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Why Sustainable Power Is Unsustainable
Urchin writes "Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, the most advanced 'renewable' technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources including indium and platinum —
resources that could dry up in 10-15 years if they were widely used in the renewable energy market."
"Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter"
They are NOT agreed.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
For things like solar, sure. But I don't see wind or tidal power generation needing anything more advanced than fiberglass.
Use less energy.
No, it can't solve everything, but more conservation would be vastly more helpful than trying to exploit new energy sources.
The article points out Indium in some of the better solar cells in the lab (40% efficient), and Platinum as an important catylist in a hydrogen fuel cells. Both of these are already valuable metals for existing applications, and will easily see minable reserves dry up if you add on renewable energy applications.
However, this is why you don't focus on one and only one solution to this problem. Solar reflectors, wind, tidal, and nuclear all have roles to play.
Not a typewriter
I disagree categorically with the article title. Sustainable energy is the only sane way to exist and make tradition upon. If in the short term, we find we can't implement some energy catching machine because of a scarity of an earthbound resource, someone will find another way. Human innovation is invincible.
Take it even further. Neither nuclear nor geothermal suffer from this supposed problem. And not even all solar power systems face it--molten salt and biomass-mediated systems, for example, won't suffer either.
So really we're down to a potential problem with photo-voltaic solar power, and only then on the assumption that no systems based on plentiful materials are waiting in the wings.
Bah.
--MarkusQ
But although silicon is the most abundant element in the Earth's crust after oxygen, it makes relatively inefficient cells that struggle to compete with electricity generated from fossil fuels. And the most advanced solar-cell technologies rely on much rarer materials than silicon...
...The efficiency of solar cells is measured as a percentage of light energy they convert to electricity. Silicon solar cells finally reached 25% in late December. But multi-junction solar cells can achieve efficiencies greater than 40%.
Hmm, so Silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust at 25% efficiency and the alternative at a measly 15% performance gain will dry out in around a decade. Disclaimer: I wish there was more information in TFA on what "greater than 40%" is.
Do the math. Looks like we'll be melting down more sand and (hopefully) augmenting our nuclear power in the near future.
Too bad we don't have any other way to make magenets...oh wait.
Don't you love the impartial scientific tone here? And the sheer illogic of this statement is staggering. If you know you are going to have large amount of episodic oversupply there are all sorts of useful things you can do with it. Make ice. Melt salt. Run pumps. I wouldn't be surprised if the "giant toaster" is some clever over supply utilization system being ridiculed by TFA's evidently clueless author.
--MarkusQ
.. is suitable for realistically providing power for the typical modern life.
Nuclear is clean, safe and practically inexhaustible. The latest advances could provide small nuclear "batteries" the size of a hot tube that could provide power to an entire neighborhood decentralizing much of the power systems (and huge networks of wires) we've come to think of as unavoidable. Making our power systems virtually fool proof. For too long we've lived in the fear from the propaganda of the illiterate press. It's time to start using the miraculous energy source we uncovered and made practical nearly 3/4 of a century ago. It's there, it's understood, it's completely doable and for a hell of lot less money than the democrats want to steal from the people of the US right now.
Go nukes! Go nukes! Go nukes!
Even if none of the scares so far has come true it doesn't mean that their conclusion is not inevitable. The amount of raw materials on earth is limited, we consume raw materials at an exponential rate (x % increase pear year). As a consequence, there will not be enough raw materials available in the future.
Football Odds
Yup, the planet's been cooling for 10 years. Ask your newspaper why it's not news.
If you actually look at the data, you'll see that's not true. The climate -hange deniers who have a clue-- and most of them don't-- sometimes argue that the planet hasn't heated up on the last few years (and if you look carefully at the graph, you can in fact argue that). But it most certainly hasn't, on the average, "been cooling."
But the average climate-change deniers aren't interested in the data that hasn't passed through Rush Limbaugh first.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I thought the problem was that they can't get the transmission lines built because the NIMBY guys have been keeping the power companies in court for years. Last I heard they were finally getting started with the lines though, so the situation might turn around in a few years.
I read the internet for the articles.
The situation with renewable energy is different. Yes when it takes energy to manufacture biomass into fuels. But if is done right, we are taking carbon out of the atmosphere one year, and putting it back in the next, creating a steady state. Clearly there are some issues now, but that is political. In the US, instead of using weeds, the corn growers, which have been pushing the US for years to a deadly philosophy of monoculture, is using food crops. On the other point, I don't think that biofuels is causing food prices to increase any more than lack of oil is causing the current high prices at the pump. demand for luxury food is increasing, the economic expansion of the past several years means that people are buying more, and there is much less focus on the needs of those that have no food.
