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Renewable Energy Production Surpasses Nuclear In the US
mdsolar writes "Renewable energy production has surpassed nuclear energy production in the U.S. according to the latest issue of Monthly Energy Review (PDF) published by the Energy Information Administration. ... During the first three months of 2011, energy produced from renewable energy sources (biomass/biofuels, geothermal, solar, hydro, wind) generated 2.245 quadrillion Btus of energy equating to 11.73 percent of U.S. energy production. During this same time period, renewable energy production surpassed nuclear energy power by 5.65 percent. In total, energy produced from renewables is 77.15 percent of that from domestic crude oil production."
Since solar-caused skin cancer kills more people every year than leaks from nuclear energy plants does.
Hydro-electric!
check out all that flooding!
We can basically say renewable energy fsckin works, now ?
Read radical news here
I wonder how much of that biomass consists of wood-burning stoves. Considering the time period of this study (first three months of this year) that could definitely be a large factor.
EDIT: A quick look at the PDF shows that biomass is the largest renewable energy source, at 1.049 quadrillion BTUs. It even beat out hydropower at 0.618 quadrillion BTUs. However, a look at 2009 and 2010 does not show a seasonal variation that you would expect from wood stoves.
It just includes installed hydroelectric.
There ain't more big rivers.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
that would be costs after interest, this is costs before. Although with interest at ~1% for bonds the difference might be quite small for the short term.
Besides, a lot of the infrastructure involved (for example hydro electric) was built some time ago, as was the nuclear, but nuclear is being phased out gradually (whether part of a broader strategy or not), whereas renewables aren't.
Btus? Can't we just stick to standards?
Kilo/Mega/Giga/Tera Watt hours in this case.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Do you mean by driving extremely inefficient cars and suvs?
Unless we want to try Tocks Island again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocks_Island
Hydroelectric has been a big part of the US electric grid for the better part of a century now (Roll on, Columbia roll on). I realize it's "renewable", but lumping it in with the newer renewables (biodiesel, wind, et. al.) - the electric production of which is miniscule compared to that of hydro - and then pretending it's us making strides towards a great green future is a tad misleading.
#DeleteChrome
Actually, the hard numbers, available in the second link, are in BTUs, not percentage points. comma
also, Renewable Energy(a)
a Most data are estimates. See Tables 10.1-10.2c for notes on series
components and estimation; and see Note, "Renewable Energy Production and
Consumption," at end of Section 10
It doesn't take a Genius Bar attendant to figure out mdsolar is spewing shit as usual, but that's never stopped him before.
actually, as long as that energy is replaced (ie, more farts are produced) then yes, by definition it makes it renewable energy.
"Notwithstanding the recent nuclear accident in Japan, among many others, and the rapid growth in energy and electricity from renewable sources, congressional Republicans continue to press for more nuclear energy funding while seeking deep cuts in renewable energy investments," said Ken Bossong, Executive Director of the SUN DAY Campaign. "One has to wonder 'what are these people thinking?'"
I have to wonder what he's thinking, because the best solution to US energy needs looking forward involves expansion of nuclear power as well as renewables. We still haven't really made a dent in the roughly half of US electricity production that comes from coal. And that huge base load need isn't going to be solved by intermittent power sources like solar or wind. Underfunding nuclear power development will only result in delays in bringing up safer newer plant designs.
Not much of a milestone since new reactors have been banned in the US for several decades while "green" power is being shoved down our throats regardless of the costs involved.
is also biomass. I suspect it is skewing the results. Also nuclear is more like 20% of US domestic energy electrical production. Also, they are talking total energy production, but nuclear is strictly electrical energy. So the comparisons are pretty much bogus designed to make it look like renewables are substantial when they are not.
Ok, wow... did I miss it, or did they completely avoid using any
real numbers, that could be tallied and put in a spreadsheet?
Everything seemed to be something of something else.
RTFA is a horrible idea. RTFPDF, well, that's up to you, it's
214 pages long.
Anyone rationalize those numbers out yet?
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Being simple minded, cost per kW-hour is about the only comparative metric I can get my head around.
I found this table... warning there could be a renewable bias.
