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Google Goes Green
foobsr writes "Google today announced its RE<C project to make renewable energy cheaper than coal in the near future. The company, and its charitable arm google.org, plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the initiative. Larry Page stated: 'With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.'"
I want to say there was an article about a week ago on Slashdot debating this issue (of the return of nuclear power plants.) I wouldn't swear on it, but I believe the capital outlay for a new nuclear plant is 3-5 times that of a coal plant for similar production (in addition to needing to be located near a body of water.) The cost for the fuel is less (although as demand would rise this could change).
Factoring in the long run cost of running the plant and the externalities of said plant, nuclear is likely the better route. However you may remember that people are somewhat myopic, though there are apparently plans for 28 new reactors as of 2007.
The obligatory wikipedia link is... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
"Clean" coal is still extremly dirty, EVEN if you ignore the carbon issue. For instance, Clinton had passed a law that was going to force ALL of America's coal plants to cut way back on mercury emissoins. W. killed that almost right away when he took over. The reason is that it was estimated to jump electric prices up by 25%. Bear in mind that Clinton's clean up would not have stopped the mercury, just cut it in half. Right now, even in America, we do not do a good job of cleaning up our emissions, BECAUSE of the costs. And countries like China simply skip it all togehter, even though they have billions in the bank and are giving it to other countries to obtain their resources.
Best thing that America can do is get off coal (and natural gas is not the way to go, but better than coal). Nukes would help.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
> breeder reactors wring the last of the energy out of the original source but
> ultimately the source dries up/cools down whatever you get the picture. A
> renewable source is one not dependant on a finite resource.
That's a decent argument, but you need to understand just what a breeder reactor can do.
U-235 is the only natural fissile material, which sucks because it's only about 0.75% of elemental uranium. U-238, which isn't fissile, makes up the remaining 99+% and is basically just dead weight. The basic idea of a breeder reactor, is to pack U-238 around a running reactor. As the (very many!) stray neutrons leave the core, they collide with the U-238 and create Pu-239. This Pu-239 is a fissile material and can then be used in a reactor in place of U-235. There is also a variant that produces U-233 from Th-232.
The point is, that even if we do only have 30 years of U-235, if we breed the U-238 we could extend that to well over 3000 years at our current usage. Throw in the Thorium versions, and energy problems are solved for quite some time. Let's be pessimistic about production results and rising demand and call it about 1000 years. I'd say that in that amount of time we should be able to come up with something better, like fusion or drawing directly from the sun. Or hell, maybe we'll just mine more Uranium from Mars. It's not really a problem that can just be solved straight away. After all, these "renewable" sources require the sun, which ain't exactly renewable itself.
Why are we ignoring this technology???
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Peak Oil is debated - have we already reached it, will it be in 10 years, 20 years? I tend to think we are living through it more or less now. However, I heard a representative from BP speak recently that indicated that, if demand drives the cost of oil up enough, there's enough tar sands and oil shale out there to push peak oil back a long ways. Sure, that's BP talking, and oil shale and tar sands are shit kinds of energy, but it is a facet of the debate.
Peak Coal, on the other hand, is decades or centuries off. The United States has enough coal reserves that we could be energy independent for a few hundred years. China, India, and Russia have lots of reserves, too.
Of course, there are prohibitive problems with becoming an all-coal energy economy for a few hundred years. I advocate that we move away from coal (and oil) as fast as possible. The point is, though, that there's still a lot of coal out there.
uhuh ... nuclear power never got that subsidy ... RIGHT !
Let's put something straight : total subsidies for solar are not even close to those of nuclear.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
$29 Billon at the last count. It has the same budget as the entire WHO and dwarfs the amount the US government spends on aid.
Gee, building a maglev train in the richest part of the world's richest country to carry the world's richest, fattest taxpayers, wouldn't THAT be a gift to humanity?
are widely recognized to be almost at, at, or past peak production on a global level,
I find it interesting that so many people have such a poor concept of the current situation. What people fail to recognize is that we are artificially reaching peak production. Contrary to popular belief, the world's most cost effective refinery was shut down less than a decade ago. No new refineries in the US are being built. Keep this in mind when you contrast this with the fact that more oil is currently known to exist than any other time in human history and its widely believed huge undiscovered reserves have yet to be located.
Right now, artificial scarcity is causing production peaks. Artificial scarcity helps keep fuel prices high so oil companies have zero incentive to create new refineries. What most people also fail to understand is crude comes in varying qualities. The per barrel price you constantly see quoted represents the highest grade crude. What you don't see is the "junk" crude is often half or a quarter the price. The low quality crude can be processed but requires special refineries. In the US, we only have one or two refineries which can process high sulfur crude. Processing high sulfur crude is actually equally profitable but requires additional investment from the oil community a it requires expansion in processing capability.
