Twelve month Rolling Output: Grid based Solar Energy Continues to Decline.

[NNadir]

The output of renewable energy - hydroelectricity excepted - in spite of a lot of wishful thinking to the contrary, continues to represent a trivial form of energy when addressing the issue of climate change.

Of these largely trivial forms of energy, solar electricity - which gets all sorts of praise for managing each year to produce enough capacity to prevent the building of one or two new natural gas plants per year, remains the most trivial form of energy.

People place all kinds of faith in solar energy, but it's just that faith. We will not address climate change in a faith based way.

As of October of 2006, the 12 month rolling production from solar energy - which does not even produce 0.1% of the world's energy - declined in the United States from 558 thousand megawatt-hours to 503 thousand megawatt-hours.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epmxlfile1_1_a.xls

For perspective, New Jersey, where I live and where one can receive all sorts of tax breaks if one is a rich person and can afford a solar system, produced in one month about 8 times as much electricity as the much ballyhooed solar industry produced in the whole year in the entire country..

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_6_a.html

New Jersey produced less than 2% of the nation's electricity.

Here in New Jersey, we say, like everyone else, subsidize the rich, fuck everyone else.

The "renewables will save us crowd" - consisting almost wholly of trust fund brats living on Mommy and Daddy's dime - continues to be as out to lunch as ever.

I know, I know, "solar will get cheap...new type of crystals...zillion percent growth...trillion solar roofs...world's largest solar plant...blah...blah...blah."

Climate change meanwhile, is real, not some fucking fantasy.

[Dead_Parrot]

1. I'm intrigued...

...how the hell does it manage to go down? Have you had a lot of eclipses or something? :shrug:

[phantom power]

2. It's our damned Roswell black R+D programs.

Invisibility experiments, bending spacetime, manipulating ley-lines, the usual.

[phantom power]

3. Increased cloud cover? Or performance degradation from aging PV?

[nebenaube]

8. global dimming.... n/t

[msongs]

4. do you have proorf that the renewables will save us crowd are trust fund brats?

YOU say: "The "renewables will save us crowd" - consisting almost wholly of trust fund brats living on Mommy and Daddy's dime - continues to be as out to lunch as ever."

can you prove that is true?

links please.

Msongs
www.msongs.com

[bananas]

11. Did he just "make stuff up" ????

:rofl:

[NNadir]

15. I know it from personal experience.

For instance, here on this website there is a renewables guy who is heir to a huge spread of "family owned land" that has been "sustainably managed for generations."

I could live on wood in my family left me forested heritary estates, and I might think wood is just great to burn. But a person making this argument is not talking about the owner of a bodega in Brooklyn OK.

Tell me when you can show me a home based power system that a family of 4 living on $25,000/year can afford.

Look at the "solar demo" homes on line. They're McMansions.

Here's one in Maine for instance:

http://www.solarhouse.com/

Check out the stream of professionals who build this monstrous McMansion on "pristine land." No they weren't cheap, and no, the environmental impact was not zero.

I don't even want to think about the gasoline burned for all the tours to preen these self-satisfied rich people. Maybe they've confused themselves with Madonna or Britney Spears.

[bananas]

24. Your family left you forested heritary estates?

So you're a trust fund kid?

[kestrel91316]

5. All our problems will be solved if we just put ALL our eggs in the

nuke basket..................and we'll let future generations worry about storing the waste or dealing with future Chernobyls.

Remember, sports fans: Renewables CANNOT solve 100% of our problems, so we have a sacred duty to reject them out of hand.

[Dead_Parrot]

6. Ahem...

If you read NNadir's post, you'd see he directed at the people who believe renewables can solve 100% of the problem.

We need both nuclear and renewables. Lots of them, as soon as possible: Sadly, all we're getting so far is lots more coal.

[NNadir]

13. Nuclear power is about as close to a "magic bullet" as you will see.

Do not pretend you know about the damage of energy because you can say Chernobyl.

You do not give a shit, for instance that nuclear fission products are the only form of spent energy "wastes" that exist in equilibrium. You feign to pretend to care about future generations, but give not even the remotest shit about the mercury being distributed into the ecosystem by coal plants. Unlike radioactive materials, that waste will never decay and there is no equilibrium.

Neither is their an equilibrium for carbon dioxide waste that you are perfectly happy to dump in the atmosphere in billion ton quantities without remark.

