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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!
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.
I'd say solving our economic need for oil far outstrips billions of dollars.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
The second is a fair point: the main problem with coal and other fossil fuels is the external cost exported to society at large. (CO2 and other emissions.) If you could factor in that cost - and make the generators pay it - the cost of electricity from fossil fuels would go way up. (And, if they can afford to pay it - actually clean up their emissions to the point where they aren't harmful to the environment - then we don't actually have a problem with fossil fuels, except for the limited supply.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
If we launched the Earth into orbit, we wouldn't need satellites anymore.
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Fukushima and Chernobyl are deadly enough reminders.
Would it surprise you to learn that the deaths from producing renewables is orders of magnitude higher than the deaths from all the reactor meltdowns combined?
If so, do a little research and prepare to be surprised.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
In reality, nukes are terrible as backup power. Just assuming you have a plant that can ramp up and down quickly (most can't), nuclear plants are almost all capital cost. Hence they need to run at a high capacity factor to pay back the investment; it doesn't pay to idle them. But if you're wanting to use them as gap filling in low wind/solar times, then that's exactly what you're suggesting be done - sit idle until more power is needed. It's a terrible use of a nuclear plant.
Pumped hydro isn't that expensive. It's currently the cheapest option out there by a good margin (except for uprating already-existing conventional hydro). But other techs are trying to beat it. Probably the best thing you can do is simply have a powerful HVDC grid so you can move power between different geographic regions and to use different types of renewables techs. The randomness goes way down when you do this. NG is commonly used as a peaking fuel, and I see no problem continuing to do this (instead of doing energy storage) if you can keep it down to an average of under 10% or so of the total generation mix. It's low carbon to begin with and modern NG peakers can hit upwards of 60% efficiency once warmed up. So 90% renewables, 10% efficiently-used NG, you're talking near total elimination of electricity-related CO2 emissions.
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CO2 never has been and never will be a pollutant. Without it, all plant life on earth would be impossible. There is zero scientific proof that it causes atmospheric warming. For you true believers, please cite the scientific paper that convinced you beyond doubt that CO2 is the dominant driver of climate warming. Note, it your paper uses computer models or least squares curve fitting, it is worthless for proving causality.
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?
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"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Actually a lot of environmentalists are in favour of nuclear power. It's those investors and their "risk averse" nature that don't want to throw billions of dollars at something that might lose them money, especially when there are better opportunities.
The UK has to pay power companies to build new nuclear plants, and still only one player is interested. They are that bad of an investment. Nuclear is unsuitable for commercial operation, and always requires government funding to get built.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
I think the difference between me and the opposing commenters is that I have actually lived in the ugly communities, and they haven't.
I used to act as a local law and insurance adviser and do taxes for people who didn't know how to do this kind of thing for themselves. Please don't call me a community organizer heh. Anyway, the racism and hatred you find in such places must be experienced to be believed. These people need to work - if only to force exposure to other people and to understand that we are all human and must live within some kind of rules to avoid bloodshed. Otherwise, the scenario I painted above is reality - and will become more prevalent when work is optional.
I live in a nicer place now, but I still have friends from those communities and I still remember how things were. They tell me nothing that makes me believe things have changed.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Hydro kills far more people per amount of energy generated than nuclear: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
The electricity prices are low in France, not because nuclear power is cheap, but because they tax it less. It simply isn't economically feasible to build nuclear power plants that must operate on normal market mechanisms; it is too expensive. Gas and coal, and even oil prices makes it impossible.
The people of France and Europe are paying less for electricity generated with nuclear power. How else do I have to phrase that before you'll stop insisting it is impossible? It doesn't matter what kind market situations and various problems you can concoct about how challenging or impossible a task it is to accomplish. It has none the less been accomplished and won't cease to exist for all your insistences against it.
You're paper is based on the same data. The debunking clearly shows the why what you're saying isn't accurate.
That CO2 and NO radiate heat doesn't make them 'cooling' agents in the way you're trying to imply. It means that they prevent the passage of heat energy, on the outside they radiate heat into space when they are hit by a solar flare. SOME energy does get through and the agents now keep that energy locked up longer because they restrict escaping heat.
ANYTHING hit by a solar flare is going to heat up and then start radiating heat away from itself. CO2 and NO block much of the Suns energy, we'd fry if we had all the energy coming in. That again doesn't make them 'cooling' agents. They are insulators keeping heat on whatever side of the border it currently is. If you pile more blankets on your bed, you get warmer.
That's what we're doing with CO2 in the atmosphere.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people