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The Myth of Renewable Energy
Harperdog writes to this "Excellent piece by Dawn Stover about what renewables can and can't do. The sun and wind may be practically inexhaustible, but 'renewable' energy isn't. Solar, wind, and geothermal power are not fundamentally different from other energy technologies that consume finite natural resources. Good reading for anyone who thinks they know how to combat climate change."
Renewable doesnt mean infinite.
Jose T Oliveira Jr.
After all, why worry when you know that global warming is good for world peace?
The finite nature of geothermal always bothered me. Won't the core stop rotating and the Earth's protective magnetic field disappear if we used too much of it? Granted, that would not be an easy thing to do. If only fusion was easier than it is, and we would have almost unlimited energy at the cost of some sea-water.
Claiming solar power isn't renewable because it requires water, you do realize the water used returns back to the earth once it is used right? That water is also renewable (as long as you don't pollute it while using it, you can use it forever). Will it maybe take 10% of the power generated to transport water, sure.. but that leaves us with 90% gains and full renew ability.
I'm not even going to bother refuted this ultra netcase's other bits, there is something mentally off with this idiot.
That's a finite resource. Has anyone even calculated how long our present known reserves will last?
600 acre feet of water? I probably use that much to shower every year.
Did you know that things like coal and oil came from the capture and processing of Photons, just like wind/PV/hydro does?
Coal/Oil only seems cheap on a photon processed basis because Man didn't spend the effort and time converting biomass into the coal/oil.
Only have one child.
The author, by failing to mention the current oil-based energy strategy at all, while vilifying the alternative energy sources leaves the reader with a sense of, "the alternatives are bad, lets keep using the current infra until we come up with something better." Interestingly, nuclear energy is *not* mentioned either, positive or negative - it's completely omitted.
I'd not be surprised if the author was either a shill for the oil and gas companies or the nuclear energy affiliates.
Several times, she talks of water consumed by steam turbines.
Wouldn't any sane design condense the steam into water, and re-use it? Otherwise you're throwing away water *and* heat.
... so watch it get shouted down by the right-wing big-government cloud-cuckoolanders.
the water need to wash panels doesn't get "consumed" ... the water cycle is kind of renewable (and ongoing since a few billion years on this planet).
as "scalable". Solar is really impractical to harvest in large quantities, doesn't work well for baseload generation because of no way to store surplus, needs distribution, etc. I get his point but the title is somewhat misleading.
Dog is my co-pilot.
"In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Interesting read, because of all the factual information in it (I assume, it's actually correct).
Is "renewable energy" a meaningless term? Sure, even sunlight isn't limitless. Everything's finite and we're all gonna die, buhu. The things we call "renewable" are more sustainable in a long run, than current main energy sources (e.g. coal), that's what it is about. You can discuss semantics all you want.
So, while understanding the technology limitations is surely important, the solution is not to do nothing, just because we can't achieve perfect results just yet.
Less people == eco-friendly
If there were only a billion or so humans around, we could dump pretty much anything we wanted, anywhere we wanted, and it would never matter. Certainly with current technology, we could truly conserve the planet.
So the problem is figuring out how to murder about 6-10 billion humans over the next few decades without wrecking the global economy.
OP seems to be a compendium of old FUD I've read before. Yeah sure, solar panels have a limited lifetime -- about 25 years, by which time the next generation of them will make twice or more as many panels from the same amount of materials harvested by recycling them. Oh dear, solar sites need to wash panels, they'll never figure out how to make dust-resistant coatings, of course. OMG wind turbines use a lot of Nd (using the worst case of a direct drive unit) so naturally it follows that that's the only way to do it and we won't be switching to Separately Excited Syncronous or Switch Variable Reluctance gensets when it becomes cost effective to do so.
I'll be glad when these clowns finally sell their Exxon stock so I don't have to listen to them whine any more in the face of the inevitable.
Someone had to do it.
Do not let anyone tell you this drivel. "Solar, wind, and geothermal power are not fundamentally different from other energy technologies that consume finite natural resources" BS! BS I say! Check out www.thevenusproject.com
We do not want infinite energy. The earth is (approximately) a closed system that only takes input from the sun. It does not radiate much energy in the void of space.
Said otherwise, if we have infinite (even clean, but non-renewable) energy and produce too much, we will increase the energy input of the system, but that will not translate into a greater dissipation into space. Hence, nuclear fusion/fission is not a long term solution, even if it is rendered completely clean and harmless.
Actually, the only safe option is sun power, although the impact of transforming a significant amount of sun energy into waste heat from thermal losses might have a variety of consequences, compared to when it is used to produce hydrocarbons in plants.
We do not want more energy, we want less people.
The most likely cause of a major die-off for the human race (say 500M+) is Peak Oil and the lack of a decent transportation fuels substitute.
Wind and solar don't help that problem.
MontyHigh, www.worldofwallstreet.us
Did not bother to read TFA but quite fruitlessly did a little research on the effects of large scale extraction of wind energy. There must be a 'dark' side. Anyone able to enlighten the crowd, including myself?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
There are 7 billion people on the planet.
Way too many.
At our current energy usage growth rates, the planet is the temperature of boiling water before 2500.
This has nothing to do with global warming. It's just a fact that as you use energy, it flows into the environment. Just like a 100 watt lightbulb also warms up the room, 7 billion people worth of devices releasing energy warm up the planet faster than it can radiate the heat into space.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/02/2315207/limits-on-growth-of-energy-use-and-economies
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sure materials which we need to use in order to build e.g. wind turbines are theoretically finite. They are not being used up by building wind turbines, they can be recycled if that's economically interesting. Stuff like "While sunlight is renewable -- for at least another four billion years -- photovoltaic panels are not." is just silly. We are not going to run out of sand in any plausible scenario, so that's just nitpicking.
In any case, renewable energy refers to the energy source. That clearly sets it apart from other energy sources, and is thus a good description. There is nobody who believes the installations required to use renewables can be build without any environmental impact in terms of pollution, area use etc. That doesn't distinguish them from other installations. If people were calling renewable energy plants "impact free", fine the author would have a point. The myth the article is debunking is one which doesn't exist, however.
I'm not trying to be overly negative but that article (yes, I read it) didn't seem to go anywhere. The author correctly points out that nothing is free and then... stops. No conclusion, no message, just one obvious statement and then nothing. Maybe he's trying to point out the need for reduced population growth? Maybe he's one of those "nothing works, so I'll do whatever I want" doomsayers? Maybe he's trying to encourage further energy research? I have no idea. The article just stopped.
Interesting that the summary doesn't mention that TFA is published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Which is a quote respectable group; but nevertheless, they have a horse in the energy race, one that burns Uranium. TFA simply counts the cost of various "green" energies, but never compares them to the costs of "conventional", or nuclear, energy generation. You're left with the impression that "green" energy is a shill, that all forms of energy are equally bad, and so you might as well sit back and keep burning oil and coal until someone invents perpetual motion.
It's really time to go metric guys, unless anyone can explain to me what that means?
Had he been comparing transistors to vacuum tubes in 1950, he probably would've written that while transistors probably had some specialized uses such as in portable radios for the military, the visionaries who championed them didn't seem to notice that cost 10 times more to manufacture than tubes.
But technology marched on. A collection of millions of transistors embedded on a microchip now costs orders of magnitude less than the same number of staples, and requires orders of magnitude less storage space.
Don't click
Who is Dawn Stover and why should we be taking her opinions seriously?
so, to make your energy properly renewable -
Solar plants, which use ground water to wash panels, need to look after water use.
geothermal needs fresh water, from more than just the local aquifer.
Wind turbines need good recycling for their metal components.
Biomass needs to come from non arable wasteland and crop waste not new cut forest and good farmland.
Also hydro electric needs a huge investment as well as sediment management behind the dam.
and you must bear in mind that everything you build needs cement, which is usually recycled as hardcore, not back to cement (unless you bother to use lime mortar which can be reprocessed back into mortar by the same manufacturing process as was used to make it.
Why is this news to anyone with half a brain?
Of-course we need to be take care with these new technologies and of-course they do not magically fix everything, but none of the problems are insurmountable, and even without fixing them most are still much better than fossil fuels.
Thorium: http://j.mp/sGoUz0
Is this a joke?