I am not asking non-hydro renewables to solve 100% of our problems. I am asking them to solve 5%, but they are so fraudulently represented they cannot do that. Hydro produces about 10 exajoules of primary energy, renewables 2 and nuclear 30 exajoules. World demand is 470 exajoules.

Your whining and crying does not change any of these numbers. The renewable industry is too weak to save anything by itself. If the glaciers that feed the rivers disappear the bulk of renewable energy as represented by dams will disappear completely.

[kestrel91316]

18. My, you presume to know a lot about me.

Unfortunately, your post shows you know nothing at all about my views, other than that I don't support a total switch to nukes.

It may come as a shock to you that I DO care about CO2 generation, and I DO care about mercury emissions. I use a hell of a lot less fossil fuels and energy than most Americans BECAUSE I CARE. I have made a lot of personal sacrifices to decrease my carbon footprint. So get nasty with someone else.

Are you always this meanspirited and hateful to dedicated environmentalists??

[NNadir]

19. I don't need to know anything else about you other than your nuclear position.

Frankly I don't buy the claim that anyone who is concerned about carbon dioxide or mercury can simultaneously oppose nuclear power.

I don't define such people as "dedicated environmentalists." I define them as faith based fossil fuel apologists.

One could interpret this entire thread as a statement that I oppose solar energy, as in I want it banned. This is actually not the case. I am simply stating very clearly in numbers that the numbers report that the pet renewable strategies of anti-nuclear activists are frauds, that after 50 years of prattling and misrepresentation (as in solar vs nuclear), they still don't fucking work, at least on a scale that matters.

For more than 3 decades I've been listening to people who define themselves as "dedicated environmentalists" prattle on about why we don't need nuclear because of biofuels, wind, and solar. These same fucking people seldom raise their voice to say we don't need coal. I have never called, in all this time, for anyone to abandon a single wind, solar or biofuels project. Nobody opposes renewable energy, at least in theory, and still it doesn't work. And yet, year after year after year after year, the emissions of mercury and carbon dioxide attributable from coal go up and up and up and up and up.

Here are the fucking numbers: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table14.xls

Do you see that? The world passed 6 billion short tons of coal for the first time in 2004 and no doubt you were on your first or second decade of solar, solar, wind, wind, biofuels blah, blah, blah, and oh yes, "nuclear is dangerous." But you cannot produce one person, not one who has died from nuclear generation in the United States. Not one.

If you want to know whether or not I am filled with contempt and vitriol, yes, in fact, I am.

It is amazing, but if you corner any anti-nuclear activist by pointing out that solar energy is completely trivial, that biofuels are trivial, that wind is trivial, they will begin to apologize for coal, begin to talk about IGCC and sequestration.

So what's the game Mr or Ms, big environmentalist activist? What is your plan for energy besides telling everyone what you don't like, as in "I'm against nuclear?" What's the plan, to link 500 JPak threads making a giant deal out of 20 kilowatts of "peak" solar somewhere? Tell us what you do like, and mention it on an exajoule scale baby, because in case you haven't fucking figured out, the world is using 470 exajoules, 120 of them from coal. Your pet renewable schemes, after decades of cheering produce less than 5 exajoules, less than 3 actually.

You may think that I know nothing about you, but I do. You don't qualify as a "dedicated environmentalist" in my book, OK?

[TupperHappy]

20. Doesn't coal also have a tiny percentage of radioactive material?

So not only do you have CO2 and mercury, you have literally tons of radioactive material being spewed out of smokestacks every year?

I say bring on the nukes.

[phantom power]

21. yes, that is so.

[greenman3610]

7. the fallacy is that someone is stopping anyone from

building nukes.

You want a nuke? Build it! Go right ahead!
Oughtta be simple..
Hell, nukyaler power has been subsidized thousands
of times more than any alternative source ever thought of.


People think that hippie tree huggers somehow stopped
nukyaler power from expanding in this country.
In fact, left wingers were about as effective in
stopping nukes as they've been in stopping
the current war.
Nukyaler power fell from the weight of its own
poorly thought out strategies, bonehead execution,
and greedy overreaching, (very much as our
recent wars have, come to think of it).
This was all thoroughly documented
30 years ago, even in conservative publications
like Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, a little advice.

If you build a nuke, best to
get on George Bush's good side, or he will
make you part of the Axis of Evil, and declare World War
3 on your ass.

[NNadir]

14. The twenty eight nuclear plants now under construction around the world

are in no way affected by ignorance or by the inability - deliberate or other wise - of people who know almost nothing about energy rather childish refusals to spell the word "nuclear" correctly.

