Slashdot Mirror
Stanford, UCD Researchers Say 100% Renewable Energy Possible By 2050
thecarchik writes with news of an analysis published in Energy Policy by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California-Davis. "There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources, said author Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor, saying it is only a question of 'whether we have the societal and political will.' During this decade, the two 'fuels of the future' will be electricity and gasoline. Beyond that, we can't project."
Hopefully before crude oil hits $250 a barrel (which will happen sometime around 2035 or later) and the world spins out of control. What's especially interesting is looking at the rising food costs and population growth side-by-side with peak oil graphs.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Maybe we'll be a few steps closer to being able to cover the Sahara desert with solar panels if more regimes fall. A deal between the EU and the new hopefully democratic governments?
We are all God's parents.
During this decade, the two 'fuels of the future' will be electricity and gasoline.
Electricty isn't a fuel.
didn't realise solar was renewable, my science class told me the sun was going to burn out eventually...
Oil on the other hand, let some fish decompose and you've renewed the source.
Right. If only we had some sort of giant fusion reactor constantly sending us more energy... but what would we CALL it ?
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I don't trust any article that touts ethanol (presumably from corn)
... so fuck 'em. My generation had a pain in the ass dealing with all the bullshit that mere existence dished out, so let's just let's just leave nuclear waste, lack of petroleum based fuels, etc, as a problem for forthcoming generations.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Tripe! Replacing all the polluting power plants with new generation coal or nuclear power would be an incredible feat and we're efficient at that. To suggest we can replace all that infrastructure when we have no real suitable proven baseload technology aside from hydro is completely laughable.
Do these people understand money, time and resources are not cheap and infinite? This sounds like something my manager would throw up.
That energy is not exactly "renewable" in the sense that it can be used again. However, we can make much more use of the energy input that the earth gets from the sun (directly, as in solar panels or heat engines, or indirectly, as in wind and tide energy). That energy is eventually converted to heat and radiated into space, just as the energy was originally radiated in from space. Not renewable in the exact sense, but very clean and sustainable.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
We'll just have China make all the composites and fabricate all the solar panels, mine and refine all the nickle and do all the other nasty work to make our 'clean' new 'renewable' energy system work. Install it here in the West and not talk about the contaminants and pollution we've exported to Asian kids.
Yay 'green' energy. When we're done we'll congratulate ourselves and buff moral cred.
I'll bite on this troll...
Renewable energy != perpetual energy
Solar power, wind power, hydro power, burning plant matter are all viable renewable energy sources today.
Incidentally all have been in use for the last... oohh 3000 years
We don't have the societal or political will.
Of course, everything is possible if we have the societal and political will. What's new here?
Isn't thinking like this exactly what got us into the environmental and energy problems we have now?
"Renewable" doesn't mean "perpetual", it means "lasts as long as the sun". The sun won't last forever, but probably well over a billion years, while oil will likely be depleted in under 100 years (and maybe far sooner than that).
Thank you. You just volonteered as fertilizer for the biofuel that those of us who will be alive in 40 years will need.
Yes, but when it shifts from primarily fusing hydrogen to primarily fusing helium we're all doomed! DOOOOOOOMED!
Doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooomed!
Breeder reactors are clean and never run out of fuel. Hydro is very dirty from enviromental view and very destructive. Solar is getting better. Wind and wave are also dead ends for total replacement as they dont scale. Geothermal and hydrogen could be viable, too.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
As if looking one year into the future isn't difficult enough. The whole article is just wishful thinking.
-- Cheers!
This Stanford PR piece has received a lot of "coverage" -- mostly cut and paste.
Here are links to the original papers.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnPolicyPt2.pdf
We estimate that 3,800,000 5 MW wind turbines, 49,000 300 MW concentrated solar plants, 40,000 300 MW solar ...
PV power plants, 1.7 billion 3 kWrooftop PV systems, 5350 100 MWgeothermal power plants, 270
new 1300 MWhydroelectric power plants, 720,000 0.75 MWwave devices, and 490,000 1 MWtidal
turbines can power a 2030 WWS world that uses electricity and electrolytic hydrogen for all purposes.
Barriers to the plan are primarily social and political, not technological or economic.
I'm sure everybody will want to study the papers in detail. And hold on to your checkbooks.
Or we could start building Thorium reactors next year and move past all talk about a looming energy crisis.
Why is hydro power 'very dirty'?
Why use the implied polemic "Electricity and Gasoline"? Is he pushing the standard lie that, if the world replaces food crops with flammable plant oil, the new version will be CO2 free? Is CO2 really a problem yet anyway? This implication is not only false science, it could cause international havoc by raising the price of food.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
I'll bite on this troll...
Renewable energy != perpetual energy
Solar power, wind power, hydro power, burning plant matter are all viable renewable energy sources today.
Incidentally all have been in use for the last... oohh 3000000000 years
FTFY, unless you mean to imply that life on earth in general does not employ solar power?
Yes! Electricity the "fuel" of the future! Wait what??!
By 2050 disease and war will have reduced the global population to a fraction of what it is today, and whoever is left will not be wasting energy on heating and cooling McMansions and feeding oversized vehicles and toys. It won't be that we've managed to move to renewables on a scale that can keep up with the population, just that we've reduced the population to the point that renewable energy will have no problem keeping up with demand.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. -H. L. Mencken
There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources
I didn't read any further than this. If there aren't any economic barriers, then why does it need any sort of public backing or support. If wind and solar actually were an economic alternative to things like coal, then power companies would be switching without any other sort of incentive, simply to save money.
Now, one could certainly make the argument (though he doesn't) that fossil fuels produce negative externalities to society, and correcting for that clean energy is actually more economic in the long run for us all. However, correcting for market failures at a national political level is definitely a "barrier" in my mind, and even more so if he thinks we can expand this to a global scale.
No it doesn't. Better quality of life means less kids. AFAIK this is purely biological and at most mildly influenced by religion. Education and access to contraceptives are also important factors.
Only a square 251km a side would be required for 5% effective solar to supply the entire world's projected 2020 energy needs. An area about the size of Wales. The earth's surface would be a square about 18000 km on a side.
Free energy ? Is that what liberals think renewables are ? Oh dear God.
Renewable energy is only free in exactly the same way food is free : given land, very long-term investments, huge risk, and a *LOT* of patience you can make it "for free".
Now tell me : where can I get me food for free ?
And now let's compare : the price of oil, per unit of energy, currently stands at 5.8e6 BTU for $100 (let's round it seriously upward) : let's say $20 per million BTU
your "free" energy, should be within a factor of 10 of current agricultural energy prices : 150 BTU per pound, 3300 pounds per acre (you need oil-based fertilizer for these yields, but let's ignore that), 14 cents per pound =150*3300 BTU for 3300*0.14$ = 5e5 for $462 = about $1000 per million BTU (this is for corn, one of the more efficient plant species)
Let's suppose we can make renewables 10 times more efficient than they are now. That would be an accomplishment that far surpasses putting a man on the moon btw.
That would make the price per kilometer travelled for your car ... 5 times what it was during the oil crisis ...
"free" ... I think you're going to find "expensive" to be cheaper ... and that's ignoring the fact that there is going to be a (long) period with fundamentally less energy. Who gets to die ?
Why on earth would anyone want to remove yet another limit to human growth?
Where do you see a correlation between access to energy and population growth?
The countries with greater population countries are Liberia, Burundi, Afghanistan, Western Sahara, East Timor, Niger, Eritrea, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Palestinian territories. Clearly they have too much access to energy.
What we really need is a Chinese-style one child policy, or better yet incentives for no children at all.
Because, not only that doesn't have any moral implications, as it clearly worked in reducing their population.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that having many children with our current population is completely immoral, but I think that approach to dealing with the problem is misguided.
