The World's Astonishing Dependence On Fossil Fuels Hasn't Changed In 40 Years (qz.com) 243
schwit1 shares a report from Quartz, adding: "Maybe 'dependence' is a poor description of poor people using the ready availability of cheap energy to help lift themselves out of poverty": There are few ways to understand why. First, most of the world's clean-energy sources are used to generate electricity. But electricity forms only 25% of the world's energy consumption. Second, as the rich world moved towards a cleaner energy mix, much of the poor world was just starting to gain access to modern forms of energy. Inevitably, they chose the cheapest option, which was and remains fossil fuels. So yes, we're using much more clean energy than we used to. But the world's energy demand has grown so steeply that we're also using a lot more fossil fuels than in the past.
The typic of the one true house. (Score:5, Insightful)
The headline is false, of course. There is still a dependence, but "unchanged in 40 years" is bullshit.
Re:The typic of the one true house. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The typic of the one true house. (Score:5, Interesting)
Unchanged maybe not. Deepened, I suspect. Setting aside the use of oil as a fuel, the production of plastics and so many other materials that are oil or gas based is almost universal. I look around the office I'm sitting in, almost every surface is covered in plastic or other synthetic material. If all types of fossil fuel disappeared tomorrow, I think this would have more of an impact that the loss of an energy source.
Yes, you are right. However that's actually part of the reason why the dependence on fossil fuel and single use plastic is hugely dangerous. Although we will probably never "run out" completely of fossil fuels sources, as we use more and more we not only damage the health of the poor and the environment they live in (the rich can always buy up the few places that remain comfortable) but we also increase the long term costs of valuable plastic materials which is damaging for everyone.
We should compare things like micro-hydro power with fossil fuels. Micro hydro provides a locally available, maintainable power source which the poor can rely on and which has limited negative impact on their local environment (especially compared to fossil fuels and large scale hydro, both of which can be terrible). Fossil fuels put the poor at the mercy of global markets, disappearing and becoming more expensive every time there is a war or the wrong kind of financial crisis.
The same doesn't apply to long term multi-use plastic items. I have plastic handled tools that are well over 40 years old. They have a nicer shape than the wooden tools and allow me to work more efficiently, however if the plastic version wasn't available and cheaper then the wooden version would work as a substitute. The dependency here is much more positive than dependency on fuel.
It's the population increase (Score:5, Insightful)
Why has demand increased while global energy efficiency has also increased?
population increased!
Why do people tiptoe around the true cause like it's taboo or something?
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Because a strong minority doesn't want to face the fact that we need to manage our population. Beyond that, they don't want to fact the fact that, "Just say no to sex!" simply isn't going to work, even if they wanted to manage the population. Even farther beyond that, they don't want to accept that if you really want to stop, or at least minimize abortions, you need to make birth control easily and readily available.
I can manage to believe that both global warming and overpopulation are real - at the same
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Most countries have a stable or decreasing population.
I don't there any problem.
We don't distribute food good enough, or in other words, in some regions warlords are reigning and snitching stuff away and let the population starve. Beyond that we have enough food for twice the population right now. 50% or more of all food is thrown away.
As long as a country can cope with its population, either growing, stable or shrinking, there is no reason to intervene.
Re: It's the population increase (Score:2)
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Why do people tiptoe around the true cause like it's taboo or something?
Population growth is the only way to provide business growth. More goods and services to be sold, more profits to be made,
Per capita consumption rose (Score:2)
Why has demand increased while global energy efficiency has also increased? population increased!
Good thought but demand per capita has also increased which means the rate of consumption has increased faster than the population growth.
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Because the population increase is only a part of it, even considering that it probably doubled in the last 40 years.
The other thing that increased is transportation, firstly cars and secondly ships and on top of that air traffic.
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Can you walk me through the revenue model for this supposed scam of which you speak?
Re: It's the population increase (Score:2)
Re: It's the population increase (Score:2)
...there is no solution which involves beating on white people.
That's a solution to a different problem: how to divide and conquer.
Local generation (Score:5, Insightful)
We should compare things like micro-hydro power with fossil fuels.
Compare them for what? Subsistence living? Small scale hydro is a Good Thing but for most people it's hardly going to be enough to meaningfully displace fossil fuels except as a very small part of a larger energy portfolio. Solar and wind are far more practical in most circumstances, even for local generation. I couldn't use micro-hydro anywhere close to my house because it's so geographically dependent and it's not an option at all for almost anyone not living in a fairly remote area.
Fossil fuels put the poor at the mercy of global markets, disappearing and becoming more expensive every time there is a war or the wrong kind of financial crisis.