"America - and much of the world -- is becoming increasingly electrified. Today, more than half of the electricity generated in the United States comes from coal. For the foreseeable future, coal will continue to be the dominant fuel used for electric power production. The low cost and abundance of coal is one of the primary reasons why consumers in the United States benefit from some of the lowest electricity rates of any free-market economy.
The Department's Office of Fossil Energy is working on ways to keep coal in America's electricity future. The key challenge is to remove the environmental objections to the use of coal in tomorrow's power plants. New technologies being developed in the Fossil Energy program could virtually eliminate the sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury pollutants released when coal is burned. It may also be possible to capture greenhouse gases emitted from coal-fired power plants and prevent them from contributing to global warming concerns."
http://www.energy.gov/energysources/electricpower.htm
The U.S. has the largest coal reserves of any country. Clean coal will always be the major factor in any U.S. energy policy. Period.
This sounds like great news for renewable energy buffs, except for one thing: if you're thinking this represents a success by high tech new power sources like wind, solar, etc., you're wrong.
The two biggest components of "renewable energy" in EIA's report are hydroelectric dams and biomass -- the biomass sector is mostly industrial wood and paper plants which run on waste wood, plus people using wood-fired stoves at home. Good for them, but it's not exactly high tech.
In 1990, before the wind-and-solar revolution, things broke down this way: .09 EJ
Nuclear: 6.1 exajoules
Hydro+biomass: 5.7 EJ
Wind+solar:
In 2000:
Nuclear: 7.8 EJ
Hydro+biomass: 5.8 EJ
Wind+solar: 0.12 EJ
In 2010:
Nuclear: 8.4 EJ
Hydro+biomass: 6.8 EJ
Wind+solar: 1.03 EJ
Or to put it another way: The "wind and solar revolution" that's taken place in the past 20 years now produces 1 EJ of energy per year. The nuclear power industry has managed to increase output by *twice* as much, without building a single new power plant, just running existing plants a little harder.
This isn't intended to support nuclear power or to knock renewables. My only point is that wind and solar are much less significant than people on both sides of the debate think they are, and if we intend to use them as serious industrial power sources, we're going to have to start building them in a serious industrial way. What we're doing now is making a mountain out of a molehill.
mdsolar is laughing to himself right now. He sucked off Soulskill yet again till he came. I mean, wowza. mdsolar has sucked off Soulskill so many times that his ding-dong doesn't have any skin left and is nearly down to the subcutaneous fat. But he does get his flood of submissions posted. And Soulskill gets to shoot a flood of a billion half-babies into another dude's mouth. Gross.
Percentages don't mean anything. Numbers can be skewed so many ways its not even funny.
Just because some greeny stuck a hose up his ass and lit his farts to make sear his tofu doesn't make it renewable energy.
For example, this article says that coal power is cooling the earth...
How much would nuclear be contributing if so-called environmentalists hadn't spent the last 35 years fighting against nuclear power.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Plenty of medium size projects around the USA. We no longer have LARGE 10-12 GW hydro type projects, but we have plenty that are 100-500 MW sizes. And 1000s are available in the 50-100 MW size. Interestingly, there are many dams that require a re-build and can be turned into a hydro-generator at the same time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not really, this has been an extremely productive year for hydroelectric dams, hardly a typical year, we'll be lucky not to have a year this productive for quite some time. Now, if this were a normal year or the figures weren't so skewed from hydroelectric dams having to top out their capacity, this might suggest just that.
considering the only reason why the figures are what they are because of the increase in biomass aka ETHANOL I would say yes, nuclear is still the only viable alternative. Hydro is maxed out, wind blows (ha!) and solar is the promise which never lives up to the hype.
The problem is coal, not nuclear. It's ridiculous that most of a allegedly first world nation's energy still comes from coal in the XXI century.
Sorry, more and more environmental groups are demanding hydro NOT be considered a renewable resource. Bounce it back out and you'll probably lose 95% of your total...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
No new plants to speak of so really what we are seeing is decades of overcapacity in nuclear power, basically waste of capacity since nuclear power is supposed to be baseload. And this is really what killed the nuclear construction industry in the eighties. Bad planning. http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/25/244122/three-mile-island-accident-nuclear-power/
"It doesn't get much simpler."
