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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."
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"This article talks about the small country of Portugal on the West Coast of Europe" (As opposed to the other Portugal)
You can always find the truth buried near the end of the article:
But a decade ago in Portugal, as in many places in the United States today, power companies owned not only power generating plants, but also transmission lines. Those companies have little incentive to welcome new sources of renewable energy, which compete with their investment in fossil fuels. So in 2000, Portugal’s first step was to separate making electricity from transporting it, through a mandatory purchase by the government of all transmission lines for electricity and gas at what were deemed fair market prices.
Fox News translation: Obama bin Laden wants steal our energy and kill your grandmother! Let freedom ring for... um... dirty coal power.
It's hard. It's expensive. It won't please everyone. But it is totally worth it for future generations. It takes vision, vision beyond the end of our noses, to realize that.
That is the issue though. The summary mentions how Portugal is poor in oil but has a great deal of potential for solar and wind. This implies that by using sun and wind to create electricity somehow oil usage will drop. While I heavily support the switch to alternative fuels, this is just not true. Most oil is used for transportation rather than electricity. So the only way to save oil by switching to solar or wind is to use electric cars, which in general are not popular enough to be a heavy drain on the power grid. People really do need to learn the difference between electricity generation and oil usage, if nothing else just to make an informed decision when creating policy.
The summary says they're now an energy exporter. So, their long-term investment is paying off. What's the gripe?
Whether it'll pay itself off in time for the actuaries to be happy with the deal's another thing.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Your link also indicates that Portugal's public debt is 75.2% of the GDP (getting this number from the CIA fact book and the other one from The Economist).
The United States' public debt is 88% of the GDP without the huge investment in renewable sources of energy. What's their excuse?
I'm not saying Portugal's economy is better than that of the United States — it isn't. I'm just pointing out that public debt as a percentage of the GDP is not the best way to assess the health of an economy or if an investment in cleaner energy is a good idea.
Paying off for who? According TFA, the Portuguese government sold off the rights to the electricitiy to private companies. The government is also paying a massive subsidy to the private companies for 15 years. So the people of Portugal get to pay higher (15%) electric costs while the companies get to export energy to other nations. I'm sure you're right that there is nothing to gripe about.
This implies that by using sun and wind to create electricity somehow oil usage will drop. While I heavily support the switch to alternative fuels, this is just not true. Most oil is used for transportation rather than electricity. So the only way to save oil by switching to solar or wind is to use electric car.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
Ok, so quitting the car habit is a hard task in the sprawltastic U.S., but much of Europe is quite suited to better transportation mechanisms.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Dumping pollution into the environment is often cheaper, at least in the short term, than trying to avoid creating waste, or trying to dump the waste responsibly. Burning coal is cheaper because of this. If you factor in the costs -- acid rain, altering the chemistry of the air, acidification of the oceans -- coal is more expensive.
And, by reducing their fossil fuel imports Portugal has now insulated themselves from the vagaries of the energy market. The next time oil prices spike the US will be force to send crates of money to unfriendly regimes because the US is addicted to their oil. Portugal will thrive while the US stumbles.
Portugal is planning ahead. The US is hoping that it can continue to be profligate forever.
Money isn't necessarily a proxy for emissions. Often it is a proxy for human labor.
Clean energy is about harvesting it directly from the sun, instead of using one of the many intermediaries - gas, coal, oil - and further polluting the planet with the harmful byproducts involved. The vast majority of energy usage worldwide is from these three sources. In Europe as a whole, transportation only takes about a third of their energy usage as of 2009. Much of that is electric since they have a lot of rail, but I couldn't find any better breakdowns.
The point is, there's no use in putting off transitioning to direct sun energy consumption. All known quantities of fossil fuels and U-235 will be exhausted by 2150 at current rates and predicted growth patterns. We might need it for something else we can't foresee, so the smart move would be to conserve every bit of easy to use energy, and use the resources we have now to make progress in sustainable technologies.
I think most people prefer a higher energy cost if they can get rid of things like lung cancer.
I don't really mind you burning a lot of coal but if you don't spend the money to contain the output then you are causing damage to my health.
Friends do not let friends use fossil fuel.