As far as rare metals, these are not consumed. All these products can be remanufactured. The issue is political. In my US town, trash is picked up once a week at every house, but recycling is picked up only every other week at some houses. Houses are allowed to throw away dangerous materials without any fine. The only way to send electronics for remanufacture to go to the drop off on a work day. Of course a lot of this has to do with the costs involved. it is cheaper to mine new material rather than reuse old. for these materials the economics might be reversed, and we might the trend reversed.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The only thing the power company can do is sell that energy for a cheaper price. They are a power company, not a "salt melting company". Building a plant to perform these kinds of activities costs a lot of money and needs a very complicated business plan that depends heavily on logistics-related factors.
A salt-melting (or any other kind of process) plant would need to run 24/7 to be profitable, using valuable energy during most of the day. The only difference from a normal salt-melting company would be the cost of a single part of their operation, during specific times of the day.
Conclusion: They would be selling energy at a cheaper price. But to themselves, while needing to run a new (to them) and complicated business. It's better to simply sell the energy to anyone else.
And they already do that: they sell energy at a lower price during low usage times. And the part the can't be sold is simply wasted using giant "toasters". It's cheaper to simply burn the excess energy than powering off the thermoelectrical plant.
And you have discovered how to advance the technology enough for it to be buildable within the available open space, without destroying habitats and greenspaces that are protected? The solar energy concentration is not sufficient to convert the amount of energy we need with the technology we have without bulldozing half of the available landmass. This argument is similar to the (thankfully abortive) ethanol argument, which had Brazil contemplating how much of the rain forest they could knock down to grow corn without destroying the world's oxygen supply.
If it were as easy as you think, it would already be solved, for Pete's sake.
I have been hearing about indium and platinum shortages from chicken littles for a couple of years now. In fact, there is 3 times more indium than silver in the Earth's crust and I haven't heard anyone shouting about a silver shortage - especially since digital camera's became popular. When the price goes high enough, more money will go into mining, extracting, and refining both minerals. And only solar cells, out of the currently common "sustainable" technologies, require these rare minerals.
The Indium Corp couldn't be biased.
It's an open market, so it must be true.
Back in 2006 this blogger noticed we use indium. Scroll down a bit.
The price is going up, but hey, copper prices sure fell.
I'm not worried. This just someone wanting some attention and web page hits.
Anarchists never rule
Platinum and Indium shortages only affect a limited number of technologies in the renewable camp, namely fuel cells and solar panels, neither of which are worth considering for large scale power generation due to their gross expense and lackluster performance. In the case of the latter, you don't even need Indium, though it makes for appreciably better panels.
This doesn't stop us from building solar-thermal power plants and wave farms rated in the hundreds of megawatts. Show me a windmill, or a hydraulic ram, or a steam turbine that uses either of these metals in any appreciable volume. Nuclear reactors might use some, but when you have nuclear power plants rated at over a gigawatt, that doesn't seem like a bad investment at all.
Ummm, I think you missed the point there.
Making ice, melting salt, and running pumps are methods for storing energy (like a battery) so when you are making too much power you can save up the excess and extract it later when you are producing too little power.
The poster wasn't suggesting that power companies become molten salt salesmen.
We can use the sun, wind and waters to generate more power than
we could ever fit humans onto this planet to use.
Who are all these 'tards who keep flogging oil, coal, and nuclear?
Instead of slurring alternate energy sources start designing
and engineering them.
Duh!
Anyone who has believed otherwise has been caught drinking too much of the spiked Kool-Aid.
We live in an effectively finite ecosystem with finite resources. Had we not allowed human population to explode as it has, particularly in the last 200 years, virtually none of what we consider "crises" would even be problems worth noting yet. We would still have had to address them eventually perhaps, but we would have had centuries more to learn before then. Unfortunately the species is very adept at burning the candle at both ends. What we're experiencing now is not much different than the crash of withdrawal after binging on some hallucinogen. The morning after is always a bitch.
Again, human overpopulation is the 800-pound Samsonite gorilla in the room. Until we deal with that, none of the rest is anything but posturing.
The WWW is the solution.
Wind, waves and water can be harnessed for renewable enegy without exotic metals.
The premis of the title is wrong as it makes the assumption that the only way to get good energy is through current solar cell technologies.
No exotic metals here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
The first problem is what exactly is meant by "sustainable"? The weakest definition is something like "not using fossil fuels" or some such nonsense. Why is this nonsense? Because unless you want to define the lifespan of the humann race as your own, it is meaningless.
Today, we have "sustainability" problems because of multiple factors and fossil fuels is only a small part. There is the matter of recycling wastes into raw materials, something which happens through natural processes. The only problem is today there are far, far more wastes being produced than can possibly be processed before the raw materials are needed. The only way out of this trap is to either obtain resources off Earth or to reduce the resource consumption to the level where natural recycling can occur. The latter means a big population reduction, on the order of 95% or so.
