
100% Renewable Energy in 40 Years Not Limited to Our Wildest Dreams: Study - raphar
http://www.fastcompany.com/1721388/study-100-renewable-energy-for-world-in-40-years-yes-only-our-doubts-in-the-way
======
ugh
That is so frustrating. So many links in that article. All to Fast Company and
not anything actually useful like a source.

Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, the two authors, have been publishing
about this topic for more than two years.

Here is the pop science writeup in Scientific American from 2009 (PDF):
[http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad11...](http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf)

The considerably wonkier paper, published in Energy Policy this year (two
parts, PDFs):
[http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnP...](http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf);
[http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnP...](http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnPolicyPt2.pdf)

Here is a page collecting everything Mark Z. Anderson published or said about
the topic:
[http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/susen...](http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/susenergy2030.html)

That should hopefully reduce the amount handwaving involved.

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spitfire
Ambitious and completely impractical. All that it requires is that everyone
change everything they do.

Here's a better idea, invest in efficiency. If we insulated buildings properly
they wouldn't need any heating/cooling - See passivhaus. If we designed cars
properly they'd get 50+mpg already (See europe). If we did things bit by bit
to improve efficiency we could easily become energy independent and even an
exporter.

Have a look at the rejected energy portion of that graph. The worry isn't
creating more energy, it's doing more with what we already have.

1\.
[https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/en...](https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2009/LLNL_US_Energy_Flow_2009.png)

~~~
muhfuhkuh
"All that it requires is that everyone change everything they do"

Can't really be reconciled with

"If we designed cars properly they'd get 50+mpg already"

But, then we'd have to make everyone change every notion of style, hot-rodder
fantasy, and living-room comfort that everyone wants out of their galactic-
sized vehicles. It might just be easier to sell them on a plug-in than make
them give up SUVs for mini eurocars.

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johngalt
I've heard the line several times: "Costs the same so long as you add in total
system cost." Then they proceed with estimates for everything from accidents
to climate change related costs. This sounds like handwaving to me. You could
make anything cost competitive with variables that large.

What is the total system cost from throwing out an entire nation's
infrastructure?

~~~
j_baker
Yeah, but on the other hand you don't have to mine or discover sunlight or
wind. You don't have to transport it from the place you discovered it to where
it will be generated. You don't have to refine it. You don't have to have
pollution filtering mechanisms.

Maybe they are hand-waving a bit, and perhaps the costs are higher than what
they are claiming. However, I could see the long-term costs being nowhere near
as high as you might imagine. I mean, it's not so much the throwing out of the
infrastructure that's expensive. It's _replacing it_ that's really costly.

~~~
johngalt
You do have to determine where winds or sunlight will be regularly available.
People that need solar power in Seattle will have to discover sunlight
somewhere first. This is precisely my point. I get the idea when people
calculate "total system costs are the same" the calculations go like this:

Current system costs: Fuel + Transport + Transmission + Environmental
destruction + 1/3rd of all cancer costs + 1/3rd of every hurricane/flood +
1/3rd of Iraq war etc...

Proposed system costs: Solar plants in Arizona + Wind Generators in Nebraska +
Hydro on the mississippi

Somehow I doubt the proposed system is considering the costs of the
mines/foundaries for the solar panels, or the dead birds from the windmills,
or the destroyed fisheries from the hydro.

Additionally, consider that you still have to transport the electricity if not
the fuel, and you lose a lot more on this side of the equation. Transmission
losses are significant over distance. You can put a natural gas generator
anywhere and it will produce power in a very dense footprint. Specifically
when compared with acres of solar panels or windmills. So even if you can
_produce_ power at a similar rate it matters _where_ you produce it.

Anyone that's concerned about fossil fuel dependence and CO2 should be
campaigning for more nuclear plants. Solar and wind can be used where
feasible, but to say they can replace the whole system is overshooting.

------
pshapiro
The article makes some big assumptions. Like for example the idea that
switching to the renewable energy sources referenced in the article would
solve the phenomenon of global warming. The article references human inertia
as the only obstacle left but one of the fundamental assumptions made is that
simply switching to the alternative sources referred to would allow the
environment to recover before it collapses. That's another kind of "inertia"
(karma). I have never seen any any solid proof presented by mainstream
scientists about the actual cause of global warming. Is there a concrete chain
of cause and effect that relates by quantity the amount of emissions with the
exact changes in Earth surface temperature?

Besides all this, lots of the renewable energy sources turn out to require
more energy to produce and set up than they are able to recover over the span
of decades (like wind farming, which is very costly to mine the materials,
ship them out, set up, and get going). The article mentions the fiscal cost of
setting up these alternative sources but apparently that's not the only thing
standing in the way either.

My point is that this article paints a highly idealistic portrait. We don't
have enough time left for that!

~~~
evgen
There is not a single renewable energy source that is a net negative over its
lifetime. We have gotten very efficient over the past 40 years since that
factoid may have once been true.

That is not to say that this study did not engage in a lot of hand-waving
assumptions (the claim that a small fraction of total power that was hydro
could cover solar/wind fluctuations for base load is delusional to be point of
being outright deceptive) and is light on a practical path from here to there,
but if you were to add a nuclear component that was 30-40% of the total I
would not find the paper's claims to be completely unreasonable.

~~~
pshapiro
Thorium is promising, but I've heard on a TED talk (can't find the link now,
it was a talk with lots of data and projection being presented) that even if
we were to build one nuclear power plant each day, it would not be enough to
keep up with the increase in energy usage, much less to switch over
completely. Do you have any figures or an experimental apparatus to back up
what you said?

~~~
johngalt
A large nuke will produce around 3GW, a large solar plant will produce 0.1GW.
So if building a nuke every day won't do it, sounds like building 30 solar
plants every day won't either.

So I guess we start building two nukes every day?