Dilbert RSS feed
The countries with greater population countries are
Sorry. "The countries with greater population growth rate are"
Dilbert RSS feed
You, sir, make a great case for abortion. Please, GTFO of this world and don't let the door hit you. It's a damn shame your momy had no idea what RU-486 was. She could have saved the earth and us from your carbon footprint.
don't go camping with Daniel Plainview.
.
.
.
or hunting with Dick Cheney.
There are three major issues, two are more technical and one is political:
The technical issues: transportation of goods ( by ship, airplane or trucks) and intensive farming. Both rely practically to 100% on oil-based technology and there is no strategy and no technology in sight how to change this, or change it quickly enough.
The other, perhaps more important issue is political: the only way to have the solutions available when we need them is to start pumping money into them now, or even better, yesterday. However, companies that want to make a profit will not pay more than necessary for this now and will stick to oil-based technology as long as that is cheaper. And governments, especially neo-liberally influenced ones, cannot invest the huge amount of tax-payer money either (which will give countries like China a huge long-term advantage in this area).
Maybe the best argument to motivate countries like the US to invest more into this is that practically all their war-technology is based on oil too: tanks, jets, missiles, even the rockets launching satellites are driven by fuel that is made directly or indirectly out of oil.
So, the real effort will just start to happen when the prize for oil really goes up. Unless we can buy the technology from China then, this will get rather unpleasant.
But damn does my town have the nerve to charge money for the water they get from it.
QUOTE: During this decade, the two 'fuels of the future' will be electricity and gasoline. Beyond that, we can't project."
Saved me reading time.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
" During this decade, the two 'fuels of the future' will be electricity and gasoline. Beyond that, we can't project."" - If they can't do projections beyond the next decade, how can they claim 100% renewable energy possible by 2050?
There's more than just earth, you know. And if you feel so strongly that the population needs to be reduced, that humanity should just let itself fade away, then why don't you lead by example and off yourself? Then the rest of us can get on with expanding the human race and moving off this rock.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
At least you have a better chance of interesting investors into making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's hard enough to think 10 years ahead when you live for the next quarter, and 40 years is just completely irrelevant to them.
And, don't forget, the sun doesn't care whether we use the energy before radiating it back into space (as heat). The sun will die in a billion years or so, whether we use the energy or radiate it back as soon as it arrived.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Funny. Its already a whole lot cheaper to have no kids. I don't think thats it.
The Chinese population is continuing to rise because the one child policy has been in place for only several decades, and improvements in health have increased the average lifespan. The Chinese population will go down when people born before the one child policy die of old age, in a few decades.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Yeah whenever a scientist says X or Y are possible within 30-40 years, then most of the time it takes much much longer, for example Artificial Intelligence. But despite of that we could probably say 100% renewable energy is definately 100% possible in 4500, but the question is: since how long. These are always PR bullshit stories to raise investment. Because how do they know it's then on the marktet, or do the same scientists there also know how the market works? Very clever, because even the economists don't know how it works.
Yeah, it was kind of ironic the previous poster's linked page having a link to:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population%20growth%20of%20China&lk=2
which shows China has a 0.63% population growth --- 154th in the world.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Gosh Mark Jacobson, I'm no smart stanford professor, but even I know electricity is not a fuel. That is, unless you are somehow harnessing lightning. "Electric" cars are really coal burning cars. Or are our houses powered by "clean" electricity?
There already is a clean, limitless, reliable and safe power source available to us. It's called nuclear power.
... is not renewable enough. Whenever you take energy out of some system to convert it to something else (for example, from athmospheric winds and into electricity), well, the original energy's gone. That isn't a problem as long as it's not being done on a massive scale; however, replacing all current energy sources (oil, coal, nuclear, etc...) would require massive amounts of solar panels / wind turbines / etc - and for some reason, this worries me.
The idea that the human contagion could spread to other planets is horrifying. If there is so much as a single microbe on Mars, then a total ban on human colonization must be put into place. After all colonization of Africa worked out SO WELL.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
1 trillion spent by USA on Iraq War2. Three trillion spent worldwide on direct bailout of banks. $500 Bn on fossil fuel subsidies worldwide.
Figures spent over about 7 years: $7.5Tn
Those turbines will take 40 years. So over the same period of time, that comes to about $2.5Tn.
No economic issue that wasn't gladly done in the name of capitalism. It just seems that if it's done in the name of sustainability there's a problem.
We have quit a lot invested the current way of doing things so some prodding is justifies. But, if you look at new generation, renewables do pretty well. Wind has been playing tag with natural gas for several year and solar put in 16 GW of capacity in 2010 while nukes did less than 3. Both wind and solar will be getting cheaper still so eventual replacement is inevitable as the old stuff breaks. But inertia is expensive. The cost of using coal is much higher than what turns up on your electricity bill, about $0.178/kWh in extra costs. http://climateprogress.org/2011/02/16/life-cycle-study-coal-harvard-epstein-health/
Even if we had enough raw materials or enough supply to construct such a solar panel field (we don't), how on earth do you plan to move all this energy to places that need it? Supraconductivity doesn't work all that well (read at all) in surface, or anywhere near Earth's surface temperatures. And no matter how high voltage you pump into lines, we're no longer talking a few hundred of kilometers at max. Even if such a project were possible from construction point of view (again - it isn't), logistics of moving the energy are largely unsolvable in this time frame.
Christian sects encourage their brainwashed followers to have as many children as possible, so as to elbow out the smart people. In a democracy this can only mean bad news. What we really need is a Chinese-style one child policy, or better yet incentives for no children at all.
Most estimates on power consumption use our current average consumption rates. As products become substantially more efficient we'll see the average consumption rate plummet. 10 years ago my uber-sweet gaming rig took 500 watts to power. Now it takes about 1200 watts. In 2-3 years it'll take about 450 watts. The power race is over in electronics. We're looking at the efficiency part of the technological curve now. Remember when cars couldn't produce 1hp to a cubic inch in 1950? By 1960 that was practically standard, by 1980 it was creeping up on 2:1, In 2000 that was standard. Now in 2011 combined HP in some hybrids is creeping up on 3:1 and gas mileage in the 40s and 50s.
So before you spout your atheistic crap across the internet realize that A.) Christians on average have about the same number of children on a world and national basis. B.) "Idiocracy" is not a real or accurate theorem, it's something pushed by bigoted asses who think that X group if they have more children will overrun Y group which is infinitely smarter. C.) The one child policy is a failure in China and will be a failure elsewhere. The United States has a positive birth rate largely due to immigration. Stabilized western Europe has a barely positive birth rate and in Scandinavia the birth rate is negative. The world's population isn't growing exponentially and consuming all our resources. Poor countries are growing exponentially and then dying at age 30 of diseases we cured a hundred years ago and malnutrition from the poor quality of the land and farming access to arable land.
The fear of overpopulation is only used by scientists to try and drive people to do something otherwise all the good will is wasted because humans are generally lazy creatures who won't solve their problems unless their showed a glaring issue. The current estimates put a sustainable population on the planet around 60 BILLION people. We're going to reach it at the end of this century but another 90 years of progress could see our birth rate slow, major advances in food production, or the collapse of capitalism in favor of egalitarian pursuit of happiness. All three would easily give our planet new life.
This is written by people who understand the difference between reliable base-load sources and less-predictable renewables like wind and solar. Their plan recognizes the need for energy storage to balance out the erratic sources - that's the "270 new 1300MW hydroelectric power plants", which you need for pumped storage. There's a social and political barrier for you - we have enough trouble in the US running new power lines, and this plan requires the construction of hundreds of new dams!?
