Slashdot Mirror
How the Economy Is Changing Clean Energy
Al writes "The economy has hit green energy technologies hard, but technologies focused on energy efficiency and clean coal are still attracting money. Over the next few years, venture capitalists say that the biggest winners in clean tech will most likely be companies with technologies that improve efficiency. Such ventures often take advantage of cheap sensors, communications hardware, and software packages to monitor and control energy use both in buildings and on the electricity grid. High-capital businesses are now more likely to succeed if they can attract foreign funding. For instance, Great Point Energy, based in Cambridge, which has developed a process for converting coal into natural gas, has attracted $100m in funding from China."
... the companies that will do the best will be the ones that can maximize their profit with a minimum amount of debt. How cool their toys are doesn't factor into it.
There have been a number of ads by IBM lately pushing the idea that their new line of computers is needed to redesign the nation's electrical grid, claiming that half the power never makes it to any light bulb.
In other areas power companies will actually buy you the new CCFL bulbs if you pay the tax on the bulb.
The push for efficiency is long over-due.
But realistically, will the replacement of a an entire power grid really save more than it costs? Is it really necessary?
Wouldn't more energy be saved by taxing long haul trucking out of existence and putting the money into a resurgence of rail freight?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I read about how coal could be converted to methane via bacteria.
here's a quick example.
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/2003/bnlpr091103b.htm
This is one way to convert coal to a cleaner form of energy. However there are implications since there is a question as to who owns the energy: coal companies or gas companies?
So to create cleaner coal we just may need to pump some bugs and other chemicals into the ground but we also need to sort out some legal and policy issues.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Clean coal doesn't exist. Saying it is a clean energy form is like saying fusion is a clean energy form: regardless of whatever merits you can come up with for the system, carbon capture and sequestration (clean coal), like fusion, has no working plants (and probably won't for at least a decade) and is more a gimmick for public support and research funding than anything else. Money would be better spent on the efficiency efforts mentioned and commercially viable forms of clean energy that can be bought in the market today.
Great Point Energy has been unsuccessfully trying to drum up investors since 2005. Andrew Perlman is not a scientist, but is better described as an adventure capitalist. In venture capital, you don't actually have to have a technically sound idea. You just need to convince investors that you have some magic formula for creating a profitable business and they give you money. They still do not have a working prototype that shows a positive return on energy. They are only drawing up a proposal for a $100m plant for China. China has not committed to any funding.
I work for a company that is retrofitting 30-40 year old steam turbines at coal power plants. Its such a difficult and expensive process to get a new power station built (of any fuel) that the power companies want to keep these coal plants running for another 40 years. You can blame the NIMBY folks, or the environmentalists that require environmental study after study before ground is broken.
I'm in the business, and the cost of electricity is going to continue to rise pretty spectacularly. Most of the plants built in the past 15 years or so are natural gas, which is now expensive and continuing to rise in cost. Many of plants built in the 60's running on cheap fuel are getting near their end of life. Some are being retrofitted but many aren't worth it. Nobody can build a nuke plant these days and coal is equally taboo. Few people are studying engineering so the manpower is also getting scarce. Its not a crisis yet but most of the power industry is aged in thier 50s and 60s.
We aren't in a crisis yet, but in another 10 years its going to start getting ugly.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
In many areas of the country clean coal won't work since the geology isn't right for storing the captured CO2. Additionally, there currently are not even any working demonstration plants, only talk of plants that could be converted. The sheer amount of CO2 produced from coal is also a huge problem. It would require massive pipelines to dispose of the CO2 from areas that don't have the geology for storing it, and then there's the danger of a fissure opening up somewhere and the CO2 escaping, which would be deadly. As I see it, the only long term methods of reducing CO2 are renewable and nuclear. The only reason clean coal is happening is because the government is throwing money at it and all those coal producing states and the votes they represent. There has not been a single demonstration that clean coal actually works.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
There is also a vast amount of utter bullshit surrounding nuclear. The lobby is not happy with saying they have low CO2 emissions, they lie and say "zero emissions" and also pretend that waste at every step does not exist. If you ignore everything outside of the reactor, ignore all waste products and assume you never need to refuel nuclear is "clean" - but then under those conditions so is the sort of coal use with no pollution controls that gave London it's famous green fogs a bit over a century ago. Nuclear has to be considered over the entire process - and if it's going to be used as more than the nice side of the bomb we need to put in a hell of a lot of work to improve designs before building a lot of the things. It's possible, but private enterprise has only been interested in trying to sell old designs to fleece the taxpayer. We should be building prototypes first instead of some mad rush to force large quantities of money into the pockets of those pushing the hard line.