Oh, the chart itself is simple. The problem is, it's incomplete info without much context.
You have to go to the EIA.gov web site and look at other tables than the one linked to find out that the big part of biomass used is wood.
That's been fairly steady for decades. A lot of that is paper and forestry products burning the waste wood to power their plants, and ignorant rural rednecks like me stoking up the fireplace among other things. (Gotta power those moonshine stills with something. The revenuers track electrical and fuel deliveries anymore.)
I'm not sure that's exactly what most people are thinking of as "green" energy. And chopping down a tree to burn it and release carbon immediately sure doesn't sequester carbon very well.
A lot of the rest of the biomass is ethanol in gasoline which is mandated more as a subsidy to farming and as an oxygenator rather than as a real competitor to gasoline.
Conventional hydropower is another huge part of these "renewables". Just try to build a new dam and found out how green the environmentalists think it is.
So, if you just take it as "simple" and only look at that one chart it's rather misleading.
that would be costs after interest, this is costs before. Although with interest at ~1% for bonds the difference might be quite small for the short term.
Besides, a lot of the infrastructure involved (for example hydro electric) was built some time ago, as was the nuclear, but nuclear is being phased out gradually (whether part of a broader strategy or not), whereas renewables aren't.
Well, it's certainly part of SOMEBODY's strategy.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
There are dams that do both power generation and flood control. But much of flood control infrastructure does not generate electricity. When there is flooding, usually extreme weather is to blame and it is the non-generating levies that give way.
Apparently that is exactly what renewable power is doing and nuclear power is not.
What's funny is while everyone's pushing for renewable energy sources, they gloss over the fact that dams are an ecological disaster, and that nuclear power causes far less environmental damage. If we used breeder reactors, in fact, waste wouldn't be much of a concern, either. The reason we don't use breeder reactors? The products of them (which can be reused many times) are weapons grade. We were worried the ruskies would steal them during the cold war. So, instead of reactors which reused the same material over and over, we went with the crappy designs that exist now, which produce a large amount of waste that's difficult to deal with. And, because everyone's petrified with irrational fear over the use of nuclear reactors, we've never built any more reactors, which would likely be breeder reactors in this day and age. Those reactors would run happily for many years on the waste produced by reactors we have now.
Humans are very bad at gauging the damage and risks posed by nuclear reactors. It's one of the safest ways to produce electricity in the world, far, far safer than oil or coal industries. Also, it's a better "green" energy source than hydroelectric, and probably solar power once you factor in the damage caused just gathering the materials to make solar cells, not to mention the batteries they charge.
If you want to cause less damage to the environment, build more nuclear power plants.
Thanks to endless red tape, roadblocks by the enviro-nuts, what power company in good conscience build a nuke plant in the USA these days? Thanks to the stupidity of the average American, who thinks a problem at a nuke plant will turn it into an H-bomb, coupled with Three Mile Island, The movie China Syndrome,Chernobyl people think nuke plants are unsafe. Well, to quote a radio talk show host...I'd rather live near a nuclear power plant, than in a city with UNION government school teachers.
Duh!!! Given that there have been no new nuclear power plants for the last 30 years and that nuclear energy has been defamed by environmental wackos, no wonder that this should have happened. Oh, and before one mentions that Japanese reactor, please - comparison of a reactor built on the fault lines of an earthquake is not the same as one built in an area w/ no seismic activity.
Oh, and if nuclear fusion gets harnessed as an energy source, that too will be renewable. If the environmental wackos oppose that, as they surely will, their support for 'solar' is only b'cos it's not adequate (for now) in addressing world energy needs.
You can learn about relative support for nuclear, wind and solar here: http://www.repp.org/repp_pubs/pdf/subsidies.pdf
Do you really really think that if the solar plant were not there the sun would not shine? You must really love the peek-a-boo game.
According to every source on the internet the US produces
~20% of it's energy from nuclear. My own power company says it is 33% with 8% renewable (mostly wood burning).
So why does the linked article show US nuclear at 8%? Something is amiss here.
My guess is that we shut down a bunch of nuclear plants for upgrades as a result of Fukushima just long enough for a statistician to claim we reached some meaningless milestone.
How many tons of lumber are needed for a house? 10? Still, you get to reuse it every day.
