Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover 368
daem0n1x writes "It appears that some countries in oil-poor Europe are making a successful transition to renewable energy at a fast and steady pace. This article talks about the small country of Portugal on the West Coast of Europe, known for its white sand beaches, oranges, fish, and wines. Portugal has no oil, but lots of sun and wind. Five years ago, the government decided, against many dissenting voices, to invest massively in taking advantage of the country's natural resources in clean energy. The results are here. It used to be a heavy energy importer, but now it exports it."
Re:Wow let me run out and buy some solar panels (Score:2, Informative)
And Portugal expects in 2011 to become the first country to inaugurate a national network of charging stations for electric cars.
A difficult step, yes, but without creating the market private companies won't jump in and invest.
Re:Wow let me run out and buy some solar panels (Score:4, Informative)
The article says Portugal is going to roll out a national network of electric vehicle charging stations in 2011. They needed the power infrastructure first.
Re:Wow let me run out and buy some solar panels (Score:3, Informative)
Actually most of the public transportation in the big urban areas (mind you big urban areas in here is about 5 only) run exclusively in natural gas or, in some few cases hydrogen.
One of the most important facts for that was actually not energetic consumption, but air pollution. We have many old monuments, and it's not nice to be burning oil around them.
Re:Debt (Score:5, Informative)
Well, USA has a public debt of 93% and an electric grid quite archaic compared to Portugal.
And did I mention that Portugal has one of the most state of the art internet broadband internet coverage (with optical fibre connecting the house in major cities) and 3.5G across most of the country in the all world. Being Portugal only rival as far as I know, Estonia?
Yeah, the public accounts might be bad ... but we are investing in the future.
Re:Debt (Score:4, Informative)
elecric cars (Score:4, Informative)
Portugal has been working on this for some years now. They will be getting some of the first shipments of the Nissan/Renault electric Leafs I presume.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL0934720820080709 [reuters.com]
Re:the best part is... (Score:5, Informative)
The number of things wrong with the article summary almost defies imagination. As you've pointed out, Portugal is a small country -- about the size of Maine or Indiana. It has ten million people and a remarkably benign climate (the record low in Lisbon is 30F. The record high a bit over 100F) that results in virtually no use of energy for heating and cooling. It had one of the lowest, if not the lowest, per capita use of energy of any developed country BEFORE upgrading it's energy infrastructure.
They also have -- as the article does point out -- very high energy costs, which means that renewable energy projects that might be economic disasters in the US or Canada are economically viable in Portugal.
It's NOT a typical country.
Moreover, Portugal is in no way, shape or form a net energy exporter. The still import very large amounts of North African oil and gas. They export a very small amount of electricity sometimes.
One suspects that their success in dealing with wind power is due more to the very high amount of (imported) natural gas powered electric generation rather than hydro or pumped storage. The natural gas plants can easily be modulated to match load to demand and to accept the full amount of power generated by renewable sources.
This is not to denigrate their accomplishments in getting useful amounts of renewable power on line and in upgrading their power grid. But comparing their energy infrastructure with that of the US is virtually meaningless.
Re:the best part is... (Score:4, Informative)
your population density citation actually works *against* your argument. Large landmass + sparsely populated areas = big time power transmission problems.... e.g. try sending power from windmills in Kansas to New York
Best practice would be to utilize whatever resources is abundant locally, and for places that don't have any resources (like the East Coast), build nuclear plants.
Drill Baby Drill is a loser's mantra. Oil is too precious a resource to waste on an idiot's whim. The smart man's mantra is Nuke baby Nuke.
Oil is truly a gift from the Gods (or the dinosaurs if you aren't religious) to waste on making electricity and running cars... these can be done with other things. Years from now when the oil is gone, and the rest of the world is lumbering around steamboats, we Americans could be flying in style in our supersonic 797's.
Re: Uranium mining in Portugal (Score:3, Informative)
Portugal exported some uranium ore to Iran during the early 1980s, ammounting to close to 300 tons. However, its mines have been abandoned since late 1980s to early 1990s. From http://www.iraqwatch.org/un/IAEA/s-1997-779-att-1.htm [iraqwatch.org] :
However, its mine have been abandoned since late 1980s to early 1990s, mainly because of economic viability and not as much as from puny environmentalist concerns as claimed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Portugal [wikipedia.org]
Re:Debt (Score:2, Informative)
I checked both from CIA world fact book earlier but those wasn't the numbers they had:
Portugal:
76.9% of GDP (2009 est.)
66.3% of GDP (2008 est.)
