Slashdot Mirror
Two Google Engineers Say Renewables Can't Cure Climate Change
_Sharp'r_ writes Two Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, worked for Google on the RE<C project to figure out how to make renewables cheaper than coal and solve climate change. After four years of study they gave up, determining "Renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?
Hopefully it will. We should at least convert our base load power to nuclear as a start.
I guess that's it settled then!
Renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels in terms of generation, but when it comes to storing that power we still haven't found anything better than pumping water uphill at a massive efficiency loss.
Chemical batteries clearly aren't going to cut it, so the question is, what massive physical process can we use to store power that's more efficient than moving water arround?
We don't need to work 50 hours a week "producing" virtual bits.
Bring in the ten hour workweek and the leisure society.
"Renewable energy technologies, as they exist today, simply won't work."
So, what? We should stop pursuing them altogether?
i love renewables but we know all this already, it's been commented to death here before already
Yes, they are right. Renewables *ALONE* won't solve the problem. However, without renewables the problem *CANNOT BE SOLVED*.
So to draw the conclusion that renewables are useless because they are not a silver bullet 100% fix is a false conclusion.
If there's a 2' hole in my boat and I am unable to 100% patch that hole should I give up? No. If I can patch 80% of that hole, maybe my bilge pump can keep the boat afloat long enough to be rescued or get to shore or long enough to figure out how to patch another 80% of that 80%.
The problem with thinking in this world is that we are lazy. We want to sit on our couches and have the perfect, 100% for everybody solution handed to us and not have to get off our fat ass and do anything. The reality is, instead of looking for a silver bullet, we need to solve this problem through a thousand paper cuts, a thousand pinpricks, a thousand bandaids. Every time a person makes a sustainable choice, a thimbleful of water is bailed out of our boat.
We can and will develop a sustainable future through innovation and hard work.
Ironically, environmentalists and their 'spooky nuclear' protests is why we are still so reliant on fossil fuels and still pumping carbon into atmosphere. Nuclear technology, especially breeder reactors that produce minimal waste, is how you eliminate emissions. Wind and solar are unsuitable for base load due to variability, and require often non-renewable backups.
We have the problem that we expect to be able to work whenever we want. But the sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest at certain times, not all the time. Solution, reduce waste, and work when the energy is available, or find more power storage technologies and install 'em. Either way, big changes in the way energy is handled.
We're coming to a point where we need less and less workers, but we're expecting to do more and more work. What?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?
No, because there's almost half a decade worth of FUD been spent on making people equate "nuclear" with "bad." People don't have the slightest idea of how nuclear power works, what's involved, and how many plants have been in operation during that time with absolutely no lives lost due to nuclear accidents. People don't realize that nobody died from Three Mile Island, that Chernobyl only happened because the operators intentionally violated about a dozen safety protocols, and that Fukushima radiological aftereffects are so small in comparison to lives lost and property destroyed due the the earthquake and tsunami as to be statistically unmeasurable.
But hey! Don't let facts and logic stand in the way of an emotional response. Let's keep thinking we can solve this who thing with solar and wind power and ignore safe, abundant, carbon-free power sources like nuclear.
You assume that economies can't lose any money in transition.
This is a flawed idea in that just refuses to consider political action in response. When you can't imagine a government putting the externalized costs of fossil fuels on fossil fuel consumers, this conclusion is a natural one.
That's not to say a nuclear heavy solution is bad, either. The real amazing thing here is that there are so many solutions that simply require not keeping the status quo, and we can collectively bring outselves to do none of them.
What about brick production, which emits massive amounts of CO2? What about declining rain forest and other ecosystems that store CO2? What about undoing the damage that's already been done? What about the positive feedback loops like methane being released from the tundra as it melts? The global climate is way more complex than this, and buying a Prius and high efficiency light bulbs aren't going to cut it by a long shot.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Makes me think of the Simpsons episode with Panaphonic and Sorny TVs.
Anything but change the way we live on the earth! Anything but that!
What absurdity
More trains
Local farming and gardening
Hybridizing cities
abandoning what is useless
There is nothing complicated, just our attachment to how things appear to be, even as broken as they are.
Hilariously you mention nuclear as a solution? Haha. That is the least renewable of all.
our problem is the fixation on "baseload" power. We need to switch to an auction model where natural gas plants are on standby and compete to sell energy to the grid at times when renewables aren't available. The less the sun shines, the more a watt of nat gas electricity would be worth, to the lowest bidder. But this will require getting rid of 90% of the existing coal/gas infrastructure and until we do, there will be huge push back against wind and solar.
So, two guys gave up after four years or study and conclude the whole thing is futile?
Sure, they're probably smart guys. But, their inability to solve a decades old problem in a few years doesn't mean anything more than they didn't come up with a magic bullet.
Maybe the problem is the arrogance of Google engineers who think they're going to solve something like this is a short period of time where nobody else has succeeded.