No reasonably foreseeable amount of small scale local power generation is going to change that fact. Even if I put enough renewable energy into my house to power all my needs (including an EV), that still won't affect the impact on of fluctuating energy costs on manufacturing, transport, and agriculture. Modern agriculture is basically the process of turning diesel fuel into food and nearly all our transport systems are tied to fossil fuels currently. What needs to be emphasized is that we need a diverse portfolio of energy sources to mitigate economic disruptions from geopolitics. An important part of this will be local generation (solar roofs, etc) but we'll also need technologies for transport that aren't tied to fossil fuels (EVs) and for fossil fuels to actually have to bear the full cost of the pollution they generate.
And yes you are quite right about one use plastics. That's a much bigger problem than most people realize.
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Is the plastic really 'one use'? Landfills are storage areas, not disposal areas. 100 years from now they will be cursing the fuckers who have insisted on incinerators replacing landfills.
This. Unlike using oil for powering cars, you don't destroy the oil when you turn it into plastics. You can heat it, optionally crack and reform the polymer chains to turn it into an entirely new kind of plastic, and turn it into something else.
If anyone is actually using incinerators on plastics rather than separating them for recycling, that is, of course, short-sighted idiocy.
Re: The typic of the one true house. (Score:2)
I have plastic handled tools that are well over 40 years old.
Those are very much the exception rather than the rule; wood stands up to hot/cold cycles and UV rays far better than plastic, is more comfortable to grip than plastic (especially in extreme temps) and doesn't off-gas a cocktail of cancer-causing and endocrine-disruptin
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Those are very much the exception rather than the rule; wood stands up to hot/cold cycles and UV rays far better than plastic, is more comfortable to grip than plastic (especially in extreme temps) and doesn't off-gas a cocktail of cancer-causing and endocrine-disrupting vapors.
... unless it's treated lumber. Then your wood outgasses a cocktail of cancer-causing (chromated copper arsenate) and endocrine-disrupting (methyl bromide) vapors, too. Yay, progress.
Plastic vs wood (Score:3)
Those are very much the exception rather than the rule; wood stands up to hot/cold cycles and UV rays far better than plastic, is more comfortable to grip than plastic (especially in extreme temps) and doesn't off-gas a cocktail of cancer-causing and endocrine-disrupting vapors.
Plastic isn't a single chemical. There are all sorts of plastics with all sorts of properties. For particular applications many of them easily outperform wood. Wood can be a fine thing to use too but to pretend that it outperforms plastic as a general proposition without specifying the application is simply willful ignorance or confirmation bias.
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Also add in cement and similar kiln-fired products. Hard to make electric work at scale, and if you did it would be inherently less efficient as a high temperature heat source.
Same goes for steel with coke.
Re:The typic of the one true house. (Score:4, Insightful)
And "astonishing" is bullshit also. Nothing astonishing about it....
And it's "astonishing" only to clueless idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
When you think about just how much energy it takes to simply feed 7+ billion people and then the portable energy density in fossil fuels, there should be no astonishment.
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I had more of a problem with Astonishing in the headline, as if we were not supposed to be using fossil fuels at all. It immediately tainted the summary and article as biased. Not good journalism...
The Coal Board (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently saw a documentary by the British Coal Board, made in late sixties or so. Their economist went on to explain that the difference between "this" (pictures of Western developed industry manufacturing big things like ships) and "that" (pictures of developing world poor, surviving by making stuff with their bare hands) was ENERGY, and LOTS OF IT.
Then they went on to explain that although nuclear had a lot of promise, it wasn't here yet, for various reasons they did not appear to want to dwell on, and that therefore coal would remain the heart of industry.
I now nobody likes nuclear, and nobody likes consumerism, and we all want a quiet life in the countryside, until we need a hospital and emergency chopper ride, but essentially, there seems to be only one choice, between two kinds of energy:
1. coal, oil, gas, wind, solar
2. nuclear
And the world keeps often choosing option 1.
Which must be to the delight of all those vested interests in the oil and gas (and somewhat lesser extent coal) industries.
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I now nobody likes nuclear, and nobody likes consumerism, and we all want a quiet life in the countryside, until we need a hospital and emergency chopper ride, but essentially, there seems to be only one choice, between two kinds of energy:
1. coal, oil, gas, wind, solar
2. nuclear
The oil and coal industry hold significant patents on the devices that make competing energy systems viable. Even the darling of Nuclear power technology, the Integral Fast Reactor has been destroyed by oil and coal industry lobbying. Nuclear power is used by the oil and coal industry as a way to extract taxation credits from the taxpayer, [citation] Section 600-657 US Energy Policy Act. [gpo.gov]
Oil and Coal own the energy market and that is the way it will remain whilst they own the patents, the market and the
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The oil and coal industry hold significant patents on the devices that make competing energy systems viable.
