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Milestones and Trends in Renewable Energy
Sterling D. Allan writes "Some reflections and projections: The year 2005 saw large wind power installments come into a price range where they are now competitive with traditional grid prices. 2006 could see several solar designs do the same. Cold fusion was boosted with two, concurrent and independent sonofusion breakthroughs, though the stigma in the name is still deeply seated. 2006 could see floating wind turbines arrive on the commercial scene -- floating in the water like oil rigs, or floating high in the air, courtesy of helium. 2006 will see at least three companies offering after-market kits for adding Brown's gas (H and O from electrolysis, common ducted) to the air intake of vehicles for enhanced mileage and performance. Many other fuel economizing systems are slated to mature in the marketplace. Climate change evidence will continue to mount. It will yet be years before we harness lightning, but stable tornado systems prototypes that tap waste heat from power plants could arrive this coming year. Will 2006 be the year that clean energy becomes more the vogue than cool computer gadgets?"
Clean energy sources will become as cool as cool computer gadgets because they are themselves cool gagdets. I mean, come on, how cool is a wind generator floating in the air?
Finland and France are constructing new nuclear power plants - first new ones in Western Europe for many years, and China and Russia are also going to nuclear (with 40 pebble-bed reactors coming to China in the coming decades).
So yes, we're finally starting to see some clean energy.
They didn't mention bio-diesel that I could see. Though I have to admit, that's not really a technology I'm rooting for. I'm not sure if I could stomach a $50,000 mercedes that smells like french fries.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Until it hurts, U.S. consumers will not switch anything. The market will drive change. Gas prices are currently inconvenient but it is not something that keeps people from getting to work. When prices are prohibitive, maybe we will see changes.
U.S. citizens must also get out of the "grid" mentality. Electricty on site, not relying on the grid is a shifting in thinking for most. Lori Ryker addresses this in her book, "Off the Grid"
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Let's assume that wind, wave, solar, and even cold fusion will be able to provide all our energy needs - in fifty year's time. (I personally don't think that will be the case, but - hey.)
How should we generate electricity until that happens? Let's assume that energy demand will not decline any time soon, but rather will continue to rise.
Coal?
Oil?
Natural gas?
Nuclear?
Which of these is the least-worst to you?
Climate change evidence will continue to mount.
Yes. In fact, depending on where you are today, it's colder or warmer, wetter or dryer, brighter or darker, calmer or stormier than normal. Some places are even foggy. It's all evidence of climate change.
What else could it be? Can we afford to wait to find out?
Stop commerce now. Before the weather gets any less precisely normal.
Are you nuts? There is no offtopic post at the beginning except this hello world 34856347857834 shit.
It seems that our government is preparing to build reactors again, as the current batch are reaching end of life.
I feel rather ashamed to be in the generation that saw what a f**king mess we made of things, and then decided to go do some more. God help the next generation.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
No, no, no!
2006 will be the year that Linux takes over the desktop, 2007 will be the year that Duke Nukem Forever is released and 2008 will be the year that clean energy comes into vogue!
Also, I think somewhere in there they discover the cure to the common cold, but that part of my crystal ball is still a bit fuzzy (probably due to that cheap antenna from Walmart).
> The year 2005 saw large wind power installments come into a price range where they
> are now competitive with traditional grid prices.
Incorrect.
The year 2005 saw oil come into a price range where it competes with wind.
He sticks his head in the sand, in the most hilarious of fashions!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Beats me why so many people seem to keen to build wind farms.
Surely, there is too much wind in the world already (witness recent events) and farming more of the damn stuff seems like utter lunacy to me.
Anyhow, couldn't we just import some foreign wind from some windy place?
Check out this wikipedia article on Hello World: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_trolling_phe nomena#HELLO_WORLD
One should keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out.* I think some of the folks doing alternative energy research really need to keep this thought in mind a bit more. RTFA and see what I mean.
Will we need to replace oil and its fossil fuel cousins at some point? Definitely.
In our lifetimes? If we are talking strictly about oil, probably. Coal? Probably not.
Does such a substitute exist that a) Can be stored, b) Can be transported, c) Can be used, and d) Is energy positive (meaning we get more energy out of it than we put in to extract/grow/create it) in our current engines, machinery and infrastructure? No.
Is one close? No.
Can we fund every idea in creation to find a substitute? No.
So we have to pick and choose, and it is VERY HELPFUL to have a grounding in basic physics and chemistry so we can intellegently develop alternatives. This journalist seems to be a bit deficient in the basic physics and chemistry department. He doesn't want to pick and choose, he wants to report that magic is just around the corner. This lack of realism is one reason why alternative energy sources are not taken as seriously as they should be.
* Carl Sagan
or floating high in the air, courtesy of helium
Admittedly I don't know the details of this, but am I the only one who hears "floating wind generator" and thinks "Dipshits"? If it's tethered, you're going to run into a huge amount of problems. Small planes, birds, etc would all be problematic, as would the consequences of a broken tether. If it's NOT tethered, then I'd be curious as to how it functions, let alone safety. Large wandering structures floating through the upper atmosphere tend to not to appeal to airliners and the military.
When promising technologies like Pebble Bed Reactors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor finally become deployed, these windmills and other alternative energy sources will truely become Clean. Until then, unless it is coming from a natural gas power plant, the energy to produce these high tech devices will have to come from something as dirty as coal or as sketchy as a light water reactor or hydro power.