Sadly, only a certain segment of the population believes you can cut taxes and start two wars without harming the economy.
I'll be glad to respond to any shucking and jiving with salient quotes from some of your friends about inheriting the Clinton Recession in 2002. The most unfortunate thing that did happen under Clinton's watch, as far as the economy goes, is allowing Glass Steagall to be dismantled.
But my point is to question if this is a positive or a negative point. Sure it's nice to have clean energy, but there are downsides too. It involved investing billions that could have been used for other purposes, not least tax breaks for individuals and businesses.
Just look at Ireland (well it's in crisis too but there is no question that lowering taxes was a huge factor in the unprecedented economic boom there). What if they decided that instead of bringing in hundreds of high tech companies by very low business taxes they decided to invest that money in windmills, solar plants and the best broadband in the world? Maybe they would be in Portugal's place today (btw Ireland GDP per capita today: $39K, Portugal: $21K - 20 years ago they were about the same).
Another problem is higher electricity prices. There is no surer way to reduce jobs, increase prices and generally harm the economy than by increasing energy cost.
Disclaimer: I don't know if what I said above has anything to do with reality in Portugal, I am just pointing out that there are two sides to clean energy equation
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
You do know that the cities in USA are much more populated than in EU where the population is much more spread out around the country right? So actually the argument works even more against you.
I do agree in the nuclear point though. We can and should use it here in Portugal.
Sadly, only a certain segment of the population believes you can cut taxes and start two wars without harming the economy.
First of all, cutting taxes is generally understood to be good for the economy. Fighting wars generally isn't, so I don't know why you are bundling those two together. Secondly, the two wars were generally supported by both parties (though in case of Iraq there were more opponents among Democrats but that was mostly posturing for political reasons). I don't think it's clear at all that the US foreign policy would have been any different under Clinton or, god forbid, Gore especially after 9/11.
I don't think the recession was caused by Obama nor inherited from Bush. It's simplistic to the point of ridiculous to view something as complex as the economic cycle as determined by which president is in office even though their decisions of course have some impact.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
This would work only for people who confine themselves to staying forever in cities and suburbs, but it certainly won't work for me. Train will not take me from Bat Area to Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Central Coast, Redwood Forest, Point Reyes, Monterey, Death Valley, Mojave Desert, Grand Canyon (both rims), Mount Shasta, and tons of other places in California and Oregon I enjoy going to on weekends the day and time I like. Neither could train bring bags full of groceries to my doorstep. Let's get real. Cars have their uses. What we need to get rid of is the lifestyles and city designs that induce long daily car commutes, build better public transport systems, and build high speed rail where it does make sense.
Pumping out enough renewable energy over a state of the art grid means being able to fuel electric cars en masse.
More electric cars -> less oil.
Besides, there is a direct correlation between the current price for oil(which is based off of demand) and the price of other energy resources.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I don't know much about Portugal, but perhaps one of the reasons is that it tends to embark on projects like you mentioned that sound good but don't make economic sense?
Doubt it. This is an issue you can see in general comparing north vs south Europe. I don't remember the word for it but the southern countries is more about living / spending your time outside of work whereas for many in the north your life is about working. I assume the weather conditions, need to take siestas in the middle of the day because it's too warm to do anything useful anyway and so on may be some reasons for it.
I think one reason economic is better up north is because people simply work harder.
May be wrong though. Also tourism is a bigger industry in those southern countries.
I also thank you, a very good set of points. America uses an insane amount of power, and I am certainly part of it, but it is what it is. Hopefully we can continue to make electronics use less electricity to do more, I know my current computer has more than 200x the processing ability of my old one, but uses the same amount of power. Hopefully our society will find more ways to improve efficiency and drop energy consumption, and find new ways of generating power. And hey, with any luck we will find room temperature superconductors (I am telling you, just add boron(haha)). It would be especially nice if we actually started building houses and buildings properly, to take advantage of the environment to minimize the need for heating and cooling. Until then.
But really, I was going to post the exact same thing, except more in terms of significantly lower energy use per capita, without details. Great explanation.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
First of all, cutting taxes is generally understood to be good for the economy.
Citation needed.
Fighting wars generally isn't, so I don't know why you are bundling those two together.