Easy, go look at other places where they shoot environmental protesters. Nuclear isn't doing as well as the dreamers claim it can do but better than the outright opponents say it is. All the people here who talk about the "new designs" should be brought back to earth by the 1990s design of the AP1000 of which the first is still a few years away from completion. We really won't know until it's been running for at least a few days or months how good that design really is let alone the newer designs.
Because there is so much money involved nuclear become surrounded by political bullshit. As an example Germany had no desire to spend a lot of money on upgrades of their existing nuclear plants so got a lot of political goodwill for just doing what they were planning to do anyway for purely economic reasons - shut the aging plants down as they got near their end of life without major overhauls. It came off as a "bold statement" but was really free votes for effectively doing nothing.
IMHO what would be a good idea is more R&D and construction of prototypes (eg. what the Chinese are doing with pebble bed) BEFORE commiting to building a pile of things that just may not be good enough. The side benefit of materials for nuclear weapons even if the plant is not viable for other purposes is pointless now because the military have their own more economical ways of producing the stuff instead using defence money to prop up bably thought out commerical adventures.
For those idiots that scream "we have no time - we must build 1970s nuclear painted green now" the answer is that it takes well over a decade to build those large units from existing designs and the direction of research is towards smaller reactors that would take a lot less time to be built. It's likely that small submarine influenced reactors could be developed, a design finalised and then constructed in less time than an AP1000 reactor could be constructed in the USA even though we have the design and a partially completed example overseas.
It's a myth that large scale civilian nuclear power is only being held back by environmentalists. There are a lot of factors that have held it up and a lot of groups (eg. investors) that just do not think it is good enough.
Why are they comparing the production of ethanol (48% of "renewables") with nuclear? That doesn't make any sense. Nuclear is for electricity. Ethanol fuels cars. And what happens when they factor in all the petroleum used to produce all that ethanol. Last I checked, ethanol barely breaks even. Woops! And what would it even say if the comparison was meaningful? That people are scared of nuclear? No surprise there.
And then they go to compare "renewables" with domestic crude oil. First, why just domestic crude? Why not talk about ALL the crude consumed in the US? Why include anything but ethanol in that comparison? What sense does it make to compare hydropower with domestic crude oil? They're totally different markets.
You can't say I got it right. If I'd written the Bible, you are supposed to say I had and ax to grind.
Sure, mod me down and call me a troll. Fine. But its been proven time and again and again, and one more time even, that numbers that are generated by people trying to make a headline can *lie*. Call me a pessimist or whatever you want. The vast majority of "articles" are nothing more than propaganda designed to make those that its pandering to feel better.
And feel free to mod this a troll too. I can take the heat. Can you?
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Seems like naval reactors do OK so was it really deemed impossible?
it would be a shame if something happened to it.
Sincerely,
USA
If you take a look at the numbers in the pdf, they only go to March, 2011. Spring runoff doesn't usually start until March and peaks around May or June.
There's more renewable energy coming on the grid because states have mandated a carve-out for renewable energy.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, what does this say about renewable power?
Always amusing to watch the gyrations whenever anything remotely negative is posted about nuclear power. Are you people all 14? There is nothing wrong with renewable energy other than it might take away from your precious 4th generation nuclear power plants. Given that there is still no long term storage site for nuclear waste and that some of the latest science is saying that heat generation is more important than greenhouse gases as a cause for global warming you might try being a little more open about the merits of renewables.
Hydro doesn't count because it's not new??
There should be more investment in wind, hydro and solar. You could even say there should be more investment in wind, hydro, solar and nuclear but that would take a level of maturity not seen recently on Slashdot.
BTUs are useful, because your electric heater transforms watt-hours into BTUs.
If you stopped using BTUs consumers would get the impression, that all it does is heat up some wires...
The reason that talk about BTUs is that they are talking about all types of energy consumption even the burning of wood in home stoves. Wood is renewable but produces carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide. Just because it is renewable does not make it green. Take a look at this http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec7_5.pdf
For three months in 2010 Neuclear produced 202,449 Million Kilowatthours. Hydro produced 63,295 MKwhrs. Solar, wind and geothermal combined produced 25,288 MKwhrs.