Remember that Carter and Thatcher both were in favour of nuclear power and both knew what they were talking about - and they both had to cut back on the lame duck nuclear projects their countries had been conned into.
According to BBCs Horizon, the UK spends more on ring tones than the world spends on fusion research.
In terms of energy we are screwed, but at least we have custom ring tones.
... the companies that will do the best will be the ones that can maximize their profit with a minimum amount of debt.
. . . that would normally be a very economically sound business plan. However, governments are now in the process of bailing out businesses that have minimized profit, with maximum debt, and are "too big to fail."
So who gets to pay for that?
"Ah, Mr. Bond, I was expecting you. I see that you have again made a tidy profit. I will forgo any unfeasible sharks-with-lasers-aimed-at-your-crotch death machines. Instead, I will simply tax you to death."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Let's see... We can't have nukes, because nuclear waste is dangerous for thousands of years and is produced in tonnes by reactors.
But "clean coal" is ok, because CO2 can be stored by deep well injection. And unlike nuclear waste, it's dangerous forever, and produced in millions of tonnes by power plants.
I guess sequestered CO2 is better than nuclear waste because giant clouds of killer gas are more "natural" than that awful "atom" stuff. After all, look at the area around Chernobyl, and compare it to the scenes around Lake Nyos.
Oh, and while we're at it, lets consider the number of coal miners killed each year. Too bad we can't ask them about "clean coal" technology.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
I thought the idea of "clean coal" was finding a way to store the CO2 to prevent it from screwing with the climate. This "coal-to-gas" does nothing towards this goal, so I don't see how one would call it "clean coal" other than the obvious lack of sulfur or mercury.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
If you enjoy being depressed, you may want to read "The Next Bubble", an article in Harper's by Eric Janszen from February 2008. He predicted this green bubble over a year ago, and it's a pretty grim prediction:
Sound something like recent legislation? Then comes the bad news:
Yes, you should read the whole article. It'll take some time, but you'll come away with a better understanding of how our global economy works these days.
ObCredit: I found this article via Memestreams.
I think one of the reasons people are more afraid of nuclear waste than CO2 is that after you're irradiated, you know you'll die, but are still alive for some time and aware of the fact you will die. (Regardless of the actual chance of that happening, which is extremely low.) People really fear being confronted with their mortality. That's why they are afraid of cancer and flying, but not so much of road accidents where you die instantly.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Fischer-Tropsch synthesis is currently uneconomical, and producing hydrocarbons through this process and then burning them in engines generates much more CO2 than burning oil, because some of the coal has to be used to generate the extra hydrogen present in gasoline:
C + 2 H2O = CO2 + 2 H2
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Ignoring nuclear power because of controversy (...)
Ignoring the only proven alternative to coal, as in one that is supplying a significant percent of electricity in several nations (over 50% in some cases), only because some dimwits don't understand physics or engineering, is extremely stupid.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Actually...
You can take the 'waste' from the reactor and re-enrich it (a process that is also used for creation of nuclear weapons unfortunately) and turn it into fuel-grade material again although you do lose some mass in the process.
The idea of capturing CO2 is basically a result of chemical compounds/processes that turn CO2 into Sodium Bicarbonate or Baking Soda. If you put it underground in places with high Sodium content you'll end up with it converting to Baking Soda as it tries to escape.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
The 'economy' didn't hit all these green energy projects, the plummeting price of oil did. Few, if any, of these projectcs are remotely competitive with oil/nat gas under $75 and in many cases still higher - and even with substantial subsidies and tax breaks.
As we saw with ethanol, energy 'policy' is just another boondoggle of lobbyists and special interest groups seeking government funds so they can make some bucks. Wind, solar, clean coal and so on all live off the government teat to one degree or another. Would they even exist without those tax breaks and direct funding?
That is the new governmental hybrid business model. Private profits, but public debt socialism for the same guys.
IMO, "too big to fail" should translate into "too big to be allowed to exist in the first place".
We have energy demand, and energy production, two different things. We can still do a *lot* more to reduce demand and not just fixate on the production part (this is also the main article point). If you had ever been inside a superinsulated home you would know what I am talking about (I have helped build and retrofit a few). It is quite conceivable and has been proven that-for instance- you can take a normal stick frame residential home and drop its energy demands for heating and cooling down to like 10-20% of what they are now, using off the shelf already proven technology, that in the medium and long run has a spiffy return on investment from reduced utility bills. This reduction in demand (along with better built and designed appliances) would greatly help to eliminate the need for all those coal to electricity plants in the first place, we can just shut them down and not have to deal with storing any co2 then, which then also makes the addition of home solar thermal and PV much cheaper, as you don't need as much production to get to what you still need to run the home. This same concept applies to both small houses all the way to large buildings.