Imagine a wind turbine - under water. That is also something to look for in the near future.
Tide currents have a much better predictability than wind, this is an important feature of this type of clean energy. The underwater turbines are below the surface so waves and ice won't hurt them (within some limits of course).
Ultra-low frequency noise will be a problem, though.
-- From Denmark
I sure hope we can find better renewable energy sources, but this blog is hardly the one to take the pointers from.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
I just talked with my father yesterday, and he let me know that the local power company has decided against expanding their wind turbines, as there's only usable wind 30% of the time, and the maintenance costs make the cost of it's electricity exceed that of other power sources.
At least nuclear power is an on demand system which doesn't produce pollution, but containable waste. Combining breeding reactors and an intelligent waste management system* would fix problems so that even the flawed yucca mountain repository would be sufficient.
*Our current system isn't intelligent.
I don't read AC A human right
There is only one thing worries me about modern nuclear plants, and that is the access to cooling water. If you plan on using rivers or lakes, you need to be pretty sure that global warming will not dry them up.
Much as I like relatively low overhead technologies like wind, solar, bio-Diesel and bio-ethanol, I have to admit that I'm a convert to the idea of fast neutron sodium-cooled non-breeder plants. They even seem to be relatively terrorist-proof. And they would provide some well paid tech jobs that are not just in moving bits around.
Pining for the fjords
Dream on global warming is a myth.
There is plenty of oil and ways to burn it cleanly.
Peak oil is a lie.
Wake up and learn about reality.
http://home.earthlink.net/~root.man/sci.html
NASA scientists are about to publish conclusive studies showing abundant methane of a non-biologic nature is found on Saturn's giant moon Titan, a finding that validates a new book's contention that oil is not a fossil fuel.
There's a GNAA post up there too. Read at -1 if you're going to comment on trolling.
The article is some mishmash of reality (wind power becoming competetive wrt fossil and the stirling solar systems are certainly interesting) and the most harebrained crackpot schemes around; Tom Bearden (Net loonie #1), "magnet power from vacuum", "blacklight power". Gee, it all sounds so credible.
I was 8 (or somewhere around there) years old when I first heard about renewable energy, global warming and the like, that was 1992. It was possible to get wind turbines, and Photo-Voltaic Cells then, but they were very costly. now they are falling, woo-hoo. Our electric companies adopting these will be able to generate power on good days where there is wind or sun, but they will have a varying energy output. It is not really cost effective to store this energy locally, so this leads us back to the stressed power grid again. We have the ability to generate electricity, but not necessarily enough to keep with the demand. We need the means of getting the electricity from point A to point B.
The other major thing is the cool gadget factor. I am 21 years old, and I would like to build my house after I finish school and get an "actual" job, and of course, if I don't have the ability to make my own power right away, I'm going to have the wiring in place to retrofit everything. Hypothetically: I get a wind turbine, put it up in the yard, and I ran the wires back to my utility room, there is huge cost associated with hooking it up. I don't know the proper names of the equipment needed, but I imagine you would need something similar to a transfer switch to hook it up. Like what you have in your server room to plug in your equipment that does not have two power supplies.
Bottom line, this is the first year it is an economically feasible alternative, but unfortunately, this doesn't mean everybody will be jumping on the bandwagon this year.
"10001110101 - periodic table with a centerpiece of mind" -Clutch
For more information about Cold Fusion please check Lenr-Canr site.
It seems that it's bigger far beyond the "clean unexhaustible energy source" thing.
Sir Arthur C. Clark considers that as a modest introduction to "Nuclear Chemistry" - just see results obtained by Iwamura.
The international conference ICCF-12 was held in Japan recently.
A great thing would be more efficient digesters for farms around the world. We are getting to the stage were large scale animal manure digesters can produce worthwhile amounts of electricity from the methane. The equipment price has reached the break even point for some farms which is good becuase regulations on methane will only get worse in the future. Hopefully, genetic enginerring will help create more efficient digester bacteria.
Just think, your sewage plant could sell power back to the electric company and therefore lower taxes AND polutants to the environment.
"Stop commerce now. Before the weather gets any less precisely normal."
It's easy to poke fun, as long as all the bad things happen to the other guy.
It has the lowest energy cost, even with the proper storage of spent material. Coal is 2nd, if it is clean, which would make it expensive, and Oil and Natural Gas come last but only they continue to come up with tons of new supplies, which is not a fargone conclusion at present. hard to be optimistic about Natural Gases with the present world wide price jump in prices; just ask the Ukrainians!
As far as switching off Nuclear, you don't need to "switch off" anything. With the PBR design, you just replace the pebbles and then all you have to do is store the pebbles untill we can afford to reprocess them(10-20 years), certainly not 10,000 years like some FUDsters would have you believe. This is the time of Solutions after all, what else are all those people in white lab coats working on?
All the other Nuclear technologies are not nearly as safe, certainly not safe enough to put close to the urban centers that would benefit the most nor safe enough to have nuclear powered farms, oil rigs, clean coal to fuel facilities and High Energy manufacturing. If a PBR plant needs to be decommisioned, it is simply a matter of transferring the still viable pebbles to other reacctors and then disassmebling like any other Industrial Equipment. Certainly not an impossilbe task for the government that succesfully landed that tin foil wrapped contraption on the moon some 35 years ago.
