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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.
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.
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, 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.
We can basically say renewable energy fsckin works, now ?
Of course it works. The open question is, "can it scale?"
Good luck tripling the amount of hydro or getting woodstoves into cities.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Btus? Can't we just stick to standards?
Kilo/Mega/Giga/Tera Watt hours in this case.
Joules.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
No one has ever said that it doesn't generate power, just that it's cost ineffective, and requires traditionally generated power in any event to even out the peaks and valleys.
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
Admittedly more effort would need to be put into load and supply management with a large proportion of renewable power. Hydro power is a good candidate for filling gaps in supply. It can operate around the clock and it can be brought on line quickly. It can also be used to store energy with reasonable efficiency.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
It also requires a massive amount of salt. Sodium thiosulfate, one of the favored salts for thermal energy storage due to low cost, practical melting point, high heat of fusion, and low toxicity, takes over one ton to store the energy required by the average household for one day. You can reuse it each day, of course, but that's still a buttload of salt for just one city.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
I think that salt thermal-storage collectors are a great idea. The problem I have with non-PV collectors in general is:
1 - They tend to use large arrays of mirrors
2 - They are usually located in the desert
3 - Mirrors don't last long in the desert
I've yet to see a cost breakdown on replacement of these huge mirror arrays.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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.
PROTIP: Operation DESERTEC.
Yes, it does scale. And with 400 km^2 of CSP we can power the entire world. (Including nighttime through hydroelectric pumped-storage and winters.)
(Connected with high-voltage DC lines to minimize losses btw.)
To be honest, I think this project is awesome. Cheap, simple, elegant, easy to repair, only made of abundant and recyclable materials, never (well, not in any imaginable time frame) running out energy source... It's hard to imagine a better solution.
And the best part: The mirrors allow water from the air to condense on them, moisturizing the ground below, which creates a whole flora and fauna thriving on it. So it's not only neutral to nature, but has a positive effect.
P.S.: I have nothing against nuclear power, and know pretty well how it works. I don't think it's bad. I just think this is so much better! :)
You really need to read. Coal today is less than 45% of American electricity
More importantly, the question is what is the trend, Look here You will see that coal use rose through the time until 2005. Then it started falling. Now, part of that COULD be the neo-con's recession. But it is not. Look at the other energy sources. THey all rose except for one year with AE.
Coal is withering. Heck, here in Colorado, we are going to tear down something like 5 coal plants and replace them with natural gas and AE.
Coal's only real chance is to convert to natural gas by using GreatPoint or other means and then piping it around the nation. Likewise, you then pump the CO2 underground, or sell it for chemical use (for example, sugar beets need it for sugar production).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You can learn about relative support for nuclear, wind and solar here: http://www.repp.org/repp_pubs/pdf/subsidies.pdf
Plant matter decaying, but that depends on the environment. Let me quote Wikipedia, because I'm lazy:
"In boreal reservoirs of Canada and Northern Europe, however, greenhouse gas emissions are typically only 2% to 8% of any kind of conventional fossil-fuel thermal generation. A new class of underwater logging operation that targets drowned forests can mitigate the effect of forest decay."
Of course, there's a fixed amount of plant matter that can decay; over the long term, I imagine the methane production becomes negligible. And while dams will eventually need to be replaced (I believe they can last about 50-100 years), there's no reason that you can't use the same reservoir for a new dam.
Of course, I'm biased. My province gets 92.3% of its power from hydro, and the producer, HydroQuébec, is the single largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world (36.8 GW). Canada as a whole only produces 61% of its power from hydro, but that's a damned sight better than the US at under 6%. Heck, HydroQuébec supplies almost a third of Vermont's power...
Also, you don't need a reservoir for hydro. For example, the Beauharnois generator is almost 2GW, and doesn't use a reservoir.
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.
Actually, if you read the table in TFA, you'll see that hydroelectric has been *declining* for the past decade or two, due to dam closures and environmental restrictions on river flow. Most of the increase in the past decade has been an increase in biomass energy -- mostly paper and lumber plants using their wood waste for fuel, plus more homes using wood and pellet stoves.
Wind power has grown from "utterly insignificant" to "barely worth mentioning", and solar power is still at the "cheap parlor trick" stage.
Hydro plants don't have to use reservoirs. We've got an almost 2GW hydro plant in Quebec that is a run-of-the-river type.
In terms of scale, I'd note that Canada, with 10% the population, generates 1.47x more hydro power than the entire US. HydroQuébec alone (36.8 GW) has ~5.4 GW of additional capacity and upgrades under construction.
Not exactly. Since TMI, domestic construction of new nuclear power plants has ground to a halt here in the US. Since building a new plant hasn't been politically feasible, operators have learned how to squeeze every joule out of the existing fleet. Steam generator upgrades and thermal power uprates have increased the fleet's output substantially. Taking fuel to higher burnups through better in-core fuel management has allowed operators to squeeze a bit more energy from the fuel bundles. But mostly, plant operators have pretty much perfected the art of running a light water reactor. Capacity factors (the percent of time that the plant is operating and generating power) averaged around 75% or so in the US back in the 1970s. Last year it was more like 91%. That's like getting a few reactors "for free."
It's not that operators in the 1970s were incompetent, it's that we've been continuously raising the performance bar. Par for the course is 90%+ capacity factors these days -- totally unheard of, and deemed impossible back then.
mdsolar has it right. Nuclear is 20% of electricity generation, and electricity is about 40% of total energy use, so ... do the math.
For more details, see here:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2009/LLNL_US_Energy_Flow_2009.png
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.
Canada also has substantially more landmass. Much of that landmass is also unoccupied. It is easier to produce power when there are no pesky people in the way.
No one will let nuclear power scale. We haven't actually built a new nuclear plant in 30 years. With old ones simply wearing out means nuclear is on a decline that just can't be stopped without new plants.
That said, most of the US energy supply still comes from coal and gas (in that order), with 'renewables' as a group taking a distant third, and nuclear still chugging along in a close fourth. We don't seem to really be decreasing coal and gas use, which are real problem areas and instead focus on the perfectly adequate nuclear as what needs to go away.
I'd really rather they replace some of those craptastic coal and gas power plants that make up the bulk of our energy production.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
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.
It being SI and all, what's wrong with using megajoules as God intended?
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.
That's because it isn't just electricity. It also includes solar and geo-thermal, biomass and bio-fuels.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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.
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.