USA:
52.9% of GDP (2009 est.)
39.7% of GDP (2008 est.)
Though:
"note: data cover only what the United States Treasury denotes as "Debt Held by the Public," which includes all debt instruments issued by the Treasury that are owned by non-US Government entities. The data include Treasury debt held by foreign entities. The data exclude debt issued by individual US states, as well as intra-governmental debt. Intra-governmental debt consists of Treasury borrowings from surpluses in the trusts for Federal Social Security, Federal Employees, Hospital Insurance (Medicare and Medicaid), Disability and Unemployment, and several other smaller trusts. If data for Intra-government debt were added, "Gross Debt" would increase by about 30% of GDP."
So maybe for comparisons your 88% is more correct anyway. What do I know. IANAE.
Not just poor countries leading (Score:5, Informative)
Re:the best part is... (Score:5, Informative)
The main company in that energy/electricity market there sates on their website with a very clear chart [www.edp.pt] that their capacity is about 9675MW per year. In 2009, some 4500MW of this total were generated by river dams and 5400MW by thermal sources. These are plants that burn natural gas imported from Algeria and oil from wherever it's sourced. The total capacity available to harvest from wind farms is 595MW per year, which indeed doubled since 2006.
I would be quite surprised if recent developments since 2009 allowed for what the summary says, that Portugal "used to be a heavy energy importer, but now it exports it". In any case, with the climate we have in South Europe, harvesting sun power for electricity should be a no-brainer.
Re:Wow let me run out and buy some solar panels (Score:3, Informative)
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
Actually, rail does not. Rail uses electricity when the driver wants it to. That often means peak times of electricity use. An electric car can get charged basically at any time - at night (or mid day in the case of solar) - whenever there is excess electricity in the grid. Rail also uses just as much electricity as an electric car. There's a slight difference but the time of use control makes up this difference. Public transport exposed [templetons.com] (article is a graph with nice numbers from a bureau of transportation statistics report - numbers spot checked by me). If the electricity was cheap enough, you could use it to capture CO2, make hydrogen, and heat the mixture to produce gasoline and diesel. However, most renewable electricity is too expensive for this purpose.
Ok, so quitting the car habit is a hard task in the sprawltastic U.S., but much of Europe is quite suited to better transportation mechanisms.
Public transport is not any better than the automobile (see above). Let people choose between the automobile and public transport. Finally, the idea that public transport is big in Europe is a myth. The same article links to an Australian study (which is dead) that suggests that Europe uses 0.75 times as much energy per mile on average in transport. While %1 of trips in the US are based on public transport, less than 10-19 percent are public transport based in Europe. Even they have the automobile as the main mode of transportation. Japan is quite different, but even there the electric public transport is not much more efficient than electric cars.
Leading? Not really... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Thanks for the geographical help! (Score:4, Informative)
For us non-USA folk, could you Americans give us geographical guidance when referring to US states, e.g. rather than just saying "New England", could you provide similar context, for example, say "New England is a small state on the East Coast of the USA, known for its historical districts, American Football team and ..." (umm well I don't know anything else so this is why I could do with some help).
New England isn't actually a state, it's a region in the northeastern part of the country. It pretty much encapsulates upstate New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
Is that the type of context you were looking for?
Wiind/Solar doesn't normally replace oil (Score:5, Informative)
Why do we see this meme so often? Solar and wind energy is used to produce electricity. Electricity isn't significantly produced by oil, it's mostly coal, followed by nuclear, hydro, and natural gas...
We do use oil as chemical feedstock and for fuel for mobile applications like vehicles. Thus far, our usage of electricity in that function is 'insignificant'.
Don't get me wrong, I'm always happy about staying away from coal and using something significantly cleaner. After all, coal is even nastier than oil. Well, modern coal plants are cleaner than autos, but that's because they have industrial sized pollution controls.
Re:Wow let me run out and buy some solar panels (Score:5, Informative)
Then there's the time it's expected to take to get from San Diego to San Francisco, a trip of about 500 miles. The low end times are quoted at about four hours
Seriously? That works out at 125 miles per hour, which is the speed of the UK InterCity trains. They were state of the art in 1976, but in comparison with modern trains (which aren't being deployed in the UK, because we've been systematically crippling our rail infrastructure since the '80s) they're laughably antiquated. France and China, for example, have trains that maintain an average speed of almost 300 miles per hour, and the maglev version of the Shinkansen can reach 360 miles per hour. On a brand new 500 mile route, with entirely new track and rolling stock, there's no excuse for taking more than two hours, and I'd expect it to be closer to one and a half. Once you factor in check-in times, it should be faster than flying.
