 | A Simpler Way to Calculate Global Oil Reserves? | The Oil Drum | Server News and Check Out Our Advertisers... |  |
Geophysicist Klaus Lackner on Fueling the Future
Posted by Glenn on September 13, 2006 - 12:14pm in The Oil Drum: Local
This lecture was geared for the well educated lay person so he offered generalities on major subjects with only vague estimates of the numbers involved. Below is a brief outline of his lecture, which is not to say that he doesn't have hard numbers to back all this up, he just did not hand them out for us to write down. Still it would be interesting to follow up with his sources at some point.
However, he said that solar was the only renewable potential source of energy capable of scaling up to meet energy demands and that the technology was getting much better, similar in efficiency gains as the early computer technology. So for renewable, he would bet the farm on solar being the best long term investment.
But he said that we should not dismiss the potential of coal and uranium to meet our energy needs either, at least for the next 200-300 years. After that, he could not begin to imagine what technologies might be available. The trick is dealing with coal's carbon output and uranium's potential for proliferation into the wrong hands.
He talked about the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the case for human activity causing global warming, which he thinks is a major threat over the next 50-100 years, especially if we go from current 380ppm to 500-800ppm. He strongly believes that if we were to tax carbon output at it's source or cap output through a trading system we could create a whole new economic incentive for reducing carbon output. This is where he put forth some interesting ideas that I guess he has worked on himself about sequestering carbon from fixed sources (like power plants) and storing it under ground or below the ocean floor. He also thinks that pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere directly might work to offset non-fixed sources (like automobiles run on gasoline). That sounds a little like fantasy right now, but given that there is currently zero incentive to take carbon out of the air, it's not hard to imagine that with some strong incentives, this might not be possible.
Turning to uranium, he stated that there is a limited supply of uranium assuming you use it once and dispose of the spent fuel. But if you use breeder reactors and other ways of reusing fuel to create more and reuse it again and again, you can magnify the limited supply to be 10-100x as large as currently estimated. The problem is where to store the waste and the risk of plutonium proliferating to the wrong folks. He thinks again we should look far beneath the Earth (and far away from water sources) to store the nuclear waste, but also consider places like Yucca mountain to be a good temporary option until we find a good final resting place. Anti-proliferation efforts should be increased dramatically to be as strict and enforcable as possible.
----
Editor's Comments: This was certainly an interesting lecture. He made the case better for solar and carbon taxes and against the other renewables as well as I have heard before, if not better. That gave me a fair bit of hope. I was however underwhelmed with the feasibility of long term nuclear storage and carbon sequestration - I would love to see more specifics on these issues. But all in all a great speaker on energy issues. He brought a welcome sense of scale and proportion back to the debate in my mind over the way forward.
Personnel
Classic posts
Archives
- November 2008 (1)
- August 2008 (1)
- July 2008 (4)
- June 2008 (4)
- May 2008 (3)
- April 2008 (1)
- March 2008 (1)
- February 2008 (2)
- January 2008 (2)
- December 2007 (4)
- November 2007 (4)
- October 2007 (6)
The Oil Drum: New York City archives
- September 2007 (3)
- August 2007 (2)
- July 2007 (3)
- June 2007 (8)
- May 2007 (1)
- April 2007 (8)
- March 2007 (2)
- February 2007 (3)
- January 2007 (5)
- December 2006 (5)
- November 2006 (12)
- October 2006 (10)
- September 2006 (9)
- August 2006 (14)
- July 2006 (15)
- June 2006 (11)
- May 2006 (18)
- April 2006 (35)
- March 2006 (14)
- February 2006 (13)
- January 2006 (12)
- December 2005 (17)
- November 2005 (13)
- October 2005 (25)
- September 2005 (36)
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
is the most authoritative document on carbon sequestration.
In short:
- yes it's economic, if you put a reasonable price on carbon emissions either via a tax, or a 'cap and trade' system
It would probably add c. 2 cents per KWH to your electricity bill (that's me summarising, a closer read of the report might give you a better view)
- the big problem is we don't know where to put the CO2 once we capture it:
- geologic storage may only defer the problem (geological formations leak) and could pose a significant safety risk (I can hear NIMBY coming a mile off). But the fact that we have all these empty oil and gas fields gives confidence that the problems are solvable.
- oceanic storage is entirely speculative, we would need to do a lot more work on the consequences for marine ecology
The Economist this week has a fantastic special section on global warming.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7884738
is the editorial leader, there is a 12 page special section in the magazine.
...it is actually 24 pages. Huge by Economist standards.
That doesn't take away from the significance of the magazine committing resources to the topic and their reasonable conclusions.
So, is this good MSM or bad MSM? Is this a superficial 24 page treatment of climate change? If the MSM avoid contentious issues just to sell advertising space, then what happened here? Won't this rare bit of truth set the sheeple shaking on their hooves?
Please help me out, I find these sweeping generalizations and plot theories so difficult to follow.
Conspiracy?
Thought control?
Paid-for by whom?
Everything is "unclear" in the land of the fog heads.
But elevating the MSM to public enemeny number one often just means only listening to those you already agree with.
It's nuance, man. Haven't we had this same discussion before - or did I just get a glimpse of ther matrix?
they perform a service by bringing the sponsor's messages to the public. ;-)
The Agency "embraced more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals." --CIA's 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World's Views, New York Times, 12/25/77
"The final Church report was a disappointment, having been audited by the CIA. A subsequent House investigation was suppressed, though a leak it was published in the Village Voice. The House report indicated that Reuters news service was frequently used for CIA disinformation, and that media manipulation may have been the "largest single category of covert action projects taken by the CIA."" Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?
The CIA and its tentacles into the MSM.
Unbelievable in its range and depth. We are truly sheeple in this regard.
I unplugged my dish satellite the very day my wife left the farm. It only plays DVD movies now.
The benchmark value I often see quoted is $100 per ton of carbon, equivalent to about $30 per ton of CO2 (because CO2 is about a third carbon). Now, actually I think this is an overestimate of the true costs to the world in terms of greenhouse warning. I found a study a while back that compared over 100 separate analyses of the estimated marginal cost of carbon over the course of this century, and the median value was only $14 per ton of carbon:
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/Wiss/FB/15/Sustainability/enpolmargcost.pdf
But even if we use the higher value of $100/tC, that corresponds to only about 20 cents per gallon of gasoline. Does anyone really think that a 20 cents per gallon tax is going to dramatically change people's behavior? We see fluctuations of greater than that amount all the time. Gasoline has fallen by over 50 cents a gallon in the past few weeks. A 20 cent per gallon tax is going to have very little impact on people's energy usage.