Want to bring manufacturing back to America? Can't do it without the discounted energy only Nuclear provides. Kept the French from falling into anarchy for many decades now, couldn't do any worse for Americans.
It pissed me off when I saw that GWB was giving the oil industry HUGE tax breaks while cutting alternative energy research. The two industries that need a jump start are nuclear and alternative. As it is, California wants to build huge coal plants in eastern states and then ship the electricity back. Worse, California is not insisting on tight environmental laws be applied. I would rather that America offer huge tax incentives to start building nukes, wind, and solar.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why would it be a "disaster"? Really, expound on this a bit. All the proposed methods and techniques and crops are "wrong"? It is not useful to use the sun and photosynthesis (our only practical fusion power at this point) to make biodiesel and other bio-derived fuels? What's wrong with using some of the huge quantities of biowaste produced every year to make fuel? What's wrong with putting more farmers to work and expanding crops? Using permaculture and low till ag techniques combined with some solar and perennial and self seeding annual crops, seems to me it could be quite a viable alternative, plus tend to spread out the jobs and money involved in the whole energy business, rather than have it remain in the hands of the current cartels. It's somehow wrong for joe third world farmer who's nation has little to no natural oil in the ground to also help grow the fuel his nation needs, rather than exporting precious hard currency to go purchase expensive petroleum on the world market? It's wrong for a first world farmer to expand his operations and produce fuel as well as food crops? Why?
Sorry, overall I would have to completely disagree, bio derived fuels are here now and they work ( I've made and used ethanol fuel before, incredibly easy), they aren't energy sinks, you get a gain with the newer processes, they use a closed carbon cycle that is neutral, unlike petroleum from the ground or liquid fuels derived from coal, they require very little if any infrastructure changes for either the vehicles or the fuel delivery process to the end user, (unlike the "hydrogen" schemes currently being pushed where most everything has to change radically and expensively) and there are a raft of techniques and crops out there that could be used, something for every climate and level of technology around the planet basically. You can take most any vehicle already out there and run it on either ethanol or biodiesel with very little changes, and the fuel stations are already set-up to handle and dispense liquid fuels into "normal" fuel tanks. It's an outstanding energy transition option while we are waiting for the universal backyard Mr. Fusion reactor and the pie in the sky "hydrogen economy" which is still a long ways off.
Anyway, the point is moot, it's *being done now on a large scale* all over the world and we aren't seeing much if any "disasters" associated with it.
I have a relative that owns Green@Work Magazine (greenatworkmag.com) and he has very large corporations coming to him all the time wanting to advertise or whatnot. So, it seems that "green" is really catching on, and in the process I'm sure we'll see lot of innovation in the field.
Meh.
For about USD $2000 anyone could add a turbo charger to their vehicle to increase mileage and performance. For someone who drives 600 miles per week and could save 20 gallons per week, it would pay for itself within a year (with gas above USD $2). Since a turbo charger allows you to run at a lower compression, it's too bad all vehicles didn't come standard with them since it could be designed in from the start.
in the UK NPower has a program called juice
basically if you signup for this
All your electricity is generated by renewable energy sources.
Cost wise its exactly the same as non-renewable sources.
So if you want to be part of the solution choose a supplier that gives you this option.
The more people that sign up the more investment npower has to make to meet the demand simple really.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
two, concurrent and independent sonofusion breakthroughs
The big-news sonofusion results in 2005 were about neutron, not power, generation. There was some evidence that acoustically-driven cavitation could produce temperatures high enough to result in fusion-generated neutrons. This is quite exciting in terms of understanding the basic processes involved. However, in terms of the driving physics, this is hot fusion: a very small volume of material may be heated to extremely high temperatures for a very short time, resulting in a tiny amount of fusion occuring.
Due to fundamental physical constraints it is very unlikely that such a process is scalable in a way that will produce more power than is required to generate it. The bottom line for hot fusion is that the cross-sections for loss processes are orders of magnitude larger than those for the fusion process itself, and the losses scale as the surface area of the hot volume while power production scales with the volume. This means that the cube-square law strongly favours really big hot-fusion reactors (something the size of a star seems about optimal).
So while it is not impossible that one day we'll all drive cars powered by sonofusion, I don't think anyone working in the field is suggesting that.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
that this article lists the cost ($200,00.00 to $300,000.00) to build a fusion power plant the size of a gas station as less than the cost to build a gas station. I know this because I work in the construction field.
If the rest of his items are as accurate, then NONE of these pipe dreams will ever really exist.
His floating wind farms don't seem to be anchored to anything. Large scale use of wind farms will reduce the force of the wind, reducing transport of water and other things we don't take into account. Just like with Hydropower, there will ultimatly be important environmental impacts. Same with tapping ocean currents. Pull enough power out of the Gulf Stream, and it just stops. Then, most of Europe gets the same climate as Siberia. Not good.
He's relying on 'clean' fusion power, mostly in small devices that are currently only proposed. This 'clean' fusion power plan has been 'only 20 years away' since 1935. Main problem is it just doesn't work.
I had the same problem throughout the article. Lots of pipe dreams, not much real evidence.
Please quit refering to americans as USians. If you wish to be diminutive, then how about yankees, yanks, gringos (not quite right, but ...), howle, etc. But USians??? It sucks.
