Years ago, people said renewables wouldn't ever amount to much. Sure, it's growing exponentially, but look at how small it is! And yes, costs keep going down but it will take forever before it's competitive with coal and nuclear.
Now some critics and skeptics will go around saying no one could have predicted how quickly wind and solar took over. They'll say it was due to the rapid increase in oil prices (no one saw that coming either) or subsidies (German feed-in tariffs were very generous, though not as much as tax breaks for oil co's).
So the lesson: humans are really bad at forecasting the results exponential growth. If you can find one that people are ignoring and time it well, you can entrench yourself in a market before most people even realize it exists.
As someone else said here a while back "The current alternative energies are linear solutions to an exponential problem."
I have another lesson.
15 years ago before anyone knew it existed. Denmark invested heavily in wind. It created one of the biggest windmill companies in the world.
It did all the right things. Took it to the stock market allowed normal people to invest in it, created lots of new jobs and the stock surged in the early zeros.
Today stock is struggling and most of the jobs have been outsourced to other countries much less expensive to produce in.
The windmill technology in itself is not hi-tech but "low-tech" so there isn't even som IP that the Danes benefit from.
The only customers worth talking about is countries and there is no revolution in efficiency happening.
My guess is that wind will be surpassed by other more beneficial technologies.
So the lesson: Alternative energy as we know it right now is far from being a solution to the problems we have. The politicians should not pick the winners but instead set goals that can be won.
linear solution? Please explain. Wind and solar are growing double digits per year... how is that not exponential?
If you're taking about Vestas, it's still worth $5 Billion, going up or down depending on the results of big sales. That share price was worth 20X more is a disappointment to investors, but it does not prove that no one can make it in that sector.
Alternative energy is not 25% of German production because it is competitive. They are forcing it through, in spite of the fact that it is not competitive.
I haven't seen a credible economic analysis showing alternative energy isn't competitive that doesn't hand-wave away externalized costs or use ridiculous temporal discounting of future environmental harms.
The tax breaks were set to go down on a schedule. It would be nice if the same were true for oil and gas. Right now, those subsidies for renewables are only creating a more even playing field.
"A 2009 study by the Environmental Law Institute[5] assessed the size and structure of U.S. energy subsidies over the 2002–2008 period. The study estimated that subsidies to fossil-fuel based sources amounted to approximately $72 billion over this period and subsidies to renewable fuel sources totaled $29 billion." They give a breakdown of why some aren't true subsidies here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies
Counting per megawatt avoids looking at the subsidies that have been amassing to fossil fuels over decades, and completely avoids the issue of externalities.
Deepwater Horizon is but the most recent example of a catastrophic spill. We never hear of a wind spill. In any case, the big externality is being allowed to dump so much CO2 in our shared atmosphere.
As has happened in other countries, the subsidies have gone down over time. With increased growth we get faster drops in price (that experience curve, again). Compare this to the regulatory capture from oil and gas that has led to ever higher subsidies.
In terms of renewables, i think Norway and Brazil are higher up there, with 85% and 95% of their energy coming from renewable sources such as hydroelectic plants.
The damage of hydro is fairly localized afaik, both spatially and temporally. Fossil fuels cause damage globally (in addition to the local damage of oil fields/coal mines, and the power plants), and the damage is much more long lasting. Also the damage of hydro does not accumulate over time afaik.
Norwegian hydroelectric plants usually don't destroy a ecosystem, just some nice looking waterfall. They have so long and steep falls that ecosystem would be naturally separated by it anyway.
That's not the only damage hydroelectric does. The damns normalize naturally occurring floods with a view to maximizing electricity production, and material that would have been carried to sea gets trapped behind the dam.
In a traditional hydroelectric generator, yes. Norway has the advantage of numerous, steep cliffs and waterfalls. It is my understanding that the Norwegian HEG's are placed in the middle of the waterfalls, so that no dam is necessary...
That's hardly ever the case, and would be quite inefficient unless the waterfall provides the same amount of water all year.