Interesting. Do you have some of these patent numbers ?
Re:The Coal Board (Score:5, Informative)
The oil and coal industry hold significant patents on the devices that make competing energy systems viable.
Interesting. Do you have some of these patent numbers ?
Sure, US4009052 [google.com],US3791867 [google.com], US3972759 [google.com], though I think it will be easier for you to start working your way through the Energy act I posted and you'll get an idea how the oil industry works.
IIRC around sec 625 is where the funding is allocated to destroy the only demonstrated viable functioning prototype of the Integral Fast Reactor, a Fast Neutron Nuclear Reactor, high burn up rate (almost 20%) with a design that encapsulated a self contained fuel reprocessing facility, that produces electricity (obsoleting coal) and hydrogen (obsoleting oil - whilst maintaining existing vehicle fleets), producing medical isotopes, whilst burning through the stocks of enough weapons grade plutonium and Depleted uranium to power the US for the next 5000 years. Your tax dollars at work.
I think it's important to consider if Oil and Coal would be motivated to maintain their multi-trilllion dollar profits and capable of doing this than greenies and NIMBYs that are so often accused. It's time for that stupid premise to be put aside with the naivety that allows it to be believed. Greenies and NIMBYs didn't argue for billions of dollars of subsidies to maintain oil industry profits and I think it's safe to say that a nuclear reactor that promotes nuclear disarmament is in everybody's interest. The US could export these reactors to Russia, China even North Korea and end global conflict within 5 years whilst solving the global nuclear waste issue, but oil.
The only loser would have been oil and coal. You think they're going to give up trillions of dollars? No, they're gonna start lobbying, it's cheaper. Repealing the "New Deal PUCHA (Act)" that was put in place to prevent a repeat of the 1929 depression in the bargain so they can rort half billion dollar subsidy hits on delayed conventional nuclear facility construction, whilst claiming input tax credits. That's the reality of energy funding policy, that's how the scam works.
Look for yourself, it's US law, enacted.
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Thanks, very interesting reading.
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Re: The Coal Board (Score:2)
Are you seriously suggesting that a handful of old battery patents are what stopped all other modes of energy production from being competitive with fossil fuels? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that is? Are you imagining that these were some magical unicorn batteries which could store 100 MWh per square centimetre or something?
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Modern reactors don't solve the waste problem. They only produce a little bit less waste. ... produce more waste of the 90% kind ... wow, what a progress.
And 100% certain you are one of the morons who mix up spent fuel with waste. The spent fuel "waste" is only 10% of all the nuclear waste we have.
And that spent fuel you could reuse in modern reactors to
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The problem with nuclear is simple economics. Neither the U.K. nor the US can build nuclear power plants today that are economically viable; in Georgia Plant Vogtle 3&4 are now likely to be cancelled due to cost overruns (and an incomplete design).
If you could build it safe, cheap, on schedule, and manage the waste problem it would be a different story. Right now, even "safe" poses a significant challenge and everything else is out the window.
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Either way, 3 categories would be better: renewables, fossil and nuclear. Maybe even a 4th for storage.
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Nothing requires "a base load".
You don't know what "base load" means.
Modern grids that phase out old base load plants actually don't use the term anymore. Germany produces in peak times more power by wind than we have "base load". What do we do then? Hu? We power down the base load plants to fit demand, obviously. And: that is exactly the reason why we don't "need" base load anymore.
Re:The Coal Board (Score:4, Interesting)
Wind and solar are at #1 because both require a base load.
That is a lie... [nrdc.org]
Believe it or not, I am open to learning new things, and I don't like pollution, or poverty.
But right in that conceptual mix graph on that report you linked, it shows
hydro + wind + gas
in roughly equal thirds.
And recently I am hearing news that "gas" is a fossil fuel which should be phased out.
To me, "base load" just means, generate enough energy for what's needed. Yes you can make it up in any proportion you can manage, if you can manage it. That conceptual graph still shows gas as one third of the mix at night time. Call it base load, call it demand. But it is still conceptually the same as saying
1. fossil + whatever renewables like wind / solar / hydro
Re:The Coal Board (Score:5, Insightful)
And recently I am hearing news that "gas" is a fossil fuel which should be phased out.