Good grief it is full of more pseudoscience than a Kansas biology class.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Can we use our farts as a renewable source of energy?
China loses 30000 mine workers a year? You are implying that they died from mining accidents or job-related sickness. Where do you have accurate docs for that?
Don't get me wrong. I am a fan of nukes, but your numbers sound way out of line.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Except some of these "energy gadgets" are based on unconfirmed observations or are just plain frauds. Just at the bottom of page 1, there are 3 "magnetic generators" and a mention of cold fusion.
Most French favor a step-by-step halt of the nuclear program (French), therefore EDF uses various little tricks in order to build the toy. The most funny trick is that we (the people) must help them decide without being informed because most pertinent information is kept secret. Moreover it seems that EDF will in fact decide, after the public debate, without any explanation. This is a sad joke, especially because some published information revealed potential problems (French).
I'm not against civil nuke...but the hell with lies and disinformation!
If the problem is that energy is overused because its costs are not properly allocated to the users, subsidies will not fix the problem. They will just encourage even more over-use.
If you shift taxes from productive activities to destructive outputs (like malware-prone operating systems made by monopolists... but I digress) people have a choice. They can shift to products which don't have the destructive outputs, cut back (efficiency might be cheaper than shifting), or just pay extra if they have no other options. Since they'd be paying less in taxes, they would have the money to pay if there were no alternatives.
Subsidies only go to people with enough political power to qualify for them. Taxes on "bads" create a financial incentive for everyone to do what they can, whether it's a CF bulb, a backyard project or a Prius.
Bio-diesel, if produced in large enough quantities to be significant, would be an ecological disaster. Much better to let the enormous areas of land that would be needed lay fallow or remain in a wild state.
You obviously have no idea about the current state of Biodiesel. It's clear that you assume Biodiesel requires massive crop production, without any consideration to the crop and other plant waste techniques that are being used today and the advancements in yield efficiencies that we're only beginning to see hit the market. It's really irritating when ignorant environmentalists shamelessly label a new technology an "ecological disaster" without any regard for the current research and advancements within an industry.
Research goes a lot smoother when you decide ahead of time what the results will be.
The market is good at eventually seeking the best answers,
Except the 'answers' being 'sought' are being done in a market where the taxing power and power of force is being used to distort the market itself.
How can a market price something if the replacement cost is ignored? (What *IS* the replacement cost on a barrel of oil? The cost of the next barrel, or the cost to wait many, many years for oil to be made in the ground, or the cost of taking plant matter and converting it to oil?)
Not to mention how waste disposal costs are mostly ignored - if the waste is CO2.
Just curious, but how does the fact that we're also experiencing a ~30yr solar cycle activity peak factor into all of this? I'm not being an ass, but I rarely hear much about this. Given that our sun provides the vast majority of our planet's energy, I'd like to see some science on how this could be impacting our climate-shift studies.
Don't laugh.
There are already serious research into producing certain types of algae in special vertical tanks that could refined into motor fuels (biodiesel and possibly kerosene). Because these algae are a true renewable resource just as long as they're fed water (including possibly seawater) and carbon monoxide, we could put up such production facilities almost anywhere on Earth.
A big benefit of refining these oil-yielding algae into biodiesel fuel and kerosene is that the "waste" from the refining can be processed further into either animal feed, plant fertilizer or even into ethanol fuel! That right there solves a lot of problems with feeding farm animals and fertilizing crops, and ethanol produced is enough to tremendously extend the availability of fuel for gasoline-powered engines (since most gasoline-powered engines can be simply modified to run as high as 50% gasoline/50% ethanol mixes).
Nope, most ecologists want a mix of power sources. In France, for instance, many want to divert part the money funneled in nuclear-related research into some clean-energy work.
I just had to google a bit. Apparently, this is still on the board, and possibly not a go. Apparently, arni needs to make the final call. Considering that he is pushing the solar industry in CA, it is possible that he will not approve the importation of Coal-based electricity. Wait and see time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They didn't mention much about Geothermal Energy, and specifically Geothermal heating/cooling for your home. The new systems on the market today have a payback of 4KW of energy from the ground for every 1KW of energy put into the system. This is a huge deal and saves you a lot of money over the long run. Typical installations are $20K Canadian but you will see a payback in 3-7 years depending on the type of system.
n tial.html or http://www.justgeothermal.com/
More information, at least for Canadians, can be found at http://www.nextenergysolutions.com/success_reside
From what I know, the most vocal group "Sortir du nucléaire" want to immediately shut down nuclear plants and replace them with coal plants.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If we're going to have all these nuclear plants (Europe needs about 650 to replace fossil fuel use completely) there isn't actually enough Uranium to power them all. Uranium is fairly rare and there isn't an endless supply of it. It's also completely under valued right now so expect to see dramatic growth in its price over the next five years. This is probably the best stock tip you'll see today ;-)
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
The first piped gas in cities was coal gas, made by the chemical reaction of white-hot carbon with oxygen and steam. It contained mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which is why it was so useful for suicide. It was made in "gas works". Varieties of coal gas include water gas and "carbureted water gas" (with energy content increased by adding oil to the steam and oxygen).
Compared to any type of coal gas, "natural gas" is just that.