So, you'll excuse me if I take their sweeping proclamation with a giant grain of salt.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/11/19/0030229/rooftop-solar-could-reach-price-parity-in-the-us-by-2016
The two google engineers in question found that if we cut off carbon emission TODAY (like, say, going nuclear) it would already be too late. They were advocating climate engineering, which is to say we need NOT ONLY a cuttoff of carbon emission, but also massive carbon CAPTURE.
The submitter apparently didn't even read the article this time. How Sad.
Nukes need to move forward in a deliberate manner.
1. A few reference designs need to be established, accounting for some reasonable subset of possible sites such as coastal, inter coastal, inland, etc.
2. These designs would be vetted by the Industry, the feds, and what the hell, invite the Greenies.
3. Once approved, the designs should be exempted fro EPA meddling and some reasonable level of lawsuit immunity...as in the construction can't be delayed decades by lawsuit after lawsuit.
4. Operators should undergo the same rigorous training as military nuke operators...subs, ships, etc. Not the same, but just as rigorous. We don't need fucking button pushes on the night shift. They have to understand the plant, the theory and they consequences of each action they take.
5. Parts should be manufactured in factories using standard methods and specifications. Parts should be interchangeable from site to site. Minimize customizations as much as possible.
The Free Market is great, but this is one of those things he Feds can and should do.
Oh, and none of this jetting into D.C. for 1 day a month for hearings crap. Get all the experts into the same room and lock the door. Make it into a Manhattan Project kind of thing...get it done and get it done right.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
you don't need a PhD to know this. Its common sense. The equation is very simple and doesn't need calculation. First you ask yourself, how much energy does it take to create renewable source X for energy production. How much energy is required to keep this source X going for Y years... and without knowing what X and Y is you can answer : YES it will not work. Now I don't contribute to up to this point to the question that has arisen. "How to tackle our current overkill of the planet?"
:)
My answer and it may be radical, delusional and fantastic but: "Stop fooling around, go to "google" or "Apple" and tell them that the easiest way to world domination or a dystopia of an apple or a google... is to design, create and build alots of fusion or plasma reactors... meaning "find the solution for infinite energy" for todays needs and you will rule the world. Trust me, they will listen and they are the only ones willing to invest and got the guts to invest, including having the funds to invest in such ridiculous ideas.
How? With what kind of source? or whatever else is needed to release this idea doesn't matter here. What matters is time and we don't have it to dwadle around and discuss about problems. We have to tackle them.
My contacts are saved in slashdot. Contact me if you need me to solve this issue, all I require is your funds.
Their suggestion at the end of the IEEE article is to quit trying to pick winners in energy research. Fund development of known sources, and also fund wild ideas that won't necessarily (but might) lead to a breakthrough. Things like adding ethanol to gasoline and loaning money to politically connected businesses are dead ends.
I think they have massively missed the point...
Our society is hooked on CHEAP energy, it's cheap because the energy used to create it has become embodied over millions of years, we dig it up and burn it in a few seconds. Cheap energy from coal that remains cheap will exhaust itself and at the same time, it appears, affect our climate. Market forces should take over at some point of course, but the damage could be done.
An alternative conclusion could be: to reduce climate change the increase of price of burning coal should be artificially increased to make it more expensive than renewable energy so that the market forces kick in earlier and the change happens earlier?
Is this what is supposed to happen with carbon credits etc?
If you think you can, you're probably right.
If you think you can't, you're probably right.
But isn't the issue power consumption? Appliances and computers are getting more efficient and hopefully in the future a microwave, AC, refrigerator, pc, laptops, light bulbs will run at microwatts or milliwatts levels. Then we could run solar or wind over our national grid. But runnning in microwatts or milliwatts also means they can embed a thin solar panel on these appliances or even run off of double a batteries.
From the IEEE article:
"As Hansen has shown, if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal, which means centuries of warming and instability. "
Their main problem was that fossil fuels are cheaper because the infrastructure is already built and they can dump CO2 into the atmosphere without any cost.
The easiest way to address this problem is with a carbon tax which uses the money to build renewable infrastructure.
Even with this, we may be toast.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
In the last stages, hydrocarbon usage is going to be the privilege of the military, the ones tasked with maintaining some order amidst the chaos. Long after growth is gone, there is going to be domination, and in the last days, energy monopoly is going to be the main tool to achieve that, for it will be too expensive for anybody else, or they will be barred.
It is as if they tried to study energy needs in a vaccuum. Yes, many changes will accompany a change to renewable energy. Getting rid of gasoline and diesel vehicles leaps to mind. Cutting back on the use of large ships is likely and international tourism may be sharply curtailed. Our appliances have been changing for quite some time already. Your lED monitor burns far less energy than your old tube monitor. We will see homes and buildings with plantings on the roofs or even fish ponds on the roofs. For much of the nation solar hot water heaters has worked well clear back to 1910 or maybe earlier. And bamboo may be the fuel winner of all times. Bamboo absorbs carbon for the first five years of its life and only returns that carbon to the atmosphere when burned. In addition bamboo can be very, very fast growing and is easy to harvest and requires no fertilizer or chemical sprays. We have plenty of space to grow bamboo forests and bamboo can also be used to make paper and build homes. So yes, we will change almost everything to have renewable energy but guess what. All hell will break lose if we do not go to renewables and in that scenario everything would change for the far, far worse than we have now.