Correct. In fact, we should probably phase it out before coal and oil, because the production levels we're seeing now are predicated upon fracking, which compromises the planet's clean water supply in the future for energy company profits in the present.
Guess what? We don't need that gas either if we just keep putting more storage online.
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You don't know what you're talking about. There's enough natural gas sitting in a small area(just outside of sour gas alley) of Alberta to supply the current US demand for 300 years. The amount of easy-to-tap natural gas without fracking is stupidly easy to get at, hell we still burn around 70% of it off when we're straight up pulling oil out of the ground.
But here's the thing, your idea of storage is built around batteries for the most part. It takes more energy and creates more waste to build them, the
Re: The Coal Board (Score:2)
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So all this expensive fracking - required, presumably, to extract cost-effective natural gas - is, in fact, not required?? The drillingfield services industry won't be glad to hear that but the E&P guys sure will...
It's pretty amazing that people think we do these things for no reason. But if Big Energy has shown us one thing it is that they will jump on a good thing (for them) and ride it straight into a hole. They have the money and the contacts in government to parlay their influence as the world's largest cartel into one over being the providers of a superior source of energy. But since there's less profit in solar farms than pumping oil out of the ground, or breaking the earth and contaminating aquifers in order
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Fracking isn't to pull NG out of the ground in most places. It's to pull oil(shale/tight oil/coal gas/etc) out of the ground which occur in smaller deposits or has very low flow(low viscosity), NG "flows" to the top during the fracking process and can be captured, or burnt off. Fracking to pull NG only happens in regions where there are small deposits or where it's more expensive to import NG, then to pull it out of the ground by fracking itself.
The US fracking is mainly shale oil. In Canada? Mostly heav
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Most grid scale storage is actually pumped water storage, not batteries.
Though compressed air is also present at the utility scale in the US...
So what is it now? 80? 100? "environmental impact studies" another 40-50 lawsuits to stop dams being built in the mountains of BC for exactly what you're talking about. Roughly the same in Alberta, and Manitoba. Gee, it's the same with all of those others and those simple solutions being blocked.
The simple solutions are the ones already in use. Maybe you can get the evironuts to stop cockblocking everything while you're at it.
Next time just link to the Onion or Inquirer (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you *read* any of that before you linked to it? Did you pay any attention to WHO was making those ridiculous claims? Don't tell me you read Kevin Steinberger's claims like 40% of Texas energy production is wind and actually *believed* that. Try 3%. Texas DOES produce more wind energy than any other state, but it's a tiny fraction of what we produce. When it's hot, and therefore not windy, we average only about 6 megawatts - the same days we need our air conditioning.
If you click on the About Us page th
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When it's hot, and therefore not windy
Why this implication? Hot implies high temperature, wind is caused by temperature differences. Wind is often highest in the summer, because more energy is being pumped into the atmosphere by the sun and causes air to move around. Texas appears to have higher average wind speeds from February to July, lower speeds from August to January, but not by a very large margin (20%).
Re: Next time just link to the Onion or Inquirer (Score:2)
A 20% drop can be VERY significant since wind turbines have a minimum wind speed below which they produce zero electricity. So it's not like you can just assume that if at the high wind average they're producing 100 MW, then at 20% less average wind they'll produce 80 MW. It doesn't scale that way. Depending on the actual speeds that 20% decrease in the average could very well be the difference between 100 MW and 10 MW.
I don't know what the actual situation in Texas is; maybe their 20% difference really
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Not necessarily. In my experience, it's windy when there are storms. When it is stormy, it is usually cooler than normal. But when it is stormy and hot... well, that's tornado season.
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He s not a lier ... he simply is an idiot.
He does not know what base load means and thinks it is something magically like viagra or something.
Re:The Coal Board (Score:4, Insightful)
Storage costs money to implement
Every other source of energy also costs money. Storage could very well be cheaper than alternatives.
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Storage is an extra cost, it doesn't replace generating capacity. It also presupposes extra generating capacity to be available to top up the storage while still meeting the current demand which costs even more. At the moment renewables like wind and solar free-wheel on grids with large amounts of fossil fuel electricity production, either fast-response gas turbines (usually combined-cycle these days) or slow-response coal plants. Lots of solar and wind in a grid will need lots of storage or lots of fast fo
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But it does replace generating capacity. Because if you don't have the storage, you have peaker power plants instead.
And gas doesn't have to have a fossil source - you can brew biogas from trash - you can even find an old landfill site, put a cap on it and harvest the gas.
