this mind-set, even if industry can be saved it MUST NOT BE. I look at the repeated protestations of "you can't" not as conclusions of reason, but as part of a program to bring about TEOTWAWKI for their own purposes, the collateral damage be damned.
I think the Doomers and Gloomers are needed to counter balance against the Cornucopian Optimists
E-P, I don't think Gail, or myself or others really wish to force some collapse of the system. We may want the system to be wound down before it trashes the planet even worse, but the main point is that we believe that collapse is unavoidable anyway. And given that unavoidability the most sensible thing is to warn people to prepare rather than have everyone drown when the globoTitanic hits the berg.
I don't know about you, but I read Gail's position as wanting to wind down even resources where we have wild abundance such as wind and nuclear. That fixes the endpoint of "winding down" as a mass dieoff, because there's no way to manage smoothly without growth in those areas.
If you're right, so what; it's all the same anyway. But wouldn't you rather give the benefit of the doubt to the people who think you're wrong, and who just might know a few things you don't? Isn't that a bet you'd be happy to lose?
That is why I thought Gail's #8 was a waste of time and effort.
Almost all of the people trained will die in a die-off, and the social disruption and eventual recreation of society will lose any knowledge. The physical structures she proposes are too fragile to survive several decades of neglect.
So don;t waste time on #8. And refusing to put maximum efforts into #1 to #7 guarantees a die-off (although one can argue what priorities within the possible courses of action).
Best Hopes !
Alan
Scientific American Brave New Brain, page 51. Judith Horstmann
We are designed to fret.
I guess it is better to fret about what we know and love.
Oil.
On last thread, regarding the geothermal mining of heat:
the Geothermal map, which indicates a geothermal energy flux of about 40 - 150 milliwatts per sq.m depending where you are... go down 10,000' (3,000 m) and "mine" it
I would propose using geothermal for roughly providing peak power. Install, say, a 150 MW geothermal complex (in dry rock or with natural heat). Use a working fluid with a lower boiling point than water for the "steam" turbine (common today) and exchange superheated water with the working fluid on the surface.
This complex would, in the first decades, produce power for 120 days per year, with a production curve somewhat like this:
Hour 1 - 50 MW
Hours 2 to 5 - 150 MW
Hour 6 - 100 MW
Hour 7 - 50 MW
As the heat is mined, and temperatures drop a bit, the working fluid is changed (and perhaps the turbines are swapped too) and it becomes a 90 MW geothermal plant that can be scheduled for 90 days/year. And after over a century, the wells may need to be mothballed to allow the natural heat to rebuild.
One would need a very low interest rate to justify such a plant today, but renewable peaking power on demand is quite attractive. In an emergency, such a plant could be run 24/7 for years before exhausting the stored heat.
This approach allows natural regeneration of a portion of the heat that is "mined". And it extracts the greatest value power (peak on specified days) from the natural resource.
Given that heat will flow from nearby "hot rocks" into the suddenly cooler area that is being mined, and the natural flux will reheat the entire affected area, it is possible that Stage II (90 MW for 90 days/year) may have an indefinite lifetime and be in balance with natural heat flows (multiple centuries plus seems likely).
Best Hopes for geothermal,
Alan
We exist to bring energy/resource gradients to an equilibrium state. We consume. We are defined as consumers by our society.
There are many gradients (high value deposits) in existence that help support our structures and reproduction. Fresh water, forests, rich accumulated soils, other non-equilibrium systems ( livestock, crops, fish), ore deposits, pension funds, oil deposits, coal, uranium, low wage workers, phosphorous and so on.
The tapping of some of this wealth has allowed the emergence of technological society with new tools to discover and bring to equilibrium other concentrated sources of energy.
We use fresh water faster than the sun can purify it, soils faster than they can be built, fish faster than they can breed and grow, pension funds as fast as they can be duped into buying a new security, low wage workers as fast as we can ship them the capital, oil and coal as fast as we can mine and burn it. The waste products swirl around us.
There is no natural stopping point until we collapse. Nations, businesses, and individuals cooperatively process high value energy and resources through their structures and can collapse if supply is suddenly removed or the energy gradient slowly reaches equilibrium.
Just tapping into another energy source will not save us from ourselves, but will only delay the end of a natural cycle of growth. One last meal before our executions may be comforting, but the bullets are already loaded in their chambers.