Long story short, there is actually zero factual information to suggest we are anywhere near peak. What the misinformed often quote as peak are simply observing artificial limitations which are kept in check by the oil companies and further compounded by their refusal to increase production capabilities while having reduced capabilities less than a decade ago. The only question is, how much are you willing to pay for your fuel?
With oil prices as they are now, most of the known oil sources become viable, but again, no one wants to do that because what is already available is far more profitable. And heck, if you can use up your competition's supply, it makes your reserve all the more valuable down the road.
Is greed really so easily confused for peak production?
Google invested heavily in a company called NanoSolar back on 2002. Since then, Google, along with some of the top investors, have given Nanosolar millions and millions of dollars to produce printable roll-out solar cells that uses a conductive foil instead of silicon, making the cells much cheaper and easier to make. For information on Nanosolar's history, you can go here.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Zion was powered by geothermo energy.. "The only place that is still warm" - Morpheous in matrix I.
It would be insuffient to power them...
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
I work for a major public power company and have worked on some renewables projects in departments concerned with supplying retail load (e.g. you, your aunt, Google, etc.) What so much of this debate forgets -- either deliberatley or inadvertently -- is that electricity can't be stored in any useful quantity. It's unique among commodities.
Thus it follows that the main problem with 99% of renewable energy is that it is not dispatchable. When you're working for the power company and suddenly load spikes, you need to be able to call on a resource immediately. We have dozens of internal procedures (and a load of regulation) that dictate how much "ready to go" energy we must have available at any point.
As a utility I can't count of a solar plant to be there as a reserve -- even in the Southwestern U.S. -- nor wind. (Geothermal is a notable exception -- it's as reliable as coal or nuke -- but is only available in specific locations.) Sure, if I could store the energy produced by a wind farm until I needed it, great, but that's not a possibility.
I doubt that Google (or any business) will be willing to accept the operating risk of not having some form of dispatchable energy ready at hand. So they've got two choices:
Utilities, for the most part, regard renewable energy projects as really expensive press release opportunities. Utilities are required to be reliable and, for the most part, are run by men and women who take pride in the fact that when you, Joe Customer, turn on your kid's night light, it comes on. Until someone figures out how to store energy from a wind or solar farm, the energy driving that night light is going to be baseloaded on either fossil or nuclear fuel.
Good points.
Part of the problem is that we don't have an accurate accounting of how much oil is left in the easy-to-get-to locations. The middle eastern sources are depleting, but they refuse to acknowledge how much. Every year they say that the amount of oil left in the ground is the same as it was the previous year. This is because they are limited in how much they can extract by international treaties. If they can only extract 5% a year, then the only way they can keep production up is to claim that the amount of oil is the same. So they lie. We may find that those oil fields run dry all of a sudden and nobody knew it was going to happen.
As you point out, other sources can be exploited - but it requires investment and time to setup. And unless we know how much is left in the easy sources it is hard to gauge when to invest in the hard ones. In the end, it doesn't matter: We need to move to renewable for this reason, and 1000 others.
Firstly, Google has a non-profit arm called google.org which will be providing the funding for this. Second, Google directly profits from this, as they use an astronomical amount of electricity to run their servers, so there is a business interest as well as a non-profit interest. Third, Google employs hundreds of energy experts already to maintain and optimize their own systems, and are running by solar power in their HQ - see "In the last 24 hours, Google produced 1,092 kilowatt-hours of electricity from the sun", which says that they "launched the largest solar panel installation to date on a corporate campus in the United States" With that kind of success, if they want to go from producing enough energy to power 1,000 homes to powering all of San Francisco, and they want to be the ones to shove money at it without subsidy, I say let them! I'm sick of seeing companies bitch about the costs of going green instead of exploring the potential profit. Even if they end up just funding and organizing the project (rather than directly owning it), it's still a plus for everyone.
The cost of solar and wind have been going down fast for three reasons:
- improved technology (larger wind turbines, better generators, new solar cell types)
- more efficient production techniques (production of larger solar panels see: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/appliedmaterials/index.jsp?epi-content=GENERIC&newsId=20060905005378&ndmHsc=v2*A1167656400000*B1178676791000*C4102491599000*DgroupByDate*J2*N1002992&newsLang=en&beanID=547561197&viewID=news_view) or check out eSolar's modular approach to thermal solar
- economies of scale as production volumes increase
Government subsidies have reduced the cost to consumers in certain markets such as Germany and California, but are not the primary driver of the price decreases we have seen in these two technologies over the last three decades. Currently, demand is so high for solar electric, that suppliers cannot keep up and prices are inflated and will remain so until more of the planned and in-progress photovoltaic production plants come on line. The solar industry is looking to grow beyond their current marked of subsidized installations and specialty installations (off grid, mobile power, etc). Solarbuzz.com states: "As a guide, the industry is looking to drive module prices down to $1.50 - $2.00/Watt over the next decade, if it is to make large inroads in to the grid tied electricity market, without subsidy." The price is currently $4-5/Watt range. In 1982 it was $27/Watt. The goal is aggressive, given that current price is affected by the supply constraint and the amount of investment in alternative power that is occurring, we may be pleasantly surprised.