Are you seriously suggesting that it's reasonable that we could one day run out of fucking sand?
Get rid fo 5 billion people, and stop making more.
They're not practical for mobile steam engines, but they certainly are used in most nuclear plants. Those that don't are located near the sea. Not gonna run out of sea water any time soon.
I remember when household cleaning chemicals used to be really dangerous.
then we started with the safer ones, that didn't really work.
Now we have safer ones, for us and the environment, and they work pretty good!
already more "organic" solar panels are being researched. and in the end they will be easier to produce then working with harsh chemicals.
technology doesn't generally get dumber.
Thank you Captain Obvious.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
First of all, we should make a distinction between renewable and clean energy sources, as the article seems to treat them like they were the same. For example, biomass is renewable but not ecology-friendly, while nuclear power is clean but not reneweable.
The argument that building plants costs resources has little to do with long-term usage, as it is a one-time cost. And at the end of it's lifetime most building materials can be recycled would we ran out of them.
That plants use water, yes it's true, but they don't make water disappear, they just turn it into vapor. The problem seems to be only local, as the area of the plant runs out of water. That's why most non-renewable plants are built next to rivers. The problem with some renewable sources is that they require optimal places to work effectively. This is a valid problem but one that has little to do with renewability.
Yes, hydropower and especially biomass have severe ecological and social problems, which again has nothing to do with renewability.
Worrying about when will we run out of steel, concrete, rare earths or water is simply stupid.
You can't combat "climate change", it's inevitable with or without humans and not necessarily a bad thing. What should be focused on is making technologies that provide energy at less and less cost, which inevitably means less consumption of resources.
... all extract wind energy. They interrupt the flow of wind and generate turbulence, and eventually turn wind energy into heat, except that unlike wind turbines they don't make electricity as well. It's a rather silly question when you know the first thing about thermodynamics.
Probably the biggest problem to addressing the 'population issue' is that the areas of the world where environment movements tend to exist tend to also exist alongside groups which love population growth.
Big cities like New York, Toronto, London... tend to have a lot of 'green movements'.
Yet they're also places which keep advocating high immigration rates for both political reasons (diversity...) as well as special economic reasons (prop up the housing industry, cheap immigrant labor...). More often than not the same groups in the green movement are the same who love increasing population.
It's one of the reasons why things like pollution/Capita are tricky. A lot of people seem to think per Capita measures are the ultimate measure. But it doesn't take into account societal and cultural choices.
For example, we compare two societies.
1. A huge population like India where the consumption/capita is very low. (545 kg in oil equivalence)
2. A sparsely population country like Iceland with high consumption/capita (17338 kg)
source: http://www.google.ca/publicdata (energy use per capita).
Now many who just look at the per capita measures like to rant how inefficient and wasteful western people are. Yet don't look at the per capita numbers alone. Look at the society as a whole.
Icelandic society provides a high standard of living for everyone and keeps its population reasonable. That each Icelandic person lives much better than an Indian is not a problem... as the Icelandic society has managed to keep its population small.
Put simply... is the solution to shove everyone in to a city and make everyone live like they're in Tokyo? Only for those who like to measure everything in per capita use and don't want to look at the greater functioning of society.
One of the great thing about fuel is its transportability. You cannot transport wind energy unless you convert it to electricity. There are limits to that conversion because you need to manufacture the battery and the construction of the battery itself is problematic.
Moreover, if you need to expend gobs and gobs of mechanical/wind energy to create electricity, you may not be that much further ahead given the size of the average wind farm.
Nothing is free.
Published in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Can't see any agenda there...
She doesn't exactly cover herself in glory for facts, either. She doesn't appear to know what neodynium is used for (why, exactly, would you want magnets in a gearbox?). She (quite deliberately, I think) confuses consumable fuels with non-consumable equipment - a turbine may need 800 pounds of neodynium, but after 20 years of operation you've still got 800 pounds of neodynium. In fact the whole magnet is reusable as is. Today's largest wind machines are 10MW (in construction, anyway). 4.5 million of them would (on average, not peak capacity) provide the entire world's energy use - not sure where her need for an additional ~2 billion devices comes from.
Of course it's not infinite - nothing is (probably) but that's not really the claim, is it? The only sensible point made is that renewable sources require materials that are finite, but I think we knew that already.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
There is now self-cleaning glass - this should be used if technologically appropriate.
A thin layer of titanium dioxide and impinging photons cause dirt to fall off with application of water.
This could be rain or recycled water.
The solution to the water energy problem is more energy, because energy can be used to get water. This, however, lowers the Life Cycle Output of the energy system. LCO or LCA is the expected usable energy out, divided by the expected usable energy used to create and run a system. So if a system produces 10 watts for every watt it takes to build, run, and dispose of it, then its LCA is 10. The 20th century got by on a miracle: namely petroleum has a high LCA, and its its own storage mechanism. Gasoline has great power to weight storage capacities with internal combustion. And internal combustion engines can be built of very cheap metals. There are many quandaries in replacing hydro-carbon energy, and the water energy trade off that the piece mentions is one of them, but it is one of scale. Once there is a large enough renewable base, then the low LCA that getting the water to run it has, is not a problem. It is at the beginning, when the return is eaten through by the water problem, because there are competing uses for water that have much higher economic returns in the short run, such as airconditioning and agriculture. None of these uses want to pay much higher rates for water so that people not yet born can have the advantages.
Where the article falls down is pressing an agenda, and making sloppy equivalences. The first is equating capital requirements with expendable requirements: we don't burn the rare earths we use in kinetic energy extraction – that is water, wind, and geothermal – and in fact, rare earths, are not, as a percentage of the earth's crust, all that rare. For example, wikipedia has this chart. It shows that all of the Lanthanide rare earths, plus scandium and yttrium, are more common than either gold or silver, many are more common than tin, and some more common than lead. The problem with them is that they tend to be found near the Actinide rare earths, particularly Thorium. If you have seen a press for "Thorium reactors" it is because exploitation of rare earths leads to Thorium by product, and reactors which burn it would be fantastically profitable, for the people who sell the rare earths. In reality, they have the same problems, only more so, of actively cooled salt reactors. Namely, they work until they blow up. The Chinese dump their Thorium in a holding lack, which, should it break, would contaminate large areas of land and volumes of water.
Side note: how is it that a browser's spell check doesn't know Actinide?
But for all of that, rare earths are not burned, the way for example Lithuium is not burned in a battery and can be recycled. These are recyclable, which is different from consumable. Hence moving from consumption of hydrocarbons, which really are burned, to using rare earths in capital energy, is a positive step, and while the author of the paper implies that there would be rare earth shortages, the reality is that this is not the case, and substitutes in the form of ceramics and active magnets (See Rare Earth Prices Plunge as Manufacturers turn to substitutes
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
any electronics manufacturing requires vast quantities of ultra-pure water, as well as large amounts of heavy metals and rare earth metals. pollution levels surrounding electronics factories, thousands of miles away from where you (the 1st World Reader) can actually see what's really going on, are beyond belief.
If we burn coal, we still have carbon and oxygen just in a much lower energy state. We can't get that back without spending at least as much energy as we got out (in reality a lot more), which would defeat the whole point. Same with oil, gas and nuclear. So solar panels have a limited lifespan, but it's not like they disappear when they break down. Recycle them and make new ones, as long as you manage to get a net positive contribution of energy it's sustainable. The reason is of course that solar panels have an external power source while coal does not. Of course we have to design them to be recyclable and actually do it, but that's a matter of will and economics. But there's no way to do the same with fossil fuels, they'll never be sustainable because their energy is consumed.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They might be secretive (or not, I've never heard that claim before) because purer sources should require less work. In any case microelectronics grade silicon needs to be extremely pure, and the industrial processes involved are very advanced; finding a good source of raw materials is likely to be a trivial problem in comparison.
But that is rather moot because the total amount of Si used is rather small compared to its economic value. Chips and solar cells are etched on extremely thin discs. Considering that there are enormous amounts of the element in the crust (it's the 2nd most common element there after oxygen, 28% in mass), there's bound to be plenty of places where you can find it in the right configuration.
We all know how to combat climate change.
Less humans.
It's that easy.
But we do not want to face the facts and the consequences.
If we were to collect enough solar, wind, or geothermal energy it would cause climate change like we have never seen before.