Most hydroelectric power in Norway are generated with the help of a reservoir, usually a natural lake that's been regulated with the help of a relatively small dam, but there are some wholly artificial ones as well, the biggest one being 84 square km.
That said, yes - the environmental impact is small. It also helps that the Norwegian population is very small.
It's not renewable, but it is essentially zero-impact as far as atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions are concerned. I'm hedging only because someone will come along and cite fossil-fuel based ancillary activities related to nuclear fuel mining, processing, transport, and disposal if I say "zero". But for all intents, zero.
There are breeder reactor designs which convert far more abundant non-fissile isotopes to fuel-grade fissible isotopes, usually starting with U-238 or Th-232. While not technically "renewable", these do off a theoretically sustainable energy supply, with projections suggesting over 5 billion years' supply at forseable energy consumption rates (that's long enough for solar stability to be the principle limiting factor).
Yes, all the things you mentioned, plus building the actual plant.
As far as new breeder designs, it's a bit too late. Nuclear promised us "energy too cheap to meter" and construction and maintenance costs have kept going down. Meanwhile solar and wind have been regularly going down in price with each doubling of production.
The case against nuclear isn't environmental; it's economic.
There are a number of arguments against nuclear. I'm not an uncritical fan, but I'm not a absolute opponent either.
Nuclear represents high risks at multiple areas of operation:
- The fuel, waste, and plants are all radioactive, in some cases for geological time periods, presenting unprecedented disposal issues. Perhaps not insurmountable, but very, very significant.
- Scale of operations of nuclear plants means that the plants themselves, their operations, and their revenues are immense. A large nuclear plant generates over $2 billion worth of electricity (retail) annually. As we've learned with other large financial systems, profit maximization can skew risk management objectives.
- Risks of scale include management, financial, terrorist, natural disaster, labor action, and other factors. Any of these could put, at the least, power reliability at risk, and at worst, health and safety for millions of people. One consequence of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan was TEPCO's loss of 27% of its generating capacity (http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/379610/japan_facing_ma...). Exacerbated by Japan's dual-cycle grids (eastern and western Japan operate on 50 and 60 Hz respectively: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/03/tech-legacy-tokyo/).
- The timescale and emergent phenomena associated with nuclear power mean that risks aren't known, appreciated, and/or understood at construction time. Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima all exhibited fundamental engineering and/or operational flaws. Siting of the Fukushima plant turned out to be problematic. Several California plants are now known to be on or near active seismic zones. We still don't have a permanent waste disposal solution in the US (and much of the rest of the world).
Most alternate forms of renewable / sustainable power are much more diverse and distributed. Though this means higher capital and maintenance costs per MWh of generation, it also means vastly smaller risks of any individual plant failure, and far lower likelihood of cascade failures.
But my major problem with most forms of nuclear is that from a geopolitical standpoint, if you are proposing a technology for clean global power, it has to by definition be something you would be able to share freely with a potential enemy. Most current nuclear power technologies, including the pebble bed, conspicuously fail at this.
Just because some of the popular resistance to nuclear energy production is based on fear doesn't mean there aren't rational arguments against it.
Personally, I consider the current generation of fission reactors technologically unsound: Neither the problem of radiactive waste nor shutdown in case of catastrophic failures are adequately solved.
Research in Thorium reactors is worthwhile considering the growing energy needs of China and India, but smarter transnational grids with more efficient load balancing can probably make renewable energy production viable in Europe.
A technically renewable resource would be one that renews itself naturally, at a rate exceeding that of consumption.
Solar, wind, and hydro are renewable in the sense that we consume them as they are produced.
Agriculturally-based power sources (wood, ethanol, biomass, algae oil generation) are renewable in the sense that the biological source grows back after it's harvested (assuming sustainable harvesting).
A sustainable consumptive resource is one which, at projected rates of consumption, would be sufficient for forseable demand until the end of time on Earth. In 4-5 billion years, the sun will expand to the point that it encompasses Earth's orbit. Somewhat sooner than that, increased solar radiation will boil off the oceans and atmosphere. We'll have bigger things to worry about than sources of electricity.