> NASA scientists are about to publish conclusive studies showing abundant methane of a non-biologic nature is found on Saturn's giant moon Titan, a finding that validates a new book's contention that oil is not a fossil fuel.
How, precisely, does the existence of methane around Titan validate the claim?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The point of biodiesel is converting solar radiation energy into chemical energy. How are you going to capture a lot of light with a vertical tank?
I'd rather have a component that has a large area in the plane perpendicular to the sun rays in my solar energy plant.
The bottomline is that many ecologists don't want us to burn coal all-the-way. They only ask for various sources, energy savings and, then, renewable energy. Many slightly different opinions exist upon the details and planning, one of them if for instance stated in one of their document (French) ("les antinucléaires ne prônent pas un retour au charbon, mais demandent l'utilisation du gaz à court terme, des économies d'énergie et enfin le recours aux énergies renouvelables.").
Energy is the key issue for this century. With plentiful, cheap energy available, mankind will be doing so many cool (or evil) things. Think hydrating the sahara desert, just because we can. Sure that will take huge amounts of energy but what if that was cheap? Currently, producing sweet water from see water is very expensive, mainly because of the energy cost. So is pumping it from the sea to the sahara. So are many other production processes. In many industrial processes, energy cost currently is the bottleneck. So take it away.
Currently, driven by rising oil prises, the increasing cost of oil production and the exponentially growing demand for energy, there are many research projects into alternative energy production methods, improving existing methods of producing energy and improving energy efficience on the user side. I expect 99% to lead nowhere and 1% to revolutionize the world. We've historically been very good at squashing technical issues on our path. Producing energy is just the latest hurdle.
It is my hope and expectation that we will tackle this problem during my lifetime. Energy is plentiful, we just need to learn how to tap into it more efficiently.
Jilles
Here at my place (Floyd, VA, USA), I run 2 small businesses (embedded programming and machine shop) and two homes completely off the grid, except for the occasional use of some gasoline for a backup generator -- for some reason my employees expect to come to work and get paid even in dark weather, else I'd never need the gasoline. It is cost effective, but you have to put the money out up front, which is painful in most people's financial models. There are two solar systems here which serve to back one another up. The systems are not zero maintenance, if you are your own power company, you do have a job to do now and then, if only to scrape the snow off the panels. I probably have on the order of $20k invested in panels, batteries, inverters and so forth over both systems. One of the systems has paid for itself by ANY measure and is still working fine over 20 years after installing it. The other is only 8 years old, still using the original lead acid batteries (I use some special engineering tricks to make them last longer) and has probably paid for itself, but I don't count anymore. One overlooked fact about being off the grid, especially if you start with raw land and build yourself in some rural place, is the tax and building code situation. Essentially, the power company has been empowered (perhaps the name power company has more than one meaning?) by the state to enforce the codes. No power company, no building permit required, and all your buildings, no matter how nice, are taxed as barns or sheds. This alone makes solar power competitive and the payback time is VERY short when considering this factor. The 1k square foot building I'm in right now has 16 120 watt Solarex polycrystaline panels on top, cost about $20k to build, add about $12-15k for the solar system, and it contains about another $20k of chinese machine tools and electroplating gear. I pay tax on $2k for it. Work it out -- were this listed as a residence I'd be paying taxes on over $100k instead -- something over 3 grand a year. Anybody who wants to go to solar can do so now, period -- I started 25 years ago and its worked the whole time, more reliable than the power company by far. It works pretty well, but does require some lifestyle changes for a reasonable cost system to work well. If it's a dark day, you might not decide to arc weld all day that day, for example, and you might use gas to cook with instead of the microwave when the weather's bad. Same with any other power hogs -- you use them when the sun is out and the batteries already charged -- in that case you're in a use it or lose it situation anyway. We even have air conditioning here that we can use some days. Of course, we use efficient lighting, the smallest most efficient freezer there is and so on, so those might be considered added costs.
These things are big - the towers are 200 to 300 feet high. It takes 500 of them to equal one coal plant. And bigger wind turbines are coming. The latest General Electric 3MW turbines are so big they're only being considered for offshore installations. The Cape Cod Wind Farm project has produced much grumbling: "A 24 square mile industrial park the size of the island of Manhattan, 40 story turbines permanently scarring our ocean horizon, 580 lights destroying our nightscape, 130 air and sea navigation hazards in the middle of some of the foggiest air and waters in the world..." This is a generic problem with wind and solar energy. Once it starts really working, the installations are huge, because the energy densities are so low.
The downside of wind power, of course, is that it's intermittent. Typically, average power is only 30% of rated power. Of course, you don't get to pick when you get power. So you either need energy storage (like a pumped storage plant) or excess capacity in non-wind generation. Which means building more plant.
Still, wind power is real. Unlike much of the other stuff mentioned, like the "magnet engines" (an entry-level bozo idea), the "neutron generator" (a misunderstanding of a well-understood device), and "blacklight power" (generally considered to be a scam).
Tidal power seems attractive, but there are only about 20 good sites worldwide.
The Athabasca Oil Sands projects are already producing 1 million barrels of oil per day, and that should double by 2010. The scale of the operation is huge. It takes two tons of sand to yield one barrel of oil. That's one Panama Canal every ten months. Want a job as a heavy equipment operator? Move to Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. Rents have passed Silicon Valley levels, and the apartment vacancy rate is zero.