Renewables are still a much better solution than burning fossil fuels and will get cheaper than fossils (just like every technology after time and mass usage). Climate change is far more complex than just "stop burning fossil fuels." Regardless of how energy is produced, it still results in heat. Given that in just the past hundred years the population of the Earth has increased by more than 6 billion people, it stands to reason that all those bodies and the energy they are using is going to contribute to warming. But switching to renewables (and nuclear) would at least help slow down the process.
Renewables are carving out a larger and larger slice of the energy pie. When the real word conflicts with your research findings, you should go back to the drawing board rather than make grandiose announcements. (In particular, these researchers might want to revisit their assumptions.)
You put up a device, it spits out power for free, and it doesn't run on fuel. Problem solved. What the hell about that do they think is not going to work?
GAAAAHHH !!! A FLASH OF THE OBVIOUS !!! I CAN'T SEEE !!!!!
Except, with all the tax money changing hand, plus the political "land grab" taking place, I do not expect any change.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Google frequently tries to make some grand change but then gives up when the going gets tough. Not only is this a pattern with Google but also a pattern with Millennials hence the reason they make poor employees on long term projects.
Standford: The Harfurd of the West Coast.
~Idarubicin
..nuclear solves it ? No ? Then take your radioactive shit and stick it.
Does anybody know why Tesla coils aren't mentioned? They seem to generate a lot of power...
Also, what if we combined what we presently have eg. street light poles, with vertical turbines, and upgraded slowly ... Couldn't that take load off the existing infrastructure by slowing consumption, thereby increasing efficiency over time.
Windows 3.1 was a starting point in the early 90s... Nobody set off to create Windows 8 back then, it evolved over time.
Please don't tear my head off for grammar, Oxford comma, or naivety...
A huge number of environmental problems could be solved if we could just get couples to have only 1 child. One side effect of this would be an aging population and reduction in labor force. But health care improvements and automation could cushion that.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Nuclear isn't cheap. Google aging nuclear power plants. As always capitalism is THE barrier to progress no matter which source of energy you go with.
"As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?"
Ummm, no.
As long as NG peakers are $1/W CAPEX and ~2 cents OPEX, nuclear is as dead in the water as it is today.
For comparison, the average price for nukes in the western hemisphere is about $8/W and ~5 cents OPEX.
According to those Google engineers, Nuclear power can't solve the problem either.
The problem isn't cheap energy but man made global warming and climate change; the CO2 levels are now so massive that inventing a zero emission ultra cheap energy source, that globally replaced all other polluting energy sources in an instant, no longer is enough stop the global warming process going on for hundreds of years.
You simply have to do much more than just making zero CO2 emission energy to stop the accelerating global climate change going on.
Beside that, nuclear power also fail on price; it simply can't compete against cheaper energy sources, despite direct and indirect subsides. This is the main reason why very few new nuclear power plants are being build.
Maybe nuclear is the way out
Maybe it's not,
But to abandon renewables,
'cuz 2 Guys With The Googles,
gave up is premature,
is it not?
Burma Shave
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Nowhere does the article mention nuclear. They argue for distributed and dispatchable power, hardly features of any nuclear design.
Which is what being fully environmentally conscious always amounts to.
They are right... renewables can't compete with coal economically, and it's foolish to try.
Where they *DO* compete with coal is in longevity.... in partictular, being sustainable for durations that are many orders of magnitude longer than any fossil fuel based system can hope to achieve while still keeping the planet's ecosystem unaltered. Yes, it costs more, but until somebody finds another habitable planet for us to live on and a way for us to actually get there, even a more expensive option is more desirable than no option at all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
is that people can set it up themselves, and free themselves from the energy mega-corporations, and the governments who use them as political tools. That is why wind and solar "will never work."
I'm always puzzled that people who present critical views of renewable energy always seem to rely on old data. News flash, massively popular and fast growing industry changes quickly. You can build utility solar plants that profitably sell electricity at 0.06 $/kWh. Look no further than report released by Lazard today... When prices are 30% lower in 5 years, like will happen, they'll be citing 0.06 $/kWh as too expensive, meanwhile ppas will be signed for 0.045 $/kWh.
Bill Gates' TED talk "Innovating to Zero" is a great talk on this subject.
No matter what Google does, they let it sit for about four years and then give up. Is anyone surprised?