If you want to dig into the specifics of any given model, well, you'd have to dig into the specifics of the model.
If you look at the Timeline of the Far Future, somewhere between 100m and 800m years from now life as we know it on Earth becomes untenable (asteroid impacts, solar flux), if not before (other effects).
There are some practical upper long-term limits to human population on Earth. I suspect it's anywhere between a few hundred millions to low billions (I don't believe present populations are long-term sustainable).
There are other resource constraints which may serve to set an upper limit on energy consumption per capita. From this we can establish long-term energy demands, available supplies, and feasibility of these supplies.
4 billion year forecasting is rather more fantasy than science, so far as human endeavors go.
If the model is physics, the specifics say that there's no such thing as renewable energy. Solar energy doesn't "renew itself", it's generated by the fusion of light elements in the sun. Geothermal energy doesn't renew itself, it's generated by the radioactive decay of heavy elements in the earth.
The machines we use to harness energy don't last forever either. If every 30 years I have to replace either 2,600 tons of equipment for energy source A or 200 tons for energy source B, don't I want B?
Yes, we all believe in the Third Law of Thermdynamics, and understand that the arrow of time is defined by entropy.
"Renewable" means that the specifically tapped resource will renew, by its own access to its prime driver, faster than we can deplete it. In your geothermal instance, it's the geothermal reservoir that's considered renewable. It's also possible to tap geothermal as a nonrenewable resource (generally in open-cycle systems in which groundwater is vented, release, or otherwise not returned to the reservoir, resulting in eventual depletion).
Even fossil fuels are renewable if the extraction rate is kept below the creation rate. Given that FF were created over roughly 200 million years, and will likely be practically exhausted in fewer than 200, that rate is on the order of 1 million times less than we're utilizing them now (probably more if you consider that extraction rates have accelerated the past 100 years).
Your harnessing plant isn't considered part of the fuel resource, and isn't considered in the sustainability equation, generally, unless you're doing something silly like open-pit nuclear fission to capture waste heat for generation, in which you'll likely exhaust your available habitable planetary surface.
Most likely you're not physically transforming your plant in a way that excludes, say, recycling of raw materials, and/or your plant is comprised of very abundant materials (iron, silicates, etc.) relative to your fuel source. It's not the absolute magnitude of plant material involved in generating energy, it's the portion of same relative to the available resources for replenishing these. Generally, structural materials are much more abundant than energy-containing materials. Starting with the matter surrounding and below you at this moment.
You act as if the distinction makes sense. Structural materials are more abundant than energy-containing materials? Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Structures, regardless of what they're made of, contain embodied energy by virtue of having structure.
Please point me at the large available free hydrogen reservoir on Earth.
Sources of useful energy are not hugely abundant. And, in the case of nonrenewable energy sources, are consumed in the process of utilizing them.
If you're looking at the Earth's crust, it's 60% silica, with most of the remaining 40% being various highly oxidized compounds, including certain quantities of dihydrogen oxide.
It depends on the kind of nuclear. For example thorium, while finite, is quite abundant. Note that the sun's energy is finite as well, so "renewable" is not black and white.
It is interesting to note that Brazil uses renewable energy sources in the majority of the cars/trucks. So it is not only because of being luck of having hydroelectric power, it was a society/government decision/strategy to use bi-fuel cars.
The United States has an abundance of cheap natural gas and the will to drill it. Incidentally, substituting gas for coal has allowed the US to lead the world in reducing CO2 emissions[1]. Yes, that's right, the US has reduced its emissions more than any other country in the last five years, thanks to technical innovations that have lowered the price of natural gas.
It's not gas, it's coal. Coal accounts for half of US electric production, versus a negligible amount of French production.
Coal, however, is only seemingly cheap. Most of the actual costs of coal are externalized, and not seen at the meter. Rather, they show up at the doctor's office:
The Princeton professor in the second article estimates that accounting for the externalities of coal would more than triple the meter price of coal power. The Harvard study in the first article estimates a somewhat greater cost based on looking at a wider range of factors.
