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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."
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.
When a solution is safer, uses less resources, causes less polution. But costs more to scale to a useful size, then it tends to lose out.
While electricity is a commodity, and is sold on a market as such, the cheapest producer wins. To fix this artificial constraints that artificially inflate the cost of the cheaper methods of electricity production have to be considered.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The corn farmers are going to be upset by this but once again research shows that Ethanol made from corn is not an energy efficient way to create fuel. It's time to stop the ethanol subsidies and start spending money on energy sources with real potential. That way corn will now go back into the food stream, and farmers will also start growing hops again rather than switching to corn to make more money.
Sincerely,
Home Brewer who misses his hops
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
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.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I am happy to hear this: Wind (and solar) does seem to be a very elegant energy solution.
I do note, however, that the report seems to assume wind-based power generation as taking place with traditional turbines.
The question arises in my mind if the use of the windbelt technology might offer additional gains in this respect?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windbelt
My searches for use or deployment of the windbelt seem to garner sparse results...any info out there?
is the windbelt indeed a more effecient method of wind-power generation? Or are turbines still the way to go?
Read my Very Short "Stories"
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.
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Moon energy. I know there must be some way that we can harvest this great natural resource. Maybe attach a rope to it that pulls a gear or burn it or something.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When I was young and savvy, I always knew that nuclear power was bad. Polluting. Toxic. Dangerous. Wrong. But now that I'm older, I'm not so sure. In fact I think it's pretty safe. But, I can't objectively confirm this. My current opinion is still just as uniformed as my previous one.
Trouble is, it's difficult to separate the facts from the rhetoric, and it is danm near impossible to find an unbiased introduction to radioactivity, its uses dangers and safety limits. I would like to learn more, but there is precious little information available. I mean real information, with numbers. Without them, I'm just getting gas. And no, I am not going to rely on wiki-trips.
It's easy to find information on astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, radio, electricity, etc, etc, etc. But radioactivity? Not a chance. How close to I have to be to an exposed nuclear rod before I am "at risk"? 10 meters? 100 meters? A kilometer? In orbit? Give me graphs. Give me numbers. Help me understand. I'm not stupid, nor are most people. But without hard numbers, I can't confirm or deny my suspicions?
Or you could just keep making Radioactive super-mutant movies and promoting candle wick alternate energy sources. Whichever.
May the Maths Be with you!
there is ALWAYS wind. if there's no wind here, there certainly will be wind 500 miles from here. No wind is only possible when the the sun has gone out, AND the globe has stopped turning.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
From TFA:
I wonder if the transportation necessary to reach 0.5 of all U.S. land was considered. You must transport 1) the windmills themselves to the site, 2) all maintenance materials, 3) all maintenance workers over the lifetime of the windmills, 4) the windmills themselves offsite once they're retired.
Transport costs for windmills is undoubtedly large. I live in Texas and I've seen a few of these being hauled up I-45 from the port of Houston on the way to their destination in Midland. The blades are hauled individually by semi trailer and are about 2x as long as an 18 wheeler. And they're shipped to Houston from the Netherlands!
So I suspect that the analysis has neglected to take these factors into account when rating the carbon footprint of wind power...
I didn't see much mention of economics in the article. If there's one thing I would have thought environmentalists had learned by now it is that no matter what the politicians say, nothing is going to happen if the finances don't work out. From what I can tell wind and solar are still a ways from being competitive with oil and gas even though the $/KWH cost is very close. The real problem is you have to put all the money in up front with wind and solar, whereas gas plants are cheap, and a gas plant can start generating revenue with its first drop of fuel. So a fossil-fuel plant carries less debt and less risk for the power company.
Also there's the problem of reliability. The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. So you either need lots of excess power generation capability, or you need to burn something. And yes, I know Germany has this tri-mode system with wind, solar, and biofuel. But the Germans couldn't keep the lights on without French nuclear power.
Solar and wind are bad solutions because:
- They require thousands of miles of new power lines to be built. Getting power lines approved and built is monumentally expensive (which is why Mr. Pickens wants the tax payers to pay for them instead of building them himself).
- The wind doesn't blow all the time, nor does the sun shine all the time. You can store it (which is equivalent to running a hydroelectric dam) or build gas powered plants to run during the evenings.
- Solar and wind are not as inexpensive as proponents claim.
Nuclear is the only power source with a virtually unlimited source of fuel and that can be brought online without a massive new power grid and is nearly as cheap as gas powered generation.