I also don't understand some of their trade-offs. Mining uranium is bad, but flooding 270 new valleys is OK?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Listen to this non-tinfoil podcast: http://www.financialsense.com/financial-sense-newshour/guest-expert/2011/02/17/chris-nelder-bill-powers/shells-doomsday-scenario-wti-versus-brent
leather-dog muksihs
Blog: @muksihs
>>We simply need to decrease the surplus population of ravenously resource-hungry bourgeoisie
Yes, comrade! We must destroy the rapacious bourgeoisie that are breeding like rats and... oh, wait, what? All affluent countries are having problems with population *decreases* instead of exponential growth? Damn, I guess all you people stuck in the 1800s with Malthus are wrong, huh?
The only people still undergoing large population expansions are the uneducated poor - and if you make the poor educated and wealthy, they magically stop having as many kids (well, it's maybe birth control instead of magic, but you get my point, comrade).
>>What we really need is a Chinese-style one child policy, or better yet incentives for no children at all.
Lord, you're just a walking stereotype of the tyrannical communist, aren't you? Weren't you supposed to have been purged back in the 40s alongside all your other fellow true believer Stalinists?
Yep, it is about time we think of protecting those Martians from the destructive colonial powers on Earth. While we're at it, we should declare all life in the solar system, e.g., Jovian, Saturnian, Uranian, Neptumian, Plutonian, etc. sacred and not to be even interacted with. With a bit more legislation, we can protect all life in the Milky Way from the destructive influences of humans. No need to stop there, let's do it as a favor to all life in the Universe. Hell, let's do it for the entire Multiverse. And let's not let time get in the way, let's protect all life past and future from humans.
Everyone will be issued hari-kari knives and asked to do the dirty deed on Dec. 21, 2012. Before we do, we'll paint the Earth to look like a giant bullseye from space. That way, the asteroid Apophis can make doubly sure humans never, ever happen again. Repent! Save humanity! Die today!
Geothermal energy produces brine with heavy metals. So renewable and clean do not belong in the same sentence.
The Sun is only through about half of its lifespan. It's got about 5 billion years left, not 1 billion.
Learn something new.
Huh? HVDC does do 1000s of kilometres, these lines are in operation. Now geopolitically this isn't an option for a lot of the world (the EU for instance would need solar thermal power plants in Africa ... and Africa is a shithole). The US however has plenty of deserts with plenty of sundays per year to be able to supply itself at very high uptimes even with limited storage (say one or two days).
If it had the will the US could be energy independent in a couple of decades ... but the powers that be don't want that, no country is allowed any sort of independence any more. It would set a bad example and might prevent the rise of our neofeudalist overlords.
"Western Sahara" when you're population is three, percentages can be deceiving.
your criticism of 'lefties' for what they didn't actually do immediately after sep 11 2001 rings especially hollow given that 'righties' did do what is described i.e. grab more power and control over peoples lives, using the 'war on terror' as an excuse,
The point is that many developed countries have less than that even without such policies, which lead to a huge number of forced abortions.
Dilbert RSS feed
There's more than just earth, you know.
Not for now. Will there be in less than 70 years, when the world's population has doubled from the current 7 billion?
And if you feel so strongly that the population needs to be reduced, that humanity should just let itself fade away, then why don't you lead by example and off yourself?
Stupid dichotomy. I didn't defend that we should disappear. I'm simply saying we shouldn't have many children to reduce the current growth rate to reasonable levels.
If you can't understand the difference, I don't think you'll be of much help getting us out of this rock.
Dilbert RSS feed
It pisses me off to see government and/or private organizations saying that we can do this in 40 years. What a fucking cop out, its like saying, "Our children will fix this as soon as we pass control on to them and then we can live out our remaining years with the benifits." I for one think that no government office should be allowed to project more than 10 years, if it can't be done in ten years then you can't brag about it.
I'm very, very sorry, I thought you were replying to me. Disregard my previous post. Sorry!
Dilbert RSS feed
If we don't have children (collectively) how will we survive in old age? The alternative to having a next generation capable of producing enough food, etc. for themselves and prior generations is mass starvation and euthanasia for the elderly. Given your view on childbearing, I would not be surprised if you were quite fine with encouraging retirees to die off, but that and a one child policy seems far more ethically objectionable to me than trying to find replacements and cleaner means of powering our world.
Well, nuclear is one, and fusion is another...even though we are being postponed on these 2 for reasons unknown by the gov., maybe they do not want little nuclear cells the size of a hand running your car engine, so that if you bought 20 cars, you would have enough for a small nuc bomb....and same for fusion, once the fusion has become available enough for reg. joe's to use and have, it wont be long before hackers would break it down to know how it works and tweak it, and therefor become self sustaining, as the merger of hot and cold to create the fusion
needs nothing other then the casing , everything else is free (the heat, AND the cold).
"the two 'fuels of the future' will be electricity and gasoline" Electricity is a method of energy transportation not a fuel. Gasoline is not clean and not renewable on a human time scale the way its currently produced. If the future is to burn gasoline to make electricity to transport it to everybody we are royally fucked.
Overpopulation is a myth
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
Please read, learn and revise opinion accordingly.
Not "righties". Neocons. Which came over from the left. This is politics 101. Try educating yourself.
Also, I did not write "lefties". Do you substitute that term in your mind when you read "leftists"?
It certainly does, however power loss over "thousands of kilmeters" is going to be pretty damn heavy, no matter how high you pump the voltage. Which is the whole point, suddenly you need more then double the field.
The most significant factor in reducing population growth is per capita wealth. Amazingly, per capita wealth is also the largest factor into how much effort a country puts into protecting the environment. The most significant factor in increasing per capita wealth is rule of law, that is countries that have laws that only change slowly and apply the same to everyone have the highest per capita wealth over the long term. This is why the U.S. is slipping economically, over my lifetime, more and more laws are written with the intention that they will be applied differently to those with political connections (just look at the waivers that have been issued for Obamacare, although that is just the most obvious recent example and there are many more).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources...
Really, no economic barriers? I guess they haven't heard of those big oil companies. Do the researchers not think that they would be an obstacle?
Societal and political will nothing, this will have EVERYTHING to do with the Big Power companies being willing to convert from what they know to something new. They have to up and drop gas, oil, and all that mess and fully 110% embrace new sources. It doesn't matter what the people or government says, if the producers themselves don't feel like changing, and instead milking a known profitable source to the last proverbial and literal drop, then we won't be going anywhere.
Current predictions of population growth project it topping out at 9 billion.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Wikipedia has a link to Siemens which claims otherwise ...
"The most economic solution for long-distance bulk power transmission, due to lower losses, is transmission with High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC). A basic rule of thumb: for every 1,000 kilometres the DC line losses are less than 3% (e.g. for 5,000 MW at a voltage of 800 kV)."
With that you could get energy from the equator to Santa Claus without losing half the power (26% loss over 10000 Kilometre). Within the United States the losses would be negligible.
Nope...thinking like that and yours is what got us to the point where trolling is an internet passtime.
Because our society is one large ponzi scheme, and you don't want to find out what happens when we run out of dupes.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
No, it isn't what liberals think. Are you so desperate to make liberals look bad that you're going to take an obviously uninformed and ridiculous viewpoint and try to make it seem representative of what members of a political party think? I suppose that's one way to make an excuse for Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and the like.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
If fuel can be made from petroleum substitutes, this frees up petroleum for petro-chemicals, plastics, fertilizers, etc. I'd be slightly surprised, but only slightly, if US domestic production of oil couldn't satisfy all non-fuel needs in the US. And if can't, then there are all oil exporting non-OPEC nations like Canada, Great Britain, Russia, China, Mexico, Brazil, etc.
in many prev /. stories in this area, there have been numerous, angry, assertive posts that (fill in your favorite renewable) is bunk.
I wonder how many of those people will, if not today, someday realize that not only were they wrong to dis solar, wind , conservation, etc, but they did so in typical blog manner - overbearing and pompous.
