You know the old joke: An optimistist says the glass is half full, the pessimist says the glass is half empty and the engineer says the glass is the wrong size.
A small flurry of energy-related tomes has appeared recently, impelled perhaps by Al Gore's far-from-dispassionate movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," which the movie claims is global warming caused by human activity. Columunist Robert Samuelson writes today that whether Gore's movie is right about warming's cause doesn't matter because there's nothing we can do to reverse it.Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty -- and freeze everyone else's living standards -- we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050. ...
No government will adopt the draconian restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might curb global warming. ...
The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.
What most people don't understand is how unbelievably enormous the engineering problem is.
"If 2 percent of the continental United States were covered with photovoltaic systems with a net efficiency of 10 percent, we would be able to supply all the U.S. energy needs," said [Dr. Vladimir] Bulovic, the KDD Associate Professor of Communications and Technology in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Two percent of the continental USA "covered with photovoltaic systems?" That, snorts N.Z. Bear, is the equivalent of "Paving over Georgia. Counting only the area of the lower 48 states, two percent equals,
Fifty-nine thousand, one hundred and eighty square miles. That's 59,180.
For perspective: Over half of the fifty states are smaller in area than 59,180 square miles. The closest in size to that number are Iowa (55,869), Michigan (56,804), and Georgia (57,906).
So: who's for paving over Georgia [with solar cells]?
Quite apart from the sheer physical size of project envisioned, and the trillions of dollars it would cost, there are other, uh, "issues" that a reader sent in. One, electricity's generation and demand have to be nicely balanced. Electricity can't be stored along the way. But we still need power at night. Hence,
We need about 1.17 × 1012 kilograms, or 1.17 billion tonnes, of lead-acid batteries to store the energy. Around 3 million tonnes of lead are mined each year, so that's only a little less than four hundred years of world production. Lead-acid batteries in deep-discharge service last about five years, so the best way to maintain the array would be to round up to 1.4 gigatonnes of batteries; at any given time, 230 megatonnes of batteries would be undergoing reprocessing. The EPA's gonna love it, don't you think?
And,
... those solar cells are 10% efficient, remember? Roughly 20% of the loss is in reflection, light reflected back into space from the array. The rest of it, 70% of the incident light or roughly 5.75 × 1014 watts, is heat. How much power will the fans to carry it away use? Will they have blue LEDs inside? Methinks the site will be popular with hang glider enthusiasts, provided they don't mind being warmed a bit by the reflected light...
And what effect will all that heat have on global warming?
Now, I have gone through all this to point the way to Steven Den Beste's long series of 2002 on why alternatives to oil are not practical on the scale needed to replace oil in significant quantities, except for nuclear-power generation. And let us applaud that the first new nuclear-power plant in, what, 30 years? - has been approved for the American southwest, New Mexico, I think. Better for it to be built in the northeast, but let us not scorn progress wherever found.
Anyway, Mr. Den Beste is a retired engineer whose posts addressed, in turn:
1. Replacing oil with another energy source.I know of only three technologies I consider credible which actually could generate energy at sufficiently high rates to offset our use of petroleum in a significant way. Two of them are hydro and fission. And the US has already fully developed its hydro, and fission as a power source is politically dead in the US, irrespective of its merits from an engineering standpoint [or it was when Steven wrote this]. The third is creation of synthetic petroleum from coal. That works, but it isn't cheap, and I can hear the anti-CO2 screams already, because it emits far more CO2 per unit effective energy than petroleum does. (You have to burn a lot of extra coal at the synthfuel plant to power the conversion.)
2. Why electric cars are not the answer:
But if the goal is to reduce emission of CO2 overall, they are actually worse than using gasoline. That's because electricity isn't an energy source.
Electricity is the most versatile form of energy we have, but all the electricity we use is created from other things. The majority of the electricity used in the United States is generated by burning coal. ...
If the original electricity was created by burning coal, then what this means is that a lot more CO2 is released per passenger mile by the battery-based electric car than by a gasoline car.
Steven was referring here to plug-in electric cars, not hybrids, but hybrids have their own set of business and marketing and environmental problems. (For a more positive view of hybrids, see here.) 3. Conservation:
I have to disagree with the basic assumption that we actually could significantly reduce our energy usage through increases of efficiency if we just did enough research into it. What you have to understand is that for the last forty years we've already been increasing the efficiency of our physical plant, and in a lot of places we're getting near the point of diminishing returns. We've already increased the use of insulation in our homes. Our cars and refrigerators are already a lot more efficient than they used to be. It's not like conservation is a new idea; it's been a policy of this nation since the oil crisis in the 1970's. And we've already collected all the low hanging fruit, and a lot of the rest, too. ... Even at the most optimistic estimates, conservation doesn't actually reduce our consumption of oil. It just reduces the rate at which we increase our consumption of it.
4. Hydrogen and other exotic energies:
The problem here is that hydrogen is a fuel but not an energy source. Gasoline is both. But there's no substantial natural source of hydrogen which we can tap, so any hydrogen we use can only be created by utilizing energy from some other energy source. Hydrogen is like electricity, a way of moving energy from one place to another. That's why discussion of conversion from internal combustion engines to fuel cells in vehicles may well be important when you're concerned about air pollution or changes in industrial policy but isn't when you're talking about energy sources.
Hydrogen currently has some nontrivial engineering problems though, the Hindenberg disaster notwithstanding, excessive flammability isn't one of them. In fact, gasoline is more dangerous than hydrogen in those terms. The film of the Hindenberg burning is quite impressive, but hydrogen is in reality not very flammable. When released it rises extremely rapidly because it is so light (much lighter than helium), and it also tends to thin out so fast as to no longer produce a flammable mix with the air.
The biggest problem with hydrogen now as a fuel for vehicles is that it's really hard to store an adequate number of joules in a small space with hydrogen without liquefying it. The best answer so far seems to be certain metals which spontaneously form hydrides and release the hydrogen equally readily, but the energy density doesn't appear high enough yet to be practical, and no one will want a vehicle that has to be refueled every fifty miles or less. Any attempt to switch to hydrogen away from gasoline for our vehicles would require an immense change to the physical plant. Not only would a significant number of vehicles have to be replaced, but we'd also have to build major installations to create the hydrogen using energy from some other source, and we'd need to create an entire infrastructure to distribute it and make it available at service stations. Irrespective of any technical problems involved, the capital investment would be immense ... .
5. Biodiesel and biomass - advocates of both of these proposals have to be able to address the problem of scale. Both are actually indirect forms of solar energy and are therefore even less efficient than solar cells in the first place. They may be good for waste disposal, "But as a source of energy, it barely generates a blip on the scale." The US presently uses, Steven says, 3.29 terawatts - more than three million million watts, and that was four years ago.
If any proposed energy source can't be scaled up to generate 10 gigawatts average (1% of that), it won't be large enough to make any significant difference in the grand scheme of things even if it works and is really, really cool and clever and innovative and nifty.
And that's why windmills and tidal or geothermal generators and the like won't ever matter in the grand scheme of things: "They can generate energy, but not enough. If biodiesel ever exceeds ten megawatts, I'd be surprised, and that's three orders of magnitude too small." As for ethanol and other forms of biomass:
[I]t grows on the ground, and though you may get a lot of it, it's spread over an immense area and you can't do anything until you pick it all up first and collect it.
Also, sugars and alcohols are already partly oxygenated, which means they don't yield as much energy in combustion per unit mass. Effectively, they're already partially burned. ... In general the oxygen in biomass increases the weight and decreases the energy yield compared to hydrocarbons in oil or the almost-pure carbon of coal.
It takes two tons of dried biomass to yield as much energy as one ton of anthracite [coal], but biomass isn't dry to begin with. There are huge amounts of water mixed into it, which isn't combustible but is exceedingly heavy and interferes with or outright prevents combustion. Drying the biomass takes a lot of energy in its own right, and even then all you're doing is reducing the quantity of water. Of course, you can dry it by leaving it out in the sun, which works fine as long as it doesn't rain. Or you can collect it while still full of water and bring it to some sort of drying facility, but that means you're expending a lot of energy hauling water around. But even if you leave it to dry in the sun, you'll still be hauling a lot of water (just not as much).
And the energy used simply to gather the biomass crop and transport it to a conversion plant has to be figured in, too. Hence, unless I'm very much mistaken in what I've read, ethnanol production does no better than (if as good) as break even on energy produced versus energy expended to produce it. I would think (but I'm no engineer) that the same scaling problems apply to making diesel fuel from simple sugar. Some people think we can significantly reduce oil imports or consumption by getting rid of SUVs or gaining greater gasoline-engine efficiencies, whether by hybrids or better ordinary engines. The problem is that reducing gasoline use doesn't really reduce oil requirements.
[A] refinery doesn't take oil and make gasoline for a while, and then switch to making diesel, and then switch to lubricants. They do not have the ability to arbitrarily control how much of each product they produce. Oil refining yields certain proportions of each product, and they all emerge simultaneously in ratios which can to some extent be adjusted but not to the extent that many think. Refining isn't really a manufacturing process; it's more like large scale fractional distillation, which takes what's already in the oil and separates it. You're always going to get at least some gasoline out, quite a lot in fact, if you need the other things coming out of the refinery, like heating oil and diesel fuel. It does little good to reduce consumption of gasoline unless you equally reduce all the other needs by about the same amount. (In fact, the reason that gasoline was originally selected in the late 19th century as the fuel of choice for vehicles is that it was a waste product of the petroleum industry at the time which was making its money producing other things, mainly kerosene and lubricants.) The reality of the process is that the gasoline is going to be produced whether it's consumed or not; there's hexane and heptane and octane in there, and it's going to come out when you refine the oil. If the market for it is removed, they'll burn it at the refinery as a waste product.
One way or another, gasoline will have to burned if we are going to use oil at all, whether for other fuels or lubricants. And no one anywhere is even suggesting that we can wide-scale replace oil lubricants with something else. In sum:
For any energy source to be a plausible alternative to hydrocarbons, it has to be huge (both in exajoules and in gigawatts), reliable, highly concentrated, able to be utilized efficiently, and it has to be possible to utilize it without an unreasonable capital investment and operational costs relative to the sustained energy yield. ... Even if fusion ever works, the capital expense will make it unreasonable as a practical matter. All the other alternatives are even worse, being too limited or too unreliable or too diffuse or too inefficient or too expensive per unit energy yield, if not all of those. There are no alternatives available to us for the forseeable future which satisfy all five of those requirements, which is why we won't stop depending primarily on coal and oil for energy for a very long time (decades).
"The people who suggest these kinds of alternatives, says Steven, "don't realize just how much energy we consume, and don't have any idea about the problems of scaling in engineering."
Crossposted at donaldsensing.com
engineers who dont understand economics are a nuisance.
Lets say we want petrochemical X out of oil. Today we get refine the oil, get petrochemical X, and also get gasoline. If gasoline becomes a waste product, then at current prices for petrochemical X its no longer worthwhile to produce, transport and refine the oil just to get petrochemical X. Ergo the price for petrochemical X MUST increase. SOME uses of petrochemical X will cease to be viable at higher prices - either others substances will be substituted, end products will be modified, or end roducts will become more expensive and be consumed less.
The free market will respond to price, one way or the other - whether its an oil price increase driven by scarcity, or a carbon tax.
"Even at the most optimistic estimates, conservation doesn't actually reduce our consumption of oil. It just reduces the rate at which we increase our consumption of it."
which is what matters from a global warming standpoint. Reduce the GHG emissions toward a sustainable amount.
Actually, Steven makes exactly the same point, I just didn't cite it. One way or another, the cost of refining out the gasoline will be absorbed by consumers even if magically the demand for gasoline dropped to zero.
Good but
There are no alternatives available to us for the forseeable future which satisfy all five of those requirements, which is why we won't stop depending primarily on coal and oil for energy for a very long time (decades).
True, but I don't think that this is the point today.
You know, in the 19th century coal was the widest used energy source. Today is the second or third. I don't see new energy sources replacing oil, but making us less dependant on it.
For any energy source to be a plausible alternative to hydrocarbons, it has to be huge, reliable, highly concentrated, able to be utilized efficiently, and it has to be possible to utilize it without an unreasonable capital investment[...]
That's nuclear.
Even if fusion ever works
It works. Sooner or later we humans will tame plasma, and it will be wonderful.
the capital expense will make it unreasonable as a practical matter.
Who knows. Today's computers were not unreasonable but unthinkable in the early 1950's. It is probable that a breakthrough in superconductors reduce the cost of magnetic confinement fussion reactors. New thermonuclear reactions producing protons instead of neutrons might simplify the process of generating electricity...
There is enough energy for everyone if investment is carried out in the right places.
BTW the glass is filled at 50% of its capacity.
Uh, electrical storage is possible and desireable. If it was economical we could double our electrical transmission capacity without installing any more transmission lines.
In fact as a retired aerospace engineer (aircraft electrical systems) I have some ideas. Economic and profitable. Sadly, despite repeating this for at least two years, no one has contacted me. Should this time be different my e-mail address can be found on the sidebar at http://powerandcontrol.bl*gspot.com/ .
At this time I have no answer for the vehicle problem.
Oil refining yields certain proportions of each product, and they all emerge simultaneously in ratios which can to some extent be adjusted but not to the extent that many think.
AFAIK true, for a given facility.
Chemical engineers may not know much about economics, but they have invented these processes
for converting oil fractions.
Therefore you can change gasoline into aromatics, heavy fuel into gasoline, nafta into gasoline, etc. Of course, you need to carry out an important investment in reactors, catalysers and all that stuff, that is, the production cannot be neither easily not rapidly switched, but it can really be changed for great variations in the market.
Have a little faith in technology, please. Don't you remember the Ozone hole?
The glass has reserve capacity to respond to surges. Kind of like our electrical grid.
BTW SDB is/was a software engineer. He is very techincally savy, but gets the occasional physical detail wrong.
As to the scaling problem: the system we have today was built in a period of 50 to 75 years, starting from near zero. If we build the next system that way transition and scaling will not be a problem.
It also means that we will not know much about what the next system will look like since it will be responsible for very little energy output at this time.
In the 1880s coal gas was big for illumination. Electricity was too local and the energy to light conversion ratio was very low.
BTW the best production solar voltaics currently convert 15 to 20% of incoming radiation to electricity. And from a transition standpoint the energy produced is well matched to air conditioning loads. Places that are demand metered can use the current solar cells profitably to reduce peak loads.
Interestingly wind energy peaks in the winter when we would rather use natural gas for heating.
So we already have two transitional forms in operation.
Another nail in the 2%, think of the amount of manpower needed to erect such a system, not to mention to maintain it. The cost of which would make it unbearable.
The economics of current technological systems make them unviable for the forseeable future. Yeah its nice to have a discussion about it, but putting it into practice in a workable manner is something else.
Also, given the NIMBY attitude of even staunch 'renewable energy' propoents (aka the Kennedy Clan), no one can name a state that would want this stuff in its backyard.
people talk about the capital costs of alts, but neglect the capital costs of finding and developing new oil fields.
And let us applaud that the first new nuclear-power plant in, what, 30 years? - has been approved for the American southwest, New Mexico, I think. Better for it to be built in the northeast, but let us not scorn progress wherever found.
A nuclear enrichment plant has been approved in New Mexico, after it became apparent Hartsville, Tennessee didn't want it. (gentle poke to the author)
There are three nuclear power plants that are going through the permitting, one about an hour from me in Clinton, Illinois. I don't know enough about the other two (I believe in Virginia and Louisiana), but Clinton might be unique in that the plant had just finished the first reactor, laid the foundation for the second, when three-mile island struck and the plant was required to go back and make extremely expensive retrofits. Its the abandoned second reactor that they are now trying to get permits to build.
Two observations:
The politics are not what the used to be. More supporters of the plant showed up than opponents at last year's hearings. The community wants the jobs and are not going NIMBY on something already in their backyard. The pro-nuke side is well organized and wants the precedent of an efficient permitting process. Sen. Obama came to one of the hearings and said that we have to keep nuclear energy on the table.
Even if permitted, the plant may not be built. The permits give a 20 year window to build and the company has been coy about whether it will build. I think this is partly to put pressure on the government to keep the permitting process efficient. I think its also keeping options open in case energy costs go down (or don't rise as expected).
Interestingly, the area required for 10% efficient PV just about equals the area currently used for roofs, roads, and other human structures. Since 20% efficient PV is already available, putting PV on roofs and roads would just about meet US electrical demand. I noticed that the above article gave no real arguement that wind power is impractical (tell GE that their $2 billion a year business is not "credible {confession, I own GE stock}). Again, economic US wind resources would easily replace all US electrical consumption (see NREL studies, etc.). The current cost of Iraq war could have replaced 50% of US electrical generation with wind power and that expenditure has not bankrupted us (yet).
WASHINGTON - If all the highways, streets, buildings, parking lots and other solid structures in the 48 contiguous United States were pieced together like a giant jigsaw puzzle, they would almost cover the state of Ohio. That is the result of a study by Christopher Elvidge of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, who along with colleagues from several universities and agencies produced the first national map and inventory of impervious surface areas (ISA) in the United States.
As calculated by the researchers, the total impervious surface area of the 48 states and District of Columbia is approximately 112,610 square kilometers [43,480 square miles], and, for comparison, the total area of the state of Ohio is 116,534 square kilometers [44,994 square miles].
Gabriel,
You have a striking lack of transitional thinking. You have what i would call big-bang thinking. Very vast and fast transitions.
Suppose you thought of the solar panels as roofing material. Changes the equation re:labor.
#11 Tom,
Excellent.
My position: I'm a near term pesimist about alternative energy (i.e. niche only) and a long term optimist (we will do better over time).
Interesting article. Kennedy types "kill you" in all states. In reality, it is already well known that the U.S. Continental shelf has as much in potential oil reserves as have already been produced in the U.S.A.
The problem with getting it produced is Political. More "Flaky Kennedy" types in Florida, California, etc. (There are Republican enviro-nuts also, but they are very rare).
What political solutions do Democrats propose for global warming?
Besides massive taxes on gasoline?
For decades they've been blocking the only workable energy solution. They've been demogoguing solar and wind energy, which are attractive to them precisely because mass reliance on them is a total pipe dream. If the problem could be solved, they would no longer be able to exploit it politically.
For years they pushed ethanol, trying to convince farmers that it would make them all as rich as Arab oil ticks.
In fact, given the D's so-called energy policies for the last 30 years, somebody explain to me why this isn't all their fault. Maybe we should turn the Kennedy School of Government into a wind farm, if that's not redundant.
As I recall, SDB' objections to solar were:
1. size of collectors needed (and possible albedo effects causing climate problems)
2. intermittent nature of solar and storage problems
Since we seem to be getting closer via nano-tech to a space elevator, perhaps we could build some orbiting collectors in space (always in the sun w/o atmospheric interference) that could microwave collected energy (again no atmosphere to interfere with transmission) to stations at the end of space elevator ribbons that serve as transmission lines to the earth's grid?
The orbiting collectors could be photovoltaic or generate power by focusing heat for steam generators.
As I understand from reading the professor (Glenn Reynolds) the space elevator/station is kinda like a small weight on a string attached to a spinning ball so as to remain geo-stationary.
If any of this works out, I would just like enough of a pension to go hiking and fishing for the rest of my life.
Glenn W.,
Actually within the next decade or so (as wind turbines get larger) the price of wind electricity will go below that of nuke or coal. Every doubling of wind turbine size reduces the electrical cost by 1/3. This BTW is the same scaling factor found in coal fired plants from about 1890 to 1950. For the same reason. Economies of scale and the ability of materials to support more KW per lb as facilities get larger. A 2KW transformer does not require 2X the amount of copper and steel that a 1 KW transformer needs. In addition the 2 KW job will probably be fractionally more efficient despite less material per KW.
#16,
Focusing light from space is not practical. Because of the wavelengths involved you run inot focal length limits (about 50 to 100 times the mirror diameter). At 22,500 miles above earth you would need a mirror 225 miles across accurate to 1/4 wavelength of light or better. We have no idea at this time how to produce such an object. Which is why conversion to microwaves is suggested.
Long term I think we will see solar and wind along with storage that is economical over a 24 or 48 hour period (we can do that with current technology) extending over time to seasonal storage (three to six months).
It's important to distinguish between energy for electrical power and energy for transportation. Very little oil is used for power generation; something like 3% of electricity is oil-derived. Probably most of those here are already aware of this point, but many people seem surprised by it.
Several good points are made although the author is far too gloomy.
The use of fossil fuel is not a supply problem or an environmental problem. It is an economic and political problem.
Simply stated: fossil fuels require importers (we are the biggest) to protect their sources. So will manufactured fuels such as ethanol to the extent they are imported.
Anyone who looks at the world today can see how many problems this causes.
Solar and nuclear are the way out. Add fusion if it can be done and compete on price.
Solar and/or nuclear can work almost anywhere. Huge tracts of well watered land, square miles of port and refinery facilites, oil tankers, and pipelines are not needed. And there is no reason for nations to scrap about the others resources or behavior.
When we stop thinking 'fossil' and 'carbon' only technical challenges face us. The impossible politics of land use for biomass and strip mining, of foreign supplies, and of greenhouse gas production depart.
It would seem hideously expensive at first. But how does our future look using carbon?
The objection that nuclear equals weapons is not valid. Numerous nations have nuclear weapone. Many more can easily create them. So how does more power generation make things worse?
I've never thought of solar as something that would be a mass production type of facility - although solar voltaic might be. For 20 years I have looked at solar as simply an energy reduction aid, not an energy replacement - hot water heaters, winter heat, etc. Most homes (at least those rooftops between a southeast to northwest face) can use solar for adjunct heating. While it's doesn't sound exciting (you can't really see it) it does help. Downside is that the payoff for the homeowner takes a while. And since we're so mobile now, most folks don't think of it as a plus - only a complication when it comes to selling the house.
By the way DS, great post. I always learn something here I didn't know. Thanks.
#17 M Simon,
Not talking about focusing the light from space to earth, more like:
The hydrogen is produced by large solar plants built in the desert, which use mirrors to focus the sun's rays on a central generation plant which disassociates water into hydrogen and oxygen.
From SDB
#21 jdwill,
About 1/2 the energy from electical disassociation goes into the production of oxygen which has aproximately zero value as an energy source. It does have some commercial value. Not near enough to make up for the 50% losses.
This makes such hydrogen generators uneconomical.
If the method used is thermal disassociation the energy balance is worse. Plus you have the problem of separating H2 from O2. Plus you have the explosion potential. Then the gasses need to be cooled. Then compressed (more cooling required and more energy lost).
BTW I read the SDB article. He says your idea isn't practical. I agree with him.
K,
I don't know if I have your last question right but I don't think of the nuclear power issue as weapons related. Nuke plants, of course, don't use weapons grade plutonium. The problem with nuclear power, aside from the Three Mile Island fiasco, is waste. Where do we put the stuff that wears out - though it still has a toxic half-life of 200,000 years or more?
I think the NRC has done a decent job of improving the safety issues but nuke plants have gone up in price tremendously because of that. So nuclear is semi-economical - but still a problem. What do we do with this stuff now? If we can figure that out, it might be a lot more attractive. Currently we are just leaving it to the next generation to fix. I hope they can.
I tend to agree with SDB also, and I am no engineer, but I don't think you are correctly reading what I said originally. I have no problem if you want to say that won't work, but you are saying that something different from what I described won't work. Which is fine, but at least take another look at #16 and tell me what you think of that.
#12:
I'd rather have my own Sterling Solar Engine and just power my own home with it and take the house off the grid completely. I would still probably have to buy big ass batteries as well, and that creates yet another problem.
As for homeowners roofs, I'm not sure that local zoning would allow for it, but that could change. Still, there is maintenance, and access issues involved with using private residences as a source of power generation.
So while we may have the roof capacity for such a project, the costs are still there. And lets face it, most guys hate mowing the lawn, do you really think they are going to maintained their solar roof?
As an aside, why no talk of geothermal?
The cost is barely the issue; the enormous infrastructure and bulk of wind and solar is. Making it even bigger is not the reassurance we're looking for.
All that stuff has significant environmental impact. If the left ever got their way with wind and solar, they'd promptly forget that they asked for it and start telling everybody that it was a Republican plot to destroy the earth all along. At least until the first winter, after which they'd all freeze to death.
Col. Sensing,
Far, far, far too defeatist.
First, if I recall from the film - go see it! there were quite a number of things that could be done NOW, that do not rely on any "hard problems".
Second, it IS a moral issue. Up to 100 million people live in areas that will be swamped, if something isn't changed. Can you imagine that displacement challenge?
Third, Gore has seen the facts of the situation have been confirmed, more and more, for the last 30 years he has paid attention to this (this, as with so much else, Gore has been right. Be it one of the leaders in allocating funding for the modern internet, the labeling of rock lyrics by his wife, his vote in FAVOR of Gulf War I, his alliance with Clinton in producing the 1st budget surplus in - what - 50 years?, his outspokenness AGAINST this Iraq War. It is a tragedy, that this guy, who probably has been more correct than any other political guy in the last 30 years, can't be elected because of an irritating speaking style.)
Fourth, he still insinuates that there is a "small minority" who believe that there are two sides to this.
That is clearly false, and shows that his engaging in techno-hackery, not sound policy.
#23. Your view is widely held. It is not my view. I do not believe there is a nuclear waste problem. There is a political problem with nuclear waste.
Nothing will ever be good enough.
Again. Nothing can ever be good enough.
A mindset that some will maintain forever.
Yucca Mountain will do the job and it would have done the job fine if it had been built for half the cost. But we may never use it.
We have moved atomic and hydrogen bombs all around the earth for 50 years. But politically we cannot get low level waste on rail cars that have been designed, built, and tested over 30 years at the cost of millions, perhaps billions.
The uranium and plutonium that France, China, and Japan move around the world in quantity for their plants seems to arrive safely. And where does their waste go? It goes into carefully designed storage just like ours should.
Good storage isn't cheap. But we do know how and there are many good sites. There is also progress in reducing the volume drastically.
Uh huh. Gas taxes that will grind rural and poor Americans right into the dirt, and when that fails to reduce use to Kyoto levels, rationing.
Already I can feel the electorate getting cooler.
And of course, continued opposition to nuclear power and ANWAR. Same stuff they were against in 1970, when a new Ice Age was right around the corner.
But let's look at Gore's "Global Marshall Plan" in toto:
1. Stabilizing of world population
2. The rapid development of environmentally appropriate technologies
3. A comprehensive change in the economic “rules of the road” by which we measure the impact of our decisions on the environment
4. Negotiation & approval of a new generation of international agreements
5. A cooperative plan for educating the world’s citizens about our global environment.
I can summarize that one sentence: Journey to the Emerald City and ask the wizard for help. In fact, the Emerald City might be an appropriate symbol for Gore's twisted dream of a Green Theocracy.
#26 Glenn,
What exactly do you mean by bulk.
Currently the best place for wind turbines is farm country where they take up about 1/2% of the farmed area and provide the farmer with an income of about $2,000 a year per turbine. If the 1/2% is the kind of bulk you are speaking of, it is not significant.
Another way of thinking of bulk is to turn the idea on its head and think "distributed". This reduces the attractiveness of a single point attack.
What exactly is the big environmental impact of wind turbines in MW size? 1 - 2 bird kills a year? Tall buildings are worse. Cats are much worse.
BTW Glenn, utilities are rushing into wind these days because they understand learning curves. Investment brings operating capability and lowers costs.
I do agree with you. Everthing you say is true. At least it was 20 years ago. Not any more.
As to enormus infrastructure. The build out will not be done in one year or even ten. More like 20 or 30 years.
jd,
The space elevator is a long way from practicality. The ribbon used has to be able to produce a strength that is something like 95% to 99% of the ultimate strength of the best material for such use known to man. Carbon fibers. Currently the available strength is on the order of 1 to 2% of ultimate. Not even close.
Thermal plants (steam generators) have serious issues when the gravity available is small. Condensers depend on gravity for the separation of condensate from vapor.
As to royalties from your ideas: the devil is in the details. I'd say your engineering background is inadequate for a defendable patent.
==============================The problem with geothermal is location. The best spots are at the edges of continental plates. Where water is underground and hot. Such water tends to be very corrosive (sulphides mainly). We currently do not know how to fracture large volumes of underground rock to get the heat transfer capability required. So if you don't already have geysers a site is not promising.
=============================The sterling engine has low thermal efficiency because the source and sink are not well separated (see the regenerator section of the engine). Plus unless you can run such an engine totally sealed, you have a maintenance problem. Think of your automobile whose engine is designed to run 2,000 to 3,000 hours. Then consider that there are about 3,000 to 4,000 hours of useable daylight in a year.
Solar voltaics have comparable efficiency and are very low maintenance. Plus you do not need a tracking collector and all the problems that entails. Wind for instance.
====================================I think the points Donald makes are very relevant and I have been making them here for a number of years. We are going to be an oil (fossil fuel) dependent economy for many decades to come. At least for transportation.
#28,
Quite correct. An operatining nuke plant has a low enough radiation signature after 10 days that operators can do maintenance in the reactor room. It is not near the long term hazard that detractors make it out to be as long as the stuff can be sealed away for about 100 years.
Plutonium proliferation is a significant problem though.
In addition uranium is not a renewable resource.
I'm a former Naval Nuke so I do understand the technical issues. In case any one was wondering.
#30 Glenn,
Issue #1 is not an issue. Population growth is slowing due to economics (rich - relatively - people would rather spend their money on vacations than kids). The transition point is about $3K to $4k per capita. By 2100 population will be declining.
As to the other points you make you are right (without sarcasm). A visit with the man behind the curtain is in order.
All the things Gore wants will come to pass. Just not in the time frame he envisions.
Excellent and very timely piece Don. And I am delighted to see the denBeste energy reality check roll in.
That said there dozens, indeed hundreds, of ways to reduce consuption which has the same economic effect as increasing supply. Just a couple: single home wind, geothermal and solar passive design. These three well understood techniques can take a home's energy consumption down by 40-60%.
In transportation how about reducing the weight of cars by, say, 60%. Take a look at http://www.thesmart.ca/index.cfm?ID=4720 (Not available in the US...yet). Replace commuter jets with commuter rail. Take a serious look at improving engine performance in IC cars and at supplementing it with flywheel energy recapture.
None of this is the magic bullet. But it is an incremental process for reducing energy consumption.
And here is the best part: it requires no governmental regulation at all. Just steady $70-$100 a barrel oil. A couple of years of that will create real market demand for more efficient home and transportation energy solutions.
The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.
Kyoto-style 'international' agreements are a trade war (Europe vs. America) disguised as a moral crusade. Gore is crusading for the other side.
I haven't seen the movie, for the same reason I didn't see Michael Moore's F9/11 - I don't want to give these bums my money. But I was wondering, did Gore offer any real, verifiable proof that we can reverse or even slow the effects of global warming? Because, as far as I know, nobody can prove that we can stop or slow it. Even if every evil capitalist on the face of the planet abandoned all technology, lived like a medieval peasant, had no children and repented, repented for their sin and greed, there is no proof that the globe would stop warming.
Nor is there any proof that repenting for our sins would have any effect on the global warming that's affecting Mars..
There's no doubt that we need to find alternatives to oil. Kuwait and Yemen are running low, and the we've been relying on the Saudis to tell us how much oil they have. Have they ever lied to us before? Every time they open their mouths.
Plus there's the fact that oil from the middle east has been funding nearly every terrorist attack that has occurred worldwide in the past few decades. We're appeasing and paying for the terrorism we're supposed to be fighting.
Even Exxon admits that we may run out of oil in a few decades, and it will take decades to develop and distribute real alternatives. We need to start taking action now, we need to solve these engineering problems as soon as possible, but not for the reasons Gore gives us.
Re: geothermal, there is actually a vast amount of geothermal energy available. The trick is not location, per se. Rather, it's the cost to develop it. Most of the low-hanging fruit--those that generate power using in situ steam, or geothermal fluids flashed to steam--have been picked (Calif: Geysers, Imperial Valley, Coso; Nev: Steamboat Hills, Dixie Valley; Utah: Roosevelt Hot Springs, Cove Fort; Hi: Puna).
The industry is now developing the next tier of resources that have lower temperatures so that heat is best harvested using binary-fluid heat exchange, or those hotter resources with no obvious surface expression, and so require an extensive exploration program to define.
Vast reserves beyond these are available through the concept of "Enhanced Geothrmal Systems," where the periphery of known geothermal resources are artificially fractured to allow heat mining from a new portion, or through the fracturing of new rock that is hot, but neither porous (void-filled) or permeable (pathways in the rock that allow fluid movement). Most parts of the country can develop geothermal this way, not just the west
The U.S. Department of Energy is sponsoring a study that will lay out how much new geothermal power can be generated, and for what price, from the now-affordable, to the pricey, to the absurd. It will be based on a survey of know geothermal resources, as well as recent maps of heat flow in the U.S.
The study will also show how the price can be lowered through various technology improvements.
Whether the more expensive resources are worth developing depends on the price of the cheapest alternative. Coalbed methane was once derided as "moon gas," too expensive to develop when all around us was ridiculously cheap, traditionally developed natural gas. That worm has turned, and there's now a CBM boom in Wyoming. Same story with oil, or tar, sands, in Alberta, which have petroleum deposits that are expensive to extract, but nonetheless profitable these days.
The study should be out later this year, or early next year.
#34 Rick,
I think my point was the same as yours just stated differently i.e. the need to fracture rock and pump water into the holes in order to get steam out.
The thing that so many with energy ideas forget is that is always easy to make a small fortune if you start with a large one.
Geothermal is viable any where in the country if you don't care what the cost is.
BTW thanks for the technical details. The outlook has improved since I last looked.
#29 Glen,
Actually, M Simon and Jay, are addressing your concerns, so I don't have to - at least regarding reducing consumption without lowering the quality of life, and the now coming competitiveness of solar and wind.
You also forget, that we were able to address the hole in the ozone by - get ready - legislation! Regulation!
Using the government for good!
I tell you what - we certainly could have funded a hell of a lot of projects for the 300 billion we have now sunk into Iraq, couldn't we?
Especially since the experts agree that the war in Iraq has had a negative impact on the War on Terror.
Glen, glen, glen. It must be a burden to be wrong so often.
Donald Sensing:
But there's no substantial natural source of hydrogen which we can tap
Actually not true. There is plenty of naturally occurring Hydrogen. More than we could could use in a millennium by any reasonable increase in usage. Admittedly there would be some very significant initial investment in 'mining' technologies, but once developed should reduce extraction costs dramatically.
The real issue is logistics. The supply is already existing and already liquid; the major energy expenditure is moving it from Point A to Point B. However, logistics is an issue we've tackled time and again over the last couple of centuries. We could tackle it again if we focused on it.
Earth is a box. Lets start thinking outside of it.
StargazerA5
Replacing democracy and economic freedom with an eco-priesthood that deliberately creates scarce and expensive energy, the better to sacrifice the human race to Gaia (or whatever ignorant-ass pagan entity they worship) is not my idea of good, I can tell you.
Take the most bigoted primitivist superstition imaginable, throw in some Soviet proletarian pseudoscience, and garnish with white upper middle class pig-headedness and you've got Goulash a la Gore. If you don't like that, report me to the suede-denim secret police.
Ive always thought that volcanic activity at sea floor level would be a good location to attempt to harness the geothermal energies. Heck, Hawaii has a great active flow that is seemingly constant, how about tapping some of that.
I admit I know little or nothing about geothermal so I may be totaly off base on this.
Doesn't Brazil operate purely on E85 for cars, though? The noise in the US is from the fact that Brazil has already achieved a situation where all cars run on E85..
#36,
The experts agree that the war in Iraq has been bad for the war on terror. I refer of course to the experts of al Queda.
They say that winning in Iraq is/was do or die and that they are losing. (I'll post a link as soon as i find one).
In any case covering the country with wind mills will do nothing to solve our liquid fuel for transportation problem.
From Osama's lips to your ears:
“Stay steadfast and don’t leave Baghdad, otherwise all the capitals in the region will fall to the crusaders,” said the message.
Iraq is the key to the region.
BTW I might mention that we defeated the Libyan WMD program by deposing Saddam. Evidently, living in a sewer is not Kdaffy's idea of a good time.
#40,
The problem with E85 is that a bad crop will cripple the transportation system.
I might mention that small wind turbines are not economical except where there is no grid.
And then you need storage etc.
Scientific American had an article a few months ago about Fast Neutron Reactors. The idea has been around forever, but basically you get more energy and much less waste.
Draconian measures, or Gore's utopian dreams, are not going to work here. Yes, if we could build 500 FNRs in the U.S. we'd be free of the Saudis -- at least for oil. We'd still need petrochemicals, though. And the rest of the world would still be fighting over crude. And the terrorists would still be getting rich by digging holes in the ground. So much of the geopolitical situation would not change.
I think if you had to take political action, a ramped tax on fuels that paid for nuclear reactors seems to make sense. Using the market demand for one energy source to pay for the development of another. But in general, I think the system is fixing itself. Crude will continue to rise, and market forces will handle the transition quite nicely over the next hundred or so years.
Personally, none of this greatly concerns me. Despite all the red tape the government and enviros have managed, its really the market that has produced our current dynamic. The truth is despite the fact that petroleum has to be located, sucked out of the ground, shipped all over the world safely, refined, shipped again, stuck into tanks without poisoning the neighborhood, and the vended on every street corner, once you factor out tax gasoline is still cheaper than milk by volume. Cheaper than bottled water. That is an astonishing testament to the economy of scale.
Now the government may not be able to solve this dilemna, but it sure can muck things up- for instance the tariffs on imported ethanol. Agriculture subsidies and import protections cost Americans billions and have set back energy independence as much as anything. The beauty of ethanol is that it is interchangeable with gasoline in modern cars- so the bad crop theory isnt really a danger. Certainly not anymore than the danger of Iran turning the Straights of Hormuz into a warzone.
If we can get the government out of the way, we will have modern nuclear plants running on recyclable fuel and cars running largely on ethanol, and thats all within a decade. Beyond that the market will decide if wind, geo, and solar are going to be cost effective (although slapping solar panels on the top of longhaul trucks has been one of my pet ideas for a while).
The economics of Ethanol in Brazil have been hashed out already. Brazil has a large sugarcane crop capacity and doesn’t rely on maize (corn) for its biofuels like the US.
The big joke about ethanol is that its far more polluting, and you get less MPG so you need more of it (roughly 1.5 gallons of ethanol to 1 gallon of gas). Since ethanol is heavily subsidized, the price is per gallon is hard to determine correctly, but And the price of ethanol has shot up from roughly 1.10 a gallon to close to 4 per gallon right now. Ethanol is most certainly not the answer, in fact its the wrong path altogether and pushing it is a very big mistake. Especially when you take into account how heavily subsidized the Ethanol and Corn industry is in the US, this ends up being yet another boondoggle for big business.
The thing I find most amazing is how ignorant the MSM is regarding the costs of ethanol, and just how deceptive the marketing campaign has become for it. If people really knew that ethanol would be costing them closer to 5.50 a gallon, and roughly 7.50 per gallon to go the same distance as a single gallon of gasoline, I don't think GM would be selling any of those cars.
If people really knew how much of what is paid at the gas station goes into the pocket of dictators, mobsters, religious extremists, Latin Fascists... politicians...
#48
Much of the ME would look like most of Africa if there was no oil there.
Perhaps there would be less of a problem to solve if Americans started growing up, and stopped demanding ridiculously large and fuel-inefficient vehicles.
The average weight of a car in the UK is probably about half that in the US, and MPG is proibably at least 50% better; do you really think that we are suffering thereby?
#51,
Rule of thumb for solar insolation (during daylight) is 1 KW/m^2. So your 150 W figure is probably a 24 hr Average. A little low (300 W is more like it). But then we might say that the 150 W average is worst case for a sunny climate in winter. My guess is that the 150W figure already includes weather. That puts you a factor of 2X low on the input side.
The 6% figure for solar cells is also low. Amorphous cells (the lowest cost) now run about 10 to 12% efficiency.
T.J. Rogers of Cypress Semiconductors is investing in a new process which should up the efficiency (by about 3X over the example given - 18 to 20%) and lower the cost.
If you eliminate air conditioning 1KW will support a house at minimum levels. If you figure a mistake of 2X in the calculation and a 2X gain for summer plus a 3X efficiency gain you come up with about 8.5KW on a 24 hour basis. Air conditioning should not be a problem. A ground source heat pump should handle it no sweat.
However, like everything technological prices are coming down over time. Eventually solar cells will cost about what glass does plus the cost of reduction (removing the O2 from the Si). If integrated the reduction might not cost much more than the cost of heating the glass.
We are a long way from that. So it will come. It just might take another 30 to 50 years.
In the mean time there are enough wind resources to supply 3X or more of current grid load if fully exploited. Wind and solar are complimentary. Wind peaks in winter, solar in summer.
So you need storage. Storage could be done for $2K per KWH (at low production volumes) declining to $1K per KWH with production volumes in the 10s of MWHs. Which gives a cost of roughly $400K installed to deliver 8.5KW for 24 hours at low volume production. High volume would bring that down to $200K. If you are grid tied, storage might be limited to minimum loads (refrigerator, computer, microwave, furnace fan, 100w of flourescent lighting) of about 1KW average over 24Hrs reducing storage costs to about $10 to $15K (assuming high volume production).
#45 Daniel Markham,
You left out the magic part. How do you make an acceptable (range, acceleration, cost) vehicle run on electricity?
======================================Fast neutron reactors are very hard to control. Thermal variations in the moderating ability of H2O in current reactors plus a few other technical details make current reactors aproximately self regulating over time spans of a few minutes once they are above about a few percent of maximum rated output (at rated temperature).
Since control systems for reactor reactivity are mechanical, response times are on the order of 100s of milliseconds (except for scrams which are designed for about 5X faster response). Human response times in emergencys are on the order of a few seconds. Fast reactors cannot have humans in the loop. They are way too slow. Automatic controls are barely fast enough. i.e. not much safety margin. Automatic controls for thermal neutron reactors are currently more than adequate.
It is noted that fast neutron reactors also have thermal feedback. However, such feed back is much slower than similar feed back in water moderated reactors and the rate of change of neutron flux is much faster. Not a good combination.
I wouldn't want to live within 100 miles of one of those suckers.
The devil (as usual) is in the details.
BTW the wiki bit was a puff piece. No indication of the problems.
#46 Mark says:
If we can get the government out of the way, we will have modern nuclear plants running on recyclable fuel and cars running largely on ethanol, and thats all within a decade.
The big problem is not government. It is physics and chemistry.
As to nuke plants: how will you get utilities to invest in nuke plants with a 40 year life span if you know that in 10 years wind will cost less than nukes? This is not a problem government can solve.
If people had even basic training in physics and chemistry and could run the numbers a lot of this pie in the sky by 'n by type thinking would evaporate.
I'm not expecting understanding of reactor controls. Just simple stuff like BTUs per gallon and gallons per acre would be a start. A smattering of industrial production logistics wouldn't hurt either.
For most people all this stuff is magic. And magic can be done with a wave of the magic wand can't it? Well no, it can't.
You really want to leave out AC in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, Georgia, etc. etc. etc.?
"As to nuke plants: how will you get utilities to invest in nuke plants with a 40 year life span if you know that in 10 years wind will cost less than nukes?"
Mmmhmm. We've heard that song and dance before. You guys really want to talk about government subsidation keeping a technology afloat? The biggest windmill in the world has a diameter of over 300 feet and produces 6 megawatts of power. It would take 100 of these tip to tip (thats almost 6 miles, see i do have a basic education!) working constantly at max capacity to produce the energy the smallest modern nuclear power plant puts out continually. You want that in your backyard?
"If people had even basic training in physics and chemistry and could run the numbers a lot of this pie in the sky by 'n by type thinking would evaporate."
I have a basic training in physics and chemistry.
"For most people all this stuff is magic. And magic can be done with a wave of the magic wand can't it? Well no, it can't."
There is nothing magic, so far as I know, about reprocessing nuclear waste to keep the residents of Nevada from freaking out. France seems to get by. There is nothing magical, so far as I know, about suplimenting our auto-fleets with ethanol. Brazil may have a magic wand, but I doubt it. Oddly I find confort in the fact that my proposals are in actual scale use in large nations around the world, and dont particularly rely on the same rehashed promises and pipe dreams we've heard about wind and solar for the last half century.
What could be truly magical is asking someone for their metrics of what constitutes a successful idea before trying to shoot it down btw.
The big problem with wind power as a source of engineering was nicely summed up by something I read somewhere: "flipping the light switch doesn't make the wind blow."
An electrical power system has to be carefully tuned, so that the power generation closely matches current power consumption. Over the course of 24 hours, most major power grids in the US increase total power levels by more than 50% over the minimum and then decrease it again afterwards.
The physics of it is stark: power generation and power consumption will always match one another. If you don't do the tuning, physics will tune it for you, but one way or another they're going to match. If you undergenerate, you get brownouts. If you overgenerate, you're going to get explosions and fires as transformers and transmission lines (and appliances in homes) are hit by overvoltage.
So as demand for power consumption rises, they have to turn power generation on. As demand falls again, generators are taken back off line. Each major power grid (e.g. California) has a central control facility which monitors demand and tells various generators when to come online and when to go back offline again.
A heavy reliance on wind power doesn't fit the control needs. When the wind blows, more power is generated. When the wind stops, the windmill stops turning, and no power is generated. Even when the wind blows continuously it rarely blows at a constant speed; there's nearly always some variation. And from day to day, and month to month, there's a lot of variation.
That means there has to be more reliable power generation capacity to back the wind power up. If the wind stops blowing, the other generator gets turned on to pick up the load.
And that's why wind power sucks for the primary grid: most kinds of reliable high-power generators rely on steam, and that means they have to burn fuel to keep the boiler hot even if they're not actively pumping energy into the grid. The central control facility is only able to give them about 15 minutes notice for when they need to come on. If the boiler is cool, it takes hours to heat up and become ready.
There are some kinds of power generation mechanisms which don't rely on steam. Two in particular: hydro can be turned on and off pretty much at will. And gas turbines can be brought online quite rapidly. But hydro is fully developed in the US, is not very large relative to our consumption, and is also regionally concentrated. Gas turbines are not cost effective because of the amount of gas that has to be burned relative to the amount of electricity produced. (Gas turbines tend to be treated as last-resort generation for exactly that reason.)
So if you have a big plant of wind electrical generation, you have to have enough coal-fired steam-based plants to substitute for those wind generators just in case the wind stops blowing, and those coal-fired plants will be burning coal even if the wind is blowing.
Which rather defeats the purpose, don't you think?
You can get some idea of how much tuning goes on by looking at the charts here.
For example, today minimum power in California was about 23 gigawatts, at 4 AM. Peak power generation was at 39 gigawatts, at 4 PM. So over 12 hours it was necessary to bring 14,000 megawatts of generation online to match the rise in demand over those 12 hours. And over the next 12 hours, 14,000 megawatts of generation has to go back offline again.
Texas went from 30 gigawatts at 4AM to 51 giagawatts at 5PM, a rise of 21,000 megawatts over 13 hours.
Nationally our power consumption rises and falls by 150,000-200,000 megawatts every day. Power generation must be adjusted to that demand.
The problem is that the wind refuses to blow at its hardest at 4PM. It blows whenever it wants to, whether we need it or not.
Gee, whatever happened to Global Cooling...
Ah, Steve.
The wind is always blowing somewhere.
Typically wind farms can produce 20% of their rated maximum capacity as base load if your wind sites are distributed.
The problem you cite (flip the switch - why don't my lights come on?) is only a problem if your wind generator is isolated from the grid.
Now some of the problems you point out are real. However, in relation to wind they do not become significant until wind is above 20% of the mix. In any case wind (which is at its highest output in winter) could reduce natural gas consumption in winter when the gas is most desired for heating rather than electricity.
BTW the current generation of wind turbines produce electricity at a cost well below the cost of natural gas peakers. So right now wind is economical in some situations.
The prices paid for wind electricity take into account the stranded cost of unused peakers. As electrical generation market traiffs are better adjusted to reflect the cost and profits of wind generation you will see more wind turbines over time.
If you want to find out more about the adjustments in tariffs in the electical generation system due to wind this is a good resource.
Last year about one nuke equivalent of wind (i.e. 3,000 MW of wind name plate rating = a 1,000 MW nuke plant) was brought on line in America. This year that is expected to increase by 20 to 50%.
So let me ask a vital question. How many nukes were brought on line last year? Zero. How many nukes will be brought on line in America in the next 5 years? Zero. By then we will have added at least 5 nuke equivalents of wind.
If nuke siting regulations were totally eliminated it would be at least 3 to 4 years before even one nuke went on line.
BTW nice to have these discussions with you again. I miss USS Clueless. Life brings changes. Nothing stays the same.
Best wishes,
Simon
#57,
Utilities have been doing their economics based on learning curves since about 1890 or so. In the utility field this is very old hat.
So given your basic understanding of economics, physics, chemistry, and industrial logistics, what is the learning curve for wind? Given the learning curve when will wind electricity cost the same as coal?
Also note that if wind is done mainly in farm country who will care that it takes up vast acreage? Farmers? They already use vast acerage for food production. A small part of that area (about 1/2% on the ground) set aside for wind production will not be a problem.
Wind turbines and farming are complimentary.
===================================We will add wind incrementally. As we add it we will solve the problems that go with it. Storage will be developed when the market demands it. So far as I can tell, lead/acid batteries are adequate to meet current storage demands at prices people are willing to pay. If they were not adequate money would be rushing into storage solutions. It is not.
Texas is going gang busters with wind installations.
Why?
Because it is more profitable for them to sell the unused natural gas to the other 47 states.
Here is a nice fact sheet on the state of wind today.Wind energy fast facts [pdf].
Here is a map of wind installations by state.
[Padding added by the editor to move the url back and stop breaking the home page] A 2003 report on the cost of wind electricity [pdf].
This article claims that wind is below the cost of nuke electricity.
Note that the report linked in #63 is in the main about the European situation.
Natural gas is more expensive in the USA.
Does anyone really believe that there was a "hole in the ozone layer" and the great benefactors in Washington passed a law and hey presto!! the "hole" went away? It is difficult to conceive of how many impossible things would have to be taken for granted to sustain such a belief. And how much reality would have to be ignored.
I'm not familiar with corn-derived ethanol costs in the US, but regarding the costs of sugarcane-derived ethanol here in Brazil: a liter of ethanol currently goes roughly for R$ 1.05 without taxes, which would translate to US$ 1.79 per gallon. Even if you consider that ethanol is less efficient than gasoline (mileage per gallon of ethanol is 70% of mpg for gasoline), it still makes sense.
So there is no magic wand, sugarcane ethanol is viable in Brazil, and without any government subsidies. The real technology breakthrough needed may be using genetic engineering to make sugarcane a viable culture in the US climate, or improve the efficiency of extracting ethanol from corn.
M. Simon wrote:
Texas is going gang busters with wind installations.
Why?
Because it is more profitable for them to sell the unused natural gas to the other 47 states.
There's more to it than that.
From an editorial in the Boston Globe:
Another factor is classic NIMBYism. Massachusetts didn't invent the "not in my backyard" attitude that critics pin on the Cape-loving Kennedy. But we have our own twist. "In New England, we've created a culture - usually centered around environmental issues - that allows the smallest minority to stop things," says Robb Pratt, who led the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust until February. Thus it is that a handful of opponents can thwart Cape Wind, despite the project enjoying overwhelming support from the state's residents.
There is a deeper problem, however, one that perhaps speaks to the reason our economy lags behind the rest of the country. For most of its history, Massachusetts has been able to import energy. Making it - even with so benign a technology as wind - is a messy business. It takes money and investors, and the projects are necessarily enormous. Here in the Bay State - where "industrial" and "for-profit" are sometimes epithets - that makes us uncomfortable. Wind is OK in theory, but we really don't like getting our hands dirty. Texas, on the other hand, is used to it. Oil derricks dot backyards. The state built its economy as the hydrocarbon supplier to the nation. "Texas knows energy and money. Wind, like oil and gas, is simply another energy resource that's going to make money," Patterson tells me. "We look at Cape Wind, scratch our heads, and say, 'How can that be?' " he adds. "It's just bizarre."
Not, you understand, that Texas is complaining.
(Bold type mine).
Actually within the next decade or so (as wind turbines get larger)...
Count on the animal-lovers to then start screaming about increasing numbers of raptors being killed by the spinning blades.
Oops.
I just realized the formatting didn't work the way I thought it would.
For some strange reason, it interpreted line breaks as also a "close italics" tag. I probably should have used bq.Anyway, Mr. Simon's message is above and it's clear what I was trying to quote from him, I hope, It should also be clear what I was trying to quote from the linked article.
Sorry about that.
A big problem with all this is that oil is fungible. Right now, oil is $80 a barrel, which isn't much more than the marginal cost of producing that last barrel of oil. But much of the oil is much cheaper; Saudi Arabia is producing, say, 20% of the worlds oil, at a cost of $5 a barrel. And they'll continue to sell that, for the next 40 years, unless your il alternative is less costly than that. Which it won't be, barring some serious breakthough... it'll be really hard to get oil consumption much below current levels; too much of it is cheap.
Which brings me to the question of carbon sequestration. Is this really viable, especially, say, in conjunction with extraction technologies (eg, injecting CO2 to force out oil or methane hydrates or whatever), or even just with coal burning? And isn't 'sustainable levels of CO2 emission' nonsense? I mean, the long-term sustatinable level must be 0, yes? And everybody talks about, eg, The Rain Forest as though it were a carbon sink, but it isn't, is it - it's a carbon buffer, at best! Or am I completely off base here somehow?
re: post 63 editing:
It showed up OK on my browser Netscape 7.2
I loaded the page a number of times before you made the correction.
Sugarcane ethanol is viable in Brazil because of its abundance and its superior EROEI of around 9:1 vs Corn based Ethanol which sits at around 1.5:1
You can see the spot market cost of a rack of Ethanol in the producer states here, roughly 3.70 a gallon.
Since the US can't grow sugarcane in CONUS, it has chosen the corn based Ethanol solution. I think the better route would be to divert some R&D dollars into genetic engineering of a sugarcane that could grow in the US proper, and then with high yield high EROEI, ethanol would make more sense as a fuel additive/alternative.
A gallon of ethanol replaces only 2/3 of a gallon of gas, and making it requires the fossil energy in about 1/2 a gallon of gas. So we must make 6 gallons of ethanol to save the fossil energy in one gallon of gas.
As it stands right now to get the same mileage out of a gallon of ethanol as a gallon of gas, one has to pay $6.31 vs $2.96 (National Average).
+ 3.70 average price of one gallon of ethanol
+ .51 federal subsidies to ethanol plants
+ .18 federal corn subsidies
-.13 minus state/federal excise tax bias against ethanol
= $4.26 a gallon
Now multiply that 4.26 times 1.483 because it takes roughly 1.5 gallons of ethanol to go the same distance as a gallon of gasoline, and you get: $6.31
Even without the subsidies added the price is unacceptable at $5.48
Ethanol is not a solution, it’s just another problem. At least in its current produced form in the US. I'm all for alternative fuels, but right now Ethanol is not a viable alternative, regardless of what GM or the ADM/Ethanol people would have you believe.
Utilities have been doing their economics based on learning curves since about 1890 or so. In the utility field this is very old hat.
So is wind power, but again, it hasnt added significantly to our grid to date. Wind power has existed since electricity was invented, yet it accounts for just .6% of our production as off 2005. As I'm sure SDB would tell you, we run instantly into the scaling problem. Even the wind industry site you link to estimates by 2020, wind will account for 100,000 MW capacity, which is about 6% of current consumption. I dont think we're going to be using any less electricity in the next 15 years, so that share is likely to be smaller still. A nice dent in the total bill, but wind isnt going to be anything like a silver bullet.
So given your basic understanding of economics, physics, chemistry, and industrial logistics, what is the learning curve for wind? ?
Well, nuclear power generated electricity for the first time in 1951 and the first working plant went online in 1954 and peaked in the US by the late 70s. Wind power for electricity production was invented in the 1890s, was connected to a grid in the 1940s and seems to be peaking now (or soon). So considering how slow the curve has been to date, I hesitate to guess. One would assume wind isnt going to continue growing at 50% per year indefinatley, but it would need to to have a prayer at catching nuclear, much less coal.
"Given the learning curve when will wind electricity cost the same as coal"
Does this include the 1.7 cent per KWh tax incentive wind producers enjoy? Or the millions in subsidies? This article is a little less confident in winds ability to compete, much less long term prospects.
** Warning - No Science Background **
One of the arguments used against wind production was that EXCESS production could cause serious problems to the grid.
Could it not be feasible to use the excess production to generate locally stored hydrogen to power cars or to make up for excess demand during the peak hours?
Also - at night (not peak hours) would be the perfect time to charge electric cars, which would also assist with any potential oversupply problem.
#54, M. Simon:
Actually fast reactors are easy to control. They rely on delayed neutrons in the same way as thermal reactors. The delayed neutron fraction is somewhat smaller when you use plutonium as the fuel instead of uranium, but that isn't really a problem. And as for feedbacks, fast reactors, like thermal reactors, lose reactivity when the fuel becomes hotter, which involves no delay.
#73 Mark,
You are asking the wrong questions re: roll out of wind.
We have had sailing ships for thousands of years. Wind mills for many hundreds and wind driven generators for over 100 years. Proves nothing.
What you have to ask are what are the enabling technologies that make wind practical.
1. Computers for monitoring and control. Reduces the number of on site personel required. Acailability? About 20 years.
2. Ability to produce large aerodynamic glass fiber (going to carbon fiber) structures. Availability? About 20 years.
Surprisingly (or not) utility scale wind has taken off in the last 20 years.
One of the articles I posted said the learning curve for wind ($/KWh) is about 18% for every doubling of size. It also says that wind is cheaper than nukes in Europe.
In any case we don't have to roll it out all at once. The current rate of production increase of about 30% a year means that production capacity doubles every 3 years. So we will be installing 2 nukes a year of wind in 3 years. In 6 years 4 nuke equivalents. etc.
There really is no rush and the roll out is coming along nicely. Electricity is not a big American worry.
Oil is the problem.
Since the US can't grow sugarcane in CONUS,
WELL, it can on the Gulf Coast.
Regarding your info on the energy "cost" of ethanol, was that specifically fossil-based energy or just energy from any source?
(And was that measured via energy fraction of an equivalent energy amount of ethanol, or per volumetric amount?)
The reason I'm asking is because I've run into extensive Vizzini-esque calculations that purport to prove that all the oil drilling rigs in the West are actually energy sinks rather than energy producers, and I'm wondering if there's a similar sort of analysis here.
#77:
Just what we need, to put our energy dependant crops in the worlds biggest hurricane zone.
Tad Patzek at UCB has been pretty harsh on Biofuels and the claims made by the industry as a whole, he has a selection of papers on his research found here. It makes for some interesting reading in regards to industry claims on biofuel efficiency, etc.
I by no means claim to be an expert on ethanol, but I am not willing to buy the industry arguments regarding their being the replacement for gas based fuel.
As a person investigating the alternative energy field for a major US corporation, I feel I must correct some inaccuracies:
1) Electrical generation is a coal problem, not an oil problem. About half of all electricity in the US comes from burning coal. Oil is less than 7% and declining. True, hydro and nuclear provide current grid cost competitive power on demand, but solar power generated from mirrors heating a working fluid is about 37% efficient, and there's wide stretches of land in the Southwest US that can be employed to set up Solar Thermal Electicity generation. My own calculations indicate that we would need 10,000 square miles to make the annual 4 TWhr the US consumes.
2) As for the 3% solution, well there is quite a lot of flat roof space throughout the US that does nothing more than protect us from the weather - integrating photovoltaics into a building structure would more that easily provide the 3% discussed. I might add that todays's typical silicon chip cell has over 14% efficiencies, not 10% as claimed.
3) Removing CO2 from the air can be done with today's - no make that 1950's technology. Caustic scrubbers can strip the air of CO2 and make a sodium bicarbonate. I imagine that a few billion dollars a year would create a downturn in the carbon dioxide trend in the atmosphere. That's assuming of course that CO2 is the major contributor to global warming. When you include all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (CO2, methane, CFCs, water vapor, etc) you can reasonably argue that man's estimated emissions total less than 0.25% of all greenhouse gases. One thing that needs to be remembered about the earth's climate is that is is perpetually changing - regardless of what we do.
#75 Frej,
Thanks. It has been a long time since I studied the fast reactors.
I was under the impression that because of the thermalization of neutrons the reactivity change was faster and covered a larger volume.
In any case a smaller fraction of delayed neutrons makes the reactor harder to control. (It may be that I'm giving this feature more attention than it is worth). Can you tell be the difference in % of delayed neutrons U vs Pu? And the time constant or 1/2 life of the decay period of the delayed neutrons?
From current reading it appears that the #1 problem (besides control which does not appear to be fully solved i.e. anomolous reactivity fluctuations) is the coolant which is normally something which is not a good moderator (i.e. a liquid metal). Sodium reacts with water (corrosiveness causes steam generator leaks which cause very bad accidents), mercury (expensive and poisonous), lead (corrosive and reactive when hot).
The fuel costs are high and the safety record is poor.
It might be worthwhile to continue experiments. It is far from ready for a productiion roll out.
I'm staying out of the wind argument, other than to remind everyone of SDB's point that power generated has to equal power consumed at all times--and that means that somebody has to be able to flip switches or run programs that increase or decrease supply with only a few minutes' warning, and it has to work every minute of every day. The first time it fails... remember the northeasten blackout?
And please see SDB's old post on electrical storage for the whole battery thing. The orders of magnitude are just a few orders too high for that to be practical.
Also, someone mentioned using a space elevator as a power cable. Unfortunately, that won't work; it just isn't built for that. Microwave or high-efficiency laser transmission is about it for space powersats. I think those have potential, but not until we can build everything from rockets to solar panels out of engineered nanomaterials for pennies--and that's a ways off still.
Geothermal--and ultimately, core taps--sound really nice, but again, there's a heck of a lot of expensive R&D that needs to be done.
Nuclear is still our best bet in the near-mid term, and probably out through the long term as well. It's about as controllable as hydrocarbons, scales really nicely compared to anything else, and the fuel is pretty cheap compared to the sale price of the power generated.
We're also not going to run out of fuel anytime soon--there's plenty of Uranium left to go around, and I believe someone (SDB?) mentioned at one point that Japanese scientists have come up with a scheme to extract Uranium from seawater at a cheaper price than reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.
On top of that, there's Thorium, which is essentially non-radioactive (half life in the billions of years--it ain't gonna hurt you) and actually burns quite well in a reactor--it just uses a different fuel cycle. Unlike Uranium, where most of it (U-238) doesn't do anything, you can burn pretty much every atom of Thorium in theory. The estimate is that we have over a million tons of it, with 10% located here and the major sources (India, Oz, Norway) being allies or friends.
There's also the small matter of oceans of oil sands, a few mountains of oil shale, and the continental shelf. We're not going to run out of oil as long as people are free to do something about it. That said, I certainly wouldn't mind doubling our nuclear base to drop-kick the marginal cost of oil and pull the rug out from a few parties that are profiting from the price spike.
"We have had sailing ships for thousands of years. Wind mills for many hundreds and wind driven generators for over 100 years. Proves nothing."
You brought it up. The point is there are inherent limitations on the technology. Yes, better computing and electronics can probably help deal with the 'light switch' problem, and advanced materials can extend blades as they are developed, but those things manage the limitations, they dont eliminate them. The technology at its core is always going to be predicated on an inconsistant source and limited by the length of the blades. It seems to me there is a pragmatic ceiling on how much you can improve on these things, at some point there will be diminishing returns. Because technology is advancing at a set pace- the more mills you build would seem to conflict with your ability to manage their production, and the size of the blades will run into larger scale engineering hurdles. Turbulance? Structural integrity? If you give me a big enough wind mill i'll power the universe, but how big can you build one that makes any sense? The sheer space we are talking about to produce even 20% of the nations electricity would be enormous and the physics indicates nothing can change that. For wind space=yield.
My point is wind is so far behind it doesnt really matter that it's rate of increase is much faster rate than anything else. It will take too long to catch up to make any difference, and it seems to me extremely unlikely that it will keep up this rate for decades to come.
You are right and you are wrong about electricity. It isnt an issue but it will be. My point, which i never got to, on ethanol is that is may be a loser on efficiency, but if we are producing electricity dirt cheap via nuclear power surplanting coal (and of course along with small contriubutions from all the others) we will be essentially converting electricity into ethanol to run our cars without hasseling with oil barons. This will rapidly be cheaper than petroleum the way things are going.
Not to mention the potential boon this could be for agriculture world wide- and before anyone asks Brazil is not going to become the next Saudi Arabia for the simple math that a small oligarchy can easily control and benefit completely from a nations oil, but farming is a community endeavor by nature. Brazil can export ethanol profitably, so we dont have to figure out how to. Other nations will as well if the demand materializes, and we can produce an abundance of our own if we can get away from the corn lobbyists poisoning the well. If we could convert switchgrass into ethanol even at a loss of energy, if electricity is cheap enough it is still a net benefit to the nation.
"Since the US can't grow sugarcane in CONUS, it has chosen the corn based Ethanol solution."
Thats not exactly how it worked. Corn was chosen because corn farmers are an extremely powerful lobby. Corn is perhaps the worst choice to produce ethanol- too expensive, too much space. Unfortunately there is no switchgrass lobby in DC.
As far as hurricanes, a good chunk of our oil infastructure is already in the hurricane zone. I'll put my money on a sugar cane crop surviving a hurricane better than an oil rig.
Just what we need, to put our energy dependant crops in the worlds biggest hurricane zone.
Well, once you start thinking of it as a solution rather than the silver bullet, I think it makes sense.
Then again, I can walk outside my office and see the fields, almost, except there's a warehouse in the way (I'm in a built-up area).
Should I resign myself to doing nothing for a living because I live in aforementioned "world's biggest hurricane zone?"
#73,
re: the wind subsidy.
Many in the wind field say that once the subsidy expires in 3 years it should not be renewed. The purpose of the subsidy was to encourage experience with wind and to jump start the market (i.e. push it down the learning curve). When it expires it will have served its purpose and should not be renewed.
You will also note from your article link and current information that wind has gone from .13% of electrical energy production to .60%, an increase by a factor of 4.5 in 6 years.
Not bad.
BTW the article notes that wind was not cost competitive in 2000. Too true. Since then production turbine size has increased by a factor of at least 3X lowering costs accordingly.
Also note that the former Enron Wind is now GE Wind.
You will also note that the cost per KWh of wind is still dropping despite the "plateau" expectation of the article.
In a generation or two blades will change from glass fiber to carbon fiber. Thus allowing larger blades for even bigger mills. We are not at the end of the learning curve.
I am surprised that flywheels have not been mentioned in this thread.
I recall an article in either Popular Science or Scientific American a few years ago about carbon-fiber flywheels with very high rotational velocities, contained in vacuum and mounted on magnetic bearings. They have a high energy storage capacity, an extremely low rate of loss, and a high rate of discharge.
If we assume for a moment that the energy storage problem were solved, wouldn't that make some of these technologies (wind, solar, etc) workable as real solutions to our energy needs?
Wikipedia Link
You are really missing the boat on THE fastest growing alternate energy.
Question - what industry increased production by 600% and is already sold out for the 2007 heating season.
Hint - its the same one that will reduce your house heating costs by 80%.
http://www.hearthdirect.com/pressroom.cfm
M Simon, natural gas is way more expensive in europe than in the US (~5.50/mmbtu here vs. 7.30 in the UK). Also fwiw Texas consumes more natural gas than any other state for electrical generation.
Re: #86
SDB covered flywheels somewhere (no time to hunt it up right now).
The scales that you're talking about are again a few orders of magnitude too large. Unless you want stadium-sized DU flywheels spinning at high mach next to a city.
My understanding of the technology is that the capacity of the flywheel system varies directly with the square of the maximum rotational velocity of the flywheel.
This implies that such systems are bounded only by the strength of the wheels we can build. Are there inherent (known) limits to how strong such flywheels can be?
At any rate, I imagined the overall system as a distributed one. Each house would have a flywheel buried on the property, capable of storing several hours or days of power. Each neighborhood might have a flywheel buried on the land they currently use for power distribution stations (there is one a block from my apartment complex). At each level in the power storage/generation heirarchy, users and producers (often the same people) would pair flywheel storage with small-scale, persistent generation (wind, solar, geothermal).
It's not a question of stadium-sized flywheels or massive centralized power generation facilities, but of thousands of small flywheels being fed by thousands of small power generators.
After Katrina, the oil rigs were up in a few weeks. Can you re-plant/re-grow a crop in that same amount of time? Ever see a picture of a cornfield after a twister? IIRC Hurricane George devastated around 90% of the sugarcane crops in the Caribbean.
I'm not discounting it, I'm just saying that its one more thing to take into account.
re: #90
Yes, there are limits on the capacity of flywheels; basically, the strength of the materials. Which is limited by (among other things) the energy of the chemical bonds of the materials they're made from... and that puts you in the same general energy storage ballpark as batteries, combustion et al, give or take an order of magnitude.
Flywheels might well scale up more cheaply than batteries, though.
After Katrina, the oil rigs were up in a few weeks. Can you re-plant/re-grow a crop in that same amount of time? Ever see a picture of a cornfield after a twister? IIRC Hurricane George devastated around 90% of the sugarcane crops in the Caribbean.
I'm not discounting it, I'm just saying that its one more thing to take into account.
No, you can't, and I've seen hurricanes wreck fields of sugarcane.
But I also read the reports on how damaged the oil rigs were after Katrina, and while some of them were back at work shortly thereafter, some were knocked offline for about half a year or more. I think I have the report at home. I'll check it tonight or maybe tomorrow.
#90,
Flywheel capacity for a given size is strictly dependent on the strength of materials.
Density of the materials controls mass. Rotational speed is a function of density and strength of materials.
I see the system as you do. Distributed.
In the beginning the system is sized for emergency backup and some load shifting (peak shaving). Energy is drawn in the early AM and delivered during peaks. As costs come down more storage is installed.
#81 Big D,
Variable sources and loads are a feature of the grid as it works right now.
Small fluctuations are handled by local voltage regulators. Larger fluctuations are handled by adding or removing generators or loads in a continuous power auction.
Wind is no different.
#92 Mike,
Flywheels don't wear out (very fast) batteries do.
Which is why batteries are not viable for general use.
I think geothermal is the ultimate answer. We live on a planet that's almost entirely molten lava. Dig down anywhere and you're gonna find enough heat to boil water, which means turbines, which means electricity.
You get one degree of Fahrenheit increase per 100 feet. Figure cave temperature at 55 degrees. 212 degrees is boiling. Dig 170 * 100 = 17,000 feet. So the problem is digging down 3.22 miles. Yeah, I guess that would be tough. There's got to be a way, though.
#82,
At the current time the calculated point of diminishing returns for wind turbines is at around the 10 to 15MW peak level. Given that we are going into series production with 3 MW jobs we still have a few doublings to go.
I estimate that if the 15 to 18% learning curve holds wind will wind up costing 70% of coal. That is a huge difference.
Considering that we are at .6% penetration for wind and that variability is not a problem until we hit 20%, I'd say we have enough time to figure out what to do next.
What do you mean by wind catching up? If it makes economic sense it will get installed. Do you mean that it will not be our sole grid source by day after tomorrow or even in 20 years? So what? Actually it is coal and nukes that will need to catch up - price wise.
Since wind electricity will be the cheapest it will be used for liquid fuel production. Especially if the fuel plants can be designed to vary their load as more or less excess wind is available. Plants that can vary their load according to power available get the cheapest price for electricity. Sometimes as low as free.
There are alternative energy sources out there.
1. Turning old oil wells into geothermal energy sources- cycling cold water down and getting steam back up.
2. Energy towers such as those developed by the techneon in Israel that exploit temperature differences at different altitudes to drive a turbine (cold air, assisted by humidity from a thousand feet up falls down a tube and drives a turbine at the bottom)
3. Coal Bed Methane. Already thousands of wells and economic.
4. Oil Sands- Thank god, I've made a ton of money here and expect to make more! 70 billion in capital being invested here, it is the new thing, not the next thing.
5. Nukes, nukes nukes.
6. Wave power-waves drive a flapping thing, which drives a generator.
Suppose we solve our gasonline problem? Then gasoline becomes that much cheaper. It will not be left in the ground as Gore requires. Then China and India, eventually, start developing the military capacity to project power into the oil producing regions that we will presumably have abandoned and will have become vital to them...
The idea that the whole world will agree to leave the fossilized carbon in the ground is of the sheerest phantasmagoria. Oil will seek a new price. It's large capital investments have already been made. Replacing it with new technologies, that are only economical when compared with oil priced to current demand, will not make it disappear. World stil ends.
Mark B.: Corn was chosen because corn farmers are an extremely powerful lobby. Corn is perhaps the worst choice to produce ethanol- too expensive, too much space. Unfortunately there is no switchgrass lobby in DC.
The corn farmers don't care what they grow. I've talked with some that are going to meetings this summer on how to grow switchgrass. They want to know what kind of soil it grows in, whether they need new equipment, fertilizer rates, water needs, who will buy it, how much it will pay, etc.
We've always grown corn in this country; we're quite good at it, as I'm sure the Brazilians are with sugarcane. I think we have to accept a learning curve and the risk a farmer takes by going from a commodity with many uses (food, livestock feed, sugar substitute and energy) to a commodity with one use (perhaps also basket weaving?)
#100:
Gas is a byproduct of oil refining. You can't leave it in the ground, because it doesn't exist there.
Gabriel #72: Ethanol for September delivery is selling at $2.50 per gallon. Here The current high price is believed to be temporary as new supplies arrive. I assume the numbers would probably still favor gasoline, but I think its not fully matured industry and not inconceivable that ethanol could get close. Long-term, we can't grow enough corn, so it would have to be part of a larger solution of methane/ethanol fuel sources.
From a CO2 angle, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the coal industry's proposal to inject CO2 into the earth so that it doesn't reach the atmosphere. Sounds crazy to me, but half this stuff would have sounded crazy to me several years ago.
If electric power gets cheap enough relative to gasoline, battery-powered cars will become viable.
Yes, standard lead batteries don't last long. The design on those is a century old, the difference is using plastic versus glass and waxed paper to contain the cells.
What would you say to a Ni-Cd battery that held 150% of the lead cell energy density, had almost no memory (and that eradicable by trickle-charging the full cell), could accept 80% charge in 15 minutes and discharge fully in 5 minutes if needed? Then add on a capacity loss of less than 10% every 2000 cycles, with a energy efficiency of 80% versus the lead 60%?
I was making those batteries 10 years ago. They exist and are used in jet aircraft. The problem is that these are made totally by hand, making them very expensive. Some process engineering and automation later, these would be cheap enough to use in a car, instead of the $100k plus they currently would cost.
M. Simon,
Yeah, Texas is building a lot of windmills. As for "wind power" --
Windmills are heavily subsidized. The subsidy is hidden by not making it cash from the treasury; instead, utilities are obliged to buy power from wind producers (at top dollar) whether they need it or not. So, when the wind blows Texas farmers get money. Meanwhile the oil- and coal-fired plants are running at 0% output and 50% fuel usage, ready to kick in when the wind stops. Consumers pay twice: once at max price for wind power, once at about half that for keeping the fuel-driven plants going. What a deal.
When you set it up so that money is falling from the sky, it's worth remembering that Texans wear big hats.
Regards,
Ric
#103:
Interesting that futures are trading that low, when the price hit a high today:
I don't know much about the Ethanol/Methane combination and how the two will react together since one is a gas and one is a liquid. Plus the treehuggers are not all that keen on methane since its a "greenhouse gas".
Cellulose based ethanol seems far more preferable than the pure Corn based. The more I read about switchgrass the better it sounds as well. I think the larger issue is that Ethanol product is being rushed to the market without a suitable analysis of the effect it will have on alternative ethanol agents such as sugar cane, beet, etc.
Also, keep in mind the prices of ethanol are artificially low. The corn industry gets subsidized to the tune of 4 billion a year (2004 data), as well as tax biases, and outright ethanol subsidies. As I calculated above, the real price of ethanol should be around 6.31 a gallon (that incorporates the tax bias) if you wanted to match distance for a gallon of gas.
All you battery enthusiasts, go read my part of what NZ Bear published.
Oh, and learn the meaning of the word "scale".
The ABSOLUTE THEORETICAL MAX storage capacity of the nickel cadmium system is approximately 80 watt-hours per kilogram. That's pretty good, right? Except when you've got 5 × 1013 watt-hours of energy to store. Say you're going to be conservative and only do 1% of that. 5 × 1011 divided by 80 is about 6 × 10^9 kilograms -- six MILLION tonnes of nickel and cadmium required, about two-thirds nickel and one-third cadmium.
Now go look up nickel reserves and nickel production. The numbers are available on the Web, so you don't have to take my word for it. Then the same for cadmium. Then remember that the EPA has the serious hots for cadmium -- it's not only a heavy metal poison, it's carcinogenic!
Rule: if the numbers don't have at least nine zeroes the source is trivial and near-useless. If you'll start with that you'll have better luck figuring out what's going on.
Regards,
Ric
Sheesh.
First off, the MIT professor said, specifically, continental US not contiguous US, so Alaska gets put into the kitty for starters. Net result is 183,180 sq. km which is a size just between that of South Dakota and North Dakota. Using average insolation rates for the lower 48 (give or take with annual variations, which would have to be accounted for, but I am nice to the back of the envelope calculations) and his 10% overall system efficiency for conversion, delivery, etc. gets you 2.67 E13 kWh/yr.
US energy use in 2004: 2.92 E13 kWh/yr.
And back in 1994: 2.61 E13 kWh/yr.
(all energy types converted from BTU to kWh/yr for standardization in measurement purposes... YMMV... this is the entire consumed energy from all sources in the US)
So, overall energy use by the US has increased a bit over 12% in 10 years, which is not too bad considering the rate of economic expansion over that 10 year period, which includes the Net Bubble and 9/11. And between '84 and '94 there was an approximate 15% rise in total energy use. Conservation is playing a large role in slowing the rate of energy consumption growth while the economy expands at a greater clip.
Second up, wind power. Go for it! And deal with the NIMBY and BANANA and 'viewshed pollution' folks too, while you're at it.
Third up, nukes. Pebblebed designs and vitrification of waste for putting into subduction zones. Death rates for the entire nuclear mining, refining and use process is similar to that of coal. Look at safer, non-water moderated designs that do not build up heat but distribute same. The US has lost the lead here for a few decades due to the BANANA and NIMBY folks. A hard look at silica vitrification of waste and putting the results into subduction zones to let the Earth recycle same on its lonesome.
Fourth up, global warming. The planet is coming out of The Little Ice Age lasting from about 1300 to the 1820's and heading back towards the early medieval and previous warm period. Over the last 4.2 Billion years the Earth's average temperature has been much, much balmier, only falling into cyclic glacial periods during short term geologic events lasting only a few 10's of millions of years. Causes for the downturn for the last 70 million years or so is from increased speed of continental drift and the continents riding higher because of that increased speed. With that comes a massive decrease in shallow ocean basins that covered North America and large parts of Eurasia and Africa. Less warm water, less heat retained, average global temperature drops. If the folks doing the fine calculations stop piddling around with only 100 years of data, they might actually get some answers that are meaningful. But then they will need to consider the entire planet and solar output... let me know when their model can replicate the last 4.2 Billion years of climate.
Fifth up, Solar Power Satellites. The US needs a heavy space industry with reliable and re-useable heavy lift vehicles. Space elevators are nice once nanotech gets to the strength, length and wide temperature variations to be seen by those strands. Best cycle for SPS is still the Princeton plan of 1969 or thereabouts, but now augmented by remotely operated vehicles for Lunar mining. In the long haul, this is a large-scale and self-sustaining proposition, but getting to there from here requires killing NASA and offering hefty prizes for a non-first past the post to set goals system. Take any 30 years of aviation and compare with the last 30 years of space flight. I prefer this as it moves industry slowly off of Earth and gets electrical generation on the cheap. Initial infrastructure costs are the hurdle at this point. And getting a low cost to orbit system up and running. Prizes worked to make aviation reliable, efficient and safe, while government seems interested in none of those.
Sixth up, the Green Meme. Corn in the US produces 300 gallons of ethanol per acre over its 125 day growing cycle, thus garnering a 9.4% efficiency from sunlight to end product. Sugarcane gets 662 gallons per year, with a 7 harvest before replant is necessary (that is already factored into the 662 gallons), but is done only in areas with continual warm weather and increased insolation. So it gets more solar energy to start which is about 20% more per meter than the congtiguous US gets. Because of that higher daily sunlight amount and the energy density of ethanol, the efficiency of sugarcane in converting sunlight into fuel is actually less than that of corn, coming it at 6.63%.
Now if you look at a higher energy fuel for a similarly situated climate, say biodiesel, palm oil gives you only 635 gallons/acre but a 9.45% efficiency of conversion because it packs about 50% more energy per gallon than ethanol.
The US uses about 125 billion gallons of gasoline per year (2004). Brazil produces about 4 billion gallons of ethanol per year (2005). And they get to destroy lush rainforest to get at its poor soil for agriculture, which soon depletes that soil, leaving it fit for cattle until it washes away. That is the 'miracle' of ethanol in Brazil. Someone have 30 Brazils handy?
Seventh up, geothermal. As others have pointed out, the easy stuff has been gotten to. When cycling water into previous oil reservoirs remember that many of those were in salt domes and when water is introduced that goes into solution at high temperature and quickly goes out of solution with a temperature drop. Even Iceland, which does not have this problem, has problems with pipe corrosion and a replacement cycle for its near surface geothermal plants. For each and every place that one wants to put a water system into the ground that actually contacts bare rock, temperature, pressure and what goes into solution at same needs careful examination, especially if the water is in a re-use cycle. Build up of metals and acids are a large factor when dealing even with hard rock deposits. Remember, this is being done to generate energy, not to pump out oil.
Further, many of the non-salt dome, hard rock deposits have semi-permeable rock that allowed for concentration of oil by its being less dense than the water in the system. That water is under pressure, at high temperature and is most likely saturated with minerals after sitting in the rock for over 100 million years and cooking. Either those rock layers need to be sealed off in three dimensions or the system must handle the influx of this water or keep the system under higher pressure than the surrounding water to limit infiltration of same. An interesting tango with physics, chemistry and geology... and ensure that there are NO fault structures that are dormant in the area that can be reactivated by high pressure water being put into the system.
One might look at Great Lakes thermal gradient or deep sea thermal gradient systems. I would shy away from the lakes on account of not knowing what putting energy continually through their coldest regions would do to the overall system and climate of the northeastern portion of the North American continent. With deep sea work you would like to have something that is close to a continental shelf drop-off and close to actual dry land. Also not earthquake or tsunami prone. Wave action is a bit easier to situate, but has mechanical inefficiencies due to they energy type coming in. Also note that a surface system needs heavy resistance to brine, corrosion, cleaning off of the system to keep sea life from colonizing it... and a tsunami survivability for the last known one of such over, say, the last 1,000 years at minimum.
All such systems need to either exploit and utilize already existing infrastructure or have the cost of re-fit and expansion for it considered into the overall system start-up cost. Thus production from the Athabasca tar/oil sands is increasing and Canada has become a net oil exporter since 2004 and is increasing their capacity annually, and running out of people to take good jobs in that industry. They are job rich and people poor. Luckily the US pipelines take in oil just as well as send it, and some expansion of US storage facilities is happening because of this. This is an inexpensive addition to an already robust system. Newer and less time-tested systems need to be examined for types of problems they get over time and how much the remedial factors are likely to cost (RE: the need for energy storage by increasing wind generation).