Perhaps we need to see a few nations collapse and the collateral damage to see the necessity of regulating our own behavior. However, the parts of our brains that motivate our activities have evolved over many millions of years of ruthless competition and are not readily amenable to rationality that contravenes our natural impulses.
The fact that the wealthiest members of our societies consume substantially more than poorer members of society means that voluntary reduction in lifestyle amongst the middle class and below will not be forthcoming. Why adopt simplicity when the slack is simply consumed by a competitor,
Dopamine, you are overlooking the positive points of delaying the collapse, via renewables or whatever, for say a decade or so. In one more decade we could drive millions more species into extinction. We could clear cut millions more square miles of rain forest. We could expand the world's deserts by millions of square miles. We could pollute or dry up dozens more of our large pristine lakes. We could cause many more rivers to dry up before they reach the sea. And of course we could expand our population by about a billion so when the die-off does come, there would be one billion more souls to suffer and die in misery.
Err... wait, those are negative points, not positive points. Okay, someone else name the positive points.
Ron P.
Well, that's a pretty elegant verbal summary of the big picture, Dopamine, that includes all major processes without isolating details. Just call us the little nullifiers, one big frenzied pulse of gobbling stored resources. Here's a conceptual/mathematical model of the same, for those so inclined. By simplifying the whole into key processes, without isolating pieces of the problem, one arrives at the inevitable truth, as the assets curve suggests. And the relative degree of downslope of the assets curve is dependent for the most part on how far into overshoot we run these processes. Do we want it to level off at some point, or just fall to zero? Alan, are you listening?
http://books.google.com/books?id=PXNWwRXZU7cC&pg=PA204&lpg=PA204&dq=odum...
Wasted, you give me hope, thanks.
Yeah, Ron, what Iaato said (I keep saying that): Very well done.
"Here's a conceptual/mathematical model of the same, for those so inclined."
Beyond inclination, H.T.'s work oughtta be required background reading.
Renewables, yes. However, coal, hydro, gas, and nuke will always be needed for a sustained constant electricity supply. There has to be some kind of storage and light on demand.
My wife and I flew into LA some years ago. Our flight was delayed and we arrived around 1:00 am. I was astounded to see absolutely everything lit up....including outdoor stadiums and all parking areas, parks, etc. As the jet descended I could see that these areas were devoid of people. I couldn't see into the shadows, though.
I didn't understand it until one day it dawned on me it was for crime control.
We cannot have blackouts in cities. I don't have stats and numbers for this, but it seems to me that rolling blackouts of any kind will be just the excuse needed to turn some places into a very dangerous place, indeed. All cities have their areas where you simply don't go. In the dark? I'd rather walk through a tiger preserve.
Hopefully, led technology will alleviate these concerns, but that is going to take some serious dinero to refit.
My point is that energy disruption is more than being cold/hot or inconvenienced. We have many power outages where I live. However, this is the kind of place without streetlights and I imagine the lowlifes that do live here curse the tv going out and finish off their beer and go to bed because they don't have candles or flashlights to find anyone to rob or ripoff.
Paul
I don't think that a lack of outdoor lighting would necessarily increase crime rates in cities.
In some areas, business owners would provide lighting of their premises to encourage patrons to come to their businesses. This was the original rationale for street lighting (along with providing a predictable nightime base load for the utility).
But outdoors activity of all kinds would be greatly decreased during the night.
The general lack of traffic and pedestrians would make law enforcement much easier, particular with a ubiquitous installation of low-light security cameras. These can be arranged to automatically detect motion through video processing and then panned and zoomed as needed to track activity.
There are other physical security technologies to detect and analyse activity besides cameras. I'm sure that DoD has been working hard on these for use in various trouble spots.
I like your mile-long glass analogy for the available oil reserves. Like any other natural resources oil will be exhausted in the near/distant future, depending on one's view on the subject, and becoming harder to access. Unlike other natural resources where recycling can help preserve the existence of the resource, oil, coal, uranium, and other currently available energy carrying resources will be exhausted. It is just a question of time...
In my opinion the renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, and water, are in the reverse cycle of the mile-long glass analogy at the current time. As the technology in this area advances, the glass is getting more full instead of just scraping the bottom of the glass. The efficiency of this technology had been increasing during the years and continues to do so in the future. By the time the oil glass is empty, that could be 20, 50, and more years, the renewable energy glass will be full and will stay that way due to its renewable nature.