One 1600 MWe EPR reactor will easily produce as much energy as the entire solar industry produced in the last 12 months - and do so much more cleanly, much more safely, at lower cost and with better reliability.

This is why the world has more or less stopped giving a fuck about the renewable fantasy.

Last year 6 reactors closed in Europe. Four were shut by appeals to ignorance and two had grown too old. Nevertheless world wide nuclear capacity increased enough to entirely match the entire solar out put of the US and to make up for the shut reactors.

Now, if you don't give a fuck about climate change, these numbers won't impress you and you'll stumble along with the mindless certitude that one gas plant's worth of solar power is enough. But mind you, this places you as a cause of climate change, and not someone who is acting against it.

[greenman3610]

16. as a matter of fact, I do care about climate change

I am a member of Al Gore's Climate Project training
group, and just last week heard the Gore man himself, who
obviously has thought about these issues, express the same
skepticism about nukes that I have.


The current nuclear (there, I can spell it) program, as I understand it, is based on
coming up with a safer, standardized design that will meet
requirements of cost and safety, and reliability, better than the old
PWR dinosaurs (like TMI) have.

This means, in our country, there has to be a demonstration
plant built, which will be a long term project.
Further building out the system, if it works, will take decades.
That's time that we don't have, my friend.

Meanwhile, lowest cost energy is available immediately from
conservation, which doesn't sound high testosterone enough for many
techno warriors, nevertheless will get us a lot further a lot
faster than even a crash nuclear program, while creating more
jobs and evenly distributed economic boost in the sectors that
need it most.
On the tech alternatives, your figures on solar may be correct, frankly
I don't know. But currently, the least costly way to add new baseload
capacity is Wind turbines (coal companies may quibble) - doubling in capacity every 2 years with only the very spotty government support the Bush Admin has been
willing to give. A number of new wind projects are quite muscular and
industrial strength in size, and in Denmark, for instance, they
now supply 20 percent of the baseload electric power. Spain is
not far behind.

Overwhelmingly, the disadvantage of nuclear, that you
completely ignore, is the proliferation problem.
Those of us who pointed out that the terrorist possibilities of the nuclear
fuel cycle 30 years ago were ignored, but recent events have
shown that the wide availability of nuclear technology
may be incompatible with the survival of constitutional democracy.

Nuclear power is perhaps the most grotesquely subsidized industry
in history, yet has always been an under achiever. Perhaps if we
considered devoting a fraction of that kind of money to solar and
other alternatives, they might be rolling up the kind of numbers
that would satisfy you.

[Porcupine]

17. No!! We need to build nukes.....

OVER THE OBJECTIONS OF LOCAL POPULATIONS because as Nnadir has so politely explained it produces the power needed to maintain the consumer economy.

Never mind that the consumer economy is an environmental disaster completely absent of the Climate Change or Peak Oil issues. Never mind that after every round of ice storms, tropical storms, brushfires and what not its the people with solar panels on their roof that have any power at all.

We should also completely ignore that nuclear power has been hideously managed in the US and cannot show a profit despite massive subsidies. Hell, if we just allowed power companies to ignore local populations and build these units without safety and environmental reviews they would be the cheapest power ever. (as long as we ignore the cost of waste storage and reprocessing and decommissioning)

It produces one but-load more power in any one place than all other options allowing those controlling the plant the kind of political control that Putin exercise over the FSU. Now that's a reason to produce nukes.

[Dead_Parrot]

22. God Save Constitutional Democracy!

nuclear... may be incompatible with the survival of constitutional democracy.

Now I fully appreciate that The USA is the one true light and everyone else on the planet is just a bunch of fucking foriegners who have no right to breathe God's clean air, and that if a non-constitutional-democracy country - like New Zealand or Greenland - were to get a hold of nuclear technology, we would instantly turn into raging xenophobes and start bombing everything from Afghani wedding guests to Somali nomads, and we couldn't have that, could we?

Maybe the US should should Shock and Awe more countries into having the right kind of political system, because it's worked so fucking well in Iraq and the place is now a beautiful, peaceful paradise of renewable energy. Or something. At least there are no nukes - the only one they had was blown up by another constitutional democracy.

Yessir, we can't let anything be a threat to constitutional democracy.

This may come as a surprise to you sunshine, but those of us who are not living in constitutional democracies are still capable of behaving, on occasion, like human beings. And of the 60+ countries who have (or have had) nuclear reactors, only one is universally regarded by everyone else as a nation of violent morons.