And yet, this is the amazing $100 per ton carbon tax which people think is going to save the world, drive sequestration, promote conservation, encourage alternatives, and have all of these wonderful effects. I don't think so.
Next time someone tells you that a carbon tax or carbon trading is going to fix things, just keep in mind this 20 cents per gallon figure. And maybe also take the economic estimates I linked to above into consideration, which implies a 3 cent per gallon gasoline tax as the economically optimal level. That's not going to change a thing.
Some recent estimates of the cost of GW would be higher, I suspect, as estimates of the speed and impact of GW rise.
Because the range of temperatures, and consequences, is a probability distribution, it's not possible to say 'global warming is going to cost us $100bn'. the right hand half of the curve includes a number of possibilities which are of such great concern as to justify radical action.
Because it might cost us civilisation. We don't know what the planet would be like if sea levels were 6 metres higher (what's the cost of relocating the US Eastern Seaboard, and London?). One major Katrina-style disaster in say, NYC or London, could cost $100bn+.
And we don't know what the world would be like if, say, the Amazon dies. or the sub permafrost methane is released rapidly (it happened once before, about 50 million years ago, and 90% of the species on the planet died).
Or what the costs of 2 billion people migrating out of uninhabitable equatorial areas are.
In terms of the 'necessary' level of carbon taxation, the picture is unclear. Since we don't tax carbon emissions, no effort is made to reduce them. Yet the evidence from previous effluent taxes, eg on water, is that economic agents can reduce output by 90%+ in some cases.
Also there may be cheap ways of increasing the uptake and sequestration of CO2.
So high price elasticity activities will follow first. Consuming gasoline is a low price elasticity of demand activity: it may be the case that much higher price changes are needed there to change behaviour (but improving standards for fuel economy may help).
It might be better to use a 'cap and trade' system, which has the advantage of producing a quantitative limit on CO2 emission. Such a system has the advantage of not putting a tax in the hands of government, that might be tempted to use it for economically inefficient purposes.
Either way, the increasing evidence of rapid global warming, species extinction, and the 'right hand' of the distribution of possible outcomes, means we are going to have to do something, do something dramatic, and sooner rather than later.
Of course, this all could change due to thin films, nanotechnology, etc., but that is more or less the same as saying that cellulosic ethanol will save the day for oil depletion - the potential is there, but the devil is in the details (i.e., scaling up to the necessary levels).
The price has stayed high, even going up some, but costs have been falling consistently.
How can that be? Silicon production hasn't expanded as fast as demand, so Si prices have jumped to ration supply. Similarly, cell production hasn't expanded as fast as demand, so cell prices have jumped to ration supply. So, while costs throughout the supply chain continue to fall exponentially, prices are rising and profit margins are skyrocketing.
Supply is doubling every two years, while demand is growing even faster. That's why it looks like Moore's law.
Wind potential in the US has been estimated as higher than current total production, but the US may be much better off than most of the rest of the world.
For the uninitiated, that's about 2150 quads of pure electricity. Current human energy consumption (raw, not final) is ~400 quads/year from all sources.
World electricity generation averages about 1.6 terawatts and the Stanford estimate is an average, not a peak, so the worldwide wind potential is 45 times the average electricity usage! Total energy usage is only about 2.5 times the electrical usage (IOW, electricity is 40% of the total), so total wind energy is 18 times total human energy use. Doesn't sound like a practical limit to me.
The difference between my ratio, and E-P's ratio of about 5 to 1 is that in effect I used final energy, rather than raw, which seems more useful for comparison purposes.
Interesting that the Stanford study finds quite a lot of very high wind potential in the American South-East, an area that is often described as not having much wind potential. The difference seems to be that this includes off-shore wind.
On the other hand, another solar technology that is real, here now, and intrinsically much cheaper is being ignored by everybody. The NASA space power free piston stirling engines can put out an honest 35% efficiency right now, and do so for decades, as is required by the NASA space missions. And they don't use any exotic materials or processes.
So why no talk about that????
Talk is all there is about stirling. Show me some shipping engines that are mass produced at a good price point.
No, I don't think so. Reasons. 1) look at the $ invested in the two. Maybe (guessing) at absolute minimum 100/1. 2) Look at the basic physics of the two- lots of quantum miracles trembling on the wings of angels vs mere 19th century newtonian iron. 3) boots on the ground (or in space) NASA and the Army are going for stirlings in a big way. They know all about quantum dots and such stuff, And in the recent Army portable power JP-8 shootout, stirlings won going away,right here and right now, and fuelcells, thermophotovoltaics and the rest were but nowhere-ten years from now.
I spend my time thinking about power for the people in a fossil-free world, the while trying to be true to my sainted professors, and I keep coming up with little steam turbines, IC engines running on moonshine, and stirlings running on anything including sun.
PV does have one huge and maybe overwhelming advantage- lots and lots of thoughtless VC money in it. Where do they find all those thoughtless VC's???
Not at all. You have talk from KAmen - no shipping engine. You have talk from
http://web.archive.org/web/20011019081714/omachron.com/papers.html
No shipping engine. You have a price reduction of $20,000 on the whipsergen.
Yet, where are the shipping stirling gens at reasonable pricing? (because $5000 for an oil burning stirling isn't a bargin.)
Perhaps the military sourcing (using tax dollars) will lead to cheaper civilian stirlings.
I'll bet Kamen is feeling like a fool for not going with a free piston instead of that very ordinary crank he cooked up, containing all the problems everybody knew about for maybe 50 years.
It's easy to find examples of stupid stirlings, there are lots of them. But look at NASA space power stirlings. They are not stupid.
Err, why do I need a 'concentrator' when Unisolar has been selling their triple-junction cells for years w/o a concetrator? Well? (it looks to me like you are trying to toss out a herring to distract the readers from understaing how few stirlings are shipping)
I've asked you to respond in the past when you've been pimp'n stirlings. And, well, you havn't. Rather than addressing the lack of low-cost stirlings (like the omnachron claims) or even how a known working design (the ST-5) isn't able to be bought anymore....your reply is 'show me where a triple junction with concentrator is'?
Come on. Where are the low-cost stirling engines? Or, how about cost competitive enngines?
Well?
Come on. Show the readers where the solar powewred stirlings are able to be bought. becuae I can put down $$ and get a triple jkunction from unisolar.
Stirling Disadvantages- they need high temperature metals, high pressure gas, preferably helium or hydrogen; crank stirlings have severe problems with wear, oil contamination, power variation and working gas leaks. Free piston stirlings have been made only in relatively small sizes for special purposes.