2 stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid Stanford PhD researchers. Yes, they have massively missed the point. It's Ok for alternative energy to be more expensive if it saves the global environment. What are the hidden costs of humanity going extinct? Infinite costs ????
They assume that they must have RE C to encourage power companies to switch to the clean stuff solely based on economics.
The first step is to get to RE = C, then social mandates/nudges/incentives can effect the switch.
Until there is a real, workable alternative, there can be no talk of things social.
Such a talk is one of turning off my AC.
Not going to happen, especially if the planet is getting warmer.
Wont' work? It would be far more appropriate to say that renewables are only part of the solution, not the whole solution. They are definitely a part of our future energy production but due to their intermittent nature they can't (currently) fulfill a majority of our production needs. Nuclear baseload (either Fusion or Fission), a smattering of fossil & a healthy amount of solar/wind/tidal is definitely the way to go with current technology. Adjusting consumption (certain industrial processes, residential hot water/refrigeration, etc) to some degree to match the production of renewables should also be encouraged. Distributed energy production (mentioned in the article) would be great, but I don't know if any current or near term technology could offer power at current rates.
6. Anyone with responsibility for the safety, maintenance and/or operating budgets of a nuclear plant must reside, with their spouse and dependants, on or near the grounds of said nuclear plant
All your eggs in one basket, eh?
You don't want 2/3 of the people who have the best understanding of the facility to be taken out in the first few minutes of an accident. You don't want first responders burdened with the problem of evacuating dependents.
Not so evil after all?
Obviously there's benefit to Google in long term if renewables can be made cheap. But either way, it is research done on google's dime that helps public.
Did you mean "catastrophic man-made global warming'? Then why didn't you say so? Leading question much? "Renewables Can't Cure Climate Change" LOL.
www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com
The article keeps talking about cost. The energy has to be lower cost, companies won't switch if it costs them profit, coal is still lower cost, etc. The problem seems to be our economic system, not our technology level. We'd love to save the planet, but it will cut into profits, so we can't.
How crazy is this? The future of our civilization is at risk, but our economic system won't let us address the issue. It's as if Capitalism is more important than the civilization it supposedly serves. It is not even questioned that saving the planet has to make a profit. Oh, it will cost money? Well then, sorry, can't do it because everything done in America has to be profitable. It's like Capitalism is a suicide cult or something.
Since 2008 the Federal Reserve has tripled the money supply to save the oligarchs, I mean the economy. Would they print that much to save the planet? I mean, if it's really just a matter of money, the US can create all the money it needs. They pulled $700 billion out of their ass to bail out the banksters, I mean the economy. Why not bail out the planet? The fact is, neither technology nor markets will save us. They may be the tools we use, but what we need is a new attitude and perspective; one that's not a slave to money and profit. We could do all kinds of things if we weren't hamstrung by needing to make a profit. But it seems instead we'll just go over the cliff with our favorite ideology intact. Amazing.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
If these people were on the EPA science advisory panel, would their study have to be ignored too?
Eric Schmidt runs Google and seems to have great influence on its overall direction and this project in particular. Many people think of Google as a generally 'good' company, and by extension Mr. Schmidt should be good.
But there is strong evidence that he dances with wolves. That he is very adept at maneuvering among regulators, the military elite and masters of industry. And it is industry and conservative industrialists who have been fighting the 'green thing' since the beginning. It is known that he meets and mingles with these people but it is difficult to know what they talk about together.
So, if we 'follow the money', we might find that this study was influenced inappropriately.
...omphaloskepsis often...
"can't compete with coal economically, and it's foolish to try."
I don't know why this seems to be the foregone conclusion. I don't see how (after some reasonable developments, and economies of scale) coal can compete with renewable for many energy needs. Coal requires massive excavation of large stretches of land with multimillion dollar equipment, shipping a bulky material hundreds of miles to where it is used & considerable disposal costs to get rid of ash even before you consider the environmental issues. For baseload purposes I suppose it can have its advantages, but I have a hard time believing they outweigh the disadvantages. The only reason it is entrenched as a major player in current energy production is because it has been established in that role for a long time.
Nuclear won't be accepted as a solution until people who claim to believe that climate change has the potential to end civilization accept that the only proven technology capable of replacing base-load coal is nuclear, and that climate change is a technological problem, not a social problem.
This will take a long time.
The green activist movement is completely dominated by Naiomi Klein-style social engineers who don't care one whit about the environment, but who see it as a useful tool for defeating global capitalism. Thus their opposition to any technological solution to the problem of CO2 emissions whatsoever.
Now that climate change is increasingly widely acknowledged as a real issue--the Pentagon takes it seriously, can you get realer than that?--the green activist community will increasingly be seen as the major impediment to solving the problem. The question is: will we push these utopian socialists aside quickly enough to save the planet?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The french even manage to HEAT their houses with nuclear energy. From that, it is a minor step to put two power lines above each autobahn lane to power cars with leccy, too. All proven technology.
