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On Electricity (Generation)
Engineer-Poet wrote a piece a few months back that focuses on electricity production; or rather how or what we will need to do to keep pace with people's demands while balancing that with environmental and economic impact. Lengthy but well-reasoned and good reading.
Wait for the baby-boomers to die off. Suddenly energy, housing, and jobs will become plentiful. ;)
For a science-fiction cant on some of the issues raised in TFA, take a look at The Bikes of New York which explores a post-energy crisis near-future in which impoverished people have the option of riding stationary bicycles to spin massive underground flywheels that top up the energy needs of commercial enterprises.
I think creative solutions to electricity problems are in all our futures. Personally, I live about 75% off the grid and am looking forward to be able to afford to get all the way off -- but I need to get my roof re-done before I can even think about solar panels or mounting a wind turbine up there.
At any rate, fiction for thought.
These stories are free but worth money.
As it so happens, Ethanol is being used as an ocatane-booster additive in the majority of gasoline today. In part, it's because it's safer than cleaner than most of the chemicals previously used to improve octane ratings. Another part of it, however, is that up to 10% Ethanol mixtures are helping to lower the cost of gasoline as the prices for gas surpass that of Ethanol.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
..Hybrid Sweaters!
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Agreed. Nuke plants won't fix everything--there will still be the issue of the waste--but it's certainly better than what we have now.
As for the nuclear waste: if we switched to 100% nuclear and renewable sources, it should follow that a significant amount of time and money be devoted to a permanent solution for nuclear waste. But I'd prefer we have 1,000 years to solve that problem than have 100 years or so to solve the current one. Especially as the current problem is alreay doing harm, whereas a well-run nuke plant would not.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Lengthy but well-reasoned and good reading.
Dude, what the hell is something like that doing on slashdot? I need more psuedo intellectual rants about how the RIAA is going to eat my first born!
Monstar L
"Try telling any green environmental lefty that Ethanol is a bad thing and show them why, and they turn their nose saying, "But, but, but, but its GREEN!"
Wow, what an uninformed stereotype. Plenty of us green environmental lefties have serious issues with increasing society's reliance on industrial agriculture, and see the potential usurpation of the oil lobby by the corn lobby as a meaningless substitution. Our leaders keep trying to find new and exciting ways to supply our energy demand without examining the nature or utility of this demand. Sustainable energy will come from changing cultural attitudes regarding the worthy expenditures of energy, not a shuffling of environmental issues.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Hopefully commercial fusion becomes viable soon, removing a lot of the present objections to nuclear power. Hard to see how this will have much of an impact on transport fuels, though, without major advances in battery tech.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Wrong wrong wrong.
Ethanol is being used to reduce emissions on that small fraction of badly running automobiles out there. It does not have any effect on modern engines except to lower their mileage. Modern engines don't even require the "higher" octane rating, as they can compensate as required for slightly lower octane ratings.
Ethanol actually reduces the specific energy of gasoline.
Lastly, ethanol's true cost is in growing and producing ethanol - namely, water use and the agricultural pollution.
Ethanol is not the answer. Neither is bio-diesel. Nothing that replaces the current liquid storage medium will be the answer. The true answer is either nuclear or solar (also nuclear:) or wind/tidal. The last 3 are all extra-planetary in their power source and thus not add to planetary heat as we're merely shifting energy from A to B: solar/wind are both driven by the sun, and tidal is mostly driven by the moon). Nuclear is still using "stored" power, thus can still have a net add to planetary heat.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The real pay off for ethanol will be when a good process for making ethanol from cellulose is developed. Cellulose is just long chains of sugars, and it is just a matter of time before the chemistry becomes a reality.
In the meantime, ethanol for corn will help get the infrastructure in place.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
because for all the work we do it won't amount to a hill of beans if China doesn't play along. Go look at many of their cities, they look even worse than the US did at its height for pollution.
:)
Hell, their only fix for good air during the Olympics will be to ban cars and shutdown nearby industries.