Advantages- very quiet, vibration-free, efficient, able to use any heat source, have very long life in the free piston configuration.
Competition- If a user is satisfied with a Honda genset, or a Toyota sedan, or a Cummins diesel truck, and is willing to accept a fuel price rise, then stirlings offer no advantage. They cannot compete with IC engines in first cost, power density, or even efficiency, relative to a good diesel.
But if there is a need to use biomass, or isotope heat, or sunlight, then stirlings might be advantageous. NASA, for example, presently rates the free piston-linear alternator stirling as the leading candidate for space power using plutonium isotope heat source.
Until recently, the cost of oil has been so low that stirlings had little appeal relative to much cheaper IC engines, and there has been low demand for solar or biomass energy generation. And little money had been devoted to their development. By far the greatest amount, some 500 million dollars, was expended during the automotive stirling effort up to about 1990. Despite intense efforts by Ford, GM and United Stirling, crank stirlings could not be made to compete- they had short life, high cost, mediocre efficiency and intractable problems with power control, wear and leaks.
The present is different for two major reasons- the cost of oil has risen, giving solar and biomass some appeal, and most important, the NASA success with space stirling coolers and engines (both free piston) has justified new hope in their application to renewable energy sources, especially solar.
But these are recent events. There has been too little time for industry to respond by producing affordable engines. Hence, we cannot buy them for the most basic of reasons- to this date they have not been considered a profitable investment by manufacturers.
AS
ALanofBigEasy is to trains
Keep up the good work Wimbi !!
You're my inspiration.
I'm in agreement with you that population explosion and social /cultural stagnation are the Pink Elephants in the middle of our living room.
The solar business is a good way of making finite bounds understandable.
At high noon the best one can hope for is 1kWatt of incident energy per sqaure meter (that's a mere ten 100 watt light bulbs for each 3 foot by 3 foot parcel of land if you need to think of it that way.)
However, since conversion efficiencies are so poor, even at a wondeful 25% efficency we are quickly down to 250 watts per square meter (two 100 watt bulbs and a 50 watter) being squeezed out of that 1m^2 parcel of land (or rooftop). And that is only at high noon on a cloudless, pollution free day.
On the other hand, it's far far better to design new, emission-free solutions rather than sitting around and becrying the overbreeding problem day and night. The crying game gets us nowhere.
Even 5% efficiency would take a huge bite out of net electric consumption if it was cheap enough per watt. Our problem isn't efficiency, that's for sure; it's cost and lifetime.
What you don't seem to realize is that expense is a proxy for resource inputs. If solar costs too much without its externalities of production accounted for, it's going to be even more expensive if they are. (Of course, coal will rise considerably more.)
EROEI considerations currently favor wind over solar; energy return on a land-based wind farm may be as little as 0.26 years.
Population growth globally is stabilizing. Some people argue that it will stabilize at a level (about 9B) that is higher than the Earth's carrying capacity, but it's not heading out for perpetual growth.
Same thing for resource consumption. For instance, per Alan the US now puts out only 2.4% more CO2 from liquid fuels than it did 30 years ago, despite roughly a doubling in GDP (and France, for instance, puts out 30% less, despite substantial GDP growth). Similarly, car sales are only a bit higher than they were 30 years ago, despite much higher population (due to immigration, not the birth rate). In general US resource consumption is stabilizing.
Now, you can argue that the whole world can't imitate the US in getting to the same levels of resource consumption (and clearly in the simplest terms that's correct), but it's not the same problem as perpetual growth.
It's funny - both the cornucopians and the anti-growth people are arguing about a problem (perpetual growth) that doesn't really exist in the terms in which it's often put.
The cost is astronomical, in comparison to the grid. Our system produces less than a kilowatt hour per day, (which the grid sells for 15 cents), at a cost of over two grand.
plus, the support is very poor; unless you pay a heap to a contractor, you basically have to research and design it and maintain it yourself. And, worst of all, all the "experts" disagree about battery characteristics (equalization, etc.), about how to lay out a PV system, etc. etc. etc. It's really quite vexing.
It suits my personality (I studied electronics for a semester and a half, and I'm very good at doing the math in my head). But for someone of very limited technical knowledge and skills, it might be very challenging.
But having designed a comfortable lifestyle for my wife and myself that uses less than a KWH/day, I can confidently state that the VAST majority of residential electrical energy used is wasted. Our society can, without significent sacrifice, cut it's electricity usage in half. But there is no desire to do so until costs get much higher than they are at present.
For a quarter century I have had conversations with environmentalist friends (who rail about mountaintop removal for coal, for instance), about simply turning off lights they aren't using. It's rare that behavior changes as a result.
Beliefs about the outer world rarely seem strong enough to force change; often times huge energy bills don't provoke change either; they just whine about how much it costs. And blame the providers of energy for gouging.
Compared to maybe $1000 system cost per delivered kilowatt for a big fossil fueled power plant, or $300 for a diesel.
But all this is nuts. How much juice do we throw away on big signs urging me to buy soda pop, which I detest? Or you-name-it pet wasteful caper offering us a destroyed planet in return for some sort of rotgut or rotsoul? As I said, time for a change of species.
Ah, well, maybe my home power stirling will work tomorrow. I'll let y'all know.
It sounds like he has a very small off-grid, battery system.
You'd expect it to be much more expensive: it's standalone, and it's very small. Beyond that, for the central plant you have to add a lot of other costs: system overhead, capacity factor (a natural gas plant may be cheap, but it doesn't run that much), transmission, fuel, etc, etc.
Solar PV costs about $.25 all told, and utility costs average $.10 in the US. About half the PV cost is for the support structure, installation, etc, which ideally would be eliminated by making PV a standard item on new construction and making the PV the roof itself, instead of an expensive retrofitted additional layer.
The last step is to reduce the cost of the PV itself, which is happening. Already PV is cost-competitive in parts of California, and in Japan, and PV is doubling every two years, and demand is growing even faster. It's at a tipping point of hyper-exponential growth now. As costs fall it's area of cost-competitiveness will spread, and it will be unstoppable.
There are many ways we could use fairly benign government regulations (imposed on utilities) to encourage people to conserve electricity. E.g., about 30% of my bill (for about 7 KWH/day) is the fixed monthly amount (before the first KWH). If the utility was forced to fold their fixed costs into the KWH charge, that would encourage people like me to cut back further. A per-KWH cost that escalates with the consumption level would be better yet, to encourage the high-users to cut back. So would time-of-day rates to reduce the peak demand.