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..
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Moon energy. I know there must be some way that we can harvest this great natural resource. Maybe attach a rope to it that pulls a gear or burn it or something.
It's called "tidal power". There are some large power plants running on it already, and more being considered.
The moon's gravity drags the oceans around, creating a bulge on the side of the earth toward the moon and one on the side opposite. The earth rotates faster than the moon so the oceans appear to go up and down. This creates massive flows of water into and out of bays and other holding areas. Turbines in these flows can be used to generate electricity, while seawalls, dams, and other structures can be built to guide the flows for efficient harvesting.
The friction of the tides (either against the Earth or against energy harvesting turbines) slows the rotation of the Earth and raises the orbit of the Moon. This power will continue to be available until the Earth's rotation is slowed to where the Earth is tide-locked to the Moon - one side always facing the Moon, just as one side of the moon always faces the Earth - and further until the Earth stops rocking back-and-forth relative toward the Moon (as the Moon still does a little bit relative to the Earth). This will take geologic time, whether this "moon energy" is harvested or not.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
Wind isn't the panacea because it needs back-up generation which needs to be running all of the time. What do you do when the wind isn't blowing?
A) Storage works just fine. (Do a search on "vanadium redox" to see how that's handled with some recently deployed technology. For large power companies pumping water from a low reservoir to a high one when there's extra power and running gennies as it comes back down when power is short is also practical - and already deployed.)
B) Wind at any given point on the Earth's surface is quite variable. (This is why home-power mills need storage.) Wind averaged over a number of mills spread out over a larger area is much better behaved. Hooking several scattered wind farms together in a grid fills in the holes from local weather patterns quite nicely.
C) A major fraction of the wind power comes from "lake effect" winds: Periodic flows from bodies of water toward land during the afternoon and from land to water during the predawn morning. These occur because the temperature of the land changes rapidly with the day/night cycle while the temperature of water is virtually unchanged. Some of the best wind sites are in mountain passes where such lake-effect winds are funneled. Example: The farms at Altamont Pass in California uses the lake effect with the Pacific Ocean as the "lake", California's Central Valley as the "island", and the Pacific Coast Mountain Ranges as the funnel with the San Francisco Bay, Sacremento River Delta, and Altamont Pass as the funnel's stem.
Another major chunk comes from the prevailing wind flow.
Weather patterns are on top of this. But in many areas the prevailing flows are dominant.
D) Wind power tracks heating/air conditioning load peaks (because wind reduces the effectiveness of building insulation) and the strong afternoon peak of the lake effect coincides almost exactly with the afternoon peak of the electrical load.
Result: You don't need to have anywhere near equivalent capacity of the windmills in hot standby power. In fact, several geographically diverse wind farms are actually more reliable statistically than the power plants that would "back" them.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Tell me again how nuclear is (at minimum) 25X more polluting than wind or solar please. I think I missed that part.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So basically, to make Nuclear just fall off his chart, he assumes that building more powerplants will lead to nuclear war, and calculates how much stuff that will burn. Is that not completely absurd?
Basically, the gist of what he's saying about Nuclear is this: "We have to pretend like it's a bad idea, because if we don't, other countries will want to do it, and then they might build bombs. So, say it with me: Nuclear is a baad idea."
Does somebody want to break it to the guy that Iran and other states will pursue weapons programs no matter what sort of powerplants we build in the US? And besides, what's more likely to cause war: Clean and cost-effective nuclear powerplants that the rest of the world will want to copy, or an energy shortage which sends us looking to secure fossil fuels? I think the latter.
Anyway, this calculating methodology is so incredibly bizarre that I suspect it's bought.
This is the worst reactionary reply that I have ever seen, and it provides NO facts to back up the ridiculous claims.
We give more corn subsidies than anything else, and you're going to bother attacking solar subsidies? WTF is wrong with you?
Solar power is not 5-10x more expensive than nuclear. You're wrong and have nothing to back up your absurd claims. The average cost per kWh for solar is very similar to nuclear, perhaps slightly more expensive meaning you'll pay MAYBE 5% more on your electricity bill at first, but since solar production is an economy of scale you'll actually end up saving money down the line as manufacturing processes improve and costs go down.
Sometimes the (non-science) environmentalists are overzelous and try to sell this argument. The fact is everything currently takes brown energy to produce so if you're making a nuclear power plant, that's brown energy because it takes carbon-based work to make the fuel.