And guess what? It's a constitutional democracy. The same constitutional democracy that is responsible for 25% of the shit in the atmosphere, even though it only has 4% of the population. the same constitutional democracy who has actually used nuclear weapons against civilians. The same constitutional democracy that dropped cluster bombs in iraq. It even gives clusterbombs to other constitutional democracies, so they can be dropped on the Lebanon. That constitutional democracy, BTW, comes a close second for "Most Feared Nation" status.

Yeah, better not let the brown people have nukes: You might have to stop behaving like the school bully. Much better to blow the shit out them if they try it: Besides, they can always buy PV instead.

And if they can't afford it, it's their own damn fault for not being a constitutional democracy.

Alternatively, of course, you could stop pissing away more money on weapons that the other 96% of humanity combined, and use that to fund some clean power.

Or is that just too damn scary?

[XemaSab]

9. Solar can do several things that nukes cannot

*Solar can take electrical production out of the hands of big business

*Solar can take sales of electricity out of the hands of big business

*Solar can be decentralized, lessening the need for big power lines

*Solar can help stabilize the grid when tapped into a larger area

*Solar takes energy to build, sure, but it can make up for that energy during the lifetime of the panels

*Solar does not produce the toxic waste, environmental destruction, or greenhouse gas problems that many other forms of electricity involve


Solar is clearly not the entire answer, but it's part of the answer and if some people want to pursue solar, why not? It's a big country and there's room for more than one solution to our environmental problems. If trustafarians and hippies want solar panels, God bless 'em. The rest of us do need to get our energy from somewhere, and we're free to disagree about where that should be. :)

[Dogmudgeon]

10. "Solar can take electrical production out of the hands of big business"

Uh, maybe I missed something here, but who manufactures the solar cells?

The last time I checked, semiconductor manufacturing wasn't a cottage industry. And manufacturing semiconductors does entail a "carbon cost" and produces toxic waste. It may not be as horrifyingly dirty as coal, coal-to-gas, coal-to-Marshmallow-Fluff, or coal-to-Lego, but it needs to be taken into consideration, especially if we want to ramp up development by a factor of ten ... or one hundred.

If it produces energy, it WILL become a Big Business, complete with fatcats in 3-piece suits smoking big-assed cigars and writing success books, every one bowing down to their little statue of Lord Cheney (or whomever the latest lefty hate object is). "Green" is already a hot "intellectual property" commodity if you check out trademark registration applications (look around on www.uspto.gov).

The solution, so-called, won't be a simple matter of "my energy is red hot, your energy ain't doodley-squat!" but a long, complicated, frustrating struggle for human society as a whole.

--p!

[NNadir]

12. Solar would be cute if it recognized its limitations, but that's not how it's explained.

You say that "solar can do what nukes cannot," and you are correct, that it can do some things that nuclear cannot do, but not all those you list.

First of all let's review, the claim "solar takes electricity out the hands of big business."

Not really. Solar doesn't generate as much energy as a 100 MWe coal fired plant (an unusually small one). Somehow I don't think big business is all that worried, any more than a family owned burrito stand puts the fear of God into McDonald's. Of course the comparison with the coal plant is disingenuous since the solar plant works about 20-25% of the day, and the coal plant continuously.

Second, let's see if solar "takes electricity sales out of the hands of big business." Well I won't note that Sharp and BP are not tiny businesses, but I will note that anyone who is grid connected is trading with a "big business," specifically the business that owns the grid. The owners of the grid are indeed buying and selling. But solar nationally is really trivil in this case.

As for stabilizing the grid - maybe so - in the tiny areas it is used by extremely wealthy people who can afford it. However a 100 MWe plant isn't going to make a hill of beans here in New Jersey or anywhere else I expect. I don't think power companies are decomissioning their gas, coal and diesel plants because they suddenly have so much solar.

The main reason that the external cost of solar energy is not recognized - and yes there are toxic wastes involved - including carbon dioxide - is that the industry is so small. If it ever becomes as large as the computer industry, it's environmental impact will become more clear.

It is true that solar can pay off these environmental debts, sometimes within a few years, sometimes longer, but it is neither risk free, cheap, nor reliable.

Solar is useful for providing power to people who wish to live off grid for political or libertarian reasons. In this application the point source pollutants are higher than with grid based power because of the high external costs of batteries or other storage devices.

