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UK to "get serious" About Renewable Energy
Bob Dobbs writes "Tomorrow the UK government will
announce (observer.co.uk) it's going to "get serious" about renewable energy; in the bleakest look at global warming so far Tony Blair will warn that extreme weather will wreak £150 billion worth of damage across Europe within a decade and the current situation is "unsustainable". On the bright side, it's mentioned that sustainable energy sources are less susceptible to terrorist attack."
Blair actually disagrees with Dubya on something.
Next up, he's going to be accused of supporting Al Qaeda's scheme to cripple American industry with this 'global warming' nonsense.
On the bright side, it's mentioned that sustainable energy sources are less susceptible to terrorist attack.
:/
Yeah let's see them terrorists blow up the sun. The jokes on them though even if they do, they'll just kill themselves too. HA!
Oh, kamikazes. yeah
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
This is a classic politicians trick. Are you on awkward territory with the liberals? Throw them an environmental policy they'll like. But the trick is make it so far fetched that nothing will happen for 20 years by which time you'll be conveniently out of office. Remember the Hydrogen Care initiative at El Presidente's State of The Union? Next up - a space elevator!
It's depressing that the primary reason for action, quoted, is expressed in monetary terms, and not human ones. This happens time and again, and is a reflection of the values of the times we live in. When we speak of damage to the environment, the future of the human race itself is at stake, but our primary reason for wanting to do something about it is how much it might cost? PLEASE WAKE UP.
Watch for this, watch for how often things are expressed in monetary terms, as though that was all that mattered.
Foreign oil funds dictators and terrorism.
:)
Renewable energy (wind, hydro, solar) creates local industries and reduces reliance on foreign energy sources.
It makes political, economic, and ecological sense
I'm telling you... it would work.
But the metamphetamine you need to power them comes from non-renewable sources...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
That's not too surprising, especially in Europe. There's not a whole bunch of places to put the waste, for one thing. No desert mountains to bury it under. New Scientist did a piece on the dump near Sellafield, which has the radioactive leavings stored up. It's a light concrete bunker containing enough waste that if a medium size plane were flown into it, it would release radioactive waste equivalent to hundreds of Chernobyls.
Europe's a small place. That kind of thing makes people very rationally concerned.
Oh, not to mention the ongoing problems in the Irish Sea, and the atypically high rates of cancer recorded around some of the existing plants...
Sadly some of us do consider human life cheap (It's very easy to make, and will be around a long long time). I believe in quality of life over quantity of life, and economics is a reflection of quality of life. When the shuttle broke up, I didn't think twice about the people on board, I wondered what it was going to do to the US financially.
We are all going to die, I promise you that. Spending an extra 2 months out of the year working to fund federal disaster programs affects me directly, and I am not ashamed to say that I care about that. Counting costs and counting lives are equally important, and intimately connected.
I'm not actually saying you are wrong, just that money and life aren't so seperate.
A 20% reduction is nothing to laugh at. It sets a precedent for other nations to look at. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has already impacted the climate for the next generation or so, there's no way out of that. We can act now to minimize that impact and make sure it doesn't continue to accellerate. Food production: right now we have excess food production in developed countries. They'll be fine. The places where you need to be concerned are in developing countries, especially in Africa. These countries will have severe climate fluxuations that will most likely decimate their agricultural systems. They lack the irrigation to give water supplies to crops in many areas, and there is realistically very little storage capacity or granaries to store crops year to year. That's where planning needs to start.
Your assertion about solar energy is incorrect. Most solar panels are net energy producers after 5 years of their 30 year lifespan.
w ww.nrel.gov/wind/wind_potential.html
Your assertion about wind energy is also incorrect. The time for most wind turbines to be net positive in energy is a few months. The area required for energy production for wind is much smaller than you say. If 6% of the total land in the US were cultivated for wind power (which doesn't exclude other uses, like ranching), the total energy production would be 1.5 times the total produced in the US today.
The key to energy independance is not just switching sources, but using substantailly less energy. Using less energy is possible without making huge sacrifices, it just requires developing and building smarter.
See:
http://www.awea.org/faq/bal.html
http://
Alternative energy is a dead end.
You should have made a more limited claim, perhaps along the lines of "alternative energy is not going to replace fossil feuls anytime soon". Alternative energy as such is obviously not a dead end because there are lots of types of alternative energy that are cost effective. Sometimes these sources of alternative energy are cost effective only in special cases (like solar powered phones on the side of the road) but in many other cases they are cost effective even when competing directly with fossil fuels (like wind power being used to supply electricity to the national grid).
All the same, the author of the article you linked to is right when he says:
The question is not whether this, or any of the others, actually are commercially feasible. The question which began this whole thing was whether any single one of them, or all of them collectively, could make it so that the US no longer had to import oil. They aren't even close to representing a big enough source of energy to offset the amount we bring in via tanker.
But then commits the same error that he describes here:
You've got to think big. I've run into this before. Most non-engineers (and even a lot of engineers) don't actually have an intuitive understanding of large numbers. (That's why people play the lottery.) For most people, any number above about a thousand is the same size.
