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.

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.

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: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.