Grid based solar is useful inasmuch as displaces tiny amounts of natural gas, again about as much as one small gas fired plant nationwide, if one believes the data.

Solar is a very, very, very dangerous form of energy however inasmuch as it encourages magical thinking. It can never replace coal, because it is not continuous nor on demand and because it is very expensive. Moreover in my position I have heard very poor thinkers assert that it is the entire answer. Greenpeace for instance, insists that this is so, even though they acknowledge percentages of far less than 100% will be available more than a full generation from now.

If the matter were not serious, we could let daydreams stand on their merit. But these are not ordinary times. Solar is not even remotely close - even fractions of remotely close - to being a serious form of energy, but still, still, we have to listen all of the time while people misrepresent what it is - rich boy toys.

[GliderGuider]

23. Crunching the numbers

I went to a few sources on the net, most importantly the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2006, CANWEA and a couple of solar web sites. I found the following:

World total primary energy in 2005: 470 EJ. Growth from 2004 was 2.4%
Solar and wind each contributed about .36 EJ, or about 0.075% of global requirements in 2005, for a total of 0.15%.
The projected long term growth rate for wind is 14% pa. I assigned this growth to both solar and wind.

I then ran the growth rates out 20 years (caveat: I think both these growth rates are too optimistic over that period).

After 20 years, the primary energy requirement would be 750 EJ (an increase of 280 EJ)
The wind/solar capacity would be 10 EJ, or about 1.3% of the total requirement.

Given more reasonable annual growth estimates of 1.5% for total energy and 10% for renewables, the primary energy goes to 630 EJ, and renewables end up at 5 EJ, for a share of 0.75%.

Now let's look at what is likely to happen to our energy picture as a result of oil depletion. Assume we have a 10 year plateau in oil production at around 80 million barrels per day followed by 10 years of a 2% pa decline. As anyone who has been following the Peak Oil debate will probably agree, these are fairly conservative assumptions. At the end of that 10 year decline, which is 20 years from now, we are down 5 billion barrels of oil per year, for a loss of 30 EJ.

So over the next 20 years we will probably lose 30 EJ of oil energy, but we'll gain back 5 to 10 EJ of wind and solar.

I have to agree - by any measure the likely contributions of wind and solar are absurdly small numbers to pin any hopes on. The law of compound interest isn't going to save us, because the requirements (and the current supplies) have such an enormous head start.

[GliderGuider]

25. One more crunch

On the oil depletion side, if we have a 5 year plateau followed by 15 years of a 3% pa decline, we'll be losing 10 gigabarrels, or 60 EJ per year by 2025. Given that even this disastrous scenario is not dismissed by Peak Oil analysts, it shows that we need to get really serious about large-scale energy over the next two decades.

In the face of numbers like this it's even more clear that 5-10 EJ from solar and wind can legitimately be regarded as "toy energy".

[Ready4Change]

26. Oops.

Meant to reply to the original post. See below

[bananas]

28. The CBO already crunched the numbers

"But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says there is a high risk -- "well above 50 percent" -- that the nuclear industry will default on the federally-insured loans, leaving taxpayers with the bill. Each of the new nuclear reactors still faces the stiff competition that worries Wall Street, making profitability questionable. "We expect that the plant would be uneconomic to operate because of its high construction costs, relative to other electricity generation sources," the CBO reported."
http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2003/06/we_435_01.html

[bananas]

29. The IEA already crunched the numbers

See the bottom two lines of this graph? That's what we argue about in the E/E forum - the bottom two lines of the graph. Kind of ridiculous, isn't it?

These projections put peak oil at 2025 or beyond, and don't include carbon trading etc to address global warming. My take on all this is that any reduction in fossil fuels will be from renewables and efficiency, not nuclear. At least not for the next couple of decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_energy_development
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/highlights.html

[GliderGuider]

35. That bottom line of "renewables" is hydro

Solar and wind don't even register.

The EIA's projections for peak oil are laughable in the extreme. The only government organization that does a worse job in that area is the USGS.

[bananas]

38. Nope - half was hydro, half was non-hydro

Hydro will stay flat, non-hydro will increase.
This chart breaks them out into hydro and non-hydro.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/forecasting.html

[GliderGuider]

39. Thanks.

It looks like EIA thinks most of the increase in non-hydro renewables will from geothermal and biomass. The proportion of renewable energy from PV and wind goes from 3% in 2005 to 13% in 2030. However, as a proportion of the total US electrical supply they go from 0.25% to a whole 1.2% over that period.