The purpose of these subsidies to to grow the industry to the point where the economies of scale are large enough and the technologies are improved enough that the subsidies become unnecessary to the continued growth of the market. We are not at that point yet, but the cost reductions in both solar and wind have been dramatic. Currently industrial solar installation cost $0.21/KWh and produce their peak power at times of peak demand, increasing the value of their power. (Figures from solarbuzz.com . Distribution charge, typically $0.05/KWh, might not be included here). The US national average electric rate is $0.095/KWh. Tuscon Electric Charge residential customers with time of use meters $0.184/KWh in the daytime in summer and $0.126/KWh in the winter peak power times. These prices are getting pretty close to where unsubsidized solar costs currently are. Further increases in fossil fuel prices and improvements in solar will help to close this gap.
There is another justification for subsidies as well. If we were to take an economist's perspective on this issue, we might see that there are certain "externalities" in traditional energy production. An externality is a cost that is not reflected in the price of a product. For instance, the price of electricity from coal does not include the cost of treating people for asthma caused by coal plant emissions. While few would propose charging power companies a surcharge for their health effects, since this calculation would be extremely difficult to get right and politically impossible to implement, this lack of a surcharge can be seen as individuals and governments subsidizing the cost of coal power generation through their health care expenditures as well as through damage to their citizen's health. The government will actually save some money in health care costs by subsidizing alternative energy which would replace dirty coal plants and might see an interest in protecting the health of its citizens. Clearly certain subsidies would have more impact in reducing external costs than others. Some people might want to include other externalities such as
OK - fine. How many parts per million of uranium is there in sea water, eh? Now, take the number of parts of Uranium you will need to run a reactor. Multiple those two numbers, and you will get the volume of water you will need to boil off to get the uranium you need for ONE reactor.
About 3 parts per billion
That's the first I've ever heard about anybody being crazy enough to try to boil off the water to extract the uranium.
http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/4_5.html
If 2g-U/kg-adsorbent is submerged for 60 days at a time and used 6 times, the uranium cost is calculated to be 88,000 yen/kg-U, including the cost of adsorbent production, uranium collection, and uranium purification. When 6g-U/kg-adsorbent and 20 repetitions or more becomes possible, the uranium cost reduces to 15,000 yen. This price level is equivalent to that of the highest cost of the minable uranium. The lowest cost attainable now is 25,000 yen with 4g-U/kg-adsorbent used in the sea area of Okinawa, with 18 repetitionuses. In this case, the initial investment to collect the uranium from seawater is 107.7 billion yen, which is 1/3 of the construction cost of a one million-kilowatt class nuclear power plant
So, of the order of $1bn to setup and then around 250$/kg to extract using current technology to extract enough uranium to run 6 nuclear power stations.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
"The concentration of uranium in soil ranges from 0.7 to 11 parts per million (up to 15 parts per million in farmland soil due to use of phosphate fertilizers), and 3 parts per billion of sea water is composed of the element." So there is far more uranium in the ground than the ocean but it's still fairly cheep to extract it from the ocean because of the insane amount of energy in tiny amounts of uranium.
Anyway, you don't extract uranium by boiling the sea you use some sort of ion exchange or http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4585627.html. If you used uranium from sea water you would increase the cost around 4%. And using Uranium from sea water is still 100's of times energy positive. So it works on an economic and energy basis. But it's pointless at this point in time we 100's of years of stock piled uranium already mined and waiting to be used.
Up to this point we have focused on extracting around 2% of the energy from high energy uranium ore. At this point we use depleted uranium in bullets even though it has more than 10,000 times the energy density of crude oil.
I can second the impact on the effect it has on the landscape. I flew over the tar sands of northern Alberta recently and it looks like a nuclear wasteland from a science fiction movie. After they're done ripping all the bitumen out of the ground, that region is probably going to be a complete mess for centuries. It's a classic example of short term gain at the cost of long term devastation. It's the kind of shortsighted activity you'd expect from a third world country.
Oil has been used in different applications for quite a long time. Many hundreds of years. You may be right, though, that coal pre-dated the use of oil. But all that is irrelevant to my point...
Until we hit Peak Whale Oil, we'd never used a fossil fuel as our PRIMARY ENERGY SOURCE.
Despite the fact that coal and oil were used, until a few hundred years ago, the use of biological energy sources dramatically overshadowed use of fossil fuels.