Making prediction in the future for the renewable energy sources based on current technology is misleading to say the least. For example about 20 years ego storing electricity in batteries was in its infancy, when compared to the capabilities of today's batteries. Back in those days nobody has seriously consider the electric cars, due to the limited range of the electric vehicle because of the insufficient storage of electricity. Today the electric car is a viable option and as the technology advance in this field, it is becoming more so in the near future.
Energy is all around us, it is just a question of harvesting it. In a carbon, sun, and oxygen based world as long as these exists, human kind ingenuity will find the way to harvest this energy. It may not be as easy and cheap as harvesting the energy from oil, but the "must have" nature of electricity will find a way to sustain our life as we've got accustomed to.
Now, if the sun decides to disappear, all bets are off...
This whole thread is hard for me to follow. No clear issues emerge. I read the post, and basically nothing in it seems that off-track. Questions of emphasis, perhaps. But I read some of the responses and get the same feeling of basic agreement.
One thought: the title "the fake fire brigade" and the "attack" on renewables is setting off a lot of concern. I think there's no question that we can't rescue the current economic set-up, and shouldn't try, either. So perhaps we could identify what exactly is burning, that needs to be saved. Just a thought.
Keith
This terrible post doesn't come close to proving renewables cannot provide 100% of our energy need(rather than consumption).
If the US at 327 GJ/person used the same amount of energy per capita as Uruguay at 30.96 GJ/person, a nice, quiet, civilized, somewhat socialist country, it would require current US renewables(~6.8 quads) would cover 2/3's of our low-energy needs. It would be quite easy to increase renewables to cover all of our low-energy need.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table2.html
The people of Uruguay are in fact slightly happier on average that americans in 2009, though much less happy than the Swiss, Cubans (or the gung ho Chinese).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Planet_Index
It must be his economist-training that finds importance/utility in things other than basic happiness.
Economists should be taken out to the country to tend gardens to allow their re-education as something other than parasites, though some might consider this to be a crime against humanity.
The Happy Planet index has nothing to do with happiness, which you'd known if you read the link you're referring to.
You are wrong in a fundamental way.
It makes no sense to rank happiness on the basis of pure materialism when society cannot sustain that materialism.
Happiness is living sustainably within your means.
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." --Wilkins Micawber
The HPI authors do say they are measuring,
http://heavylifting.blogspot.com/2006/07/on-happy-planet-index.html
"Happiness returned on resources invested" appears to look like EROI (or by extension--net energy), rather than absolute happiness.
Human Development Index is a ranking of literacy, standard of living/purchasing power and life span which doesn't measure happiness but 'productivity', which is relatively meaningless.
"Scandinavia comes out on top according to the HDI because the HDI is basically a measure of how Scandinavian your country is."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
Far from tripping me up, you've proven you don't know what happiness is in a world of shrinking resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Planet_Index
We don't have shrinking resources. We have expanding resources. No, happiness is NOT about living sustainably. You can just go around redefining stuff like that and expect to be understood or taken seriously. You claimed Uruguay and Cuba were happier than US, but no real happiness index supports that claim.
If you mix in how backwards a country is, of course some countries "beat" the US by being somewhat less happy but much more backwards. That's no surprise.
"We don't have shrinking resources. We have expanding resources."
That's just too ridiculous to... well, just too ridiculous.
As Jay Hanson likes to say, "The Earth is a closed system. It contains a finite amount of stuff."
What part of that assertion would you contest or dispute?
Ever heard of meteorites?
But seriously, resources isn't about what raw materials there is. It is somewhat about what raw materials we are technologically and economically able to extract, but even more about what we are able to do with them once we have them. What did a 36" TV weigh in 1995, and what did it cost? What about now?
Then, I'd like to point out that humanity's greatest resource is, well, humanity.
Sure, at least resorting to cannibalism is better than those who think that "information will replace energy." If it came down to it, we could eat each other, but not our computers.
Humanity's greatest assets are brainpower and foresight. Humanity's greatest liabilities are stupid, short-sighted people.
However, "asset" is probably the right word for it.
Real happiness index? Such as what?
If you measure happiness as having things and I define happiness as sustainable well-being, we are talking about two different things.
