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."
the best part is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:the best part is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Portugal, you mean that country that's less than 1/3 the population of California? Surely what works for them will work for us, right?
Actually, Portugal has a population density of 115.129 inhabitants per square Km. USA: 32.191 inhabitants per square Km. So yes, what works for us in this case should work 3 times better for USA since you have 3 times more area per inhabitant to produce wind energy and gather sun energy.
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.
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You do know that the cities in USA are much more populated than in EU where the population is much more spread out around the country right? So actually the argument works even more against you.
I do agree in the nuclear point though. We can and should use it here in Portugal.
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Power from WA and OR makes it to L.A. L.A. is closer to AZ than WA. So your argument is false. They already get their power from further away than the best places to put solar. So, what's the next excuse?
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Re:the best part is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your argument doesn't make any sense and reeks of lame excuse. Here in Portugal we have towns with a nearby wind farm that are self-sufficient in electricity. How difficult is this in the US? Don't you have towns with lots of windy and sunny desert/mountains/plains around?
Also, for example, the NY state is huge and mostly rural. How hard is it to put wind farms on it to feed the power-hungry city of New York?
Or you take advantage on the sun and wind in Arizona, a huge state with very little population and feed the big Californian cities with renewable electricity. Is it so hard to transport electricity a few hundreds of Km? We do it here. Why can't you?
It won't solve the energy problems, but it will certainly help. If you let the "market" decide, the polluting energies win, because they're cheaper in the short term (they appear cheap because nobody gives a fuck about environmental costs). But investing in the future means taking chances and, when eventually oil and gas get extremely expensive (believe me, they will), suddenly finding you're decades behind in diversifying your energy production sources won't help your economy much.
Re:the best part is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Here in Portugal we have towns with a nearby wind farm that are self-sufficient in electricity.
Are they really self-sufficiant in electricity or are they just generating more in total than they use in total?
Since electricty is a major pain to store generating more in total than you use in total is not sufficiant for self-sufficiancy. You have to be able to generate electricty when it's actually needed.
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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.
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Yeah it's done in some places but it's not very efficiant and it requires a lot of expensive infrastructure. If we want to get anywhere near the point where we are running our elecricity grid on renewables alone someone is going to have to pay for storage.
If you are relying on your fossil/nuclear based neighbours acting like a battery to make up for the unreliability of your renewables you are far from self-sufficiant.
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Nuke is not a smart man's mantra, for sure you dont want to live near one, even less near a nuclear waste storage location.
Why wouldn't I want to live near one? I'd much rather live next to a nuke plant than:
1. Chemical factory/storage. See Bhopal
2. Coal Power plant (lung cancer risks slightly lower than active smoker)
3. Garbage dump (stinks, possibly/probably toxic)
As for storage location, well, nuclear waste is at least incredibly dense. You can store like 60 years worth of 'waste' in what amounts to a extra deep Olympic swimming pool.
the smart man's mantra is renewable energy... big installations are good, but the future is small, local area installations. If all the houses had wind and solar generation, the outside energy needs would be small and a lot easier to manage. Of course, freezing winter can still be a problem, but those could use other energy sources like biomass and biofuel.
It's been calculated that for Britain it'd be more efficient to put the solar panels i
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.
Thank you. (Score:2)
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.
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I also thank you, a very good set of points. America uses an insane amount of power, and I am certainly part of it, but it is what it is. Hopefully we can continue to make electronics use less electricity to do more, I know my current computer has more than 200x the processing ability of my old one, but uses the same amount of power. Hopefully our society will find more ways to improve efficiency and drop energy consumption, and find new ways of generating power. And hey, with any luck we will find room
Wherever we live looks normal (Score:2)
Yes, but it's a lot like where about 3/4 of the population of China live and colder than most of India. That sounds a bit more typical than Lake Wobegon USA to me.
Wow let me run out and buy some solar panels (Score:2)
Well maybe not, electricity is still cheap in the US. Keep burning coal it has been working for me rather well so far.