But you know what ? That would seriously damage some entrenched* industries from Novosibirsk to Marietta, Georgia. They benefit from the hydro-carbon game massively and they certainly have some unused change to "donate" to the GREEN* information-warmakers. It wiped out German nuclear, which had the first large-scale Thorium reactor running. Now wait for them to set their aim on France.
* take this literally
For starters all renewable energy scenarios involve a reduction in energy us by 80% which is easily achievable when you isolate your homes and make devices more efficient.
The EU thinks this change is possible. And for example Denmark want to be totally free of carbon emissions by 2050.
The problem of these two guys is that they want renewable energy at the same price as coal plants which are directly and indirectly subsidized in many ways. In addition you normally do not pay for the environmental impact of extracting the coal from the soil. There for coal is much cheaper.
And by the way we had in western Europe a decline in energy consumption over the last decades while still the economy was growing. There for, the assumption that growth implies more energy consumption is not generally valid. And furthermore, economic growth might not be a present indefinitely. So many assumptions of those two Google guys are wrong and therefore their conclusion is also wrong.
Cheaper than coal is a false assumption error
Coal is subsidized in transit, insurance, pollution caused healthcare and climate change costs.
All these differed costs are borne in TAXES.
Oil receives all the usual tax breaks, about $40 billion / year in the U.S. alone, plus healthcare costs plus the costs of a deepwater Navy and Marine force whose only job at present is keeping the M.E. Oil Business friendly.
Like every problem in nuclear, the issue is "how much does it REALLY cost?".
Subsidies like the federal liability limit, reprocessing costs, shipping and long term (>9000 years) storage costs keep nuclear on the low end of costs by hiding those costs in tax payer money
Coal, of course, leads the pack in carbon dioxide caused climate change. Until ALL those costs are figured in, coal looks cheap, nuclear looks reasonable
And, of course, they aren't and cannot be made so.
So boys, return to your sliderules, show us full cost accounting for ALL long term costs and then get back to us with real numbers.
Or is that wayyyyyy to obvious?
There's a book with the title: Farmers of Forty Centuries and the subtitle: Organic farming in China, Korea and Japan,
which says other things. It says: If you do it right, it works for a long, long time.
It's from 1911. Reprinted 2004.
obfuscate!
Google is getting trounced by Apple in the renewables department (as well as in the revenue and profts department ;-)
Is it a disease?
No, it's a naturally occurring phenomena.
Hot earth -> warm earth -> cold earth -> ice age (no more dinosaurs!) -> warm earth -> warmer earth....
Lather, rinse and repeat.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Looks like they missed a Stanford result. http://news.stanford.edu/news/...
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_JVOm...
Fuel cells triple the energy output from natural gas. The US has a 200 year supply of natural gas using the existing fracking technology that can release 10% of the natural gas from tight repositories. The 40% reduction in CO2 expected already from the US will largely be achieved by exchanging natural gas for coal. If we shift from the Canot cycle (thermal burning) to a fuel cell cycle (electro-chemical process) we'll get 3X the energy.
Off the coast of Alaska is 10X the volume of continental natural gas reserves as methane hydrates (a clathrate). This methane hydrate could require the use of CO2 to release it because CO2 make a more stable hydrate with water than methane.
We'd see dual pipelines - ones carrying methane to the site of fuel cells and CO2 back to the site of methane production. The CO2 will be pumped into the reservoir to release more methane. The generating stations could be in your neighborhood, or even your house, meaning a decentralized electrical grid - add a factory and all you need is a couple of pipes and a small fuel cell facility.
No net CO2 emission for several hundred years as we work on the Mr. Fusion device. :)
It's almost like this is a very HARD PROBLEM that hundreds if not thousands of very, very bright people have been working on for years without much success.
Huh. Who'd'a thought?
(I think this entire project, while worthy, shows a staggering level of conceit, if not profound disrespect for brilliant scientists and engineers of previous generations. "Well, if we just get some smart people - I mean GOOGLE smart - and let them think about it, I'm sure they'll find the answer!")
Sometimes the historical ignorance displayed by people today is breathtaking.
-Styopa
For all the talk of the dangers of nuclear, it has still caused less deaths per amount of energy generated than any other method that has been used to practically generate electricity: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/... If you're not ignorant of these facts, then the only remaining reasons to oppose nuclear are either political (Naomi Klein-style anti-capitalist), or you're simply a misanthrope.
The whole issue of waste has been beaten to death. Reprocessing and breeder reactors leave only a little waste that can't be used for energy, and waste transmutation is a proven concept that further reduces any dangerous waste. With these processes, the actual nuclear waste left over is a tiny amount, and glassification trivially takes care of that.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Two Standford PhDs, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, worked for Google on the RE<C project to figure out how to make renewables cheaper than coal and solve climate change.
Yes, that's true.
After four years of study they gave up, determining "Renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach."
Well, yeah, that quote is in the article, but it's not in response to the question "can renewables be cheaper than coal".