People make the same mistake with small numbers. A large number of tiny contributions can add up to a very large contribution, but people tend to treat very small contributions as though they were nothing at all. I think your author is making the same mistake - he assumes that individual alternative energy sources must contribute at least 10 megawatts to be worth considering at all. This is a mistake. If you have a large number of sources, each contributing small amounts of energy, then in fact this could put a big dent in the demand for fossil fuels.
A realistic view of future energy use is that a combination of many alternative sources, and many types of conservation (more fuel efficient cars etc), will put a dent in the demand for fossil fuels, but will not eliminate fossil fuels as the main source of energy. If the aim is just to reduce greenhouse emissions then that might be good enough.
To get right answers to the energy question, we must start understanding that
a technology's efficiency rating must subtract the true energy cost of production of all hardware involved and extraction of all resources including the energy and resources consumed by the people involved and
an assessment of the environmental impact of technology must include the environmental impact of the factories producing the energy production devices, the raw materials consumed, the wastes produced, the land covered, and the environmental energy transferred (many transform environmental energy of some type to electricity and transfer that electricity to other locations where it almost always becomes heat).
Almost every "solution" I've seen come from the friends of the environment has huge environmental impacts and many consume more energy than they produce. Let's talk about a few.
Hydrogen - its an energy transportation mechanism, not a source. Its impact is little different than electrical wires with the exception that it allows you to "wire" a vehicle to a hydrogen generation plant that will likely be oil fueled. To date, it is cheaper to mass produce hydrogen from oil than any other substance.
Solar cells (cost) - once again, solar cells are an energy transport mechanism. Because the energy investment in lifecycle support (mining, production, distribution, maintenance, recycling) is greater than the lifetime energy output. Efficiencies would have to be far higher to offset this. Don't forget that you have to produce all the energy that we currently consume + all of the energy consumed to produce the energy. Another big weight on the efficiency rating is that you have to back this with other technologies for storing the energy to supply energy at night and when cloudy, these reduce the overall energy efficiency ratings of the system too, both directly and indirectly through the energy cost of production of the backup systems. On top of that, you have to plan for worse case scenarios because you'd likely supplant much of the other energy production technology. What effect would the fires a couple of years ago in Indonesia have had on regional and even worldwide solar energy production? And they lasted for how long?
Solar cells (environment) - solar cell energy consumption might be environmentally friendly, but the energy production will alter the landscape of an order of magnitude more land than oil. To get the capacities we need we will have to significantly change the reflectivity of large areas of our planet. What will that do to weather patterns?
Various underground organic energy sources - none are sustainable. We should stop just burning these up because they are also our cheapest stores for many other raw materials needed to sustain modern technology, though I'm figuring they will eventually make a bug to turn coal into oil/gas and leave behind an equivalent volume tubular matrix made from non-organic substances in the coal. This will allow for easier, more environmentally friendly extraction (it really ticks me off when they cut the tops off of the mountains). Anyway, suffice it to say that there will still be a massive need for oil even when none of it is used for energy production.
Wind - oh come on. Those things are a noisy, ugly blight on the landscape. Someone is making big bucks selling the Brooklyn Bridge here (and most of them are coming from tax dollars because it isn't a very good business yet except in very special circumstances). Has anybody even bothered to figure out the total energy cost of manufacturing and raw materials on these monstrosities? Not to mention maintenance, recycling, etc. And, once again, you need an entire backup infrastructure. It can't be another infrastructure needing a backup unless you can prove that their needs will never significantly overlap. No energy is free and wind seems far from it.
Inland hydroelectric - already more exploited than I like. So many beautiful rivers lost. So much history submerged. Very sad.
Oceanic water movement - This would include wave, current, and many other oceanic energy production methodologies. How come the environmentalists scream when a nuclear plant puts out heat but don't scream at the combined impact of all of this on the oceanic environment. No reason really. So they will. And rightly so. I can't wait for all the studies about what kinds of weather extremes are being caused by the minuscule reduction of energy transfers from one part of the ocean to another that all of these technologies cause.
????? combination maybe - just an easy way to trick yourself by distributing the impacts. The combination of all the smaller impacts is still as big or greater than the whole impact of other technologies.
So what's the answer. Nuclear of course. Its the only answer. Its environmental effects especially are far more containable than the other sources. Fission at first, preferrably with breeder technology, then fusion. Either way, it should be combined with a hydrogen and electrical distribution system. Perhaps mostly hydrogen at some point. I suspect hydrogen may prove to have a lesser loss in long distance transport than electric.
Even with fusion, we'll eventually need to find a way to radiate more of the energy into space because the heat produced by our consumption will eventually reach levels able to influence climates. Probably about the time we start moving society underground so that we can restore our environment and increase food production.
The interesting thing is that this is exactly the answer Bush has proposed. Hmmm. Maybe not so dumb after all. Its a wise man who seeks wise instead of radical counsel.
Like others have said, Blair's move is just a fig leaf thrown to the lions for political purposes. Unless he means "nuclear power" when he says "sustainable energy", it will have no real impact, not only because it won't last, but because its based on sensationalism and fear, not science.