Re:Wow let me run out and buy some solar panels (Score:5, Insightful)
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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:5, Insightful)
This implies that by using sun and wind to create electricity somehow oil usage will drop. While I heavily support the switch to alternative fuels, this is just not true. Most oil is used for transportation rather than electricity. So the only way to save oil by switching to solar or wind is to use electric car.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
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.
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...which creates an even more ample and cheaper supply of oil for others. I think there has been talk of building a high speed rail line between SF and LA for at least 20 years.
...assuming OPEC doesn't decide outright to produce less, and there aren't any other countries that want to take up that supply (I'm looking at you, China).
Re:Wow let me run out and buy some solar panels (Score:5, Interesting)
And it's probably still going to be talk 20 years from now.
A couple of years ago, voters passed a $10 billion bond measure to get it started. What many of them missed was that this was the first $10 billion of a $40 billion total cost, much of which is expected to be federally-funded even though nobody bothered to ask the federal government for the money. If the state has to cover the entire amount, it will cost $80 billion once the bonds are paid off.
Sure, it's planned to go from San Diego to San Francisco, but it's running into enormous political problems. City after city in Orange County alone are saying that they don't want it running through their land because of the financial and political costs that go with it. That means a longer run through Riverside County -- if cities in that county let it happen -- making it more expensive. San Francisco goes back and forth on whether they'll let it actually end in the city, or force it over to Oakland.
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, which might be acceptable, but that's for an express train, which are rare to non-existent in most plans that have been made public. Every plan I've seen has the train making numerous stops along the way -- as many as a dozen along the 45 mile-path through Orange County, let alone San Diego and Los Angeles Counties and the Bay Area -- and some reports have suggested that it would take eight to ten hours for the train to make the trip, with it spending as much time accelerating and decelerating as it does in a cruise speed -- which wouldn't be that high in the urban areas to begin with.
It's also not expected to be up and running until 2030 at the earliest. Most of the realistic estimates put it at 2040. It's a total fiasco. We can't even get a simple light rail project that runs 30 miles in place in part because the costs ballooned to more than $1 billion despite plans to run most of the line running down the center medians of the streets (hence its name, CenterLine).
Absent a minor revolution, California will never be governable enough to get something like a high-speed-rail line in place.
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.
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Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
This would work only for people who confine themselves to staying forever in cities and suburbs, but it certainly won't work for me. Train will not take me from Bat Area to Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Central Coast, Redwood Forest, Point Reyes, Monterey, Death Valley, Mojave Desert, Grand Canyon (both rims), Mount Shasta, and tons of other places in California and Oregon I enjoy going to on weekends the day and time I
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Most people could quite easily walk to the shops. Obviously there are some people who live 50 miles away from the nearest grocery store, but these are a tiny minority.
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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 transportatio
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Depends on the bus route. I got a bus to a party on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago. The bus trip was a bit more than half an hour and for almost all of it, I was the only person on the bus. It didn't go the most direct route, and almost all of the side-trips were completely wasted; no one got on or off at any point along them. A car would have used significantly less energy than the minibus. If I hadn't been there, the bus would still have run but with no passengers at all for most of its journey.
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.
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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.
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:Wow let me run out and buy some solar panels (Score:4, Interesting)
In Europe as a whole, transportation only takes about a third of their energy usage as of 2009. Much of that is electric since they have a lot of rail, but I couldn't find any better breakdowns.
In the US, transport takes about %28 of total energy use. In Europe, less than %10-%19 percent of all transport is public, and since they have a lot of buses, some fraction of that is rail. I could not find the numbers on percentage breakdown. All the rest is cars. In the USA, public transport is less than %3 of the total. All the rest is cars. Public transport [templetons.com] is only as efficient as cars of the same type. For example, a diesel car is the same as a diesel train (in real operating scenarios).
The point is, there's no use in putting off transitioning to direct sun energy consumption.