Hydroelectric scales badly (as another posted pointed out "Got any more big rivers?"), but it's also the cause of really significant ecological damage, due to habitat destruction, changes in silt flow in rivers, and problems like that.
Nuclear power is only financially viable if the government gives it ridiculously low limits on damage from accidents, basically unlimited nearly-free insurance, and if the nuclear industry doesn't have to pay for storing dangerous radioactive wastes for hundreds of thousands of years. On the other hand, the US government also blocked construction of nuclear plants, so it's messed up in multiple directions.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
More hydro, really? We really don't have any more big rivers to damn up. Also the impact of damning up rivers is real ( think fish and majorly screwed up bay ecosystems) not imaginary.
While a nice idea, Solar has some serious drawbacks as well. You needs kilo-hectares of space to build big panel farms and the chemicals used to created those nifty little wafers are toxic as hell.
Wind - Nice where you can get it. Having the wind blow reliably every day, day after day is a pretty big challenge.
Commercial, for profit, Nuclear scares the crap out of me since all you need to do is read most any news source to find where companies have cut corners and built things that blew up. I live in the SF Bay Area and watched the PG&E gas main explode from 30 miles away.
Nuclear power is safe if it is done right and about the only entity in the US that have done it right is the US Navy. They have 1000 and 0 record and that includes two reactors on the bottom of the Atlantic that did not melt or even leak. Both were in submarines. One hit the bottom at around 40 knots and the other had a hole blown in its bow big enough to drive a car through.
A basic submarine nuclear plant generates around 48 thermal megawatts from a reactor the size of a small SUV and it can do that for around 6 years before it needs to be refueled. But these are built to crazy tolerances and thus would need to be manufactured on a cost plus basis to meet or exceed specs and the Marketing Boys and MBA's are NOT invited to the party. Build em like that and you can put one in my backyard.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Renewable energy has been able to surpass the electricity production of a source of energy that's not been allowed to grow for over 30 years? Am I the only one unimpressed by this?
I think one of the major things that a lot of people are missing is that nuclear energy should be seen as a stopgap measure. We don't know if the climate can continue to support coal and oil based power sources. It might, but then again it might not and I don't think thats a risk people are willing to take.
The major problem with current wind, solar, and basically any other power source dependent on the sun is that its only on-line for half the day. The other half has to be taken up by coal and oil plants. It's not easy to spin up or down a generator on the fly so most of the time they just leave them running even if no one is burning the power. Compounded by the unpredictability of solar power (wind, wave, and various light based technologies) "backup generators" have to be left running for the event that there is a break in the supply (cloud) or spike in demand. That said, I would like to see numbers stating how much oil / coal is burned to backup the "green" tech. This is also why net metering is such a problem for both the gird and the environment. Not to mention the truly horrible chemicals used in PV fabrication or any other IC for that matter.
It's my hope that in twenty years we will have better solar panels and battery technology. There are research groups making great strides in both directions. However, without higher efficiencies in both categories these alternative power sources remain largely nonviable. Further, impact of manufacturing and disposal needs to be considered. That is not to say we shouldn't invest but we need clean sources to get us from here to there.
Personally I'm sticking with high MPG pure gas cars and nuclear power for now and hoping for a brighter future.
I really have to wonder if it's even practical to move to an all renewable energy source infrastructure?
Wind and solar take a LOT of space. As it is, bird people, environmentalists and "I don't want to see it but I want the benefits from it" people don't want wind and solar stuff all over the landscape. Geothermal energy is one usually of opportunity and while technically it's everywhere, tectonically, it's not quite as available everywhere. And hydro electric? Do we have enough rivers?
And here's a thing -- even if we shut everything down now, we're already past the point of no return where global warming is concerned. We are going to see a continuation of a change in global weather patterns which mean rain, wind and water will all continue to change movement patterns which will transform where farming is done and more. What is a good location today, will not likely be a good location tomorrow and we don't really know yet where the good locations of tomorrow will be.
We don't need figures saying what we can and are doing today, we need to know if it's even possible to do what we wish for. Can we get 100% clean? If so, how can we do it? Is it sustainable? I'd really like to know.