The future looks like coal. Too much coal. China is building about 50,000MW of coal-fired electric plants per year. US coal consumption has been roughly constant for a while, but will probably go up as oil prices increase.
Nuclear may make a comeback, probably when coal gets too ugly.
This was 1965. The country was - still is - called France. In fact the quantity of electricity made from renewable has not changes. But our needs did. A lot.
Strangely enough, I am not that sure that we live better now that in 1965. Well, I mean from a material standpoint, of course, it is obvious. We enjoy as spectators much more things. As actors of our lives, however, we have less and less opportunities to create anything. metro, boulot, dodo (commuting, working, sleeping), as one says here.
And strangely enough, this does not seem related to age. People I knew born around 1900 regretted the sixties. Those born around 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940 and 1950 too. What is more surprising, my son - born in 1980 - also tells he has a deep regret not to have known the sixties. Strange.
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
It wouldn't, of course. The claim does not make any sense. I mean, methane is abundant on such planets as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, so why couldn't it be common on Titan? It has been known for many decades that the atmosphere of Titan is mainly methane, so I don't understand what new observation they could possibly be talking about.
Virtually all commercially significant deposits of hydrocarbons on Earth have clear indications of biological origins. I can't see how any findings on Titan could magically negate that positive evidence.
In my opinion the whole discussion as we know it since decades heads into the wrong direction. Of course it is neccessary to research on new energies and obviously we can see, that after a long passionate input of brain solar cells, windpower an any other becomes ubiquitous. I came to the conclusion, that it is typical for our psyche to "generate" energy if we become aware of the lack of her. The whole discussion shows me, that it is more sexy to talk about New" energies and "new" ressources. It is difficult to tackle those problems, they are even challenging, but unfortunately they appear to be less effective to come to a solution. It is in fact more easier to think about a single, isolated system which is able to produce some energy than to analyse in a holistic way even a small consumer (in a technical sense). I give you an example. It is possible to plan a fridge without, electricity, even without gas. The whole world do not think about systems in use, they come not up with a new solution! Saving energy is somewhat unsexy, I cannot explain why, but it appears to be the looser if it comes to efforts to talk about savings, which could lead to a total similar energy bilnce to solve the problem. This has to turn. Energy saving in processes is much more challenging, from the engineering view, than "generating new" power. Thats dull. We her started a small website, so far in German, to give ideas for a "green internet". Some ideas are about "green power" www.ecologee.net, but the biggest ressource lies in savings. I wish you a happy + green year.
increased at a rate of say 1% per year. New cheaper replacement technologies will appear as they become cost competitive.
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Come on. There are plenty of legitimate "outside the box" thinkers that could be mentioned without resorting to pure crackpots, like Eric "The Big Bang Never Happened" Lerner and Randell "Quantum Mechanics is Nonsense" Mills (the scam artist who has been claiming the existence of "hydrinos" for years now, in contradiction to all known laws of physics and with no reproducible experimental evidence, and bilking millions out of investors hand over fist). It makes me take the author less seriously to see these "revolutionary advances" reported with a straight face.
One thing that all of the people have forgotten is that The law of conservation of energy. How does having all of these Windmills, and Ocean current turbines, and such effect our environment. Remembering that both the winds and ocean currents influence global weather patterns. Now when we put up these millions of devices up, could we not be causing environmental damage anyways. It might explain why the winters are so damn cold, or it could just be old age too. Just what I have been thinking about.
I live in the UK and although it would seem that as a nation we are moving (albeit slowly) towards cleaner energy sources, we're not quite so free to make individual use of these technologies. My aunt is currently trying to get three small solar panels installed into her roof and is having to go through a lot of paperwork; planning applications, surveys for the neighbours to make sure they're happy to have them on the street...
Strikes me as strange given that these panels look like a regular three-pane window from the outside, although one with a slightly more reflective surface.
You're right. Geothermal is a hugely overlooked energy source. When people talk about "fossil fuel" usage, we think oil and gasoline for cars.
But just as much energy is used heating homes as it is for transportation. Geothermal systems, even just ground-source heat pump systems, are a great way to save energy in temperate climates. And co-generation is another excellent way of improving the energy efficiency of fossil fuels.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Taxation is such an awful way for governments to "correct" market failures.
They never do it correctly. I'm sure if there were carbon taxes today, they'd manage to make you pay to burn renewable fuels like wood, ethanol, methanol, and biodiesel along with fossil fuels.
Tax revenue never goes to correct the problems it was meant to correct. In a democracy, politicians will always find a way to divert funds to pork projects or buy votes with dubious social programs.
In the long run, governments become dependent upon taxes from sources that they were originally meant to discourage. Taxes then become the perfect way for harmful industries to become legitimized in the eyes of their regulators. History is rife with examples of corrupt governments becoming one with those who profit from harming others.
What's really better, your neighbor spewing pollutants into the air and water, or him doing so with the backing of the government and military?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
You brits are pricks. Of course you learned nothing from us kicking your asses on multiple occasions over the years. Keep minding each others' business on that tiny pathetic little island of yours, and watch as Freedom marches across the globe rather than red coats. If you promise to act nice, maybe we'll let you come along. If not, you can keep your spy cameras and bureaucracy and crappy weather and bad teeth and shitty food and not bitch about it because you made your own fucking beds.