Yep. I used to think the sun was not a good source of power. I then looked at the data. Most solar panels suck but the sun does not.
We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. - Thomas Edison
All known quantities of fossil fuels and U-235 will be exhausted by 2150 at current rates and predicted growth patterns. We might need it for something else we can't foresee, so the smart move would be to conserve every bit of easy to use energy, and use the resources we have now to make progress in sustainable technologies.
Actually, the oceans can last at least 500 years, and the Japanese are already working on technology to extract the uranium in the seawater. Of course, with crappy reactors burning only 0.7 percent of the energy in the uranium and dumping the rest, we have some major efficiency issues. If we fix it, we could look forward to 10,000 years plus. By that time, I'm sure will all by dead or cruising the galaxy. I think it is important to understand the paradoxes involved in energy conservation, as well as the actually effects of conservation measures. For example, public transport looks to be only a modest gain for a lot of investment, while say, upgrading your house's insulation is a much better idea with real, measurable (positive) economic consequences.
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.
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till you a) run out of coal, or b) kill too many people with the output of the reaction that there's nobody left to continue the supply of new coal into the reaction.
Summary (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Summary (Score:5, Funny)
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/.'s target audience is American. You know, the ones who are great at geography.
Slashdotter: Yep, I'm American.
European: North America or South America?
Slashdotter: South! I'm from Louisiana.
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Ahh, the NYT (Score:5, Insightful)
You can always find the truth buried near the end of the article:
But a decade ago in Portugal, as in many places in the United States today, power companies owned not only power generating plants, but also transmission lines. Those companies have little incentive to welcome new sources of renewable energy, which compete with their investment in fossil fuels. So in 2000, Portugal’s first step was to separate making electricity from transporting it, through a mandatory purchase by the government of all transmission lines for electricity and gas at what were deemed fair market prices.
Fox News translation: Obama bin Laden wants steal our energy and kill your grandmother! Let freedom ring for... um... dirty coal power.
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Re:Ahh, the NYT (Score:5, Insightful)
This is going on in pretty much all of Europe. Following the spree of "privatize! privatize!" from the Reagan/Thatcher era, we've discovered the hard way that:
1. Some infrastructure is too important to subject to the ups and downs of the free market, or to allow it to fall into foreign hands(same thing really).
2. If you want to create a *true* free market for electricity, ADSL, cable, etc. you need to separate the hardware from the product. The infrastructure is public property, the product that gets sold over it is private.
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1. Some infrastructure is too important to subject to the ups and downs of the free market, or to allow it to fall into foreign hands(same thing really).
That's not the same thing at all, unless they're sending troops to secure it. Any corporation clearly working against the USA (purchased by foreigners and used as a DoS component of some larger attack, say) is going to be nationalized right away anyway, by ANY nation.
2. If you want to create a *true* free market for electricity, ADSL, cable, etc. you need to separate the hardware from the product. The infrastructure is public property, the product that gets sold over it is private.
Agreed.
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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
Totally worth it. (Score:5, Insightful)
The irony (Score:2)
For the most part, the "expensive" countries all have dying cultures, since they don't reproduce enough [wikipedia.org] to survive. (Remember "replacement rate" is 2.1)
Don't worry, somebody will fill those empty countries, and the "future generations" don't look like they will be the types of high-tech folk who will keep things green, care about your culture, or be high-tech enough to get homo sapiens "off this rock".
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Pooh, not high tech enough? Last I looked, Asia was building over a hundred nukes. US is bringing up one that was mothballed decades ago. Europe, hmm, I think Italy just did a nuke deal with Russia? Otherwise, nothing. All stupid "green energy" stuff instead. Mostly, it takes more energy to make than it will produce over its lifetime. Asia is at least trying to have a future, even if Portugal is not.
Too bad the article is not about Spain. Big investments in green. Big government subsidies. Oops, n
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And here's why it'll never happen in the USA
So in 2000, Portugal's first step was to separate making electricity from transporting it, through a mandatory purchase by the government of all transmission lines for electricity and gas at what were deemed fair market prices.