An interesting venue to see some of this tech is in the solar decathlon contests that are held. They even design homes that are not only capable of being self powered, but also produce enough extra power to keep an electric vehicle charged up for the daily commute.
The main point is fixating on the production side is what wall street wants because it is big ticket profit central, whereas if we shifted emphasis to energy efficiency it would be a lot cheaper for society as a whole and give much larger and more immediate returns to just about everyone, and there really isn't a whole lot of "new" stuff that needs to be invented or developed to accomplish this. It won't make wall street and those casino banks and the entrenched energy cartels as much money though, so they tend to just "forget" about energy efficiency and push just more energy production. *Most* buildings today are still in the energy hog SUV type of mileage area for their energy demands if you want a car analogy, so a practical solution becomes easier to see once you grok this.
The easiest quickest way to accomplish this would be by the use of credible and large tax credits for energy efficiency retrofits (this would also put a ton of builders back to work), and then additional credits for decentralized energy production like home solar.
Just to chime in on the coal argument. Or to be more specific, fossil fuels.
The only reason mankind as a whole has experienced explosive population growth and massive rises in standards of living, is that we discovered and exploited fossil fuels. We have taken out a massive "loan" from the earth and whether it runs out or not is irrelevant. We are basing our future survival on energy that was previously stored over billions of years. Patently, there is no point expecting coal or oil to renew themselves naturally in a useful timescale, and our population is still expanding.
We must find sources of energy that do not rely on previously stored resources. Once those resources are gone, we are pretty much bankrupt, energy-wise. So get with the program, and finally accept that coal or oil in any guise, are only stop-gap solutions to keep us going until we can totally replace them. Spending time and effort on "clean" coal is wasting time and energy on something we will have to do without, more likely sooner than later. And I'm not even going to mention the specific environmental issues, or the myriad chemical/biological uses that fossil fuels could be put to instead of being burnt.
Of course, nuclear fuels are a naturally stored resource too, but they are more efficient, cleaner, and hold possibilities that mere fire can never approach. Solar is the only energy source that is truly long term viable, simply because it is not produced or stored on earth. It comes from outside the system. Is it ready now ? Of course not, but it is the only answer in the universe. (Unless we can somehow harness dark energy/matter).
I found the article about the magnetic spin battery concept interesting. Currently, all nuclear plants use nuclear material in place of fire, to produce heat and then steam to drive turbines. What if a nuclear reaction could be relied upon to directly induce a specific magnetic spin in a "wire" and thus supply the grid ? That has to be more efficient than converting heat > steam > kinetic energy > electricity. Imagine a small cylinder (0.5 " diameter) that you clamp to the power cable of a device and directly induces current to feed that device. Dreaming I know, but this is why that discovery has greater potential than many posters realise.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You cannot/will not make coal clean. That is unconditionally guaranteed. You just want to keep burning coal because it's cheap and convenient. Or you have some other interest. To hell with the consequences. That's for the next generation to deal with. If people are protesting nuclear, it's more likely because it's being handled as negligently as before by the same companies who are dumping sludge into the rivers and crude into the oceans. So if you want to keep your damn iPod charged up, find another way. Some of us are tired of breathing/drinking/eating your shit.
What?
Never mind the CO2 that coal plants produce.
Indeed, never mind the things like arsenic (that remain toxic forever) that are in coal ash.
The fact is, if coal plants had to meet the same standards for radioactive release that nuclear plants do, they'd all have to be shut down. There's all kinds of radioactive stuff in coal (radon, thorium, etc) -- not very much per ton, but coal plants burn millions of tons of the stuff. Indeed, if you could extract the thorium from coal you'd get more energy burning it in a reactor than you would from burning the carbon in a furnace. (Don't take my word, look it up.)
"Clean coal" is an oxymoron.
-- Alastair
When there is more CO2, plants do better.
Some plants grow better with higher CO2 levels, like poison ivy. However other plants grow slower. There are winners and losers wherein some plants grow faster and others slower under high CO2 levels. The same is true under higher temperatures.
Oh, BTW, "The jolt of carbon dioxide also boosted the most-toxic forms of poison ivy's rash-raising oil".
So, please, stop trying to insult the intelligence of people on slashdot until AFTER you have educated yourself about how the world works.
I suggest you do the same.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
... in the commercial building sector is the triple-net lease. This is the most common lease for commercial space. The lease put all the costs, including energy, onto the tenant. The owner has no incentive to make energy efficiency improvements, and possibly a lot of disincentive. Even if the tenant is willing to pay for the improvements (as a trade off against their energy costs) the owner has incentives to disapprove them (such as avoidance of legal liability or any other kind of hassle).