Finally, grid-tied distributed renewable (solar, wind, hydro, biomass) generation is far more efficient than off-the-grid systems that rely on expensive, high in embedded-energy, short-lived, polluting batteries. (Alas, currently the grid-tie unit itself is still fairly expensive, perhaps mass-production of those would help.) Regulations should force the utilities to buy all surplus power from small-scale grid-tied renewable systems. That may already be the case in some states, but not here in Vermont for example (our "net metering" law is not what its name seems to mean). I don't think the utilities should be required to buy such power at retail cost, though, as they spend the money on distribution. Either use some reasonable rate that is lower than retail, or else subsidize that purchase by charging the other customers more -- that's a policy decision.
Note: the efficiency of grid-tied microgeneration is due to the grid infrastructure already being there. Where it does not exist, either people should not be building a house (live off-grid and commute by 4WD?), or, in parts of the world where people live already but without a grid, the energy cost of building the grid may not be worth it, not sure. In a thread yesterday talking about "peak copper", Alan from the Big Easy said that transmission lines are made of aluminum. Is that true for the neighborhood (lower voltage) parts too?
Also, nickel iron batteries (only 1.2 V/cell) can last for a half century. Rare & expensive AFAIK.
That's the key.
Make a little bet here. The Chinese, with lots of brains and even more cash, are gonna run off with the whole solar show in no time, leaving us Amero- Europeans in poverty and disgrace--well deserved, by the way.
A link to NASA's Stirling engine research is here:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/tmsb/stirling.html
This is something I think deserves more attention. We are already concerned about GW. If we massively shift to wind in the next 100 years, the energy which had previously created our weather is now running our computers. What would be the effect of this. Same thing for solar.
There really is no free lunch.
But for solar, he is less worried because it's really just absorbing heat in one place and then releasing it somewhere nearby a little later.
- environmental costs of solar panel production.
- displacing surface area
#2 touches on this - the solar panels have to go somewhere, and if they're taking up surface area that was doing something else, it could be a problem. For example, you can't rip up a forest and replace it with solar panels. You similarly can't go plant the panels all over the desert, either, since deserts are also immensly diverse ecosystems. You can plant solar panels all over any human-made surface that was going to be there anyway, but if you take away my windows, by gosh I'll yell! ;-)CO2 in the atmosphere is our biggest concern and we need to reduce it, and I think solar is probably the best way to go for replacing much of our energy needs - but as was said, there really is no free lunch, these things will have costs, too. Which is why reduction & conservation is so important!
Now, if we can figure out a good way to store & transport energy, someday we can put solar cells in far away places and harvest the energy intermittently... Maybe in the arctic regions where so much energy is just reflected back into space and nothing lives there anyway?
After that, just put them on the moon like people have dreampt of. Or just out in space itself. We could create a ring of solar panel stations just above Earth's orbit and harvest them in turn throughout the year... But then will we be stealing energy from the rest of the solar system, causing interplanetary ecological disaster?
There's enough roof area in the US to provide 100% of electrical generation from PV.
You can use transparent dye-cell PV for windows, if you want, but it's not necessary to get enough surface area.
Cover the malls, Wal-Mart, houses, parking lot structures, etc. Serves extra duty of providing shade and reducing AC demand.
#1 is significant, since PV cells are doped with toxic heavy metals. A lot of mining, toxic waste production and embedded energy goes into making PV cells. Plus, you can count on them losing 1% of their power each year.
#2 is not significant. I know certain people talk about providing x% of the countries power needs by covering a sparsely populated SW county with PV cells.
Well, I have bought a PV system and mounted it on my roof; it does't take much energy, but costs a good deal of money. Plus, I live in one of those SW counties, and when I go on a long drive I think about trying to cover that much area with PV cells. It is utterly ridiculous. I don't believe it can be done. What's more, I am certain it will NOT be done.
Probably the way to go is covering rooftops with some future thin film PV material. Even that will be a challenge.
kilowatts/hour 1.5
solar hours/day 4.5 <- inland Oregon
----
kwh/day 6.75
kwh/year 2,464
installed cost: 7,000 (ignoring tax rebate)
retail kwh rate: .08
payback period: 29 years (with tax credit of $1,500)
36 years (no tax credit)
This modest system requires 200 sq feet of roof space, a non-trival area, assuming using amorphous panels (4x5' each).
While stealing solar energy may not be a disaster, the other energy required to manufacture and install current solar systems is significant and probably negative net energy.
A PV delivers its "peak" rating only at high noon pointed at the sun in a clear sky. This misleading rating is just one of the many frauds thereunto associated.
I sound like a meany solar-hater. Far from it, would love to have real solar become real. But so far, a long long way to go. What gets me is all this fibbing by the solar salesguys. Does not help!
Veritas.
So we can say that the owner can expect maybe between 1/10 and 1/7 the peak rated power, for purposes of estimation of kW-hrs/yr.
That is, if the peak rating is 3kW, and the system is in LA, then he can expect 3/7 times 8760 or 3700kW-hrs per year.
That would be the number an honest salesman would tell his customer, not the peak rating.
We have 18 panels rated 165 each, or nominal 2970 watts. Subtract inverters, weather and other factors and you get actual AC production. Ours are fixed and quite shallow angle, which is fine for summer, but I may get mounts that would allow me to angle them up in winter, which could add about 15-20% during those months.
But maybe the presenter has future technologies in mind that I don't. Or perhaps, he's just thinking about the microclimate directly leeward of the windmills. (I mean, I did plant several hundred trees this year to create a microclimate for my benefit.)
I remember this concern being put to rest in 'Natural Capitalism'. Unfortunately, that was a library lone, so I can't look it up and share.
That doesn't seem like an important limit. Much more important is the problem of intermittency, which as best I can tell would limit wind to about 35% of average output (I can provide further info on if you want).
Lets not make the same mistake twice.
It was in a response to a global shortage of whale oil for lighting: whales were becoming extinct (many species did cease to exist).
Of course, Arrhenius first postulated the global warming thesis in 1898.
You could argue no one thought of global warming when we invented controlled fire (c. 30,000BC?). Or when we first used coal (c. 2000BC?).
It's worth noting, though, that wind, solar, tidal, biomass all fall into the category of using current solar energy that falls on the surface of the planet. The problem with our fossil fueled world is that we 'borrow from the past', we are using the carbon legacy of the Pleistocene era.
So in a fully solar world (be it wind, solar PV etc.) we aren't increasing the amount of energy out there, just using it differently.
What would you call geothermal? Or nuclear? Are these stored forms of big bang energy?
