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Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover
daem0n1x writes "It appears that some countries in oil-poor Europe are making a successful transition to renewable energy at a fast and steady pace. This article talks about the small country of Portugal on the West Coast of Europe, known for its white sand beaches, oranges, fish, and wines. Portugal has no oil, but lots of sun and wind. Five years ago, the government decided, against many dissenting voices, to invest massively in taking advantage of the country's natural resources in clean energy. The results are here. It used to be a heavy energy importer, but now it exports it."
Well, USA has a public debt of 93% and an electric grid quite archaic compared to Portugal.
And did I mention that Portugal has one of the most state of the art internet broadband internet coverage (with optical fibre connecting the house in major cities) and 3.5G across most of the country in the all world. Being Portugal only rival as far as I know, Estonia?
Yeah, the public accounts might be bad ... but we are investing in the future.
Portugal has been working on this for some years now. They will be getting some of the first shipments of the Nissan/Renault electric Leafs I presume.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL0934720820080709
The number of things wrong with the article summary almost defies imagination. As you've pointed out, Portugal is a small country -- about the size of Maine or Indiana. It has ten million people and a remarkably benign climate (the record low in Lisbon is 30F. The record high a bit over 100F) that results in virtually no use of energy for heating and cooling. It had one of the lowest, if not the lowest, per capita use of energy of any developed country BEFORE upgrading it's energy infrastructure.
They also have -- as the article does point out -- very high energy costs, which means that renewable energy projects that might be economic disasters in the US or Canada are economically viable in Portugal.
It's NOT a typical country.
Moreover, Portugal is in no way, shape or form a net energy exporter. The still import very large amounts of North African oil and gas. They export a very small amount of electricity sometimes.
One suspects that their success in dealing with wind power is due more to the very high amount of (imported) natural gas powered electric generation rather than hydro or pumped storage. The natural gas plants can easily be modulated to match load to demand and to accept the full amount of power generated by renewable sources.
This is not to denigrate their accomplishments in getting useful amounts of renewable power on line and in upgrading their power grid. But comparing their energy infrastructure with that of the US is virtually meaningless.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Developing countries also leading the way. Thailand broke ground this month on two large solar PV installations, a 38 MW plant and a 73 MW plant, the latter will be the world's largest when it goes into operation November 2011. Thailand is not poor but it isn't rich either, yet it can figure out how to finance and build renewable energy systems on a large scale. More on the solar race in Thailand http://geomark.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/solar-race-is-on-in-thailand/
Khao Yai Land
The main company in that energy/electricity market there sates on their website with a very clear chart that their capacity is about 9675MW per year. In 2009, some 4500MW of this total were generated by river dams and 5400MW by thermal sources. These are plants that burn natural gas imported from Algeria and oil from wherever it's sourced. The total capacity available to harvest from wind farms is 595MW per year, which indeed doubled since 2006.
I would be quite surprised if recent developments since 2009 allowed for what the summary says, that Portugal "used to be a heavy energy importer, but now it exports it". In any case, with the climate we have in South Europe, harvesting sun power for electricity should be a no-brainer.
For us non-USA folk, could you Americans give us geographical guidance when referring to US states, e.g. rather than just saying "New England", could you provide similar context, for example, say "New England is a small state on the East Coast of the USA, known for its historical districts, American Football team and ..." (umm well I don't know anything else so this is why I could do with some help).
New England isn't actually a state, it's a region in the northeastern part of the country. It pretty much encapsulates upstate New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
Is that the type of context you were looking for?
Why do we see this meme so often? Solar and wind energy is used to produce electricity. Electricity isn't significantly produced by oil, it's mostly coal, followed by nuclear, hydro, and natural gas...
We do use oil as chemical feedstock and for fuel for mobile applications like vehicles. Thus far, our usage of electricity in that function is 'insignificant'.
Don't get me wrong, I'm always happy about staying away from coal and using something significantly cleaner. After all, coal is even nastier than oil. Well, modern coal plants are cleaner than autos, but that's because they have industrial sized pollution controls.
I don't read AC A human right
Then there's the time it's expected to take to get from San Diego to San Francisco, a trip of about 500 miles. The low end times are quoted at about four hours
Seriously? That works out at 125 miles per hour, which is the speed of the UK InterCity trains. They were state of the art in 1976, but in comparison with modern trains (which aren't being deployed in the UK, because we've been systematically crippling our rail infrastructure since the '80s) they're laughably antiquated. France and China, for example, have trains that maintain an average speed of almost 300 miles per hour, and the maglev version of the Shinkansen can reach 360 miles per hour. On a brand new 500 mile route, with entirely new track and rolling stock, there's no excuse for taking more than two hours, and I'd expect it to be closer to one and a half. Once you factor in check-in times, it should be faster than flying.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually the contents of the article beyond the for-shock-value graphic are quite interesting. If you read further down you see that the author recommends to actually use mass-transit where available instead of the car.
The numbers for mass transit efficiency are so low because the average number of passengers transported by a specific type of mass transit across the whole country (not just urban) in the US is very low. This in turn is because even though during some periods buses and trains are full, for most of the time they run empty or almost empty (at least outside urban areas).
A fully loaded bus or train is very energy efficient compared to a car on a per-passenger basis, but there are plenty of areas and plenty of periods where/when those buses and trains run almost empty which lowers the overall average efficiency per-passenger.
However this brings an interesting paradox:
- By using mass transit you are actually increasing it's efficiency since it would be running anyway (whether you use it or not) and by adding one more passenger you decrease the energy usage per-passenger (people weight very little compared to the actual vehicle so one more person barelly increases the energy consumed).
- By using a car, you only increase the car's energy efficiency per-passenger if you carpool: if you take one more car and travel solo you actually decrease cars' energy efficiency (again, from the article, you see that the average number of people in a car is 1.57)
Not only that, but from the article commuter-rail numbers are still better than car numbers by about 25% and this is for US diesel-powered commuter trains only. If you check the numbers for East Japan Rail (at the bottom) which is much closer to Europe, you see it's twice as energy efficient as using a car.
Even more interesting, if you take the energy efficiency for the TGV (high-speed train in Europe), which is electric and travels with an average passenger load of 80%, from here and convert them into BTU/passenger-mile, you end up with 229 BTU/Passenger-mile which in that article's graphic puts it at the bottom, below the electric scooter/trike and almost 20(!) times more efficient than car travel (it's also way much faster).
The whole article does in fact read as a recommendation for setting up more electric commuter trains in urban environments and to cover long distance with electric powered high-speed trains rather than inneficient diesel trains.