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It also presupposes extra generating capacity to be available
Yes, but that's not a big deal. When you install plenty of wind and solar, you get the extra capacity included. Also, coal/nuclear base load generators can be operated more efficiently when they provide a constant amount of power. This means there will be excess capacity available at night.
Storage can also be implemented in the form of parked electric vehicles, for very little extra cost.
Re:The Coal Board (Score:4, Insightful)
It costs money to install plenty of wind and solar. A rough thought-experiment -- a grid needs a peak capacity of 10GW (winter evening in Europe, summer A/C load in America). During low demand it needs about 5 or 6GW. Assume it's all renewables, half solar, half wind at 15% load for solar and 30% for wind that means peak load capacity (10GW) will need 30GW of solar and 15GW of wind or about 45GW of capacity in terms of hardware. That capacity also has to top up storage as well as meet the instantaneous demand. A long winter calm with little wind could cut hard into storage as well as reducing the amount of electricity to keep the lights on so building out a lot more than the 45GW of renewables would be a prudent but expensive move.
Storage costs are in the $200 million/GWh region whether battery or pumped hydro, the two real deliverable storage alternatives. Assume a 12-hour capacity for the 10GW peak demand, that's $24 billion just for storage. The bad news is that high pressure calms can sit over an area for days at a time, reducing the assumed wind power output to a few hundred MW at best (I've seen Britain's 10GW of installed grid wind generators produce as little as 50MW for half a day during a calm).
To meet that 10GW demand purely with nuclear would require 12-14GW of online capacity, maybe even less as refuelling downtimes for individual reactors can be scheduled for low periods of predictable demand throughout the year. Winter or summer, there's 10GW available. Windy or calm, 10GW available. Sun up, sun down, 10GW available. The lights always come on, the electric car always gets charged and no CO2 gets added to the atmosphere.
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Nuclear can't easily throttle back to 50% output during the day, so an all-nuclear solution doesn't work either.
Solar plus moderate storage is great for covering the delta between ~120% of the daily low and peak for 14 hours in the summer and 9 in the winter. Wind is great for throttling back gas plants when it is available-- generally at something like 50-80% of the base load demand. Hydro can be a direct substitute for gas. Nuclear just works well for the bottom 10-20% of the base load (minimum daily loa
Re:The Coal Board (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear can't easily throttle back to 50% output during the day, so an all-nuclear solution doesn't work either.
Actually modern operations of older PWRs and BWRs and all new-build versions of such can swing output down to 75% and back up in about thirty minutes or so. Myself I'd run them at 100% and use the surplus power to decarbonise the atmosphere and stave off the increase in global surface temperatures as it doesn't cost much more to keep the reactors running at 100% since fuel is cheap. OTOH there's usually a Solartopia next door that could import the surplus power to keep its lights on at night when the wind dies down.
Oh, and 9 hours of sun in the winter? I wish. Today in my home town sunrise was at 08:26 and sunset at 15:42 for a total of 7.5 hours, and it's not quite midwinter yet. For a lot of today the sun was low to the horizon producing little solar power even from panels that can be angled to best effect all day, assuming no cloud which in midwinter here is a rare event.
Re: The Coal Board (Score:2)
If your nuclear plant is situated near a large body of salt water, you could use any excess to desalinate water. Or, hell, have an electrolysis facility next door and break down the water into hydrogen and oxygen. Sure, electrolysis isn't very efficient, but the energy cost at that point is so low that it really doesn't matter.
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Desalination has been done using reactors -- the Soviet BN-350 fast reactor (now shit down) used its high temperature loop to directly process seawater for desalination at about 700 deg C. Desalination is problematic though, the "exhaust" enriched brine stream pumped back into the sea from desalination plants smashes the local marine environment into an underwater desert, killing everything living nearby.
Global warming will result in more sea surface evaporation and more rainfall inland generally so desalin
I wish it were (Score:5, Informative)
I wish storage we're in any way feasible for a significant portion of our energy needs. Unfortunately, any storage we can come up with is orders of magnitude too small. We use 11 TRILLION btu of energy every year. There's nothing can come anywhere close to storing enough power to make it through those weeks when a couple of large cloud systems cover half the country, drastically reducing solar output.
I'm trying to come up with a good analogy to give you a sense of scale, but it's difficult. I can tell you that all of our current storage can store less than 1% of what we produce, and the clean energy we produce is less than 10% of our energy needs. It's like saying "water can be stored in Dixie cups" and then supposing that we can store the nations water supply in Dixie cups. You can picture the hundreds of paper cups it would take to store water for just one shower - energy storage is like that.