I stopped reading when I got to the statement "And then there's the benefit of halting climate change". I have no doubt that this will curb (perhaps significantly) human impact on climate change (and therefore I'm generally all for this type of research), but to say that it will HALT climate change illustrates a complete lack of recognition that human activity is only one contributing factor in the current trend of climate change. Climate change is for the most part a natural, inevitable, and ongoing process. Trying or expecting to "halt" it is akin to trying or expecting to halt the rotation of the earth, and the statement of such claims or goals undermines the objectivity of the article.
(For what little effect it might actually have or not on you.) But despite the tin foil hat folks, we know little enough about cell diruption and the role of E-fields in brain communication, that I'd better be safe than sorry.
One frequent fault of 'green' energy fans is the inability to comprehend the massive amounts of electrical power we need on demand. One of the insurmountable (in terms of economics) advantages of fossil fuel and nuclear plants is they output power on demand, regardless of when the sun is up, the sky is clear, the wind is blowing, or the spring melt-off is sufficient.
These researchers essentially gloss over this fact, treating it as a minor issue worth only a paragraph, and certainly not worthy of any serious economic or environmental evaluation. These folks have the numbers for national electrical demand, but no concept of what those numbers actually mean on the ground.
The article:
The best thing I could find while skimming the report:
And then nothing else. This is a massive oversight and represents an omitted capital expense of this plan on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars, if not more.
I'll try to illustrate what they omit.
Let's start with a nuclear power plant I'm familiar with.
It puts 1240 MWe onto the grid 24/7 for an 18 month fuel cycle.
If you want to replace this output, you can choose:
1) another hoover dam,
2) a few thousand wind turbines in geographically dispersed areas (to cover when the wind dies)
3) 20,000 acre solar concentrating plant (8,000 acres direct electricity generation, 12,000 acres to store heat to continue production at night.)
(These are rough examples from quick wikipedia references)
The material and labor (and hence capital) requirements of all those projects are massive. (and considered by the authors) The land or river requirements of those projects are incredible, and glossed over by the Stanford professors. If the authors are concerned about the environment, they sure have a funny way of showing it- and other environmentalists will certainly take issue if any of these grand plans start to move forward.
Now, we've just talked about replacing the output of this particular nuclear power plant. The other challenge is getting that 1240 MWe to New England, and providing it constantly. 'A more robust electrical grid is required' is presented as an after thought, when it's just as central to the issue as generation.
First, adding grid capacity to move large amounts of electricity over massive distances is incredibly expensive. You either need to obtain 600' rights of way over several states and build massive steel towers every several hundred feet, or you need to buy a 60' right of way over the same distances, bury superconducting lines and put in refrigeration terminals ever few miles. (This latter technology is still in it's infancy, and while it will ultimately be cheaper than massive steel towers, it's still a large investment.)
Then you need to install Voltage Source Converters (VSC) at each end of these massive lines, because it pays off to transmit the electricity in DC and the VSC's help manage things like grid voltage and VAR loading. You can figure $200 million dollars for these end terminals. They're worth it if you decide to build the project, but the capital cost can't be ignored.
Now you need to build lines of this capacity into New England from a number of locations, to ensure reliability. Some existing lines can be used, some new lines are already underway, but you're still not going to find buildable lands or rivers to replace this particular nuclear power plant up here in the Northeast. More will
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
GP said 5% effective. Supposedly, the best capture systems of today have an efficiency of around 46%. The gap from 46% to 5% allows a 9x loss in transmission. If we get into hydrogen efficiency, the efficiency section of the fuel cell page on wikipedia indicate that the power-plant-to-wheel efficiency of a high pressure hydrogen system is around 22%. This means that at 5% efficiency, there's left a 4x loss possible in the 5% efficiency above - which should plenty cover e.g. capturing power with power cells and moving it to heat something locally (though in that case a mirror may be more efficient).
You raw materials point may be well taken; I've not looked into that at all.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
It's not just shipping. The farming and manufacture techniques are an order of magnitude more energy intensive than traditional techniques. The so-called green revolution is oil intensive, and could fall on its ass.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
probably even less if one considers impacts of mass production and technological improvements.
It will not be less -- because of the cost of resources, which are already being squeezed.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The summary is attributing to Jacobson the views of greencarreport.com which has the linked article. Jacobson is pretty optimistic about hydrogen fuel cells and the article is contradicting him saying that they won't be competitive soon. And, electricity is clearly playing the role of fuel in cars now so the shorthand is not really all that objectionable.
your criticism of 'lefties' for what they didn't actually do immediately after sep 11 2001 rings especially hollow given that 'righties' did do what is described i.e. grab more power and control over peoples lives, using the 'war on terror' as an excuse,
So, we are drilling in ANWR now? No? Then it appears the "righties" didn't get their way as much as you like to lead people to believe.
As for the "righties" being solely responsible for the "war on terror", I seem to recall very few "lefties" voting against it.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Not disagreeing with you but you do have to count the conversion losses. So if the energy starts in AC and needs to end in AC you're going through two transformers. My google-fu shows the conversion efficiency is about 65%, which may or may not be correct. Anyways, it's still a viable option in conjunction with nuclear imho.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
2050 is going to be too late for renewable energy, current predictions say commercial nuclear fusion will be viable by then.
Now geopolitically this isn't an option for a lot of the world (the EU for instance would need solar thermal power plants in Africa ... and Africa is a
shithole).
It would be much less of a shithole if it could earn a lot of money selling energy to the EU.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
... that anything significant and necessary making the human culture on this plantet sustainable will happen in the near future.
The efforts necessary cannot be undertaken in the current prevailing socio-economic control structure which fails right now.
Suggest you take a look at http://www.youtube.com/user/TZMOfficialChannel which shows the issues and tries giving an alternative.
What worldwide cooperation needs to happen to make this effort happen?
Have a look - in US "democracy" - failing
Totalitarian systems - dictatorships, monarchies - failing, right now people protesting to change to democracies.
Seems like much more suffering (jobs, housing, food, environment, violence..) needs to happen that people become willing to drop the current nonsense.
So this lofty authority is certain that we can be free of our energy crisis yet he has no clue as to what the fuels will be nor what it takes to garner those fuels or the space and technology required to deploy them. And when we get beyond all of that we still have the issue of heat generation from motors, lights etc..
Whatever we do two things stick out. We each need to consume less and we must reduce the populations if we have any real hope at all. The population bomb is already exploding and each new human demands natural resources to survive.
No, it isn't what liberals think. Are you so desperate to make liberals look bad that you're going to take an obviously uninformed and ridiculous viewpoint and try to make it seem representative of what members of a political party think? I suppose that's one way to make an excuse for Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and the like.
Sorry, but I don't see a whole lot of conservatives blocking energy production. Liberals want to ban any energy production that may make someone money. They are against natural gas, nuclear, and even renewable, green energy. Try to cover Death Valley with solar panels and you'll have a horde of liberals protesting that it will harm some endangered fly that lives there. Try to put wind turbines in West Texas and you have environmentalists complaining about the damage to birds that may fly into the spinning blades.
Conservatives don't care where the energy comes from. They want to drill for oil, extract oil from shale, pull gas from the ground, put up wind turbines, build nuclear power plants and cover the deserts solar panels. Conservatives believe that the market is Darwinian. They believe that the market will naturally find the most efficient way to produce energy in the quest to maximize profit. Competition between industries and companies will ensure that the "strong survive and the weak die off" through the natural selection of the market. When one method of energy production becomes scarce, peak oil for example, the price goes up, making other forms of production more desirable. The idea is that as we run out of oil, it will become more expensive. This will spur more efficient/effective ways of extracting it and will naturally encourage other means of production. When oil is expensive, renewables are suddenly not so expensive by comparison which will spur development in that area. Natural selection will win out and continue to provide us with the most efficient means of energy production possible.