"The transition from oil to other energy sources will occur naturally, through normal market forces, and without any extreme shocks"
I think we'll get to test your theory of just a slow reduction and gradual changes and no shocks, etc., this spring. I'd given even odds now about a greatly expanded war in the mideast involving NATO and Israel vs Iran and possibly Syria, followed by katy-bar-the-door. And who knows, this might be the war that we see the re-introduction of nuclear weapons again. I think if that occurs it might cause a sum-total lowering of global production, and not slowly, either, into the "sudden shock" realm. It's really at best a SWAG though, as those sorts of things are incredibly difficult to predict. I wouldn't *discount* it though, nor would I count on Saudi Arabia to immediately pick up the global slack. Something might happen there as well. This is the age of cheap missiles and suicide commandos and various and diverse flavors of political and religious extremism, most anything could happen that might disrupt "normalcy".
I distinctly remember having a non-slow and non-gradual "option" a few decades back now of ten dollars/gallon gas during the OPEC embargo, the two choices presented were pay it, or no gas, and only 2 gallons per customer sold. I paid it, just to be able to get home. We didn't get much notice either, and it caused some profound changes immediately. Stuff happens sometimes...
Then there's South America, in particular Venezuela, another potential flashpoint where oil supplies could be disrupted with little notice.
We still don't have Iraq back producing at pre war levels, AFAIK, and that's been 2 years now since the latest invasion.
In short, no time in human history can be considered "abnormal", it is what it was, but today we are so highly dependent on petroleum fuels, basically just the last century in all of our existence as humans, and we also have such a proliferation of advanced weaponry completely beyond the ken of any dictator or warlord in the past, that these times we are in now might be considered extremely experimental and out of any sort of "norm". There are too many potentially devastating wild cards present to hold a totally rosy view of future events. Not to say we should be pessimistic, but I think it's prudent to cover your prognostication bets with a dash of modern political realism.
We have a saying that fits in the Preparedness community:P "Pray for the best, prepare for the worst"
Erm, I know the majority of the /. community are dumb as bricks but seriosuly did anyone even follow the link? It's not for drinking you gonads!
moo
At some point extracting oil from shale and tar sands will become cost-effective.
Wooo! And at that point we tar-sand-rich Canucks will be joyfully gloating all your base are belong to us as we are ^H^H^H^H^H^H bombed by the U.S.A. whose sole desire is to finally bring us freedom and human rights!
I for one welcome...
...easy enough to check that. 30 years ago was the Arctic melting at a fast rate? y/N
I don't recall that being a topic of conversation back then, not much anyway, they were talking about it possibly becoming MORE frozen, but it might have been, I honestly don't remember. Seems to me it was more or less like it has been, all frozen, not changing fast. They were still working out ramifications of increased aerosols, something we are still contending with, and near as I can see they were all partially correct, greenhouse gasses will trap heat, and particulate matter will reflect solar gain. We've gotten a better handle on solar gain because of reductions in particulate matter since then, but greenhouse gas emissions are way up... hmmm..gets complicated fast
Some climatologist here might have a good reference to go look and see what was actually going on then. I'd be interested in knowing as well, because of the recent evidence that Mars is undergoing severe climactic changes, most likely from solar activity.
You shouldn't dismiss biodiesel with the assumption that SOYBEANS are the only thing you can make the stuff from. We naturally look forward to advances in solar cell technology, we look forward to advances in nuclear fission and fusion technology, but for some reason people hit a mental wall with biodiesel and can't imagine any technological advances happening.
The US Govt conducted studies on the cultivation of algae with high oil content, using open-raceway ponds. Greenfuel Technologies have an enclosed system using algae to synthesize fuel from CO2 waste, such as from power plants. Synthetic Genomics are working on genetically engineered organisms that secret biofuels (they are focused more on methanol or hydrogen, but the same approach could produce vegetable oil).
You can get around the whole problem of conventional farming and consuming too much arable land. None of these approaches are fully proven on a commercial scale yet. . . But then, a lot of things we discuss on Slashdot are more far-fetched than making biodiesel fuel from algae. It's hardly fair to wave away the whole idea of biofuel as if it were some annoying insect buzzing around your head, just because you found out soybeans won't fill the bill.
To his credit, he regularly exposes individual scams, often turning overnight from a booster to a scammer's worst nightmare. Many of the "true believers" never figure out that they've been taken, even after they've lost their life savings. But Allan never seems to learn the bigger lessons about science and nature, so his cycle continues to repeat.
Those interested in new energy technologies would do well to pay close attention in physics, chemistry and thermodynamics classes and remember that whenever something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
"Climate change evidence will continue to mount."
I guess since we all know this ahead of time, the scientific data isn't really necessary!
We already have evidence that there have been several ice ages, and therefore several "global warmings." Much of this occurred before humans started using automobiles and building factories. You don't need rocket scientists or quack leftist professors to tell you this. If you want to scrub C02 from the atmosphere to prevent "global warming," then create devices that turn C02 into O2 and C and mass market them to consumers. (Oh, I forgot, global warming is really about how people feel about consumerism and capitalism rather than reality.)