My understanding of current scientific theory is that Geothermal is nuclear energy --aka radioactively decaying heavy isotopes.
Gravity draws the heaviest elements closer to the core than any other elements. So near the core of the Earth (but not at the very center where net gravity is zero) you have a high concentration of molten uranium including decaying U238 of course. Neutrons from that decaying mass heat up the other surrounding molten metals. Iron (Fe) is less dense and therefore forms a heavy liquid iron shielding (magma) around that radioactive core. Because of the massive shielding we can't detect the radioactivity from the core and can't prove it is actually happening. So it's just a "theory".
As poster shows very well below, the lead theory re geothermal is that is created by radioactive isotopes.
Nuclear you could categorise in a number of ways. Call it 'geologic energy' and it aligns it with oil, gas and coal.
Tidal is the other (and one with huge potential). The sun prevents the seas from freezing, so you could call it 'current solar'. Or you could call it Lunar.
The real dividing line is 'carbon release or no carbon release?'
In the case of biomass, it is carbon release, but with inherent sequestration. I have my doubts whether we can really scale biomass (too taxing on the soils and ecosystem) but biological waste (sewage, rubbish dumps, agricultural waste etc.) is a huge area of potential.
I remember covering this in school, but do NOT remember the answer. Other engineers have quoted this to me and it seems reasonable.
The wind loses more energy to friction against the ground than humanity uses. This is not something to worry about anytime soon.
This is a nit-pick, but that is a wrong headed idea. Energy is neither created nor destoyed ("wasted"). That's the primary law of thermodynamics --well, of basic physics. This so-called wasted work you talk about becomes thermal energy and radiates out into space mostly in the infra red band. If it did not, the Earth would be constantly getting warmer and warmer.
Global warming does not "stop" energy from leaving the Earth. It merely impedes (resists) the outward radiation a bit, thus increasing the black body temperature of the emitting sphere (aka our planet).
Consider a roof that bakes in the sun, or a roof with solar cells that power indoor appliances. Do the appliances contribute equally to GW as the roof? Or do sound waves from my tv, visible light from my LCD, etc., "waste" some electricity, convert it to non-thermal energy, and return a smaller portion of heat to the environment?
(maybe the big win is in winter when we want all that indoor heat anyway)
The % of light reflected vs absorbed is important.
Maybe the biggest thing we could do quickly for global warming would be to paint the roofs of all manmade structures silver.
So increasing the planet's albedo that way is a neat idea, but a non starter.
However painting roofs is a great idea: it will save at least 10% of air conditioning bills in summer, and so would reduce a major source of global CO2 (not sure what to do about winter, but perhaps simply lay down black plastic?).
hmm. IIRC, the daily energy inputs and outputs for the planet are astonishingly large, and the excess heat trapped by CO2 is a very small %. If the difference between stable temperatures and GW is a very small % of daily solar insolation, than we might need to raise the albedo of the Earth by a very small %.
Hot rock geothermal seems a shorter hill to climb than solar PV.
One dam in Africa (Grand Inga) could produce 44 GW. Basically, Africa could be run off hydro. Also close to true for South America. Add some wind & geothermal.
Electric rail trades 20 oil BTUs (heavy trucks) for one electricity BTU.
India is looking at building 66 GW of hydro, and they have decent wind resources. China has some major hydro in planning (3 Gorges = ~9% of Chinese electrical demand).
Europe and China will likely require nukes and some nukes (~20%) would make things much easier in North America.
Australia will require solar, nukes or coal I am afraid. Also true of Indonesia.
Still, solar is "trailing the pack" and we should build out other renewalable alternatives ASAP, IMHO, while waiting for solar PV to improve.
Point of correction. Three Gorges is 17 GW; total Chinese installed capacity is 575 GW as of the end of 2005. That would make it a shade less than 3% of installed capacity, and even less of production, since hydro plants have lower load factors than the predominant coal-fired plants.
The entire output of the Three Gorges hydro project has been more than "eaten up" by the explosive growth in residential air conditioner ownership over the past 5 years. Supply responses aren't always the most reasonable.
Many of their other power plants also have low load factors.
When announced, I remember 3 Gorges would supply 12% of Chinese GWh. Such has been Chinese growth.
I find it difficult to understand why this had to be such a mega project, why not a series of smaller dams?
Just the loss of the gorges was substantial. And they're only just beginning to see ecosystem damage.
Must say, though, the size of the undertaking was impressive.
India is taking that approach, storage reserviors in the head waters and then a series of run-of-river projects down-river.
Sediment control at 3 Gorges is "questioned" by those here.
But simply from a power generation standpoint it has major problems in any region (which is most) where droughts occur periodically. And when this happens, the failure of the electrical system is catastrophic, widespread, and very long lasting (measured in months or years, not hours or days). See the current situation in Tanzania, as an African example:
Drought in Tanzania has slashed power generation in the country's six hydropower stations to less than one-third of their usual output, forcing electricity rationing to be extended. More than two-thirds of Tanzania's total generation capacity is hydroelectric, meaning power rationing affects businesses nationwide, as they are forced to turn to expensive diesel generators to maintain their production. "This situation is not just bad, it is scary," President Jakaya Kikwete told an energy conference in Dar es Salaam in February.
In January, Kikwete told the nation that a prolonged dry spell had led to a severe drop in water levels at dams feeding the country's hydroelectric power plants, forcing the Tanzania Electric Supply Company (TANESCO) to resort to power rationing.
"We are now approaching a point where we must shut down the hydropower generation plants," Kikwete said at a meeting of elders in Dar es Salaam on 31 January. The following day, power rationing of eight hours per day began.
A few days later, Ibrahim Msabaha, the minister for energy and minerals, announced that rationing had been extended by four hours. In Dar es Salaam, the reality was that some sectors of the city were without power for up to 18 hours each day.
Kikwete said the water level at the Mtera Dam, which feeds the major hydroelectric power plants in central Tanzania, was below the permitted power-generation water level of 690 metres. In January, the government amended the regulation to permit TANESCO to continue until the level dropped to 687 metres.
The level has since dropped to 687.59 metres, leaving a narrow safety margin and raising the possibility that power plants will have to be shut down.
Kikwete said the 447 megawatts of power generated by TANESCO's hydro and thermal stations and produced by state-contracted firms fell well short of national demand: Tanzania's power needs are double the amount that is currently being generated.