Still got to love this comment on his blog
"There is sufficient biomass energy to replace motor fuel and then some... if the energy is not wasted. "
Well duh. Thats the problem with his whole page, its all stuck on a BIG bunch of IFs.
but the biggest problem is turing grain crops into fuel, there are just so many uses for grain crops in everyday products that a slight increase in their pricing because of competition with fuels could force consumer prices up, masking the true cost of these new forms of power creation.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Not that anyone reads those pesky things... but your concerns are mentioned.
It's not that it's energy negative- we still come out ahead- it's that it's not energy positive enough. There's a lot of other things we could be doing with that corn instead of turning it into ethanol. We are paying tax money through subsidies for something that's not going to be a long term solution. It's a waste of money and resources that could be spent elsewhere.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
This is a really nice piece of work. A couple of technologies that were missed are marketing mechanisms related to solar http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/solar-power-am way-way.html
and fly wheels http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/saving-not-bor rowing.html, described on the Real Energy blog.
Sure - the proposal to produce charcoal will allow for some soil renewal, but to allow this process to become sustainable, we'd also have to manage our soil resources much more carefully than we have been. Oh well, one problem at a time, I guess - global warming-related climate change would likely destroy even more viable soil than this proposal (it dries quicker in some spots, erodes others much quicker), so it's certainly an improvement.
Ryan Fenton
Not that I disagree with nuclear (from a pragmatic point-of-view), but I'd like to see more self-generating forms of electricity. Things like exercise gyms that double as power generators. That way I could convert my eco-guilt into a strong exercise regimen.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The only reason ethanol is being pushed in the US is because the government is getting tired of paying the thousands of corn farmers to keep growing far too much corn, and is hoping that burning corn will convince prices to rise so they can quit giving money away to farmers who should be growing something else.
At least thats what I hope they're doing. The corn farmers have destroyed pretty much everything else thanks to their ridiculous subsidies, getting them off of their subsidies and getting food diversity back into our food chain will benefit everyone from the diabetic to the e.coli sufferers.
I've been around quite a few what I would consider hard core environmentalists and I've never gotten that impression. In fact, some of them seemed to be apprehensive about ethanol because of how they view the impact some of the corn production in the US has on the Mississippi delta--i.e. the dead zone.
Maybe I've been around some of the more logical and open minded environmentalists, but my recollection is that they seemed to think solar and wind hold the biggest promises with ethanol being good if the major issues can be worked out.
Seriously, do you think energy conservation and looking for cleaner forms of energy are all in response to a hoax? if so you should consult your mental health professional and up your meds.
Sure coal could be used albeit not very cleanly, but do you think no one dies in mining coal?
True, although moving to easy, more natural crops like Switchgrass will alleviate some of our problems.
Much of our soil erosion and depletion is due to the way we grow crops: in strict rows, with chemicals to kill weeds and grass. While killing weeds makes picking corn easier by keeping the rows clean, there is a lot of exposed soil under the plants.
Grasses don't have this problem and actually help to maintain or even expand soil over time, and most have the added benefit of being perennial and self-propagating.
I'm curious, though... this article only outlines crops that work in the US. What will other countries do? Will rice or other water crops work for coastal countries?
Nothing wrong with ethanol.... that figuring out all the problems it has might solve ;)
Like the fact that transporting it more than a few miles to where it is produced removes most of the benefits
Corn is definitely a bad idea for this - the useful output is just far too small - about 5-10% of the biomass. Some interesting research has been done with certain kinds of bateria and soy plants (the whole plants stalk, roots leaves and all) managing to use 90-95% of the biomass as usable energy.
Your point is right though - if the total impact (carbon, polution, use of fossil fuels) to produce is more than the same impact it saves then doing it is worse environmentally than not doing it.
A lot of the advantages of things like ethanol don't deliver large sale benefits - need localised micro production (used sucessfully on farms for methane burning power generation) which in a lot of cases doesn't translate to real world uses.
Persoanlly my hopes are on a combination of tidal (the only non intermittant green energy source), solar where it makes sense (portugal yes, england no), hydro where possible, fision where we have to and fusion as soon as we can - the abington research looked quite promising - I just hope ITER manages to make the technology a net producer.