Well, that isn't going to happen. That pretty much means that use of off-planet resources is an absolute necessity for the human race to survive for more than another couple of generations. Would that be "sustainable" enough?
No. We need to look at a longer term. Where are things going to be in 1,000 years? How about 10,000? We are poised at a cusp where we must make some hard decisions. If we choose to fix problems on Earth first, pie-in-the-sky kinds of things like eliminating poverty, we are going to run out of resources and will to obtain off-planet resources. This effectively dooms us to the first alternative mentioned above of population reduction. Somewhere around 1850 was the last time that Earth recycled wastes through natural processes at a rate equal to or better than the rate the resources were being consumed. What the population back then? Think about that for a while.
Sustainable means it is good until the Sun expires. Currently the only thing that comes close to this is nuclear power with a breeder reactor fuel cycle. This is permanent. Solar power satellites with an orbital and lunar industrial base would be pretty much permanent. Virtually every other proprosal either falls far short of current power requirements (which are just going to grow with the population) or doesn't last for even 100 years.
Personally, I think we can hope for a solution that nobody has dreamed of yet and plan for a big population reduction. We have maybe 10 years before the decision is made for us no matter what we want. After that we will likely be struggling to keep the lights on and not likely doing a real good job of it.
And nuclear and conventional power don't need generators?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Even if you manage to find sources of fossil fuels buried deep in the crust or under the oceans, eventually the energy cost of extracting those sources will equal the amount of energy recovered, at which point the source is useless. There could be a trillion barrels of oil locked in some reservoir under the ocean, but if the energy cost of extracting one barrel of that oil becomes equal to the potential energy stored in one barrel of oil that resource is forever worthless; it will be worthless whatever the price of oil is. The minute advanced extraction technologies enter the equation one starts running up against the one-to-one dilemma very quickly. With petroleum the low hanging fruit is all that's worth picking.
Nuclear is not clean!
It's there, it's understood, it's completely doable and for a hell of lot less money than the democrats want to steal from the people of the US right now.
So I guess CATO and Forbes are Democrats. Where are these commercially running plants?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
"Trashed econmomy."
BS. Seriously. We buy new cars anyway, so why NOT more efficient ones? Besides, if everyone drove dramatically more efficient vehicles it ALSO mean reducing (or eliminating) our trade deficit in oil. How does THAT trash the economy?
Eliminate dependence on foreign oil, and it also means we don't have to spend billions sending our kids off to die every time the Middle East hicups. How does THAT trash the economy?
And there are as many economic OPPORTUNITIES in doing the right things as there are not doing them. Solar cell have to be manufactured and installed. Wind turbines constructed. And so on. That spells jobs.
Less polution. Reduced environmental impact. Economic growth. Reduced trade deficit. Eliminate dependence on foreign oil. And perhaps, taking out some insurance on our planet. There are many, many, many reasons for making the investment.
And practically none for NOT doing so...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
from TFA:
"the most advanced "renewable" technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources"
No, that's wrong.
Some technologies (solar cells) are require scarce materials in their construction. These materials are not used up to generate power. These materials don't have to be renewable. It doesn't matter that these materials are scarce, except from an economic point of view. And, most likely, these materials are used in a renewable way. When these constructions need to be replaced, can be recycled and the scarce materials can be re-used.
assignment != equality != identity
Oh so high and mighty, Mr. "I don't drive a truck so I'm better than you". Did it ever occur to you that there are a significant number of people that actually need trucks even if only part of the time? And not everyone has the money to have multiple vehicles so they could drive something more economical when they didn't have to, say, haul things around?
It's great to be on your high horse, but when you need a new water heater or washer and dryer in your place, you need to get a truck to haul it. Better hope you don't have a yard or want to add on to your house, either... oh, wait. You just consume and pay other people to have trucks to do things for you and act smug because you don't have one.
Get over yourself. Not everyone who owns a truck is part of the problem.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Well, the people on the planet now (including us) did not create the problem.
We, and I include myself in that, maybe making things worse. As someone once said, "if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem."
At the moment, the idea is to determine what the best course of action is. To me, it seems like the best way to handle the situation is to get as much low hanging fruit as possible (change light bulbs, etc, etc) in the short term. Things like this reduce energy usage and also don't really add an economic cost.
As happened to me, many others are finding out making some changes actually saves them money.
In the long term, switching to nuclear power would probably be the best way to go.
I haven't been convinced nuclear power is needed never mind the best way to go. Some say it's needed as a baseload, however geothermal energy [pdf warning] might be used as a baseload as well. And without subsidies nuclear power wouldn't be profitable. The Free Market CATO Institute has this article from the business and investment magazine "Forbes" on "Why conservatives should join the left's campaign against nuclear power", "Hooked on Subsidies".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?