Two technology areas that will greatly affect this depending on rate of development and basic understanding are nanotechnology and superconductors. Nanotech hits on the production side for space elevators and low cost to orbit for the good things that provides, but also for more efficient production of solar collectors and fuel cells. Superconductors, especially in large rings, can hold electricity until needed without loss once the length of such and energy density of them can be increased. A slow replacement of the older, copper based infrastructure will exploit this field when, and if, it matures to something that is reliable over time. This may be done in tandem with long tube nanostructures to efficiently hold superconductive material over longer distances.
Most new sources hit the theory and practice conundrum: 'In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.'
Wiped by writing this, hope it gives a bit of light where shadows lurk.
#50
"The average weight of a car in the UK is probably about half that in the US, and MPG is proibably at least 50% better; do you really think that we are suffering thereby?"
And how does the average distance travelled compare? We put close to two thousand miles on the work car in the last two weeks. I don't think that would have been as productive had we done it in a car weighing half as much. My son drove from Kansas City, Kansas to Aspen, Colorado and back this week. That's a little less distance than Land's End to John o'Groats, and only a fraction of the length of our country. Once he got above 5,000 ft, the air was a bit thin for his engine. How do your British cars do at that height?
Hmm. I seem to have struck a nerve with Mr. Locke. Okay - 1 million tons new nickel produced annually, 100 million tons proven reserves, unproven reserves (ocean floor) claimed to be much higher. So - we can produce the nickel. Next - cadmium. It is not produced much at all - 18 thousand tons used annually. However - this is just as a byproduct of zinc production, no mining is done for cadmium. The stuff is considered more of a pain for mining companies - gets in the way of extracting other more valuable metals.
Ni-Cd cells are 99% recyclable, lowering the need for mining more metal for them. Are batteries a silver bullet? NO! IF we boost our electric grid enough using the above mentioned technologies, then an electric car becomes viable as a commuter car, and that only in built-up areas. I see batteries competing successfully with hydrogen in this limited area.
Here's SDB's comments on flywheels.
Great piece. I think we're starting to relearn some lessons.
In 1970 (October issue I think) Scientific American devoted an entire issue to the energy crisis. One of the articles compared all the prime sources of energy (same list as today) and concluded there were only two that were "net producers." Defined as systems that would produce more energy in their useful life than was required to build the system. Those two were hydrocarbon combustion and fusion (hydro was a net producer but near full exploitation). Nothing seems to have changed. Wind and solar have made great progress but show no signs of ever going positive.
Nothing else is even close.
They noted that economics was not a sufficient measure of comparison because it often distorted long term factors like capitalization and ease of access.
My electric utility in Florida, Florida Power & Light (FPL), has a pilot 250 KW power project in Sarasota county using photovoltaic (PV) cells covering an area the size of a football field. The cost of the project is in the $1-2 million range which is reasonable because, as a rule of thumb, the cost of photovoltaic cells is about $4 per installed watt. Based on this project the question is, can the size of photovoltaic facilities be scaled up to produce meaningful quantities of our electrical energy needs, say 1% or even 10%?
A conventional power plant is usually rated at 1000 megawatts. I have constructed a spreadsheet showing that a PV facility generating 1000 megawatts of power would require about 42 square kilometers of PV panels and would cost at least 4 billion dollars. These results are based on a solar intensity of 240 watts per sq meter and PV cells having efficiencies of 10%.
It should be pointed out that manufacturers of PV cells/panels, in the entire life of the industry, have produced only a few square kilometers of PV panels. 42 Square kilometers of PV panels would be an enormous undertaking for the industry.
It should also be pointed out that 42 square kilometers of PV panels would produce only about 0.1% of the electrical energy needs of the US and only for 5-6 hours per day. Little or no electrical energy would be generated the other 18 hours of the day.
Also it should be noted that the plywood required to just support the PV panels for a 1000 megawatt PV project would cost at least 700 million dollars. While such a cost does not scare the government it certainly would worry builders and would cause shortages of plywood in the housing industry.
If we want to generate an average of 1000 megawatts of power from PV panels over 24 hours, the above numbers have to be at least quadrupled: 167 square kilometers of PV panels would be required and the cost of the PV panels would be at least 16 billion dollars. And the excess energy would have to be stored in expensive and polluting lead-acid batteries or in unproven flywheel facilities for use when the PV facility is not generating energy.
It should be mentioned that the electrical generating capacity of the US in 2004 was 963,000 megawatts. An extremely tiny amount of this generating capacity was from PV and thermal-solar, less than 0.1%.
If we were to generate 1% of the US electrical energy needs from PV cells, 1,605 square kilometers of PV panels would be required and the cost for them would be 154 billion dollars!
Although silicon is the main element used to manufacture photovoltaic cells, other elements are necessary in the manufacturing process. A study back in 1979 by the American Physical Society revealed that to produce just 1% of our electrical needs with PV cells, 250 tons of germanium (three times the world’s annual production) and twenty times the world’s yearly production of gallium would be required. Since that time our requirements for electrical energy increased by 60%!
If we were to generate 10% of our electrical energy from PV cells, 16,050, square kilometers (about 6,200 square miles) of PV panels would be required and the cost for the panels would be 1.54 trillion dollars! In addition, at least 270 billion dollars of plywood would be required to provide support for the PV panels! Current yearly sales of plywood in the US are probably less than 10 billion dollars.
I wonder if any of this getting through to you PV energy advocates yet.
If we were to generate 100% of our electrical energy needs from PV cells, 160,500 square kilometers (about 62,000 square miles; a land area greater than that of Florida) of PV panels would be required and the cost would be 15.4 trillion dollars! In this case at least 2.7 trillion dollars worth of plywood would be required to provide support for the PV panels!
And, oh, did I mention that PV cells are intermittent generators of electrical energy and would have to be fully backed up at all times by the electrical energy generated from conventional power plants and that these plants have to be spinning in reserve? It means that PV facilities will absolutely never replace conventional power plants no matter how large! Furthermore, the efficiency of PV cells falls off by about 3% per year. Over 20 years the efficiency will be down by about 46%.
FPL has a program called the Sunshine Energy Program that is currently supported by 23,000 of FPL’s most gullible consumers at $9.75 per month. These naive contributors believe that they are helping to rid the world of that global-warming menace, carbon dioxide. But what do these contributors to FPL’s Sunshine Energy Program get for their money besides nothing? Quite simply, they get to finance PV electrical energy costing about thirty (30) times the cost of conventionally produced electrical energy – $3.61 per kilowatt-hour versus $0.10 to $0.12 per kilowatt-hour for conventional electrical energy. Don’t you think that it is fraudulent? If Martha Stewart or Ken Lay tried to sell you this Brooklyn Bridge would you buy it? If you are reluctant to buy it from them, why would you buy it from your electric utility?
PV generation of electrical energy certainly has small niche markets in the US but its contribution to our overall electrical and energy needs will remain minuscule unless the cost of PV panels is reduced by at least an order of magnitude. As photovoltaic science is a rather mature technology, major improvements in the cost-effectiveness of PV cells are not expected. And yes, I am aware that there is promising research on double layer PV cells that utilize up to 20% of the energy from the solar spectrum. However, these cells are tiny and are expected to be considerably more expensive than conventional PV cells per installed watt. Even if we assume 20% efficiency and $4 per installed watt the costs involved are still enormous.
And please be more specific when you champion nanotechnology as an approach to solving our energy problems. It just ain’t going to happen any time soon. Nanotechnology is extremely expensive, probably much too expensive for the pie-in-the-sky space elevator.
Don’t get me started on the hydrogen economy, wind turbines or ethanol from corn.
Jose
#105 from tweell,
Electric power is cheap enough already.
It is the cost and weight of storing it in your auto that is the killer.
#106 from Ric Locke,
So fuel consumption is reduced 50% for the same amount of electricity and the wind generators must compensate the idle power plants for part of the lost revenue and the fuel they burn. It is part of the tariffs.
All for about 1.7 cents per KWh subsidy on .6% of the electrical supply. Plus the subsidy runs out in 3 years and I will vigorously oppose its renewal because wind power should be cost effective enough to stand on its own by then.
I'm pretty much libertarian and oppose subsidys. I favor this one (time limited) because it gets us down the learning curve faster and is a hedge against high natural gas prices.
#113 John,
You are probably working from old data.
Current wind turbines produce 7 to 15X their energy cost over their lifetime. About the rage of most successful energy technologies (5X to 20X).
#114 Jose,
Actually Cypress Semiconductor is investing in a Solar Cell company that gets 20% efficiency, better area useage (contacts on the back), and lower cost production. The learning curve on solar cells is not as steep as wind. However, cost is still declining.
Ultimately the cost is the cost of extracting silicon from sand. Removing impurities. Pitching in some imputities and casting the product into ribbons. We are just not smart enough yet. No rush. Coal and wind are more than adequate to keep us going while we learn.
If we make the cells part of roofs, no need for extra plywood. Of course the roll out then will be driven by replacement of housing stocks. About 1 to 2% a year. No rush.
Liquid fuels are the big stumbling block. No obviously viable solution exists.
===========================BTW I read the flywheel piece. All I can say is that if you start with a lot of really stupid assumptions you will get some really absurd results.
Again the solution discussed is a big bang solution. In reality storage will get deployed gradually over 20 or more years.
So far all our energy transitions have been gradual. Why should this one be any different? In addition given the numbers involved how could it be any different?
The Set America Free Coalition has a fairly comprehensive plan for displacing oil use.
Additionally, this video shines a spotlight on hypocrisy.
Actually I'm a little misleading on the subsidy. It is for 10 years of an existing turbine. The 3 year cut off is for new turbines. So it will actually take 13 years for all subsidies to expire.
For turbines installed 11 years ago the subsidy has already expired.
Figured on the basis that wind will amount to no more than 2% of the electrical supply by the subsidy expiration date, the cost represents at maximum $.00034 per KWh on the total electrical energy supply. i.e. much less than the fluctuations in fuel costs. Probably in actuallity around 1/2 that figure and declining over the life of the subsidy.
A very small price to pay to get us 5 or 10 years farther along than with no subsidy.
Great post.
But I think your missing your own point. There is no singular alternative to the Petrochemical conundrum but if all of the different sources and technologies were used the conundrum could be solved. Unfortunately we live in a market driven world and unless the alternate energies become at least as economicaly feasible or more so none of the alternatives will ever be adopted.
We also need to adopt an calculation of equality like you reference in your post of Joules. Energy should be sold by the joule not the gallon or killowatt to make all energy sources equal and hence promote alternative energy development on an equal basis utilizing taxes and tarrifs to create an environment of equality amongst the different energy producing alternatives.
Now we could create a false market driven incentive to make the alternatives feasible by taxing and levies on the oil industry but right now we are actually doing the reverse we are providing incentives to the oil industries to develop which in turn discourages a break through in some other alternative or for that matter utilizing what has already been developed to date because it is cost prohibitive because of the laws of supply and demand.
I cross posted to my Blog but got of on a rant.
#116,
The hybrid market is stalling because all the greenies have bought theirs and for those not comitted they do not make economic sense.
The 100MPG is misleading. That is for commuting where electricity supplies most of the energy.
In long distance travel you would get the usual 30 to 40 MPG.
The only way to meet the goals suggested is by government forcing folks to buy vehicles which do not make economic sense. i.e. It is just another tax proposal.
And it does nothing re: India and China.
And magic dust fuel additive to increase fuel economy by 25%? Don't make me laugh. Next thing you know they will be touting the 100 MPG carburetor suppressed by the auto cartel. LOL.
Incentives and mandates will be required. i.e. the proposals make no economic sense.
#118,
Here is a simple way to calculate joules.
1 watt for 1 second = 1 joule. It is a little more complicated for liquid fuels. LOL.
As to the oil industry. We have a lot of capital invested. We ought to move away from oil only as the market dictates.
I'd hesitate to remove subsidies quickly. Market decisions were made based on their availability. Transitions should be slow to minimize disruptions like the current ethanol fiasco.
You guys have the wrong attitude.
Finding a replacement for fossil fuel will very rapidly become a life-or-death issue. We MUST find a replacement.
Data showing Hubbert's peak was indeed in December 2005, and how producers are frantically working to keep production constant. From The Oil Drum blog:
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/7/2/205758/5414