Coal did account for half until about four years ago. Due to the explosion (no pun intended) in natural gas development and the increase in environmental regulation, its down to about a third now.
Read the link. The fracking revolution has led to a substitution of gas for coal in the US. Meanwhile, pressure from green activists in Europe has led to obstacles to fracking and nuclear power and an increasing reliance on coal imports. Renewables still suck as an energy source.
The biggest piece of good news for the environment in
Years is being driven by a "brown" industry in cowboy America, who woul have predicted it?
Wait a few years before proclaiming it good. And keep a good eye on the water table. Everything has a downside, and this one might be more costly than you suspect. Might be fine admittedly, but the US is not doing this because it has found the secret to everlasting energy, it is doing this because currently it's options are very limited and domestic fuel plays extremely well politically compared to most of the other options, which haven't been going that well.
Do you have a better link? The Economist talks about reduced emissions in the past 5 years saying "much of the credit" should go to natural gas. Then it cites numbers going back 15 years that would give half the credit to natural gas and half the credit to renewables. I'm curious how those numbers change if you look back only 5 years.
(There was twice as much increase in natural gas as there was increase in renewables, but renewables produce approximately 0 carbon while natural gas produces 56.25% of the carbon coal produces: http://www.naturalgas.org/environment/naturalgas.asp )
I'm curious to see how much of that difference is actually caused by environmental factors.
Most of the continental US gets down right hot for 2-5 months out of the year. So hot that air conditioning accounts for the largest share of commercial and residential electricity usage. This is probably becoming an even bigger factor when you consider there has been a mass migration from more temperate climates of the upper Midwest to areas such as Texas, Florida and the Southwest. This migration began in the mid 20th century with the advent of reliable central air conditioning.
My question is are Americans consuming more electricity than the average German because of environmental factors or because we're really guzzling power like gasoline in the 1960s and 70s?
> Superior energy efficiency can be designed into new construction (or retrofitted to existing buildings). Since the U.S. Department of Energy was created in 1977, their Weatherization Assistance Program[25] has reduced heating-and-cooling load on 5.5 million low-income affordable homes an average of 31%. A hundred million American buildings still need improved weatherization. Careless conventional construction practices are still producing inefficient new buildings that need weatherization when they are first occupied.
Compare that with German standards for energy efficient buildings.
Yes, since efficiency is the other (oft neglected) half of the sustainable energy equation. A better average measure is the cost per unit of work performed, rather than the cost of the energy input. For example, higher energy prices might make me buy a more efficient refrigerator, meaning the end result, keeping my food cold, still costs about the same.
This article describes the power Germany produced, but doesn't mention the power Germany consumed. Does Germany import a lot of power? If so, that would be a good way to tweak the numbers, just import more non-renewables, and produce less non-renewables at home.
Germany has been a consistent net exporter of electrical energy since 2003.
The circumstances have changed, though: In addition to two nuclear plants which were dormant since 2007 and 2009, six plants were shut down in mid-May 2011, and all of them are now gone for good.
The balance was still positive in 2011, and I suspect it will be this year as well, but it might be a close thing.
That's a pretty useless metric, though: every industrialized nation 'burns stuff', and if it happens that you can't produce at home, you need to import.
While not a poster child, Germany is far from the worst offender as far as CO2 emission per capita goes.
I answered the grandfather's question "Does Germany import a lot of power?"
Also, I think that is highly relevant. If you do not include imports, countries with few natural sources automatically will appear to be green. For example, I bet many small island groups will have close to 100% renewable energy production, including those with huge navy bases such as Truk and Diego Garcia.
> If you do not include imports, countries with few natural sources automatically will appear to be green.
Consider the flip side: Tracking imports won't help you with countries that have their own resources. What you need to track is energy consumption and production modes.
Germany imports nearly twice as much energy as it produces. It is a net exporter of electricity, though as of 2009, France exported about twice as much electricity.
According to the CIA World Factbook, Germany consumed 545 billion kWh of electrical energy in 2008. 67.9 billion kWh is only 12.5% of that. I suppose they import a lot of their electrical energy? Also, electrical energy consumption is only a small fraction of total energy consumption (about 4 trillion kWh for Germany in 2007 according to Wikipedia.).