Instead of looking at the economics of installing a large wind farm for the sole purposes of bulk wholesale sales, to a customer who doesn't want to deal with you, to instead plan on using your produced electricity for a specific industry/factory/large agco concern set upright near the wind farm. Two businesses that compliment each other. Plenty of potential businesses that need lots of electrical power, the cheaper the better, and if you (your sister) corporation supplies the power from the wind plants, you sell it to yourself (the manufacturing facility, or etc), a common and legal business tactic.
Not to flame but those ecologists arn't that bright then. Coal is a much less efficient fuel then is Pu especially when used in a PBR or CANDU reactor. Public fears of radioactive waste are far out of proportion to how dangerous they acutally are. As well as the fact that coal plants can even sometimes create 3 to 4 times the amount of backround radiation as a scale PBR.
Let me guess. . .
You were one of the ones who scoffed at the idea of global warming, (as well as the general concept that the use of all that fun technology might be environmentally irresponsible), for years until finally evidence from the tree-hugging contingent eroded your position to the point of your either having to bail or look silly.
There is particular stubborn genius in your, "Well, consumerism and technology are still the solution and the tree-huggers are still wrong", position.
-FL
It should come pretty soon, cheap, plastic solar cells. It is easy to calculate that we need to cover only a small franction of Earth surface to fulfil all todays needs of electricity and electrical power.Fule for a cars is different story, as solar power will never be a solution here. Read more and disuss about that at http://www.e-verdict.com/car-fuel
www.e-verdict.com -> People's opinions and judgments
I haven't said the "end of all good things", just a credible probability or high level possibility (even odds I gave it) of an expanded middle eastern war right gob smack in the middle of the planet's largest oil reserves. There's already a rather large one going on,perhaps you've noticed?? It just might *expand*. Check the headlines, it's not just me saying it. I hope it doesn't happen of course, just looking at the newzzzz.
Of course, if you have secret insider info that it 100% positively won't happen, let's see it! I'm open for good news all the time! I'm a glass half-full guy by nature, it doesn't bother me at all when things go well.
There are a number of things that you haven't said here.
First the easy-to-reach oil reserves are ALREADY depleted. Third-generation Techniques such as "bottle-brush drilling" are already the NORM, not the exception. The technology used in oil drilling and extraction is becoming more and more, shall we say, desperate?
Second, the price of your energy has NOTHING to do with the quality, density, reliability, availability, or EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested).
Third, extraction of oil from shale and tar sand is ALREADY monitarily cost-effective; but it completely ignores other factors, namely that it will create more pollution than existing oil refineries, and that it will take enourmous amounts of energy to extract the oil in the sands, which means the amount of "energy" you extract from it may not be the same as the amount of "energy" you put into the extraction process.
As the price gradually rises, more and more alternatives to oil will become cost-effective. As use of alternative sources increases, the investment into them will improve their efficiency, through process improvements and through mass production, making them even better competitors.
Alternatives such as wind and solar are ALREADY cost-effective; the prohibition here is not that they have a negative monetary return, but rather that it takes a longer time to see a return on monetary investment. If you factor in the energy returns on energy invested, you'll find that some power sources are not what they seem...some make more sense...
The transition from oil to other energy sources will occur naturally, through normal market forces, and without any extreme shocks. No "outside shove" is required to make the energy source transition. That said, I think there is value in governmental influence pushing toward cleaner energy sources, since market forces won't naturally push us in that direction. I think "pollution taxes" (or pollution credits, which are similar) are a good idea as they can both bring market forces to bear on keeping the environment clean and can also provide funding for alternative energy research.
The transition from oil to other energy sources will be a shock, because there is so much already tied to the use of oil besides the use of it as an energy resource. That restaurant salad in a plastic container you just ordered is positively DRIPPING in oil. Oil was used to create the fertilizers that are used in American agriculture. Oil is used to make the pesticides that allow for large, cheap crops to be grown. Oil was used to lubricate the machinery that is used to harvest and transport that food. Oil was used to make the fuel that allowed for the salad greens to be planted, harvested, transported, and in some cases stored for extended periods. Oil was used in the manufacture of the plastic shell that the salad comes in, and it too had oil used for the manufacture and transportation of that plastic shell. But it doesn't end there! After you eat that salad, the plastic shell is disposed of into a plastic bag (made with oil); the bag is transported to a disposal site (oil for lubrication and fuel again); hell, even the final resting place of the salad greens you ate, well, let's just say that municipal sewer treatment plants are powered by electricity, a large portion of which is coming from natural-gas fired turbines; natural gas is a common by-product from drilling....oil wells.
Pollution tax and credit spending is a nice idea, I agree, but it becomes a political shell game of what we define as "pollution". Given how "honest" big energy has been in the past (let
Unfortunately technical issues aren't the only hurdle to overcome in getting the world off petroleum. Many of the more influential world leaders believe the demon Allah has given them control of the world's energy.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Nope, most ecologists want a mix of power sources. In France, for instance, many want to divert part the money funneled in nuclear-related research into some clean-energy work.
They also want to funnel a portion of that money into increased baguette production.
Anyone seen anything on a piezo generator that works by converting the tension on the kite string into power via some kind of piezoelectric affect? Or maybe tension on a string winding spool, like a reverse spring generator?
If Sterling is the only person writing about something you can be sure it's wrong.
I just looked at a house up here in North Dakota. I was a bit suprised, it was listed as having electric heat...
My first thought was: "I'll have to get a heat pump installed".
I don't read AC A human right