Industrialists are already complaining that erratic power supply could drive them out of business. "We cannot compete if we use generators to produce. It is expensive - the only option is to close down the factory until mid-March," said Clifford Antao, an engineer with the corrugated roofing sheet manufactuer JJ Industries.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=52020&SelectRegion=East_Africa,%20Great_Lakes
The last step is to reduce the cost of the PV itself, which is happening. Already PV is cost-competitive in parts of California, and in Japan. PV is at 2.4MW per year and is doubling every two years, and demand is growing even faster.
It's at a tipping point of hyper-exponential growth now. As costs fall it's area of cost-competitiveness will spread, and growth will continue at this very high rate. In 10 years it could easily be 60MW per year, which would make it a major player.
Price of PV cells is falling by c. 5% pa ie halving every 14 years. Right now, in Western Europe, PV is 3 times more expensive than gas fired, for large central applications.so c. 21 years before it is competitive on a pure price basis.
But for the retail user in Western Europe, distribution charges are 40% of the cost of electricity (40-50%). So if you have a PV system on your house, it is 1.8 times more costly than a grid solution.
At that rate, in about 12 years, PV will be breakeven with gas fired electricity IF:
- no carbon charge is imposed on electric power in the meantime
- gas prices don't rise any further
I expect PV power to be economic in places like Spain, Greece and Italy a lot faster-- domestic energy is very expensive (Italy is 70% gas fired) and sunlight is constant almost all year round. Crete for example powers itself with a 500MW oil fired station: and a real stinker too (you can see the cloud layer of smog coming out of it and sprawling across Heraklion Bay).It will be a race between PV and Wind to power Meditteranean Europe-- in fact Spain already has the second largest wind grid in the world (after Germany). Remember those windmills in 'Don Quixote'/'Man of La Mancha', well, he would need a longer lance to tilt at the new ones!
www.technologyreview.com/microsites/spain/wind/index.aspx
'If Spanish wind-power developers and turbine manufacturers meet the government's goal of 20,000 megawatts by 2010, wind would supply around 15 percent of the country's energy needs. Even that figure is somewhat misleading, however, since natural fluctuations in wind mean that when wind is plentiful, it could supply half of Spain's needs.'
Wind power is now 6% of Spanish energy needs, but on certain summer days, 15-16%.
* analogy. There will never be a fixed line phone grid in much of the world. Mobile has gotten there first, and the fixed line solutions are too costly and inflexible to ever be economic. This is how Africa has gone from under 10 million phones 15 years ago to 100 million now.
Costs are falling much faster, but prices are high to ration supplies.
A major supplier recently projected a 50% drop in costs by 2010, another 50% by 2020, and another by 2030.
"BERLIN - Japan's Sharp Corp., the world's biggest maker of solar cells, expects the cost of generating solar power to halve by 2010 and to be comparable with that of nuclear power by 2030, Sharp's president said.
"By the year 2010 we'll be able to halve generation costs," Katsuhiko Machida said on Thursday.
"By 2020 we expect a further reduction - half of 2010 - and by 2030 we expect half the 2020 level.
"By 2030 the cost will be comparable to electricity produced by a nuclear power plant," said Machida, speaking on the fringes of the IFA trade fair in Berlin, the world's biggest consumer electronics fair.
Asked how the costs were likely to compare with those for producing electricity from fossil fuels such as coal, Machida replied: "Fossil fuel resources will be totally out by then.""
Convert the majority of electric power generation to wind and solar. At least 2/3rds should be feasible in most countries. There is enough uranium out there to fill the remaining gap via nuclear power also pumped storage etc.
We already have electric cars here for commuting in London
http://www.goingreen.co.uk/
and plug in hybrid vehicles could suffice for much more of the market that needs to drive on highways.
The new layer will be using hydrogen as the major transportation fuel. Which is not there yet for cars (but is imaginable) or airplanes (conceivable, but who knows?).
So the problem of global warming (and Peak Oil) is solvable. What is lacking is the political will and the institutional adjustments to make it happen fast enough.
It will cost money, and it will require sacrificing the now for the future of other people (like our children). As human beings, we are not very good at that kind of tradeoff.
My best guess is 30% wind, 30% solar, 12% hydro, 22% biomass, 6% other (wave, geothermal, etc).
Maybe nuclear - I don't like it because of proliferation risks, but it's workable otherwise.
I think that battery technology is moving much faster than portable hydrogen fuel cells, and with the infrastructure and renewable conversion inefficiency problems I think hydrogen has clearly missed it's window of opportunity.
The current trends are not bad: Wind and solar are both growing very quickly: wind is doubling every 2 years in the US, and every four outside the US, and already is the single largest source of new generation planned for 2007 in the US. Solar is doubling every 2 years, and has reached 2.4GW per year, so I think it's going to be here faster than nuclear can.
I agree we need an Apollo style push on alt energy for the sake of preventing global warming, but current trends could be worse.
And with nuclear, no one ever talks about the REAL waste problem--uranium mine tailings and depleted uranium. Don't ever forget that depleted uranium makes up over 98% of the mass of refined uranium ore--and it has a half life of 4 billion years. Nuclear is the worst idea ever, only closely followed by coal.
There is a common misconception, especially here in the "Saudi Arabia of Coal", that we have enough to burn the stuff for hundreds and hundreds of years. That is simply not the case, aside from the obvious CO2 problems. It is another Cornucopian fantasy.
To be more precise, US recoverable reserves are estimated at 267,311 million short tons, consumption in 2005 was 1,133 million short tons = an R/P ratio of 236 years. Sounds like a lot but it all hinges on what you mean by "recoverable" -- which is a lot different for coal than oil & gas because you are mining it (deep mines, strip mines, mountain-top removal). Unless, of course, you don't mind that large parts of the country would resemble the surface of the moon.
Uranium is everywhere, and is a naturally occuring element in plants and animals. There is alot of it around and all life on Earth has lived and is living with uranium exposure. Depleted uranium is less radioactive than this naturally occuring uranium (we use the more radioactive isotope as fuel). Some places have much more uranium in the environment than others, like Colorado compared to Florida. An interesting fact is that cancer rates in Colorado are lower than those in Florida, despite the greater exposure to uranium and the greater level of background radiation due to the higher altitude. People have argued from facts like this one that low levels of radiation may have a beneficial effect, or that too low a level has a harmful effect on people. If true, then nuclear is definitely not the worst idea ever.
I think some links are in order, here.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=74&ItemID=10944
George Monbiot's piece in the Guardian.. re: Dounreay Reactor site spills in Scotland
"Before the reactor at Dounreay was completed, the operators - the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) - bored a tunnel under the sea bed, through which its liquid effluent would be discharged. In order to remove the spoil, UKAEA dug a 200-foot shaft a few yards behind the cliffs. Though this hole was unsealed, though groundwater could flow in and out and though coastal erosion could pull the whole thing down into the sea within 100 years(7), in 1959 the British government gave UKAEA permission to use this shaft as a dump for radioactive materials.
