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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?
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.
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.
"In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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
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.
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?
Or were you actually serious?
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.
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
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
I think most of Slashdot is well ahead of the curve in this department, albeit not necessarily by choice.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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 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).
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.