It's utterly *mandatory, in order to create true competition within natural monopolies, but is politically impossible in the USA.
*Breaking up the vertical monopoly, not necessarly the mandatory government purchase
Hydro FTW (Score:2, Interesting)
Sun and wind?
Don't make me laugh. Those are hardly a blip compared to good ol' Hydroelectric production in Portugal.
But as an out of fashion techology (no one likes big dams anyway) I guess it's not worh mentioning.
or maybe this is all related to the fact Portugal is pushing really hard to export their wind tech to the US..
Re:Hydro FTW (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, the hydros in the new energetic plan were made and are being made to store the solar and wind energy by pumping the water. Because during the night you cannot use solar power and the wind power reduces a lot.
The hydros are not being made to produce energy by themselves.
Mind you, I'm against hydros, but unless we embrace nuclear or someone comes up with huge and efficient energy storing methods, hydros are unavoidable in this scenario. And between burning oil and hydros ... we choose the less of the 2 evils.
Not just poor countries leading (Score:5, Informative)
Where did they put them? National parks? Beaches? (Score:2)
In my last travels around Europe I could not help but notice wind turbines dotted all over the beautiful Austrian country side. I noticed wind turbines in the mountains in the south part of France. I went skiing on the edge of the Swiss alps and there were wind turbines on the fucking mountain tops. I mea
Because we want to keep them? (Score:2)
As for Australia, yes. What are you personally doing about it? (Asks he,
Thanks for the geographical help! (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for pointing out that Portugal is "a small country .... on the West Coast of Europe, known for its white sand beaches, oranges, fish, and wines".
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).
This kind of context would be really helpful for us non-Americans! ;-)
I think Americans knowledge of European countries is about the same as Europeans knowledge of US states. Probably in both cases knowledge is biased to places which feature more in movies.
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?
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salient quotes (Score:3, Informative)
Not so simple. (Score:3, Interesting)
Portugal has distinct geographic advantages which allows them to benefit from renewable energy sources. Many parts of the country fairly mountainous. So there are countless ideal locations for wind turbines and there are already a ton out there. But what the article fails to mention is that the majority of Portugal's power generation actually comes from hydroelectric.
In fact, in a region much of my family hails from there has been talk, for decades, of building a dam. It looks like it's finally going through and it's going to have a fairly profound affect on the area. I mean that negatively, people losing land and it possibly changing the nature of commerce in the area. A concern I've been hearing for years is that dams increase humidity. From personal observation summers seemed dryer when I visited as a kid to more recently. They get a lot of the hazy humidity I experience in the states. One of the concerns is that it affects the quality of grapes for wine production but admittedly I've seen no evidence to support that.
One thing that's certain is that it hasn't made electricity any cheaper. And from the way people talk, it seems to have gotten a good bit more expensive. But again, Portugal is ideally situation. They've got consistent strong winds blowing off the ocean and mountains. Perfect for wind turbines and they could easily set up tidal generation along the coast. It also helps that a lot of people have left the countryside for the cities. There have been some moving back, but there's still plenty of land, even if a lot of it is farmland, to erect turbines or sacrifice for reservoirs. The country is also quite small making it rather easy to keep the grid up-to-date.
The US is a far larger country and not every state has ideal geography for renewable energy. Certain areas are far too densely populated to realistically build anything like this. In my area there was furor over something as simple as how to run power lines across a few counties. And really, while individual states are comparable to any European nation the fact is that they've come to be far too dependent on the federal government. They don't have the resources or sufficiently knowledgeable state employees to be able to be able to do any of this for themselves. Hell, a a bunch of trees go down and a city will run to FEMA asking handouts.
The NIMBY crowds seem to be much stronger in the US than in most other countries. Choose from the right checklist of concerns, historical preservation or environmental issues, and you can block anything or at least put it in limbo. I'm not sure if it's because other governments walk all over their citizens with impunity, which in some cases they seem to, or if the people can look beyond their self-centered and unrealistic desires to protect their communities from change.