See, the Earth depends on the power from the sun and core to run everything. There is a finite amount of that power that we can suck off before it would really screw up the Earth.
Who knows, maybe we're screwing it up already. Probably not yet since our "renewable" energy sources provide a very small amount of our power but if we scale up and start pulling away too much of the Sun or core's energy then expect bad things.
Coals plants also need to be built, they also need generators that require rare earth elements, they also need plenty of steel and concrete. And not only do they obviously spew shitloads of CO2, you also need to build the roads, railways or ships and ports to carry the coal around, as well as mine the damn thing.
So what is the argument? That since it's just merely much better, and not simply perfect, we should just give up on them?
Lets see. Coal. Expensive to mine from underground and a blight on the load in open mines. Nuclear material? Same issues with mining it and that love waste to get rid off. Oil? That is running out and drilling for it has proved hazardous. Mining it from tar sand is even worse then coal mining and even just transporting it ain't save.
Funny the article doesn't mention any of that. Or for that matter that efficient generators ANYWHERE need rare earth magnets. In the end, almost all power generation needs the same kind of generator, the only difference is what makes them spin and how efficient you want them to be.
And yes, desert water is not infinite... Greenland is a desert now? Funny. I expected them to be warmer. And less wet.
Troll article cherry picks arguments to support its troll and ignores everything else.
How unexpected.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What the article fails to mention, and what most people fail to understand, is that renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar are not suitable to replace the majority of conventional power sources. Your average pro-renewable energy advocate would have you believe you can throw a bunch of turbines and solar panels onto the grid and solve all your problems: unfortunately you need to supply your base load with guaranteed sources.
It sounds simple enough when you think about it, but you can't replace a coal, nuclear (or hydro power plant in certain cases) with solar or wind because those plants supply a large amount of power all of the time. If the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining, nobody is getting electricity. This relegates these sources of power as contributors, not dominant supplies of electricity.
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I checked that atomic website thebulletin, they dont have very many scientists, and are not a scientific
agency. their board of directors is pure PR experience, Corporate directorship experience, banking etc....
one of the more qualified members of the board is an MD..... remember the discussion material
is regarding engineering and biological sciences....
seriously check out the qualifications of the people who run the organization....
propaganda and misdirection.
For a given power generation capacity, there is no intrinsic reason why the energy cost for building windmills / solar cells should not be a fixed ratio of that of building coal plants. Maintenance costs for wind/solar are very low, but even if you don't believe me on this one, ask yourself, again, whether coal plants require no maintenance -- they do.
After that, solar/wind cost nothing in energy, while coal plants need to be fed coal, that also has to be transported.
None of it's truly renewable because the universe will experience heat death at some point!
Also, there's this thing called recycling, look it up.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I have always wondered about what might happen if large quantities of energy were taken out of the wind/climate system and used to generate power. Might this cause some even greater climatic change? Not trolling, just genuinely scared of everything.
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However, this deals with renewable energy as touted by big business. They make big huge systems that consume lots of resources so that they can sell them and make money. A passive solar house isn't going to use all these rare precious resources. Geothermal energy that is designed into the house going down 10 to 20 feet using convection isn't going to require the same massive resources that a huge power plant going hundreds of feet into the ground nor is there any fracking required. A personal wind turbine or hydro isn't going to need rare earth magnetics to squeeze out every drop of possible energy because energy use will already be reduced and you can just take the inefficiency of normal magnets/em into account when designing the system.
Besides the obvious slant of the article what we should realize is that large, centralized, hi tech renewable energy products are unsustainable. The way to go is smaller, decentralized, personal systems. Decentralization reduces the need for large quantities of any resource to be taken from any given area, making it sustainable. Is it a bother to have to wipe down your mirrors 2 or 3 times a year on your passive solar oil collection system, sure, but you won't need 600 acres of water in your back yard, just a damp cloth.
Unfortunately that involves designing tech that can be put together/serviced by your average joe and that simply isn't going to happen without government or industry help to educate the masses which won't happen because there's no money in teaching a man how to fish instead of selling him a fish everyday for the rest of his life.
Which is unfortunate. I'd love to see bamboo sand biofilm water filters with added activated carbon (provided by gov't/business) in homes for cleaning water instead of huge water treatment plants and plastic encased water filters that are non-renewable by the customer.(activated charcoal is renewable, if they let you get at it)
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
From memory, typical internal combustion engines are on the order of 20% efficiency; advanced combined cycle fossil fuel power plants, taking into account transportation losses, conversion, charging, battery losses, driver and motor translate into something like 40% efficiency.
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The problem is not so much with the technologies' themselves as it is people's understanding of the scale of them. For example Tom Murphy explains that dropping the great lakes by 1m would produce 54 billion kWh. Compare that to the 2,000 billion kWh produced every year by coal plants. My napkin math says we would drain the great lakes of their current supply of water in the order of years, not decades just to replace coal.
Since the people on Slashdot are mathematically inclined, try to calculate the physical area needed for solar panels to replace a nuclear power station near you. To replace the Pickering Nuclear Planet (3.1GW) the oldest planet here in Ontario with solar assuming Ontario get the global average amount of sun light (which is pretty generous for Ontario) and gets an average of 20% efficiency you get 250W x 0.2 = 50W/m^2. So, (3.1E9W) / (50W/m^2) = 62E6 m^2 or 62,000 square km, a box 8km by 8km of solid solar panels or a circle with a radius of 4.4km. That is approx 2% the size of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. We are talking about building something 2% the size of the area we fenced off during the worst nuclear accident in history per nuclear station.
Most renewable source of energy are not very concentrated, so anything dealing with them has to be huge, it's inescapable.
... and lack of respect, or attention, for Murphy's Law.
As in the case of the Fukushima Power Plant disaster, diesel generator and control room 'emergency battery power' relocation would have made a statistically significant difference against the effects of the tsunami. Then again, so would not putting profits ahead of maintenance and quality standards.
Pick your nit, but this all comes back to human error. Greed and foresight seem to be our biggest obstacles.
Makes me want to off myself. Very depressing view. How about just say we need more cleaner renewable materials going into the process? Be positive. Must be an oil and nuke shill.
This Science Writer Blows...Renewable Energy way out of proportion. This to me seems like some kind of inflated straw man argument, and a step away from "Because we can't turn matter into energy without any efficiency loss and no means of production with nothing but our MINDS, 'Renewable Energy' is a terrible polluter!" (yes that's an example of a straw man argument itself :P).
I'm glad that most commenters can see right through this sloppy 'critique'.
While I'm taught in RS/RE, science and geography lessons that renewable energy will never run out, obviously it will. Wind power: caused by vacuums caused by sun. Waves: caused by moon movement caused by big bang. solar: caused by sun. Also note, the energy cannot be destroyed, so in theory solar makes the world slightly darker, and turbines slow the wind down slightly. However, it will last so long that it's near finite to the human mind I thought slashdotters knew this!
You realize that our government pays farmers to NOT grow food? World hunger is not caused by insufficient farmland...we have enough to feed the world several times over. World hunger is purely an economic problem. Those who have too much can't conscience the thought of giving the extra away to the have-not's for free, so instead we give free money to the already-have-plenty's to prevent them from upsetting the global food market.
Humans are stupid.
Solar cells are potentially made from carbon :
graphene - http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/carbon-based-solar-cells/
or carbon nanotubes - http://www.bitsofscience.org/solar-cell-carbon-nano-energy-3418/
http://inhabitat.com/carbon-nanotubes-could-create-better-solar-cells/
The other technologies like wind turbines and those steaming solutions are just alternative green solutions to solar cells that are often cheaper. When the solar cells are going to continue to get cheaper like they are and no new alternative pops out, then they will probably be the prefferable choice of green energy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/20/solar-panel-price-drop
Their co-existence with new ways of storing electricity would make them even more practical.
New cheaper ways for making hydrogen:
http://www.gizmag.com/fukai-hydrogen-extraction-process/16674/
or carbon based supercapacitors?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110512150731.htm
My point is, that there are actually new advancements in every horizon, which make this article a bit outdated.
But you're making me change my mind.