Let's take one proposal as an example, hydro storage. Hydro is handy where you happen to have a just the right geography, such as at Hoover dam. The thing is, you need a LOT of water pumped high to hold a little bit of energy. To match the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline, we would have to lift 13 tons of water (3500 gallons) one kilometer high (3,280 feet). Hoover Dam, holding back 147 square miles of water, can store about 1/3,000 of the needed energy. Unfortunately, we don't have 3,000 locations as good as Hoover dam. Given actual US geography, we'd need the reservoir to be the entire area between the Rocky Mountains on the West and the Appalachians on the East. Our hydro reservoir would completely flood 17 states and portions of 5 other states. We'd have a huge dam across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Building that dam would itself require approximately as much energy as the country produces in a year.
You can do the math for lipo and other types of storage. Sure, you can store a week of energy for a remote hunting cabin,if the cabin doesn't have air conditioning or any tools or anything that requires more power than lighting does. The US has 325 MILLION people, though. Energy storage per person, adequate to supply AC, transportation, etc, will take up about as much space as their living space, and cost at least as much (unless it's stored as hydrocarbons, an incredibly dense form of storage). So you can picture for every residential neighborhood, you'd need an equally-sized neighborhood of energy storage units. Your rent or mortgage is very roughly about equal to what your energy storage bill would be.
Typo: 247 square miles (Lake Mead at Hoover Dam) (Score:2)
I had a typo. I wrote that Hoover Dam holds 147 square miles of water behind it. That should be 247 square miles.
The dam is 726 feet high. From highest to lowest levels, it can store about 1/3,000 of our energy needs to get through a typical large storm system. Obviously you'd still have to ration energy on days like this:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic... [gstatic.com]
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There is some storage but not nearly enough.
So you build more storage.
Storage costs money to implement and doesn't create energy in itself
No shit, you condescending fuck?
it just buffers supply and demand, it wastes energy on the round-trip and requires oversupply of capacity to top it up.
But let's just give nuclear a free pass on all the ways that it is shit?
The only scaleable always-there non-fossil power is nuclear, but it's Scary!
No, it's shitty. It's economically nonviable, which should be enough to make it a nonstarter for all you libertarian types who don't care what happens to anyone else as long as you can flick the lights on at will, but even that fact seems to have escaped you. It's actually cheaper to build renewables plus storage than it is to build nuclear plants.
Re: The Coal Board (Score:2)
No shit, you condescending fuck?
Low blood sugar this morning? Hey, I'm trying to work with you here... ;)
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Cost isn't the only fucking critical metric here.
There are many costs, they all must be accounted for. I prefer to account for the energy cost. The energy cost of cleaning up after nuclear is effectively infinite, since we do not know how to clean up after nuclear power. Even reprocessing leaves behind waste, and some of it is particularly nasty.
Nuclear is viable because of the demand for electricity that we must sustain.
Nonsense. We can meet that demand with renewables.
And no, I'm not some nuclear shill, I would much prefer to sustain the planet on solar/wind/hydro,
Then stop making shit up to support nuclear.
but I don't see us shrinking the demand to meet that supply level anytime soon.
We are going to have to reduce our wastefulness, mostly the creating things nobody needs. The biosphere can't sustain w
Re:The Coal Board (Score:4)
We are going to have to reduce our wastefulness, mostly the creating things nobody needs. The biosphere can't sustain what we're doing to it.
Well then the biosphere is fucked. Sorry, it just is. Human technology advances way faster than human psychology and culture. If you are banking on change "because we must", well people "must" nothing.
What is your view on climate change versus say, Genghis Khan's? For you, climate change may mean people will naturally start living better and caring for their environment more. For Khan, climate change is a way to crush your enemies, see their peoples starve, and their lands ruined. What you see as a problem ,Khan sees as an opportunity.
Now that's a silly example but essentially this is the problem. 95% of humanity does not give a shit about "the environment" and they are not about to start just because the climate is going to become harder to live in. For many in the world, the environment is already hard to live in. There is poverty, disease, lack of education, and so on. And look at the West -- people won't stop whining about how all the moneys are going to big evil corps, as if people in the West were living in poverty, rather that notice that in the West all our lives are already rich compared to previous generations 200 years ago. Like, people have mobile phones but think they are poor.
The kind of change in attitudes and values and beliefs which you are advocating, are going to happen very very slowly. They only happen in the West AFTER people have a high enough standard of living. When people's material means go down, get reduced, they turn to fascism and strong-men and move bigoted outlooks. They go back to puritanical religion and nationalism.