You don't define happiness at all but I would guess that if you don't buy the idea that sustainable well-being is happiness than it must be by possessions, or literacy/life expectancy/standard of living, etc.
Living without some sense of sustainability would make me stressed, anxious and uncertain to some degree and degrade my sense of well-being.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfaction_with_Life_Index
Eh, no, I measure happiness by asking people how happy they are. Which seems to correlate well with GDP/capita and seems to improve with income within countries, just as my graph showed. Did you even look at it? Did you think I proved that GDP/capita correlated with "having things"?
You are free to try to prove a correlation between happiness and sustainability. I'm interested in your results.
Psychobabble.
I looked at your Life Satisfaction Index by a psychologist Adrian White in 2006. It's entirely subjective. It is correlated to health and wealth, full of cultural biases and frankly stupid; for example the French are less happy than the Mexicans or Chinese are happier than Japanese. Russians are famous for their pessimism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfaction_with_Life_Index
On top of this, the rankings are very close in many cases so you can really say they mean anything at all.
All it proves is that people lie to pollsters, which is not exactly news.
I also notice that nobody is doing anything new with the Life Satisfaction Index of 2006, so it is probably bogus. Can't you find something a little better?
Very close, lies, frankly stupid, full of cultural bias, entirely subjective, probably bogus? Ok, that's very open-minded of you.
But as I said, such subjective happiness indices correlate well with GDP per capita, and within countries, correlate with income. There are several such indices, I just picked one. This measure is mainstream in happiness research, and I have a hard time taking your home-brewn redefinition of happiness to mean "sustainable" seriously.
I'm a little late to this post, but here goes nothing.
My major question regarding renewable energy sources has to do with the results of extracting the energy from the systems in place. Is there a maximum amount of energy which can be redirected from bio-systems without having them affected? What is that maximum?
If we put up all the wind turbines we are able to - both on and off shore - is there a chance that we will remove some significant quantity of atmospheric energy? If we removed a significant amount of the energy which drives our atmospheric system, will it affect that system? And what will the effect be? Is anyone doing any research on this? I wonder if current weather/climate models could assist with this question, I certainly don't have the skillset required to approach it.
The same sort of question bothers me about geothermal energy extraction. If we scale geothermal sufficiently, will it break the smooth flow of heat from the earth's core to the surface? And if this happens, what will the effect be?
The discussions here often assume that because renewables do not excrete CO2 they will therefor not affect our biosphere. And perhaps they won't. We have, however, run into unintended consequences with every energy source we have scaled up in history. We overforested, overmined, overpolluted, and overdrilled. We have significantly changed the chemistry of our atmosphere and oceans.(imagine trying to convince anyone of that in the 1920's) At some point the scaling up of anything might not be in our species best interest. And if we all go great guns into wind, geothermal, solar, hydroelectric and scale these technologies - what other unintended consequences will we reap?
I think Darwinian is right - there are too many of us. Any advantages that are found and implemented may be benign over a few hundred million, but have a significantly negative effect if implemented by a large proportion of our population.
Regards, Al
I don't think anybody here disagrees that there are too many of us.
I love the Population threads that start their thousand mile journeys with "Why doesn't anyone want to talk about the REAL problem, POPULATION!"
I can't expect pop. to keep going up, as our net energy starts going down. It'll run parallel to energy, with something of a delay, I suppose.
Whatever we've got for renewables when it peaks will be that much better a percentage for those remaining when we've 'contracted' a bit, while other factors of life might muddy this helpful news, just the same.
A key sentence of Hannes' post is:
From "our societies" and other parts of the post, it is clear that it is global energy systems that are being addressed, and that the topic is not limited to global peak oil, US peak oil imports, or US energy systems.
From "reshape societies" it seems clear that reductions of population and limits on energy use per capita are within scope, although they are not proposed or described.
The "assumption that renewable technologies have to provide the entire amount required" is arguable. In particular, nuclear fission reactors can provide large parts of the future requirements. Nuclear fusion reactor research continues and is promising as a replacement for fission reactors at some point. So an alternative to the "renewables, coal, oil/gas, back to renewables" assumption is the "renewables, coal, oil/gas, onwards to nuclear" assumption. Furthermore, technology replacements are rarely complete. For example, water power, coal, oil, and gas can be used for a long time to come, and tar sands and oil shale may be economic alternatives as well.