I heard at a power conference last week that Germany halted installation of new solar panels on homes recently due to the problems integrating solar onto the grid.
As the lecturer put it: We've spent the last hundred years building systems to safely and reliably send power on a one-way trip from the utilities to businesses and homes. Modifying the electrical distribution system to be multi-directional is not an easy problem to solve.
That would be new to me - people here have been able to feed in excess energy to the grid for more than two decades. The real problem however is that the traditional power suppliers are forced to pay users that _feed in_ a very lucrative amount per kWh they produce in excess and recently started to rebel against that policy. So I wouldn't be surprised if the "technical problems" are somewhat politically/economically motivated.
I was surprised the energy they get from wind is more than twice what they get from solar. Isn't Germany like a good country for solar?
Also, this is the first time I see that they want to get only 35% of the energy from renewables by 2035. So they want to improve it only by 10% in the next 23 years? That's sounds like a very small improvement in a lot of time. I thought their original goal was 40% as renewable energy by 2020.
They actually get about the same amount of sun as northern Canada. Which makes their commitment to solar and other renewable energy even more impressive. If solar can work in Germany, it can work anywhere.
Germany's not a great place for solar energy in terms of annual sunlight. It's just putting a lot more resources into it than countries that are better situated, and has set up a working system of feed-in tariffs to incentivize small private installations.
If Europe had a more integrated economy and power grid, the more efficient thing to do would be to take those same PV panels and put them somewhere further south. But that would take significant changes, so for now, the resources get put into the geography that happens to be at hand.
I think this is related to statistics regarding how fast the power grid can be expanded in relation to how fast it has to expand. Can't find any news items on this, though.
There are not enough land lines to transport the energy that is created in wind farms to the parts of Germany that need it, for example. Seems Germany is missing about 4500 power grid kilometers to supply every household.
I'm not completely sure if that is in anyway related to the big players in nuclear energy who won't allow the use of their networks. Could be it's just the basic infrastructure missing. However, it's probably crucial to hook up big wind parks first.
Try searching for Energiewende on the matter, maybe.
That sounds very impressive. But I wonder at what cost overall.
For instance there is a great deal of talk about windenergy, but the primary customers are states and these windmills seems to require quite a lot of maintenance.
So the questions of course is. Even if the energy is sustainable, is the economic model?
It's maintained by the European Wind Energy Association, so it is predictably pro-wind power. But their data does seem to indicate that wind can be economical if: 1. you put the windmills in good places, 2. the price of oil and gas goes up (which it has done), 3. technology improvements drive operation and maintenance costs down (which it has done).
Their economic comparisons include CO2 emissions costs, since it is a European study and they do have an emissions trading program there.
Cost is obviously important, but whenever cost does come up in these discussions the massive externalized costs of coal and gas energy are always ignored.
E.g. in Illinois, we have four major sources of energy: coal, gas, wind, and nuclear. Nuclear is of course dirt cheap on a per kWh basis. Wind is about twice as expensive as coal. However, if you factor in the enormous externalities of coal power generation (probably billions of dollars in Illinois alone) as well as coal mining, the real per kWh price of coal power is double the nominal price, and that's assuming that there is nothing to this whole "global warming" thing.
If you drive through Bavaria, especially the area between Munich and the Alps, it's very hard to find 4 houses/farms in a row that do not have photovoltaic cells on their roofs.
For the same reason burning wood is green- as long as you are regrowing it.
So - if you're burning timber from a forest which is sustainably managed (so you're renewing wood at the same rate you're using it), then there is no net carbon released.
That would be true if carbon dioxide was the only greenhouse gas. But it isn't.
Burning biomass could be sustainable if we make sure that new biomass is grown at the same rate as it is burned. I have yet to see a document assuring me that is the case.
In any case burning biofuel is not greenhouse gas neutral. And hence not green.
