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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.
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
... 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!
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
Isn't thinking like this exactly what got us into the environmental and energy problems we have now?
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.
Reservoir sites usually contain lots of vegetation, and once underwater, the plants naturally decompose and release methane (a greenhouse gas). That's why it's considered "dirty." It's considered destructive because of the effect on migratory patterns, currents, and the overall eco-system surrounding the dam. There have also been reports of increased temperature levels around hydroelectric dams which can have a very harmful effect on surrounding wildlife.
Thermal effects of hydroelectric power stations on the environment
The Environmental Literacy Council - Hydroelectric Power
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Breeder reactors are relatively efficient. "Never run out of fuel" is a pipe dream. The 1800s perpetual motion machines want to talk to you.
-josh
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.
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I think "no economic barriers" is different from "more profitable". There were no economic barriers to going to the moon, but it was not profitable. Because there was no profit in it, we wouldn't expect companies to do it without public backing.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
>>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!
>>By 2050 disease and war will have reduced the global population to a fraction of what it is today
I am fascinated with your ability to predict the future and would like to subscribe to your RSS feed.
If anything, though, diseases and war have been trending down in the last 60 years. The only real threats these days is some sort of unknown superbug, or a rogue state engineering a superAIDS virus (or just getting nuclear weapons and dropping it on us).
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.
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.
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.
I'll just put this up there with the perpetual motion machine, because there is always something that breaks any time it comes to energy, nothing is fully renewable. Entropy rules all in the end. I'll believe it when I see it.
Hint: The energy's coming from a very large fusion reactor that will last billions of years. You might be able to spot it if you look out a window during daylight hours.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You didn't because your parents kept voting for the Flintstones.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Wow, what a horrible site full of misinformation and straw man arguments.
This site was funded by the Bradley Foundation, who also funded hard-right "think tank" groups such as PNAC, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Federalist Society. The authors affirm they are a network of "pro-life" groups.
The site begins by linking belief in overpopulation to efforts to kill the poor and promote Chinese abortions, then proceeds with meaningless factoids (all the humans on earth could fit in Texas) to conclude that overpopulation is a myth.
The only legitimate argument on the site is that the Earth can produce enough food, although the argument relies on petrochemical fertilizers, and does not acknowledge constraints on the petrochemicals.
The site does not even acknowledge concerns about the high risk of global diseases, the massive amounts of waste products and pollution from industry and agriculture, or constraints on energy and water supplies. Oh, and nobody has even mentioned that there might not be enough jobs for everyone in the world.
In one section, the authors "prove" the Earth's population will peak around 8 B in 30 years and begin to decline by linking to the UN Population DB and telling you to use the "low variant" model. They don't tell you that the other three models (constant fertility, medium, high) all show the population continuing to rise for the duration of the model (present - 2050).
Talk about selective information. What a crock of shit.
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?)
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?)