I'm not sure why we're bothering to discuss wind and PV except out of idle curiosity.

[bananas]

40. But when fossil fuels are limited by peak oil or carbon caps, what happens?

The growth in fossil fuels go down, the growth in alternatives goes up.
Is nuclear needed at all? No.

One of the authors of the famous "wedges" study said: "I personally think nuclear is a non-starter."

Read the interview here: http://www.theclimategroup.org/index.php?pid=549

Here's the website of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative: http://www.princeton.edu/~cmi/

[Dogmudgeon]

42. Yet the Climate Group wants to double the number of nukes

One of the items on the very page you linked to is "Adding double the current global nuclear capacity to replace coal-based electricity". But I agree, for the purpose of dealing with the problems we face, the nukes are secondary.

Here are the next four proposals in that list:

- Increasing wind electricity capacity by 50 times relative to today, for a total of 2 million large windmills
- Installing 700 times the current capacity of solar electricity
- Using 40,000 square kilometers (200 x 200 km² -- p!) of solar panels (or 4 million windmills) to produce hydrogen for fuel cell cars
- Increasing ethanol production 50 times by creating biomass plantations with area equal to 1/6th of world cropland

Re-read those multipliers: Wind x 50; Solar x 700; Ethanol x 50, for almost 17% of all cropland. That's a staggering amount of increase in an industry that is satisfied with 20%/yr growth rates and less growth than that in manufacturing infrastructure (e.g., the factories for the solar cells and wind plants and the specialized agricultural equipment for ethanol production).

I had originally written a lot more, but it could be condensed into a simple statement: Most of us radically underestimate the scope of the problem we face. I personally think that with nuclear energy, we could solve our energy problems much more efficiently, cheaply, simply, and safely. But no matter what route we choose, it won't be efficient, cheap, or simple, and there will be unavoidable risks involved.

Nuclear energy has been tied in knots by legal and political issues. Not only is alt-energy capacity not growing fast enough to meet the challenge, the ability to manufacture PV cells and wind generators isn't growing all that fast, either. I could go into more detail, but you're probably aware of most of the issues. I have heard anecdotally that a large amount of the money being made in solar is coming from intellectual property and licensing, not manufacture and sales. Similarly, in anticipation of Bush's New Ethanol Deal, there has been some major real estate and produce futures wheeling and dealing.

Yes, we can rise to the occasion, roll up our sleeves, and change the world. But will we? I have come to believe that our approach to energy will remain petty and absurd until significant numbers of people begin to suffer and die, and there is a corresponding loss of capital, wealth, and plain old money. We won't begin to face our future until it hurts. And it looks like it's going to hurt a lot.

--p!

[Dead_Parrot]

43. One point about peak oil...

...the main effect it's going to have on electricity needs is to push it up, as more is needed for processing alternatives (ethanol, hydrogen, plug-ins). The amount of electricity generated by oil is pretty small.

I'm afraid I still can't see renewable-only generation in place in anything approaching the sort of timescale we'd need it to do anything meaningful - and no state is going to implement restrictions on coal until they have a replacement.

[Dogmudgeon]

37. Hydroelectric power throws that chart off

I don't question the need for efficiency, not at all. But there are a couple of devils in the details.

That the line for "Renewables" includes hydroelectric power. In fact, hydro accounts for nearly all of the power contribution of renewables, including the EIA projected growth. But it also obscures the contribution and growth rates of solar, wind, and tidal power. They are scarcely blips on the scale of that chart. If they were shown, it would illustrate just how little they contribute, and how the production growth rates of those new renewables have to be much, much higher.

The EIA chart also suffers, as you probably well know, from several other problems, much greater than simply failing to account for carbon trading. Mainly, oil depletion is not really factored in. The EIA seems to have simply taken the most cautious approach to the polarizing nature of nuclear and "green" power and figures that they won't grow. It is fallacious. Both nuclear energy and non-hydroelectric, non-nuclear renewables could grow dramatically in a decade or less, given a commitment to replacing fossil fuel use.

The main problems that nuclear, wind, solar, and tidal now face are problems of criminal stupidity. Anti-nuclearists have tied up reactor building, and brag about it; at the same time, non-nuclear renewables are not receiving enough investment. They cannot grow fast enough to replace even a significant amount of residential energy, which is currently 11% of the total. The big money in non-nuclear renewables is intellectual property rights; nuclear energy primarily enriches the cadre of lawyers involved in project litigation, both the environmentalists' and reactor owners'. The EIA games their estimate figures, preferring to not rock the boat. But the depletion of fossil fuel resources continues unabated, nukes are hamstrung, and alt-energy is starved, choked, and impoverished.