Because conservatives consider that fossil fuels as a viable option in energy production, and because it is currently the most efficient method of producing energy, liberals like to label them as against renewables. Unfortunately, that label is not accurate. Conservatives are not against renewables. Conservatives are against providing subsidies to one sector while penalizing another in other to give an advantage to methods that are not the most efficient. It doesn't matter that the goal of a free and open is to maximize efficiency. Liberals will intentionally mislabel conservatives as opposing renewable energy with the goal of destroying the planet.
And to bring this point back to the topic, just as liberals with mislabel conservatives as those who for no known reason like a destroyed planet, liberals will mislabel renewable or sustainable energy as "free" to sweeten the idea in an attempt to push their agenda.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Not "righties". Neocons. Which came over from the left.
What does that mean? You think Neocons aren't right wing? You think they used to be left wing but had a road to Damascus moment? What are you talking about?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
... so fuck 'em. My generation had a pain in the ass dealing with all the bullshit that mere existence dished out, so let's just let's just leave nuclear waste, lack of petroleum based fuels, etc, as a problem for forthcoming generations.
Ignorance continues...
Nuclear power generation remains the most efficient and clean way of maintaining the world's energy needs. Simply because America let Carter screw up its implementation and Fonda scare Congress into submission is not the technology's fault.
Add to that the fact that nothing is or ever will be 100% renewable. Everything has a cost. Entropy, anyone? Many of these costs may not be readily apparent to us now, but the only thing I'm certain of is that we will all pay it in the end.
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."
I really doubt we won't have the required will to go into renewables AFTER* we runt out of oil and natural gas. Of course, we could still use coal, deep and calories poor coal.
May I say: Get real people! 2050 is the timeframe both of you main energy sources are expected to be almost all gone.
Rethinking email
Why is no one mentioning perhaps the most promising renewable fuel: Algae Biofuels. The idea is to grow photosynthetic algae in land based salt water tanks. We can engineer the types of algae to be easily refinable into fuel. And we won't need to use vast tracts of arable land since the tanks won't need good soil, nor will we need large amounts of fresh water. The difficulties lie in keeping the algae tanks growing the right organisms. Overall, this could be vastly scalable.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
what costs $80 now should cost over $250 in 35 years with inflation it's no big deal
Congrats! You have just won the Slashdot Moron of the Year Award.
If Mark Jacobson has the money, and wants to spend it, then there's no "economic barrier" to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources. But, I don't have the money, so it's an economic barrier to me.
Isn't thinking like this exactly what got us civilization? FTFY.
That is all.
The paper is disappointing.
One of the assumptions of the paper is that some sources, like wind and tidal power, can be expanded as desired. That's not the case.
Tidal power is very limited; the geography has to be just right. There are about four really good sites in the world, the Bay of Fundy being the best. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near a big electrical load.
Wind power sites are more limited than most people realize. Look at the wind maps of the United States. The high wind areas are mostly far from the populated areas. The best wind areas are from the Texas panhandle north to Canada, the big empty space in the US. Illinois looks very promising.The Northeast and South, not much. California has four really good on-shore wind sites, and all four already have wind farms.
Wind power is also more variable than its enthusiasts realize. Check out the current California wind output graph. There's been a 3:1 variation in output just today, and that's with wind farms spread over an area 400 miles across.
Hydroelectric power is great, but all the good dam sites were gone by 1940. The ideal dam is Hoover Dam - plug up a gorge in a useless desert and fill the desert with water. Few other sites are that good.
Hydrogen is, of course, a joke. It's a terrible way to store electric power. Inefficient to make, and dangerous to handle. Electric cars get that job done just fine with batteries.
Ethanol from cellulose looks promising. That works now, although it's still kind of expensive. It runs on agricultural waste and other unwanted cellulose, so it's a good renewable source. That's probably the liquid fuel of the future. Ethanol from food crops is a tax gimmick.
Solar power is very effective in the right climate. Realistically, that means the southern half of the US and points south, Spain, most of India, Africa, etc. There's also the nice property that peak electrical load in places that need air conditioning is guaranteed to coincide with peak solar power output.
The world will end up running mostly on renewable energy, though. The fossil fuels are running out. Oil at $100/bbl is the new normal. It's not going to be pleasant.
Weren't you supposed to have been purged back in the 40s alongside all your other fellow true believer Stalinists?
Stalinists weren't purged in the 1940's. They were members in good standing with the party until Khrushchev won his struggle against Malenkov for leadership of the party in 1955. Then they were purged. Why are you trying to rewrite history, capitalist pig dog?
That is all.
hydrocarbons + O2 => energy + H2O + CO2
There is nothing inherently preventing the reaction from being run backwards. Plants do it all the time. However, why not skip the plant stage? There are all sorts of problems with arable land being consumed for biofuel production, even if we disregard corn ethanol. So, why not make the hydrocarbons directly?
This is not a new idea, and it is not theoretical only:
We need to stop conflating petroleum's source with its capacity as a "battery". We are always going to need hydrocarbons for plastics, oils, etc. Also, the energy density of gasoline, at ~45 MJ/kg, is orders of magnitude better than the best battery technology available.
...just don't conflate the use of hydrocarbons with their source. If we can make the source clean/renewable, then what further problems exist? I freely admit much more research & engineering is necessary in this field, but all of these prognostications engage in similar thought exercises (including TFA).
It would be awesome to run reverse combustion at large-scale nuclear facilities. It would benefit from improved efficiency at the nuclear plants due to running the reaction on thermal energy rather than going through the relatively inefficient step of thermal to electrical conversion. This approach would be, by definition, carbon neutral. Hell, if we wanted to remove CO2 from the atmosphere we could just run the plants in overtime and pump the hydrocarbons back into the geological reservoirs we drained in the past (would the EPA have a problem with that? Hmm...)
The potential benefits are significant: a single point solution that retains all the current infrastructure investment in petroleum distribution/consumption, no issues with hydrocarbon "self-discharge" like batteries/ultracaps have, excellent energy density, etc. We will always need hydrocarbons, so why wean ourselves off of them?
... once the fusion has become available enough for reg. joe's to use and have, it wont be long before hackers would break it down to know how it works and tweak it, and therefor become self sustaining, ...
A number of fusion approaches are being investigated. All of them except perhaps laser ignition are not susceptible to easy conversion to a batch process.
The problem with fusion is to get it going on a big chunk of material using something short of a fission bomb. Farnsworth-Hirsch, Polywell, Dense Plasma Focus, and classical magnetic confinement devices such as Tokamak are dealing with applying extreme control to something very close to a vacuum. Muon-catalyzed fusion can't break even because the muons decay before they've caused enough fusion to pay the energy cost of their creation. Solid-state approaches (if they actually do work) apparently require stable large-scale order that breaks down by the melting-point temperature of the solid substrate. Laser-ignited approaches require a barn-size laser system to put the squeeze on a dust mote from all sides, and while the square-cube law says a factory-sized system might get you up to setting off nuclear party-poppers you're still a long way away from setting off pounds of fuel in a fusion bang.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Um, apparently, no one told them about the Laws of Thermodynamics?
"Conservatives are against providing subsidies to one sector while penalizing another in other to give an advantage to methods that are not the most efficient."
Glad to have conservatives on board with killing fossil fuel's annual $15-35 billion subsidy. I'm sure Boehner will include that in the House budget to help reduce the deficit and to make the energy market freer.
There are no technological or economic barriers
Merely saying that there's no "barrier" (that is, something isn't impossible), doesn't make something a good idea. There's no technological or economic barriers to building replicas of the Pyramids of Giza every week either. But after you put up a few thousand pyramids, you might start to wonder if it was really worth the effort.