So what we "must" do, if you want that word, is to find technology which makes everything better for everyone, and THEN people will become more caring about the ecosystem. It is a race. And this is why you "must" use whichever tech can get you there sooner. And 50 years ago that could have been nuclear, but it didn't happen.
Re: The Coal Board (Score:2)
lol. Solar isn't a viable solution even today, but you want people to believe it could have fixed the problem 50 years ago?
You have a great sense of humour, I'll give you that!
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And it pisses me off when we refuse to consider smaller and far more modern (read: safer) designs to offset the "scary" bullshit.
You can't buy 'em - all you can do is fund a research prototype.
Meanwhile, other sources of energy keep falling in price.
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It's still not enough [withouthotair.com].
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According to the DBEIS report, the UK consumed about 1.6PWh in 2017. That works out at a little under 200GW average load. As a starting very rough cut, let's assume 100% efficient solar power, which gives 1kW per square metre. That means we'd need 200,000,000 square metres of solar panels (assuming 24 hours of sunshine), or a square roughly 15km on each side covered in solar panels. Now, of course, we don't get sunshine 24 hours a da
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If massive amounts of grid storage were available such as in the range 1TWh to 10TWh then you could run the whole grid from grid storage. In other words, the grid storage powers the grid, and the power sources charge up the grid storage. This would eliminate the need to have any fast responding power sources.
Note that recent nuclear catastrophes have occurred in old nuclear plants. Fukushima was due for decommissioning before the natural disaster occurred. Human error of not foreseeing the catastrophe was t
It's because of growth in developing nations... (Score:3)
A quick look at the graph in The Fine Article shows that indeed "fossil" looks flat; probably because in the late 70s and 80s nuclear was coming on-stream and hydrocarbon usage started to dip. Of course, the oil crisis helped. But then China exploded economically so hey - coal and gas came back up %age-wise. These days of course, "renewables" (why do I hate that term so much? The sun is not magically "renewing itself; it's literally burning to death...), anyway, solar & wind etc. are picking up where nuclear left off. The fact is that the cheapness, convenience and energy-density of hydrocarbons can't be beat in most situations in developing nations.
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>(why do I hate that term so much? The sun is not magically "renewing itself; it's literally burning to death...),
Yep. The term ought to be 'sustainable', though even then you have to have the caveat of, 'until the Sun renders the Earth uninhabitable'.
Even thorium, that nuclear darling, annoys me because it's only good for about 1,000 years at current power production levels. Great, so we take maybe 500 years getting our entire civilization dependent on thorium (instead of the mere hundred we've spent
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It's not all bad (Score:3)
Some of the African countries are turning to the renewables first, skipping fossil fuels for electricity entirely. So that's gotta be at least one positive.
Unfortunately, that's not really addressing transportation fuel consumption, which is the daddy of fossil fuel use.
Just really frickin hard to argue with the utility and bang for your buck when it comes to hydrocarbon based liquid and gas fuels. They're just freakin awesome.
Electric cars are nice and all, but they do require a supporting grid to recharge from. They're going to help in developed countries for sure. But will that offset the growth in poorer countries that just don't have the infrastructure?
When you figure the balance sheet at the end of the year, if we're still putting a lot of CO2 into the atmo, we got serious problems inbound. I mean, humans will adapt, but it's not going to be pretty.
Re:It's not all bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Electric cars are nice and all, but they do require a supporting grid to recharge from. They're going to help in developed countries for sure. But will that offset the growth in poorer countries that just don't have the infrastructure?
EVs can actually provide infrastructure, if they have enough battery. You can charge it up in town during the day (while the sun is shining) and then drive it home and use it to power your house.
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People in these situations probably have single digit percentages of power usage compared to a typical western household, probably just for refrigeration if they are lucky lighting, a well pump. Maybe some TV, Radio, and cellular again if they are lucky. My guess would be air conditioning is probably low priority and an energy hog, heating and cooking is probably provided by burning some type of fuel, electric heating and cooking is a waste and inefficient use of their limited electrical supply.
So what you're saying is that their electrical needs for things like lighting and entertainment could be served by this scheme, but they'd still need fuel for cooking? That's still a massive win. All those small, cheap incendiary light sources are big sources of indoor pollution, and a single cookfire's exhaust is easier to manage than all of that put together.
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Some of the African countries are turning to the renewables first, skipping fossil fuels for electricity entirely.
I don't know where you read that, but it's wrong. No country skipped fossil fuels entirely and went straight to renewables. Few countries in Africa even made it to "a significant percentage of renewables for energy".
