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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."
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.
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.
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.
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, you mean that country that's less than 1/3 the population of California? Surely what works for them will work for us, right?
Actually, Portugal has a population density of 115.129 inhabitants per square Km. USA: 32.191 inhabitants per square Km. So yes, what works for us in this case should work 3 times better for USA since you have 3 times more area per inhabitant to produce wind energy and gather sun energy.
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.
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.
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.
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