Wind and Sun Beat Other Energy Alternatives

iandoh passes along the news that researchers at Stanford University have completed the first quantitative, scientific comparison of alternative energy solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability, and sustainability. Based on their model, they found that the best sources of alternative energy are wind, concentrated solar, and geothermal energy. The worst are nuclear, clean coal, and ethanol-based fuels. In other words, "the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options."

Comments

Well of course

[AkaKaryuu]

Of course the ones getting the most attention can be much more easily controlled by those who provide it. I would love to see a rise in energy costs because a "shortage" of wind or sun light.

Re:Well of course

[Rei]

Battery capacity, charge times, etc., all need to improve by an order of magnitude.

So, just to use the Phoenix SUT as a starting point and improving it by an order of magnitude, you're saying that you want electric cars that go 1,500 miles per charge and charge to 80% in 30 seconds? Or are you still under the misconception that EVs only go 50 miles or so and inherently take hours to recharge?

State of the art but commercially available battery tech is the titanates, which get ~70Wh/kg and can recharge as fast as you can provide the power and cool the pack (individual cells have been charged to 80% in one minute), or phosphates and stabilized spinels which get ~100Wh/kg and can recharge in 10 to 20 minutes. Traditional li-ion now gets nearly 180Wh/kg, but is limited to 1 hour charging minimum and won't last the lifespan of the car (unlike the aforementioned techs). To get weight/range parity with a typical gasoline vehicle, you need about 300-400Wh/kg, which is what about a dozen different next-gen battery techs are promising. Personally, all I care about is the ability to drive for about two hours on a charge; I don't see the point to more since I'm not going to want to have to be sitting down for that long in a row.

As for chargers, the highest power EV chargers I've seen are 250kW. The highest I know of that are already installed for general use are the 60kW Aerovironment Posicharge chargers in Oahu. For a 200Wh/mi EV charging at 250kW, that's 21 miles range per minute of charging, meaning that charging makes up under 5% of your travel time.

In short, while the state of the art tech isn't perfect yet, it's not half bad.

Nuclear

[PitaBred]

I love it. He only doesn't like nuclear power because of them there terr'ists. And that it's completely reasonably possible to get weapons-grade uranium from any nuclear reactor.

And he completely ignores the effects of wind power on things like bats and birds.

Re:Nuclear

[GradiusCVK]

Just finished reading this garbage, and you're 100% right. The "study" was conducted to prove a certain worldview (that solar and hydro and wind are the only possible solution). Take for example the following:

Estimates of future (c. 2020) US premature deaths per year from vehicles replacing light- and heavy-duty gasoline onroad vehicles and their upstream emissions assuming full penetration of each vehicle type or fuel, as discussed in the text. Low (solid) and high (solid+vertical lines) estimates are given. In the case of nuclear-BEV, the upper limit of the number of deaths, scaled to US population, due to a nuclear exchange caused by the proliferation of nuclear energy facilities worldwide is also given (horizontal lines). In the case of corn-E85 and cellulosic-E85, the dots are the additional US death rate due to upstream emissions from producing and distributing E85 minus those from producing and distributing gasoline (see text) and the slanted lines are the additional tailpipe emissions of E85 over gasoline for the US

Essentially, they are assuming that converting to nuclear power results in global nuclear warfare. Yes, it's only the "upper limit" for the range of possible deaths that they throw into their calculations, but let me break it down for you... they have a weighted average of factors used to calculate what is the best solution, and each factor is actually a probability distribution, and they set the upper 10% (or whatever) of potential deaths per year (one of the factors in their model) for one of the solutions (nuclear) to infinity (essentially infinity.... a number so high as to completely skew the resulting weighted average), then guess what... they stated nuclear wasn't an option.

This isn't research, this is propaganda.

Re:Nuclear

[jmorris42]

> Yes, it sounds like the author had an axe to grind.

Of course the author had an ax to grind. Green gets grant money, nukes get you shunned from elite society.

The horrible truth is that for hard core greens the only solution is eliminating a couple billion excess humans and forcing the remnant to live a 'reduced' lifestyle to satisfy their self loathing. Thus no proposed solution to the 'energy crisis' is going to be acceptable if it has the potential to actually produce energy at affordable prices in quantities anywhere close to current levels. As you correctly note the greens are already mobilizing against wind and solar on the fear that they MIGHT become practical someday. There are even efforts to stop geothermal! What could possibly be wrong with geothermal? Google it if you want to be sickened.

The truth is there is no 'energy crisis' there is only a political movement to change our lifesysle. Nukes can be built perfectly safe these days, the fuel can be reprocessed to minimize the waste storage issue and we have more than enough Uranium to power any lifestyle we want until we finally perfect a practical fusion reactor. Saying this in public will end a scientist, politician or TV pundit's career though so we hear endless bleating about an energy crisis, running out of energy and global warming bullcrap intended to frighten us into doing things sane people would never do otherwise.

Re:Nuclear

[MarkusQ]

Carter decided to avoid breeder reactors in part because they can blow up and new fuel is cheep enough that reprocessing is not that big a deal.

I'll agree that Carter knew a lot about nuclear power, and for that reason I doubt that he thought that breeder reactors can blow up. 'cause it isn't true.

And while new fuel may be cheap the real question is how much does storing the fuel after extracting less than 1% of the energy cost?

--MarkusQ

Re:Nuclear

[bnenning]

Not to mention the gross amount of concrete that would be needed to create all those plants and the resulting global climate effects resulting from the emissions in creating that concrete.

As opposed to the solar and wind installations that are built from pixie dust? The US has 104 active nuclear plants producing 20% of our electricity. Is building 400 more to get close to 100% really going to cause a concrete shortage?

Very sloppy, misleading headline

[MSTCrow5429]

The rankings are based on a model, not empirical, real-world science. You can stuff whatever you want into a model, and make it say whatever you want. All we know from this is if you make some wild assumptions on XYZ, options ABC line up in the order of 123.

Nuclear is the best option.

[Lumpy]

I love how it's dismissed out of hand because of the bogeyman argument.

TERRORISM!!!!!! Oh crap.

We better rule out anything that is efficient and can be used RIGHT NOW.

No let's pick the ones based on Unobtanium.

This is a judgement call, not science.

[gurps_npc]

While I generally agree that 'clean coal' doesn't work and that non-production waste ethanol creation is foolish, I disagree with the basic premise of this article.

The problem is it is NOT comparing everything in one area. It uses multiple different measures, including pollution, cost, etc.

But when you that kind of study it requires you to make judgments about which is more important. These are value judgments, NOT scientific ones. Basically all this study does is tell you what a few scientists at Stanford want, not what is true or factual.

P.S. While ethanol as done in US is stupid, Ethanol as done in South America makes sense. They take all the production waste from agricultural and make ethanol from it. That would be the leaves, etc. the things we don't eat. In the US on the other hand they put the stuff we actually EAT into the pot. South American plan makes sense, but the US version does not..

Re:All things decay

[Retric]

You can find plenty of old abandoned buildings so clearly the single family home is never going to catch on without creating huge wastelands of old abandoned homes.

AKA: If the site is valuable maintaining or upgrading the wind farms is a net gain.