Solar panels? Those are brown energy because the wafers and cells take carbon-energy to produce.
Electric cars? Those are brown energy because it takes brown energy to make the battery.
It's true, but really it's false. The energy produced, saved, converted, etc causes a net drop in the amount of brown energy we use and lets us stop. I suppose the idea is that we should somehow stop using energy all together or somehow magically convert to a green economy without using our current brown infrastructure. It's factually true, but inherently dishonest and despicable rhetoric.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Turn off the sun! We have all the solar and wind we'll ever need. Nuclear is a complete failure.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
is nuclear power. We're arguing about storage technologies.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This "study" is not really a study, but a model. As such, it's only as good as its assumptions. Unfortunately, many of its assumptions are completely wrong or totally implausible.
For example, the model predicts that nuclear power emits 25x as much carbon as wind power. You may wonder how that could be possible. It's possible because that conclusion follows from the model's assumptions which are all wrong, as follows.
First, the model compares the carbon output of new windmills, versus the carbon output of obsolete ways of refining uranium as an average over the last 40 years. Since refining uranium is far less carbon-intensive than it was, we should use the new figures only. It does not matter how much carbon was emitted by uranium enrichment for plants in the 1960s. Nobody is suggesting building those. We are debating whether we should build new nuclear power plants, or new windmills. As such, we should compare the carbon output of new uranium enrichment against new windmills. In this case the author clearly commits the "sunk cost fallacy", and the assumption is totally wrong.
Another mistaken assumption behind carbon emissions of nuclear plants, is carbon emissions from delays in plant constructions. The author assumes that nuclear power plants will take 10+ years to construct, and in the mean time, we will continue to generate electricity by burning coal. On the other hand, he assumes that the delay associated with windmills is "zero". However, that assumption is totally wrong. Windmills will lead to "zero delay" only if the United States throws away every coal-burning plant we have and replaces them with windmills this year. Since that will never happen, the assumption is wrong. In actuality, those coal plants will be decomissioned at the end of their useful lives and will be replaced by either wind, nuclear, or something else. So, the delay associated with nuclear or wind would probably be quite similar. Since this factor alone accounts for most of the "25x as much carbon" which nuclear is said to produce, that figure is refuted.
And there are other assumptions which are wrong. For example, the model assumes that nuclear power will lead to nuclear weapons which will cause a nuclear war with a resulting environmental catastrophe. Since nuclear power cannot be used to construct nuclear weapons, this assumption is mistaken. Unfortunately, the author makes many errors when he discusses the relationship between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. In actuality, nuclear power has almost no probability of starting a nuclear war.
The paper states that "Worldwide, nine countries have known nuclear weapons stockpiles (US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea)" and shortly thereafter concludes that "Thus, the ability of states to produce nuclear weapons today follows directly from their ability to produce nuclear power". But that is entirely wrong. It's a spurious correlation. The reason some countries have nuclear power plants, and the same countries have nuclear weapons, is because those countries are technologically advanced, which causes both nuclear weapons and nuclear power; not because nuclear power causes nuclear weapons.
And there are other assumptions about nuclear (not related to carbon emissions) which are equally unrealistic. For example, the model claims that nuclear "produces fuel rods that are usually stored on site for several years in cooling ponds pending transport to a permanent site" and somehow concludes that nuclear has as much of a detrimental effect on wildlife as coal power. I honestly have no idea how he derived that conclusion (he doesn't say). It seems to me that mass strip-mining of the countryside (including mass-strip mining for serpentine rock if we intend to use that for mineral sequestration) every year, would greatly outweigh nuclear power's single kilometer of radioactivity buried deep beneath a single mountain in an isolated arid desert in Nevada, once. In fa
I wonder what will happen if they factor in costs . . . or short term vs long term needs . . . And the equation of what is 'better' is entirely dependent on the weights in the equation - meaning its only opinions and assumptions.
While solar "heat oil/water -> turbine" approach may be plausible, with the common "ecological" solar batteries, it takes more (usually "dirty") energy to produce such a battery than it can produce in its lifespan. Meaning solar is just a hype which in fact is bad for environment.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Any attempt to use a model to describe a complex situation is wrong, and only as accurate as the assumptions made by the researchers. The authors of this research made a fair amount of assumptions that are obvious judgement calls that invalidate the model if any one of them are shown to be innacurate. This paper looks to me to be an attempt to justify ones own opinions by the use of modeling.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde