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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.'"
The solution to this problem must be out on the internet somewhere... if only I had a website I could use to try to find it...
Spent fuel -> breeder reactor -> fissionable fuel, and it's already cheaper than coal.
Oh wait, we don't like that kind of renewable resource...
These are the kinds of initiatives that one can applaud when they're coming from a public company. Interestingly, this isn't just an idle PR stunt, or vain charity. While Google expects to invest "tens of millions" into pilot projects, they also are committing themselves to investing "hundreds of millions" into those projects that are likely to yield positive returns.
I have spent so long lamenting the short-sightedness of American business, that it's easy to overlook the fact that at least some companies are willing to stake their immediate earnings on potentially much greater gains in the future. It's therefore very nice to see Google at the forefront of energy innovation because, let's face it, as a geek, that's exactly where I'd be pouring a fair portion of my post-billionaire funds. That and space... but alas Brin hasn't decided to finance his own airospace company YET...
Professor Page, are you telling me you built a tiiiime machine, out of a Priiiiius?!
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Coal, and fossil fuels in general, are widely recognized to be almost at, at, or past peak production on a global level, and will therefore become increasingly scarce, and therefore increasingly expensive, as time goes by.
Therefore, anyone wishing to create renewable energy more cost effective than coal doesn't need to do anything beyond keep trying and not get worse, and they will get there eventually.
As far as technical challenges go, this is right up there with "hitting the ground".
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Jobs doesn't have to make pledges; they just have to figure out how to convert the radiation of his reality distortion field to energy, and to use the pressure of the smugness from his customers to power iPods. Ballmer is currently busy with research to tap heat from system administrator's heads when updating, and he's already made great strides to put the kinetic energy of chairs in something useful.
"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.
The machines in The Matrix story were so dumb.
Skies darkened to block out the Sun so that their solar power sources would be negated? Well, duh. What was stopping them from building taller solar power collectors that were above the black stuff? Neo and Trinity penetrated the layer, didn't they?
Alternatively, they could have used whatever power source the remaining free humans were using: Zion wasn't powered by human batteries, was it?
Worst Plot Hole Ever.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
"Earth is a zero sum game"
That's simply not true, and renewable resources (plants, trees, etc.) are evidence of that. We are not a zero sum game because we have, for all intents and purposes, an inexhaustible supply of energy from the sun. Think back through the chain --> sun causes plants to grow, animals eat plants, etc. We're all solar powered, ultimately.
More efficient exploitation of that energy results in an increase in available resources. Sure, there's a limit, but we have even begun to tap into it, even with existing technology.
That's why projects like Google's are important. Any increase in efficient production of renewable energy ensures that we continue to not be a zero sum game.
There may come a point where no further technological innovation is possible, but it looks like when we get to that advanced state that the population will contract voluntarily. Witness the below-replacement birth rates in first world countries.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
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.
$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?
Resources do not have to be infinite in order for the game to not be zero sum. They simply have to increase over time.
The total amount of energy available to the Earth increases over time. We haven't even scratched the surface of exploiting what we have, let alone optimized the exploitation of energy that comes in continuously that is currently unused.
Hence, no zero sum game. In other words, I don't have to take energy from you in order to increase the energy available to me, there are many other ways I can increase usage or efficiency.
In the U.S. we are not currently taking advantage of this fact, to our great discredit. It's short sighted and results in conflict.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
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.
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.
The US and other major world economies already went thru this "Peak Oil" crisis, although they didn't use that specific term at the time. Nevertheless, there were no shortage of educated economists predicting absolute DOOM for civilization. Economies would crumble. Our way of life would regress. Nothing short of disaster.
Of course, as has often been a trait of humanity, we rose to the occasion and, true to form, Peak Whale Oil was not the disaster so many thought it would be. Why? The biggest reason, of course, was the ingenuity of American business to not just lie down and die, but to innovate. They found that the black liquid bubbling up from the ground could be tapped as a brand new energy source, and they built out the huge infrastructure that was needed to make it happen.
The same thing will happen again. Nobody is going to just lie down as our world falls apart. If for no other reason than there's a (huge) buck to be made in preventing that.
Don't under estimate the powers of greed and self-preservation.
Nonsense. You're confusing the price of crude oil and the price of gasoline in your argument.
;)
Artificially reducing refinery capacity does reduce gasoline supply - which definitely increases the price of gasoline. BUT it also reduces the demand for crude oil - which lowers its price!
And yet, the price of crude oil not only has gone up, but it has gone up faster than gasoline prices this year (http://www.wtrg.com/daily/oilandgasspot.html). I suspect you might have to further refine your crude conspiracy theory.
The current problem with rapidly escalating oil prices is not related to US refinery capacity. If the bottleneck was at the refinery level, crude would be cheap and gasoline would be expensive. In fact, both are expensive.