This is just another group skirting all the negatives in their own industry while trying desperately to paint their competitors with a 'dirgy energy' brush. Never a mention of the materials required by the "clean coal" they so prominently touched upon. The point is, yeah, energy doesn't just jam itself into those electrical lines that ALL THOSE FORMS OF ENERGY REQUIRE. And most importatly, ALL of the polluting, NON-renewables likewise use and lock up amounts of resources, including concrete, and steel to produce energy.
Remember there is no such thing as 'clean coal' except as a topic for television brainwashi - er, commercials.
Feh!
Solar thermal is about the worst technology in this respect - About 6l per kWh. Nuclear power (PWR) clocks in at around 3l per kWh, coal plants use about 2l.
And of course you will find the most fervent supporters of Desertec - a project to build solar thermal on a HUGE scale in Northern Africa, well known for such water rich places as Libya or Morocco - among the exact same people who claim that nuclear power in France is unsustainable for lack of cooling water.
Renewable forms of energy, along with increased EFFICIENCY of production and use of it.
The significance of (almost certain) future energy shortages are so grossly understated. They start to lead to economical problems since financial growth stops being possible which makes them much harder to tackle (specially in a democracy). We desperatly need some alternatives and start deploying them now. But funding to research is laughable in comparison to the problems we are facing. If there is some silver bullet in fission or fusion for example we would not know....
If you want to let Ms. Stover know how you think about her article, she can be found on dawnstover
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
And not only do they obviously spew shitloads of CO2
and mercury ..
The reason why tuna, swordfish, shark, and other top of the marine food chain has soooo much mercury is because of coal fired power plants.
Distributed solar power... where we put as many 8kw solar systems with inverters and battery-backups on family homes around the country as we can... reduces the need for new nuclear, coal, hydro, wind, wave or biomass generators. And it also eliminates the "infrastructure" problem (the infrastructure that delivers that can also move it the other way without change). If we can get to the point where solar panels provide 90% of the daytime energy use of every family home then the other power generation systems will only need to be used to fill in the gaps and to provide the power for industry.
This can be done for about $20,000 per home rooftop and will also mean that a tree falling on a power line six blocks away won't take your power down; you'll just keep going on your backup system.
My wife and I used two 33-watt solar panels for five years on a sailboat cruising the Pacific augmented by a wind generator I made by carving a propellor and buying a surplus 36-vdc electric motor and hanging it in the rigging. We ran our diesel engine about 30 minutes a week and still had power for lights, ham radio, and our little 12-vdc refrigerator. And this was in 1981 long before the advent of LED lighting and new - farm more effective - insulation materials.
It *CAN* be done. We cannot eliminate point-source power generation systems but a nationwide thrust to do this will make new ones much less necessary.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Do you know what happens to all that purified silicon (which requires a lot of toxic chemicals to purify) when the solar panel (for example) is replaced?
It remains there. Refined. Able to be reused without anywhere near the resources for refining originally required.
Rare earth elements likewise also are renewable.
Your "finite resources" is, frankly, bollocks.
You don't generate wind power by burning your turbine blades and motors.
"It has the smallest impact" ???
Fukushima and Tchernobyl come to mind of course. Do you realize that making an area like (40 miles)^2 unusable amounts to not a small cost on the economic point of view, or ruining the lives of 10'000's of displaced people is not a small nuisance?
Presently nuclear energy is the energy method having the largest impact in the far future (~100'000 years), as the nuclear wastes will require to be watched for a long time. Do you realize that such a timespan is comparable to the total time homo sapiens existed on Earth? (The salary of a single engineer over 100'000 yr corresponds already to the total building cost of a nuclear plant).
Can you imagine what will happen when the next global war occurs? And it will occur well before a century for sure. Each nuclear power plant will be an easy target, at the least a serious menace for those countries foolish enough to have forgot how stupid and nasty human beings may be.
The #1 thing we can do to combat energy inefficiency, which is the only thing we really need to do, is switch from an economy that maximizes profit at all costs, to one that minimizes waste. It's THAT simple. Seriously.
The question is, how is this even possible? Well, we need a department of government that analyzes products and their life-cycles and somehow comes up with a waste quotient that takes into account production waste (this is where renewable energy use comes into play, and makes my post not off-topic) as well as product waste (so that companies will be incentivized to make products that last), and somehow work this into a tax scheme that eats into the profits. Boo-yah. Done
Once you hit Kardeshev-III, it's a long hard slog to M31, and that only buys you another doubling.
You use fresh water in a closed circuit for steam, and you cool _that_ with seawater.
Of course, power plants based on "renewable energies" consumes other resources. But those other resources (including water) can be obtained with energy that the plant produces. The idea is to have excess energy and sustainable output overall.
Also, unless you think that technology is just going to stop dead in its tracks, we don't need eternally sustainable solutions, just solutions that work for the next decades or centuries. The history of humanity and progress has always been driven by unsustainable practices. Europe became big and powerful by turning its oil, minerals, and forests into technology, innovation, and conquest, and the same is happening on a global scale.
While agreeing that energy consumption control is key in the (near) future, this article is flawed in so many levels that I do not know where to start.
As mentioned before, if we run out of materials for doing PV (silicon, glass, some Aluminium and copper/silver), we are screwed, and those can be recycled easily, specially the metals, which are more scarce and expensive than silicon and glass.
Solar thermal plants do have technical challenges in regard to water use, which in the desert may be discussed as consumption. Work to do.
Wind and "rare" elements, somebody already debunked it- the magnets are there to be reused if the turbine is decommissioned, for Gods sake.
Biomass grows back! However, it is true that its use is problematic due to environmental issues and food issues. It cannot be deployed to the infinite.
Geothermal has to be made with care, but same applies to mining and look! there you have, fracking around... Work to do to improve!
Water pumping is nice, but same as biomass, not applicable to the infinite.
Thing is, if we do not start to apply renewables to a great extent, we are going to fuck up the planet, even more than we did already. So yes, stop driving SUVs, stop running your AC all day long, etc, but help with your decisions change the energy generation paradigm. And that is not done choosing a next president who would rather qualify for the loon than for Harvard, or one who is in bed with "big corporation".
Breeder reactors...
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Today? you fucking hypocrite bitch. I love how NONE of you live by example
If all the libtard, agw alarmist cult following religious freaks STOPPED USING THE COAL THEY DISPARAGE...
The problem would be solved. So unplug your damn computer, turn off all your lights and take residence in a hole.
We have so called renewable energy source, which is obviouly limited due to the fact that the sun output does not increase significantly (and that is good) and the earth is not getting warmer inside. And we have limited resources. So no we cannot replace every car with a lithium-battery powered electrical engine. A) we do not have enough copper and b) we do not have enough lithium.
So to switch to a sustainable way of life, we have to rethink transportation of electrity, goods, and humans. I personally find it very interesting that the average time used to get to ones job didn't change over the centuries. The faster we could go the longer the distances become. For a lot of office jobs, travel could be avoided or reduced, if people start working in offices closer to theri homes. If they are in a 20 minute walk or bicycle distance, you can skip the car. And you even could use busses or trams which can be implemented much more resource efficient than cars and even more personal cars.
In short: Sustainability requires renewable energy, but it also needs resource efficieny.
I mean the fuel source is renewable.. but so is oil.... just the rate it takes to make oil more is a hell of a lot slower than corn.
Then you also have the energy needed to turn either non-renewable or renewable into a usable energy source. Some are cleaner than others, untill we can find a way to make energy clean and use clean sources, engery both non and renewable will be dirty
I seem to have taken something different from the article than most. Yes, the author spends most of the time pointing out "the cost" of renewable energies but the last three paragraphs seem to sum up her take on it: consumption (i.e. demand) need to lower for it to be sustainable. She concedes that renewable are "often less damaging to the climate and create fewer toxic wastes than conventional energy sources" but merely points out that our demand (especially in light of ever increasing population) must decrease for it to have any meaning. Even using renewable energy technologies we need to cut how much we use for it to be sustainable. I believe that is the point she was making.
According to the article "California's Blythe Solar Power Project, which will be the world's largest when it opens in 2013, will require an estimated 600 acre-feet of groundwater annually for washing mirrors, replenishing feedwater, and cooling auxiliary equipment."
In the same arid region they grow rice with irrigated water using literally millions of acre-feet of water so lets not get to crazy about the water costs. If they decided to grow a less water intensive crop than rice you could have enough water for solar for thousands of similar solar plants.
