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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.
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.
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.
It's really time to go metric guys, unless anyone can explain to me what that means?
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
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?
"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.