British Thermal Units? Come on, not even the British use that insane unit anymore.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Only temporarily, until it rains down as acid rain. Really not a terribly attractive trade-off.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And for how long will they require it? You know, to store the nuclear waste.
I don't mind the fact he submits so many stories it does beg the question, why do so many of his submissions make it to front page?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Its going nowhere because it costs too much. The corporations who want to build have said they WILL NOT build if they aren't given a guaranteed profit by government.
Wind takes almost no space because the vast majority of the ground in a wind farm is unused by the wind turbine.
Cows quite happily eat grass under a wind turbine. Under a nuclear radiation shield, not so much.
Hydro is renewable. It is basically solar power since it is driven by evaporation. Nothing misleading about that. It is rapid growth in other renewables and moribund behavior in nuclear that makes the cross over, but not counting hydro is silly. Just be happy about the good news.
The clean up costs for the molten salt reactor were staggering. Going over budget does not even begin to describe it.
Ironically the troll at the top of the comment tree is correct.
The growth in renewable is actually primarily in biofuels, the majority of which is corn ethanol, which is produced, as Paul Gigot pointed out, by combining corn and taxpayer dollars.
I've been a nuclear advocate for years but right now, I need some reassurance about the state of the art before I can bring myself to call nuclear "perfectly adequate" anymore. I am finding it increasingly difficult to contend with the following concerns:
1) The public and political will isn't there to deal with waste in a responsible way. We COULD build breeder reactors but we won't. We're using just a small fraction of the energy in the fuel and letting the remaining energy pose a public health hazard instead of using it to produce electricity.
2) Nuclear power plants don't seem as "fail safe" as we've been promised. I understand that the Japanese plants were NOT state of the art but there still appears to be problems with the model to me, highlighted by the failure of the plants in Japan. Namely, mechanical damage to the plant can result in the plant being unable to shut down safely. Perhaps this can be solved just by zoning plants more effectively. Nonetheless, this doesn't really fit my definition of "fail safe."
3) There are big problems with current energy generation methods. I don't dispute that. The model as a whole is unsustainable and could be doing irreparable harm to the environment. Considering concern #2, though, I no longer feel like the repercussions of a nuclear power plant failing can be ignored. The damage may be more localized but depending on the mode of failure, it could be equally irreparable. Parts of Fukushima Prefecture will be contaminated for a long time. I've seen estimates that at least in the vicinity of the plant, it may be uninhabitable for 20 years. (That doesn't mean the contamination will be gone in 20 years; just that it may drop to tolerable levels in 20 years time.)
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
Hmm, did anyone notice that the conclusion (renewables surpassed nuclear) is only based on the first 3 months of 2011? I am all for extrapolating, but shall we wait with celebrating just yet and wait for the year to be out?
I could make an article about my new power system that produces power out of Rainbows and Moonbeams. Would the Slashdot editors publish a story on that? This article has no basis in fact. There is not the slightest possibility that renewables are even within an order of magnitude of nuclear. Really, is the state of science education in the United States really that bad that stuff like this gets credibility?
If you click around the EIA website, you can get a breakdown of the renewables. The growth is in ethanol, but other biomass is still the majority of it (presumably waste wood used for power generation is a big contributor, if they include firewood, it would also likely be a big contributor).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
How come I'm not seeing any reduced costs at all? Inflation is rising. Our national debt is a worldwide joke. Democrats have controlled the government since they took over the House and Senate in 2006. It's time for something different.
Different? Cause republicans will do...better? You crack me up. We need the things republicans are against. I support neither party, but oil has got to go.
I'm going to say that again, and I'm afraid I'm going to have shout it, because I am pretty tired of reading about how much extra energy we're apparently getting from burning the renewable strawman: fossil use is the only number that matters.
Jan-Feb-Mar 3 months totals for fossil use:
When that number starts to come down, then we can talk about how great renewables are doing. Until then, they're just expensive greenwashing for the coal plant hidden over the next hill that's keeping the lights on 24/7.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
US energy production is significantly less than US energy consumption due to substantial imports of oil, natural gas, and hydroelectric power. Matching some fraction of production isn't particularly relevant. It's fun with statistics. It's like saying you only need fuel to get half way to your destination. What fraction is it of consumption/demand? Significantly less. And solar + wind is still < 2% of either production or consumption, so there's a long way to go before closing the gap.