Thus, while comprehensive backwards planning from an end goal is a useful tool, and more informative than a collection of inadequate incremental solution proposals, choosing an unrealistic end goal tends to defeat its purpose.
So some questions are:
In all the above comments I have not seen any mention of producing hydrogen by electrolysis. The process could be powered by wind or sunlight and the energy could be stored as hydrogen gas. Existing natural gas infrastructure may be usable for hydrogen delivery.
Could someone comment on this please?
Refer here for a discussion of several ways of splitting water
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy
The price of free H2 needs to get down below say $2 per kilogram for large scale applications. I've also wondered if the oxygen co-produced could be used to create pure CO2 then combined with hydrogen to get fuels and chemical precursors. A slight surplus of oxygen from electrolysis could be vented.
Hydrogen is a significant chemical product, chiefly used in making nitrogen fertilizers and, increasingly, to convert low-grade crude oils into transport fuels. Some is used for other chemical processes. World consumption is 50 million tonnes per year. Virtually all hydrogen is made from natural gas, giving rise to quantities of carbon dioxide emissions. It is a waste of 5% of world natural gas production, to use it to make anhydrous ammonia and to sweeten sour crude oil, since an efficient method for splitting hydrogen from water is known.
There are 350+ mechanisms for thermochemical splitting of water. I picked one of the most studied, the sulfuric acid iodine approach to call attention to the possibility of a more efficient process than electrolysis. It was invented in 1970. This process uses sulfuric acid and iodine as catalysts and a heat source. Of 800 to 1000 C . Thermal solar and high temperature reactors are ideal sources for the needed heat.
Sandia and the Idaho lab are preparing for reactor pilot plant hydrogen production. with this method. Japan has successfully already demonstrated that this process produces hydrogen at 50% efficiency.
The Los Alamos National Lab has developed a highly efficient method for using atmospheric carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce synfuel. They project an operating cost (Nov 2007) of $0.65/gal for MEOH and $1.40/gal for syn gasoline. Add on $ five billion for plant construction and the cost the price goes to $4.60 for gasoline and $1.65 for methanol. With suggested improvements costs could drop to $3.40/gal and $1.14/gal.
Too little attention is being paid to synthetic gasoline and diesel fuel from atmospheric carbon dioxide and hydrogen form water as part of the solution to the peak oil problem.
One "economic R&D" that would be helpful for renewables are processes that can use electrical power that would other wise be stranded (>local demand and > transmission to other markets).
One such would be batch electric arc smelting of scrap steel (today, this is the dominant technology for recycling steel. The other major way to recycle is adding some scrap steel to be mixed with iron ore for blast furnaces). Run electric arc steel recycling on sunny days that are not sweltering hot with excess solar PV and on windy days that are not very cold. Relatively low capital cost with abundant and widespread raw material. Even minimal economic value (say $0.02/kWh) for otherwise "waste" power ("spill" in hydro terms) raises the economic build-out point for renewables. A more extensive build-out then provides more power on moderate and minimal production days and less need for either storage or fossil fuels.
Iowa, as one example, has excellent wind and imports vast quantities of ammonia. This sounds like a continuous process rather than batch, but a process that can be slowed or speeded up.
In Iowa, right amidst wind farms and cornfields, use solar thermal and/or heat pumps to preheat the water to a moderate temperature (around 150 C ?) and electrical resistance (plus heat from the hot evolved H2 & O2) from there to the required 800C to 1000 C.
Operate this plant in Iowa for 9 or so months of the year (the good wind months) with varying production rates depending on the price of electricity. Transport the ammonia a dozen or so miles to the farms for use. Such plants would be a nearly ideal "storage system" and would allow more production for the general market (due to more WTs being erected due to improved economics) in the summer months and the lower wind days the rest of the year.
Best Hopes for new variable demands for electricity,
'
Alan
Electrolysis is currently both expensive and lossy. Recent developments in non-precious metal electrodes seem likely to solve the expensive part, but losses are much harder to get around. Converting hydrogen back to e.g. electricity is also a lossy process. The result is that stored energy from electrolytic hydrogen costs multiples of the price of what feeds it, and you have to start with electricity. Dr. Ulf Bossel has a lot more to say about that, and he's not someone to be ignored.