The working idea seems to be to stop energy replacement technologies by all possible means.

On Tuesday night, Bush will announce a major ethanol initiative. I am certain it will be another boondoggle, designed only to profit a small number of Bush's pals and perhaps slow the collapse of the real estate bubble. It will slow down the drop off the Peak Oil plateau, maybe, but not by much. And if we don't start putting some real effort into building nukes, wind farms, solar farms and roofs, tidal generators, deep geothermal, and other emerging technologies, all we will have left is to conserve as much as we can, spurred on by the Invisible Hand of the Free Market acting like the Stark Fist of Removal, as our world collapses around us.

Why collapse? Because our economy is predicated on continuous growth. This has been dealt with in some detail by many of the bards of Peak Oil. Politically, though, transition to a steady-state regime or planning for an orderly but complete re-thinking of our society is impossible. I am afraid that we will only do it when large numbers of people begin to die. At that point, money will get spent to make solar roofs common, concrete will be poured for wind generator pylons even if under duress, and nuclear reactors will be built by court order if necessary.

So I'm pro-nuclear, though I'm not picky. Build enough windmills to prevent an energy crash, and I'll be happy -- not that my happiness should be anyone's concern. The fact that the EIA provides good data but bad forecasts is immaterial; it is a technical spectator, not a player. The future is entirely in our hands, and we've had our hands in our pants. Failure to change that will mean that the slopes on the EIA's production charts will soon go to zero, then go negative.

--p!

[Ready4Change]

27. At some point, that will be all we can get.

Arguing that we need nuclear power vs coal is pointless.

Fact:
We WILL use BOTH until they are gone, or until we develop alternatives.

Go ahead. Build 10,000 nuclear plants. Then in 50 years, when all reachable radiactives have been shitted out into mythical safe waste fields, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna burn coal ANYWAY.

Why? Because we humans are a bunch of shortsighted mofos who'd rather argue about which way we should kill ourselves, rather than how to SAVE ourselves.

Nuclear energy is nothing but a 50 year plug in the dike of our civilizations future. It can buy us time, but it's not the Holy Grail.

We need a real, long term solution. Nuke aint it. Coal aint it. If not solar, what?

Either propose a better LONG TERM solution than solar, or stop bad mouthing it at every opportunity.

Name me one single other power source that we can use for the next BILLION YEARS. Cmon, just one. How many EJ can be produced over a billion fricken years?

[bananas]

30. LOL

The E/E regulars know what the response will be - a bunch of ad-hominems, followed by "seawater! we will extract uranium from seawater!"
:rofl:

[Dogmudgeon]

32. Huh? You whine about ad hominems, but post the Mr. ROTFL icon.

I guess it's different when the other guy does it.

Right?

--p!

[Dead_Parrot]

31. Two thoughts on that...

First off, there's a wee bit more than 50 years left: there's billions of tons of the stuff in the ocean, which we already know how to extract (try to ignore the sound of Wxy and Jpak ramming their fingers in their ears and going lalalalala) and have done for years: there trillions more sitting in the earths crust if we get that desperate. It's just cheaper to dig up the rich deposits that we know about. So cheap, that a lot of the other deposits haven't been mapped out properly - and therefore aren't "proven" and therefore don't exist, according to some people.

It's rather like claiming that because I only have 3 days worth of cat-food in the house, my cats will be dead by the end of the month: Not actually true, it's just I'm not insane enough to buy 5,475 tins of cat-food before heading off to the SPCA.

Now, I don't actually like the the idea of using fission long term: Whilst the dangers are trivial compared to sitting with our thumbs up our arses watching the planet cook, they are non-zero. But as you point out, it buys us time, which is the one thing we really, really don't have much of. Enough to get renewable sources and storage in place (for everyone, not just those with a few grand to blow on a PV system. There are Kenyan farmers and Indonesian fishermen who would also like power, rather than have their families sitting around in the dark for the next 100 years). We might get Fusion with an EROEI > 1. Who knows, we might even see that cheap solar that's always just around the corner.

What we hopefully won't see is an ice-free Antarctic, a desert where the Amazon forest used to be, the bleached bones of 3 billion victims of starvation and the crumbling remains of cities that lost their water supply.