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How to end US carbon emissions in 30 years without damaging the US economy:
Step 1: Build nuclear power plants. Update the designs with modern technology and give tax incentives for every new nuke plant built.
Reason: 50's and 60's technology nuke plants currently generate electricity for less money than any other technology, even coal. They cost less than a third of what oil and natural gas plants cost. With modern technology its likely we could improve safety while lowering the cost further. Speaking of safety: the worst US accident in 50 years of opererating nuclear energey plants was three mile island, in which no radiation leaked and no one got hurt.
Yes, worse accidents are possible. That means that over a long enough period of time they will happen. But weigh the rare environmental damage from a meltdown against the continuous destruction of the atmosphere by hyrdocarbon burning plants.
Step 2: With the cost of electricty driven cheap enough by nuke plants, shift to hydrogen-based internal combustion engines. With electrolysis done at off-peak hours to generate hydrogen from electricity, every home can be its own fueling station. Hydrogen burns with oxygen to make water, so go drive a steamer.
Reason: Imagine a city, maybe the city you live in, where the only air pollution is the occasional methane from peoples' farts! Nuclear makes its possible and these technologies are economical now, not just in some hypothetical future after more research.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The answer is sitting in the fucking sky.
Solar energy is there waiting to be harnessed.
The smart people will setup solar farms.
They're using their grammar skills there.
But I'd prefer we have 1,000 years to solve that problem than have 100 years or so to solve the current one.
Very well put. There's only one known solution to the problem at hand, and we need to start lighting up one of these plants every two months to get the carbon problem solved - nothing else has a chance of doing it (without 'killing off the human race' as an item on the table),
Besides, we only need enough time on fission to get fusion perfected. That should take less than a hundred years. Then we only need to wait until we, as a race, consider that we have lift into space as a reliable technology. Then we just take all that old fission waste and send it into the Sun for the next generation of solar system to enjoy. And that's assuming we don't have a better solution for it by then.
But, the current course is for nothing to get done and the problem to get worse. The "environmentalist" groups seem to think that's the best course of action (scare-quotes intended) and that implementing wishful thinking is a sufficient plan.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
World annual human energy consumption (about 400 quads from all sources, including nuclear heat input to electric production) is equivalent to about 40 minutes of global solar input. The direct effect is utterly trivial save on a very local basis; the warming we're seeing is from greenhouse gases which trap more of the 5.2 million quads of sun striking the atmosphere every year.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Maybe I'm not typical.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
But it's not a Ethenol hybrid.
It's a 2001 VW Jetta TDI. Diesel. Installed a GreaseCar system. Works well, but not in this weather (-20C..-30C).
Pretty much every other time of the year, I start on DinoDiesel and once things get hot enough I switch to Waste Veggie Oil I get and filter to 10 microns from a local pub.
The article puts things together in a clear way. Points out what's wrong with the nut-jobs who think the world can be run off of butterflies and rainbows.
To those back-and-forthing on Ethenol - think about how much energy there is in a litre of ethenol. It's very very small. Production is expensive ($$$ & energy).
I don't 100% agree with the article's view on charcol fuel sources. But I like the analysis, not many gems like that.
My thoughts on how to solve this? Okokokok I'll tell you anyways. Grow alge, crush it into oil and use that. Alge grows 100x faster than canola/soy/rapeseed, is 50% oil, and only requires sunlight, (non-)salted water, heat, dirt and shit. No expentive farming equipment guzzling diesel to harvest. Just settling ponds like at the local water treatment plant to skim off the alge.
Anyways. Alge == good. Alge has had about 3-4 Billion years head start on Solar-power. Don't believe me? Take a deep breath.
Unfortunately, just because it's money-positive doesn't do spit for energy. The energy balance of corn ethanol may be as low as breakeven, according to a recent MIT analysis; even the USDA's numbers only come out to 1.09:1 after you correct their math. Should you manage bring that up to 2:1, you can still generate barely 16 billion gallons-net of ethanol (energy equivalent to 10-11 billion gallons of gasoline) out of the entire US corn crop.