In 1977, the shaft exploded, blowing the lid off and scattering hot particles. It would not be strictly true to say that the incident was covered up. After rumours of the accident reached the press, UKAEA issued a news release entitled "minor incident at solid waste facility"(8). The word "explosion" was not mentioned.
The full story did not emerge until 1995. The hole had been used to dispose of everything from rubber gloves to fissile waste. It is not hard to see why this dirty bomb went off: sodium and other reactive chemicals had been dumped with the radioactive materials. One estimate suggests that around 2.2kg of plutonium and 81kg of uranium-235 ended up there(9). But the auditing was patchy: some of the disposals were never recorded; some of the records later disappeared. In 1998, the Guardian discovered that a second hole had been dug, and was still in use despite the demands by government inspectors that it be closed(10). This one was slightly safer, as it was lined with concrete. But it contained a similar mixture of fissile materials and reactive chemicals, which had not been kept apart. Underground fires had already broken out(11). "
~ Too much is never enough..
http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/2001/october/a5oct01.cfm
Here is a list of techs that we should be exploring but aren't:
http://www.logicalscience.com/technology/
We need an Apollo program.
If electricity cost $1/KWH instead of fifteen cents, people would use it more wisely. Same with oil, since if you multiply the efficiency of an ICE (20%) by the payload (10%), you get a net efficiency of 2% for autos. At best.
I honestly don't understand how this isn't a technical problem. The Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley says an Apollo program is our best and possibly only chance. We spend $69 billion a year fighting marijuana and who knows how many billions we hand out to Big Oil, coal, and the boondoggle that is the grain ethanol industry. The fact that we can't spend $5 billion a year developing technology that might not only save the planet, but will easily drive our economy for years to come makes me sick.
One of the things that scared me about Kerry's energy plan was his proposal to nationalize the gas lines. Then the lines are run for the benefit of big contractors, instead of efficiency. Plus, you can fight El Paso Gas if it wants to dig up your land, but you can't fight the federal government very easily.
On the other hand, there's a lot of energy policy already in place, and if we don't get involved it'll just be in the hands of more self-interested people.
My faith is no more than other scientists in the field.
Tell me this, how are you going to convince those same boondogling politicos to fund the technology that you think will work?
Smalley already covered this. Distribute money among organizations like DOE, NSF, NIST, NASA, and DoD. They decide. Get the politicians out of it and run science like it's supposed to be ran.
It's convenient if you want to skip over the way our society and government work in your head. But when it comes to the real world, it is the "politicians" and bureaucrats who decide on where the money is distributed. Until you come up with a plan to convince the politicians to allocate the money to these organizations and then convince the top brass in those organizations to accept your plan of letting the scientists decide, you have an insurmountable problem.
In case you'd be interested:
The Myth of the Rule of Law
or
"What was happening [was that] annually, starting in 1995, the Federal government, the auditors underneath the auspices of each agency's Inspector General, would come forward and say, "This year we could or could not produce audited financial statements, ... and part of the reason is that we have undocumentable adjustments of $59 billion or whatever the number was." And so in this annual sweep up whereby the individual Inspector Generals would report into the Secretary of the Treasury and to the General Accounting Office (which is the auditor for Congress), it would come in through this annual sweep, and they would come in and say, "OK, we can't produce audited financial statements, and we have this much of undocumentable adjustments." At some point after the numbers got really crazy, they just decided after 9-11 to stop reporting them.
Now, when people say to me "What is $3.3 trillion of undocumentable adjustments?", let me give you an example. In fiscal 2000, the Department of Defense had $2.3 trillion in undocumentable adjustments. OK now, there's no way for us to know Jim, how much of that translates into cash. `Cause $2.3 trillion is more than total taxes paid in a year by ... say tax payers in that year would have paid taxes of about $1.6 trillion. So, there's no way to know if $2.3 trillion translates into how much cash, or how much cash is missing.
What we do know is that under the laws of the Constitution, which say money cannot be spent unless it is appropriated. It is essentially a violation of the Constitution to do that, with one exception. And this is where the black budget comes up. There are provisions under the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949 for military and military intelligence to crawl money from outside of different agencies' budgets, and spend it on non-transparent purposes. That's sometimes why it's called the "black budget"." America's Black Budget & Manipulation Of Markets
So was the moon. That is why Smalley calls it an APOLLO program.
The algae for the farms don't exist yet (though it's a great prospect and deserves attention),
ok, so we agree.
OTEC is only usable on tropical seas with deep water nearby and has questionable viability,
Are you saying we shouldn't even bother exploring it?
ethanol is a boondoggle (it even refers to Robert Rapier)...
GRAIN ethanol is a boondoggle. Rapier thinks cellulose & E3 have great promise.
you get the idea.
Not really. It's a long list and you have a long way to go to convince me we shouldn't even bother trying.
I'm afraid that it's all a boondoggle, including cellulosic and synthetic; the low efficiency of the engines it's intended to feed, combined with the losses in conversion to ethanol, guarantee that supplies will be only a fraction of today's gasoline demand (and leave nothing to replace diesel, jet fuel, petrochemicals, etc.).
It talks about "laddermills", but doesn't mention the mechanical limits. Gyromills don't have those limits.
It mentions ethanol from power-plant emissions, but omits the detail that the 40% reduction in CO2 falls far short of the 70+% reduction we need to balance uptake from the atmosphere.
The site mentions "artificial coal", but says nothing about the technology which can make the most efficient use of carbon such as charcoal: the direct-carbon fuel cell.
I wonder if that site isn't a deliberate distraction from measures which would work in the near term, like Bush's constant push on hydrogen cars while never mentioning batteries.
On a non-crash program, I could reduce US Oil consumption by 10% in ten to twelve years.
expand: nuclear, efficiency
reduce: coal, tar sands
niche: solar, wind, biofuels
won't work: geosequestration, fusion
no opinion: hot rocks, Stirling, wave, algae
Sometimes you think a commentor has an irrational fear or optimism of a technology. Could be they just haven't made their case strongly enough.
Wind is key. 20% of the capacity, if not demand, of the US, UK, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Spain, France (maybe), Greece, Italy....
could be more.
In particular, wind's biggest problem is intermittency, which is pretty easy to handle up to 20%, and which could be pushed with a reasonable amount of work to 35%. Over that I think you'd run into diminishing returns, though Alan has argued for 52%, and I haven't seen his calculations. Alan, how did you come up with that??