But I guess we'll find out pretty soon.

Edit: sorry, add Bananas to the finger-in-ears list

The sun rises and sets in his dewlap,
And when he closes his eyes, it's night - Dylan Thomas

:P

[Dogmudgeon]

33. What about breeder technology?

It seems to me that an enclosed, carefully-controlled "breeding" cycle, combined with complete waste recycling, would produce a self-sustaining reaction that would last for a long, long time. By keeping it enclosed (i.e., part of the internal "burn" cycle), the potential for proliferation would be close to zero.

Let's see ... the problems of nuclear power can be dealt with by fixing them, by improving the technology, or by scrapping the whole industry.

It almost seems like taking your car to the junk yard the first time it needs an oil change -- and buying four unicycles to replace it.

Since I've presented a reasonable argument for nuclear power, I suppose the Mr. ROTFL icon will be showing up soon.

--p!

[Moby Grape]

34. you are assuming, no fuel recycling

the once-thru fuel cycle, only applies
the the U.S.

everybody else is allowed to recycle

[GliderGuider]

36. At some point, we're going to recognize some hard truths about our energy use

The first one is that there are no "good" long term energy solutions, and there are unlikely to ever be any so long as "Long Term Solution" maps to "Business as Usual".
The second is that we are using too damn much of it, and absolutely none of our use is sustainable.
The third (and it's really just a restatement of the first two) is that if we simply keep expanding all our available energy sources, two things will happen: we will accelerate the destruction of the ecosphere; and there still won't be enough to let us all live like Americans, or even just to let us all live, for that matter.

The only good long term solution is to reduce our energy use. We will be able to do some of that through conservation, of course, but eventually that approach runs aground on the sandbar of diminishing returns. At that point, only an impoverishment of the civilization and/or a reduction in human numbers will do the trick.

I try not to advocate for one side or the other in the nuclear/solar/wind debate, aside from pointing out just how small the relative contribution of the last two really is. We will use them all as the situation becomes more desperate, and I accept this as a fact of life. The one thing I advocate against, of course, is coal. But even there I am resigned to the fact that we will use every energy source at our disposal - including demon coal - as the energy situation worsens.

I don't believe we have much time left. I expect to see a dieoff driven directly or indirectly by energy declines start around the margins of our civilization within 10 years. In fact we are already seeing the first nibble of it in Africa. I further expect it to gain steam within 20 years, and by the time 2030 rolls around we could have lost more than a billion - perhaps up to three billion - people.

No amount of arguing the relative merits of solar, wind or nuclear power are going to alter the big picture outcome. The best we can hope for is to preserve some islands of relative security, and in those places relatively low-tech renewable/sustainable solutions will be inevitable. Will those solutions include solar? If the high tech industrial supply chains take a big hit, then even that could be compromised. Nuclear will certainly be out of the question.

I'm convinced that decisions in these matters are already out of humanity's hands. As with Global Warming, I think we're past an energy-use threshold and into the era of "Every man for himself and may the Devil take the hindmost".

[Porcupine]

41. The Die Off is here NOW!!

We just don't acknowledge that it's what's really happening. In the book "Collapse" Jared Diamond documents that a significant stress on Rwandan society before the genocide was population pressure in villages were reducing family farms sizes to as little as 1/8th acre plots.

Sudan is largely about pressures due to water shortages.

Lake Chad is almost gone eliminating the food sources for millions.

The Aral Sea is gone.

Refugees from Africa are drowning by the hundreds for the chance to get to Spain.

Indian farmers are committing suicide due to prolonged drought. Ditto Australian farmers.

Inuit are having to rely on imported food as game patterns stable for 30 thousand years change.

Islands are vanishing in the Indian ocean and the South Pacific.

The Russian population is no longer replacing itself due to alcoholism and infertility as well as economic pressures.

Desertification of cropland in north-west China is resulting in reduced grain harvests for the nation as a whole. US grain belt fields are being abandoned as the Ogalla aquifer dries up.

Really the list goes on and on. Ecological damage will kill vast numbers of people in a few short years unless it happens to conveniently start raining where it doesn't normally rain.

Simply plugging into a different socket in the planet's wall and continuing as usual will not save these people. The entire planet needs to adapt ecological practices with the ferver they adapted industrial technology and tools. We will fertilize our fields with the bodies of the dead and stare at the sea with mouths parched with thirst until we do.

It's change or die time folks. Malthus was right.