Where did he mention republicans?
don't require retirees to go in and shut down a breeze.
Do you mean to tell me that the projected 4 trillion dollar cost of 2 illegal and misconceived wars can be laid at the feet of renewable energy? Perhaps you could elaborate?
I thought all the nuclear fans have been saying that there was no way that renewable energy could get anywhere close to the amount of power generated by the nuclear plants. Is everything they have been telling us just a bunch of lies, or do I have something confused?
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
It certainly doesn't include the cost that air pollution from conventional energy plants would cause. Those health costs are murder! How about the cost of securing our oil as it travels all the way from the Middle East? Or keeping those dictators in power so our corporations get the sweet oil deals? Wait...what about the cost of the transmission lines, because who wants those dirty old power plants so near their house?
Oh and if its debt your worried about. Three letters: DOD
Skin cancer from the sun, wouldn't matter if you used CSP or PV to harvest, would still get skin cancer, so no correlation... ...UNLESS... ;D
You built yourself a nice PV covered patio, then used that to relax INSTEAD of speding too much time exposed to the sun!
For nuclear, only way to get increased cancer risk is radiation exposure is from contamination or direct exposure: is from nuclear bombs, nuclear reactors, or the rare direct exposure from nature (i.e. radon gas seeping up from basements in areas that have the risk).
Therefore, I say 'full speed ahead' on society increasing its use of Solar energy via PV, CSP, and such.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Too bad it's not reliably consistent. That means we will have to keep some existing carbon based energy plants at the ready which is very, very expensive. No problem! The extra costs will simply be handed down to the public individuals; just as Obama said it would be.
Only thorium nuclear has the true potential to be plentiful, consistent, reliable and, by the way, its basically safe compared to conventional nuclear.
We can basically say renewable energy fsckin works, now ?
If you mean "It produces electricity", then yes, it works. But that's no great trick. Any kid can produce electricity from simple lessons taught in grade school.
If you mean "It's cost competitive and scales well and can supply all our energy needs", then no, not even close.
The headline is kind of meaningless anyway, as the US doesn't get a lot of it's power from nuclear. It's like saying "KDE passes Gnome in America". Compared to the computer user base as a whole, it doesn't mean much.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
lol, nice, i'm using that quote... Also considering how subsidized corn is, its like combining taxpayer dollars with more taxpayer dollars...
Also what is with measuring in Btus VS Giga Watts? When did that start happening?
Also in case no one noticed, everything is flooding, which likely helps out hydro over production.
Also this renewable is likely 95% Hydro and 5% everything else.
Also this is about produced energy, not consumed. So its nice that all those windmills are generating all that excess unused power at night, and all the other inconsistent renewable, when what people have to understand, is it is the constant hum of nuclear at 5pm Wednesday, when everyone comes home and turns on their AC and every other appliance in their home and peaks power consumption, that keeps the distribution system electrified, and not under collapse every day of the week. Hydro is awesome, but there are finite rivers.
"There ain't more big rivers"
We don't need big rivers. Even a small spring with good head can power a small town. We have enough water flow on our land to power our entire town. Using that pressure would not disrupt the environment or cause any pollution or other problems. Micro-hydro can solve the macro problem. This works great in the areas like ours that are mountainous. In other places such as the plain states wind makes more sense. In the sunny places solar electric. And truth be told, nuclear power has its place too - unfortunately the current model is wasteful.
I don't understand the enthusiasm for nuclear in the light of the above, or the recent disasters.
I can think of only one recent nuclear disaster. It didn't dim my enthusiasm for nuclear in the least because, you see, I'm not enthusiastic about 50-year-old reactor designs like the one used at Fukushima. I'm enthusiastic about the new designs that are orders of magnitude safer. Unfortunately the general public isn't aware the new designs exist -- they think that when "Republicans continue to press for more nuclear energy," they're pressing for more Fukushimas, and the media of course does nothing to fix that perception.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Yes, we still measure potential energy output in BTUs for things like water heaters, furnaces, etc. However, we generally measure electrical output in kilowatt hours or megawatt hours, so this list is just as much confusion for us as it is for you.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
how much land mass?
The problem with solar is energy density.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on