As for why we don't look at cellulose.... it's because cellulose is a tough polymer evolved to be hard for bugs to eat, and we are better off using pyrolysis (charring or burning it) instead of hydrolysis (breakdown into sugars) to get energy out of it.
Sustainability actually does propose converting cellulose to ethanol, but via a rather indirect path:
It goes by a roundabout route, but it doesn't require any funny business and it tries to get useful energy at every step.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
There will have to be multiple, complex solutions to this coming energy crisis, but 2 things will have to happen: 1) The public as a whole is going to have to be better informed and concerned enough to force the politicians to move, and 2) A huge majority of the public is going to have to make a few changes.
:)
Which green solutions are best is sometimes debatable. But there is a new company that seems to best cover both 1&2, and it is one of the 'no-brainer' solutions. Citizenre will be renting solar panels out, letting them almost immediately save everyone money, while making each customer a sales person, familiar with product and issues. Its 100,000 panel/yr manufacturing plant is scheduled to come online in September 2007. They're currently using 2005 average power bill prices, and will switch to 2006 on Jan 31, 2007. The rate my Dad locked in, just by registering on the website, was 37% less than his current bill.
If you live in the US, and would like to sign up under me, sites are:
http://www.jointhesolution.com/solarnevada (as customer)
http://www.powur.com/solarnevada (as sales associate)
To ruthlessly give someone else commission, www.citizenre.com.
Corn ethanol is not green. Greens aren't following your agenda.
Stop getting your perspective on "greens", "environmentalists", and "lefties" from the dirty energy meme-machine and you might find that there are some green environmentalists who know what they are talking about. Many of them are conservative (in the true sense of the term, not like the radical pro-monopoly big-government neo-cons who masquerade as conservatives).
Your statement is essentially the same kind of blind prejudice as "black people all like chitlins and watermelon"; it's a way to depersonalize a whole group of people so you can discount their value.
And your original point is wrong. You are backwards, power reactors don't receive subsidies to dispose of their waste. They've been paying into a DOE waste fund since 1982. The cost of waste disposal has already been factored into the economics of their operation.
It's true that Yucca mountain will most likely not be used as a commercial power reactor waste repository site. But it is not as if the billions of dollars in the nuclear waste fund will go to waste. The money will be used towards another storage solution or, more likely, waste reprocessing.
As for the insurance costs, it most certainly is not free. Power plants spend huge amounts of money for their liability insurance. What you are probably thinking of is the price-anderson act, which states that power companies are only liable for the first $10 billion in damages due to a nuclear accident, where the federal government picks up the rest. While the act makes it so that people cannot sue the power companies for _punitive_ damages in a nuclear accident, it also states that the power companies cannot defend any action for damages. It's a fair two-way street that makes nuclear power commercially possible.
According to the wikipedia article on the price-anderson act, the actual subsidy comes out to around $2 million per reactor per year. That seems fairly modest to me, considering the financial risk power companies invest in the plants and their benefit to the country via clean, reliable power.
Energy generation needs to be localised. Everyone needs to be aware of their usage, control it, and take on the responsibility of generating it themselves, be it photovoltaic, wind turbine, or micro hydro.
Our leaders keep trying to find new and exciting ways to supply our energy demand without examining the nature or utility of this demand.
"Nobody" gives a damn about energy. They care about keeping the cars running. The culture will gleefully accelerate toward ultimate destruction so long as this need is met in the short term.
Sustainable energy will come from changing cultural attitudes regarding the worthy expenditures of energy, not a shuffling of environmental issues.
Prepare to be accused of wanting to plunge us back to the stone age. Nevermind that the Hittites mastered iron in OT times and steel production began before the birth of Christ, all without a lick of petroleum.
And we'll have an awful lot of Chevy's lying around with nothing to do. Leaf springs make nice knives that can last for generations if you don't live in a throw away society. Maybe if we didn't toss most of our energy into the midden we'd have more of it go around.
KFG