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The World's Astonishing Dependence On Fossil Fuels Hasn't Changed In 40 Years (qz.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Quartz, adding: "Maybe 'dependence' is a poor description of poor people using the ready availability of cheap energy to help lift themselves out of poverty": There are few ways to understand why. First, most of the world's clean-energy sources are used to generate electricity. But electricity forms only 25% of the world's energy consumption. Second, as the rich world moved towards a cleaner energy mix, much of the poor world was just starting to gain access to modern forms of energy. Inevitably, they chose the cheapest option, which was and remains fossil fuels. So yes, we're using much more clean energy than we used to. But the world's energy demand has grown so steeply that we're also using a lot more fossil fuels than in the past.
But it does replace generating capacity. Because if you don't have the storage, you have peaker power plants instead.
And gas doesn't have to have a fossil source - you can brew biogas from trash - you can even find an old landfill site, put a cap on it and harvest the gas.
You don't know what you're talking about. There's enough natural gas sitting in a small area(just outside of sour gas alley) of Alberta to supply the current US demand for 300 years. The amount of easy-to-tap natural gas without fracking is stupidly easy to get at, hell we still burn around 70% of it off when we're straight up pulling oil out of the ground.
But here's the thing, your idea of storage is built around batteries for the most part. It takes more energy and creates more waste to build them, then it does to build a natural gas power plant of comparable size and run it for 30 years.
Om, nomnomnom...
The oil and coal industry hold significant patents on the devices that make competing energy systems viable.
Interesting. Do you have some of these patent numbers ?
Sure, US4009052,US3791867, US3972759, though I think it will be easier for you to start working your way through the Energy act I posted and you'll get an idea how the oil industry works.
IIRC around sec 625 is where the funding is allocated to destroy the only demonstrated viable functioning prototype of the Integral Fast Reactor, a Fast Neutron Nuclear Reactor, high burn up rate (almost 20%) with a design that encapsulated a self contained fuel reprocessing facility, that produces electricity (obsoleting coal) and hydrogen (obsoleting oil - whilst maintaining existing vehicle fleets), producing medical isotopes, whilst burning through the stocks of enough weapons grade plutonium and Depleted uranium to power the US for the next 5000 years. Your tax dollars at work.
I think it's important to consider if Oil and Coal would be motivated to maintain their multi-trilllion dollar profits and capable of doing this than greenies and NIMBYs that are so often accused. It's time for that stupid premise to be put aside with the naivety that allows it to be believed. Greenies and NIMBYs didn't argue for billions of dollars of subsidies to maintain oil industry profits and I think it's safe to say that a nuclear reactor that promotes nuclear disarmament is in everybody's interest. The US could export these reactors to Russia, China even North Korea and end global conflict within 5 years whilst solving the global nuclear waste issue, but oil.
The only loser would have been oil and coal. You think they're going to give up trillions of dollars? No, they're gonna start lobbying, it's cheaper. Repealing the "New Deal PUCHA (Act)" that was put in place to prevent a repeat of the 1929 depression in the bargain so they can rort half billion dollar subsidy hits on delayed conventional nuclear facility construction, whilst claiming input tax credits. That's the reality of energy funding policy, that's how the scam works.
Look for yourself, it's US law, enacted.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The demand for oil in China has decreased, and now the price of an oil barrel is around US$ 50. Everyone now is talking about "peak demand": oil consumption in OECD countries is almost flat for the last ten years, and the major source of growth comes from China.
Oil consumption is on the highest levels of human history, but with little change for the last decade. Meanwhile, the potential of growth of an important renewable source became scarce for the last couple decades: hydropower. It will take some time for us to actually see a decrease on consumption of oil and coal, as other renewables increase their share on the world energy consumption.
I wish storage we're in any way feasible for a significant portion of our energy needs. Unfortunately, any storage we can come up with is orders of magnitude too small. We use 11 TRILLION btu of energy every year. There's nothing can come anywhere close to storing enough power to make it through those weeks when a couple of large cloud systems cover half the country, drastically reducing solar output.
I'm trying to come up with a good analogy to give you a sense of scale, but it's difficult. I can tell you that all of our current storage can store less than 1% of what we produce, and the clean energy we produce is less than 10% of our energy needs. It's like saying "water can be stored in Dixie cups" and then supposing that we can store the nations water supply in Dixie cups. You can picture the hundreds of paper cups it would take to store water for just one shower - energy storage is like that.
Let's take one proposal as an example, hydro storage. Hydro is handy where you happen to have a just the right geography, such as at Hoover dam. The thing is, you need a LOT of water pumped high to hold a little bit of energy. To match the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline, we would have to lift 13 tons of water (3500 gallons) one kilometer high (3,280 feet). Hoover Dam, holding back 147 square miles of water, can store about 1/3,000 of the needed energy. Unfortunately, we don't have 3,000 locations as good as Hoover dam. Given actual US geography, we'd need the reservoir to be the entire area between the Rocky Mountains on the West and the Appalachians on the East. Our hydro reservoir would completely flood 17 states and portions of 5 other states. We'd have a huge dam across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Building that dam would itself require approximately as much energy as the country produces in a year.
You can do the math for lipo and other types of storage. Sure, you can store a week of energy for a remote hunting cabin,if the cabin doesn't have air conditioning or any tools or anything that requires more power than lighting does. The US has 325 MILLION people, though. Energy storage per person, adequate to supply AC, transportation, etc, will take up about as much space as their living space, and cost at least as much (unless it's stored as hydrocarbons, an incredibly dense form of storage). So you can picture for every residential neighborhood, you'd need an equally-sized neighborhood of energy storage units. Your rent or mortgage is very roughly about equal to what your energy storage bill would be.