Re:Wow let me run out and buy some solar panels (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the contents of the article beyond the for-shock-value graphic are quite interesting. If you read further down you see that the author recommends to actually use mass-transit where available instead of the car.
The numbers for mass transit efficiency are so low because the average number of passengers transported by a specific type of mass transit across the whole country (not just urban) in the US is very low. This in turn is because even though during some periods buses and trains are full, for most of the time they run empty or almost empty (at least outside urban areas).
A fully loaded bus or train is very energy efficient compared to a car on a per-passenger basis, but there are plenty of areas and plenty of periods where/when those buses and trains run almost empty which lowers the overall average efficiency per-passenger.
However this brings an interesting paradox:
- By using mass transit you are actually increasing it's efficiency since it would be running anyway (whether you use it or not) and by adding one more passenger you decrease the energy usage per-passenger (people weight very little compared to the actual vehicle so one more person barelly increases the energy consumed).
- By using a car, you only increase the car's energy efficiency per-passenger if you carpool: if you take one more car and travel solo you actually decrease cars' energy efficiency (again, from the article, you see that the average number of people in a car is 1.57)
Not only that, but from the article commuter-rail numbers are still better than car numbers by about 25% and this is for US diesel-powered commuter trains only. If you check the numbers for East Japan Rail (at the bottom) which is much closer to Europe, you see it's twice as energy efficient as using a car.
Even more interesting, if you take the energy efficiency for the TGV (high-speed train in Europe), which is electric and travels with an average passenger load of 80%, from here [wikipedia.org] and convert them into BTU/passenger-mile, you end up with 229 BTU/Passenger-mile which in that article's graphic puts it at the bottom, below the electric scooter/trike and almost 20(!) times more efficient than car travel (it's also way much faster).
The whole article does in fact read as a recommendation for setting up more electric commuter trains in urban environments and to cover long distance with electric powered high-speed trains rather than inneficient diesel trains.
Re:the best part is... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually storing excess energy isn't that hard, I suspect most of the power conglomerates in the U.S. already do it. I did some contract work for Georgia's power conglomerates and they already store excess energy using a hydroelectric system (at low demand times excess energy is used to pump water into reservoirs, at high demand times the water is released). It may be a pain to do, but it's already being done and I'm sure new ways of storing and releasing electricity can be invented.
Re:Thanks for the geographical help! (Score:1, Informative)
"New England" is a region, a collection of states, not a state itself. I'm not from there, so I'd guess Ma, NH, VT and Maine were the included states, but I really don't know if it is all the states northeast of NY or not. Don't really care.
It is like using "the south." The south is usually the states including Tx headed east and including Virginia and Florida. It is unclear to me whether Ky is included in the south, but that could be due to language dialect over location. Tx, Ar, Tn, Ms, Al, Ga, Fl, Sc, Nc, Va would be my guess at "the south" for the SAT/ACT tests.
You probably knew all that and were making a point, ya'll.
I could not name all the countries formerly in "Eastern Europe" and I wouldn't have any hope in naming the current countries included in the EU.
Portugal seems to be a forward looking country. I saw a PBS show on how they were trying to generate all the power needed on an island they owned in the Atlantic ocean and how the entire population there was helping to make it happen. Portugal seems to be blessed with a great location for wind, sun, and wave power. Portugal appears to be about the size of the state of West Virgina, so it isn't a very large land area, while still being enough for a real test. About half of the USA is closer to the equator than Portugal is, so perhaps the use of solar could make more sense than we believe. Sadly, where I live, there isn't much wind and we only have about 100 sunny days a year. We have nuclear power here, it is really cheap. States north and west of my state use hydroelectric power for as much as they can. I pay very little for power compared those in other states. Californians pay thru the nose for power, but those high prices are half due to government regulations, IMHO.
salient quotes (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Summary (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ahh, the NYT (Score:3, Informative)
Fox News also told me that Portugal is FUCKING BANKRUPT. Just like Spain and its Green economy crap.
1sr - It is NOT bankrupt, it's bad yes, but it was the country that overall had the better result in the banks stress tests! So, either those tests are completely stupid, or the rating agencies are ... chose one cause the fault is obviously in one of those 2.
2nd - Implying that Spain economy is in bad shape because of "green economy crap", it's so absurd, so ignorant that people can see right away you don't know about what you are talking about.
3rd - The fact that you See Fox News, explains exactly point no. 2.