If you had a drug addiction, and you were always broke, there's a very good reason to think that ending the drug addiction would solve the second problem.
Secondly, the two wars were generally supported by both parties (though in case of Iraq there were more opponents among Democrats but that was mostly posturing for political reasons). I don't think it's clear at all that the US foreign policy would have been any different under Clinton or, god forbid, Gore especially after 9/11.
Let's see: we've spent a few trillion dollars, increased recruitment to Al Qaeda, funneled money to the Taliban through the ISI, lost thousands of soldier's lives, maimed thousands more, killed a few hundred thousand muslims, displaced a few million more, given up habeas corpus, built secret prisons around the world for the purposes of rendition and torture, and we've handed the war in Afghanistan - the "good" one - over to the CIA and Task Force 373 that's busy extrajudicially executing terrorism suspects.
What could Gore, or anyone, have possibly fucked up more than that?
I don't think the recession was caused by Obama nor inherited from Bush. It's simplistic to the point of ridiculous to view something as complex as the economic cycle as determined by which president is in office even though their decisions of course have some impact.
Generally speaking, Democratic administrations have reduced military spending and increased taxes. Have a look at the results for yourself: http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
Democrats aren't inherently better or anything, but at least they have demonstrated that cutting military spending and progressive taxes reduce the national debt. If people making more than 160,000 a year are really going to quit working over a 4% increase in Federal tax income, I say good riddance. There are plenty of people who will step up to take their place. They deserve to lose money for being fair weather patriots, who apparently only care about this country when it's dumping cash into their pockets.
Thanks for pointing out that Portugal is "a small country .... on the West Coast of Europe, known for its white sand beaches, oranges, fish, and wines".
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).
This kind of context would be really helpful for us non-Americans! ;-)
I think Americans knowledge of European countries is about the same as Europeans knowledge of US states. Probably in both cases knowledge is biased to places which feature more in movies.
Most people could quite easily walk to the shops. Obviously there are some people who live 50 miles away from the nearest grocery store, but these are a tiny minority.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Cutting taxes is often NOT good for the economy, especially long term when there is a lot of debt and unfunded entitlement programs, and programs that are desperately needed but have yet to be created and funded. I don't think Gore would have done much different to stop the coming recession, he's not socialist enough to have really challenged the corrupt capitalist system that causes the depression cycle, but we would have been in an incredibly more favorable position to ride it out than we were and are in. He also would not have attacked Iraq - a war of choice which has done nothing to improve our security and has in fact weakened it and squandered our hard earned reputation with the rest of the world.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Your argument doesn't make any sense and reeks of lame excuse. Here in Portugal we have towns with a nearby wind farm that are self-sufficient in electricity. How difficult is this in the US? Don't you have towns with lots of windy and sunny desert/mountains/plains around?
Also, for example, the NY state is huge and mostly rural. How hard is it to put wind farms on it to feed the power-hungry city of New York?
Or you take advantage on the sun and wind in Arizona, a huge state with very little population and feed the big Californian cities with renewable electricity. Is it so hard to transport electricity a few hundreds of Km? We do it here. Why can't you?
It won't solve the energy problems, but it will certainly help. If you let the "market" decide, the polluting energies win, because they're cheaper in the short term (they appear cheap because nobody gives a fuck about environmental costs). But investing in the future means taking chances and, when eventually oil and gas get extremely expensive (believe me, they will), suddenly finding you're decades behind in diversifying your energy production sources won't help your economy much.
Depends on the bus route. I got a bus to a party on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago. The bus trip was a bit more than half an hour and for almost all of it, I was the only person on the bus. It didn't go the most direct route, and almost all of the side-trips were completely wasted; no one got on or off at any point along them. A car would have used significantly less energy than the minibus. If I hadn't been there, the bus would still have run but with no passengers at all for most of its journey.
This is one of the problems that could be easily solved with the application of a little bit of processing power. Rather than having fixed bus routes, I ought to be able to go to tell the bus company where I am and where I want to go (either from home via the Internet, via a mobile phone, or at a bus stop) and have them schedule a vehicle to take me there. If there are lots of people going the same way, it should be a large bus, if there are a few then it should be something smaller.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Your reasons do not explain the Gini index. This is clearly caused by poor wealth distribution, which goes against your arguments.