Vaclav Smil and Energy Transitions (Score:4, Insightful)
there are a few (very) interesting speeches on youtube from Vaclav Smil where he explains that energy transitions (wood to fossil fuel, fossil fuel to solar )are a slow process, completely contrary to the speed of innovation. For instance here https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
There's no 'law of energy transitions' forbidding fast transitions, but it's very hard and it's worth understanding why it's hard.
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energy transitions (wood to fossil fuel, fossil fuel to solar )are a slow process, completely contrary to the speed of innovation.
It's like when LCD displays came out. Yes, there were LCD displays but CRT was far superior. When LCD finally caught up 10-15 years later, it was mass adopted because they were cheaper AND better.
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Smil's point is that energy transitions are much slower than that.
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Smil's point is that energy transitions are much slower than that.
Fair enough but my point is, I don't know why we would find this surprising given that this is how most technological change occurs, it's just a question of the speed of the transition. Expecting everything to happen right away when scientists and engineers are working as fast as they can and complaining that it isn't going fast enough doesn't help anything.
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It was surprising to me that such a transition would require two or more generations. That's because like more people I was thinking more in terms of availability of high level technology rather than a complete switch of more 'fundamental' technology on a world scale.
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It was surprising to me that such a transition would require two or more generations
What basis would you have to believe that? The Steam Engine was invented in 1698. The Combustion Engine was invented in 1859.
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that's what the lecture is about.
Fossil fuels are fine... (Score:2)
if you put a tax on them that is used exclusively to remove the CO2 byproduct from the air. Sure, it would be cheaper just to use electricity but if you really gotta have it, you can pay for it. Now we just need to build a hundred thousand of these machines. [all-that-i...esting.com] This is in line with "there is no free lunch" that insensitive clods love to tout on other issues.
Phasing fossil fuels out is not an impossible task but we need to slow and then halt the tragedy-of-the-commons that is happening every day that we do n
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A lot of that was due to market forces pushing coal out and natural gas in as a fuel of choice. So thereâ(TM)s no evidence a tax would change things
These two are contradictory. Fossil fuels were phased out because they were not price-competitive with the alternatives. A tax that made them even less price competitive would therefore be expected to increase the rate and degree to which they were phased out.
Peak demand for oil (Score:3, Informative)
The demand for oil in China has decreased, and now the price of an oil barrel is around US$ 50. Everyone now is talking about "peak demand": oil consumption in OECD countries is almost flat for the last ten years, and the major source of growth comes from China.
Oil consumption is on the highest levels of human history, but with little change for the last decade. Meanwhile, the potential of growth of an important renewable source became scarce for the last couple decades: hydropower. It will take some time for us to actually see a decrease on consumption of oil and coal, as other renewables increase their share on the world energy consumption.
The issue isn't fossil fuels... (Score:2)
"The human race is in so much trouble that it needs to colonize another planet within 100 years or face extinction." - Dr. Stephen Hawking
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There's a case that that's driven by child mortality. When child mortality is high, women have lots of children. Then as conditions improve, there's an overshoot in population. But women do not want to spend all their time having babies. When child mortality is minimal, they return to a replacement rate of 2 per couple -- "even" a land like Bangladesh has reduced its child rate to around 2. Hence the predictions now that the world population will stabilise at about 9 or 10 billion. And on the plus side, tha
Duh, the combustion engine is still superior (Score:3)
The answer is right in the article (Score:3)
As wealthy countries have shifted away from fossil fuels, the poorest countries have moved from no energy usage to industrial use of fossil fuels. It's like a..well, a pipeline.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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These headlines are an easy way to be confident that the article is a complete waste of time. Which raises the question about Slashdot...
Good! (Score:2)
But they get a pass on emissions limits (Score:4, Insightful)
If greenhouse gas emissions are indeed a global problem, why do developing countries get a pass on emission limits? Because they're poor? Gotta do better than that.
this is changing now (Score:3)
Interestingly, Elon Musk is driving this more than any single nation, business, or person. Kind of sad, and yet, in the future, he will be regarded as a true hero for this.
Re:chepaest? (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt that. Can anyone provide numbers?
It's definitely cheapest if you ignore the cost of the damage done, because it requires less infrastructure than anything else.
Re:chepaest? (Score:4, Insightful)
only number that matter to consumer, is the price directly paid by consumer.
every other number is selected subjectively, thus open to interpretation.
"lies, dammed lies and statistics"
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Please do not feed the Trolls. They require attention as a food source.
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Tree huggers want us to live in caves. The market says otherwise.
Bullshit, I want a house outfitted with solar panels so I don't have an electric bill AND make money selling it back to the power company.