I don't think we should discount costs of renewable in fact we should measure all the costs of pollution and emissions from mining of raw materials to the maintenance costs.
It's a misleading hack piece. First, 600 acre-feet of water per year to run a 1000-MW plant is diddly-shit. For comparison, a unit-home consumes about 1kw (averaged over a month, give or take a factor of two) and one acre-foot/year of water. So a plant supplying enough power for a million homes, which themselves consume a million acre-feet/year of water, will add 600 acre-feet/yr of water to their consumption. Whoopie-shit.
Notice how no numbers were given for the geothermal plants and their consumption. The Geysers were initially run from in-place groundwater, which they did consume (there was no condensation, no recharge). Now they are being recharged, NOT with groundwater, but with treated sewage water. So the article was misleading there, too, since groundwater is no longer the limiting factor.
She gives numbers for windpower resource consumption, but is again misleading. A "4-foot-wide, 7630 mile sidewalk". How do you suppose that compares to a single lane of interstate highway (12 feet wide) capable of carrying truck traffic? 636 miles of 4-lane interstate, NOT accounting for the increased road thickness. She repeats the "rare earth metals are rare" canard.
Neodymium: "Although neodymium is classed as a "rare earth", it is no rarer than cobalt, nickel, and copper ore, and is widely distributed in the Earth's crust". She may be right about Dysprosium, at least with current magnet technology. It's not clear if it's necessary, or merely nice at current prices. Note that the current main consumption appears to be hybrid automobiles, not wind turbines. (Hybrid autos, not a good idea at present size.)
Her treatment of hydropower is similarly deceptive -- first dismiss newer technologies as "experimental", then hammer on the problems of (some) hydropower installations. Wave power looks interesting. There's not too much that can go wrong with a buoy anchored to the bottom; we've got ample experience with them in their non-power-producing form.
All of the article lacks a good "compared to what" -- how much water and concrete are consumed by existing energy production? What resources do they consume?
So, NOT an excellent article.
In a temperate climate, increased temperatures means higher agricultural production yields, which means lower resource contention, and fertile ground for peace and progress.
The study linked to by the GP is about mostly-temperate China. All is well when the sun shines, but when the temperature falls and crop yields do the same, it's a disaster for a slow-adapting tradition-bound empire.
Unfortunately, quite a lot of the world's population lives in tropical climates, where higher temperature is going to mean lower yields. And it doesn't help when resource contention is already high in these areas. So alas, the fairy tale of warmth and peace is not true - there is every reason to believe that global warming is going to lead to a less peaceful world.
Checking Wikipedia, it seems "The Heartland Institute" that produced this fairy tale has a climate skeptic history. Not really surprised.
I gotta see some backup for:
"The gearbox of a two-megawatt wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium "
I've worked on a lot of gearboxes and several turbine/generator sets in my career as an ME. The gearbox on a 15MW gas turbine generator might weigh 1/2 a ton total and I assure you that is 90% iron and 10% oil. I think somebody seriously slipped a decimal point or two.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
The CAISO ("The California ISO provides open and non-discriminatory access to the bulk of the state’s wholesale transmission grid") keeps a daily set of graphs on the utility generation demand, and contributions by renewables here:
http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
let's just keep burning fossil fuels and coal then, who cares.
The real problem (if you read the article) is not the energy sources themselves, but using up all other other finite resources required to tap the sun, wind, etc. As long as one accepts infinite economic growth as indispensable, the resource problem won't go away. Happily, there is an answer, and it's been well thought through for over 3 decades: steady state economics. In a nutshell, you stop growing quantitatively (more and more oil burned, people born) but keep growing quantitatively (ever better use of a fixed , sustainable demand on the planet's resources and waste sinks). This is more widely known here in Europe, where the German federal president recognized the need for qualitative but not quantitative growth a while back. But the English-speaking world has some great intro resources too: check out Wikipedia of course, and a very accessible series of articles is available on http://www.steadystate.org./
This guy is an idiot. There are NO citations for his calculations in the article. I would like to say that I am employed as a consultant to oil, and gas companies. Geothermal plants do not have to run off of steam produced by the earth. I have to run now as turkey is being served. Life on this planet has been using renewable energy for 4 billion years. The world has a shitload of water on it. We can move it to the desert. Renewable energy is the future of mankind. Our population will continue to increase. His take on everything is anti-humanity. As a humanist, I expect our energy use to increase along with our population while we simultaneously decrease our negative effects on the environment because that's how we roll.
So the take-away from this economics-ecology alarmism, is that there are too many humans ?
Because energy resources are finite, and should only be usable by a select few ?
Something that always escape the discussion on the reduction of carbon emissions is the production of cement. As boring cement is, its production is one of the highest sources of carbon emissions due to high temperature processes required for the formation of calcium silicates (the main component of cement). Its contribution in carbon emissions is major at least in the tens of %. Yet, nobody talks about it. There is great research done and sponsored by the cement manufactures, but too little. As the needs for cement are rising as fast an our energy needs, one has to wonder when we start taking this problem seriously.
Solar panels don't generate energy, they capture energy from the sun (the sun being the power source). Wind turbines don't create wind, they draw energy from the wind (which is, again, the power source). Coal power plants burn coal for power. Nuclear power creates a nuclear reaction to generate power. See how that works?
As always, the desperate pro-Pollution Industry propaganda is based on logical fallacies and fabricated results.
The author of the article should reduce global energy consumption by removing herself from the planet. The rest of us will follow suit.
This is just the usual right wing propaganda. Don't listen to it for one big. It is sad to see such a respected organization stoop so low. Just like everybody has a car in their garage, once peak oil hits everyone will have a windmill and solar panel that will charge a whole house battery. One of the Google guys was saying that if you link windmills in different states that it would smooth out the bumps. Solar doesn't just end at night anymore with new technologies like storing the heat in salt. Please never ever give into crap posted on sites like www.junkscience.com and wattsupwiththat.com.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2009-12/panasonic-will-market-li-ion-storage-battery-home-use-2011
http://advantagessolarenergy.info/how-to-use-solar-energy-at-night-scientific-american/
Nai Modnar
The point is that the whole shameful article is a cesspit of incorrect arguments, and that the author either has no knowledge in the field at all, or is biased - most probably both.
- Photovolatic: the most important component of photovoltaic panels is silicon. It's one of the more abundant elements on earth. One can cover all landmass on earth with photovoltaics and still not run out. There are dopants in there that are less abundant, but only small quantities of them are required. Also, organic (as in carbon-based) photovoltaics are on the rise, which don't need said dopants. Also, at the end of the lifetime of a silicon-based panel, the silicon and dopants get recycled - they are way to valuable to throw away.
- Thermal solar energy and geothermal power: (cooling) water requirement is equivalent to current thermal technologies (nuclear, coal, gas,...). Also, in the case of geothermal, one could make a closed-cycle plant; this would work especially well in colder climates.
- Wind power: all electrical generators (except photovoltaic) contain magnets, so the argument goes agaist conventional energy as well. Also, the term "rare earths" is historical - we now know they are not really rare in the earth's crust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust
For instance, Neodynium is more abundant than for instance lead and tin. The problem with it is that it's hard to purify from natural deposits, so the annual supply is limited. Luckily, permanent magnets can be made from all kind of other materials, including abundantly available ones. The resulting generators will be somewhat heavier and less efficient, so it's currently cost-effective to use Neodynium, but if the price goes up, the industry will just switch to something else. Finally, these magnets are not consumed, they can be (and are) recycled or even reused in their original form.
- Biomass: this is not my personal favorite, but even so, the article is overly gloomy about it. The surface used for biomass is not lost forever - it can readily be re-purposed for agriculture once it's needed (or better energy-producing technologies become available). Also, a lot of agricultural land is being used for growing animal fodder, which is quite a wasteful business; if we would just stop eating those excessive amounts of meat that are a contributing factor to the current heart disease epidemic and eat a bit more vegetable protein sources, we could easily feed ourselves from half as much farmland (and still get more than enough meat to eat for a healthy and enjoyable diet). Also, at some point, technology might become available to grow excellent animal-free meat in bioreactors, which would make meat production way more efficient.
- Hydropower: just like silicon, the supply of concrete and steel is nearly inexhaustible. Yes, CO2 is emitted during the production thereof, but it's a tiny fraction of the CO2 that would be emitted when matching the lifetime energy production of the dam using fossil fuels. Also, building nuclear power plants also requires large quantities of concrete and steel (and given the current safety debate, they're still not using enough).