Re:Debt (Score:5, Insightful)
Your link also indicates that Portugal's public debt is 75.2% of the GDP (getting this number from the CIA fact book and the other one from The Economist).
The United States' public debt is 88% of the GDP without the huge investment in renewable sources of energy. What's their excuse?
I'm not saying Portugal's economy is better than that of the United States — it isn't. I'm just pointing out that public debt as a percentage of the GDP is not the best way to assess the health of an economy or if an investment in cleaner energy is a good idea.
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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,
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)
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Yes, it is. I completely agree. But what I was trying to say is that, not all is bad. It would be worst to be like Greece, with public accounts worst than Portugal and lagging back in everything.
You can be sure I'm not defending our government. Just that there is also a positive point to the picture.
Re:Debt (Score:4, Insightful)
Just look at Ireland (well it's in crisis too but there is no question that lowering taxes was a huge factor in the unprecedented economic boom there). What if they decided that instead of bringing in hundreds of high tech companies by very low business taxes they decided to invest that money in windmills, solar plants and the best broadband in the world? Maybe they would be in Portugal's place today (btw Ireland GDP per capita today: $39K, Portugal: $21K - 20 years ago they were about the same).
Another problem is higher electricity prices. There is no surer way to reduce jobs, increase prices and generally harm the economy than by increasing energy cost.
Disclaimer: I don't know if what I said above has anything to do with reality in Portugal, I am just pointing out that there are two sides to clean energy equation
Re:Debt (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, no, this is not the problem. The public spending in these projects, even when it fails is not the problem here.
Portugal's problem, and you can check in the wikipedia by seeing our awful gini index (the worst of all European union), is the very bad distribution of wealth. Most company owners see people as a source of cheap labour ... so of course, if people doesn't earn enough, they also tend not to work very hard. And mind you, the bosses don't pay low wages because they don't have money (like I said they have a LOT OF MONEY), they pay low wages because, well, they all do, and unless you have a very specialized job, if you don't want to do it for what they pay, they find another one to do it.
Another problem, is that, there is a very big tax fraud in here. The proletariat pays taxes because they have a steady income ... the rich don't because the system is made so that it's very difficult to control what they really earn. Portugal it's a great country in some aspects ... but a very shitty one in some others :S
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Re:Debt (Score:4, Insightful)
Your reasons do not explain the Gini index. This is clearly caused by poor wealth distribution, which goes against your arguments.
The heavy taxation and the weight of State in the economy that you complain about are a lot bigger in Scandinavian countries that have the lowest Gini indexes in the world.
Your arguments are typical of the right-wing free-market mentality (called neoliberal in Europe), that has guided the policies in most of the world in the latest decades, leading our economy into ruin.
Re:Debt (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe we have low wages because we have one of the lowest productivity rates in Europe. Compared to the productivity of a German
No, that's wrong, very very wrong. That's a completely far right-wing view of the problem. The all North of Portugal relies on cheap labour. QUITE HARD cheap labour. Or do you think an employee from the shoes/textile industry working 40h a week for a measly €450 a month is not breaking his back for the boss? The productivity rate doesn't measure how are people work, it measures how much that work gives. The education levels in Germany are far higher than in Portugal, so they have many more people doing high paying, high level jobs and that's the real reason they are more productive.
What do you think it makes more money per hour to their boss, a civil Engineer in Germany or 10 shoemakers in Portugal? And now, which job would you rather do? Because from your point of view, it looks like you would like to be making shoes, since after all, that people don't do anything ... their productivity rates are too low.
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I don't know much about Portugal, but perhaps one of the reasons is that it tends to embark on projects like you mentioned that sound good but don't make economic sense?