Hydrogen pipelines are also lossy. Hydrogen has about the same flow friction (pumping energy requirement) as natural gas, but only about 1/3 the energy per unit volume. The energy moved goes down, but the losses don't; a gas pipeline which delivers 70% of its energy to the far end would become a hydrogen pipeline which delivers 10%.
HVDC lines move energy much more efficiently than even NG pipelines. Hydrogen doesn't have any indispensible uses unless you need to make chemicals or launch rockets.
Can I just say it is sickening how many people over this thread and its predecessor have endorsed government-imposed population controls? Do you really want to hand this power over to the same political leaders who have caused the very problem we are discussing here? Do you really think ecofascism is better than a crash and burn?
That is all I really have to add at this time.
Why is it sickening to you? It makes perfect sense to me.
Why do you identify perfectly rational community-determined limits to reproduction with "ecofascism" (whatever that might be)?
Why do you think "political leaders" have caused the "very problem" we are discussing?
I don't understand the basis for the objection.
It depends what you mean by rational. If we are talking about taxing people who have children beyond replacement rate, for instance, or something along those lines that might be OK. But I'd like for people to be more explicit about what measures they'd like to see when they talk about population control, so it doesn't come to forced abortions, sterilization, eugenics. Don't these ideas still make us squirm? I'm not saying population isn't a problem, just that these options are not any better. If this is going to become necessary we need to plan better options now so it doesn't come down to the really unpleasant stuff. What concerns me primarily is who gets to decide what is perfectly rational and who gets to reproduce? In other words, who watches the watchers? What prevents this from turning into the Dr. Strangelove endgame scenario where it is the leaders who simply deem themselves and their friends most fit?
The political leaders created the problem by convincing us we could convince BAU even under a renewables scenario and by refusing to face the music re: overconsumption and overpopulation, which is why I wouldn't trust them deciding that I don't get to have any kids either. Then again, I suppose we elected them to tell us what we wanted to hear.
Basically, I'd agree with your call for "rational measures," and since everyone seems to keep saying we aren't looking at the real issue and root of the problem then yes we should consider the question of population, but it behooves us to figure out what "perfectly rational measures" means. Especially since the question of how to deal with population gets at fundamental questions of what it means to be human, which each of us must answer for ourselves. I'm not a fan of biopower, state control over the physical human body is no good.
To a first approximation, no coercion is necessary. The USA went to well below replacement birthrates, and all it took was a government promise to provide support in old age (Social Security, Medicare).
The problem right now is too much breeding in some groups (permanent underclasses, especially people who have no skills to get a job) and not enough in others. Changing the incentives to line up would probably fix 90% of that pretty quickly. Just pay folks; what gets rewarded gets done.
i urge those who claim that frequent and unscheduled blackouts are ok, to build a simple device that would, at random time and for random duration, cut the power to their house, in order to directly experiment how disruptive and damaging blackouts are. i know it, because i lived in a place where frequent and long lasting blackouts were the norm. failed electric equipment, rotting food, no water and so on.
there are a lot of things you take for granted and that will stop working when electricity is not available.
but while living in such condition can be complicated and expensive (you will be surprised how much electric/electronic equipment will fail due to the blackouts) it makes it impossible for any modern or semimodern industry to exist.
constant, reliable power availability is a REQUIREMENTf for any industry, and lack of this requirement will send a country very rapidly into economic disaster.
so dont delude yourself thinking that blackouts are ok, or even good. they are worse than a natural disaster.
What? You can't be serious...Been to Haiti recently? Do you live through Hurricane Mitch and have personal experience to back up your statement that this is preferable to a blackout? When was the last time you heard about a mass exodus of refugees as a result of a blackout?
There are plenty of foods you can live on that do not require refrigeration. There are also alternatives to refrigeration. Ever heard of root cellars and iceboxes? Food survives in an unpowered refrigerator for a decent while too as long as you do not open it, too, especially a nicely insulated one.
Constant power is NOT a requirement for all industries, which is why many get discounts for signing up for interruptible service.