I'm sure there's more fallacies to be found in the article, but again, the point is that the author is either a nitwit or terribly biased (presumably both).
... less humans. Might sound harsh but that's nature! A limitied pool of natural resources also limits the amount of humans which may be sustained.
Eh, nothing in there that we didn't already know. Renewable energy is not a deus ex machina for fixing our environmental problems. What else is new? Governments should still be focusing on using more renewables over conventional methods and should still be funding research into existing and new renewable energy forms. And of course we're going to have to reduce consumption. That's a given. We're going to have to reduce it quite a bit. But it's possible to reduce consumption a ton and still maintain a first world standard of living.
The thing that really gets me going is that many forms of renewable energy can be used in a distributed manner! Not centralized power plants. It's possible to install enough solar panels on the roof of a suburban home to nearly completely power the home. They'll do it for a good twenty years or more, with out fuel inputs. In that time they will completely pay for themselves. That's a total game changer! It slices out a huge chunk of people's utility costs.
Just because solar panels are produced using 'rare earth' minerals doesn't mean solar is the environmental equivalent of coal.
First, the biggest problem with coal, oil and gas is the GHG emissions, not the scarcity of the fuel. Solar, wind and geothermal have very very low GHG emissions. Just because they may eventually be constrained by scarcity of essential materials doesn't negate this.
Second, at least in relation to 'rare earths' which are the components most commonly cited as being finite (I haven't RTFA so I can't be sure this is their argument) they aren't very rare at all. They' re all over the place. There just aren't lots of commercially viable mines at current prices. That's mostly because China hasn't enforced very strict environmental regulations, so Chinese rare earth mines have brought the cost of those minerals way down. That's changing because the Chinese people are sick of having toxic rivers and birth defects. The only result is on the market is slightly higher prices and some non-Chinese mines become viable again.It doesn't mean that suddenly solar panels can't be produced.
Without reading it, I can guarantee that this article is FUD.
Easy to build and will run on any heat source from reflected sunlight to biomethane to peat or alcohol.
And the village blacksmith can build one, no factory needed!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
How can such a suggestion be published here while we are witnessing the biggest hike in emissions in history, crap!
The article is basically saying that green energy does bad stuff though in lesser amounts than traditional energy. Which means that as consumption grows bad stuff must grow too. It isn't really an argument against green energy so much as against energy utilization growth which is incredibly popular.
I thought the E-Cat was about to solve all our energy needs.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
> why, exactly, would you want magnets in a gearbox?
Magnets are used in some gearboxes as "chip collectors", which a "chip detector" can sense to alert for contamination or impending failure of the gearbox.
gfy
The three biggest power stations in the world are all hydroelectric.
Norway, Brazil, Venezuela, and Canada all get more than 60% of their electricty from hydro, and in Norway's case it's more than 98%
There are already a lot of dams that don't have power stations attached, so you could replace/upgrade them without adding to the overall land use.
And here comes the one that's different from the other ones: The plants can stop floods.
What's not to like? Blocking sediment: There are ways to let the sediment through (see three gorges dam) and these can probably be improved further. Habitat destruction: Ok good point, but you don't have to keep mining for coal, uranium, etc. Virtually everything humans build will destroy the natural habitats of other species, but in this case it's a one-off finite use of an area for long term energy production.
IF people consume more energy than what can be produced then there is going to be serious issues as the population grows!
Why do smoke stacks point up? If the exhaust from coal plants could be deposited 30 miles below the Earth's surface... would they still be contributing to greenhouse gasses?
Stupid article makes stupid claims like "Wilderness is not renewable once roads and power-line corridors fragment it." Which is stupid. Don't trees grow back? All the bush I've seen with power lines through are regenerating nicely. Stupid article.
Comparison on a per capita level is very useful when you compare New York with Bangkok or Mexico City or Tokyo.
It does not make so much sense if you compare a very smal town close to the arctic circle in the first world with a hugh town close to the equator in the second or third world.
In fact I don't really get your point ... you have a better as in "more useful" measurement? Go ahead and tell us.
This however:
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If the nuclear industry were willing to retire more of these T-Rex reactors before they blow up, people might be less resistant to letting them build new ones. But they aren't.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It makes a whole bunch of unsupported assertions and ignores facts. It's a blatantly one-sided article from the journal of atomic scientists.
Nuclear energy astro-turfing is UTTERLY DISGUSTING. The people starting these discussions have a vested interest and should not posted to /.
Deny that.
Heck, you can just equate money to energy for the sake of argument, and look at the actual cost to drive a gas-powered car 40 miles, versus an electric car. Any handwaving analysis of the costs of these two rides will easily show the EV to be the winner in terms of money, and there's a good reason for that: it really does use that much less energy, even neglecting the differences in subsidies/taxes between gasoline and electric generation.
QTD says classical thermodynamics is wrong. L2cope.
I spent a summer working at a biomass plant. The plant had originally been designed to operate on peat, but it was determined that the peat was too wet to be commercially viable. And the plant was mothballed for a decade.
When I arrived there, they were burning wood chips. Except they needed 40 18-wheeler trucks a day (approx 1600 tons) to make about 20MW. This is a pretty big logistical problem for a piddly 20MW. There were a lot of problems at that place, but the principal one was the fuel handling system wasn't any good, and it wasn't economically viable anyhow- it would have been cheaper to just burn the diesel fuel that the 40 trucks/day were burning instead of the wood. And it would have been more environmentally friendly also.
# Existing coal plants can be converted at relatively low cost to use biomass power
# The ashes can simply be spread on the biomass farming areas to replenish minerals in the soil (compare to coal ash, which cannot be used in this way)
Existing coal plants would need a different fuel handling system. Coal pulverizers are designed to pulverize coal, not biomass. They may, depending on the boiler design, require a partial or complete boiler retrofit in order to burn biomass. This would cost a few hundred millions of dollars for an average 500MW coal unit. I am not an expert on permitting, but they might need permit re-approval or a new permit to switch fuels. This would cost millions of dollars and is not a sure thing.
EPA says that you can not spread the ashes on the ground. When I worked at the wood-chip fired plant, the company was fined heavilly by the EPA for letting their ash containers overflow onto the ground, and not keeping the ash on a pad with a water barrier. Fly ash is nasty stuff.
Recently I visited a new coal plant under construction in western Virginia (not West Virginia). They did not have a rail line (yet), so were anticipating approximately 500 trucks a day of coal, plus about 100 trucks a day of lime when they started operations. This is approximately a 500MW plant. I'm not sure they can be economically viable with trucking all their fuel in- I have never heard of a coal power station without rail on site. The good thing about coal is it generally comes out of a hole in the ground, so you can usually use rail to move it. With Biomass, the source is spread out more so trucks are generally required.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Renewable energy sources may be cost competitive, but they will never scale fast enough to replace oil, gas and coal in our lifetime. We can't run a civilization of the type we have now on it (possibly a good thing). You can review the numbers here to find out what that would take (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil).
There's an irony here lost on most people concerned with renewable energy. The reason every river isn't dammed and every square foot of arable land hasn't been farmed for palm oil and sugar cane is because oil, natural gas and coal exist. If hydrocarbons weren't there, we'd have exploited every natural energy source to support an exploding human population and the ecology be damned. Hydrocarbons have, so far, saved what natural ecology is left, and will continue to do so since desequestering hydrocarbons will eventually cycle them back into the ecosphere. Short term effects of that desequestration will suck (acid rain, etc.). Long term, much better.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Mine a few asteroids. Erect solar collectors in space, have spaced based factories using space-based sources of materials to make stuff. This article is assuming we've only got one planet, which will be true so long as we don't take the plunge.
Here is the really scary thing:
Getting into space needs vast resources. We have to do it _now_ before we use up the fossil fuel. We have to jump start the space-based economy while the earth-based one can afford it. If we don't the window will close, effectively forever because all the resources will go into battling climate shift, in feeding 8+ billion people, and so on. And the oil takes how many millions years to 'regrow'?