Doubt it. This is an issue you can see in general comparing north vs south Europe. I don't remember the word for it but the southern countries is more about living / spending your time outside of work whereas for many in the north your life is about working. I assume the weather conditions, need to take siestas in the middle of the day because it's too warm to do anything useful anyway and so on may be some reasons for it.
I think one reason economic is better up north is because people simply work harder.
Ma
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Let me get this straight...
Portugal is investing in the future. They are doing so by building out infrastructure that will supply green energy while simultaneously building out infrastructure that will increase the energy use of the population. Averting Global Warming so that you can download movies faster?
This is weird.
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If you really think so.
Imagine a nice quiet town in the mountains with a standard two-lane highway as the only transportation in and out. This little town is adorable and attracts tourists for all over who come and spend their money as well as deteriorate the very environment they find dear.
The town sees this problem because lately there have been complaints that traffic is getting very bad on the weekends during peak travel times. The town decides the best course of action is to expand the road so that i
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You are actually trying to say that providing broadband access across all the country AND IN OPTICAL FIBRE, it's not even coper, and putting up 3.5G internet instead of GPRS, is actually making any appreciable difference to our energy consumption?
You do realize that computers use electricity, right? Did I miss a /. story somewhere? Is everyone using hand cranks and hamsters?
A chart [google.com]
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Ok, listen, I know your intentions are good and all, but you have to understand something. If you roll out broadband across an entire country (though small) there will be a lot of people acquiring fast internet that they did not have previously.
Doesn't it make sense that they will be using their computers more often? Do you think that somehow the electricity the Internet uses is static? More computers, more switches, more routers, more repeaters, all amount to higher electricity use.
Do you think that gaso
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Do you think that gasoline consumption doesn't change if more people have cars? Or better roads?
It changes for more if you have more cars ... but changes for less if you have better roads. Improving our internet connection is the equivalent of better roads ... not more cars.
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Better roads just means that more people will elect to drive.
Doesn't anyone remember Ray Kinsella [wikipedia.org]?
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You do realize that computers use electricity, right?
Very little. My current laptop (and most new computers are laptops) uses a peak of 85W, which is above average. If I leave it on and consuming electricity at full load for one year, that's around 750kWh. If it's only 8 hours a day, then it's only around 250kWh. In more realistic usage (not charging the battery, running the CPU and GPU flat out and simultaneously burning a DVD and driving the USB and FireWire ports at full power), it's closer to 100kWh/year, if that. That amounts to around 2% of the pe
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Oh, now this argument. You are partly comparing apples to nail clippers. Fuel use and electricity use are not the same thing.
If people are home more often, okay, sure, you have less fuel being used to drive around conducting your normal life. But what about all the things people do on the internet that have real-world counterparts that use very little power? Internet gaming uses a lot more electricity than kids meeting up in the park to play a game.
Also, consider that in many cases a work environment cons
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Sadly, only a certain segment of the population believes you can cut taxes and start two wars without harming the economy.
I'll be glad to respond to any shucking and jiving with salient quotes from some of your friends about inheriting the Clinton Recession in 2002. The most unfortunate thing that did happen under Clinton's watch, as far as the economy goes, is allowing Glass Steagall to be dismantled.
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First of all, cutting taxes is generally understood to be good for the economy. Fighting wars generally isn't, so I don't know why you are bundling those two together. Secondly, the two wars were generally supported by both parties (though in case of Iraq there were more opponents among Democrats but that was mostly posturing for political reasons). I don't think it's clear at all that
Re:Debt (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, cutting taxes is generally understood to be good for the economy.
Citation needed.
Fighting wars generally isn't, so I don't know why you are bundling those two together.
If you had a drug addiction, and you were always broke, there's a very good reason to think that ending the drug addiction would solve the second problem.
Secondly, the two wars were generally supported by both parties (though in case of Iraq there were more opponents among Democrats but that was mostly posturing for political reasons). I don't think it's clear at all that the US foreign policy would have been any different under Clinton or, god forbid, Gore especially after 9/11.