The heavy taxation and the weight of State in the economy that you complain about are a lot bigger in Scandinavian countries that have the lowest Gini indexes in the world.
Your arguments are typical of the right-wing free-market mentality (called neoliberal in Europe), that has guided the policies in most of the world in the latest decades, leading our economy into ruin.
Nuclear is cleaner than any fossil fuel.
The problem is human nature and the organizations we form to run them are always driven to be efficient and make a profit. Which sounds good until you examine recent events in the gulf of Mexico. Too many corners were cut to save time and because nothing bad happened when the first shortcut was taken other shortcuts were implemented.
Chernobyl happened decades ago and many more decades will pass before anyone can live there again. In the meantime it seems possible if not likely that radiation contaminants are silently claiming lives without anyone being aware of it.
Solar, wave, wind power and geo-thermal aren't as efficient as nuclear but the profit motive doesn't leave behind a mess that takes decades to fix when they fail.
Our grandchildren will certainly wonder why we burned so much of a very rare and useful carbon stockpile.
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
Drill Baby Drill is a loser's mantra. Oil is too precious a resource to waste on an idiot's whim. The smart man's mantra is Nuke baby Nuke
Nuke is not a smart man's mantra, for sure you dont want to live near one, even less near a nuclear waste storage location.
Nuke is very powerful, but too expensive, even before the waste treatment and storage... add that and you see its not really a viable option. The problem is that the pro-nuke never thing about the wastes, its future generations problems, not theirs
the smart man's mantra is renewable energy... big installations are good, but the future is small, local area installations. If all the houses had wind and solar generation, the outside energy needs would be small and a lot easier to manage. Of course, freezing winter can still be a problem, but those could use other energy sources like biomass and biofuel.
what is needed is a merge of all technical advantages in solar research and mass production of solar cell and wind turbines, so the price drop and efficiency rises. Instead of giving government aid to oil production, give it to the green energies and watch things grow. Germany gives big bonus for solar installations (and remember that they have a lot less sun hours than south Europe countries) and now Germany have more solar installations than the south Europe countries and made the solar cell price drop hard and build a new industry.
The problem is always the same, oils is cheap, other ways are more expensive, but without investment the new energies cant drop price and oil prices (and taxes) can only up in the future
Higuita
Yeah it's done in some places but it's not very efficiant and it requires a lot of expensive infrastructure. If we want to get anywhere near the point where we are running our elecricity grid on renewables alone someone is going to have to pay for storage.
If you are relying on your fossil/nuclear based neighbours acting like a battery to make up for the unreliability of your renewables you are far from self-sufficiant.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Nuke is not a smart man's mantra, for sure you dont want to live near one, even less near a nuclear waste storage location.
Why wouldn't I want to live near one? I'd much rather live next to a nuke plant than:
1. Chemical factory/storage. See Bhopal
2. Coal Power plant (lung cancer risks slightly lower than active smoker)
3. Garbage dump (stinks, possibly/probably toxic)
As for storage location, well, nuclear waste is at least incredibly dense. You can store like 60 years worth of 'waste' in what amounts to a extra deep Olympic swimming pool.
the smart man's mantra is renewable energy... big installations are good, but the future is small, local area installations. If all the houses had wind and solar generation, the outside energy needs would be small and a lot easier to manage. Of course, freezing winter can still be a problem, but those could use other energy sources like biomass and biofuel.
It's been calculated that for Britain it'd be more efficient to put the solar panels in northern Africa and run power lines up north. As for wind generation, wind requires towers, and if you put one up next to every house I predict fairly substantial amounts of injuries from tower failures. Besides, wind gets more economical the bigger/taller the turbine, so they're best OUTSIDE of town where you can make them huge.
On biomass and biofuel - we'd be shipping a lot of it up from down south where it'd be best generated. Integrated grid would help; use solar energy not used to power AC in the winter to power heat pumps farther north. Still need nighttime power that's what wind would be for.
Or we could just build a bunch of nuke plants for 1/4 the price per kwh and get power on our schedule, not nature's.
In reality I think that a proportion that's like 40% nuke, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% misc 'other' would work well.
I don't read AC A human right