Throughout part 1 of the actual paper, you can read the biases that the authors bring to the subject (eg, page 4, emphasis mine):
Fusion of light atomic nuclei (e.g., protium, deuterium, or tritium) theoretically could supply power indefinitely without long-lived radioactive wastes as the products are isotopes of helium (Ongena and Van Oost, 2006; Tokimatsu et al., 2003); however, it would produce short-livedwaste that needs to be removed fromthe reactor core to avoid interference with operations, and it is unlikely to be commercially available for at least another 50â"100 years (Tokimatsu et al., 2003; Barre , 1999; Hammond, 1996), long after we will have needed to transition to alternative energy sources.
It's worth noting again that no one has demonstrated this need.
Table 4 on page 7 claims that the US needs 1.8 TW of electricity production. It's worth noting that in 2000, the US consumed on the order of 100 quadrillion BTU (looked like about 90 quadrillion BTU to me) in energy of all kinds including fossil fuels for heating and transportation. Most of that demand in a renewable world would be shuffled to electricity and hydrogen production. So if it had happened in 2000, we would probably be looking at an average demand of 3 TW or so. Now grow that for 30 years. 1.8 TW looks highly unrealistic, probably no more than half the actual demand in 2030.
Glancing through part 2, I see more unrealistic assumptions (page 2).
For example, the average coal plant in the US from 2000 to 2004 was down 6.5% of the year for unscheduled maintenance and 6.0% of the year for scheduled maintenance (North American Electric Reliability Corporation, 2009a), but modern wind turbines have a down time of only 0â"2% over land and 0â"5% over the ocean (Dong Energy et al.,2006, p. 133).
Maybe windfarms can achieve this fabled downtime, but that hasn't been true of the windfarms I've seen at the time I passed by them. I routinely see a mix of unmoving and moving wind turbines. A 2% downtime would mean that I would almost never seen halted wind turbines except in very large numbers (typically 50 or more). And we ignore the variability of wind power which is downtime of another sort.
On the following page, figure 1 has erroneous natural gas generation IMHO. The low to high power demand is roughly 25%. I simply don't believe that peak power demand on a summer day is going to be a mere 25% greater than power consumed at 4am. The second problem with those figures is the natural gas generators. Those have a relatively expensive operation, so they will be run as peaking power, that is, run at the peak demand times of the day, not continually as background power. Now if that demand curve had no natural gas generation at 4am, then it would have a reasonable trough to peak of a factor of 2.
In addition, we have the notorious variability of wind and solar. This is glossed over in the paper though they do discuss four typical ways of dealing with the problem. While geographic diversification and demand reduction at times of supply problems can help (though they exaggerate the benefits of these two approaches as well as the benefits of weather prediction), the two primary ways are complementary sources (such as natural gas and hydro), which
how on earth do you plan to move all this energy to places that need it?
With inverters or DC-to-DC switching upconverters.
You need high voltage low current for long-distance power transmission and moderate voltages with high current at the load and in the generation machinery.
AC beat out DC with 19th century technology. With AC, transformers perform the up- and down-conversion cheaply and efficiently. For DC they needed rotary converters and that limited the voltage that could be produced. (The practical limit was around 600 volts due to commutator arc-over. Too low for cross-country transmission. So Tesla-Westinghouse beat out Edison-GE by bringing cheap hydropower from Niagra Falls to New York City.)
But by the middle of the 20th century, vacuum tube technology made DC power transmission competitive with AC for very long distances (to ammortize the cost of the voltage converters), and shortly afterward semiconductors made it advantageous. These days the solid-state electronics is so good that PC boards are designed with multiple stages of voltage conversion, because you lose less power in the extra voltage converter than in shipping 1.2V a few inches across the board in a pair of copper layers.
So getting DC from the panels converted to something shippable - either synchronized with the local AC grid or shifted to high-voltage DC - is no problem at all. EXACTLY the same technology - and the same Moore's Law - that took computers from rooms full of racks full of vacuum tubes to chips in every appliance and toy has performed the same improvement on the voltage conversion problem for power transmission.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Do you have any links that aren't to websites run by right-wing anti-abortionist nutters?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_Research_Institute
And what are you going to grow? A single tomato?
Sheesh. Be responsible. Use the man for some savory Soylent Green.
My generation had a pain in the ass dealing with all the bullshit that mere existence dished out
New idea for renewable energy: round up the baby boomers and make them run in a giant treadmill.
(selfish baby boomer asshole)
PS Thanks for the two recessions since my generation graduated from high school, fuckstick. Did you enjoy riding on the backs of the economic success ensured by the Greatest Generation?
"Conservatives are against providing subsidies to one sector while penalizing another in other to give an advantage to methods that are not the most efficient."
Glad to have conservatives on board with killing fossil fuel's annual $15-35 billion subsidy. I'm sure Boehner will include that in the House budget to help reduce the deficit and to make the energy market freer.
Yes, but at the same time, the government needs to get out of the way when it comes to energy production. For example, declaring the polar bear and endangered species, when by every definition it's not, is the kind of crap that has to stop.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
While not 100% renewable, Geothermal heat pumps would represent a 60-70+% reduction in fossil fuel/electricity use YEAR ROUND for heating and cooling homes and businesses plus free hot water in the summer.Geothermal heat pump technology can be used (almost) anywhere in the US. Installing these systems in new homes and businesses when they are built would be much more cost effective. Closed loop systems don't pollute and most have lifespans of 30-50 years. Seems like everyone should be using it NOW!! http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/heatpumps.html
Bio diesel has promise and can be made from organics in your garage, it is quite possible NOW to ramp up production commercially and use of this fuel for transportation? http://www.cubiodiesel.org/how_to_make_biodiesel.php
Solar and battery technology are quickly improving, the more we use the technology the better(cheaper, more efficient) it becomes. We should install more solar electricity and hot water systems NOW.
But...we are currently sitting on our hands waiting for petroleum to hit catastrophic price levels before fully embracing these technologies, I hope we can start aggressively using these now?
Sounds like a reworking of Jacobson's 2009 cover article in Scientific American, which was *savaged* for it's bizarre economic assumptions, as well as it's jury-rigged opposition to nuclear power. Old (and discredited) news.
Was that a question?
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
talk is cheap. Stanford has so much money, they should lead the way and make a pilot city. If you can't run a 100% green pilot-city, then what chance do you have for convincing the world to your blabber.
Shit, it will take that long just to get the building permits approved.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Sarcasm alert.
WALSTIB!
The fact that this was modded down is proof of the mislabeling liberals apply. They will mislabel comments they don't agree with as an attempt to silence them so that only THEIR ideas are heard. Guess they hate the "free exchange of ideas" unless the only ideas freely exchanged are their own.
Again, the downmod of your post only proves your claim.
No matter what you do, someone's generation will starve.
If Israelis and Palestinians both decided to give the other side exactly what they want, we could have peace in the middle east!
And if every US citizen gave every penny to the government, we could be debt free
What other news do they have from the "sure, if the impossible happened we could do something highly difficult" department?"
Nucular?
This has always been my favorite article on 100% renewable energy. It's an algae biodiesel study done by Michael Briggs at the University of New Hampshire's physics department.
Here's a link to the story.
Had to use the wayback machine, UNH isn't hosting the page anymore. Anyways, it has always looked like an excellent proposal to me. It's almost too good to be true, but I can't find any faults with his numbers.
Can anyone here poke holes in this plan?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"Those public-health benefits might include saving 2.5 to 3 million lives each year." Why don't we start bringing this number to the forefront of the debate? We've spent over 1 trillion dollars in the middle east because 3000 people died, can we spend 1 quadrillion on energy to save 3 million lives?
would anyone take a prediction from 50 years ago seriously? How would we view anyone demanding 50 years ago a certain social order because he "knew" what kind of technology we would "need" today?