And in any case, we aren't talking about "frequent and unscheduled blackouts," assuming we do things right and go with something like AlanFromBigEasy's energy Marshall Plan buildout, which includes a considerable amount of pumped-storage, negawatts, demand management, HVDC transmission with geographic dispersion, resource diversity, integration with base loading renewables, and R&D in next-gen technologies like advanced geothermal, wave power, concentrating solar, and so forth. We can even work a little advanced nuclear into the mix over time if the price is right. What we are talking about is not having power for a few hours or, God forbid, maybe even days at a time, when and if the wind stops blowing "across entire continents" (and I still have trouble believing this really happens). Add all these things up and you might not have BAU, but you certainly end up with something reasonably close to the reliability we have come to expect from fossil fuels. The biggest wedge against energy scarcity can and should be changes in our behavior to waste less energy, and there is a vast amount of low-hanging fruit here (or even fruit already on the ground) that will make it easier to meet demand in the first place. So yes we might have to change our expectations, but that doesn't mean the future expectation we change to will be "frequent" blackouts.
And guess what? We have blackouts already from time to time, and the world doesn't end. Fossil fuels are not perfectly reliable either. We are capable of getting by with far less electricity than we use today, if we can learn to be smart about sipping on it instead of chugging it. Pakistan today is not our model for the future.
I think your proposition is a little tilted.
Many of us who say we don't have intense objections to the 'intermittency' of renewables, aren't saying that "Blackouts are OK", but that one way or another, they are coming, and we should design systems and lifestyles that can survive that.
If we have some alternatives built in to many homes, towns, cities, businesses.. then we know there is at least something coming in. There are some ways to do storage and keep a constant supply.. but failing that, are you going to cut off your option of having even an intermittent supply?
You can put REQUIREMENT in as big a bold face as you like, Mother Nature won't feel compelled to oblige you either way.
"Falling down isn't a problem. The problem is not getting back up." -source unknown
Monthly Variation in USA "Other Renewable" (mainly wind) & Total Electrical Generation
2009
January...11,845 ..... 355,379
February 11,046 ..... 301,443
March .... 12,778 ..... 310,941
April ...... 12,854 ..... 290,120
May ........ 11,695 ..... 311,996
June ....... 11,291 ..... 348,379
July ....... 10,888 ..... 372,249
August .... 11,550 ..... 380,890
September10,181 ..... 327,175
October ... 12,198 ..... 307,156
November 12,405 ..... 296,735
December 12,384 ..... 350,647
Total ...... 272,131 ... 3,953,111
2010
January...12,372 ..... 360,302
February 10,587 ..... 319,142
March .... 14,316 ..... 311,933
Adjustments need to be made for length of month and the continual addition of new renewable capacity
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html
Not such a seasonal generation problem in the aggregate
Alan
This is the correct data for U.S. wind, found at: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1_a.html. For example, January 2009 is 20% lower than April (corrected for number of days in month), in 2010, January is 23% below March. That is where those large cumulative gaps come from.
2009 (GWh)
----------
Jan: 6018
Feb: 5675
Mar: 6938
Apr: 7294
May: 6094
Jun: 5405
Jul: 4700
Aug: 5243
Sep: 4367
Oct: 6326
Nov: 6430
Dec: 6270
Total: 70761
2010 GWh
--------
Jan: 6355
Feb: 5110
Mar: 8196
Total: 19661
That ignores the fact that more turbines were spinning in March 09 than January 09.
Your "cumulative gap" analysis is basically nonsense.
Ask the wrong question and get the wrong answer (i.e. Renewables are the False Fire Brigade).
If one wanted a predominantly renewable grid the microeconomic (as opposed to macroeconomic) answer is to find the economic balance between storage, interruptable/scheduled use power (see smelting scrap steel or synthesizing ammonia post), using either stored bio-mass and/or limited fossil fuels and simply wasting a few percentage of peak wind power (build more than the minimum for the goal) AND ADD OTHER RENEWABLES TO THE MIX.
The required storage should shrink dramatically and approach economic and reasonable levels.
Instead you spend time analyzing straw men.
Alan
PS: I have heard at conferences that wind has a 15% annual variability and hydro a 30% annual variability in MWh. In retrospect, I wish I had asked with what confidence interval, etc. were those statistics generated with. None-the-less, the "easy" solution is build 15% more wind turbines (roughly) than you need for your goal. Cheaper than storage year to year.
There's lots of different ways to store wind energy. I like the idea of producing syngas like this demonstration plant in Germany:
http://www.solar-fuel.com/
The big advantages are you can use existing natural gas infrastructure to move, store, and generate power with the gas.