Let's see: we've spent a few trillion dollars, increased recruitment to Al Qaeda, funneled money to the Taliban through the ISI, lost thousands of soldier's lives, maimed thousands more, killed a few hundred thousand muslims, displaced a few million more, given up habeas corpus, built secret prisons around the world for the purposes of rendition and torture, and we've handed the war in Afghanistan - the "good" one - over to the CIA and Task Force 373 that's busy extrajudicially executing terrorism suspects.
What could Gore, or anyone, have possibly fucked up more than that?
I don't think the recession was caused by Obama nor inherited from Bush. It's simplistic to the point of ridiculous to view something as complex as the economic cycle as determined by which president is in office even though their decisions of course have some impact.
Generally speaking, Democratic administrations have reduced military spending and increased taxes. Have a look at the results for yourself: http://zfacts.com/p/318.html [zfacts.com]
Democrats aren't inherently better or anything, but at least they have demonstrated that cutting military spending and progressive taxes reduce the national debt. If people making more than 160,000 a year are really going to quit working over a 4% increase in Federal tax income, I say good riddance. There are plenty of people who will step up to take their place. They deserve to lose money for being fair weather patriots, who apparently only care about this country when it's dumping cash into their pockets.
Re:Debt (Score:5, Insightful)
Cutting taxes is often NOT good for the economy, especially long term when there is a lot of debt and unfunded entitlement programs, and programs that are desperately needed but have yet to be created and funded. I don't think Gore would have done much different to stop the coming recession, he's not socialist enough to have really challenged the corrupt capitalist system that causes the depression cycle, but we would have been in an incredibly more favorable position to ride it out than we were and are in. He also would not have attacked Iraq - a war of choice which has done nothing to improve our security and has in fact weakened it and squandered our hard earned reputation with the rest of the world.
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Or will it pay for itself by the time it all has to be replaced? PV cells don't last for ever. Windmill Generators can essentially, with enough upkeep. Will it pay for the army of maintainers to be paid, cover workmans comp, cover their retirement plans?
I'd like to hope so....I just doubt it will be an actual "investment" in the fiduciary sense. Energy independence is a laudable goal, but not always a good financial investment.
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Call me when these ideas scale. Until then, your irrational hatred of the weak nuclear force makes you myopic and a slave to the middle east.
Okay, I get the overall picture, but could someone explain what particle physics has to do with the situation?
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The potential energy of the weak nuclear force is what is exploited in nuclear fission. It was just an odd way of saying that us 'mericans are scared of teh nucular bogey mon.
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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_ [wikipedia.org]
Re:Even according TFA, it doesnt add up. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumping pollution into the environment is often cheaper, at least in the short term, than trying to avoid creating waste, or trying to dump the waste responsibly. Burning coal is cheaper because of this. If you factor in the costs -- acid rain, altering the chemistry of the air, acidification of the oceans -- coal is more expensive.
And, by reducing their fossil fuel imports Portugal has now insulated themselves from the vagaries of the energy market. The next time oil prices spike the US will be force to send crates of money to unfriendly regimes because the US is addicted to their oil. Portugal will thrive while the US stumbles.
Portugal is planning ahead. The US is hoping that it can continue to be profligate forever.
Money isn't necessarily a proxy for emissions. Often it is a proxy for human labor.
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Well, the hydros in the new energetic plan were made and are being made to store the solar and wind energy by pumping the water. Because during the night you cannot use solar power and the wind power reduces a lot.
The hydros are not being made to produce energy by themselves.
Mind you, I'm against hydros, but unless we embrace nuclear or someone comes up with huge and efficient energy storing methods, hydros are unavoidable in this scenario.
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Re:Explain This To Me (Score:4, Insightful)
Pumping out enough renewable energy over a state of the art grid means being able to fuel electric cars en masse.
More electric cars -> less oil.
Besides, there is a direct correlation between the current price for oil(which is based off of demand) and the price of other energy resources.
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Somebody else you should learn (note spelling) from is your English teacher...
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.