As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?
No, because you're answering the wrong question.
Let's go back to the article:
At the start of REwith steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope—but that doesn’t mean the planet is doomed.
As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
There's the quote in the summary, and those bolded sentences are what it's referring to. Not "can renewables be cheaper", but "even if we switch to renewables, can we significantly reduce CO2". And from the sidebar with the two graphs:
Yet because CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for more than a century, reducing emissions means only that less gas is being added to the existing problem. Research by James Hansen shows that reducing global CO2 levels requires both a drastic cut in emissions and some way of pulling CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it.
While nuclear may be a fine technology, it doesn't "pull CO2 from the atmosphere and store it". So, no, Subby, nuclear is not the answer to the question they were asking either.
I was curious, then I read the IEEE article, and I saw that Slashdot is now trying to spread misinformation. removed you guys from my feed aggregator. (not just this article, there hasn't been anything posted here that I haven't found elsewhere more timely. And while the quality of comments here are usually very good, I don't have time to read the comments these days.)
Fossil fuels are cheap because their costs are externalized: the person buying the coal doesn't have to pay for the climate change. The obvious and correct solution is to internalize that cost, and put a heavy tax on carbon fuels.
My pet proposal is a carbon tax collected at the source: as the coal or oil or gas leaves the ground or enters the country. This extra cost would be passed along through the economy, raising the prices of things in proportion to the CO2 generated in making and using them. You can return the tax revenue to the people as a flat rebate, a reduced income tax rate, you can keep it to balance the budget, I don't care: run your donkey-and-elephant politics however you like, it's the environmental benefits of the strong tax disincentive that matter to me.
For the value of the tax, I propose a tax that gradually ramps up to effectively equal the current price of oil by the end of the century. This is steep enough to kill off coal power in under a decade, but otherwise would let us gradually transition to green technologies and minimize the economic shock to the economy.
One last thing: goods imported from countries that don't have a comparable carbon tax should be charged an additional tarrif when imported, to compensate for their lower tax burden.
Many Slashdotters are free-market libertarians, and find taxes disgusting. I'm right there with you, but this is not a problem the market can solve on its own. But by taxing the problem, you allow the market to find an optimal solution for you, which is much more libertarian than allowing the government to pick and choose green solutions. If on the other hand you deny that there *is* a problem, that's a whole other conversation.
Good ideas! Let me make one observation, though. All commercial plant operators receive the same (very rigorous) training regardless of their shift. My take has always been that being an operator is not a job, it's a way of life. Operators are some of the most dedicated people I know. They have to be or they would never get licensed.
Other than that, I vote for you to be the next NRC Commissioner.
well then,it' settled.
Oh, but the numbers show they are wrong.
Anyway they only showed one thing: That in a pure capitalist society, nothing will change.
Yes, we can, in fact, replace coal with renewable energy, yes it might be marginally more expensive in the short term.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...is not convincing. The IPCC has 0 credibility.
As for the rest, not too bad, except, of course, all roads lead to nuclear, and greenies hate nuclear with a hot, heavy, irrational hatred and have used every resource to drive up the cost of power produced with it. Had they been kept in check, we'd have our nuclear infrastructure to fall back on, "electricity too cheap to meter" and all that 1950's good stuff. Instead we've got Seabrook, budgeted at $200M, final cost $5.5B, most of it lawyers, not technology.
However, knocking the notion that renewables will somehow save us is definitely a public service because that notion is responsible for most of the money and effort wasted thus far. What we need to do is to ramp up nuclear tech, shield it from the greenies, and commit to a cheaper energy future. While this is going on, we should be looking toward the always-nearly-here fusion power, or we could try geothermal. Of course, geothermal will enrage the greenies who will claim we're drilling potential volcanoes (which will actually be in the neighborhood of true, which is pretty good for them) but by retargeting the IRS from conservatives to environmentalists, we could get the level of static down and maybe bring on line an energy-generating technology perhaps even cheaper than nuclear. Of course, it means admitting that all environmentalists are bozoes, but that is long overdue.
Seriously, all this "it's too hard" stuff by researchers at other universities.
Listen up, children, coal, oil, and other fossil fuels are no longer cheaper than solar or wind any longer.
Heck, you can literally cut GHG emissions in half for existing coal plants just by installing scrubbers and using cogeneration.
Now I know it's hard to admit that installing 1980s coal technology could improve the basic 1918 coal plant design, but if you stop reading industry funded "oh it's too hard" PR flak maybe you can figure it's not that hard.
And that's just coal.
Here at the UW we literally can make cheaper solar energy - solar biofilms that shape to cars or walls, windows that absorb energy but still let light in (think of those fancy window shades you see in SF movies), or you can just use low carbon emission wood frame buildings with high insulation properties and passive solar.
We MAKE that stuff. You whine that you can't do it. We build many giant buildings across our 50,000 person campus.