Only owner-occupied buildings tend to get energy efficiency infrastructure technology. I've heard that is about 10% of the sector. The only way around this will be to adopt laws that cause pain to building owners that is best relieved by making or agreeing to energy efficiency improvements.
If we had civilian nuclear plants that were good at producing electricity I would agree with you. Unfortunately in nearly every case we have a compromise dual use plant that produces very expensive electricity along with the weapon materials.
The only "dual-use" nuclear power plant in the US was the Hanford 'N' reactor which was shut down shortly after the Chernobyl accident. Light water reactors are poor sources of materials for weapons due to the high 240Pu, and will be even poorer with the high burnup fuels.
Where've I heard such simpleton logic before? You're either WITH US or AGAINST US, you dirty traitor. Pretty cut and dry!
Yeah, it is, actually.
Any energy or environmental economist would be laughing their ass off at your sophomoric view of what "wealth" is
Actually, a lot of energy economists would agree with me. The more energy people have, and the less expensively they have it, the more their lives improve. It's cheaper for them to travel, to get to work, to power electronic devices and get new features in them. In so many ways, the more energy you have, the richer you are. It's just the way it is.
Even if you argued that increasing energy prices resulted in some efficiency, the fact of the matter, if you are investing a fixed set of dollars into a device to make it more energy efficient, you are losing out on other features as well.
For example, let's say cars didn't have to worry about fuel efficiency, for example, what would a designer not have to worry about? First off, weight could right out the wind. You could afford to make a car much heavier and use different materials. Indeed, the need to save weight might itself force the use of different, more expensive materials but with a compromise on other properties such as strength.
Similarly, what if power costs were not a consideration for data centers? Well, they could add other features, add more servers. Instead, they have to invest in efficiency, which doesn't really help their feature set too much. It's less brand differentiation and more commoditization, and makes them more likely to be outsourced.
Those are just two examples. There are countless others.
This is my sig.
It's anybody that acquires too much power that becomes the problem. Doesn't matter what angle they're working.
Ah, you are right, of course!
This is my sig.
I guess I'd have to disagree. I can't think of a single company, or to put it better, some manufactured item or offered service, that is so necessary that it is the only one that needs to be doing it, and I would include real big ticket items like ships and subs and power plants etc. Monopolies suck, fullstop.
There's room enough for several companies at least even at the most complex levels, heck, I'll include space exploration there as well. If companies aren't allowed to fail from incompetence or a changed business environment in society, what's the point of their capitalism stance then? That's why I would have MUCH preferred if they let those ludicrous casino derivative spewing monster banks go bust, because 99% of their so called "financial products" are complete fantasy BS contracts based on bets on bets on bets and shouldn't be tied to the real economy in any manner whatsoever, they should be firewalled off and allowed to go bust. Let them have fun ripping each other off, but not the general poulation they are now. I think they are thieves and bunco artist fraudsters at extremely scary levels. Jail not bail in other words for those gents. Madoff is a piker compared to most of them, IMO. Frankly, I think the US government now is so corrupt and so much in bed with supporting those wall street criminals and parasites I would support a second secessionary effort by some state or states, just to get away from those lying thieves and blood profits murderers.
As to the pet thing, that sucks! Someone has an injury or loses their job, their economics go down the crapper, they are already bummed out and psychologically damaged, and their loving pet which means a lot to them and that loves them back needs some care so that charity place will only help if they take the pet away? That's nuts! That's not charity it is elitism cruelty!
Doubly so with children. Human children are remarkably resilient, taking them away from the parents that love them is cruel beyond belief. Removal of children from a home should only be done under extreme abusive conditions by the parents, and for no other reason, and just being poor doesn't count as abuse in my book, especially as the official government and wall street economic policy lately has been to utterly ripoff and destroy the middle class in the US for short term globalist race to the bottom labor arbitrage profits.
The pet thing, glad I know that now, I am going to check into that spca thing and if true rank them soundly around the internet. We take care of a boatload of rescue animals (right now have 7 dogs and around a dozen cats) and my income is pretty low, I make well under ten grand a year, and I will never approach spca then if this is the case. I just suck it up and pay for what vet care I need and do without for myself if I have to. For instance the bulk of my fed return this year, I get most back from my income level, is going to spaying/neutering and vaccinations for my newest arrivals here, a coupla puppies someone dumped off and a few cats. Ya, I'd like a new computer, but my responsibility to my pets come before that. Out in the country, pets just show up. I like what I do, all my pets like me back (just got back from a good run in the mud with the pack, we got all slimed, been raining like ..cats and dogs lately here, pretty funny really) and also consider this to be my tithing for the most part.