Long term is not 10 years or 50. It's 2000. If we want to have a developed economy with all the tech we love so much but that can persist indefinitely in terms of its resource usage (THAT is what sustainable means -- indefinitely), there are really two alternatives. Wipe out 90% of the Earth's population (and keep it down there), or get into space. Anything else is ultimately lost in the noise.
We're in the infancy of this new era of Energy production away from fossil fuels. Come back in 10 years and look at the article's premise to the direction R&D has led to new, more efficient and more benign solutions to Green Energy. Hell, in 18 months what is created today will look archaic.
No, no we don't. Of course everyone keeps harping on them, but this isn't the 1800's. We have new physical theories of the universe now, and the contradict the laws of thermodynamics.
There's a lot of cherry picking here with a valid point in the end that the ridiculously wasteful way we use energy right now can't continue. However, the points made do not serve as the hit piece on renewable energy that someone along the chain seems to want. I would expect this of the Atomic Scientists: they're by definition interested in yet another fuel that is only created by supernovae, and is not renewable. They're on the wrong end of this debate, muddying the issue.
Renewables are renewable but within a specific timeframe. You have to tailor your way of life to resources that can renew at least at the rate you're consuming them, or else you're creating an energy deficit. If you're liquidating other resources like the environment doing it, you're screwing humanity's future, and you have to adjust to that. There is no other option for the long term.
They're cherry picking a couple of really badly done attempts to characterize the entire concept of cleaner, greener electricity. A bunch of solar panels out in the desert is not a good example of renewable energy done right. It's not cost-effective, whereas concentrated solar thermal is in that setting. Solar panels, however, can go places that other power generators can't, and this means you can generate power onsite, eliminating waste due to resistance of the grid. They aren't the full answer.
You could do solar thermal - or you could build with heavily insulated windows and thermal mass to let the sun heat your home and water to where your requirements from electricity sources should be minimal. You can also use thermal mass and basic convection for cooling. I know firsthand: I've stood outside a strawbale home on a 90 degree day and had goosebumps from air cooled by a huge northern wall that was kept out of the sun flowing down into an enclosed garden with a solid fence around it and plants respirating, all of which combined to cool part of the outdoors more than adequately. That only cost what it took to build: straw, plaster, and rebar. The investment is good for at least the owner's lifetime.
The other thing is excessively part things out. If you have a woodstove that's your home's backup heat, your cooking, your hot water, that's your answer when solar and wind aren't there for you for a lot of things. If you burn at the right temperatures to create pyrolysis and generating biochar, you're getting more from that biomass and creating your fertilizer for plants you'll presumably be replenishing and fertilizing so that not a drop of sun goes to waste. The maximum uptake of energy through living, renewing systems is key, and we have to respect how good nature has gotten at that and play along.
Digging up hydrocarbons from hundreds of millions ago to burn wastefully, that's what these authors should be targeting. We all know it on some level. I'm tired of the denial and false logic keeping it going just so the oil companies can have their business model, consequences be damned.
It takes 7.5 kWh of energy to produce a gallon of gasoline. Put into an EV, that 7.5kWh is good for at least 22 miles of driving, and perhaps 45 miles or more in the hands of a skilled driver in favorable conditions. In other words, an EV can generally go as far on just the energy needed to make a gallon of gas as a traditional vehicle can go actually burning that same gallon.
=Smidge=
WTF? This is total BS. There's a lot more than 7.5kWh in a gallon of gasoline. The fact that it's already been made by millions of years of evolution is irrelevant, and the amount of energy needed to make gasoline is constantly going up as extraction costs rise (i.e., tar sands require far more energy for extraction than pumping out of the ground in Texas).
Oh wait, I do see where you're going with this, because the cost of the fuel equates to the energy needed for extraction. Nevermind the BS comment.
Even so, the numbers I've seen generally show EVs at a significantly lower cost-per-mile than gas cars, and as gas prices rise (which they will), this advantage will grow larger.
The water in the reactor loop just keeps on going around the loop without getting released, barring a rare leak, and isn't a huge volume of water anyway. It's expensive water because it's been treated with a lot of chemicals to remove anything that is going to corrode the pipework. The same holds for the water in the turbine loop - that doesn't get thrown away either. For the same heat output it really doesn't matter if it's BWR, PWR, molten salt or even non-nuclear as far as water consumption goes.
The huge amounts of water required is a consequence of the advantage that nuclear power has over other forms of thermal power generation and you can't really use less without giving up that advantage. That advantage is the high temperatures and the large temperature difference that give you. That means a lot of cooling so you need a LOT of water available. That's really just a siting problem and only limits where you can put the reactors because the water isn't actually lost - just heated up. With a large river, lake or on the seashore the used cooling water can be released in such a way that it makes little difference.
It means seawater cooled thermal power plants are more expensive and generally a pain - but there have been lot of them for a long time with an even longer history of seawater coolant on ships and the problems are known and managed.
It does appear that you are considering a simplistic idea of thinking ALL the water used is the same. It isn't. Even fairly clean fresh water has a lot of dissolved solids that you don't want to get into your boiler water, and most nuclear plants have reactor coolant and inner water loops as well which never go anywhere near the turbines let alone the cooling water.
The cooling water I've had the most to do with (at an inland coal fired plant) was full of diatoms and algae - not the sort of stuff you want going through the turbines. Stuff grows in those cooling towers.
Are you aware of how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant? Don't blame it on Government or hippies - it takes a long time in China and India as well.
There isn't a completed example of the 1980s AP1000 design yet.
At first reading this blurb I thought, "Ah another concern troll." but when I went to the article it was posted on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists website. The essay isn't nearly long enough and I don't have time to deconstruct it, but the author does have some valid points to make. I say we need to transition to less destructive and more sustainable forms of energy and transform our lifestyle to using less resources. And we really need to think through the implications of what "renewable energy" really means.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
A leak of very hot stuff touching water can result in a steam explosion (yes, I've got the audacity to use Chenobyl as an example) instead of a chemical explosion. A leak can make things blow up. There are other mechanisms as well when you have hot things under pressure - if they escape suddenly and cause a lot of damage that is an explosion by definition.
It's only worth attempting to be some sort of pedant if you check to see if you are correct first.
Steam is made out of boiled water.
Is that clear enough?
I can't draw pictures here.
I'll bet it wasn't clear enough to stop you pretending to be very stupid in order to make some point, so I'd better point out that it's steam that spins the turbines which spin the generators and make the electricity. That's how thermal power stations of all kinds work whether it's nuclear or anything else.
There's more. Really hot stuff often has to be kept cool so that it will last for a useful period of time. Water often gets used for that.
Understand?
This is a moronic argument. What you're saying is that all I can do is stop using energy entirely until clean energy sources become more widespread? How about opting to pay more for solar/wind generated power and using as little power as you can? I don't find anything terribly hypocritical about that, or see why I shouldn't be allowed to argue for cleaner energy in the meantime.
That article does everything wrong that a science-related article possible can. For everyone who doesn't blindly trust in handwaving arguments, I highly recommend Tom Murphy's blog "do the math": http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/
If you were taking this seriously you would have considered some of the "interesting" liquid sodium cooling incidents that the French had. If you have a lot of heat to get rid off bad stuff happens unless you take care to stop it happening. Pretending that something is inherently safe when it is not is somewhat dishonest.
At the beginnging of nuclear power era it was a design principle that used-up uranium rods would be sent to repreocessing plants for reenrichment. HOWEVER, as it turned out, the reprocessed rods increasingly accumulate Uranium 236 which weakens their energy-generation efficiency. So much so that it affects economics of energy production.It was observerd as early as the seventies that nuclear power plants prefer fresh uranium rods to reprocessed ones - for less of them are needed to produce a given amount of energy, and so it costs less. And so the used-up rods problem arose which is present until today - the rods are stored in many places and pose a real threat to the environment. For an excellent reference try reading "The Curve of Binding Energy" - it's an excellent book even though it was first published in 1974. It describes the life and the career of Theodore B. Taylor, one of the most bright scientists of the U.S. nuclear program.
In wind power, yes, you use rare earth materials. But at end of life, these can be recycled. It's not like we throw
the rare earth materials into space when we're done with them.
Solar power uses ground water in deserts. Does this even run out? I mean, ground water is there because it rains or comes in from the sea.
Evaporating water from solar panels still make it into rain and so the cycle should continue.
What's the fuss?