It's the 21st Century, children. Not the 18th. Wake up and adapt. Cause you're out of time.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
when you are dead. For some reason it hasn't dawn on many that large regions of the world will get so hot and humid that it will be deadly to humans. And this includes a large part of the Southern part of the USA.
I didn't do the study they did, but it always seemed that nuclear was the only way to go. Solar panels are nice, and useful, and I will put them on my roof too, and when the grid between the nuclear plant and my house packs it up, I will be ok. Solar and wind are not able to do enough. "Oh, you just need to live like they did in 1900, that's all." Fuck that. Its 2014, and I want to live like its 1960. I like muscle cars and fast jet planes. Where I live its cold, and not even it 1900 did people ride bikes outside in winter. They used horses, and then converted to (gasoline/diesel/fuel oil) cars and trucks. I use a bike for recreation in the summer when its warm, but never to work, ever (and I don't plan to start). Give me a nuclear powered car, and a nuclear powered plane. Solve the pollution problem already. If the way you are doing it creates a lot of bad waste, then do it a different, better way. Make it inherently safe. Car engines have used the (high power) Otto cycle almost exclusively for 100+ years. Sterling and other cycles have been rarely used in all that time (Toyota used a Sterling cycle engine on its gas/electric hybrid... and that's the only one I've ever heard using something else). We've all build nuclear reactors using the one method for more that 60 years. Everyone, worldwide. And we've tinkered with the design, like car manufactures have tinkered with Otto cycle internal combustion engines. Sure cars of the 2010's are more fuel efficient than cars from the 1950s. But a little-refined Sterling cycle engine is wildly more efficient on fuel than a heavily-refined Otto cycle engine. Its like Frank Whittle with his 'first attempt just off the drawing board' jet engine of 1943 that was 30 miles per hour faster than a heavily refined Rolls Royce Merlin with 10,000 engineers and years of refinements behind it. We need newer better basic nuclear designs. Molten Salt Reactors might be one of them. Inherently safe. Total loss of cooling? No problem. And its low-pressure. Instead of $100 million worth of high-pressure plumbing plus a massive containment structure, $2 worth of PVC pipe is good enough. And everything can be made lighter, smaller and cheaper. But its a fundamentally newer design. The only other problem is the protesters. There is no amount of reality you can heap on the protesters. Its like Einstein said of the old-timer Physicists in 1905 who just refused to believe it: "They will have to all die off before we get to a consensus on relativity."
> After four years of study they gave up, determining "Renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?
No.
Just read about it this weekend: they concluded making renewables cheaper than coal won't be enough. So nuclear being cheaper won't help, either.
They said we must clean the environment, not just stop polluting -- because the already emitted CO2 stays around for a century; we just cannot afford to let things worsen.
Renewables wouldn't be enough but they are part of the solution... not only because of their cleaner ways, but because the right mindset they foster.
Exactly like we view men in caves with wood fires as something primeval, I suppose there will come a time when it will look primitive not to use a clean energy source.
Why are Google engineers trying to decide if renewables work or not. Lets let climate scientists
and energy engineers work on that, and these guys can work search engines. They could do
a lot of good by creating better information on climate change to all the non-scientists.
1. Switch to renewables completely and suddenly.
2. Wait a year or two for 6 billion people to starve to death.
3. Invest heavily in casket industry.
4, Profit!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Reads the articles:
"Across the board, we need solutions that don’t require subsidies or government regulations that penalize fossil fuel usage. Of course, anything that makes fossil fuels more expensive, whether it’s pollution limits or an outright tax on carbon emissions, helps competing energy technologies locally. But industry can simply move manufacturing (and emissions) somewhere else. So rather than depend on politicians’ high ideals to drive change, it’s a safer bet to rely on businesses’ self interest: in other words, the bottom line."
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
So do I. If it's fusion, that is.
because 2 so called PhD's say it isn't a solution, that definitly means it isn't a solution... NOT!
How many times have we seen so called PhD's not agreeing with each other even after a huhum 'good study'..
Because those 2 couldn't figure it out, doesn't mean it isn't possible...
There's my daily Climate Change (TM) article. Can't lose your streak, right guys?
Uranium will run out in less than a century at the current rate of use. No point in increasing the rate of use if it means the new power plants won't have fuel for their rated lifetime.
There is not enough uranium to replace coal. So, there is no proven nuclear technology, just fast breeders that blow up pretty often.
So, please, let me know why I should listen to two when hundreds say different?
Workplace accidents kill lots of people.
Not renewable power. Workplace. Accidents.
You have to be an alarmist chicken little to claim that renewables kill people.
How many times we'll have to say: WE NEED AN ALL OF THE ABOVE solution.
We need as much solar as possible. As much wind as possible. As much biomass as possible. As much geothermal as possible. As much new hydro as possible. And yes, as much nuclear as possible.
The real problem in this debate are the ideologues that want solar+wind and reject nuclear.