Well, hopefully in 30 years from now, our tech will have come so far that this type of process will be achievable quite easily with what we have.
isn't thinking like this exactly how we got into every problem of post-slavery agrarian life? civilization is unsustainable without the human sacrifice of slavery.
Even ignoring thorium for the moment, the uranium supply for breeder reactors is inexhaustible by any sensible definition.
You can extract uranium from seawater, in principle. The only real question is the cost. However, with breeder reactors the fuel cost is essentially irrelevant, so this is no barrier.
Enough uranium is added to the ocean every year (by eroding land dissolving) to more than meet any conceivable level of energy demand, if it was burned in a breeder reactor.
It's not a perpetual motion machine in the theoretical sense, but we can continue to run our society using breeder reactors until the sun becomes a red giant and vapourizes the oceans.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
No, he meant to imply that only humanity's uses of energy are relevant to the current discussion.
I know, it's quite specieist of them.
The enemies of Democracy are
The GDP of the United States is around 14.5 trillion dollars. Taking an average historical growth rate of 3.2% per year, the cumulative GDP of the US from 2011 to 2050 is 1144 trillion dollars.
Therefore, your supposedly preposterous cost represents around 10% of GDP over the period.
In any case, your numbers are an exaggeration even in 2011, and you'd have to be horribly pessimistic to assume the costs of wind turbines and solar energy aren't going to drop over that period. For one thing, the current commodity price spike can't last forever.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The polar bear is listed as threatened, not endangered. As a threatened species the polar bear is protected under the Endangered Species act. That status of threatened is likely to worsen, as the US Geological Survey predicts a two-thirds decline in population by 2050 due to loss of arctic ice from global warming. However the protected status of polar bears is a red herring. Oil and gas exploration and drilling is currently permitted to continue in polar bear habitats providing that those so engaged comply with the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
http://remineralize.org/
And such fertilizer produces healthier plants that need less pesticides.
"Biodegradable plastic made from plants, not oil, is emerging"
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2008-12-25-biodegradable-plastic_N.htm
"Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
"More energy goes into making gasoline from electricity and natural gas than it would take to make electric cars go the same distance"
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"
Other approaches to all renewables:
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
Given the exponetial growth of renewable energy, and how PV solar panels are about to reach grid parity and the prices will continue to drop, I think we will be all renewables by about 2030 from market forces alone at this point. (Unless cold fusion pans out, or if small scale nuclear like Hyperion gets popular.)
Three quarters of US agricultural production also just goes to produce livestock, and the health consequences of too much animal products are harming people's health, too, so we really don't need most of the fertilizer we produce.
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
How to deal with the economic consequences of all this increased efficiency:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/more-on-the-future-implications-ibm-watson-technology/#comment-534
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The article linked in the summary is completely worthless. Here is the real article, in two parts:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2010.11.040
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2010.11.045
Hopefully, you have some university access or something.
Mark Z. Jacobson, Mark A. Delucchi, Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials, Energy Policy, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 30 December 2010, ISSN 0301-4215, DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2010.11.040.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V2W-51TXP82-2/2/de5d9bb816ee92da3bfef3f8ecd54b1d)
Abstract:
Climate change, pollution, and energy insecurity are among the greatest problems of our time. Addressing them requires major changes in our energy infrastructure. Here, we analyze the feasibility of providing worldwide energy for all purposes (electric power, transportation, heating/cooling, etc.) from wind, water, and sunlight (WWS). In Part I, we discuss WWS energy system characteristics, current and future energy demand, availability of WWS resources, numbers of WWS devices, and area and material requirements. In Part II, we address variability, economics, and policy of WWS energy. We estimate that ~3,800,000 5 MW wind turbines, ~49,000 300 MW concentrated solar plants, ~40,000 300 MW solar PV power plants, ~1.7 billion 3 kW rooftop PV systems, ~5350 100 MW geothermal power plants, ~270 new 1300 MW hydroelectric power plants, ~720,000 0.75 MW wave devices, and ~490,000 1 MW tidal turbines can power a 2030 WWS world that uses electricity and electrolytic hydrogen for all purposes. Such a WWS infrastructure reduces world power demand by 30% and requires only ~0.41% and ~0.59% more of the world's land for footprint and spacing, respectively. We suggest producing all new energy with WWS by 2030 and replacing the pre-existing energy by 2050. Barriers to the plan are primarily social and political, not technological or economic. The energy cost in a WWS world should be similar to that today.
Sorry but some of the shittiest shitholes in Africa are selling boatloads of energy to the EU right now; if anything addition money from energy sales increases the depth of the shit in a shithole.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
>>Stalinists weren't purged in the 1940's.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Oh, comrade. You kill me!
No, no, but seriously. Stalin purged so many of his own people in the 30s and 40s that it was by sheer coincidence they still had Zhukov left around to handle Stalingrad.
>>They were members in good standing with the party until Khrushchev won his struggle against Malenkov for leadership of the party in 1955.
True loyalists and members in good standing were purged as well. Even the guy who ran the Great Purge got purged in 1940 by Stalin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#Fall_from_power
Unless you believe that the free and free-to-edit-by-the-masses wikipedia is a product of capitalist pig dogs, comrade.
Not if Jevons Paradox has anything to say about it.
More result per unit cost just increases the incentive to spend more, since the rate of return gets more and more favorable. it's unlikely next year's bleeding edge gaming rig will use less power - if you can do next year with 450 watts what you can do today with 1200 watts, imagine what you can do next year with 1200 watts!
I think the only reason PCs haven't gotten much more power hungry is because there is a limit to how much power you can suck out of a wall socket before needing to redo the wiring.
=Smidge=
Fewer newborns also means fewer elderly, given enough time. Considering one individual has the capacity to reap the resources needed to keep hundreds of others going it really does not present a problem - the limit is the total resources available.
What you are proposing is essentially a ponzi scheme with human lives instead of money, which can only lead to the collapse of civilization. Good job breaking it, hero.
"So if the energy starts in AC and needs to end in AC you're going through two transformers. My google-fu shows the conversion efficiency is about 65%, which may or may not be correct. Anyways, it's still a viable option in conjunction with nuclear imho.
Unless you have some really bizarre solar-cells that I haven't ever heard of, you start out with direct current, not alternating current.
Not to jump in and interrupt your points, but I thought I'd like to add some (slightly) anecdotal evidence.
Out here in southern NM, there were some plants to put a molten salt plant in for power generation. It was supposed to create a few thousand jobs, turn this part of the country into a power exporter, and so on.
Then it was blocked because of the local ecogroups that decided the land area it would impact would harm biodiversity. As far as I know, it'll never be built.
In short--none of these renewable energy sources are going to be deployed on a large scale precisely because various special interest groups have our policymakers (and legal system) in a choke hold.
He who has no
From the report:
"[land required to] minimize the effects of one turbine reducing energy to other turbines is 1.17% of the global land area. "
Global land area is 148,940,000 km^2. 1.17% of that is 1,742,598 km^2. That is about the size of Libya, or slightly larger than Iran or Mongolia, and much larger than Peru, South Africa, Egypt, or Venezuela.
It is larger than the largest national park in the world (Northeast Greenland National Park @ 972,000 km^2), and of course far larger than any US national park. It is 127 Death Valleys, 194 Yellowstones, or 565 Yosemites.
Good luck with the environmental impact statement on that!
"100-Renewable-Energy-Possible-By-2050"
If you believe that, then you will believe that 2012 will be the year of Linux on laptops.