So no water as coolant, no sodium, no liquid metal cooling? So it just stay hot until it melts it's way out?
Back to school with you!
Is it a myth that it is renewable? it is not. For 4 billion years, the big star near our planet can provide plenty of energy; while technically not infinite, it can certainly provide much energy.
Is it a myth that it needs infrastructure? it is not. Old materials may be recycled and create new infrastructure. At some point in the future, the very same energy that is extracted from renewable sources will be used to recycle and reuse old infrastructure, just like with oil.
Is it a myth that it needs water? it is not. But water is plenty on our planet. 70% of it is filled with water.
So why does this article exist? what does it bring to the table? should we abandon renewable energy just because it is difficult to create it cheaply now? if we abandon it, and we don't have any more oil in a few hundred years, we will go back to the stone age.
Oil, natural gas, and coal are cheap and plentiful. Man-made global warming is the real myth.
n/t
It's "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" and they are, from what I understand, watchdogs of nuclear power and weapons. It's possible there may be some shills in the mist. Like NPR was once considered fairly left, but moved ever rightward through fiscally conservative and outright Republican managers. Now it's synonymous with Nice Polite Republicans.
On the other hand, perhaps more likely, the author thought they needed to do the same about warning about the potential downsides of "renewable energy" as they have about the problems of nuclear energy.
I respectfully disagree with some of Ms. Stover's points.
Overall there seems to be some confusion between "Renewable" "Zero Impact" and "Expandable indefinitely"
Some of this confusion is in the public mind. I'll agree that many people consider "renewable" to mean "until the sun grows cold" Meanwhile there are some low impact resources that do run out after a few decades.
Yes, even renewable sources have a cost of operation. That does not mean they are a bad idea.
Let's take another look:
1. The Blythe solar project is expected to use 600 acre feet of water per year. To put that in perspective that is the amount of water to irrigate 120 acres of tomatoes in California's San Joachin valley. I live near a 2 GW coal fired power plant. For cooling they have a 3 square mile pond. In our climate a dugout evaporates about 4 feet a year. So just the evaporative losses alone account for roughly 7200 acre feet per year. Given that the pond is about half uncovered even in midwinter, I suspect that the additional evaporation from it being hotter water than a farmer's dugout raises this evaporative amount considerably.
Yes, water is more scarce in the desert. However compare the water use by the power plant compared to the water used by either industry or the residents that will use that power.
I'll agree the solar PV power is a marginally green technology at this time.
Report card:
Renewable: Long term.
Impact: Water use -- on the order of 1/10 that of conventional power.
Expansion: Moderate. Very large expansion can alter local climate and heat balance. (Solar thermal is overall darker than native desert, so the area will experience an overall temperature increase.
Geothermal:
Geothemal can use injected water, but depending on the nature of the hot rock formation, they will cool off the rocks. There is some work being done on drilling in very hot rock. This would mean that, like some classes of water well, each well has a finite life span.
Report card:
Renewable: Each installation has a limited lifespan. Use of directional drilling technology may allow each installation to harvest the heat from several cubic miles of crust.
Impact: Requires reinjection of water. The use of air cooled condensers (Like at the Blythe project above) would reduce this considerably.
Expansion: Natural sites fairly rare. Quite expandable when we can drill hot rock.
Wind Power.
Citing the rare earth magnets as a non-recoverable cost is disingenuous. They would be reused in the next turbine. And they aren't that rare. They are just difficult to separate. The concrete is not much concrete. Many cities have at least 8000 miles of sidewalk..
Report card:
Renewable: Indefinately.
Impact: Cost of construction is significant. Given their relatively short lives, it may make sense to use steel pylons for foundations. My understanding is that they have short lives because the tech keeps improving, and that after 3-4 years it is worth replacing a 2 MW unit with a 5 MW unit because they already have the site permits, and the power line right of way. There is a good market for used wind turbines. Good sites are rare, and usually not convienient to consumption. Requires extensive power grid infra-structure increases.
Expansion: Lots of room for expansion. Windfarms can co-exist with other agricultural use.
Biomass:
Argueably the best way to use biomass is with the residue of regular crops. A good case can be made for extracting syngas from any biomass feed stock, and returning the charcoal to the land to create terra pretta. Some research needs to be done to see if this is viable in temperate climates. There are methods for fermenting celluose using a bacterial process for breaking the cellulose into sugar, then yeast to make alchohol. This is a much more complex process than distallation for syngas.
I have also seen the numbers (Scientific American, many years ago) that for a Tennessee based power plant t
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Agreed, creating centralized power for 7 Billion is a monumental task. The population levels are always a wildcard in trying to figure out how to change the power systems of the world. However, there is one inescapable fact that I think we can all agree on: current energy production methods will not last forever. Oil and Coal will eventually run out and they do make a mess in the mean time. I, however, will not accept that this excuses us from attempting to tackle the problem at as many levels as we possibly can. I also don't lend much credence to arguments that state the problem without offering anything to address it. Status quo is intellectually lazy in my opinion. There are several angles we can take to mitigate the problem and some simple population measures we can take to at least buy us more time if not reduce population levels outright.
Rather than focus solely on how to centrally generate power for the masses, I prefer to think in terms of self sustainability. I don't like depending on anyone for my power, water, etc... If I make my own power, grow my own food, etc..., I am not as much of a subject of the state. I think of it like an insurance policy against natural disaster, economic fluctuations, infrastructure failures, etc... Now, similar to the larger problem, I would have to spend a huge amount of money/ time making myself completely self sustaining. The idea here is to move in that direction tackling it in small steps. A 700 Watt windmill and 300 Watts of solar step me in the right direction and reduce my dependance. It can also help feed an electric car, further freeing me from dependance and reduce the mess I make. I think people loose sight of this aspect when they argue back and forth regarding "earth sustainability". From this perspective any movement toward self sufficiency within your means is worth it as it affects you directly. At an absolute level, dependency feels like servitude. You must depend on someone else (in increasing amounts every year) whom you don't know to take care of you and hope they are competent to do so.
Now in the larger picture, many live at density levels that don't allow for many of these technologies. Living in an apartment doesn't allow for wells, solar, or wind. This is where we can focus the green infrastructure efforts. In this way, the scale of necessary energy needs can be reduced by focusing on a smaller population. We are already moving in this direction but the idea is to create incentives for those with some land to generate their own energy (and even provide back to the grid). The current barrier is still the initial cost of installation. Here in California, there was a model by which the initial cost of installation could be tacked onto your mortgage regardless of equity. Unfortunately, it was squashed by political/ financial interests. As I believe self sustaining home power will increase the values of homes by increasing amounts as energy costs continue to increase annually, I believe this idea needs to be readdressed aggressively at a national level. The net result would be increasing the value of the home, reducing the draw from the grid, reduce dependency, and create a ton of jobs especially with the America only brands allowed for the incentive. Whatever it takes, I think this should be a high priority.
Now all this is may be helpful but the pink elephant will be addressed whether we like it or not. We simply can not maintain these population levels. I think it would be better to be proactive to reduce the pain. If we don't, it will self-adjust at our expense (or the expense of our children/ grandchildren). Now there are lots of studies and numbers are thrown around all over the place but lets make an argument based on the following numbers which seem to be fairly accepted by people who seem to be fairly smart. Again, please don't get lost in the exact numbers, the point is the same assuming you believe we are beyond sustainable levels at all...
"Several recent studies show that Earth’s resources are enough to sustain onl
It's not just wind farms that provide multiple uses for land. I'm amazed that I had to make that point.
The article makes some good points, and the future to our energy will be getting the most "length" out of these technologies. The article makes one drastic mistake, and that is leaving out Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. OTEC takes the temperature difference between warm surface water, and cold deep water to create base-load, emission free power. It's truly revolutionary stuff, and the water used is pumped back into the ocean un-harmed, or some is desalinated to produce any number of gallons of clean drinking water. Once an OTEC plant is up and running, there is really no end in sight for it's cycle. The Bahamas recently committed to building 2 commercial OTEC plants and other Caribbean nations are lining up to harness the power themselves. To learn more about this game-changing technology, and stay up to date with all the OTEC news, check out The On Project.
http://www.theonproject.org/?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=messageboard&utm_campaign=mscomment
Okay, I learnt something :-)
Still, 800 pounds? I think we all knew she meant in the generator.
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