Because biomass will naturally released CO2 when decomposing
Add that biomass usually releases CH4 (methane) which is a considered a much more potent greenhouse gas. Even simply burning the methane to CO2 -- ignoring energy recapture -- is an environmentally beneficial action, which is why landfills sometimes have flares.
But you have to grow that biomass first. After you did that, you can let is decompose (bad) or burn it (less bad), but you could just skip growing it entirely.
True, though quickly is still a period of time that is detrimental to the planet. Well obviously it was self-balancing historically, but add the natural methane with the enormous CO2 of humanity and you have a problem.
Putting long-accumulated carbon back into the atmosphere does not look green to me (unless reaching the very-high levels of CO2 that were present several hundreds of millions of years ago can be defined as 'green')
Biomass is green because it does not change the percent of CO2 in the atmosphere: it fixes it into wood first, to put it back later. The net effect is zero over the human timescale.
Burning coal has also a net effect of zero, but over the Earth lifespan timescale, which is not very good for the current ecosystem (including us).
Biofuels is also destroying ecosystems because of the use of pesticides and fertilizers you a sharp decrease of the number of insects living in fields, decreasing the number of birds. In Germany, in 30 years, we had a 90% decrease of the number of "field birds". This is really worrying but at least, it is now a known fact and the EU agricultural subventions are going to shift to help prevent such issues. Still a long way to go...
I still can't get Carter's speech from 1978 out of my head about getting off of oil and expanding renewable resources. I can only imagine how far along we'd be if the US started investing and developing these resources then.
Also, keep in mind, most of the countries being referenced are smaller Scandinavian countries. Getting proper delivery of resources is a major hurdle for US companies and their customers.
You're right. Or actually we're both wrong. Coal is not renewable either, so replacing nuclear with coal megawatt-per-megawatt is going to keep the number at present levels.
However, greenhouse gases and other nasty emissions will go up if you start burning coal instead of splitting atoms. I will not open the can of worms about nuclear waste vs. greenhouse gases.
Nope, you're still wrong. What will go up is emissions, as nuclear is replaced with coal. However the percentage of renewables will continue to rise, as new wind and solar is installed. It's just a bit curious that for a while, at least, emissions and renewables percentage will both be rising simultaneously.
> However the percentage of renewables will continue to rise, as new wind and solar is installed.
True, but not related to replacing nuclear with mostly coal and other fossil fuels. If the trend of solar power and other renewable sources of energy continues, the percentage of power produced that way will, of course, go up.
No, I'm not. The low number that gets thrown about is for commercially available deposits at the present market price. The price of the raw uranium is a very small portion of the price of running a nuclear plant -- it could increase by two orders of magnitude and not have a material impact on the plant bottom line. At that point, it would be economically feasible to extract it from seawater, where there is enough of it for effectively forever.
Extracting it from seawater is, however, not necessary. Even small increases in the market price make a lot of new deposits available -- uranium is quite abundant in earth's crust.
The reason uranium and nuclear fuel is so cheap is that it was consistently overproduced during the cold war. Before the 2007 speculative bubble there was effectively no new activity since the last government-funded uranium boom.
I think he meant in the other direction. There is enough uranium for 20,000 years of consumption if we stop throwing away most of and actually burn it fully.
Current designs only burn a few percent of it, then store the rest as waste.
Renewables accounted for 25% of their electricity production, not their total energy production, and certainly not their total consumption: Germany imports about twice as much primary energy as it produces, almost all in the form of fossil fuels. Source: IEA.
Years ago, people said renewables wouldn't ever amount to much. Sure, it's growing exponentially, but look at how small it is! And yes, costs keep going down but it will take forever before it's competitive with coal and nuclear.
Forever's come and gone. Oil and gas went up in price. Exponential growth generated a nice experience curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
Now some critics and skeptics will go around saying no one could have predicted how quickly wind and solar took over. They'll say it was due to the rapid increase in oil prices (no one saw that coming either) or subsidies (German feed-in tariffs were very generous, though not as much as tax breaks for oil co's).
So the lesson: humans are really bad at forecasting the results exponential growth. If you can find one that people are ignoring and time it well, you can entrench yourself in a market before most people even realize it exists.