To get wind over more than about 30% of national power requirements, you probably need to have some quite clever storage technology eg pumped, flywheels, super batteries, fuel cells etc. Except for hydraulic pumped storage we aren't there yet.
There is a case for wind + nuclear + demand management. Taken together, you can sketch a power system which is carbon free (post installation).
The key is peak meggawatage at 4.30pm on a summer's day, in California, is about 3X the 3.00am load. So if you can use smart demand management (eg interruptible power to appliances etc.) then you can run a system that only uses fossil fuels at the absolute peak.
If those fossil fuels are in turn based on carbon sequestration, then you have a CO2 free system, near as damnit.
On an hour-by-hour basis, things are fairly steady, but you do see occasional changes in wind speed of 5nm/h over the course of an hour. According to Cape Wind, this change in wind speed results in a change in electrical power output of 50MW to 100MW. Over the course of a day or two, the changes can be even more dramatic: 10nm/h to 20nm/h in wind speed, equating to changes in output of 200MW to 300MW.
I expect that the offshore wind is more consistent in some areas compared to others, which brings us back to the discussion of how best to pair up wind with a more reliable source: water, gas-turbine peaker, baseload coal, etc.
One of the staples of UK culture is The Shipping Forecast.
Every night, before signing off the BBC gives the weather forecast for the areas in the seas around Great Britain.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/coast/shipping/index.shtml
Generations of us have grown up falling asleep to the announcer intoning 'Dogger Bank: 7, North; Faeroes 13, East':
AND NOW THE SHIPPING FORECAST ISSUED BY THE MET OFFICE, ON BEHALF OF THE MARITIME AND COASTGUARD AGENCY, AT 1725 ON THURSDAY 14 SEPTEMBER 2006
THERE ARE WARNINGS OF GALES IN BAILEY
THE GENERAL SYNOPSIS AT 1300 LOW CENTRAL ENGLAND 1001 LOSING ITS IDENTITY. LOW 150 MILES WEST OF BAILEY 983 EXPECTED 100 MILES WEST OF SOUTHEAST ICELAND 990 BY 1300 TOMORROW
THE AREA FORECASTS FOR THE NEXT 24 HOURS
VIKING NORTH UTSIRE SOUTH UTSIRE NORTHEAST FORTIES SOUTHEAST 5 TO 7, BUT 3 OR 4 IN NORTH OF NORTH UTSIRE. OCCASIONAL RAIN. MODERATE WITH FOG PATCHES
SOUTHWEST FORTIES CROMARTY FORTH TYNE DOGGER SOUTHEAST 4 OR 5, OCCASIONALLY 6 AT FIRST, BECOMING VARIABLE 3 OR 4. OCCASIONAL RAIN. MODERATE WITH FOG PATCHES
FISHER GERMAN BIGHT EAST 5 TO 7. FAIR. MODERATE OR GOOD
It is one of our last general links to the world where we dominated the world's oceans, and make our health and livelihood from the sea.
in terms of wind power, the winds blow offshore on these islands virtually all the time.
So I guess that's why I think offshore wind has a huge future...
Cricket, warm beer, footie-- bahhh, humbug. Cricket is a game our colonial descendants have mastered and perfected. Football is a wellspring of greed, corruption, big money and a justification for bad behaviour off the pitch by players and fans. The footballer's wives are of greater interest than the players. The majority of beer sold is ice cold lager in bottles, and the objective is to get p-ssed or blasted as quickly as possible. Bridge is dying out (to be honest, I know far more players in North America). English tea (the PG Tipps kind) is drech-- even Earl Grey is hard to take. Once the Queen goes, the monarchy itself is in question-- we might as well make Paris Hilton our monarch.
I listen to it in a London flat, 40 miles from the sea. it ties the nation together as few things do...
Now that's what I call "Value-Thinking," my Friend. Although, I would consider Scarlett Johanssan
HV DC continent wide grid to shift power around (4 hour delta in peak between E & W coasts for example).
Geothermal would be reworked from max output/capital $ (work at 99% load factor) to using geothermal for peaking (same steam resource, more wells & turbines). Some days (say Sundays) can be skipped and steam saved but NOT longer than that AFAIK. Hot rock with injected water + natural steam plants.
Massive pumped storage (-19% of grid energy to pump up, +15% generation) projects. Nameplate/Peak Power >> 15% of total. Most hydro for weekly power shifting, some pumped air for seasonal shifting (spring > summer; fall > winter).
Manipulating Great Lakes (within natural limits) could add tremendous peaking power and hurt Niagara Falls tourist potential.
Refuel nukes in spring & fall.
Shrink demand and expand hydro for hydro to be 12% of total grid energy (also peaking power mainly).
Some solar thermal & PV in desert SW, Saves pumped power from near peak (solar noon) for actual summer peak.
Most wind would be on "wind only" AC grids feeding a DC node. This would allow Hz & voltage to vary MUCH more and grid stability would not be the issue it is today. This is a major conceptual break ! It will allow much higher wind penetration, IMHO.
So much hydro helps stabilize grid. Massive multi-pole generators help power quality is just spinning in air.
I am still at my parents caring for father post knee surgery and away from calcs. The concepts listed above
email is lbsgrad2003 (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) uk
I had thought tidal was further along than you suggest, and I still think it could make a significant contribution, at least to places like the UK that have long tidal barrages.
Tidal is Ok WHERE IT WORKS.
It's in its very early stages and has had a difficult time getting the permits for the six-turbine pilot project.
Limited Expansion - Hydro, Nuke, Solar Space Heating, Wood Heating
Niche - Solar PV (for now), geothermal, biofuels
Won't work - Wave
Geosequestration works on old oil fields to expand production
There are a number of promising trials.
What about tidal power?
A well designed and insulated home can keep warm almost entirely by the heat, lights and appliances of its inhabitants, plus sunlight (with a backup system using gas or wood).
This is particularly true in sunny mountain regions, and in the US Southwest.
Moreover, the estimates show that a group of 12 states in the midsection of the country have enough wind energy potential to produce nearly four times the amount of electricity consumed by the nation in 1990.
http://www.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/windpoweringamerica/pdfs/climate_change_wind.pdf
It is interesting that the US, so endowed by nature with timber, oil, coal, rich farmland, hydroelectric power, etc.
turns out to have yet another trick up its sleeve: one of the world's best potential for wind power in the Midwest and Southwest (and some coastal areas).
The difference being that wind energy is not in any sense exhaustible whereas coal, oil and farmland are-- it will literally last forever.
Crazy Pat is aptly named.