But it's not enough to just say yes to nuclear. We must undo a lot of the regulatory runaway regulation the NRC created over the last 2 decades. Most of what the NRC did AFTER Chernobyl contributed nothing to nuclear safety. I'm not saying they did nothing good, but most of it was worse than useless, because it added many tens of billions of dollars to the cost of the US nuclear industry with nothing to show for it.
The NRC is doing a huge hatchet job on new nuclear technology. New nuclear R&D has been leaving the USA for China, India, Canada because the NRC demands a prescriptive regulatory model where in order to create a new type of nuclear reactor the NRC must be PAID (US$ 300/hour) to create the regulatory demands on this new nuclear, without an ounce of predictability on the process. Which venture capitalist on its sane mind would accept this model ?
Nuclear reactors should be buildable at least 25-40% cheaper than today if the NRC was being rational.
Your point is a load of bollocks made up by a numbnut in AUS.
We've lost huge amounts of nuclear power because nuclear is unreliable then lost a large coal power station because it caught fire, and somehow that's because there are renewables...? Right...
In China nuclear costs about half as much, plants take half the time to build, but the safety is about the same. As an industry nuclear power is about 1000 times safer than coal but 100 times more regulated.
The real problem is that the creeping dead hand of the regulators have all but stopped nuclear research. - Small plants, CHP, gas core reactors, hydrogen cooled, advanced combined cycle with fuel recycling, plutonium or thorium fuel, bunker self-containment storage designs, etc..
Small fast reactors (as used in nuclear rockets) are inherently safer than big low yield reactors and potentially much more efficient, but its a technology we have barely begun to touch or design.. Then there are technologies developed at the high point of nuclear research way back in the 1950's and 60's - such as pure fusion nuclear bombs which could potentially be adapted for nuclear fusion energy production... though people would probably have to tolerate how such plants actually work remaining secret...
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
The nuke people never bring it up, they're most afraid of it.
So how about that? The problem of CO2 causing global warming solved itself. Go figure.
So the "ice age is coming" of the 1970s becomes "global warming" in the 1980s/90s and has now morphed into "climate change" because the warming stopped 14-18 years ago. "Climate Change" is so nice because they won't have to change their scam's name every time the climate does something they don't expect .... like CHANGE! For goodness sake climate is always changing and humans for all their arrogance have very little to do with it. Urban heat island is proven and CO2 might have a 1 degree C change for each doubling.
A question for everyone who thinks that CO2 controls the climate. How long with rising CO2 and flat or falling temperatures before you admit your theory is wrong? 20 years? 30? Never?
All 5 of the major datasets (RSS, UAH, HadCRUT4, GISS, NCDC) show no warming for between 14 and almost 18 years. In that time CO2 has risen 8-10%.
Here are 2 predictions. First I predict that CO2 will continue to increase because China and other countries don't care about CO2. They don't even care about real pollutants much less CO2. Second I predict it will get colder over the next 20-30 years. Why?
Dr Libby in the 1970s said that "looking forward it will stay cold until the mid 80s (it did), then it will warm by about 1/4 degree F until the end of the century it did), then it gets cold". When asked how cold she was predicting a 1-2 degree F drop with an outside chance of a 3-4 degree drop.
Dr Easterbrook in 2001 said the PDO was done it's positive warm cycle and that we were in for 25-30 years of cold weather. How cold? We have his good, bad and ugly predictions based on previous negative cold phases of the PDO.
Why do I join with them and side with their predictions? While past performance is not a guarantee of future correctness it is a lot better record than the IPCC and their dozens of models of which none have been accurate. They are all based on CO2 controlling the climate and the other 2 are all cyclical natural cycles. I'll go with those who have a good track record at predicting future climate. Dr Libby is the most impressive as her prediction is 30+ years going and still accurate.
If you want to read a great explanation of why the IPCC models are broken beyond belief there was a great article describing that and all the other problems with climate science by Dr Brown of Duke university
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/06/real-science-debates-are-not-rare/
The final part was a post he made here on slashdot. Very worth reading.
If man were meant to fly, he'd have wings.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sun and wind and tidal will always be cheaper than dealing with an ever growing pile of deadly garbage you can't get rid of, no matter where you try to hide it.
And were you awake for Fukushima? Seriously?
> WE NEED AN ALL OF THE ABOVE solution.
We already have one, don't we? Lord Obama says so, and sure, he wouldn't lie about something like that, would he?
**Excluding Externalities**
The real cost of coal is already far more expensive than wind, solar, nuclear, or even geothermal.
So these guys decided that the health costs and environmental destruction that coal plants cause are irrelevant.
They also decided that Renewables were not feasible because they supposedly could not create energy as cheap as coal. Two things here, One - So fucking what if coal without the externalities is cheaper, it needs to die regardless. Two, they must suck at projections because wind is now as cheap as coal and solar looks like it will catch up.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.