Pigskin-Referee
Linux: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow
Dam's are great for humans in the short run, but as we have seen with nearly every attempt we have made to shape nature to our will it causes long term damage. Dams restructure entire ecosystems. They (obviously) change water levels in adjoining rivers and streams will leads to kill offs of entire ecosystems. They mess up spawning patterns of various fish and even the ones that add fish ladders still screw it up because there is a severe temperature gradient between the two sides of a dam that upsets egg viability. There are several more ways and I am sure you can find lists on the web from the Army Corps of engineers, etc. that are less biased than some of the more radical green groups, but in general dams are not good for the environment.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
"Easy" to get to hydrogen for direct use is abundant from Iceland and is a route of exploration by traditional oil companies. I see it as one of the most likely planet scale replacements for gasoline unless there is some major breakthrough in fusion energy in the next 10 years or so.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I know this comes off as naive to the security issues, but small breeders are much cheaper to build and maintain and the waste costs are next to nothing (which is where most of the operating expenses come from). I don't have a problem with wind. I live in Indiana and we are building a huge wind farm here to get away from our other big native energy source - cheap coal.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
You are dead on that algae is a super fuel and is cheap. The reason corn and palm oil has dominated the bio fuel markets is national economics pure and simple. Corn is horrible for a fuel source and has cause the price of food around the world to skyrocket (and I come from where it is booming the local economy). Palm oil production has done more to slash and burn rain forest than beef production ever has.
The problem with algae production for fuel is that it is difficult for any nation to grow out the production on anything except international waters and no one can own that. Okay, the problem lies with strictly capitalistic countries and the multinational companies that have strong vested interests in seeing that never happens.
Corn subsidies in the United States are tens of billions of dollars and yet corn is selling for the highest price in history. These are not family farms. They are gigantic factory farms owned by huge corporations. That's what needs to be fought to get algae accepted. It sucks.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
You got no-one you care about that would be affected? You have have my sympathy.
And to the mods, "interesting"? Really?
Wikipedia has a link to Siemens which claims otherwise ...
And wikipedia has dozens of links to perpetuum mobile machines, and yet more to weight-loss cures and creams that make you younger. Your point ?
Specifically, HVDC lines can run less than 100 km before an interconnection point is a necessity, for safety reasons at the very least. Interconnection means 1-2% power loss at least.
Here's what we have operational today, verified and free from idiocy and hocus-pocus : 5% transmission loss per 10 km. That's with the power delivered into people's living rooms. Perhaps with upgrades we can get to 1-2% over 15-20 years.
Oh ... and the US does not have a power grid that could do it at 5%/10km. Let's not pretend we'll have a universal HVDC network within 50 years, because we won't. What you're suggesting requires making 60% of ALL investments the US ever did in electricity (throwing out everything except the last mile) and remaking them in 10-20 years. We could just as well conquer the world and exploit them, because that would be a hell of a lot cheaper. Alternatively, it's a LOT more than GDP, ergo it's simply not going to happen.
One sees this all the time, some new, young, "hip" (or otherwise) engineer comes in to a company that has actual expenses, existing systems, limits to investment capital, and frankly, a LOT of work just to keep things operational. Obviously the first month is spent shooting down the wild theoretical proposals made, because they don't work. Don't worry, it'll pass, you'll get over it. I did that myself not that long ago.
And yes, the hate for the term "historical reasons" will remain. That's a good thing. But you still can't just propose to throw out all existing infrastructure and replace it. Find another way, or live with the fact that all your proposals will get turned down, or blow up in the company's face.
You might want to look into what sort of voltage solar cells are capable of generating (even when connected in series). At those voltages, AC wins the efficiency race by a few oceanlengths.
So you're right : we'll need a conversion chain : DC (solar power) -> AC (to the interconnection point) -> DC AC (for voltage upscaling) -> DC (HVDC transmission) -> DC-AC (voltage downscaling and distribution) -> AC (to the local distributions) -> AC (to your home meter) -> AC (to the actual sockets)
With each of those at some 80-90% efficiency.
*sigh* that's the ratio between incoming solar power to what theoretically hits the first power plane inside the solar cell.
We won't be anywhere near 5% efficiency when arriving at the power socket in your home. It'll take a miracle to get near 0.1%.
> At $100 per bbl that's $8.5 billion per day or, by 2050 $120 trillion, almost exactly the same cost as you've given above.
The real differentiator is that you'd be spending most of that money at home building your new energy infrastructure, instead of forking it over to corrupt middle-eastern despots to build air-conditioned palaces in the sand, as you do now. Hell of a lot better stimulus program too than the bank bailout, Iraq war, and all the other lobby-induced nonsense the US government likes to lose a trillion on every year or so.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
As I said, 46% compared to 5% efficiency allows a 9x - 90% - loss in transmission, missing coverage, broken panels, etc. Present commercial cells are 30% effective total, so that would give us 6x rather than 9x. The present normal transmission loss is about 6.6%, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission), so that would also have to be taken out; that leaves us with a 5.6 loss factor inside the production facility. 5x seems possible (we'll only get to cover 1/3 or so of the ground, and there's some other losses); however, you're arguing another 50x loss.
For the other approach I described, powerplan-to-wheel efficiency for high pressure hydrogen is (as noted above) estimated at 22% efficiency; and the powerplant in this case is a heat source, which we can reproduce with mirrors. If we assume there's *no* loss involved as soon as the hydrogen has reached the car (which would the worst case for my computation), we can replace the car with a 60% efficient turbine, to get 13.2% efficiency. After transmission loss of 6.6%, this gives us 12.3% efficency (rounding down), leaving us a failure/non-coverage/etc rate of ~2.5 to hit 5%.
You are claiming that we will need a miracle to end up at .1%. This is over 120x losses compared to hydrogen efficiency with transmission, and 280x losses compared to solar cell efficiency with transmission. If you want to convince me, you have to point at likely sources for those big factors. Saying "we'll need a miracle" is just a random claim by a random dude on the Internet; it should not convince me (or anybody) of anything.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
The problem is you should multiply all those factors.
First you have theoretical cell efficiency. Let's call it 30% (broken cells, minus production costs, maintenance equipment, infrastructure and personnel : we'll never get anywhere near 30% even with 50% efficiency solar panels, murphy won't let that happen without a fight). Then you have internal transmission within the power plant and storage (for the night), that's a difficult problem, let's say 10% efficient all in all. Then you have transmission to outside the powerplant. Let's say that is reasonably efficient, but it does involve somewhat less efficient voltage conversion, so let's say 80% - 90% - 80% efficiency before we get to a tanking station. Charging the battery : at the very best 40% efficient (I doubt it, but let's say we can get it that efficient by 2015 or so). Voltage changes within the car have to occur as well, and you have to feed internal circuitry, let's say 80% efficieny for power getting into the motor. Then power fed into the engine versus actual movement. While electric motors are very efficient indeed, mechanical transmission is not, let's call it 70% efficiency.
So this would give you 30% * 10% * 80% * 90% * 80% * 40% * 80% * 70% = 0.387072% total efficiency. Incoming solar power -> movement on the road
(power delivered into houses, due to the involvement of several more conversion steps should not be that far from this number either, certainly it'd be lower for remote regions, both due to transmission distance *and* lower-quality equipment. Btw : before you propose not providing power to the rocky mountains : that's not allowed by federal law : everyone gets to have power from the grid)
(incidentally this is why electrical engineers are always working so hard to get "conversion steps" out of the way)
And yes, rebuilding the entire infrastructure from scratch always allows for nice savings (though nowhere near what you're claiming to be possible). Believe it or not, but I think this was probably true 2000 years ago as much as today. That doesn't mean it's a viable option.
So your 251*251 kilometer square has just been upscaled to a 251 * sqrt(100/0.4) side square, that's 4000 km * 4000 km (assuming pure electric cars, hydrogen cars would require more). And this would only work if everyone lived ... I don't know ... below the covered surface perhaps ? Certainly they couldn't live very far from the edge before transmission losses would be bigger.