A statement like "more oil is currently known to exist than any other time in human history" is absurd, and I wonder how you arrived at it. We don't know how much oil exists, partly because some of it is - as you say - "undiscovered", ie we think it might be out there but we don't know for sure - but mostly because OPEC lie about the size of their remaining reserves. Data quality in the oil industry is poor to non-existant. We don't even have accurate figures for how much we pump out of the ground each day, let alone how much we have left.
You are confused about the pricing of sour crudes. Yes, they are cheaper, but not significantly so. The spot price of Mexican Maya on the 16th was $79, only about $10-$12 less than the price of the high quality stuff. Given that oil used to cost $10-$12 the fact that sour has risen to slightly less than sweet is really of no consequence.
You say there's no factual information to indicate that we're at peak. But world production has been flat since the summer of 2004, despite progressively increasing prices (due to increased demand from Asia) providing every incentive to pump more. This behavior has not been seen before and strongly suggests that world production capacity is maxed out - there are huge wins to be had by any company or country that can significantly boost production, but doing an analysis of an oil major like ExxonMobil, will show that their existing fields decline as fast as they can replace them. To me this is a pretty good sign that we're at peak - inability to raise production despite huge demand.
The whole "it's an oil industry conspiracy" won't wash, sorry. This isn't like the computer industry where one or two companies can dominate the landscape - oil is a commodity, and the price is not set by the oil companies but by supply and demand. It's the simplest market you can get. Anybody who is sitting on top of a giant oil field right now would be an idiot to leave it for tomorrow, because there's no guarantee we'll want that oil tomorrow - maybe there's a recession and oil demand is reduced. Maybe we discover better ways to power our cars.
Right now there's a lead-in time of at least 5 years from discovering a field to first commercial oil, sometimes longer. Even if you start today, there is risk. If you leave it longer, the risk gets even bigger. At least for private oil companies, there are huge financial incentives to boost production and thus get a leg up over your competitors in stock price and profits. To claim that the entire industry is in a cartel to deliberately hold back production is to reveal your lack of knowledge around discovery trends, skills shortages and the impact on depletion rates of modern production techniques like horizontal wells/waterflooding.
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.
fyi, nobody is investing in new oil refineries, because noone in their right mind would invest $$$ when they won't get a return on capitol. The market has spoken - the market says there isn't money to be made from more refineries. That's probably because you'd have to run it for 10 years to break-even, and in 10 years time, our refining capacity may outstrip supply. Either that, or there's a massive organised world-wide conspiricy, to keep gold cookies out away from intelligent negative people.
Long story short, there is actually zero factual information to suggest we are anywhere near peak
Ignore the factual information. There's *lots* of oil. Jedi waves hand.
If the oil companies are conspiring to do anything, it's that they want to sell you *more* oil and *now*. That's because it's good for their bottom line. So go to the gas station and fill up, dump in the river and fill up again! Don't worry about future scarcity! We want your money NOW! and if we make money it's good for the economy, so it _must_ be good for you too!
There's an apt saying: "Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". As I see it, the oil companies aren't capable of the type of conspiricy you suggest. It's too easy to shine light on their FUD. For example, the chamber of echos that exxon has created to suggest that there's *lots* of scientists who don't believe in the human impact on climate change. Some are fooled, anyone who cares to look it not.
And on the bright side - if you're right - and the oil companies are delibertly trying *not* to sell more oil (falls down laughing), then they're doing humanity a service on so many different levels:
Energy prices have been too low for too long. If an energy crunch happens, it will mean severe economic adjustment (and hardship) that could have been mitigated by a more frugle policy to energy usage. Such policies could help the economy slowly make the necessary structural changes. Such policies fly can only exist when the future becomes more important than satisfying immediate wants. I'm not holding my breath - too many people with a sense of entitlement - that they should have what they want, and have it now. Humanities current flirtation with greed has nothing to do with malice, and everything to do with stupidty.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Have you heard it burn rubber when the stoplight goes green? Electric motors like the Prius uses are amazing at producing off-the-line torque. Combine that with its low weight, and you find that the Prius actually out-accelerates most cars on the road.
As an environmental move, whether hybrid drivetrains represent a net win is a little ambiguous (until we get plug-in hybrids). But for performance, they have a lot of pretty exciting advantages.
I was on a University team which built a hybrid formula-style racecar. That thing blew the pants off of Ferraris. In fact, it was originally entered for the general Formula SAE event, which then outlawed hybrids as having an unfair advantage. (So we started another competition just for hybrid vehicles.)
Want to see what electric motors can do? Check out the Tesla Roadster. And it only uses an AC induction motor (hence "Tesla")!!
(The fact that it "only" uses an induction motor is important because induction motors, though cheap and durable, are not even the money-no-object "best" option: That would be a permanent magnet synchronous DC motor.)
The downside to electric drivetrains is that they have more components, and electric motors are heavy, so their more impressive torque needs to make up for the increased weight. But the fact is that, currently, hybrids do exactly that, and, as motors get lighter, the advantages will only get more and more pronounced.
Have you heard the quiet, confident, high-tech sound of a really powerful electric motor spooling up? It's truly a beautiful sound.