Will Renewable Energy Ever Meet All Our Energy Needs? 626
Lasrick writes "Dawn Stover has another great piece detailing why renewable energy will never provide us with all our energy needs. She deconstructs the unrealistic World Wildlife Fund report (co-written by several solar companies) that claims renewables will be able to provide 100% of the energy needs of several countries by 2050. From the article: 'When renewable energy experts get together, they tend to rhapsodize about the possibilities, believing that this will somehow inspire others to make their visions come true. But ambitious plans to power entire countries on solar energy (or wind or nuclear power, for that matter) don't have a snowball's chance in Australia. Such schemes are doomed to fail, and not because of the economic "reality" or the political "reality" -- however daunting those may be. They are doomed because of the physical reality: It's simply not physically possible for the world's human population to continue growing in numbers, affluence, and energy consumption without trashing the planet.'"
Re:D Stover is not convincing (Score:5, Informative)
Tom Murphy from the superb blog Do The Math [ucsd.edu] does indeed go through all of the problems with that statement and many others, carefully analyzing about all energy sources and energy storage scheme that comes to mind. A very recommended read.
Re:D Stover is not convincing (Score:5, Informative)
Dawn Stover doesn't seem to realize that a) unlimited exponential growth is untenable no matter what energy source you use and b) much of the planet is already experiencing negative growth. Virtually all of the rest is heading that way.
Re:Renewable Energy vs Waste of Energy (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Renewable Energy vs Waste of Energy (Score:5, Informative)
Modern PV panels have a net positive energy budget over their lifetime.
It's not always been like that, but the current generation PV panels provide 5-7 times their energy cost (deployed in at 25-40 deg latitude)
That's much better than a lot of other renewable alternatives, like anything bio-.
It's also better than shale oil and tar sands, the energy requirements for extracting and refining that mess is huge.
The availability of the raw materials for PV is still an issue, and probably will be in the foreseeable future (unless there is a graphene-PV or non-rare-earth thin film PV breakthrough).
Jeavon's Paradox (Score:5, Informative)
It's not really 'weird instances'... you're describing Jeavon's Paradox [wikipedia.org]
In a nutshell, it states that increased efficiency of a resource actually increases the depletion of said resource. e.g, as MPG of cars increases via efficiency, more people will accept longer commutes, resulting in a net increase in the use of fuel.